“Now of necessity you must admit that sensate things must even so consist of insensate atoms. From the insensate, animal life is born.”

“First, goddess, the birds of the air, pierced to the heart with your powerful shafts, signal your entry. Next wild creatures and cattle bound over rich pastures and swim rushing rivers: so surely are they all captivated by your charm and eagerly follow your lead. Then you inject seductive love into the heart of every creature that lives in the seas and mountains and river torrents and bird-haunted thickets, implanting in it the passionate urge to reproduce its kind.”

“The poets, through the conjunction of fire and moisture, are indicating that the vis, ‘force’, which they have is that of Venus [Aphrodite]. Those born of vis have what is called vita, ‘life’, and that is what is meant by Lucilius (c.120BC) when he says: ‘life is force you see: to do everything force doth compel us’.”

— Marcus Varro (c.50BC), On the Latin Language

Left: a photo of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (Ѻ), where Galileo in 1589 conducted an experiment wherein he dropped to object of different mass to prove that they fell at the same speed, a view contrary to Aristotle’s view of gravity. Center: astronaut David Scott (1971) on the moon (V) testing Galileo’s assertion that a feather and a hammer would hit the ground at the same time in a vacuum. Right: Brian Cox (2014) at NASA’s Space Power vacuum chamber, Ohio, wherein they watch (V) a bowling ball and some feathers fall through 12 stories or 122-feet and hit the ground at the same time. This phenomena was predicted by Lucretius in 55BC.

“Many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace
Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race.
For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air,
Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare,
Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now.”

A rendition of Lucretius thinking about atoms, by Luis Granean, for Stephen Greenblatt’s 2011 New Yorker article on Lucretius and his famous poem. [17]

“My object is to dispel the fear of the gods, which arises simply from the fact that there are so many things which men do not yet understand, and therefore imagine to be effected by divine power.”

— Lucretius (55BC), synopsis regarding gods, summarized by Balfour Stewart and Peter Tait [6]

“Fear was the first thing on earth to make gods.”

“But in what ways yon concourse of matter founded earth and heaven and the deeps of the sea, the courses of sun and moon, I will next in order describe. For verily not by design did the first-beginnings of things station themselves each in its right place by keensighted intelligence, nor did they bargain sooth to say what motions each should assume, but because the first-beginnings of things many in number in many ways impelled by blows for infinite ages back and kept in motion by their own weights have been wont to be carried along and to unite in all manner of ways and thoroughly to test every kind of production possible by their mutual combinations, therefore it is that spread abroad through great time after trying unions and motions of every kind they at length meet together in those masses which suddenly brought together become often the rudiments of great things, of earth, sea and heaven and the race of living things.”

“Again, if motion is always one long chain, and new motion always arises out of the old in order invariable, and if the first beginnings do not make by swerving a beginning of motion such as to break the decrees of fate, that cause may not follow cause to infinity, whence comes this free will in living creatures all over the earth, whence, I say, is this will wrested from the fates by which we proceed with pleasure leads each, swerving also our motions not a fixed times and places, but just where our mind has taken us?”

“Lucretius was read and studied by the general populous as well as the leading figures of Roman literature for centuries. He had a tremendous impact on Virgil, e.g., and Ovid loved his materialism and mockery of the traditional gods. Ovid’s own best statement on the subject was, ‘it is convenient that there be gods, and as it is convenient, let us believe there are.’ That does seem to have been the mood. Lucretius, by the way, died without putting his poem into published form; Cicero did that for him.”

#	Prediction	Lines
1.	The atom	1.265-328
2.	The molecule	2.100-108, 2.581-588
3.	Law of inertia	2.62-166, 2.184-332
4.	Principle of universal natural law	2.718-729, 2.1067-1078
5.	Rain cycle	6.495-523
6.	Sound as a pressure wave in air	4.524-614
7.	Light composed of particles	2.144-156, 4.183-216, 4.364-378, 5.281-305
8.	Sense of smell caused by shape of molecule fitting shape of receptor in nose	2.414-417, 2.680-683, 4.673-705
9.	Lightning caused by friction between storm fronts	6.160-422
10.	Lightning composed of tiny particles	2.384-389
11.	Earthquakes caused by slipping fault lines	6.535-551
12.	Nile rises from snow melting at its source	6.712...735-737
13.	Animals and men evolved by natural selection	2.1150-1156, 5.790-836
14.	Matter is mostly empty space	1.329-397, 6.936-997
15.	Magnetism caused by exchange of particles	6.998-1089
16.	Fire is not an element	1.635-829
17.	No center of the universe	1.1052-1082
18.	Other planetary systems	2.1048-1089
19.	Speed of light is finite	2.144-156, 4.183-216
20.	Theory of relativity	1.459-463, 2.308-332
21.	Quantum indeterminism	2.216-293
22.	Brownian motion	2.112-141

“Titus Lucretius, poet, is born. After a love-philtre had turned him mad, and he had written, in the intervals of his insanity, several books which Cicero revised, he killed himself by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of his age.”

“Happy is he who has discovered the causes of things and has cast beneath his feet all fears, unavoidable fate, and the din of the devouring underworld.”

— Virgil (31BC), Georgics (2.490); apparent reference to Lucretius; cited by Michel Montaigne (Ѻ) in his “Of Managing the Will” [18]

“Lucretius' high rank as one of the most distinguished poets of all times is the result of his highly productive skill of sensory perception, which makes him capable of vigorous representations, and further of his lively imagination, which allows him to track the perceived objects even beyond the reach of the senses down to the imperceptible depths of nature and most secretive recesses.”

— Johann Goethe (1821), “Letter to Knebel” (note: Knebel was working on a translation of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things) (Ѻ), Feb 14

“You are right; we must speak with respect of Lucretius; I see no one who can compare with him except Byron, and Byron has not his gravity nor the sincerity of his sadness. The melancholy of the ancients seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, who all more or less presuppose an immortality on the yonder side of the black hole. But for the ancients this black hole has the infinite itself; the procession of their dreams is imaged against a background of immutable ebony. The gods being no more and Christ not being not yet, there was between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius a unique moment in which man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find this grandeur; but what renders Lucretius intolerable is his physics, which he gives as if positive. If he is weak, it is because he did not doubt enough; he wished to explain, to arrive at a conclusion!”

— Gustave Flaubert (c.1875), “Letter to Madame Roger des Genettes” [14]

“Lucretius must have observed the moral breakdown that accompanied the dissolution of the old ways as Romans struggled to rise from institutions adequate for small city-state to standards and institutions that they hoped would be adequate for governing the world empire.”

— Frank Copley (1977), “Introduction” to Lucretius: On the Nature of Things [16]

“No man awakes, whom once the ice end of living overtakes.”

— Lucretius (55BC), On the Nature of Things; cited by Michel Montaigne (1592) in The Complete Works (pg. 324)

“Fools admire and like all things the more which they perceive to be concealed under involved language, and determine things to be true which can prettily tickle the ears and are varnished over with fine sounding phrase.”

— Lucretius (55BC), translation by Munro [6]

A selection (Ѻ) of three On the Nature of Things covers, the middle of which, translation by Martin Smith, shows a detail from a painting by the surrealist Max Ernst, of a crescent moon, high above the earth, where two pairs of legs, without bodies are shown, which Stephen Greenblatt read as a college student, giving eventual sway to his 2011 Swerve, on the history of the 15th century re-discovery of Lucretius, from which the scientific revolution emerged. [17]