![]() ![]() Lucretius outlines a materialist physics to support these contentions: the universe is made up exclusively of either atoms or emptiness. Lucretius expounds "the nature of things," because Epicureans believed that the aim of life is to achieve a calm of mind they called ataraxia that this calm can best be achieved by avoiding pain and extreme pleasure (which only leads to pain) that the greatest pleasure is intellectual and that a proper intellectual grasp of the world involves a recognition that consciousness coexists with the body, because the opposite (belief in an afterlife for the soul) causes more pain than pleasure. ![]() Only fragments of Epicurus' own writing have survived. (Lucretius lived from about 99 to about 55 BCE.) His poem is the fullest extant rendering of the ancient philosophy known as Epicureanism, after its founder, the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who lived in Athens in 341-270 BCE. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things IntroductionÄe Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) is a remarkable philosophical poem in six books of Latin hexameters, composed by the poet Titus Lucretius Carus toward the middle of the first century BCE. ![]()
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