Lucretius Book 6: Concluding with a Plague

An Eclectic Humanist

This episode concludes our little traipse through Lucretius's On the Nature of Things. In Book 6, Lucretius implicitly addresses the sufficiency of a naturalistic worldview in the making of great art, then brings us face to face with the concrete reality of dying. In describing a historical plague in Athens, he describes in painful detail the double agony of illness and fear to which those living in terror of postmortem judgment are often subject. In doing so, he addresses the ethical question, current in many modern societies, of prolonging a life beyond the point where the only reasonable prospect is continued suffering. In short, he seems to be laying the groundwork for what we now call “death with dignity.” But why? Why conclude a poem of consolation with a grueling description of physical and psychological suffering? Well, I won't offer a definitive answer, but it seems to me that, in addressing the origins of the world, of life, of humanity, and of society, it would then have been dishonest to have left out questions of mortality. An account of life that leaves out an account of death would necessarily be incomplete, as would such an account that shied away from the pain of dying. Looked at this way Lucretius seems to be offering his naturalistic perspective as an antidote to the real suffering caused by belief in the supernatural. We may not be able to alleviate the suffering of the body in the days leading up to death, but we can, it seems, both alleviate our mental suffering regarding our postmortem trajectory, and also have grounds for not prolonging life beyond the point where the only possible outcome is continued agony.