In trying to divine the hidden reality behind the world of appearances, Lucretius deploys an arsenal of homely observations and cunningly contrived scenarios: thought experiments worthy of an Einstein. He realised that what he sought to explain often appeared as absences to our senses: clothes hung out to dry lose their moisture but we see nothing escaping from the fabric. A stepping stone is worn down by countless foot-treads; a ploughshare is eventually etched away by the soil even as the soil is itself crumbled by the plough; the invisible wind tears down huge trees. All these dissolutions, but the sum total of things never diminishes: Lucretius deduced from this that the Ur-stuff has to be too small to see with the naked eye and indestructible. Even the observation that the food we eat has to be destroyed by our body before it can be used to sustain it didn’t escape him.
He noted that intelligent and moral behaviour only emerges in human beings slowly as they mature and so, mischievously, he set up as a reductio ad absurdum the notion that anxious souls might fly around waiting to enter into each new life as it is born. No, he says, such higher attributes do not exist independently: they only emerge in due course after a long development as a property of the human animal.
Lucretius marshals such examples to demonstrate that behind appearances there must be a realm of matter on a very small scale that constantly forms, breaks apart and reforms to create the world available to our senses. Many elegant arguments illuminate his contention that the primary particles cannot have any of the properties of the objects they compose: if this were not so not only would the atoms themselves be smelly and colourful but those that compose us would: “split their sides with rollicking laughter and deck their cheeks with helpless teardrops and even discourse profoundly and at length about the composition of the universe and proceed to ask from what elements they are themselves composed”.
This way of thinking was revolutionary because until that point all philosophers, both Western and Eastern, had sought the secrets of nature in terms of harmony: plants were sought as cures if they resembled human body parts; the stars were thought to occupy perfect spheres by analogy with the harmonies of music; material bodies were thought to fall or rise according to their place in the four element scheme of things: earth falls, air rises. All of these were entirely understandable attempts but completely wrong. The true nature of matter is that it is totally unlike the objects it composes and it took a stroke of genius to comprehend this 2000 years ago, when superficially all of the evidence seemed stacked against it.
But if Lucretius is a proto scientist, he is also a humane naturalist, hymning the good life: the arts of cultivation, domesticity, and civic society:
Day by day they forced the forest back
Up the mountains, leaving the land below free
To cultivate with meadows, pools, streams and crops.
Luxuriant vineyards stretched across hill and plain,
So that now the land is patched with charming variety,
Primped and plumped with fruit trees and plantations.
If the poem were only a paean to science and the good life, it would not have encountered such fierce opposition over much of its 2000-year existence. “If I had read Lucretius in high school I would have been enchanted”, wrote the great Jewish-Italian author Primo Levi, in1981. But Lucretius was not taught in school because, according to Levi, “there has always been a whiff of impiety about his verses”. That dangerous odour had led to the poem’s almost complete disappearance following the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire. The only known biographical sketch of Lucretius, by St Jerome ( c.347-420 CE), reads:
94 BC. . . The poet Titus Lucretius is born. He was later driven mad by a love philtre and, having composed between bouts of insanity several books (which Cicero afterwards corrected), committed suicide at the age of 44.
Throughout both early and later Lucretian commentary, “insanity” is code for his unacceptable impiety and the apparent folly of his belief in atoms. So St Jerome’s account can probably best be read as propaganda. Even supporters such as his Renaissance champion, Marcello Adriani, Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, referred to Lucretius as “our poet, not always sound in mind” and to his “worthless heresy about atoms”.
Lucretius asserted that “nature is free and uncontrolled by proud masters”; that the soul can only exist in a functioning body and that it dies with that body. It was this denial of the immortality of the soul that so exercised the Catholic Church. As far as the Romans were concerned, Lucretius did make conventional bows to the gods; their main objection was that the atomic theory was clearly contrary to commonsense (how can a human being or a tree be seen in terms of atoms flying hither and thither, colliding and rebounding in all directions?). But in Christian doctrine, a belief in the immortality of the soul was a sine qua non. For more than 1000 years to deny this was to court death.
When The Nature of Things was rediscovered in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini, it excited both enthusiastic interest from Renaissance humanists anxious to reconnect with the best of classical thought and utter condemnation by the Catholic Church. In the early Renaissance, the Lucretian message was dangerous in a world dominated by a Church that had made a compromise with classical learning in favour of Aristotelian philosophy, with its pursuit of essences and celestial harmonies, which Lucretianism totally contradicted. But Quattrocento Florence was becoming tired of orthodoxy and it found the classical world enthralling. The new tendency rode under the banner of neo-Platonism, Plato being the conventional opposite pole to Aristotle, even when the philosophy in question derived more from the Greek atomists and Lucretius.
Ironically, the rise of humanistic studies and Neo-Platonism owed much to the Church. In 1439 the Ecumenical Council of the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches brought Greek scholars to Florence; some remained and soon after this Cosimo di Medici founded a Platonic Academy. The Medicis – never the official rulers of Florence, but effectively in power from 1429 until 1494 – were, of course, prime factors in Florence’s rise to artistic and humanistic glory.
The Renaissance was the second heyday of Lucretian thought, the third being our own time. Lucretius’ appeal for the Renaissance worked on several levels. His most powerful message was his banishment of the fear of death and hell: his warrant for living a good life in the here and now. Florence was increasingly involved in trade, bringing merchants into contact with people from remote civilisations. Lucretius’ account of human development helped make sense of this new world beyond the borders. The adventurers liked his account of human history, passing through a barbarous stage – what we would now call hunter-gathering – to a settled existence with the crafts of husbandry, refined clothing, building and finally metal-working, and a new civility, with gentler human relations born of the more stable conditions. The capitalists approved of his famous conceit of “The Swerve”, a slight deviation the atoms make from perfectly elastic collisions; this was Lucretius’ way of allowing for, and sanctioning, free will.
Lucretius realised – as did later philosophers of science such as “the French Newton” Laplace (1749-1827) – that if the elementary particles – atoms – spent their time colliding like billiard balls, their interactions should be entirely predictable. If everything were made of atoms of this kind, the unfolding of the universe was foreshadowed down to the motion of the last particle, like a preset computer program that cannot deviate from its pre-planned sequence. As that is manifestly not the case, the explanation must be a built-in randomizing factor in the atomic interactions: the Swerve.
Such questions were way beyond the competence of anyone before the era of modern science, and men of good sense, from Cicero onwards, laughed at the absurd notion of the atomic theory. Of course, in the end the joke was on them. As for the swerve, today it might be explained in terms of quantum uncertainty of the Butterfly Effect. At any rate, such questions are still debated.
Lucretianism was a strictly practical philosophy and free of superstition but his poetry used classical mythology as a prop; the poem begins with an invocation to Venus which was hugely appealing to the Florentine artists. It inspired Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1486) and his Primavera (1481-2):
For as soon as the vernal face of nature shows
And the west wind blows in fresh and free,
The birds of the air adore you, goddess,
And your coming, pierced to the core by your power.
In a series of annual lectures in the 1490s, the Professor of Poetry and Oratory and later to be Chancellor of Florence, Marcello Adriani, promoted Lucretian thought. But a powerful backlash was engendered by such heretical ideas and a religious reaction, spearheaded by the fundamentalist preacher Savonarola, was brewing. He claimed to be the voice of God and predicted war, famine and general mayhem if the city did not repent of its evil ways. At Lent, 1492, he declared: “Any day now indeed, at any hour, the heavens and the earth are going to collapse”. Now, preaching the end of the world excites only derision but in 15th century Florence the message could still terrify if delivered with the kind of malign force that Savonarola could muster.
Savonarola’s hellfire and brimstone preaching coincided with real dangers for Florence. In 1494 the French king decided to exercise a putative claim on the city; the French invaded and the Medicis were deposed. In 1495 Savonarola orchestrated a Bonfire of the Vanities, burning books and other impious objects. He had Lucretius specifically in his sights, preaching against the “absurdity” of the atomic theory: "Listen, women. They say that this world was made of atoms, that is those tiniest of particles that fly through the air.”
The next few years seemed to play out a Lucretian script and, as Florence became more or more unstable, his passages on the brutal age were keenly marked:
None paid heed to the common good
Nor observed any custom or law or restraint.
Instead took pride in their strength in surviving
And kept for themselves the bounty of chance.
But a new player appeared on the Florentine stage: a tough humanist to oppose the fanatically religious: Niccolo Machiavelli. In 1961 it was discovered that Machiavelli had copied out and annotated De rerum natura, probably in 1497. What did the man whose name was to become a byword for a particular kind of statecraft, now known as realpolitik, find most congenial in Lucretius? One marginal note read: “from motion there is variety, and from it we have a free mind”. It was the Swerve again: free will.
Savonarola was executed in 1498 and Florence’s reign of terror abated. The new learning and the residue of Puritanism coexisted uneasily in the early 1500s. In this murky time, Lucretius’ account of early human history struck a chord with the painter Piero di Cosimo, who was so drawn to the Lucretian passages depicting “the barbarous age” that it was reported that he too lived “like a wild beast”. Piero’s remarkable Forest Fire, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and one of the most striking paintings of the Renaissance, with animals fleeing the burning forest and the whole eerie scene laid out in broad panorama, is almost certainly drawn from a passage in Lucretius in which he speculates on the origin of metal-working:
After a fierce conflagration has roasted the forest
And scorched the earth to its mineral roots,
In the hollow places of the earth, from the boiling veins
Would flow a stream of silver, gold, copper and lead.
In the bottom left-hand corner of Piero’s painting there is just such a roasted patch of earth, still red, and a few grey globular nuggets.
Leonardo da Vinci also was intensely Lucretian: his notebooks are like a fragmentary Nature of Things, covering all earthly processes. His famous Deluge, for instance, seems to echo that of Lucretius:
Leonardo:
Let the dark and gloomy air be seen buffeted by the rush of contrary winds and dense from the continued rain mingled with hail and bearing hither and thither an infinite number of branches torn from the trees and mixed with numberless leaves.
Lucretius:
The wind when roused batters boats and scatters the clouds;
On land, tornadoes tear trees from the mountains
And strew the wreckage about the plains.
In 1512 the Medicis were restored but the Golden Age would not return. The Catholic Church's Fifth Lateran Council (1512-17) condemned The Nature of Things as “a lascivious and wicked work, in which every effort is used to demonstrate the mortality of the soul”. But it escaped the ultimate fate of inclusion on the Inquisition’s Index of Prohibited Books.
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He noted that intelligent and moral behaviour only emerges in human beings slowly as they mature and so, mischievously, he set up as a reductio ad absurdum the notion that anxious souls might fly around waiting to enter into each new life as it is born. No, he says, such higher attributes do not exist independently: they only emerge in due course after a long development as a property of the human animal.
Lucretius marshals such examples to demonstrate that behind appearances there must be a realm of matter on a very small scale that constantly forms, breaks apart and reforms to create the world available to our senses. Many elegant arguments illuminate his contention that the primary particles cannot have any of the properties of the objects they compose: if this were not so not only would the atoms themselves be smelly and colourful but those that compose us would: “split their sides with rollicking laughter and deck their cheeks with helpless teardrops and even discourse profoundly and at length about the composition of the universe and proceed to ask from what elements they are themselves composed”.
This way of thinking was revolutionary because until that point all philosophers, both Western and Eastern, had sought the secrets of nature in terms of harmony: plants were sought as cures if they resembled human body parts; the stars were thought to occupy perfect spheres by analogy with the harmonies of music; material bodies were thought to fall or rise according to their place in the four element scheme of things: earth falls, air rises. All of these were entirely understandable attempts but completely wrong. The true nature of matter is that it is totally unlike the objects it composes and it took a stroke of genius to comprehend this 2000 years ago, when superficially all of the evidence seemed stacked against it.
But if Lucretius is a proto scientist, he is also a humane naturalist, hymning the good life: the arts of cultivation, domesticity, and civic society:
Day by day they forced the forest back
Up the mountains, leaving the land below free
To cultivate with meadows, pools, streams and crops.
Luxuriant vineyards stretched across hill and plain,
So that now the land is patched with charming variety,
Primped and plumped with fruit trees and plantations.
If the poem were only a paean to science and the good life, it would not have encountered such fierce opposition over much of its 2000-year existence. “If I had read Lucretius in high school I would have been enchanted”, wrote the great Jewish-Italian author Primo Levi, in1981. But Lucretius was not taught in school because, according to Levi, “there has always been a whiff of impiety about his verses”. That dangerous odour had led to the poem’s almost complete disappearance following the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire. The only known biographical sketch of Lucretius, by St Jerome ( c.347-420 CE), reads:
94 BC. . . The poet Titus Lucretius is born. He was later driven mad by a love philtre and, having composed between bouts of insanity several books (which Cicero afterwards corrected), committed suicide at the age of 44.
Throughout both early and later Lucretian commentary, “insanity” is code for his unacceptable impiety and the apparent folly of his belief in atoms. So St Jerome’s account can probably best be read as propaganda. Even supporters such as his Renaissance champion, Marcello Adriani, Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, referred to Lucretius as “our poet, not always sound in mind” and to his “worthless heresy about atoms”.
Lucretius asserted that “nature is free and uncontrolled by proud masters”; that the soul can only exist in a functioning body and that it dies with that body. It was this denial of the immortality of the soul that so exercised the Catholic Church. As far as the Romans were concerned, Lucretius did make conventional bows to the gods; their main objection was that the atomic theory was clearly contrary to commonsense (how can a human being or a tree be seen in terms of atoms flying hither and thither, colliding and rebounding in all directions?). But in Christian doctrine, a belief in the immortality of the soul was a sine qua non. For more than 1000 years to deny this was to court death.
When The Nature of Things was rediscovered in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini, it excited both enthusiastic interest from Renaissance humanists anxious to reconnect with the best of classical thought and utter condemnation by the Catholic Church. In the early Renaissance, the Lucretian message was dangerous in a world dominated by a Church that had made a compromise with classical learning in favour of Aristotelian philosophy, with its pursuit of essences and celestial harmonies, which Lucretianism totally contradicted. But Quattrocento Florence was becoming tired of orthodoxy and it found the classical world enthralling. The new tendency rode under the banner of neo-Platonism, Plato being the conventional opposite pole to Aristotle, even when the philosophy in question derived more from the Greek atomists and Lucretius.
Ironically, the rise of humanistic studies and Neo-Platonism owed much to the Church. In 1439 the Ecumenical Council of the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches brought Greek scholars to Florence; some remained and soon after this Cosimo di Medici founded a Platonic Academy. The Medicis – never the official rulers of Florence, but effectively in power from 1429 until 1494 – were, of course, prime factors in Florence’s rise to artistic and humanistic glory.
The Renaissance was the second heyday of Lucretian thought, the third being our own time. Lucretius’ appeal for the Renaissance worked on several levels. His most powerful message was his banishment of the fear of death and hell: his warrant for living a good life in the here and now. Florence was increasingly involved in trade, bringing merchants into contact with people from remote civilisations. Lucretius’ account of human development helped make sense of this new world beyond the borders. The adventurers liked his account of human history, passing through a barbarous stage – what we would now call hunter-gathering – to a settled existence with the crafts of husbandry, refined clothing, building and finally metal-working, and a new civility, with gentler human relations born of the more stable conditions. The capitalists approved of his famous conceit of “The Swerve”, a slight deviation the atoms make from perfectly elastic collisions; this was Lucretius’ way of allowing for, and sanctioning, free will.
Lucretius realised – as did later philosophers of science such as “the French Newton” Laplace (1749-1827) – that if the elementary particles – atoms – spent their time colliding like billiard balls, their interactions should be entirely predictable. If everything were made of atoms of this kind, the unfolding of the universe was foreshadowed down to the motion of the last particle, like a preset computer program that cannot deviate from its pre-planned sequence. As that is manifestly not the case, the explanation must be a built-in randomizing factor in the atomic interactions: the Swerve.
Such questions were way beyond the competence of anyone before the era of modern science, and men of good sense, from Cicero onwards, laughed at the absurd notion of the atomic theory. Of course, in the end the joke was on them. As for the swerve, today it might be explained in terms of quantum uncertainty of the Butterfly Effect. At any rate, such questions are still debated.
Lucretianism was a strictly practical philosophy and free of superstition but his poetry used classical mythology as a prop; the poem begins with an invocation to Venus which was hugely appealing to the Florentine artists. It inspired Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1486) and his Primavera (1481-2):
For as soon as the vernal face of nature shows
And the west wind blows in fresh and free,
The birds of the air adore you, goddess,
And your coming, pierced to the core by your power.
In a series of annual lectures in the 1490s, the Professor of Poetry and Oratory and later to be Chancellor of Florence, Marcello Adriani, promoted Lucretian thought. But a powerful backlash was engendered by such heretical ideas and a religious reaction, spearheaded by the fundamentalist preacher Savonarola, was brewing. He claimed to be the voice of God and predicted war, famine and general mayhem if the city did not repent of its evil ways. At Lent, 1492, he declared: “Any day now indeed, at any hour, the heavens and the earth are going to collapse”. Now, preaching the end of the world excites only derision but in 15th century Florence the message could still terrify if delivered with the kind of malign force that Savonarola could muster.
Savonarola’s hellfire and brimstone preaching coincided with real dangers for Florence. In 1494 the French king decided to exercise a putative claim on the city; the French invaded and the Medicis were deposed. In 1495 Savonarola orchestrated a Bonfire of the Vanities, burning books and other impious objects. He had Lucretius specifically in his sights, preaching against the “absurdity” of the atomic theory: "Listen, women. They say that this world was made of atoms, that is those tiniest of particles that fly through the air.”
The next few years seemed to play out a Lucretian script and, as Florence became more or more unstable, his passages on the brutal age were keenly marked:
None paid heed to the common good
Nor observed any custom or law or restraint.
Instead took pride in their strength in surviving
And kept for themselves the bounty of chance.
But a new player appeared on the Florentine stage: a tough humanist to oppose the fanatically religious: Niccolo Machiavelli. In 1961 it was discovered that Machiavelli had copied out and annotated De rerum natura, probably in 1497. What did the man whose name was to become a byword for a particular kind of statecraft, now known as realpolitik, find most congenial in Lucretius? One marginal note read: “from motion there is variety, and from it we have a free mind”. It was the Swerve again: free will.
Savonarola was executed in 1498 and Florence’s reign of terror abated. The new learning and the residue of Puritanism coexisted uneasily in the early 1500s. In this murky time, Lucretius’ account of early human history struck a chord with the painter Piero di Cosimo, who was so drawn to the Lucretian passages depicting “the barbarous age” that it was reported that he too lived “like a wild beast”. Piero’s remarkable Forest Fire, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and one of the most striking paintings of the Renaissance, with animals fleeing the burning forest and the whole eerie scene laid out in broad panorama, is almost certainly drawn from a passage in Lucretius in which he speculates on the origin of metal-working:
After a fierce conflagration has roasted the forest
And scorched the earth to its mineral roots,
In the hollow places of the earth, from the boiling veins
Would flow a stream of silver, gold, copper and lead.
In the bottom left-hand corner of Piero’s painting there is just such a roasted patch of earth, still red, and a few grey globular nuggets.
Leonardo da Vinci also was intensely Lucretian: his notebooks are like a fragmentary Nature of Things, covering all earthly processes. His famous Deluge, for instance, seems to echo that of Lucretius:
Leonardo:
Let the dark and gloomy air be seen buffeted by the rush of contrary winds and dense from the continued rain mingled with hail and bearing hither and thither an infinite number of branches torn from the trees and mixed with numberless leaves.
Lucretius:
The wind when roused batters boats and scatters the clouds;
On land, tornadoes tear trees from the mountains
And strew the wreckage about the plains.
In 1512 the Medicis were restored but the Golden Age would not return. The Catholic Church's Fifth Lateran Council (1512-17) condemned The Nature of Things as “a lascivious and wicked work, in which every effort is used to demonstrate the mortality of the soul”. But it escaped the ultimate fate of inclusion on the Inquisition’s Index of Prohibited Books.
READ MORE
