The Book of Lucretius 1 · Written by himself, from his poem in six books
Lucretius, born about 99 before this era, died about 55, a Roman poet. His On the Nature of Things runs to six books and some seven thousand four hundred lines, the longest argument in verse in Latin. Almost nothing of his life can be established; even those two dates are inferred by later hands. He wrote his own, a poem in six books, and he is the only one in this scripture whose book is verse. The sixth song says that without the singers we believe rightly and do not move. Chapter one of this book is his own account of why he wrote in verse — which is the question the sixth song asks, answered by the one man who actually did it. What he teaches is the doctrine of Epicurus (cf. The Book of Epicurus). But the mirror in chapter two is his and not Epicurus’s; it is absent from that book because Epicurus did not say it. Almost nothing of his life can be established. Further: the poem ends with the plague at Athens, written without mercy, and it breaks off there with not one word of consolation. Some say it was never finished. The Order neither cuts it nor finishes it for him.
1.1Let me first say why I wrote this book in verse.
1.2What I teach, people do not want to hear.
1.3I have to tell them: nobody is looking after you; when you die you are gone; and the punishments you fear after death, not one of them will happen.
1.4These are bitter to the one who hears them. Most walk off after the first sentence.
1.5A physician has to give a child a very bitter medicine.
1.6First he smears honey round the rim of the cup.
1.7The child, going by the sweetness, drinks the bitter down.
1.8The child has not been cheated — what he swallowed really was the medicine, and the medicine really did cure him.
1.9He was only coaxed past the first mouthful.
1.10That is what I am doing.
1.11I take these hard doctrines and hand them to you inside a poem.
1.12Someone says: that is a trick.
1.13I say: a trick is putting honey in place of the medicine. I have not replaced anything. Not a grain of the medicine is missing.
1.14If you can get through it, that is the verse. What is left in your hand at the end is the doctrine.
1.15I would rather you came for the poem than that you did not come at all.