And yet, as the atoms travel through the void, they occasionally, and at times and places that are impossible to predict, deviate from their downward paths-the very slightest of movements, but one responsible for the being of everything that exists, because if atoms did not swerve, if they were to fall straight down and ever onwards in parallel lines like raindrops, then they would never collide, and nothing would be created. Nothing corporeal, Lucretius writes, can ever move upwards by its own force: everything, left to its own devices, follows a path downwards through space. In a passage in the second book of his De Rerum Natura, the Roman poet Lucretius describes the movement of atoms, the infinitesimal particles that comprise all things of body and matter, as they fall through the universe. $45 hardback.Įverything depends on the swerve. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011. The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition.
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