The Text of the World

Abstract

It has long been recognized that one of the governing images of Lucretius’s great natural-philosophical poem De rerum natura is the analogy between letters and atoms, both elementa (“elements”) in Latin. At several points in the poem, Lucretius explains the mystery of atomic composition by saying that the atoms are like letters, coming together into physical bodies just as letters come together into words, and words into poetry. Taking seriously the material-cultural roots of Lucretius’s materialist analogy, this chapter approaches the familiar figure in a new way. Using papyri that provide evidence for the methods by which children in antiquity learned to read and write, this chapter shows the debt that Lucretius’s description of writing—and thus his very ideas of atomism and the ; (clinamen) &#“swerve”—owe to one of the most common tools of ancient literate education: the syllabary.