Season Introduction and an Introduction to Lucretius

An Eclectic Humanist

Greetings, folks, and welcome back. This kick-off to Season Two begins with a brief catch-up as it's been a couple of months since we've been in touch, and then jumps right into the subject matter with which I'd like to begin the year. The topic of the first few little talks will be what, to my mind at least, is the most important work of ancient Western Humanism to have survived the bonfires and vandalism of the early Christian era: Lucretius's great didactic poem, On the Nature of Things, which provides the only surviving account of Epicurean thought written from an Epicurean point of view. Lucretius presents us with a Cosmos consisting solely of matter and void, argues against any supernatural agency in either cosmological or human affairs, presents organized religion as a blight on both society and the individual, argues for empiricism as the most valid epistemology for generating knowledge of the natural world, lays out the atomic theory of matter, depicts an infinite Cosmos working consistently to the same principles, presents an early version of the theory of evolution, dispenses with the ever-destructive association of pleasure with “sin,” lays out a version of ethics that his modern inheritors would go on to develop as the social contract, and even makes an argument for death with dignity. And, particularly relevant to our own society at this particular time, he argues strenuously against any superstitious or religious self-delusion (the Latin word religio translates as both “superstition” and “religion”) during a mass infectious disease crisis. In short, he is one of my intellectual heroes.

This talk lays out some background and context for the poem and its reception in the Modern period. Subsequent talks will address details of the text itself, hopefully enough to spark an interest in reading it. And if you do decide to read it, the translation I recommend is A.E. Stallings' translation, available from Penguin, which renders the original Latin hexameters into rhyming English hexameters rather than the prose for which many other translators opt, and is a genuine pleasure to read simply on its own poetic merits.

Enjoy