The Book of Lucretius 5 · 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.
5.1Under this book of mine lies one thing, and everything stands on it.
5.2Nothing comes from nothing.
5.3If things could grow out of nothing, then anything could come out of anything: men could grow out of the sea and fish could fall out of the sky.
5.4That is not what we see. Every thing comes out of some settled thing, and having come out it grows after its own kind.
5.5And there is the reverse of it: neither does anything truly become nothing.
5.6A thing scatters. But what scattered was the arrangement, not the stuff. (cf. The Prologue 1.16)
5.7The stuff is still here. It has gone elsewhere and entered into other things.
5.8I say this not to teach physics. I say it for the sentence that follows:
5.9Nothing you are made of will be annihilated. When you are dead, that material goes on walking about the world.
5.10This is not immortality. Do not take it for immortality. There is no you in that material.
5.11I will not give you a consolation that cheats you.
5.12I only want you to know: you do not pass from being into nothing. You pass from one arrangement, scattering into another.
5.13A man afraid of becoming nothing is afraid of a thing that will not happen.
5.14As for the thing that will happen — that you will not be here — I have said it above: in that thing, there is no you undergoing anything.