Lucretius admits to not being too clear on this one. To provide some more visual clarity, I have attempted a simplistic figure (with Paint, because we are already talking about ancient things here.) This shrinkage also caused a deepening of crags that create deeper oceans and an overlapping that creates mountains. The fiery ether and sun would now, slowly but surly make the earth shrink by making it atomically more compact. The still fragile surface of the earth newly made, suddenly caved in and voilà! The sea is made.

This fiery ether, Lucretius confidently asserts, triggered then the birth of the sun and the moon domiciled in middling height in the sky.

This element appears to be the highest up. The first element was ether, generated by fire. To start, earth particles were made, because they were heavy. Initially, many atoms floated through infinite time and clashed together to make all the things. “Stages by which the initial concentration of matter laid the foundations of earth and sky.” It should be noted that Lucretius assumes humans were present when the world began. Nothingness (he does not elaborate on this one)Įverything else is subject to birth and decay. Lucretius extrapolates that since those objects have a semblance of a beginning and an end, so must Earth and other planets and stars.

He is speaking of fire, air, water and wind. With this complicated concept, Lucretius starts us off on the idea that objects that are born and die mirror the earthly and heavenly objects. “Elements all consist of bodies that are neither birthless nor deathless, we must believe the same of the world as a whole.” Book V is all about proving what the universe is, if it isn’t divine. Us puny humans should take solace in the fact that the universe was not created by gods. “What harm would it have done us to have remained uncreated?” We shouldn’t be sad that divinity in’t real however, because divinity is nonsensical since it relies on gratitude and gratitude towards divinity is useless when it comes from non-divine entities (humans). Not to be too cheery however, he informs us straight up, that the world is doomed because reality isn’t divine but natural. In this book, Lucretius goes all in to explain the very nature of the universe. “For nothing has power to break the binding laws of eternity.”

Lucretius on the nature of the universe