Lucretius and On the Nature of Things

Botticelli’s Primavera (c. 1482)

We can’t speak about Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things without first understanding his philosophy. He was a Roman poet and an Epicurean, which meant he followed the system of belief Epicurus set out some 250 years before his time. The philosopher considered peace of mind as our primary goal in life.

Epicurus believed that what he called “pleasure” was the greatest good, but that the way to attain such pleasure was to live modestly, to gain knowledge of the workings of the world and to limit one’s desires. This would lead one to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from fear as well as an absence of bodily pain. The combination of these two states constitutes happiness in its highest form.

(From Wikipedia’s entry on Epicureanism)

Venus in Primavera

Lucretius’s Venus is the Roman goddess of love and desire. Her Greek counterpart is Aphrodite, whose birth we read about in Hesiod’s Theogony. Though Lucretius seems to deny the gods play a part in our world, he begins his poem with a description of how everything bends to Venus’s will, even Mars, the god of war. From this, we get the sense that Venus is one of the most important goddess to the Roman world. Virgil, the greatest of Roman poets, writes the epic poem The Aeneid some thirty years later, detailing the birth of the Roman world. Aeneas, the hero of the epic, is the son of Venus.