The Book of Lucretius 3 · 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.
3.1Let me tell an old story. When I have told it I will say one sentence.
3.2The Greek fleet was to sail for Troy. The wind was against them and the ships could not go.
3.3The diviner said: someone must be sacrificed.
3.4The one to be sacrificed was the commander’s own daughter.
3.5The girl was brought to the altar. She believed she was being brought to be married.
3.6She saw her father standing there. She saw the knife.
3.7She sank down. She could not speak — they had already stopped her mouth.
3.8She was the first who ever called him father. That word had once won her his tenderness.
3.9And so she was lifted up. Not given away in marriage, but killed.
3.10So that the wind would turn and the ships could sail.
3.11I tell this in order to say the sentence that follows:
3.12Religion could urge men to an evil as great as that.
3.13Mark that I do not say some men made a pretext of religion. I say religion itself.
3.14Because unless a man truly believed that doing it would buy the wind, no father would ever have done it.
3.15To do a very great evil, ill will is not enough. A man also needs a reason — a reason he himself believes.
3.16That thing is what I have spent my life pulling people out of.