"And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all"
About this Quote
Life, for Lucretius, is never property; it is a rental with an expiry date. The legal metaphor does more than sound clever. "Freehold" and "leasehold" drag mortality out of the realm of misty spiritual consolation and into the hard world of contracts, terms, and inevitable repossession. You can improve the place while you're in it, but you cannot pretend it belongs to you. That cold clarity is the point.
Lucretius is writing as an Epicurean poet in a Rome thick with ambition, lineage, and civic religion. Status wants permanence: a name that outlives you, a household that continues, gods that certify your importance. Against that craving, the leasehold image is a philosophical insult - and a liberation. If you never owned your life, you were never cheated when it ends. Death isn't a cosmic injustice; it's the end of the agreed-upon term.
The subtext is a rebuke to possessiveness in all its forms: clinging to youth, hoarding wealth, demanding guarantees from the universe. By framing existence as a temporary grant "to all", Lucretius also smuggles in an austere egalitarianism. No one gets special tenure. Emperors and beggars occupy the same arrangement, just with different furnishings.
What makes the line work is its quiet bureaucratic violence. It refuses tragedy's grand music and replaces it with a clerk's stamp: finite, non-negotiable, oddly calming. The sting is real; so is the relief.
Lucretius is writing as an Epicurean poet in a Rome thick with ambition, lineage, and civic religion. Status wants permanence: a name that outlives you, a household that continues, gods that certify your importance. Against that craving, the leasehold image is a philosophical insult - and a liberation. If you never owned your life, you were never cheated when it ends. Death isn't a cosmic injustice; it's the end of the agreed-upon term.
The subtext is a rebuke to possessiveness in all its forms: clinging to youth, hoarding wealth, demanding guarantees from the universe. By framing existence as a temporary grant "to all", Lucretius also smuggles in an austere egalitarianism. No one gets special tenure. Emperors and beggars occupy the same arrangement, just with different furnishings.
What makes the line work is its quiet bureaucratic violence. It refuses tragedy's grand music and replaces it with a clerk's stamp: finite, non-negotiable, oddly calming. The sting is real; so is the relief.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Lucretius
Add to List
