The Book of Lucretius 2 · 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.
2.1You are afraid of dying. Let me hold up a mirror for you.
2.2Before you were born there was an enormously long stretch of time.
2.3In that stretch there was no you. A great deal happened, wars were fought, many died. You knew nothing of any of it.
2.4Now think: does that stretch of time distress you?
2.5It does not. You had never even considered it.
2.6That stretch is the mirror Nature holds up to you.
2.7What it shows is the stretch after you are dead.
2.8The two are the same. Both are without you.
2.9You are not distressed by the first. On what ground are you distressed by the second?
2.10Someone says: they are not the same. The second is one I have lost.
2.11I ask: and where is the one who lost it?
2.12To be distressed there must be someone there to be distressed. After death there is no such one.
2.13Your distress now is real. But in the thing you are distressed about, there is no you undergoing anything.
2.14You are using the self that is alive at this moment to be afraid on behalf of a self that is not there.
2.15You even leave a pair of eyes quietly off to one side: watching yourself lying there, watching the family weep.
2.16That pair of eyes is alive too. Take those away as well, and in what is left there is nothing to be afraid of.
2.17I cannot make you unafraid. I can only hold the mirror in front of you and ask you to look for yourself.