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Lucretius (1st century A.D.) distributed his argument into six books, beginning each with a highly polished introduction. Books I and II established the main principles of the atomic universe, refuted the rival theories of the pre-Socratic cosmic philosophers Heracleitus, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras, and covertly attacked the Stoics, a school of moralists rivaling that of Epicurus. Book III demonstrated the atomic structure and mortality of the soul and ended with a triumphant sermon on the theme "Death is nothing to us." Book IV described the mechanics of sense perception, thought, and certain bodily functions and condemned sexual passion. Book V described the creation and working of this world and the celestial bodies and the evolution of life and human society. Book VI explained remarkable phenomena of the earth and sky, in particular, thunder and lightning. The poem ends with a description of the plague at Athens, a sombre picture of death contrasting with that of spring and birth in the invocation to Venus, with which it opened.
Argument of the poem. The argument in outline is as follows:
1. No thing is either created out of or reducible to nothing. The universe has an infinite extent of empty space (or void) and an infinite number of irreducible particles of matter (or atoms)--though their kinds are finite. Atoms differ only in shape, size, and weight and are impenetrably hard, changeless, everlasting, the limit of physical division. They are made up of inseparable minimal parts, or units. Larger atoms have more such parts, but even the larger are minute. All atoms would have moved everlastingly downward in infinite space and never have collided to form atomic systems had they not swerved at times to a minimal degree. To these indeterminate swerves is due the creation of an infinite plurality of worlds; they also interrupt the causal chain and so make room for free will. All things are ultimately systems of moving atoms, separated by greater or smaller intervals of void, which cohere more or less according to their shapes. All systems are divisible and therefore perishable (except the gods), and all change is explainable in terms of the addition, subtraction, or rearrangement of changeless atoms. (See atomism.)
2. The soul is made of exceedingly fine atoms and has two connected parts: the anima distributed throughout the body, which is the cause of sensation, and the animus in the breast, the central consciousness. The soul is born and grows with the body, and at death it is dissipated like "smoke."
3. Though the gods exist, they neither made nor manipulate the world. As systems of exceedingly fine atoms, they live remote, unconcerned with human affairs, examples to men of the ideal life of perfect happiness (absence of mental fear, emotional turmoil, and bodily pain).
4. Men know by sense perception and argue by reason according to certain rules. Though the senses are infallible, reason can make false inferences. Objects can be seen because they discharge from their surface representative films, which strike the eye just as smells strike the nose. Separate atoms are in principle imperceptible, having no dischargeable parts. The senses perceive the properties and accidents of bodies; reason infers the atoms and the void, which exists to explain the perceived movement of bodies.
5. Men naturally seek pleasure and avoid pain. Their aim should be so to conduct their lives that they get, on balance, the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain. They will succeed in this only if they are able, through philosophy, to overcome the fear of death and of the gods.
Aristarchus' advanced ideas on the movement of the Earth are known from Archimedes and Plutarch; his only extant work is a short treatise, "On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon."