(931 ff):
Away with your tears, you rascal, and muzzle your moans ... Because you always long for
what you don't have and disregard what you have, your life has slipped away from you
unfulfilled and unenjoyed ... Now give up things unsuited to your years and make way for
younger men; for there is no escape.(Lucretius emphasizes, as elsewhere, the natural cycles of growth and decay.) Then with a characteristic
rationalization of myth he explains that the fabled punishments of the underworld represent the self-
inflicted torments of life (978 ff): the overhanging rock of Tantalus stands for the oppressive terrors of
religion, the vultures that tear at Tityos are the desires of the flesh, Sisyphus pushing the stone up hill is
the ambitious politician (what did Memmius make of that?). The sermon then turns to the staple of
consolation through the ages, 'You are not the first'. Good King Ancus died, and Scipio, the terror of
Carthage, and Epicurus himself, who dimmed the light of all men as the sun blots out the stars (1042 ff.).
We spend our lives running away from ourselves, without understanding the cause of our discontent;
peace of mind can only be attained when we accept that death is eternal.
The fourth book first defends the Epicurean theory of perception, by which objects give off a thin film of
atoms, (above, pp. 379 f), like heat from the sun or exhalations from the sea. Lucretius is at his vivid
best in describing distortions of perception, the motion of hills when seen from a passing ship (389 f.),
the continued rotation of hall pillars when children have stopped spinning (400 ff.), the bending of oars
as they pass beneath the surface of the sea (440 'refracta uidentur'). 'A gathering of water no deeper than
a finger's breadth, standing between the stones on the paved street, provides a view beneath the earth
with a reach as far as the chasm of the sky stretches on high above the earth' (414ff.): the image shows
the child-like clarity of the poet's vision, and his ability to use minute observation to achieve immense
perspectives. Yet in spite of strange cases Lucretius insists that knowledge depends on the senses, which
are irrefutable. In yet another section he denies that the eyes were created to give us sight, a teleological
explanation that is literally preposterous, as it confuses cause and effect: 'nothing grew in the body in
order that we could use it, but what has grown generates a use' (834 f). Here he is reacting against
Aristotle and the Stoics, with an approach that went back to Empedocles and Democritus: Bacon and
Darwin understood.
The latter part of the book provides a mechanical explanation of sex that is extended to the emotional
concomitants; here Epicurean non-involvement is expressed with a cynicism that counters the growing
romanticism of the poets.
Fathers' hard-won earnings turn into ribbons and head-scarves, ... yet from the very fountain of
enchantment a bitterness wells up ('surgit amari aliquid'), to bring anguish amid the blossoms, when the
lover's mind is gnawed by the awareness that he is passing his life in idleness and going to ruin in
brothels, or because she has left unclarified a I word she has let fly that sticks fast in his passionate heart
and ignites like a flame, or because he thinks she flaunts her eyes too freely or gazes at another, and he
sees in her face the traces of a smile. (1129ff.)