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after subsisting for some time there are transformed and diffused, eventually
assuming a fiery nature as they enter into the seminal intelligence of the universe,
in this way making room for fresh souls which then come to dwell there.”
Roman Epicureanism
De Rerum Natura, by Lucretius (95?-54? b.c.e.), is one of the best known prod-
ucts of classical Roman scholarship. In his masterwork, Lucretius denies both
the existence of an immaterial soul and personal survival of bodily death. Yet his
Epicurean poem is significant less for its effect on his contemporaries than for its
effect on medieval and early modern philosophers. It was available and read by
philosophers in the Latin West until the ninth century and then again from the
Renaissance to modern times. Among Christian thinkers, Lucretius’s eloquent
arguments for hedonism, materialism, and atheism (actually, a kind of deism)
resulted in his being widely regarded, at least until the eighteenth century, as a
kind of philosophical Antichrist. However, from the point of view of develop-
ments in personal-identity theory in our own times, it
is not any of these aspects
of his philosophy that is most significant. Rather, it is that he denied Plato’s basic
assumption that if souls, or minds, continued to exist and have experiences after
death, people would be entitled to anticipate having the experiences of their post-
mortem souls. Lucretius, thus, is the first act in a drama that is playing out in our
own times—that of figuring out the relative importance of personal identity in
the apparently self-interested desire that people have to persist.
In Lucretius’s poem, this issue arises indirectly. In the context of his making
the point that we have nothing to fear from bodily death, he argues that “if any
feeling remains in mind or spirit after it has been torn from body, that is nothing
to us, who are brought into being by the wedlock of body and spirit, conjoined
and coalesced.” He then considers the possibility that “the matter that composes
us should be reassembled by time after our death and brought back into its pres-
ent state.” He claims that even if this were to happen to humans—that is, were
they, in effect, to be resurrected—it would be of no concern to us “once the chain
of our identity had been snapped.”
Why of no concern? Lucretius’s answer, in effect, seems to be, first, that our
persisting—that is, our continuing as the same people we now are—is a precondi-
tion of any egoistic concern we might have for the experiences of any
parts
of our-
selves that survive our bodily deaths and, second, that whatever
parts
may survive,
we cease at our bodily deaths: “If the future holds travail and anguish in store, the
self must be in existence, when that time comes, in order to experience it.” “From