Nature herself does not complain if the halls are not full of golden statues of youths holding flaming torches to light up the banquets that go on all night, or if the house is not sparkling with silver and gleaming with gold, while the music echoes round the gilded rafters. It is plain to see that our bodily nature needs very few things to banish pain, and to furnish us with many pleasures that are enjoyable from time to time. To avoid bodily pain, to have a mind free from anxiety and fear, and to enjoy the pleasures of the senses.Īnd, to satisfy these goods, Lucretius continues, we don’t need anything lavish, expensive, or complicated: the solutions to our needs can be remarkably simple. This is clear from Epicurus’s Principal Doctrines, a remaining fragment of his work that consists of 40 brilliant aphorisms on how to live well, and which features in our list of the Epicureanism’s best books.Īs Lucretius summarizes in book two of On The Nature of Things, Epicurists believe the ultimate good for human nature is as follows: Often caricatured today as an exclusively pleasure-seeking, hedonistic stance towards the world, Epicurean thinking is actually more focused on eradicating pain, fear, and anxiety from our day-to-day lives. What is Epicureanism?Įpicureanism, as we define it in our short Epicureanism explainer, is a system of philosophy based on the teachings of ancient Greek thinker Epicurus, founded around 307 BCE. The Daniel Browne 1734 English translation of Lucretius’s On The Nature of Things.

Indeed, in all the ground it covers, Lucretius’s poem essentially propounds the core tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism. Why has On The Nature of Things been valued so highly throughout the ages? Well, not only does Lucretius write beautifully, but he also reveals crucial insight into the works of ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, much of whose work had been lost. Since its publication over 2,000 years ago, the poem has been celebrated by such thinkers as Montaigne, Thomas Jefferson, and Einstein. On The Nature of Things is a didactic, six-book work exploring everything from the fundamental nature of reality and what we can know, to the character of goodness and how we should best live. Lucretius was a Roman poet and philosopher born in 94 BCE, best-known for his epic poem De Rerum Natura (On The Nature of Things).

Lucretius de rerum natura english