Episode 070 - More On The End Of The World

Welcome to Episode Seventy of Lucretius Today. I am your host Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we'll walk you through the six books of Lucretius' poem, and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book, "Epicurus and His Philosophy" by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. For anyone who is not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode One for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any question about that, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In this Episode 70 we will read approximately Latin lines 324 to 415 of Book V, and we will talk more about the end of the world, destruction by fire and water, and take an excursion into what this passage may mean about the immortality of the Epicurean gods. Now let's join Charles reading today's text.<br /><br />Browne 1743<br /><br />Further, if the heavens and the earth had no beginning, but were from eternity the same, how comes it that no poets have sung of any great events beyond the Theban War and the destruction of Troy? How came the exploits of so many heroes to be buried in oblivion that none of their great actions are recorded in the eternal monuments of fame, to live forever? For no other reason, I conceive, but that the world is of a late creation, that the substance of the world is new, and began not long ago. And therefore some arts are but lately known, others are polished and refined, many new discoveries are made in navigation, and the masters of music have but now brought sound and harmony to perfection; and, in the last place, this very nature of things which I now write of, and the reasons of them, are but lately found out, and I call myself one of the first who have attempted to convey them to posterity in Latin verse. But if you think that these things were long before the same they are now, but that mankind was destroyed by the ra