CC Spin #40: Lucretius' De Rerum Natura

 De Rerum Natura (The Way Things Are, or On the Nature of Things), by Titus Lucretius Carus, trans. by
Rolfe Humphries

I didn't really know quite what I was getting into with this book, but it worked out great.  Thanks to Tom the Amateur Reader, I got an excellent translation that I enjoyed a lot.  I won't claim to have understood it particularly well -- for that I'd need a whole deep dive and probably a class -- but for a basic first read, I'm calling it a success. So here we go...

We don't know all that much about Lucretius, except that he was a Roman poet and philosopher, upper-class, and this is the only surviving of his works.  He was born around 99 BCE and died, at 44, in 55 BCE.  St. Jerome said he went mad from a love potion and killed himself, which seems to be inaccurate, but the slander stuck around for centuries, right up to the modern era.  Our poem was very nearly lost, but a single surviving copy was found in a German monastery in the early 1400s, when everyone was combing German monasteries and finding long-lost manuscripts.

De Rerum Natura is a description of the universe and how it works in Epicurean philosophic theory.  Lucretius starts at the beginning, with atoms!  But what are atoms, and how do they work?  How do they join together to form substances, and how do those substances interact with each other?  How did the worlds form?  The first two books of the poem describe the answers to these questions.  Book III moves on to human nature: what are the mind and soul, how does death and life work?  In Book IV, the senses are discussed, especially the nature of light and how we see, plus other bodily functions.  Book V addresses the gods, which are mostly discounted.  The world is mechanical and natural, not formed by gods, and Lucretius theorizes about the motions of the planets, and then early man and the beginnings of civilization.  Finally in Book VI we get to weather (how do clouds work?) -- storms, lightning, and other natural phenomena -- and the nature of disease.  Book VI ends with a spectacular description of the plague at Athens.  Lucretius almost certainly didn't meant to end here; he probably just died before he could write the rest of his planned books.  I'd bet he meant to write twelve and was only halfway through.

So that's the short version.  For me, the fun part of this was in reading his careful descriptions of the workings of the universe, and seeing how close he came to modern understanding.  Not only does he know that atoms must be far too small to see, he knows they have to have different shapes, have space between them, combine to make substances, and other stuff that they just had to figure out by logic.  He knows light travels faster than sound.  And then of course it's also fun to see his wrestling with things still unexplainable, like how we can see things -- something that puzzled philosophers for centuries.  Lucretius figures that everything is constantly throwing off insubstantial images of itself, and when these hit our eyes, we see them.  That is not a worse theory than that eyes throw out beams of light which are then bounced back!

Lucretius' epic poem on the universe has never been as popular as other epics, because it doesn't have a story, but I hereby declare that this is quite a lot of fun and should be more popular.  Here, I'll prove it with a couple of quotations:

This makes it easy for us to explain

Why lightning's fire can penetrate more deeply 

Than any torch-flame we on earth can manage.  

You can say that lightning, heaven's fire, consists 

Of smaller particles, for fine, and so

Can pass through pores which torch-fire, born of wood,

Could never enter.  Why so?  It must be, light

Has smaller particles than those of water.  

Wine glows more quickly through a colander

Than olive oil; the latter's elements

Are either coarser, or so hooked, so meshed

They can't so easily be pulled apart...

[Book II, ~390] 

 

For clothes, men tied things on, any old way

At first; the textile arts developed later 

After the age of iron and its use

In fashioning treadles, heddles, spindles, looms

And all such clattering apparatus.  Men

Are better at these arts than women are,

Much more ingenious, cleverer, but somehow

Farmers, who pride themselves on being tough,

Got the idea that this was fancywork,

So left it to the women.

[Book V ~1350.  You keep telling yourself that, Lucretius!]