Lucretius either influenced or foreshadowed many topics in science from the 17th century onwards and it was the revolution in physics at the dawn of the 20th century that brought his most comprehensive vindication. In one of the papers from his annus mirabilis, 1905, Einstein sought to address the scepticism of some of his physicist colleagues:
My major aim in this was to find facts which would guarantee as much as possible the existence of atoms of definite finite size.
This work had its origin in one of Lucretius’ most haunting, painterly, and influential passages:
Mark, when the sun’s rays pour into the shadowy room
How many tiny scintillations contend with the rays:
Dust motes in fretful motion without pause,
Massed troops clashing in endless disputation.
For Lucretius, the motion of the particles was caused by bombardment from the unseen atoms and this idea became a major plank of modern physics in the 19th century through the work of James Clerk Maxwell and others. Einstein took it further and he established the “existence of atoms of definite finite size” in theoretical work that was experimentally verified by the French chemist August Perrin; the latter won a Nobel Prize for this work and in 1916 wrote: “the atomic theory has triumphed”. Einstein and Lucretius were explicitly linked in the Preface that Einstein wrote for a 1924 German translation of The Nature of Things, by his Prussian Academy colleague Hermann Diels, in which he praised Lucretius’ goal of “freeing humanity from slavish fear caused by religion and superstition”
It was only in the mid twentieth century that this goal could be said to have been achieved. An index of this is Lucretius’ status in Italy where, despite there being a continuous strand of thought that links the Roman world with the Renaissance and contemporary thought, Lucretius had laboured under centuries of religious disapproval. In our time, two great Italian writers acknowledged Lucretius as a supreme influence. Italo Calvino was a writer whose fastidious playfulness embraced both art and science. In Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1996) he wrote of the quality of lightness in Lucretius: the springtime spirit of warmth in abundant nature and the eloquent defence of free will. In the thumbnail characterization of Lucretius’ philosophy as “atoms and the void” scientists have mostly focused on the atoms but for the Atomic Pessimists it was the word void that resounded most ominously. Calvino, however, turned the idea of the void into a virtue, a leavening influence that allows the world to be more than merely lumpish brute matter.
Calvino’s friend Primo Levi was Lucretius’ best representative in the late 20th century. A chemist, a Jew but a free thinker, his experience of surviving Auschwitz gives his endorsement of Lucretius undeniable moral force. In his book of influences The Search for Roots, Levi summarizes Lucretius’ achievements in the most wonderfully succinct manner:
...he sought a purely rational explanation of nature, had faith in the evidence of his own senses, wanted to liberate man from earthly suffering and fear, rebelled against all superstition, and described earthly love in lucid poetry.
“Earthly love”: of the many facets of Lucretius that find a more welcome climate in the present era none is more striking than his treatment of sex. In this chapter, Lucretius is a first century BCE Alex Comfort (who was also a scientist-poet) presenting, with a few caveats, a Latin primer on The Moderately Agreeable Pleasures of Sex.
The poet Yeats regarded this passage as “the finest description of sexual intercourse ever written”:
Even in the raging tide of possession
Lovers’ passion is neurotic, uncertain:
What to devour first with hand or eye?
So for Lucretius the attempt to find happiness in physical love can, at times, resemble catching water with a sieve. The Romans of course knew everything about sex that we know – the brothel graffiti at Pompeii leave us in no doubt about that. Pornography was widely available in the Roman Republic, and publicly displayed – something that links our two worlds. Even so, Lucretius’ view of sex seems uncannily modern in its psychology. But although in every other aspect of life his theme is a positive one – with the gods removed from any influence in this world and superstition banished, we can take joy in the created world – in sex he is more measured.
After Yeats, another poet also comes to mind. When Lucretius writes –
At last when the dam of desire bursts
There’s a brief respite from domineering lust,
But then the storm returns, exactly the same.
– he could be the Larkin of ‘Dry Point’:
Endlessly, time-honoured irritant,
A bubble is restlessly forming at your tip.
Burst it as fast as you can –
It will grow again, until we begin dying.
Lucretius is not anti-sex and is at pains to stress that a woman’s pleasure is equal to that of a man: “the pleasure of sex is shared”. For the excesses of those in thrall to sexual passion he has some stern bromides:
But even if her face is that one in a million
And her body brims with promised delights,
The truth is: there are many others;
The truth is we’ve lived without this one so far.
Only Proust can match Lucretius for his dissection of sexual obsession.
It was not until the late 20th century that Lucretius could be seen whole, freed from the need to obey the dissimulatory code. As a primarily secular worldview has come to be the doctrine that dare at last to speak its name, Lucretius’ status as a pioneer becomes ever stronger. And the recognition, which is very recent, that we cannot continue with Two Cultures that pay scant regard to each other reinforces Lucretius’ relevance. Figures such as Leonardo, Galileo and Primo Levi no longer seem isolated in their insistence on One Culture that can embrace both art and science. The several aspects of Lucretius that were once stumbling blocks – the apparently wildly speculative nature of the atomic theory; his denial of supernatural influence in the world and belief in the finality of the earthly human term; and his full-face frank view of sex – are stumbling blocks no more. Echoes of Lucretius, either conscious or unconscious, are common in 20/21stth century writing. He wrote, “For as children tremble in the blind darkness, / We, in the light fear things no more real / Than the phantoms the child sees lurking there”, and Auden echoed: “Lest we should see who we are, / Lost in a haunted wood, / Children afraid of the night / Who have never been happy or good”.
Lucretius went beyond Auden’s tentative conclusion to that poem (‘September 1st, 1939’) in insisting that the fear of the dark haunted wood was irrational and that to be good was not forever out of reach of humankind. He was aware that humanity had only recently begun to transcend crude animal existence. From our perspective, as the human genome begins to reveal the journey we took from animalhood, it is even clearer that the superstition and ignorance Lucretius fought to dispel are relics of our evolutionary past.
The Nature of Things is not merely a classic of its time, to be read with condescension at its quaint, outdated speculations: it combines the passion for living nature of a David Attenborough with the scientific rigour of a Stephen Hawking; the ruminative, human-centred wisdom of a Montaigne with a Darwinian sense of our place in the grand scheme of things. It is a book to be reread many times. For me, forty years on, it is still the inexhaustible fount.
My major aim in this was to find facts which would guarantee as much as possible the existence of atoms of definite finite size.
This work had its origin in one of Lucretius’ most haunting, painterly, and influential passages:
Mark, when the sun’s rays pour into the shadowy room
How many tiny scintillations contend with the rays:
Dust motes in fretful motion without pause,
Massed troops clashing in endless disputation.
For Lucretius, the motion of the particles was caused by bombardment from the unseen atoms and this idea became a major plank of modern physics in the 19th century through the work of James Clerk Maxwell and others. Einstein took it further and he established the “existence of atoms of definite finite size” in theoretical work that was experimentally verified by the French chemist August Perrin; the latter won a Nobel Prize for this work and in 1916 wrote: “the atomic theory has triumphed”. Einstein and Lucretius were explicitly linked in the Preface that Einstein wrote for a 1924 German translation of The Nature of Things, by his Prussian Academy colleague Hermann Diels, in which he praised Lucretius’ goal of “freeing humanity from slavish fear caused by religion and superstition”
It was only in the mid twentieth century that this goal could be said to have been achieved. An index of this is Lucretius’ status in Italy where, despite there being a continuous strand of thought that links the Roman world with the Renaissance and contemporary thought, Lucretius had laboured under centuries of religious disapproval. In our time, two great Italian writers acknowledged Lucretius as a supreme influence. Italo Calvino was a writer whose fastidious playfulness embraced both art and science. In Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1996) he wrote of the quality of lightness in Lucretius: the springtime spirit of warmth in abundant nature and the eloquent defence of free will. In the thumbnail characterization of Lucretius’ philosophy as “atoms and the void” scientists have mostly focused on the atoms but for the Atomic Pessimists it was the word void that resounded most ominously. Calvino, however, turned the idea of the void into a virtue, a leavening influence that allows the world to be more than merely lumpish brute matter.
Calvino’s friend Primo Levi was Lucretius’ best representative in the late 20th century. A chemist, a Jew but a free thinker, his experience of surviving Auschwitz gives his endorsement of Lucretius undeniable moral force. In his book of influences The Search for Roots, Levi summarizes Lucretius’ achievements in the most wonderfully succinct manner:
...he sought a purely rational explanation of nature, had faith in the evidence of his own senses, wanted to liberate man from earthly suffering and fear, rebelled against all superstition, and described earthly love in lucid poetry.
“Earthly love”: of the many facets of Lucretius that find a more welcome climate in the present era none is more striking than his treatment of sex. In this chapter, Lucretius is a first century BCE Alex Comfort (who was also a scientist-poet) presenting, with a few caveats, a Latin primer on The Moderately Agreeable Pleasures of Sex.
The poet Yeats regarded this passage as “the finest description of sexual intercourse ever written”:
Even in the raging tide of possession
Lovers’ passion is neurotic, uncertain:
What to devour first with hand or eye?
So for Lucretius the attempt to find happiness in physical love can, at times, resemble catching water with a sieve. The Romans of course knew everything about sex that we know – the brothel graffiti at Pompeii leave us in no doubt about that. Pornography was widely available in the Roman Republic, and publicly displayed – something that links our two worlds. Even so, Lucretius’ view of sex seems uncannily modern in its psychology. But although in every other aspect of life his theme is a positive one – with the gods removed from any influence in this world and superstition banished, we can take joy in the created world – in sex he is more measured.
After Yeats, another poet also comes to mind. When Lucretius writes –
At last when the dam of desire bursts
There’s a brief respite from domineering lust,
But then the storm returns, exactly the same.
– he could be the Larkin of ‘Dry Point’:
Endlessly, time-honoured irritant,
A bubble is restlessly forming at your tip.
Burst it as fast as you can –
It will grow again, until we begin dying.
Lucretius is not anti-sex and is at pains to stress that a woman’s pleasure is equal to that of a man: “the pleasure of sex is shared”. For the excesses of those in thrall to sexual passion he has some stern bromides:
But even if her face is that one in a million
And her body brims with promised delights,
The truth is: there are many others;
The truth is we’ve lived without this one so far.
Only Proust can match Lucretius for his dissection of sexual obsession.
It was not until the late 20th century that Lucretius could be seen whole, freed from the need to obey the dissimulatory code. As a primarily secular worldview has come to be the doctrine that dare at last to speak its name, Lucretius’ status as a pioneer becomes ever stronger. And the recognition, which is very recent, that we cannot continue with Two Cultures that pay scant regard to each other reinforces Lucretius’ relevance. Figures such as Leonardo, Galileo and Primo Levi no longer seem isolated in their insistence on One Culture that can embrace both art and science. The several aspects of Lucretius that were once stumbling blocks – the apparently wildly speculative nature of the atomic theory; his denial of supernatural influence in the world and belief in the finality of the earthly human term; and his full-face frank view of sex – are stumbling blocks no more. Echoes of Lucretius, either conscious or unconscious, are common in 20/21stth century writing. He wrote, “For as children tremble in the blind darkness, / We, in the light fear things no more real / Than the phantoms the child sees lurking there”, and Auden echoed: “Lest we should see who we are, / Lost in a haunted wood, / Children afraid of the night / Who have never been happy or good”.
Lucretius went beyond Auden’s tentative conclusion to that poem (‘September 1st, 1939’) in insisting that the fear of the dark haunted wood was irrational and that to be good was not forever out of reach of humankind. He was aware that humanity had only recently begun to transcend crude animal existence. From our perspective, as the human genome begins to reveal the journey we took from animalhood, it is even clearer that the superstition and ignorance Lucretius fought to dispel are relics of our evolutionary past.
The Nature of Things is not merely a classic of its time, to be read with condescension at its quaint, outdated speculations: it combines the passion for living nature of a David Attenborough with the scientific rigour of a Stephen Hawking; the ruminative, human-centred wisdom of a Montaigne with a Darwinian sense of our place in the grand scheme of things. It is a book to be reread many times. For me, forty years on, it is still the inexhaustible fount.
