ABSTRACT
Our stories of gods and God and, for the most part, of life are love stories, attempts to make sense of love as the ground and/or end of life. Lucretius' opening prayer is distinctly in the tradition of Empedocles, the pre-Socratic philosopher who claimed that the cosmos is the product of love and strife. Lucretius is an expression of the depth of the need that places us under love's sign even in the act of the pursuit of knowledge of the nature of things. The mechanistic world may have been a silent one in its origin, but it too was invented/discovered by lovers. Love is a power which dissolves the lover and makes a re-creation of the self possible. Mass evil or the great socially violent contagions, which spread mimetically and which require some outlet lest the entire society self-destruct, are all fueled by the wrong loves.
