How to Be an Epicurean
By Catherine Wilson
Basic Books, 304pp, £30/$30
"Our starting point will be this principle: nothing is ever created by divine power out of nothing.” So begins Lucretius’s 1st-century BC poem De Rerum Natura, an expression of the ancient philosophy of Epicureanism. An ancient forebear to today’s atheist materialists, Lucretius attributes most religion to fear of “all sorts of things happening on earth and in the sky with no discernible cause”. He proposes a prescient theory of atoms and an asinine account of change called “the swerve”. Lucretius set the doctrine of Epicurus to dactylic hexameters because he found it otherwise “unpalatable” without “the dulcet strains of poesy” and “the sweet honey of the Muses”.
