Politics & Power Quote by Lucretius

Nothing in Lucretius is allowed to sit still, not even “the sum of things.” The line has the cool, bracing effect of a camera pulling back: what looks like stability is really constant audit and recombination. “Ever being reviewed” reads almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point. He drains the cosmos of mythic drama and replaces it with process. Nature isn’t a stage for divine mood swings; it’s a ledger of atoms rearranging, endlessly.

The subtext is anti-vanity. By sliding from “mortals” to “nations” to “generations of living creatures,” Lucretius collapses our preferred units of importance. Empires rise and fall with the same indifferent rhythm as species cycling through birth and decay. “Dependent one upon another” isn’t sentimental interconnection; it’s material interdependence, the Epicurean idea that everything is entangled in causation, not guided by providence. Even the word “dependent” undercuts the fantasy of self-made permanence.

Then the metaphor lands: “like runners pass on the torch of life.” It’s humane without being comforting. A relay implies continuity, but it also implies replaceability: your job is to carry the flame briefly, then hand it off. In the context of De Rerum Natura, this is persuasion by sobriety. Lucretius is trying to cure fear - of death, of gods, of catastrophe - by framing change as the baseline condition. The rhetoric works because it offers awe without superstition: a universe grand enough to humble you, orderly enough to stop you from panicking.