On the Nature of Things

What It Is

Around 7,400 lines of Latin hexameter in six books, written in the 50s BC. It sets out the physics and ethics of Epicurus in verse: what the world is made of, what the gods have to do with us, what the soul is, and what follows for how you should live and what you should fear.

We know almost nothing about the man who wrote it. A lurid story about a love potion and madness comes from a hostile Christian source four centuries later, and is probably invention. The poem is what we have.

It is an argument in the shape of a poem, and it never pretends otherwise. Lucretius is trying to convince you, proposition by proposition, and he says plainly that he has coated a bitter medicine in honey. The honey is some of the best verse in Latin.

Why It Matters

Read a summary of its claims and you will not believe the date. The claims it makes about matter, the gods, the origins of life, the mind, and where human cruelty comes from are ones you would date to the nineteenth century if nobody told you otherwise. This is 55 BC.

Then it vanished. A single manuscript surfaced in a German monastery in 1417, found by a papal secretary named Poggio Bracciolini, and the effect on Europe was slow and enormous. Machiavelli copied the poem out by hand. Montaigne quotes it more than any other poet, nearly 150 times, and his copy survives with his notes in it. Jefferson owned five editions and described himself as an Epicurean. Modern science did not come from this book, but the permission to imagine a universe running without supervision partly did.

The other reason to read it is Book 3, which takes the fear of death head on. It has not been improved on, and it may be the only philosophical consolation that actually works.

Before You Read

Eight to ten hours. The obstacle is Books 1 and 2, which do the physics: atoms, void, motion, why matter cannot be infinitely divided. The argumentation is patient and repetitive by design, because Lucretius is teaching, and modern readers find it heavy.

Push through. The physics is the foundation the rest stands on, and Book 3, on the mind and mortality, is what you came for. Books 4, 5 and 6 range across sensation, sexual desire, the origins of society and the weather, and are the most surprising and least famous part of the poem.

Read the openings of each book slowly. The prefaces and the closing set pieces are what made Virgil and Ovid possible.

Which Translation to Read

• A. E. Stallings (Penguin Classics, 2007), published as The Nature of Things — recommended. A working poet's translation into rhyming fourteeners, with an introduction by Richard Jenkyns. The long line and the rhyme give the argument momentum and carry the didactic passages, which is exactly where other translations die on the page. Nothing else in English sounds this much like a poem someone meant. The cost: rhyme forces padding, and readers who dislike the fourteener will find it lumbers. Try twenty lines before committing. View on Amazon →
• Ronald Melville (Oxford World's Classics, 1997). Blank verse, accurate, with excellent notes by Don and Peta Fowler. The one to check Stallings against. The cost: dutiful. It informs you without catching fire.
• Martin Ferguson Smith (Hackett, 2001). Crisp, exact prose with a strong introduction, and the surest way to know what Lucretius is actually claiming. The cost: it is prose, and half of what makes Lucretius Lucretius is gone.

Read Stallings for the poem, Smith when you want to be sure of the argument, Melville if the rhyme irritates you. Rolfe Humphries's version, The Way Things Are, is a fine older fourth.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the introduction first, for once. This is one of the few books on the list where knowing the system in advance makes the poem better rather than worse. You cannot follow the argument if you do not know what Epicurus thought, and Lucretius assumes you do.

Read it aloud, at least the prefaces. He is a scientist writing at the pitch of religious ecstasy about a universe with nothing sacred in it, and you can hear the strain in the verse. It is the most exhilarating thing in the poem.

Argue with him. He wants you to. The book is a series of proofs and several of them are wrong, and finding out which ones and why is more interesting than agreeing.

And do not stop after Book 2 because the atoms have defeated you. Everyone who gives up gives up there, one book short of the reason the poem exists.