Stoicism And Epicureanism

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Agamemnon, with the hope that he could win the favor of the gods by sacrificing his own daughter. In this case “religion stood with all that power for wickedness . . .too many times /religion mothers crime and wickedness” (Lucretius 452). The Romans at that time saw themselves as “laying foully groveling on earth, weighed down /by grim religion looming from the skies, threatening mortal men”(Lucretius 451). Epicureanism offered some Roman people something that they could seek in order to escape the fears of the gods and religion in general.
Epicurean’s physics was atomistic; meaning that the entire universe merely consisted of atoms and the space or void in which the atoms floated, collided, and whirled about. Lucretius wrote that “not all bodily matter is tightly packed /by nature’s law, for there’s a void in things. By void I mean vacant and empty space, /something you cannot touch” (Lucretius 456). For if the universe ...

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survive the body, and also his postulation of purely natural causes for earthly phenomena are all calculated to prove that the world is not directed by the divine agency and that fear of the supernatural is consequently without reasonable foundation. He wrote that “our starting-point shall be this principle: /nothing at all is ever born from nothing /by the god’s will” (Lucretius 453). He opposed the public idea that the gods had created the universe, and that they were the reason for the things that happened to the people on earth. Lucretius did not deny the existence of gods, but he conceived of them as having no concern with the affairs or destiny of mortals.
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