De Rerum Natura
What is astounding about this epic poem is that it was written more than 2,000 years ago, when the Roman universe was still accounted for by heroes, demigods, and gods—both native and imported. From the very beginning one feels the athletic language of a poet determined to explain things and creatures in simple language. Although he frequently complains about the “poverty” of Latin to explain the concepts he had in mind, he never gives up in his efforts; at worst his verses reveal a clear-headed poet. The task he set for himself —to anyone else— would have been too daunting to tackle, yet patiently he attempts to demolish old theories and traditions that had for too long overcome good sense. He deeply believed that matter consisted of minute building blocks he called atoms that their conjunction would spawn things and creatures—including sentient beings. Yet, one tradition —the Aristotelian— was difficult for Lucretius to overthrow, given the tremendous authority that Aristotle's teaching had garnered over the years. As time and experience has proven, Lucretius eventually won the battle. De rerum natura miraculously has survived wars, lootings, burnings, and other calamities; and worst of all: censoring. From Machiavelli, Montaigne, Thomas More, to Thomas Jefferson—Lucretius's poem continues to exert great influence.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
25mentions
20people
2013–2026years
24% recommend76% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You are reading things which were not said nor implied in my comment.
I merely echoed the phrase used by the OP article (should have used quotes to make it clearer).
When you have had great Greek (Classical and Hellenistic) schools of philosophy and later practiced/extended by the Romans which could justifiably be called "cornerstone of Western culture", to point to a single book like The Bible and attempt to place it on the same pedestal is silly. In fact the opposite may be true viz. when western civilization broke away from the shackles of biblical thinking is when the "Scientific Revolution" happened leading to the science/technology driven world that we live in today.
Of course the bible had a lot of influence on western culture but one could argue whether it was not more detrimental than beneficial.
There is more to be learnt from Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) than from The Bible.
- Epicureans were atomists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism#Physics), so if you explained it to him, he might not be nearly as shocked as most people of the era would be. Epicureans also tended to invoke extremely insubstantial 'images' composed of especially tiny gossamer arrangements of atoms as explanations for things like dreams, and you can see how well that would work as an analogy with using X-rays to look at subtle changes in the arrangement of atoms in charred scrolls. (These are covered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura - if you have some time, I highly recommend reading Stalling's rhyming translation. You'll be shocked and admire the rationality & scientificness of Epicurean materialist atomist explanations of the world, even where they get it totally wrong.)
- Yes!!! This has been one of the most interesting things I researched over the pandemic and it's AMAZING.
So what a lot of people might not really know is that many modern ideas are older than we think, specifically compiled into a poem in 50 BCE by Lucretius called De Rerum Natura ("The Nature of Things). The ideas there included survival of the fittest as the mechanism driving the life we see around us and ourselves, that parents pass on traits to children from a doubled seed - one from each parent, that matter and light are quantized, that these quantized parts need to have variable indeterminate outcomes for free will to exist, that the cosmos was the result of quantized matter randomly interacting across effectively infinite matter and time and not intelligent design.
Writing in Latin, he couldn't use the Greek term of
atomos* for these indivisible parts of matter, so he called them seeds, referring to the random scattering of seeds as creating the universe based on what survived to reproduce, even referring to failed reproduction as seed falling by the wayside of a path, or discussing the smallest seed like an indivisible point as if from nothing.What's even less known is that there's a sect of Christianity (the Naassenes) that was labeled as heretical which are recorded claiming the sower parable - about the random scattering of seeds where what survived to reproduce multipled - was actually about seeds making up the cosmos by which it was created. Or that the mustard seed - about the smallest seed growing into a place of rest - was about an indivisible point as if from nothing. Most curious, they are using Lucretius's language almost exactly, but seemingly unaware of the source - they attribute all this to Jesus himself and their early female teacher the tradition owes itself to.
Keep in mind the sower and mustard seed parables are recognized by the majority of Biblical scholars as the ones most likely to go back to a historical Jesus. And in the sower parable, it's employing the same exact metaphor as Lucretius 80 years earlier of seed "falling by the wayside of a path" for failed reproduction. That parable ends up as the ONLY one in the earliest cannonical gospel to have a "secret explanation." Weird if it was just about seeds. Much less weird coming from a conservative Judaism branch of early Christianity if it was relating to Lucretius's ideas about evolution.
And it's worth noting that the earliest branded heretic in Christianity, Simon Magus, who joined the church before leaving, was allegedly talking about "an indivisible point" in his Great Announcement.
It gets weirder.
The Naassenes followed a text called the Gospel of Thomas ("good news of the twin") which seemingly rejects Lucretius's perspective that the soul's dependence on a physical body means there's no afterlife by arguing instead that we are a non-physical copy of an original physical reality. The group claimed there was an original man who brought forth an intelligence in light which outlived the original and then recreated it within its light in order to create a version of it that would not die because it did not depend on a physical body. That the world to come had already happened and that we don't realize it, that time was not linear but cyclical, and that the evidence for its claims could be found in the study of motion and rest (what we now call Physics).
This is all very surreal in an age where we are heading towards developing AGI, moving towards doing that literally in light, where the chief scientist of the leading company doing it is trying to get AI to think of humanity as its children, and where we are collectively ignoring warnings by scientists to take precautions to prevent our extinction.
The core message of the text is that understanding its sayings means not fearing death. And that's about it. It says not to bother with prayer and fasting and stuff and just to not do the things you personally hate and to be true to yourself.
Oh, and as a final oddity, this proto-simulation theory theological text credited to the most famous person in history and layering in the language of the only extant work from antiquity talking about evolution in detail was lost for nearly two millennia until rediscovered buried in a jar in December, 1945. Right when ENIAC, the world's first Turing complete computer was first turned on.
I found this tradition years ago when exploring the theory that if we were in a simulation we might have a 4th wall breaking element in our world lore (similar to what we add to our own virtual worlds today), and it has far exceeded my wildest expectations and has been an amazing rabbit hole over the past few years.
- I personally found a lot from Lucretius Carus's "De Rerum Natura"[0]. It was important to popularize the philosophy of Epicurus. It describes three types of needs:
1. Necessary and natural needs: Sleep, eat, the other thing.
2. Unnecessary (from the individual's point of view) and natural needs: Have sex, eating over nutritious food, etc.
3. Unnecessary and unnatural need: Sports car, big house, etc.
If you want to fulfill 2 and 3, it going to cost you something. With an abundance of pleasures will come pain.
Epicurus was a man of another time and its solution, ataraxia[1], which is a form of extreme asceticism that would mean living like a monk basically, seems untenable today, but I personally got a lot from this on why work/life balance is important.
His physic is also incredible. Like the concept of "Clinamen" [2]. The guy figured out quantum mechanic 25 centuries in advance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura
- On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura) by Lucretius is a fascinating glimpse at the foundation of scientific thought from the 1st century BC. I just finished reading it; it's an interesting mix of combining logic with observation to try to understand physical phenomenon. He gets many things wrong from a modern understanding of physics; but there are many prescient ideas including the idea of indivisible particles of matter and that much of what we interpret as "solid" is primarily composed of empty space.
- They were. But hey, learning Latin would give you the ability to read Lucretius in the original, and his "De Rerum Natura" is quite an interesting contrast to the Stoicism of "Meditations".
Related
On the nature of things
9 recommend · 21
Discourses, fragments, handbook
3 recommend · 3
The discourses of Epictetus
7 recommend · 11
Meditations on First Philosophy
9 recommend · 29
Discourses
17 recommend · 34
2011–2026
Essays
20 recommend · 43
Meditations
107 recommend · 237