Aitia.

Regards sur la culture hellénistique au

XXIe siècle
10 | 2020
Le De rerum natura de Lucrèce : perspectives
philosophiques

Lucretius on Imagination and Mental Projection

Imagination et projection mentale selon Lucrèce
Lucrezio sull’immaginazione e la proiezione mentale

David Sedley

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 Lucretius on Imagination
and Mental Projection*

David Sedley
Christ’s College, Cambridge

1 Lucretius should not be assumed to be altogether typical of Roman

­Epicureans in his day. Two decades ago in my book on Lucretius1 I argued
that he was not acquainted with recent philosophical developments either
within or beyond the Epicurean school, relying instead on the unmediated
text of Epicurus’ work On Nature, reserving his own independent thoughts
for the proems to the six books. In the present paper some cautious modifi-
cation or refinement of that thesis will be due.

2 Both Lucretius (3.15, 5.1–54) and the Epicurean spokesman Velleius

in ­Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods (1.43) rank Epicurus as one of the
gods, perhaps the greatest of them.2 Moreover, in the eyes of both these
­Epicureans, Epicurus’ godlike superiority lay above all in his powers of intel-
lectual vision, his ability to see at one and the same time an entire universe.
This had already been a mark of supreme divinity in the Greek philosophical
tradition at least since Socrates, who is reported by Xenophon as follows:3

* For helpful comments and questions, my thanks to audience members at a Cambridge

seminar on first-century BC philosophy in 2006–7, and at the April 2019 Lucretius
conference in Paris; also to Maeve Lentricchia and Voula Tsouna for further discussion,
and to Barnaby Taylor for kindly letting me read his energising draft chapter on Lucretian
metaphor (including epibolē), due to appear in Barnaby Taylor, Lucretius and the Language
of Nature (Oxford 2020).
1 D. N. Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, Cambridge, CUP, 1998.
2 Velleius echoes an existing tradition in the school (cf. Plut., Col. 1118A) of calling
Epicurus’ methodological treatise the Canon ‘heaven-sent’ (διοπετής) a compliment this
time not matched by Lucretius, who I any case never names Epicurus’ works by title.
Cf. also Cic., TD 1.48 for contemporary Epicureans’ deification of Epicurus.
3 Mem. 1.4.17.

Aitia. Regards sur la culture hellénistique au XXI e siècle, no  10, février 2021
 David Sedley

[Do not suppose that,] whereas your eyesight can reach many stades,
god’s eye cannot see everything at once; nor that, whereas your
mind can care both about things here and about things in Egypt and
Sicily, god’s wisdom is not sufficient for him to concern himself with
all things at one and the same time.

3 In the proem to his first book, Lucretius praises the similarly synoptic vision
of a great Greek predecessor, reverentially left unnamed but instantly recog-
nisable as Epicurus:
At a time when before his very eyes human life was squalidly sprawled
on the ground, oppressed by the weight of the religion that reared
its head from the heavenly regions, louring over mortals and terrible
to behold, it was a Greek man who first had the courage to raise
those mortal eyes against it, and was the first to stand up against it.
He was held back neither by the tales of the gods nor by thunderbolts
nor by the heaven with its threatening roar, but these all the more
stirred up the intense valour of his mind, making him desire to break
open the tight-shut bars of nature’s gates. As a result his mind’s
vibrant energy fought its way through and issued forth, far beyond the
flaming walls of the world, and he roamed with his intellect and mind
through the measureless universe. From there he returns victorious,
to report to us what is possible, what impossible, and moreover how
each thing’s power is delimited, and its deep-set boundary stone.
As a result, religion is in its own turn trampled underfoot, while his
victory raises us heaven high.4

4 The divine character of Epicurus’ achievement is not yet made explicit: that
apotheosis is being saved for the proem to book 5, a high point of the poem
towards which Lucretius is already working. Instead the great man is at this
stage compared to a victorious general. He was the first to fight back against
the crushing effects of false religious belief, and he did so by a progression
from ocular to mental vision. First, using his own eyes, he could see human
life to be everywhere oppressed by religion. He then dared to raise those
same eyes to the heaven, from which the menaces of religion were staring
down, and to return their stare. This in turn gave him the courage, now by his
sheer power of mind, to smash open nature’s gates and issue forth into the
measureless universe beyond our own world’s boundary or ‘flaming walls’,
the fiery heaven. Thanks to this extraordinary projection of thought he was
enabled to traverse the entire infinity of space, returning in triumph to teach
us the limits of the possible and the impossible. In his victory, religion is the
vanquished foe, we ourselves the winners.

5 There has been much valuable modern analysis of this passage, but from
an Epicurean point of view there is no better commentary on it than the
following words, spoken by Cicero’s Epicurean Velleius (ND 1.53–56):
[53] . . . For the same man who taught us everything else taught
us also that the world was made by nature without the need for

4 humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret / in terris oppressa gravi sub religione, / quae
caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat / horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans, / primum
Graius homo mortalis tollere contra / est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra; / quem
neque fama deum nec fulmina nec minitanti / murmure compressit caelum, sed eo magis
acrem / inritat animi virtutem, effringere ut arta naturae primus portarum claustra cupiret. /
ergo vivida vis animi pervicit et extra / processit longe flammantia moenia mundi / atque
omne immensum peragravit mente animoque, / unde refert nobis victor quid possit oriri, /
quid nequeat, finita potestas denique cuique / quanam sit ratione atque alte terminus
haerens. / quare religio pedibus subiecta vicissim / opteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo.

Aitia. Regards sur la culture hellénistique au XXI e siècle, no  10, février 2021
 Lucretius on Imagination and Mental Projection

craftsmanship, and that this thing which you call impossible without
divine creativity is in fact so easy that nature will make, is making
and has made infinitely many worlds. Just because you [Stoics]
do not see how nature can do this without a mind, unable to develop
your plot’s dénouement you copy the tragic poets and resort
to a god. [54] You would not be demanding this god’s handiwork if you
saw the measureless magnitude of space, endless in all directions,
by projecting and focusing itself (se iniciens . . . et intendens) into
which the mind travels far and wide, seeing as a result no boundary
of its extremities at which it could call a halt. In this measureless
stretch of widths, lengths and heights there flies an infinite mass
of countless atoms, which despite the presence of void between
them stick together and by taking hold of each other form a conti-
nuous whole. And from these are made those shapes and formations
of things which you [Stoics] think are impossible without bellows and
anvil. With this thought you have placed as a yoke upon our necks
a permanent overlord, for us to fear day and night . . . [56] Released
from these terrors by Epicurus, and delivered into freedom,
we do not fear those whom we understand neither to bring trouble
upon themselves nor to try and make trouble for others, and with
holy reverence we worship their supremely fine nature.5

6 Velleius thus brings out what we can achieve for ourselves if we follow
­Epicurus on his odyssey of the mind. The key to eliminating oppressive
creator gods from our world-view is to appreciate the inevitability that mere
atomic accident, operating as it must do on an infinite scale, will somewhere
at some time produce worlds like our own, without the need for divine crafts-
manship. That in its turn requires us to see, by mental projection, what the
infinity of the universe really means, just as, according to Lucretius’s intel-
lectual travelogue, Epicurus has already done.

7 The sequence of thought-experiments, arguments and mental exercises

by which this vision can be achieved is exemplified at length by Lucretius
towards the end of his first book (1.951–1051). For example, we are invited
to imagine going to some hypothetical boundary of the universe and throwing
a spear past it (1.968–83).

8 We have seen Velleius speak of the mind ‘projecting and focusing itself’,
se iniciens et intendens, into infinite space. His Latin is undoubtedly captu-
ring an Epicurean technical term, phantastikē epibolē tēs dianoias, ‘repre-
sentational projection of the mind’, which Epicurus himself more than once
invokes as part of his methodology.6 Another rendition of the same Greek

5 [53] . . . docuit enim nos idem, qui cetera, natura effectum esse mundum, nihil opus
fuisse fabrica, tamque eam rem esse facilem, quam vos effici negetis sine divina posse
sollertia, ut innumerabiles natura mundos effectura sit, efficiat, effecerit. quod quia, quem
ad modum natura efficere sine aliqua mente possit, non videtis, ut tragici poetae cum
explicare argumenti exitum non potestis, confugitis ad deum. [54] cuius operam profecto
non desideraretis, si inmensam et interminatam in omnis partis magnitudinem regionum
videretis, in quam se iniciens animus et intendens ita late longeque peregrinatur, ut nullam
tamen oram ultimi videat, in qua possit insistere. in hac igitur inmensitate latitudinum,
longitudinum, altitudinum infinita vis innumerabilium volitat atomorum, quae interiecto
inani cohaerescunt tamen inter se et aliae alias adprehendentes continuantur; ex quo
efficiuntur eae rerum formae et figurae, quas vos effici posse sine follibus et incudibus
non putatis. itaque inposuistis in cervicibus nostris sempiternum dominum, quem dies
et noctes timeremus. . . . [56] his terroribus ab Epicuro soluti et in libertatem vindicati
nec metuimus eos, quos intellegimus nec sibi fingere ullam molestiam nec alteri quaerere,
et pie sancteque colimus naturam excellentem atque praestantem.
6 For the main passages see n. 18 below.

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 David Sedley

term occurs in the opening of Lucretius’ argument that beyond our own world
there are countless others (2.1044–47):
For given the infinite amount of space beyond these walls of our
world, the mind demands an account of what further things lie there
for the intellect to aim to reach with its gaze, and to which the mind’s
projection [animi iactus] can free itself and fly.7

9 Lucretius here uses animi iactus, which I have translated ‘the mind’s projec-
tion’, although an even more literal rendition would have been ‘the throwing
of the mind.’ Later he uses a slight variant, animi iniectus. Cicero in the
passage quoted earlier speaks of the mind se iniciens . . . et intendens,
‘projecting and focusing itself.’ All of these Latinisations capture the –bol–
component of the Greek epibolē, from ballein, to ‘throw.’ Despite the similarity
between the two Latin authors, the fact that Cicero offers both iniciens and
intendens as translations confirms that he is not simply echoing L ­ ucretius’
Latin, but is seeking to optimize his own rendition of the Greek term epibolē,
whose nuances both his Latin words help to capture.

10 It is clear that in Epicurean thought this technique of intellectual projec-

tion applies especially to the appreciation of temporal and spatial infinity.
Take temporal infinity first. Remarkably, the mental operation of grasping
it is traced back all the way to primitive mankind, for our distant ancestors’
conception of imperishable gods was already enough to show that they had
indulged in some such conceptualisation. Consider first Lucretius’ histori-
cal reconstruction of how primitive humans first came to think of the gods
as imperishable (5.1169–82):
For already in those days the races of mortal men used to see
with waking mind, and even more so in their sleep, figures of gods,
of marvelous appearance and prodigious size. They attributed sensa-
tion to them, because they seemed [or ‘were seen’] to move their limbs,
and to give utterance with voices of a dignity to match their splendid
appearance and great strength. They endowed them with everlasting
life, because their appearance was in perpetual supply and the form
remained unchanged, and more generally because they supposed that
beings with such strength could not easily be overcome by any force.
And hence they supposed them to be supremely blessed, because
none of them seemed oppressed by fear of death, and also because
in their dreams they saw them perform many marvelous acts with
no trouble to themselves.8

11 In close parallel to this, Sextus Empiricus provides a more technical analysis

of the same process as described by Lucretius, or at any rate of the central
part of it, reporting the Epicurean theory as follows:
After forming the impression of a long-lived human being, the ancients
extended the time to infinite length, joining past and future time

7 quaerit enim rationem animus, cum summa loci sit / infinita foris haec extra moenia
mundi, / quid sit ibi porro, quo prospicere usque velit mens / atque animi iactus liber quo
pervolet ipse.
8 quippe etenim iam tum divom mortalia saecla / egregias animo facies vigilante videbant /
et magis in somnis mirando corporis auctu. / his igitur sensum tribuebant propterea quod /
membra movere videbantur vocesque superbas / mittere pro facie praeclara et viribus
amplis. / aeternamque dabant vitam, quia semper eorum / subpeditabatur facies et forma
manebat, / et tamen omnino quod tantis viribus auctos / non temere ulla vi convinci posse
putabant. / fortunisque ideo longe praestare putabant, / quod mortis timor haut quemquam
vexaret eorum, et simul in somnis quia multa et mira videbant / efficere et nullum capere
ipsos inde laborem.

Aitia. Regards sur la culture hellénistique au XXI e siècle, no  10, février 2021
 Lucretius on Imagination and Mental Projection

to the present, and then, having arrived at the conception of something

eternal, said that god is eternal too.9

12 The important point of methodology is that the process of projection must

start from an ordinary act of imagination, roughly as follows:
– Imagine a very long human lifetime, extending into both past and future.
– Eliminate the birth and infancy of the imagined person, so that their past
life is seen as having had no beginning.
– Eliminate the future death of the imagined person, so that their future life
is seen as having no end.
– You are now imagining an eternal being, in other words, a god.

13 Why did this psychological process ever start? Even the first step, that
of imagining a very long human lifetime, was hardly going to happen by acci-
dent. Consider the mechanics of imagination in general. As we learn from
­Lucretius 4.722–822, the mind is at every moment being bombarded with
ultra-fine images (simulacra) of all kinds, and each momentary act of imagi-
nation requires its concentrating so as to receive the desired kind of image,
while ignoring or discarding countless others. So the first step towards
conceiving a divine being will probably have been to picture a mature and
healthy adult, by drawing into the mind one of the innumerable available
images that really did emanate from one or another such person. To add
the notion of a long lifetime our ancestors will have had to focus on a series
of selected images showing this same person strong, resilient and more
or less unchanged in a wide variety of activities and circumstances.
By now they had arrived at the conception of a truly durable individual. They
then, finally, eliminated the temporal limits altogether. And now they had the
conception of an infinitely extended lifetime—one of the essential charac-
teristics of a god.

14 As Lucretius explains, when in our dreams people seem to move and act,
as these divine figures did, we are not directly seeing them in motion, but
are building up a cinematographic effect from the series of momentary
images. We are in effect the choreographers of our own dreams (4.800–806,
cf. 768–76):
When the first image perishes, followed by the birth of another
in a different position, the former person seems to have changed his
pose . . . The mind itself moreover prepares for, and hopes to see,
the sequel to each thing: which is why it comes about . . . Then
we add large opinions derived from slender evidence, and lead our-
selves into being tricked by an illusion.10

15 It follows that the epiphanies of gods experienced by our ancestors, espe-

cially in their dreams, were not any kind of telepathic contact with extra-
cosmic living beings, but products of the dreamers’ imagination, converted
into fully immortal beings by the further process elsewhere called
mental projection.

9 SE, M 9.46: πολυχρόνιόν τινα φαντασιωθέντες ἄνθρωπον οἱ παλαιοὶ ἐπηύξησαν τὸν

χρόνον εἰς ἄπειρον, προσσυνάψαντες τῷ ἐνεστῶτι καὶ τὸν παρῳχημένον καὶ τὸν μέλλοντα·
εἶτα ἐντεῦθεν εἰς ἔννοιαν ἀιδίου παραγενόμενοι ἔφασαν καὶ ἀίδιον εἶναι τὸν θεόν.
10 [800] hoc ubi prima perit alioque est altera nata / inde statu, prior hic gestum mutasse
videtur. / . . . / ipse parat sese porro speratque futurum / ut videat quod consequitur rem
quamque: fit ergo. / . . . / [816] deinde adopinamur de signis maxima parvis / ac nos
in fraudem induimus frustraminis ipsi.

Aitia. Regards sur la culture hellénistique au XXI e siècle, no  10, février 2021
 David Sedley

16 What does this account of primitive religion tell us about the phenomenology
of religious belief in more recent stages of civilisation, including Epicurus’
own day? Every human being, according to Epicurus, develops the concept
of god,11 and that means that every human mind goes through some ver-
sion of this complex series of steps towards picturing what an eternal life
must be like. Why does our mind do that? Evidently because, consciously
or unconsciously, it wants to conceive these eternal beings.12

17 The interpretation of Epicurean theology is a deeply controversial matter.

Only a minority of scholars would join me in favouring the ‘idealist’ interpre-
tation,13 according to which Epicurus’ gods exist as projections of human
thought of the kind examined above. On this understanding gods are,
as numerous sources testify, made of simulacra, not because these tenuous
atomic films are suitable materials for constituting a biologically immortal
being, but because simulacra are the very stuff of thought.

18 But even ‘realist’ interpreters, who insist on the contrary that the gods
exist as biologically everlasting living beings outside the world, may be left
by Lucretius’ evidence with little choice but to accept that the ways in which
all human beings conceive of imperishable gods continue to be, if not alto-
gether identical, at the very least structurally analogous, to our ancestors’
original projections of thought.14

19 I have so far spoken of how conceiving god includes developing the concept
of an infinite lifespan. It also includes developing the concept of the second
essential characteristic of the divine: supreme blessedness. At 5.1179–82
(quoted above) our ancestors, having conceived these imperishable beings,
‘supposed them to be supremely blessed, because none of them seemed
oppressed by fear of death, and also because in their dreams they saw them
perform many marvelous acts with no trouble to themselves.’ This arrival
at the conception of extreme blessedness is again explicated more techni-
cally by Sextus (M 9.45):
Having conceived of a human being who is happy, blessed and
endowed with his full complement of all goods, we [sic] went
on to intensify these characteristics, and conceived one who is at the
very summit of them as being a god.15

20 No doubt such ‘intensification’ of familiar human blessedness is another

case of mental projection. This time, however, there is no question of expan-
sion to an infinity of goods. Admittedly primitive humans did not unders-
tand—what would be discovered only in a later age by Epicurus (Lucretius
6.1–42)—that there is a strict limit to the goods that constitute a happy life,

11 For the ubiquity of the concept of god, see Cic., ND 1.43–44.

12 Cf. Origen, C. Celsum 2.60, on the Resurrection: ‘Then he [Celsus], in the belief
that this can happen—that is, that someone can experience an appearance of the dead
as if they were alive—goes on like an Epicurean and says that someone has reported
this kind of experience, having had a dream corresponding to a certain mental disposition,
or a falsely believed appearance corresponding to his own wish.’
13 For a defence, and related bibliography, see D. Sedley, ‘Epicurus’ theological innatism’,
in J. Fish, K. Sanders (eds.), Epicurus and the Epicurean Tradition, Cambridge, CUP,
2011, p. 29–52.
14 I am responding to D. Konstan, ‘Epicurus on the gods’, in J. Fish, K. Sanders (eds.),
Epicurus and the Epicurean Tradition, Cambridge, CUP, 2011, who has argued in reply
to my chapter in the same volume (see previous note) that the ancients’ conception
of gods was an erroneous one.
15 ἄνθρωπον εὐδαίμονα νοήσαντες καὶ μακάριον καὶ συμπεπληρωμένον πᾶσι τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς,
εἶτα ταῦτα ἐπιτείναντες τὸν ἐν αὐτοῖς ἐκείνοις ἄκρον ἐνοήσαμεν θεόν.

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 Lucretius on Imagination and Mental Projection

so we might expect them to have mistakenly conceived the gods as enjoying

an unlimited number of self-indulgences and luxuries. But Lucretius is clear
that our ancestors did not make this mistake, and that instead they cor-
rectly associated divine blessedness with sublime lack of fear (cf. 1.44–
49 = 6.2.646–51). We must therefore suppose that they were drawing not
on their mistaken opinions about how to be happy but on their correct innate
moral conceptions. If so, the mental intensification that leads to the idea
of divine blessedness is likely to consist, not in the quantitative extension
of goods, but in the total elimination of even the most minor irritations from the
gods’ lives. This will in fact receive strong confirmation later on, in ­Lucretius’
Homeric picture of the gods’ trouble-free lives (3.18–24).

21 The basic conceptualisation of divine imperishability and happiness, attained

by all human beings, has served to introduce Epicurean mental projection,
but clearly falls far short of the level of understanding that a philosopher can
aspire to achieve thanks to the same kind of cognitive leap.

22 In an aphorism preserved in the ‘Vatican’ collection of Epicurean sayings,

Epicurus’ leading associate Metrodorus writes as follows to a pupil
or colleague named Menecles (SV 10):
Remember that you, by nature a mortal in receipt of a finite time, have
by your discourses about nature ascended to infinity and eternity, and
have seen ‘what is, what will be, and what has been.’16

23 Nature has allotted Menecles a finite time, yet it is by his inquiries into
that very same nature that Menecles has transcended his allotted finitude,
to the extent of even challenging his own mortality. The intellectual achieve-
ment this time is not simply that of conceiving an eternal being, but that
of intellectually mastering the nature of eternity, in a way which has enabled
to Menecles himself to aspire to godlikeness.

24 Now take the understanding of spatial infinity. This involves not merely
breaking through the walls of the world—in other words, mentally entering
the expanse of space that lies beyond our own heaven—but going on from
there to embrace in thought the entire infinity of space and its meaning.
To do this, or to do it fully, is not merely to learn the truth of the proposition
that the universe is infinite, but to grasp in thought the nature of that infinity
and its implications for our own world’s origins. In 1.75 we saw Epicurus retur-
ning from his epic voyage with news of ‘what is possible’ (quid possit oriri)
and ‘what is impossible’ (quid nequeat). So bald a description of ­Epicurus’
news is hardly informative as it stands, not surprisingly, since Lucretius has
at this point not even started his exposition of Epicurus’ physics. But we can
at least safely link ‘what is possible’ to Epicurus’ discovery of the remarkable
explanatory power of infinity, as already explained by Cicero’s Velleius:
in an infinite universe containing an infinity of atoms every permutation must
sometimes somewhere be instantiated through sheer accident, and that
is itself enough to guarantee the emergence of worlds just like ours, without
any divine creator.17

16 μέμνησο ὅτι θνητὸς ὢν τῇ φύσει καὶ λαβὼν χρόνον ὡρισμένον ἀνέβης τοῖς περὶ φύσεως
διαλογισμοῖς ἐπὶ τὴν ἀπειρίαν καὶ τὸν αἰῶνα καὶ κατεῖδες τὰ τ᾽ ἐόντα τά τ᾽ ἐσσὀμενα πρό
τ᾽ ἐόντα. The quoted words at the end are from Homer, Iliad 1.70.
17 Less clear, to me at any rate, is what is added by the remainder of lines 75–77, ‘what
is possible, what impossible, and moreover how each thing’s power is delimited, and its
deep-set boundary stone;’ The same lines recur elsewhere in the poem (cf. 1.595–96
on unchanging nature of atoms), and at 5. 82–90 = 6.58–66 they name these very same
limits to what is possible as being what is unknown to those who think that the gods

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 David Sedley

25 It seems that the kind of mental breakthrough celebrated in these passages

comes in two stages. In the first stage, some concept that lies beyond direct
experience is grasped by such devices as the removal of boundaries. You
conceive the infinity of the universe by getting rid, first, of visual obsta-
cles like the sky, later of boundaries as such. You conceive divine eternity
by removing temporal limits: first the boundaries of a natural life, and even-
tually all temporal limits.

26 The second stage is that of the intellectual eyewitness, in which you voyage
in thought through the new territory you have now opened up. It was this
that made Menecles godlike. It is the pioneering act for which we have seen
Epicurus praised by Lucretius in his opening proem, and which Cicero’s
Velleius says Epicurus has inspired in him and others. And Epicurus’ perfor-
mance of it was so widely advertised that Cicero himself, speaking as a critic
of Epicurean ethics in On ends 2.102, is able to exploit it when mocking the
Epicureans about the provisions of Epicurus’ will:
But setting that aside, is Epicurus’ cult going to be practised even
after his death? And will that practice be provided for in the will
of someone who announced in the manner of an oracle that nothing
after death matters to us. That doesn’t sound like the man who roamed
in thought through innumerable worlds and through infinite tracts
of space with neither boundary nor limit.18

27 For later generations of Epicureans, in short, Epicurus is himself the great

exemplar of the conceptual quantum-leap, the act of mental self-projection
which results in a transformed vision of the universe.

28 On the other hand, it has been becoming increasingly clear that this rever-
ence for Epicurus’ triumph of mental projection did not originate from his own
pen, but from his followers’ praise of his superhuman intellectual achieve-
ments. Although in his surviving writings Epicurus himself does list the
phantastikē epibolē tēs dianoias, ‘representational projection of the mind’,
as an important part of the physicist’s toolkit (Ep. Hdt. 38, 50, 62; KD 24),19
it appears there to include some much more ordinary and frequently used
modes of cognition than is conveyed by the Latin uses of animi iniectus
we have so far witnessed. He tends to list it alongside the standard criteria
of truth, and recommends it for regular use in physical inquiries.

govern the world. What is left unclear however is why it should be Epicurus’ understanding
of the infinity of the universe that is thought to help prove divine government impossible?
Only one Epicurean argument to this effect comes to mind: Lucretius 2.1090–1104, where
it is argued that even a divine being could not simultaneously govern infinitely many worlds,
probably supplemented by Epicurean arguments attested in Cicero, ND 1.26, 28 to the
effect that no living being could itself be infinitely extended.
18 sed ut sit, etiamne post mortem coletur? idque testamento cavebit is, qui nobis
quasi oraculum ediderit nihil post mortem ad nos pertinere? haec non erant eius, qui
innumerabilis mundos infinitasque regiones, quarum nulla esset ora, nulla extremitas,
mente peragravisset.
19 Ep. Hdt. 38: εἶτα κατὰ τὰς αἰσθήσεις δεῖ πάντα τηρεῖν καὶ ἁπλῶς τὰς παρούσας ἐπιβολὰς
εἴτε διανοίας εἴθ’ ὅτου δήποτε τῶν κριτηρίων, ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ τὰ ὑπάρχοντα πάθη, ὅπως
ἂν καὶ τὸ προσμενόμενον καὶ τὸ ἄδηλον ἔχωμεν οἷς σημειωσόμεθα. Ib. 50: καὶ ἣν ἂν λάβωμεν
φαντασίαν ἐπιβλητικῶς τῇ διανοίᾳ ἢ τοῖς αἰσθητηρίοις εἴτε μορφῆς εἴτε συμβεβηκότων,
μορφή ἐστιν αὕτη τοῦ στερεμνίου, γινομένη κατὰ τὸ ἑξῆς πύκνωμα ἢ ἐγκατάλειμμα τοῦ
εἰδώλου. Ib. 62: ἐπεὶ τό γε θεωρούμενον πᾶν ἢ κατ’ ἐπιβολὴν λαμβανόμενον τῇ διανοίᾳ
ἀληθές ἐστι. KD 24: εἰ τιν’ ἐκβαλεῖς ἁπλῶς αἴσθησιν καὶ μὴ διαιρήσεις τὸ δοξαζόμενον καὶ
τὸ προσμενόμενον καὶ τὸ παρὸν ἤδη κατὰ τὴν αἴσθησιν καὶ τὰ πάθη καὶ πᾶσαν φανταστικὴν
ἐπιβολὴν τῆς διανοίας, συνταράξεις καὶ τὰς λοιπὰς αἰσθήσεις τῇ ματαίῳ δόξῃ, ὥστε
τὸ κριτήριον ἅπαν ἐκβαλεῖς.

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 Lucretius on Imagination and Mental Projection

29 Although as it happens we do not find any explicit examples of a phantastikē

epibolē tēs dianoias in Epicurus’ fragments and testimonia, I suggest that
we can identify one in Lucretius. I am referring to his brilliant demonstra-
tion that atoms lack colour (2.730–841). This requires the characteristic
Epicurean strategy of eliminating any apparent counter-evidence to the
­
­thesis, and it is for that end that Lucretius writes (2.739–47):
If perhaps you think that no projection of the mind (animi iniectus)
onto such bodies [i.e. colourless atoms] is possible, you are way off
track. For given that people blind from birth, who have never seen the
light of the sun, have nevertheless since infancy recognised bodies
by touch, with no colour accompanying them, you may be sure that
bodies unadorned by any hue can also be conceived by our mind.
Moreover, whatever we touch in blind darkness, we ourselves perceive
it as not steeped in any colour.20

30 If something cannot be conceived, even by mental projection, that thing must

be eliminated from our ontology. No amount of thought-projection will enable
you to conceive, for example, of a moving body reaching two places simul-
taneously (cf. Ep. Hdt. 47), regardless of its speed. But colourless body
is not like that. You may initially think it is inconceivable, but the congeni-
tally blind must be able to conceive it; and once we have appreciated that,
we can bridge the gap between their experiences and our own by thinking
of our experience of temporarily colourless body,21 as when we sense things
by touch in the dark. Here then, a rigorous process of mental projection
succeeds in legitimising an Epicurean conclusion about the invisible, serving
as the ultimate test in cases of disputed conceivability. There need
be no doubt that Lucretius has as usual taken this argument, including its
terminology for mental projection, from the corresponding part of Epicurus’
On Nature.

31 This bit of methodology is however quite different from the celebrations

of mental projection that we have previously witnessed, celebrations which
seem to be part of the school’s attempt to capture the nature of its founder’s
pioneering intellectual achievement and benefaction. It may be no accident,
then, that the address to Menecles, the one passage on this theme that
was selected for the Vatican collection of Epicurean sayings, came not from
Epicurus’ own pen but from that of Metrodorus. Another sign of Metrodorus’
likely role is his remark quoted by Plutarch (Col. 1117Β) recommending that
we exchange ‘life on the ground’ (ὁ χαμαὶ βίος) for Epicurus’ ‘divine mys-
teries’ (θεόφαντα ὄργια), quite possibly an ancestor of Lucretius’ talk in his
first proem (1.62–63) of how human life lay on the ground until Epicurus
elevated it with his new approach to religion. Although Metrodorus prede-
ceased Epicurus, he was regarded by later Epicureans an authority, and
it may even have been he who first brought into Epicurean discourse the idea
of a transformative mental leap.

32 So much for the idea. However, the actual term phantastikē epibolē tēs
dianoias does not appear in the citation from Metrodorus, and I have sug-
gested that Epicurus himself sometimes used it in a less elevated way,
as a regular test of conceivability. The suspicion may therefore arise that

20 in quae corpora si nullus tibi forte videtur / posse animi iniectus fieri, procul avius
erras. / nam cum caecigeni, solis qui lumina numquam / dispexere, tamen cognoscant
corpora tactu / ex ineunte aevo nullo coniuncta colore, / scire licet nostrae quoque menti
corpora posse / vorti in notitiam nullo circumlita fuco. / denique nos ipsi caecis quaecumque
tenebris / tangimus, haud ullo sentimus tincta colore.
21 For Epicurus’ contention that bodies in the dark are colourless, see Plut., Col. 1110C.

Aitia. Regards sur la culture hellénistique au XXI e siècle, no  10, février 2021
 David Sedley

it was not until after Epicurus’ death that the term came to be associated spe-
cifically with quantum leaps of the intellect. It is with that possibility in mind
that we should consider the following report by Diogenes Laertius (10.31):
In the Canon, Epicurus is found saying that sense-perceptions, pre-
conceptions and feelings are the criteria of truth. The Epicureans add
phantastikai epibolai tēs dianoias.22

33 So it was not Epicurus, but the Epicureans, who elevated the phantastikē
epibolē tēs dianoias to the status of a full criterion of truth. A reasonable
guess at how this came about is that, having identified and canonised
a transformative stage in Epicurus’ own intellectual enlightenment, his suc-
cessors sought a term for it within the confines of Epicurean canonic, and
decided, for better or worse, that phantastikē epibolē tēs dianoias was that
term. If I am right that this involved refocusing Epicurus’ original usage of the
expression, that change almost certainly occurred after his lifetime.

34 Where Epicurus had led, others could follow, including first-century Romans
like Velleius and Lucretius. Velleius’ words quoted earlier are one good spe-
cimen. Another is Lucretius 3.14–30, a direct address to Epicurus:
For as soon as your reasoning begins to articulate the nature of things,
sprung from23 a divine intellect, the mind’s terrors turn and run, the
walls of the world part, and I see events throughout the entire void.
The divine being of the gods appears, and their tranquil abodes, which
are never shaken by the winds nor showered upon by the clouds nor
assaulted by falls of white snow frozen hard by the sharp frost, but
instead are covered by cloudless aether, laughing with its wide-spread
light; nature, moreover, supplies their every need, and nothing at any
time disturbs their peace of mind. By contrast, nowhere to be seen
is the realm of Acheron, although there is no earth in the way
to stop everything that happens throughout the void beneath us from
being on display. Because of this I am thereupon seized by a kind
of divine pleasure and awe, because by your powers nature thus lies
open and revealed in every direction.24

35 Following a familiar pattern, this passage opens and closes by invoking

the inspiration that Epicurus has provided: when Lucretius reads or hears
­Epicurus’ golden words of divine wisdom, the walls of the world part (moenia
mundi / discedunt, 16–17), and he can see for himself, spread out above
him, a universe free from interfering gods, as is guaranteed by the accom-
panying Homeric image of the gods’ perfect tranquillity, free from the slightest
irritation; and below him (with the obstructing earth removed) the matching
absence of a grim afterlife in hell. Once again, this is cast in terms
of eliminating obstacles: the liberated panoptic vision that Epicurus has
taught us is one from which the oppressive items have been removed.

22 ἐν τοίνυν τῷ Κανόνι λέγων ἐστὶν ὁ Ἐπίκουρος κριτήρια τῆς ἀληθείας εἶναι τὰς αἰσθήσεις
καὶ προλήψεις καὶ τὰ πάθη, οἱ δ’ Ἐπικούρειοι καὶ τὰς φανταστικὰς ἐπιβολὰς τῆς διανοίας.
23 Reading coortam, 3.15.
24 nam simul ac ratio tua coepit vociferari / naturam rerum divina mente coorta / diffugiunt
animi terrores, moenia mundi / discedunt, totum video per inane geri res. / apparet divum
numen sedesque quietae, / quas neque concutiunt venti nec nubila nimbis / aspergunt
neque nix acri concreta pruina / cana cadens violat semper[que] innubilus aether / integit
et large diffuso lumine ridet: / omnia suppeditat porro natura neque ulla / res animi pacem
delibat tempore in ullo. / at contra nusquam apparent Acherusia templa, / nec tellus obstat
quin omnia dispiciantur, / sub pedibus quaecumque infra per inane geruntur. / his ibi
me rebus quaedam divina voluptas / percipit atque horror, quod sic natura tua vi / tam
manifesta patens ex omni parte retecta est.

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 Lucretius on Imagination and Mental Projection

36 A tentative conclusion of all this is that the school’s celebration of Epicurus’

intellectual breakthrough, cast in his own terminology of the phantastikē epi-
bolē tēs dianoias, did not rely directly on the master’s own writings, but was
part of his post mortem reception and apotheosis in the school.25

37 This in turn encourages me to modify my contentions about Lucretius’ iso-

lation from Epicurean movement of his own day. At least one of his ways
of canonising Epicurus’ achievement, and of representing our own capacity to
emulate it, relies on a school tradition not fully traceable back to Epicurus’ own
writings. Moreover, this way of celebrating Epicurus’ superhuman achieve-
ment is closely intertwined with a second development also likely to post-
date Epicurus’ own lifetime: the founder’s elevation to the status of a god,
prominent in Lucretius and well attested elsewhere in the school’s tradition.

38 I continue to believe that Lucretius drew his detailed understanding

of E­ picureanism directly from the revered books On nature bequeathed
by the school’s founder, seeing no need to consult lesser Epicurean works
written in the two centuries since the founder’s death, and confining his
own original contributions to the proems of his six books. Nevertheless,
it needs emphasising that the content of his proems is not entirely ori-
ginal and independent. This is not only evident from the obvious fact that
it is in the proems, more than anywhere else, that he displays his deep
understanding of Epicurean ethics. It is also made clear by the way that
in them he shows himself well aware of the school’s consensus about
its founder. Epicurus’ pioneering acts of intellectual projection had ele-
vated both him and his philosophical achievement to superhuman status.
And Lucretius joins his fellow-Epicureans in celebrating that fact.

25 A further sign of later Epicureans using epibolē for intellectual leaps, albeit without
any specific reference to Epicurus, can be found at the close of Philodemus On death IV,
where a healthy prospective attitude to one’s own death depends on past ἐπιβολαί into
the state of being dead (38.8, 25).

Aitia. Regards sur la culture hellénistique au XXI e siècle, no  10, février 2021