In Rome in the first half of the 1st century. BC e. Greek philosophical theories are widespread - Epicurean, Stoic, Peripatetic. The Roman aristocracy was attracted by the ethical side of these philosophical movements; and in Epicurean philosophy the most popular was the ethics of Epicurus.

At the same time, there were also consistent students of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who accepted the entirety of his philosophical doctrine, based on materialistic atomism.

Titus Lucretius Carus

This is the outstanding Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Car (c. 98–55 BC), who wrote the philosophical poem “On the Nature of Things.” Unlike the previous Greek authors of didactic poems “On Nature” (Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles), Lucretius turns to an already existing philosophical theory, expounding not his own teaching, but the teaching of the ancient Greek materialist Epicurus.

The poem begins with an appeal to the goddess Venus:

“The family of Aeneas is the mother, people and immortals’ delight,
O good Venus! Under a sky of sliding constellations
You fill the entire ship-bearing sea with life,
And fertile lands; by you all existing creatures
They begin to live and see the light of the sun when they are born.”
(“On the Nature of Things,” book I, verses 1–5).

The content of the poem “On the Nature of Things” is a materialistic interpretation of the origin and existence of various forms of matter, the nature of the universe, the laws of the development of the universe, human life and the evolution of culture from primitive tools to the contemporary achievements of human civilization by Lucretius Caru. Thus, immediately after the introduction to book I, Lucretius proclaims the Epicurean thesis he adopted:

“We take the following position as a basis here:
Nothing is created from nothing by divine will.”
(“On the Nature of Things,” book I, verses 149–150).

According to the teachings of Epicurus, whose admirer was Titus Lucretius Carus, there is only matter, which is opposed to emptiness, and matter consists of an infinite number of atoms (“atom” - literally “indivisible”). When combined, atoms form various objects, the diversity of which constitutes nature. Objects (things) disintegrate - this is death, but the atoms themselves are eternal and do not disappear with the death of the object, but only provide material for new combinations.

In the poem “On the Nature of Things,” Lucretius strongly points out the mortal nature of the soul, which, like all matter, has an atomic structure and after the death of a person disintegrates along with the body, since it is an integral material part of the human body. Therefore, it makes no sense to be afraid of what will happen after death:

“So when we are no longer there, when they disperse
Body and soul, of which we are closely united into a whole,
Nothing can happen to us after our death,
And we will no longer awaken any sensations,
Even if the sea and the earth and the seas mix the sky.”
(Bk. III, verses 838–842).

The materialistic principle of interpretation of the nature of the universe, which provides an explanation for the emergence, existence and development of the nature of things without the intervention of gods, is a manifestation of Lucretius’ atheism. It is not the denial of the existence of gods, but the assertion that the gods are in no way connected with a universe independent of them - this is what Lucretius’ atheism consists of. In Book III “On the Nature of Things” (verses 18–24), the poet depicts a “calm abode” where the gods live in complete prosperity and bliss, “nothing disturbs the eternal peace of the gods, and nothing ever disturbs.” Twice in the poem there are verses setting out the position of Epicurus, which Lucretius also perceives:

“For all gods must by their nature certainly
Always enjoy immortal life in complete peace,
Alien to our worries and far removed from them.
After all, without any sorrows, far from any dangers,
They have everything and do not need anything from us;
They have no need for good deeds, and anger is unknown."
(“On the Nature of Things,” Book I, verses 44–49; Book II, verses 646–651).

In four introductions to the books of the poem “On the Nature of Things” out of six (each of the books is preceded by an introduction), Lucretius glorifies Epicurus for his wisdom, courage, “divine reason”, which opened the way for people to true knowledge, freeing their souls from all kinds of superstitions and fear before death, as well as showing the path to happiness and the “highest good.” Lucretius Carus pays tribute to his inspirer and predecessor, defining his position in relation to the teachings of Epicurus: “from your writings... we consume golden words” (Book III, verses 10–12). Nevertheless, Lucretius clearly points to his own path, which no one had used before:

“Along the trackless paths of the Pierides I walk, along which
No one has set foot before"
(Book I, verses 926–927; Book IV, verses 1–2).

Lucretius calls the places he walks pathless, untouched the springs from which he draws water, new the flowers with which, as he hopes, the muses will crown his head. Lucretius also speaks about the reasons that give him hope for a successful outcome of the task (Book I, verses 931–934; Book IV, verses 6–9), declaring, first of all, that he teaches and seeks to expound an important and a difficult subject in clear verses that bring pleasure with their charm. And indeed, in the poem “On the Nature of Things,” abstract theoretical propositions, through various methods of artistic concretization and fascination of poetic material, become accessible to a wide range of readers. To demonstrate the movement of the first principles (for Epicurus - atoms), Lucretius draws a ray of sunlight penetrating into dwellings, and in it the flickering of dust particles (Book II, verses 114–122). And here is the picture of the battle of the legions, when “horsemen gallop around and suddenly cross the fields in a fast onslaught,” but from a distance it all seems like a spot, “movingly sparkling in the field” (Book II, verses 324–332). This is an illustration of the idea that the movements of the origins are inaccessible to vision from a distance.

Lucretius is an artist. He is a master of creating paintings and images. The poem “On the Nature of Things” contains many comparisons and allegories. In the hymn to Venus, which opens the poem (Book I, verses 1–43), the readers are presented with personified nature, filling the sea and the fertile land with life. “By you,” Lucretius says, turning to Venus, “all existing creatures begin to live and, having been born, they see the light of the sun” (“On the Nature of Things,” book I, verses 4–5). The poetic merits of this hymn are constantly noted as outstanding. The content and artistic form are associated with the poetic traditions of the Greek classics. The image of the goddess Cybele, the mother of gods and people, is also an allegory of personified nature (Book II, verses 600–643). The description of the cult of the goddess in this passage of the poem “On the Nature of Things” has an oriental flavor. The vocabulary is expressive, “the dugout flute excites the Phrygian rhythm of the heart” (Book II, verse 620). The influence of Alexandrian poetry is felt.

In the spirit of the contemporary Lucretius rhetorical tradition, the image of personified nature is presented not in the form of an allegory, but as a person who appears before a person complaining about the cruel necessity of death. And nature turns her calm and wise speech to an agitated person who is afraid of death:

“What oppresses you, mortal, and worries you with immense sadness
Bitter? Why do you languish and cry at the thought of death?
After all, if your past life served you well before this,
And it was not in vain that all her blessings passed and disappeared,
As if poured into a nailed vessel, flowing away without a trace,
Why don’t you leave like a guest, satiated with the feast of life,
And you, fool, do not taste the serene peace with indifference.”
(“On the Nature of Things,” book III, verses 933–939).

Pictures of severe human suffering do not escape Lucretius’s field of vision: he is indignant at the cruelty of bloody wars, speaks of the base motives of contemporary people, bitterly depicts the disappointments of love, and at the end of Book VI he gives a description of the terrible plague epidemic in Athens (verses 1138–1286). The poem “On the Nature of Things” ends with this description.

But all the pessimistic moments do not reduce the enormous power of optimism, deep humanism and concern for human happiness with which the poem is imbued. Defending the teaching of Epicurus on the mortality of the soul, the teaching that the soul perishes along with the body, Lucretius wants to open the path to happiness for man, freeing him from the fear of death, from the fear of the punishments of Tartarus, from all kinds of superstitions and fear of the gods. And for this there is only one, but the right way - knowledge of the true nature of all things (the nature of things). Penetration of a person by reason into the secrets of nature, knowledge of the laws of its development - this is exactly what should free people from various kinds of fears and superstitions. Lucretius insistently repeats his programmatic refrain:

“So, to drive out this fear from the soul and dispel the darkness
Should not be the rays of the sun and not the light of daylight,
But nature itself by its appearance and internal structure"
(Book I, verses 146–148; Book II, verses 59–61; Book III, verses 91–93; Book VI, verses 39–41).

Explaining the theory of the infinity of worlds, which represents one of the brilliant achievements of ancient materialism, Lucretius resorts to vivid images and illustrates his presentation with clear examples:

“...the greedy sea is always renewed
By the waters of rivers; and the earth, warmed by the heat of the sun,
Produces fruit again; and living creatures, being born,
Blooming again; and the lights gliding in the sky do not go out.
All this would have been impossible if it had not been for
From infinity again the reserves of matter forever"
(“On the Nature of Things,” book I, verses 1031 – 1036).

The poem “On the Nature of Things” by Titus Lucretius Cara has high artistic merit and gives readers great aesthetic pleasure. Abstract theoretical reasoning, illustrated with real-life examples, becomes concrete and convincing. Based on the abstract principles of Epicurean natural philosophy, Lucretius recreates before the reader’s gaze a majestic panorama of nature.

The philosophical poem of Lucretius continues the traditions of the didactic genre. It is written in the spirit and poetic meter (hexameter) of the didactic works that preceded it, widely uses techniques characteristic of this genre (comparisons, repetitions, mythological themes, appeals to muses and gods, etc.), and is quite rightly considered the highest achievement of ancient didactics. Lucretius Carus gives a fascinating character to the didactic genre, having managed to find effective forms of relationship between emotional and intellectual communication with the reader.

Ballistic theory of Ritz and the picture of the universe Semikov Sergey Aleksandrovich

§ 5.5 Lucretius “On the nature of things” and the phenomenon of Democritus

The entire history of science shows at every step that individuals were more correct in their statements than entire corporations of scientists or hundreds and thousands of researchers adhering to mainstream views.

IN AND. Vernadsky

This book has repeatedly used as an example the bold guesses of Democritus and quotes from the poem “On the Nature of Things” by Titus Lucretius Cara, who popularly expounded the atomistic teachings of Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus. The work of Lucretius is rightfully considered the first popular science book, and a deeply scientific book, with its wisdom surpassing not only the “scientific and philosophical” treatises of such ancient scientists as Aristotle and the scholastics of the Middle Ages, but in many ways also modern science. Such scientific advance proves that truth is simple and easily comprehended, and all complex, vague, mathematically intricate abstract concepts are erroneous (§ 5.15). It was not for nothing that Rutherford, who rejected the theory of relativity, said that the scientist who cannot clearly explain the essence of his work to a five-year-old boy from the street or a simple cleaning lady from a laboratory should be persecuted. And the modern theory of relativity and quantum mechanics are precisely such that, according to this rule, it is necessary to fire all their adherents, starting from the top.

It must be remembered that Lucretius Carus is only a reteller and popularizer of the teachings of Democritus. He could perceive the Democritus concept in an already distorted form, with numerous gaps and inaccuracies. After all, the works of Democritus, as is known, were bought up and destroyed by his opponents, primarily by the followers of Aristotle. That is why not a single work of Democritus has reached us - we know about his views only from mentions of him by other authors. Therefore, one can imagine what a grandiose, centuries-old concept the original Democritus theory was. It was not for nothing that when Democritus read fragments from his “Great World-Building” to the people in the square, everyone was so fascinated by his concept of the universe that the author not only escaped punishment for wasting his inheritance for scientific purposes, but also received an award with recognition. This once again proves that truth is always simple, beautiful and understandable to any person, in contrast to absurd quantitative relativistic theories, the lack of understanding of which they try to attribute to the “limitations of the human mind.”

Even judging by the little that has come down to us from the legacy of Democritus, it seems incredible that one person made so many scientific discoveries that were thousands of years ahead of the development of science. Here are just some of Democritus' ideas that were ahead of their time:

1) atomistic doctrine (in the world there are only atoms and emptiness);

2) atoms move continuously and chaotically (mechanical theory of heat);

3) interlocking with the help of protrusions and depressions, the atoms form all known bodies;

4) light is a stream of tiny particles emitted by luminous bodies at enormous speed and forming periodic layers, films (wave fronts);

5) movement of particles in space at superluminal speeds (cosmic rays);

6) laws of conservation (indestructibility) of energy, motion and matter;

7) the concept of a plurality of worlds (including inhabited ones);

8) the concept of the infinity of space, matter, the Universe;

9) cosmogony of cosmic vortices (galaxies, stellar systems and their evolution);

10) the eternal life of the Universe from constant renewal, birth and death of worlds;

11) denial of spontaneous generation of organisms (nothing is born from nothing);

12) survival of adapted organisms, development from protozoa (theory of evolution and natural selection);

13) thinking processes take place in the brain, and nervous sensitivity is of an electrical nature - sensations are transmitted by atoms of the soul (electrons and ions scurrying in the air and, upon contact, creating fire and lightning);

14) infinitesimal calculus - searching for volumes of bodies using integral analysis.

In fact, the list goes on and on. But Democritus, judging by the poem of Lucretius, did not give his theory as a set of speculative hypotheses that follow from nowhere or from considerations of mathematical ideals, as was customary in his time and in our time in non-classical physics. On the contrary, Democritus derived each of his statements from experience, supporting them with numerous observations and accompanying them with visual illustrations, parallels, and analogies from life. Therefore, his ideas are strictly scientific. This, apparently, was the main reason for the amazing scientific insight of Democritus. He did not try to create, like many philosophers of his time, his own model of the world - more complicated and more elaborate. He did not invent his theories, did not try to fit the facts to the theory, but only sought to understand and explain the nature of phenomena, find their beginnings, and get to the bottom of them. That is why in Lucretius's poem several possible explanations were sometimes proposed for one phenomenon when the available data were not enough to accurately establish the cause of the phenomenon. Likewise, in this book, if at times we present several explanations, they are given only as options, which over time, in the light of more complete experimental data, may disappear until one, the most accurate explanation remains.

Democritus used observations, mechanical models, applied a materialistic approach, rejecting all irrational, abstract, transcendental explanations and trying to find simple, natural ones. It was precisely this rational approach, continuous learning and self-education, and exhausting daily work that was the main reason for the success and futurism of his theory. However, this breakthrough into the future was so rapid and unusual that the theory of Democritus was treated with hostility: it was rejected and destroyed. She was too ahead of her time. Moreover, the atomists of antiquity were far ahead of the current state of physics when they spoke about the existence in space of elementary free-flying particles with speeds much greater than the speed of light (see the epigraph to § 2.15). What is this if not a statement of the theory of the superluminal speed of cosmic ray particles (§ 1.21, § 5.10)? Or let us remember the integral calculus of infinitesimals discovered by Democritus, which made it possible to calculate the volumes of bodies. This method was fiercely criticized by Aristotle, as were other discoveries of Democritus, including his corpuscular theory of light and matter. Therefore, integral calculus was forgotten for a long time and only two thousand years later was rediscovered by Newton, who adopted a lot from Democritus in terms of physics.

It seems incredible that one person discovered so much, and each discovery was ahead of its time not even by centuries, but by millennia. How could he know all this? There is an assumption that Democritus only presented information already known to him, brought from the future, from another planet, or from the repositories of ancient forgotten knowledge. Let us remember what was said above about traces of the bipyramidal model of the atom in the cults and games of the East. Democritus traveled and studied for a long time in Egypt, India, Persia, Babylon, and became acquainted with the scientific achievements of Egyptian and Indian priests, magicians and Chaldeans. He spent all his substantial fortune on this. Here is a clear example of a worthy and effective investment of money! After all, there is nothing more valuable than truth, information, knowledge. And it is precisely this information that those in power want to deprive the people of in the first place.

As a result, one may get the impression that Democritus only outlined and voiced the already known, but carefully hidden knowledge of the ancients, protected by the priests. And yet, I think this is not entirely true. Lucretius’s poem “On the Nature of Things” does not give bare knowledge, but shows the entire complex path of its acquisition with all the mistakes, wanderings, and dead-end paths. In essence, a method of scientific knowledge and the search for truth is presented, in which the knowledge acquired by Democritus played only the role of auxiliary guidelines. All this convinces us of the enormous capabilities and power of the human intellect, the bearers of which were undoubtedly Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius. This confirms the simplicity, accessibility, and cognition of truth. As Newton noted, in order to make discoveries, you just need to constantly think about them, and not indulge in empty entertainment and meaningless idleness. Therefore, what should be surprising is not the advance of its time discoveries of Democritus, Lucretius and other thinkers of antiquity, but the inertia of thinking, human stupidity, especially those who accepted the theory of relativity and quantum physics. It is stupidity, the inability to think critically and independently that is a deviation from the norm.

Let us only add that we must also think correctly, constructively, otherwise such monsters as Aristotle’s theory, the theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics will appear. Just the correct constructive method of thinking is set out in the poem of Lucretius. It is not for nothing that this poem was so revered by scientists who made truly great discoveries - Galileo, Newton, Lomonosov, Mendeleev, Tsiolkovsky, Vavilov, who admired the work of Lucretius, and borrowed a lot from it for their discoveries (even the corpuscular theory of light and the idea that white light is a mixture of the colors of the rainbow, taken from there by Newton). All these scientists were distinguished by cosmic philosophy, when one person with a single gaze embraced the entire world, the entire Universe from galaxies to the smallest particles of matter - all floors of the universe on all scales of space and time. And such scientists as Einstein, Bohr, Pauli and many other figures of non-classical science either did not know this work, or due to their limitations could not perceive it, and therefore invented a mountain of speculative absurdities that were rejected by Democritus. It seems that many mistakes in modern science could have been avoided if Lucretius’ poem had been taught in high school along with other scientific and artistic works of ancient classics such as Giordano Bruno and Galileo. After all, it is impossible to believe that modern scientists would seriously talk about a finite expanding Universe and other mystical nonsense if they had read Lucretius’ poem with the “Dialogues” of Bruno and Galileo in their youth.

In general, it is worth noting that in literature classes at school it would be much more useful to read popular science and science fiction works than those mountains of novels that mainly describe a small historical period (XVIII-XIX centuries) of the life of the nobility and intelligentsia, isolated from the traditional Russian culture and endowed with an incomprehensible way of life, psychology and aspirations alien to the people. The literature of the traditional school curriculum, for all its artistry, is in many ways sterile, anemic and useless, and therefore is quickly forgotten.

It would be much more useful to study fairy tales, especially Russian folk tales and the author's tales created on their basis by A. Pushkin, N. Gogol, P. Ershov, A. Tolstoy, K. Chukovsky, as well as the works of science fiction classics: Jules Verne, H. Wells , V. Obruchev, A. Belyaev, R. Bradbury, I. Efremov, S. Gansovsky, K. Bulychev, whose novels and stories are not only highly artistic, but also have great educational value, reveal the characters and relationships of people, tell about the joys of the physical and mental work. These works instill useful skills and provide necessary, vital practical knowledge in astronomy, geography, medicine, technology, and physics. It is myths, epics, fairy tales, this ancient science fiction, and modern fantastic works that most fully reveal human character, placing a person in unusual conditions, moving him in space, in time, throwing him to other planets, into worlds of utopias and dystopias. Against this background, all our earthly problems, aspirations and anxieties look petty and worthless. Science fiction teaches us to calmly perceive the unusual, the new, and provides a kind of psychological hardening and immunity in our crazy, rapidly developing world of breakneck speeds and rapid flows of information. It was fairy tales that at all times taught not only a simple, open, kind attitude towards people, animals, and nature, but also developed imagination, ingenuity, the ability to solve riddles, scientific and life problems, and find a way out of “hopeless” situations, of which there are many now. in science.

It is science fiction and popular science works that develop curiosity, awaken thought, make people seekers, purposeful, give them a desire to learn new things, to explore space, and teach them to think boldly and out of the box. Therefore, books by such popularizers of science as Ya.I. are very useful. Perelman. That is why an important component of the literature of the future is popular science and science fiction. This live literature for the intellect, soul and dreams.

It is not true that science fiction is needed only by dreamers and idealists - all people need it like air. Only the desire for a dream, fantasy makes a person a Man and constitutes, as the designer Yakovlev correctly noted, the meaning of his life. Without a fantastic dream, a person will forever remain just a thinking monkey, seeing the meaning of life in satisfying his base animal instincts. Unconsciously, a person builds exactly the kind of world that works of art bring up in him. If this is, albeit a complex, dangerous, but bright world of the distant future, then this is the kind of world we will eventually get. As it is sung in “The Ballad of Struggle” by V. Vysotsky: “If you cut a path with your father’s sword, you wound salty tears on your mustache, if in a hot battle you experienced how much it costs, then you read the right books in childhood.” And indeed, science-adventure fiction educates brave thinkers, fighters against untruth, dreamers who strive for the stars, but dreamers of a special kind - dreamers of action, making active efforts to make dreams come true, transforming the world, science and technology with dreams, in fact, building a new world with the power of imagination. K.E. was just such a dreamer of action. Tsiolkovsky, who opened the way to space for people. He embodied his dreams and romantic aspirations not only in his scientific works, but also in the fantastic story he wrote. Another well-known space explorer, who at the same time created science fiction and correct scientific theories, is Fred Hoyle.

Literature and folklore - fairy tales, myths, legends, epics - were just like this, fantastic and at the same time popular science, outlining ideas about the world, educating, giving the necessary practical knowledge. It is primarily in this fantasy form that the fiction of the future should exist. Only in this way, allegorically, with examples and illustrations that remain etched in the memory for a long time, can one convey to a person something truly important and deep, which is not found in the bulk of modern literature.

The poem “On the Nature of Things” is the first and, moreover, remarkable scientific and artistic work, revealing the fascination and romance of scientific research and bringing great knowledge and qualities to Man. The poem is also useful in terms of studying the history of science, its thorny path, an example of how correct concepts are rejected and forgotten for many millennia, and erroneous ones prevail. For the same reason, it is useful to read any other original scientific works of scientists of the past, their biographies and books on the history of science, which have enormous educational value and show the development of scientific thought and scientists, their path to science, to discovery, their insights and mistakes. All this literature (fairy tales, science fiction, biographies, books on the history of science, and especially the poem of Lucretius) contains ready-made discoveries and recipes for inventions - you just need to be able to find, see and develop them. Just like fairy tales, many, at first glance, naive ideas of Lucretius turn out, upon closer examination, to be filled with deep meaning and find justification within the framework of the modern physical concept, especially on the basis of armored personnel carriers.

The popular presentation of the ideas of Democritus undertaken by Lucretius had another important significance. Since all scientific thoughts were presented there in artistic, poetic and very figurative form, they became accessible to a wide range of people, were easily absorbed, remembered and transmitted not only in written, but also in oral form. And if not a single original work of Democritus has reached us (due to deliberate destruction), then the poem “On the Nature of Things” has survived to us. This once again proves that the oral, allegorical method of transmitting information is much more reliable than the written one (§ 5.4). Lucretius was fully aware of all this and therefore deliberately, as he himself writes, gave the information an artistic, poetic and easy-to-remember form.

It is precisely these popular books that apologists for the prevailing false teachings fear most. That is why the church attacked Galileo so fiercely when he presented the teachings of Copernicus in his “Dialogues” - not only in the living and clear Italian language (instead of the dead learned Latin), but also in a popular, entertaining form. And to this day, many scientists, being supporters of the prevailing non-classical views, look askance at popular science literature, especially if it offers ideas that differ from the generally accepted ones. Thus, Einstein, this modern Aristotle, furiously scolded the famous popularizer of astronomy K. Flammarion, who allowed superluminal speeds in space. The same Einstein criticized Galileo for his “Dialogues,” the battle with the churchmen and the popularization of the teachings of Copernicus among the people, which he contemptuously called “the crowd.” Einstein himself gained recognition of the theory of relativity easily, without battle or sacrifice, thanks to the support of higher powers. We know that it was precisely this open and courageous struggle of Galileo and Bruno, which attracted public attention, that Copernicus’ theory owes its early recognition. Therefore, the role of popular science literature, which defends new revolutionary ideas, is undoubted. And Lucretius’s poem “On the Nature of Things,” despite its age, remains the main and reliable bastion of classical materialist science.

THIS IS THE NATURE OF THINGS...The thirst to see and put together Everything that is known to your mind. Irakli Abashidze Let's summarize this chapter. First of all, we understand that destruction is not a random process. It is predetermined by nature itself. Perhaps this is one of the manifestations of the second

Lucretius, reflecting on the “Nature of Things.”

Information about the poet Lucretius, who was born somewhere around 96 BC, came to us only at the beginning of the 5th century AD in the “Chronicle of Blessed Jerome”. It says: “The poet Titus Lucretius was born, who then, driven mad by a love potion, during his enlightenment, wrote several books published by Cicero, and committed suicide at the age of 43.” It is difficult to guess how reliable this information is. After all, they are separated by almost half a millennium from the life of the poet-philosopher. Lucretius did not leave any information about himself in his poems, however, all his poetry tells us that while still a child, little Titus carefully looked at the world. Whether this world accepted the boy warmly or with a significant amount of hostility, no one knows. But most likely the second, because the suffering of a child’s soul is sometimes a wise teacher who makes a great contribution to the creation of a future genius.

Titus not only lived among the feast of the nature surrounding him, he carefully examined in it a small blade of grass fluttering in the wind, and the struggle of giant clouds in the stormy sky. Everything he saw around him was not obvious everyday life for him, but a mystery that haunted his developing mind and awakening feelings.

Questions, questions, questions...

“Where do the clouds come from? Why is it raining? How does the earth perceive him? What allows her to bring trees and grasses into the light of day? How does she feed them and how do they, in turn, become food for birds and animals? Earth is earth, grass is grass, a goat is a goat, a lion is a lion. How does earth turn into grass, grass into goat's milk, goat's milk into lion's strength, and the bones and fat of goat carcasses into the smoke of sacrificial altars?

What is nature? Nature is everything, the entire Universe as a whole, but nature is a thin tree trunk, nature is powerful elements with which it is very difficult for a person to argue, but nature is also something fragile, weak, in need of human care. Man is also nature, and when a man of our days turns his thoughts to nature, wanting to know what it is, he remembers that by doing so he is turning to knowledge of himself. We study the laws of nature in the belief that these laws apply to us.

Young Lucretius tried to find answers to the questions that tormented him in the works of Greek thinkers. When Thales, the first of the early Greek sages, said that the one nature of all things is water, he spoke like a poet. Firstly, because the mythological epic taught this, calling the god Ocean the father of the immortals, and secondly, it could only be understood as a poem. For a person who wanted to express the truth, turning to poetry was extremely natural in those days. Truth was under the patronage of the Muses, as was poetry. Poetic inspiration, according to the general opinion of that time, was akin to prophetic inspiration.

Thales taught that universal nature is water. Anaximander - that it is “neither water nor air, but something indefinitely boundless.” Anaximenes - that she is “air and the infinite.” Heraclitus called vision a lie, because if the nature of things is one, and we see the world as diverse, then diversity must inevitably turn out to be an illusion. But if the world is not an illusion, and vision is not a lie, then there must be difference in the nature of things, that is, not unity should be the basis of the world, but diversity, or rather, both of these principles: unity and diversity.” (T. Vasilyeva)

Gradually, in the soul of the reading and reflecting Lucretius, the idea is born to create his own philosophical poem about what is so visibly spread out in the world and at the same time so elusively mysterious - about Nature. Fully aware of the complexity of the task set for himself, the poet-philosopher turns to the goddess of love, Venus, with a request to become “his assistant in creating the poem.”

In his short introduction, he writes that “the Romans, who consider themselves descendants of the warlike Aeneas, must remember that the mother of Aeneas was Venus, the good Venus, the giver of life for all living things, the source of youthful strength, freshness, fun, and pleasures. Everyone rejoices at Venus, the sky brightens with her appearance, the clouds scatter, the winds subside, the sea smiles, the sun shines, the grass turns green, the birds chirp; wild animals and peaceful herds - everything is intoxicated with love, everything rushes towards procreation, towards renewal of life.

The nature of things is ruled by Venus, and you, her children, look around and remember that all life on earth is one big family, proclaims Lucretius. Help me, Venus - help instill in them a desire for peace, calm warlike passions, allow them to rest from military worries and indulge in the quiet joy of knowledge, send me the pleasure of creativity, impart charm to my poems - after all, you alone know how to tame the ferocious riot of Mars, in your embraces and he is able to soften - beg him for peace for the Romans: after all, the gods spend their immortal years enjoying the deepest peace, knowing no need, no fear, no sorrow, inaccessible to either selfishness or anger - and by their power and example they inspire these people desire peaceful joy.”

Lucretius decides to explain a philosophy that is difficult to understand in the extremely accessible language of rhyme, in order to “present the harsh teaching in mellifluous verses, as if seasoning its poetry with sweet honey.” Therefore, he tells it to his young son Memmius during a leisurely walk somewhere under the dense branches of trees on the shore of a cool pond.

Initially, the teacher encourages his student to stop looking around and try

Strain your ears and your discerning mind
Free from worries by listening to reliable teaching.

Memmius tries to concentrate. This is not easy for him. But finally he copes with a difficult task for him and looks carefully at the teacher. Lucretius sees that the boy is concentrating and begins his story:

I want the gifts I bring with impartial zeal to
Before appreciating them, you did not reject them with contempt,
For about the essence of the highest heavens and gods I gather
I reason for you and begin to explain things
Everything from which nature creates, multiplies, nourishes
And into which everything again decomposes after death.
To explain their essence, we call them matter
And for things with generic bodies usually, as well as
We call them the seeds of things and consider them bodies
We are the original ones, for they serve as the beginning of everything.
Lightning also shines when clouds collide
Many seeds are knocked out by fire. Just like a stone
If another stone or iron strikes, immediately
The fire will flare up and scatter brilliant sparks all around.
Thunder rings in the ears later than the eyes can discern
Lightning shines because it always reaches your ears
Slower sounds than what gives the impression to the eye.
It’s not difficult for you to verify this: if you look from afar,
Like a woodcutter cutting down trees with a double-sided axe,
We see the blow first, and then the sound is heard
In our ears.

Father, are you talking about the seeds that slaves throw into the ground in the spring, and in the summer they grow into ears of wheat?

No, I call seeds the smallest indivisible bodies that are dense and eternal. Democritus gave them a name - atoms. They are the beginnings of things from which our entire world is created.

I want to look at these atoms, to taste them. What do they taste like?

What are you saying, son,” the teacher-father laughs, “they are so smaller than a poppy seed that you will never see them.”

But if they are not visible, then how do you and Democritus know about them?

Where?.. But listen. You look around and admire the world, you smell a flower and inhale its aroma, you feel warmth and cold, but you don’t see who is giving you these feelings. However, someone delivers them, which means

It is inevitable to admit relegation
Taurus, who hit the eyes, causing them to see,
Smells also always emanate from certain things,
Just like the cold from the rivers, the heat from the sun, the surf from the salty
A sea of ​​swells that eats away the coastal walls all around.
If any liquid seems bitter,
The moisture of the seas, for example, there is no need to be surprised:
Its liquid consists of smooth and round particles,
But the rough ones were also mixed into it, giving bitterness;
And they don’t need to be hooked at all for grip.
Do you know that a rooster, accustomed to flapping its wings?
At night and shout loudly, calling for the dawn at dawn,
Ardent lions are completely unable to endure and immediately
As soon as they see him somewhere, they run away.
It is clear, of course, to us why this happens:
There are certain seeds that fly away from the bodies of roosters,
They get in the lions' eyes and drill into their pupils, causing
Acute pain, and for them, although fierce, it is unbearable.

But here is a very clear example for you, if you still don’t understand something, son.

On the seashore, breaking the waves,
The dress always gets damp, but hanging in the sun, it dries;
However, it is impossible to see how moisture settles on it,
And you can’t see how it disappears from the heat.
This means that water is divided into such small parts,
That they are completely inaccessible to our eyes.
Well, now why do diseases occur, where do
May suddenly come and blow the wind of mortals
A plague of unexpected power, striking both people and herds,
I will explain. There are many different seeds
As I have already indicated, some of which are life-giving,
But there are also many that lead to illness and death,
Flying to us when they come together by chance
And the heavens will be outraged, the air becomes infected,
All this disastrous pestilence, all these endemic diseases
They come from above through the sky, or arise on the earth itself,
Gathering together when the soggy soil rots
And from the torrential rains, and from the hot rays of the sun.

But if particles of smells, looks, diseases cannot be seen with the eye, then it turns out: people, trees, stones consist of large particles, the student reasons. - After all, we see them.

We see because in solid objects they are pressed tightly against each other. But the density varies. Come on, compare a ball of thread and a lead ingot of the same volume. You will hardly feel the ball in your palm, but the ingot will pull your hand away.

From here we see that many things
It is heavier in weight than others, but not at all smaller in volume.
After all, since a ball of wool contains the same amount of body,
As much as there is lead in an ingot, it should weigh the same,
For pressing everything down is a sign of the body,
On the contrary: emptiness is weightless by nature,
So, if something is lighter than another of the same size,
It obviously contains more emptiness.
On the contrary: if something is heavier, then it means more
There are bodies in it, but there are much fewer empty ones.
This means that there is undoubtedly something mixed into things that tends
With a sensitive mind to find what we call emptiness.
Yes, everything is not filled with substance and does not hold tightly
United from different sides: emptiness exists in things.
Without emptiness, things would be impossible to get anywhere at all.
There was movement; for that which is a sign of the body:
To resist and not let in is an eternal obstacle
If there were things, then nothing would be able to move forward,
For nothing, retreating, would give rise to movement.
In fact, in the seas, on the earth and in the heights of heaven
Many movements are made in many different ways
Before our eyes; and if there were no emptiness, then not only
Things could not possibly be in constant motion,
But nothing could ever come into being,
For matter would always lie squeezed everywhere.

Now I understand. “I can stick my finger into a ball, but into an ingot - well, stick it, you’ll break it,” said the student.

You see, I am presenting a vague subject completely
With clear verse, delighting his Muses with charm everywhere.

But, father, a ball and an ingot are not only different in weight, but also in their appearance and in their properties. So, the seeds of things also consist of different substances?

A property is something that cannot be separated or taken away in any way.
Without destroying what it was inherent in:
Stones have weight, fire has warmth, water has moisture,
Bodies are the perceptibility of all and the insensibility of the empty.
Even in our poems, as you can see, constantly
A set of words consists of a set of homogeneous letters,
But both poems and words, as you will certainly admit,
They differ from each other both in meaning and also in sound,
You see how strong the letters are just by changing the order.

Now it is clear to me that changing the order changes the properties of things. But, tell me, where do the particles of things disappear when they wear out and, if all things wear out, where do new ones come from for new things?

You're right, you notice that all things are getting smaller,
And they seem to melt over the course of a long century,
And their decay steals away from our eyes unnoticed.
After all, the wide gates of death have opened to things,
And through them, carried away, matter lashes out in a crowd.
But as always the greedy sea is renewed
By the waters of rivers; and the earth, warmed by the heat of the sun,
Produces fruit again; and living creatures, being born,
Blooming again; and the lights gliding in the sky do not go out.
All this would have been impossible if they had not appeared
From infinity again the supplies of matter are eternal,
So that every loss is replenished again and again,
For, like all creatures deprived of food, they grow thin
And they begin to lose weight, just like everything else
Should begin to disappear as soon as matter becomes
If there is a shortage, the constant influx will cease.
But nothing perishes, as if completely perishing,
Since nature always regenerates one from the other
And he does not allow anything to be born without the death of another.

Alas, my son, all people go through death, and not one of them escaped it, for

Every blow is beyond the strength of a living creature,
Knocks him down on the spot and immediately follows this
In his body and soul all feelings are in turmoil,
For then the beginnings are destroyed
And here the movements of life stop completely
To the point that all matter, shaken in its members,
The bonds of living souls tear away from body and soul,
Having scattered it apart, he throws everything out through the holes,
And what else can you expect upon impact?
Besides that he will destroy everything and break all ties?
True, it also happens that with a less sharp blow
Can the surviving forces of movement overcome him?
And, having overcome the strong storm that had occurred from the shock,
Everything returns again to the flow along the previous channel,
And the movement of death took over the whole body
They disperse and re-ignite faded feelings,
Otherwise, how could it be at the very threshold of death?
It would be possible to return to life sooner and to consciousness,
How to retire forever, having achieved your intended goal?

This is how the disease tries to overcome us, but by resisting, we conquer it with our will to live. We do not allow the soul to part with the body, because

The living abilities of body and spirit
There are forces and life only when they are connected together.
By itself, no spirit can be original without a body.
Neither a soulless body can create the movement of life
Neither being to continue, nor remaining in possession of the feeling.

But, son, however, not everything is so obvious. Things also have mysterious properties. They have something

What kind of ghosts do we revere them;
Thin like chaff, separating from the surface of bodies,
They soar in the air, flying in all directions.
If they collide with a shiny and dense object,
With a mirror, first of all, they can’t get through here like they do through fabrics,
It is impossible to split: their smoothness keeps them intact.
This is the reason why reflections flow from there to us.
And, even suddenly, even at any moment, put any
The thing in front of the mirror is you, the reflection will appear immediately.
It is now clear to you that from the surface of bodies continuously
The thin fabrics of things and their thin figures flow.

Father, the world is becoming clearer to me. It’s as if you are lifting a dark blindfold from my eyes, and the earthly spaces are rapidly expanding their limits.

So without much difficulty you can comprehend all this,
Because one by one everything becomes clear. Without losing a beat
On a dark night from the path, you will learn all the secrets of nature,
And gradually one will light a torch for another.
You will understand why the clouds swell abundantly with the moisture of the sea, -
Like a woolen fleece that hangs on the seashore -
If the winds carry them high above the expanses of the sea.
Exactly the same way from rivers and from all streams
Moisture goes into the clouds. And when it comes from everywhere
There are a lot of water seeds and they will accumulate there in abundance,
The clouds are vying to release moisture
For two reasons: they knock them together with each other
The wind and many clouds, gathering in a large crowd,
It crushes them, oppressing them from above, and forces them to pour out like rain.
It will not be difficult for us to explain on the basis of reasonable
Why it can penetrate incomparably more piercingly
Lightning fire than earthly fire emanating from our torches:
It will be enough to say that heavenly lightning flames
Much thinner and everything consists of tiny particles,
And therefore it can pass through such holes,
Where fire will not break through either from the wood or from our torches.

The change of seasons, which you have observed more than once in your life, also occurs due to the mixing of the seeds of heat and frost,

When the beginning of the heat coincides with the end of the last frost,
Then spring comes; and that's why we have to fight
Things that are different from each other and get in the way in the heat of this fight.
If the heat in the end interferes with the cold first
In the cycle of times, we say that autumn has come,
Here, in the same way, winter is at war, cruel, with summer.
We should call such shifts interruptions of the year.
It’s no wonder that then there are especially many
Lightning and thunderstorms, and storms rushing noisily across the sky.
For here they clash in constant struggle with each other
The flame is flying from here, and the wind and rain are from there.

From everything that I told you, you saw that particles of things are not at all thoughtlessly rushing around in space, combining with each other in crazy chaos. If this happens

You would meet monsters everywhere
And there were half-beasts everywhere, half-people, and also
Long branches sometimes grew from the living body;
Many members of the sea would appear among the terrestrial animals,
Yes, and then there would be chimeras spewing flames from their mouths,
Nature began to grow on the ever-bearing land.
But obviously that never happens, and things
Only from known seeds and from a mother also known
Everything, emerging, grows, preserving all the characteristics of the species.
It is clear that this must be done according to known laws,
For from food any one penetrates into individual members
Taurus that suits them, and there, combining
Together, they give birth to the necessary movements; The same,
What is unusable is thrown back into the earth by nature.

This is what my father was thinking about now: why nature gave so little to man: she united such powerless particles in him. After all, she could have been more generous and made us gods, or at least demigods.

Do you want to know why nature could not
Make people so that they can wade through the sea
Or they could tear apart great mountains with their hands
And surpass generations of people with long lives,
Otherwise, as because it is capable of being born,
Then at birth, matter is given an exact share.

The gods probably don’t have this exact proportion of matter? They are so omnipotent.

Gods are created from atoms of the finest matter. They, blessed and beautiful, live freely in the spaces between worlds and human affairs do not bother them at all. Therefore, one should not expect either the help of the gods or their anger. They do not care either about our earthly life or about the other world, into which, as we believe, death opens its doors. Know, my son, there is no afterlife in nature. The Greek, the great philosopher Epicurus, first dared to say this. That's how it was.

In those days, in front of everyone’s eyes, she was dragging along ugly
The life of people on earth under religion is a painful oppression,
From the region of heaven the head appeared, looking from there
With his terrible face on mortals cast down,
Ellen for the first time alone dared mortal gaze
Turn against her and dare to speak out against her.
And neither rumors about the gods, nor lightning, nor the thunderous roar
The sky could not intimidate him, but, on the contrary, it was stronger
His spirit was driven by his determination to be strong
He was the first to break the gate of nature.
By the strength of his living spirit he won the victory and went out
He is far beyond the fiery fence of the world,
Having walked through boundless spaces with your thoughts and spirit.
As a winner, he tells us from there that he can
What cannot happen, what is the ultimate force
Each thing is given and what limit is set for it.
I also teach great knowledge, trying
To extract the human spirit from the tight snares of superstition.
After all, if people probably knew,
That there is an end to their ordeals, they are at least some
The threats of the prophets could also be resisted by superstitions.
Nowadays there are neither ways nor the opportunity to fight them,
Since after death everyone must fear eternal punishment,
If the nature of the soul is unknown: is it born together?
With the body or in those who were born, it takes root after,
Does it die with us, is it dissolved by death?
There is no tantalum, why be afraid of a stone hanging in the air,
How, he says, numb, unhappy, from empty fear;
In life, the vain fear of the gods is more oppressive
Mortals and every fate and chance of fate tremble.
So everyone runs away from themselves, and it’s clear they can’t
Away to run away; involuntarily remains with himself in annoyance
For the sick person does not know the cause of his illness.
And if he understood her, he would, leaving everything else,
First of all, I tried to comprehend the nature of things.
The point here is not about any single hour,
And the state in which all mortal people are inevitably
They must remain after their death forever and ever.
Well, finally, for the unhappy passion and attachment to life
Does it always make us tremble in constant anxiety?
A certain limit has been set for the age of man,
And an inevitable meeting with death awaits us all.
Moreover, always facing the same surroundings,
New pleasures cannot be achieved by continuing life:
What we do not have seems to us desirable,
But, having achieved it, we longingly look for another.
And we are always languishing with an irrepressible thirst for life.
You know, life is not given to anyone as property, but only for a while,
Look how little it mattered to us
The part of eternal time that passed before our birth.
If we turn our gaze to the past, casting our thoughts
All the immensity of centuries, and think how diverse
There were matters of all movement, it is easy to see
That the seeds of which we are now composed took
Often the order is the same as it is today.
But nevertheless, we could not remember this:
There is a break in existence here, in which the flows
The main bodies were deprived of feelings and wandered idly.

So, my son, bodies perish, but particles of bodies and particles of souls are in eternal motion. And, you agree, it would be “madness and nonsense to combine the eternal with the mortal and think that their actions can be mutual, therefore it is inevitable to admit that the soul perishes simultaneously with the death of the body.” Just as the body disintegrates into atoms when it dies, so the soul disintegrates into atoms, because it consists of them. Therefore, while we are alive, there is no death, and when death exists, we are no longer there. Epicurus spoke about this. We must live and enjoy life. There is no point in thinking about otherworldly punishment. It does not exist. There is no one to punish. All the atoms scattered and united in other things.

A God-fearing Roman, accustomed to bowing piously before the inhabitants of heaven with his head covered and eyes downcast, may be horrified at the audacity of these words and reject them. But think, my son, is it a crime to know the truth? No. On the contrary, it is a crime to live in hopeless ignorance and, thanks to it, commit the most terrible acts. Here's a striking example: if the conquerors of Troy knew the nature of things, would they have sacrificed the beautiful young Iphigenia so that the wind would blow the sails of their ships in the right direction? No. A senseless crime was committed. Needless to say, “religion has given rise to many wicked criminal acts. Drive out fear from the soul, dispel the darkness

It should not be the rays of the sun, nor the light of daylight,
But nature itself, by its appearance and internal structure,
Here we take the following position as a basis:
Nothing can be born from nothing according to the divine will.
And that is why all mortals are overcome by fear, because there is so much
They often see phenomena on earth and in heaven,
The reasons for which they cannot see and understand,
And they believe that all this is happening by God’s command.
If we know that nothing can arise
From nothing, then we will see much more clearly
The subject of our tasks: and where things come from,
And how does everything happen without help from above?
Remember, there is nothing more gratifying than to occupy yourself serenely.
Bright heights, firmly strengthened by the mind of the sages:
You can look at people from there and see everywhere
How they wander and, being mistaken, seek the path of life;
How they compete in talents, argue about gender,
Nights and days long, striving for tireless labor
Achieve great power and become rulers of the world.
Oh, you insignificant thoughts of people! Oh blind feelings!
How many dangers does life have, and how much darkness does it take?
This century is the most insignificant period! Is it really not visible?
What only nature cries for and what only demands,
So that the body does not know suffering, and the Thought enjoys
A pleasant feeling away from the consciousness of care and fear?
We thus see what bodily nature needs
Only a little: the fact that suffering removes everything.
It’s sweet when the winds blow across the expanses of the sea,
From solid ground to observe the misfortune that befell another,
Not because someone else’s torment will be pleasant for us,
But because you are out of danger and feel sweet.

My dear son, I would like to overcome this work together with you and “illuminate your mind with a brilliant light that would reveal deeply hidden things to you.” Knowledge of the human spirit will help us in this work. How do you think,

Why are we able to move forward?
As we want, we are given various body movements,
What power gives us the opportunity to bear such a heavy burden?
Push the body, I’ll tell you, listen to how I reason.
I say there's a ghost of movement moving forward
It also strikes us in the spirit, as was said earlier;
The will will be born then: after all, no one can
Things should begin until the spirit foresees what it desires;
What he foresees is the image of the thing.
So, when the spirit is excited and overwhelmed with aspiration
To move, he immediately communicates a blow to the strength of the soul,
Which is scattered everywhere in the joints and in the members of the body;
This is not difficult for him, for he is closely connected with the soul.
Then the soul hits the body, and little by little
So the whole mass forward from the push receives movement.

Father, this time the force of the push of my soul turned out to be so great that I wanted to penetrate into the vastness of the Universe.

You can see it on a clear night. But not all of it, because

There is no end on any side to the Universe.
Because otherwise it would certainly have edges.
And by its nature, space is so bottomless,
That even a lightning beam would not be able to run through it,
In the long flow of endless centuries, slipping away
Further forward, and there was no way he could get closer to his goal.

But, just as on earth everything stops the coming of death, so the Universe can perish, from which death will someday take away the life-giving forces of nature.

There is enough space and a lot of bottomless space,
So that the walls of the universe could crumble in it
Or die from the pressure of some other force:
Death does not close the door neither for the vault of heaven nor for the sun,
Neither for the earth, nor for the waters on the plains of the deep sea, -
It is wide open and gapes with a huge mouth.
Do you know why earth tremors occur?
What an unexpected wind and enormous air force,
Either arising from outside, or appearing from the earth itself,
They immediately rush inside, into the voids of the earth, and bursting in,
In the abysses of huge caves they rage first and violently
They rush around, whirling like a whirlwind, and then, having played out, with force
There they suddenly break out unbridled and, opening
Immediately the depths of the earth open up a huge abyss.
They can count as much as they want, so they can say that the sky
Together with the earth they must remain indestructible forever;
But, nevertheless, suddenly the impending danger force
The sting sticks into people and sometimes worries them with fear,
As if suddenly the earth, slipping from under your feet, would fall
Into the abyss, and after it the totality of things did not perish
To the ground, and the world did not remain just a heap of ruins.

It’s scary, father, for me to hear these words. But, having learned from you what the nature of things is, I thought this: if everything becomes just a pile of ruins, then the atoms of these ruins will again intertwine into new forms and, perhaps, form a new world, completely different from ours.

Your reasoning is correct. But each of us should think not so much about what can happen to the Universe, since we do not decide its fate, but are obliged to support and create the human race. You will soon enter the period of manhood, so you should know that

Mortals are attracted to you
Passion is a divine call, the leader of our lives, and beckons
In the sweet joys of love to give birth to generations of living,
So that the human race does not perish, for which the gods
It's as if everything was created.
To those whom to penetrate and disturb their stormy youth
The seed began, on that day, only in the members does it ripen,
Ghosts suddenly converge, emerging from outside and revealing
Images of all kinds of bodies, beautiful in face and blooming.
Here the parts inflated with seed become irritated,
So often they, having seemingly done what is necessary,
There, releasing an abundant stream, they stain the dress.
And this seed is awakened in us, as we indicated,
That time when the mature body got stronger.
Likewise, therefore, one who is wounded by the arrow of Venus -
Was it a boy who wounded him, possessing a feminine form,
A woman with her body, filled with omnipotent love, -
Reaches straight to where he is wounded and passionately
Thirsts to come together and get its moisture into the body from the body,
For silent passion foreshadows his pleasure.
This is Venus for us; this is what we call Love,
The voluptuousness of Venus flows into the Heart from here.
Drop by drop oozing...

And prolonging the human race. You see, my son, man emerges from the seed. We are back to where we started. I believe that “with a sensitive mind you will follow everything else and will not wander far from the truth in deep error

Knowing that in everything there is rationality and a share of thought.
Through potions you will learn how illnesses and decrepitude are cured;
I am going to reveal all this to you alone.
You will hold back the winds that know no rest,
That, rushing to the ground, they destroy pastures with gusts;
If you want, you can raise them again with your breath,
After gloomy weather you will deliver the desired bucket,
In the summer drought, feeding the greenery will cause a downpour -
Streams of moisture will pour from the ethereal sky onto the earth,
You can even bring back your deceased husband from the halls of Hades!

Lucretius promised such divine power to his son if he knew to the depths of his soul and mind the nature of things.

Of course, there are many contradictions and naive ideas in the poem, like this:

So I will show you, for example, among the four-legged
On snake-armed elephants. All India with a strong wall
Many thousands of fence posts made of ivory,
So it’s impossible to get there: such is the power there
These animals, and here you can only rarely see them.

Yes, Lucretius is contradictory and naive. “But it forces a person to travel freely through the spaces of the world, as was given only to the deities of Homer, running through them along with a sunbeam or bright lightning, thereby instilling in him that not only nature surrounds man every day, but also man is his brother in the vast the vastness of the universe; this poet knows how to fly and carry away the imagination of one who, perhaps for the first time, raised his eyes to the sky.

Nature gave birth to humanity, nurtured it in infancy, taught it work and the arts, love and family life, raising children and asked many questions. Why did she also give birth to a tribe of wild animals, why does she send terrible natural disasters? No, of course, this world was not created for us; man remains alone, naked and orphaned, like a shipwrecked swimmer thrown by a storm onto a foreign, inhospitable shore. Why was I born and why should I die? Who are you, my nature, a mother or a stepmother to a person? Why, like the maddened Medea, do you kill your own children?

Lucretius was the first to ask nature these questions and the first to place so many hopes on her. He painted an image of nature, no longer a mother, but an artist. Nature does not kill us, just as it does not give birth to us. She is greater than birth and death. Nature is a creative force, she creates like an artist who is more concerned with the embodiment of a plan than with the fragility of the creation.” (T. Vasilyeva.)

“On the Nature of Things” (“De rerum natura”) is a philosophical and didactic epic by T. Lucretius Cara. Written no later than 54 BC. The work (6 books) was not completed, since the stated program remains unfulfilled (thus, the promised detailed discussion of the gods is nowhere to be found). The work is a presentation of Epicurean philosophy dedicated to Memmius (the epic is one of the most important sources on Epicureanism). The broad philosophical concept of the poem “On the Nature of Things” by Lucretius Cara includes the doctrine of atoms, the mortality of the soul, the impossibility of divine intervention in world life (this is proven by the fact that the existing world is full of shortcomings), the history of the emergence of the world and human civilization; the latter is perceived not only as progress: the development of sciences and arts is overshadowed by the growth of human greed and belligerence.

The epic begins with an appeal to Venus and ends with an image of the plague in Athens, which gives the version of the text that has reached us a pessimistic mood (generally overcome by the anti-deterministic position of Lucretius, striving for spiritual freedom). The poet's natural scientific concepts lag behind the times: he claims that the sun is not larger than it seems to us, and that perhaps a new sun rises every day (after the achievements of Hellenistic astronomy, these opinions could only make a scientifically educated reader smile). Epicurus, who freed humanity from the fear of death, appears in Lucretius as worthy of divine honors.

The genre tradition that Lucretius follows is rich and varied. Didactic-philosophical epics about nature were written by Empedocles and Parmenides. The Epicurean school was least conducive to poetic works; however, the Roman taste for large form, befitting a sublime subject, turned out to be stronger. The poet's actual aesthetic claims are modest: he perceives the poetic form as sweets that are used to coat the edges of a vessel with bitter medicine to make it easier for a child to drink it; the main value lies in philosophical preaching, which has ts The goal is to save the reader from prejudices and guide him on the path of true wisdom. Therefore, in his explanations he strives for simplicity and clarity of presentation. His admiration (along with Epicurus) is given to Empedocles and Ennius. He owes a lot to them And with its sublime style and educational pathos. He perceives his philosophy - in the spirit of the teachings of Empedocles and Epicurus - as a prophecy, and it is precisely the sphere of activity of the prophet that includes the exposure of false opinions (in his criticism, he - unlike many others - does not stop and before state cult).

Lucretius's language and style bear the imprint of his aesthetic and philosophical views. Being a contemporary of Catullus, he uses a much more archaic poetic technique (down to metrical rules, in particular, reflecting the erroneous linguistic views of that time on the nature of Greek epic verse, sometimes leading to what was impossible from the point of view of Latin grammar forms). The poet complains about the poverty of the Latin language, which is poorly suited for expressing philosophical thought; he (like Cicero) has to struggle with his native language along the way in order to give it flexibility and the ability to use previously alien concepts. Long periods not typical of poetic language, the clear architecture of the epic, poetic charm - all these are independent achievements of the poet, not reducible to either the epic-didactic or philosophical tradition. The strength of the aesthetic impression is greatly facilitated by the contrast between the bright, passionate language and the logical bonds, the task of which is to introduce this impulse into the mainstream of the general plan.

Lucretius became the greatest Roman didactic poet. He is highly regarded by Cicero, Seneca the Younger, Persius, Statius, and Ovid (the latter competed with him in some passages of the Metamorphoses). Archaists of the 2nd century. AD make Lucretius a school author. Paradoxically, the early Christian tradition, which has many parallels with him in the fight against pagan prejudices, did not reject the poet. The Middle Ages were much less interested in it (although, since Epicureanism did not pose any danger, there was apparently no persecution of the epic). During the Renaissance, under the influence of Poggio Bracciolini, Lucretius's fame increased. It is popular in France: it is translated by Du Bellay, he is Montaigne’s favorite (along with Horace) poet. Pierre Gassendi, the renewer of Epicurean philosophy in the 17th century, influenced Newton and Boyle with his expositions (a rare case when a poetic work contributes to the development of natural sciences). In the 18th century Cardinal Polignac contrasts the sermons of Epicureanism with his Anti-Lucretius. Encyclopedists speak highly of Lucretius; he influences Kant and Lomonosov; Andre Chenier is going to create scientific poetry based on his model (the unfinished poem “Hermes”); Shelley considers him the greatest Roman poet. Fr. Schlegel regrets that “such a great soul chose such an unworthy system.” The epic “On the Nature of Things” by Lucretius did not lose its popularity in the 20th century; One of the few works of belles-lettres that has had such a strong influence on philosophy and science, it should be appreciated as an outstanding aesthetic achievement.

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Titus Lucretius Carus

About the nature of things

Philosophy and poetry facing the mystery of nature

One book contains works created in different eras and in different parts of the ancient world, quite distant from each other, nevertheless connected not only by a common theme, but also by a relationship of deep and vividly felt continuity. In each of them, literature is combined with philosophy in order to, through the simultaneous work of insightful thought and creative imagination, build before the reader’s gaze a picture of the universe, the visible and invisible nature that surrounds man, includes him, determines his being and his destiny.

What is nature? Nature is everything, the entire universe as a whole, but nature is also a thin trunk of a tree that has grown somewhere on the wall of a multi-story city building, nature is powerful elements with which it is difficult for a person to argue, but nature is also something fragile, weak , in need of human care, requiring protection. Man is also nature, and when a man of our days turns his thoughts to nature, wanting to know what it is, he remembers that by doing so he is turning to knowledge of himself. We study the laws of nature in the belief that these laws apply to us.

When the Greek philosophers first began to think about nature, they clearly contrasted it with the law as a purely human invention and the will of the gods as a cause inscrutable and elusive to reason. Even in different Hellenic cities the laws are different, but in the barbarian world they are often the opposite of the Hellenic ones. Nature is something that is the same everywhere, in the Hellenic world and among the barbarians. This or that creature receives nature at birth and for the rest of its life, regardless of its own or someone else’s will. Both the Greek designation of nature “phusis” and the Latin “nature” retain a living connection with the root of gens, birth and breed.

The vicissitudes of fate force Odysseus to return to his own royal house under the guise of a beggar wanderer. The guests who are rampaging there do not recognize him as their rightful owner. But then he draws his heroic bow - and the nature of this husband becomes visible to everyone; he is a king by birth and remains one even when legitimate power is not in his hands. Nature is more important than law. Trees and beasts, stones and air have nature, man has nature, but the law of nature does not, and for nature “law” is too shallow and superficial an idea of ​​its power. “Because there is no law for the wind and the eagle and the heart of a maiden” - these Pushkin words will help us imagine in what sense nature and law are opposite to each other.

When talking about nature, the Greeks used another word - “space”. In Russian there is a word "ryad". Both “dress” and “order” come from it. The word “cosmos” combines these two meanings of regularity and beauty, it is “elegant order”; in the same sense, Roman philosophers began to use the Latin word “mundus”. In a mythological legend, there is a story about how Zeus once delayed the onset of morning whenever he pleased, and seven nights lasted without interruption - in the world of Homer and Hesiod this, perhaps, was still possible, but in the cosmos of ancient philosophy, the order of the day and night, winter and summer are no longer subject to anyone. “The sun will not cross its borders, otherwise the Erinyes, Truth’s helper, will immediately seize it.” This is what Heraclitus wrote. The law can be replaced by another, the gods can be appeased with sacrifices - nature is unchanging and inexorable.

Nature is a sphinx, and the truer it is
His temptation destroys a person,
What may happen, no longer
There is no riddle and she never had one.

This is how Tyutchev expressed his premonition of the understanding of nature to which the nature of the modern era led man. Nature is not a mystery, nature is a riddle, nature is the truth - this is how the first philosophers understood nature. The mystery is the world with its visible diversity. Where do the clouds come from? Why is it raining? How does the earth perceive him? What allows her to bring trees and grasses into the light of day? How does she feed them and how do they, in turn, become food for birds and animals? Earth is earth, grass is grass, goat is goat, lion is lion. How does earth turn into grass, grass into goat's milk, goat's meat into lion's strength, and the bones and fat of goat carcasses into the smoke of sacrificial altars? The apparent variety of things in this world is an illusion. This is what the first philosophers decided. In fact, in truth, all existing things are one. This oneness in all things is the one nature of all things, in contrast to the separate natures by which different things are distinguished. The mystery lies elsewhere. How do many separate natures, or breeds, come from one single nature? This is the mystery of nature that Greek philosophy has been solving since its inception. At first, poetry helped philosophy with this.

When Thales, the first of the early Greek sages, said that the one nature of all things is water, he spoke like a poet. Firstly, because the mythological epic taught this, calling the god Ocean the father of the immortals, and secondly, it could only be understood as a poem. For a person who wanted to express the truth, turning to poetry was extremely natural in those days. Truth was under the patronage of the Muses, as was poetry. Poetic inspiration, according to the general opinion of that time, was akin to prophetic inspiration. Explaining your thoughts in verse or in poetic expressions did not at all mean “composing” or being mannered. And the widespread distribution and influence of the poems of Homer and Hesiod encouraged philosophy to compete with these poets the more urgently, the more inconsistencies and absurdities it found in their stories about divine and human deeds. Probably, the philosopher Xenophanes, “the fervent flagellant of Homer’s falsehoods,” as he was dubbed two centuries later, criticized Homer and Hesiod more and hotter than others; he, according to legend, was the first to write a poem in Homeric hexameters about the nature of everything that exists. Following him, similar poems were written by Parmenides, the greatest of the philosophers of the pre-Socratic era, and Empedocles, the pride, beauty and glory of Sicily, as the Roman poet Lucretius, who enthusiastically revered him, wrote about him in his poem “On the Nature of Things.” That in these works philosophy coexists and collaborates with poetry was beyond doubt. If they were criticized for anything, it was for the fact that they were more philosophers than befits poets. But the fact that Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes were no less poets than them is more difficult to understand, firstly, because we are accustomed to associate poetry with poetry, and secondly, because not a single line of their writings has survived . From century to century it was passed down: Thales taught that universal nature is water, Anaximander - that it is “neither water nor air, but something indefinitely boundless”, Anaximenes - that it is “air and the infinite.”

Both philosophy and poetry give definitions to things, only philosophy defines a thing through what necessarily belongs to it as part of it or as the whole that includes it, and only poetry can define a thing through what sometimes has nothing to do with it.

“Everything is water” (that is, fire is water and stone) is a definition that is too vague for philosophy, but as a poetic expression everyone can easily understand it. This is the meaning of poetry, that it is creativity and in its reader it addresses the creative ability, but everyone understands poetry in their own way, and it knows that it will be understood ambiguously. Philosophy pursues the goal of universal unambiguous understanding. To make it easier for everyone to hit the same target, the easiest way is to expand the target. And if the target is made of white light, then everyone will hit it no worse than a well-aimed shooter hitting a penny. If we say that everything is indefinitely boundless, then such a definition, we can guarantee, will not fail. But precisely because everything in the world, and any individual thing without distinction from another, as well as any number of any things, falls under such a definition, it is also not suitable for philosophy. Anaximander’s definition is also a poetic “something” and “foggy distance”; it is not for nothing that Plato and Aristotle equated “the limitless” with the absurd. As for the combination of words that is attributed to Anaximenes - “air and the infinite,” this is the same “white light” that the Russian proverb speaks of, only named in Greek. Look above things, and you will immediately see it, this “white light”: it is air without end and without edge, “air and the infinite.”

The riddle of the world was, in principle, solved - although the details were clarified over the centuries and are still being clarified to this day - when the nature of things began to be sought not in some one very large and very indefinite thing, which, due to its size and uncertainty, was no longer called a thing, but but by substance - but in motion and in the combination of several such things. If the nature of things is one, and we see the world as diverse, then diversity must inevitably turn out to be an illusion. Therefore, Heraclitus called vision a lie. But if the world is not an illusion, and vision is not a lie, then there must be difference in the nature of things, that is, it is not unity that should be the foundation of the world, but diversity, or rather, both of these principles: unity and diversity.

The world does not have one common nature. The general nature of the world is a combination of four elements: earth, water, fire and air - the poets Xenophanes and Empedocles wrote about this. This is where poetry seems to be in its element! By the way, what is an element? – Yes, what we just listed: fire, wind, water, earth. We call fire, earthquake, hurricane, flood natural disasters. The usual habitat for birds is air, for fish - water, for animals - earth, we call them their native element. What does the word “element” mean? Where did it come from? The word “element” comes from the Greek word “stoichenon”, which means “component” in its root meaning, and it denoted a letter in Greek writing. Among the Romans, the same thing was denoted by the Latin word “elementum” - the designation “element” that is familiar to us. Water, fire, earth, air became elements just when they were recognized as constituent elements of the nature of things.

So, the true nature of this diverse world is not a large, single all-encompassing maternal body, spewing out things that differ only in whether they received more or less of this maternal substance, whether their visible shells are denser or more rarefied with this substance - nature is no longer a creation, and construction. Elements, like warriors in formation, making formations and regroupings, create more and more new things. But someone must give the command to the soldiers to close or open. The mutual arrangement of the elements of fire, air, water and earth is ruled alternately, overcoming each other, by Love and Enmity; there is neither birth nor death, there is not a single thing - there are only temporary confluences of unchanging and immortal elements - such is the solution to nature, composed by Empedocles.

The picture of nature, based on the principles of plurality, depicted by Empedocles, did not immediately establish itself in the consciousness of ancient man. Homer also said:

There is no good in multiple powers; there must be one ruler.

Greek philosophy was looking for ways to combine the idea of ​​the elementary structure of nature with the traditional ideal of autocracy and homogeneity. If the nature of each thing is determined by its internal structure, the relative position of its constituent elements, then this internal structure - in Greek it is called “logos” - is the manager of the natural cosmos. The same word “logos” was used by the Greeks to designate coherent human speech, understood not as the meaningless sound of a voice, but as an articulate expression of a clearly formulated thought. In front of a number of elements, the Logos could act both as a structure given by it, and as the command itself to be built in one way and not another, and as that thought in accordance with which the order was given. Moreover, the Logos of the cosmos for a sensitive soul sounds like a speech addressed to a person. Nature, which loves to hide from view, through the mediation of the Logos of things speaks to the human soul, and if behind its diverse, bizarre appearance, like that of the sphinx, the lion-bird-maiden, nature is hidden from man, then with every word the sphinx reveals the truth, all of its riddles - clues to existence - such a poem about the nature of things was composed by Heraclitus. His nature consists of the same elements of fire, air, water and earth, but to him these four elements are seen as the changeable faces of one single element of fire. Sensory impressions deceive us, - he said, - learn to see with your mind and hear with your mind, listen to the Logos of the cosmos and the logos of human thought, embodied in the word, in the verb - that is why the poetry of Heraclitus seeks not visual images, but verbal consonances, his speech about nature even more mysterious than nature itself, already in ancient times Heraclitus was nicknamed the “dark” and “crying” philosopher - because he looked gloomily at the world familiar to us, as at the continuous death of everything that, eternally changing, dies, barely having time to emerge .

Democritus was nicknamed the “laughing” philosopher, because his gaze, behind the fluidity of things, shrewdly saw such a constant, unchangeable and indivisible, which helped humanity solve the riddle of the Sphinx once and for all, and with the help of the very answer from which the Theban tormentor, the Sphinx of Oedipus, overthrew from the cliff . The most important mystery of nature is man.

For Democritus, the constituent elements of all things become the smallest indivisible bodies, there are no longer four of them, but an infinite number; like letters in an alphabet, they differ in outline, and the variety of things, like the variety of words in writing, is created by changing their combination and relative position. The indivisible is called “atom” in Greek, and “individual” in Latin. We will find an unconditional, almost mechanical assimilation of the physical atom to the human personality in Epicurus, the philosopher of the post-Aristotelian era, who continued and developed the atomistic doctrine of nature. But already in Democritus’s depiction of the atom there are features that clearly indicate that the thinker-artist consciously or unconsciously kept a human prototype in his memory. Human individuality begins to stand out from the general human mass no sooner than we begin to distinguish individual faces in the crowd. The atoms of Democritus are dense, primordial and eternal bodies with an individual physiognomy - they are separated by thought from each other, since they are different in appearance and shape. Appearance, the form of a thing, is denoted in Greek by the words “eidos” and “idea”. The atoms of Democritus, which he also called “ideas,” are the first elements of intelligible difference. Why do atoms need external differences if they are so small that no perception is capable of perceiving either these differences or even the atoms themselves? But atoms are bodily principles as opposed to emptiness, and how does a body most clearly differ from emptiness? – The body is tangible, emptiness is not. And the body acquires a tangible individuality, even if there was no one to feel it. But by doing so, a person makes a very important recognition: the tangible world remains the same even when sensation ceases, the world of waking consciousness and the world of extinct consciousness are one and the same.

The blind sage is a favorite figure in ancient legends. Oedipus, who has received the light of thought, blinds his unreasonable eyes. The father of all wisdom, Homer, is blind, and that is why he sees further and deeper than many sighted people. Let the world be deceptive, but the nature of things that is comprehended by thought exists, this truly existing nature receives the name of being, in contrast to the phenomenon perceived by the senses. Parmenides, who followed Xenophanes in writing the poem in hexameters “On Nature,” laid the cornerstone of European philosophy with his statement “thought and being are one and the same.”

Thought tells us about the unity of the whole world, which means that the first thing we can say about the existence of the world is that existence is one, therefore there is One-single-one existence,

it is unborn, undead.
Whole, only begotten, motionless, completely,
There was not and there will not be, but there is, but now, but together,
Together, united, -

but there is no non-existence. But if there is nothing other than this one single unified being, then what force can make it unfold into a multitude of things perceived by the senses? Sun, moon, earth - is there or not? Does one person truly exist or not as distinct from another person? According to Parmenides, there is truly one being, but man does not live by truth alone, man lives by opinion; everything that we can build on the foundation of a single truth will be closer to it or further from it, but this will already be an opinion, but there is only one truth: being.

Parmenides seemed to have completely taken away from philosophy the ability to solve the riddle of the world, but he helped thinking to realize itself in contrast to feeling, and he also helped philosophy to determine the boundaries of nature. As a true being, nature has become a single whole, comprehensive and individual.

Parmenides allowed only one truth, according to Democritus it turned out that there is no truth at all - for the atoms of Democritus, like letters in a typesetter's drawer, were ready to form into any word, scatter again and again form into another word, still without meaning and without purpose . For both thinkers, the mystery of nature became a human conjecture.

So, “maybe she hasn’t had any riddles since the ages”? But for a person, the mystery of nature is never a mystery of nature alone; it makes sense, first of all, insofar as it is a mystery of man - whether he is a monster, more intricate and furious than Typhon, or a simpler creature and by nature involved in some divine destiny ? - as Socrates said at the beginning of Plato’s Phaedrus, a philosopher who decided to begin the knowledge of things with himself.

“Nature is not a temple, but a workshop,” Turgenev’s hero, who uttered these words, hardly understood that nature in the image of a workshop was vividly represented many centuries before him by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The mystery of nature is not simply that behind the diversity of individual species, thought perceives some general unity, it is mysterious that behind the inevitable differences of one tree from another, one olive from another, one cart, one shuttle from others bearing the same name, the human mind grasps the community of a single breed. Within one breed there are more similarities than differences, between different breeds there are more differences than similarities, but even here human custom sees what it calls a plant, a tool, a seed or a fruit. Not to mention such things as height, warmth, kindness - are they in nature or not at all? To solve this riddle, Socrates offered an analogy from the life of the workshop of a sculptor, blacksmith, shoemaker - anyone. Even just starting to work, the artisan sees his product ready, and this mental image of the thing, in Greek its “idea”, always remains more perfect than the finished product turns out to be - sometimes the hand fails, sometimes the material, but the imperfection of the made thing is in no way does not detract from the perfection of her ideal example. And all these more or less successful shuttles, jugs, cloaks, carts are called and considered as such insofar as they are similar in appearance to their prototype, and as long as they are able to meet their purpose. If we assume that our world is not the creation of an unknown giant and not a random accumulation of a pile of low-quality or one-quality particles, but the work of a great master, it becomes clear why each breed in this world has an appearance that best suits its needs, why those intended for one purpose of a thing, why, finally, such an important place in the world is occupied by man - a being endowed with soul and mind, capable of discerning behind every mortal thing its imperishable model and, through reasoning, coming to comprehend the Logos of the universe. Just as the meaning of a word does not consist of the meaning of the letters that make it up, but acts in relation to them as a new indivisible integrity (to the question of who Socrates is, we will not list in order S, O, K, P, A, T), so the nature of a thing, its idea, is not identical to the structural arrangement of its constituent elements; a thing has a nature because it is innate to something, just as any work of craft has a form and structure adapted to fulfill its purpose.

What is the purpose of this world, the world of the whole of nature? Both Plato and Aristotle answer with one voice: good. Only the good of this world is only a semblance of the highest and true Good, the idea of ​​all ideas. Man is born and lives in the world of nature, but with his soul he belongs to the world of ideas, the human body is mortal, the soul is eternal - this is how Plato understood nature and man. For Aristotle, the analogy with the work of a master was more an analogy than a truth. Aristotle is ready to call the unnamed Master who created this world in Plato by the name of Nature. Thus, in antiquity, the idea of ​​nature as a single whole, creating itself according to its own rules and patterns, developed. “Nature does nothing against nature” - these are the words of Aristotle. The human soul, mortal in the natural world, has its purpose, according to Aristotle, in society. Like everything in this world, a person is born for good, and good is not life itself, but life given to daily activities consistent with justice. And it is not even because death is contrary to goodness that it takes away life, but precisely because it deprives a person of the happiness of activity.

Epicurus became the most radical opponent of the Aristotelian understanding of human nature in antiquity. A person is not born for social activities. On the contrary, the more inconspicuously he lives his life, the better. Man is a natural creature, like any natural creature, he is best when no one and nothing touches him, equanimity is the highest bliss in this world. Knowledge of the nature of this world is required by a person only to the extent that it is able to protect the soul from excessive anxiety, first of all from the feeling of fear of natural phenomena and in the face of death, and then from immoderate appetites resulting from a lack of understanding of the true needs of human nature. Epicurus, following Democritus, represented the nature of the universe as a huge empty space in which atoms fall vertically (and not chaotically, as in Democritus) and collide only as a result of a slight deviation from a straight line, unpredictable and indefinite. From these first collisions all subsequent connections and unifications occur, all things arise, and there is no purpose or meaning in this world, but in nature there are many worlds like ours, and in the spaces between worlds that arise for a while, subject to destruction, they live immortal gods, woven from atoms of the finest matter, blissful, beautiful and not in any way occupied with the affairs of humanity. Therefore, there is nothing to be afraid of the wrath of the gods in this world, just as there is nothing to be afraid of death, since there is no afterlife in nature, and the human soul also consists of atoms, like the body, along with the death of the body it is also dissolved into its component elements, and there is no anxiety to be felt there is no one and nothing to die. While we are alive, there is no death, and when death exists, we no longer exist - this is the idea Epicurus suggested that people should be guided by and, if possible, not bother themselves with questions about the nature of natural phenomena. It is enough to know that everything in nature happens for natural reasons, and for what reasons exactly is not so important and not everyone needs it. Live and rejoice, be content with simple, natural pleasures, love each other and be happy, and nature will take care of itself. Epicurus taught the students of his school, as was then customary, physics (the science of the nature of the universe), and canon (logic and the science of the nature of knowledge), and ethics (everyday wisdom), but only his ethical teaching became widespread in antiquity, and , divorced from the teaching of nature, it lost the meaning of a guide to the natural existence of man, but gained circulation as a call for carefree and irresponsible enjoyment of all kinds of blessings of life. Epicurus's picture of nature might have remained a dry speculative idea if one of the students of the Epicurean schools scattered throughout the Hellenic-Roman world had not turned out to be a poet of rare talent.

Not many major epic poems have been preserved intact by the handwritten tradition from antiquity to the time of the first printed editions: the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes, the Aeneid by Virgil, the Metamorphoses by Ovid, the Pharsalia by Lucan and there are still no more than half a dozen less famous ones. Six books in Latin hexameters about the nature of things, signed with the name of Lucretius, an almost unknown name, occupy a very significant place among these poems. In this poem, for the first time in the history of European literature, the value of an epically important object, along with the majestic natural elements, was acquired by a thousand everyday little things, from a coulter worn out in work to a cobweb hanging on a branch, which a random traveler making his way through the forest carries on his shoulders, not noticing its touch, from the bitter taste of wormwood rubbed in the fingers to the piercing screech of a saw, from a steamed bowl of ice water taken from the cellar into the yard, where large stars immediately seem to fall from the sky into it, to an oar deceptively broken by the surface of the water, lowered from the side of a ship, one of those who were crowded in large numbers in the harbor. Homer also noticed this kind of little things very well; in the epic of the Homeric model, these precious seals with subtle images of simple and everyday things find a place in comparisons, there they are depicted - in the poem of Lucretius they become not an indirect, but a direct subject of narration, contemplation and comprehension, What were the deeds of gods and people like in Homer? All these things, says the poet, really exist in the world. They are composed of atoms and are decomposed into atoms after death, so the existence of the last mosquito with all its indescribably light legs has no less truth than the vault of heaven or even than the entire totality of matter as a whole.

The poet declares himself a weak imitator of Epicurus (like a swallow that would compete with a swan in the powerful wingspan and power of flight), but only in wisdom - in poetry he boldly makes his way among a roadless field, plucks flowers that do not exist and were not in a wreath of one of the poets. With all his respect for the sacred sayings of Democritus, for the inspired prophecies of Empedocles, for the glory of Ennius, the father of Roman poetry, Lucretius quite rightly feels himself the creator of a new, unprecedented and magnificent creation - such a poem about the nature of things, which would reflect all the wisdom of the free Greek spirit, perceived by the consciousness of a Roman from a long distance as a unity in which the differences and confrontations of individual dogmas are sometimes lost, just as two armies clashing in a fierce battle are seen as a single sparkling spot on the mountainside.

When the clouds of ignorance hung low over the earth and the only refuge of the minds was religion, when all the terrible phenomena of nature - thunder and lightning, tornadoes and earthquakes, droughts and diseases, people attributed to the anger and power of the gods (not knowing either the nature of things or the true nature of divinity) and lived in constant fear - for the first time a man of Greece dared to raise his head high, look over the terrifying face of religion, penetrate with his gaze into the bright heights of the sky - he saw there the measured movement of the heavenly bodies, looked at the earth from above, comprehended the reasons for the heavenly and earthly phenomena that move the forces of nature and the ultimate limits of every thing. The Greeks trampled upon religion, and we will rise to heaven if we follow their example.

An honest Roman may be frightened by such insolence - accustomed to the daily ritual of piety performed with his head covered and eyes downcast, he will perhaps think that he is being drawn into a criminal community. But there is no crime worse than ignorance, especially when combined with religious fervor and zeal - remember the sacrifice of Iphigenia: why did the young girl die? For the wind to change direction? If the leaders assembled at Aulis had known the reasons for the formation of the winds, their usual directions and the conditions for their change, who would have thought of committing this senseless atrocity! Has religion stopped demanding human lives these days?

What does religion feed on in human souls? Fear of death and even greater fear of the immortality of the soul in the afterlife torment, so colorfully described in epic tales. This fear can be driven out of the soul only by knowledge of the nature of things, the structure of the universe, where there is no place for the kingdom of the dead, and knowledge of the nature of the soul, its material structure and, finally, its mortality - knowledge, perhaps not very comforting, but necessary for a happy life and fair (note: as if Epicurus’s words, but the tone is completely different, turned towards life, and not turned away from death).

The Romans considered themselves descendants of Aeneas, the Homeric hero glorified in the Iliad, where the goddess Aphrodite herself is called the mother of Aeneas. In order to imagine the essence of Roman poetry in general and the poetics of Lucretius as its first energetic exponent in particular, it is enough to at least trace with what diverse meanings the poet fills the relatively short introduction to his poem of purely philosophical content. “You who consider yourself descendants of the warlike Aeneas, remember that the mother of Aeneas was Venus, good Venus, the giver of life for all living things, the source of youthful strength, freshness, fun, and pleasures. Everyone rejoices at Venus, the sky brightens with her appearance, the clouds scatter, the winds subside, the sea smiles, the sun shines, the grass turns green, the birds chirp; wild animals and peaceful herds - all are intoxicated with love, all rush to procreation, to renewal of life. The nature of things is ruled by Venus, and you, her children, look around and remember that all life on earth is one big family, - help me, Venus, - help instill in them a desire for peace, calm warlike passions, let them rest from military worries and indulge quiet joy of knowledge, send me the pleasure of creativity, impart charm to my poems - after all, you alone know how to tame the fierce violence of Mars, in your arms he is able to soften - beg him for peace for the Romans: after all, the gods spend their immortal years enjoying the deepest peace , knowing no need, no fear, no sorrow, inaccessible to either selfishness or anger - and with your power and example, instill in these people the desire for peaceful joy.”

It can be considered that here the materialist philosopher, a passionate opponent of official and unofficial religious cults, pays tribute to the epic tradition, but the traditional epic technique of an appeal to the deity at the beginning of the poem is turned to the benefit of materialist philosophy - after all, Aphrodite was not the main one on Homer’s Olympus a deity, and here she alone rules the helm of the nature of things, this is no longer a goddess at all, but love, the queen of births, subduing enmity and destruction - like the memory of the poem of Empedocles - but she is also a deity, for the Epicureans had their own gods - perfect, half-airy, carefree, but Venus is here and the mother of Rome, the dear fatherland, which he calls on to tame the bloodthirsty savagery of internal and external wars; finally, she is also a beautiful woman, a seductive image of love pleasures, blissful joy in the bosom of a peaceful and happy nature, opposing concerns of public life, both military and non-military - this is where the truly inexhaustible depth lies, and the external rhetorical device used here is extremely simple: several times one meaning of the name “Venus” is imperceptibly replaced by another, as a result of which one area of ​​associations is superimposed on another , all meanings blur, become transparent, shine through one another; but at the same time, from the very first lines of the poem, the reader is prepared for the fact that various areas of human existence will overlap each other and shine through one another: the speculative nature of things and sensory images of reality, social life and mythical legends, the inner world of the soul and the excitement of natural elements, knowledge and experience, observation and imagination, insight and wit.