Lucretius

Lucretius was a Roman poet and Epicurean whose one surviving work, De rerum natura, sets out Epicurus' philosophy in Latin hexameter verse. Almost nothing reliable is known of his life, and his dates are approximate. The poem presents atomism, the mortality of the soul and a naturalistic account of the world, with the aim of freeing readers from fear of the gods and of death. Book III contains the 'symmetry argument': the time after death is like the time before birth.

Key ideas

• Everything consists of atoms moving in the void; nothing comes from nothing and nothing returns to nothing.
• The mind and spirit are material and dissolve at death, so death is nothing to us.
• Symmetry: the endless time before we were born did not trouble us, and it is a mirror of the time after death.
• Religion breeds fear and harm; understanding nature brings tranquillity.

Major works

• De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things, c. 1st century BCE)
• De rerum natura, Book III (the arguments against fearing death, including the symmetry argument)

In the conversation

• Question Epicureans and Cārvākas: two ancient materialisms, two ideas of pleasure? Arvind Poojary · 4 replies