James Baquet

    Lucretius (c. 99-55 BCE) is one of those authors whose life is obscure, but who ranks as important because of a single work. Where facts are lacking, legend is always ready to fill the gaps. And so we hear that Lucretius died after taking a love potion, which drove him mad; he wrote his poems between fits — and then committed suicide.

    Even his dates need to be reconstructed, and are uncertain (the “c.” before the dates above stands for “circa,” meaning “about”). And so we turn to his major — in fact, his only known — work, “De Rerum Natura,” usually translated “On the Nature of Things.”

    It was the first major work on Epicureanism, a Greco-Roman philosophy popularly characterized as holding pleasure as the highest good. What many miss, however, is that the Greek philosopher Epicurus, founder of the school, said that the way to pleasure is not via gluttony or indulgence, but through living simply, learning to understand how things work, and limiting one’s desires.

    “De Rerum Natura” addresses the central of these points; but over its six volumes, it also discusses human psychology, and offers thorough descriptions of a number of phenomena on earth and in the sky. Ahead of its time, it attributed the working of the world to chance, rather than any intervention by the Roman gods, and taught a materialist view that would later contribute to the rise of science in the west. This idea, called “atomism,” was lost to the Middle Ages, and rediscovered just as scientific thinking began to develop in the Renaissance. In this, it anticipated the later Scientific Revolution.

    Lucretius wrote not just great philosophy, but also great poetry. He wrote things like, “The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling” — a metaphor for the virtue of persistence. More pessimistically, he also declared that “Life is one long struggle in the dark,” but that the solution to this was “to live content with little, for there is never want where the mind is satisfied.”

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. interfering; becoming involved in;

    2. overeating;

    3. not accepting the existence of spirit, soul, or other unseen forces;

    4. high moral value;

    5. liquid with medicinal (or magic) powers;

    6. little-known;

    7. satisfied; at peace;

    8. dealt with something before its proper time; 9. physical attacks;

    10. gave credit to; assigned responsibility for