| Summary: | In his poem, Lucretius is looking to address the issue of death, for the purpose of eradicating the fear it raises. Lucretius wants to demonstrate that such fearis not only the most harmful for the humanity—in that it often leads to the worst human behaviors—but also the most vain since, according to the epicurean principle, death should mean nothing for us. Thenceforth, Lucretius begins a genetic analysis of the fear of the death, in an effort to reveal the mistakes on which it is built. Book III operates in two steps, to first prove that the death is nothing for us who are alive, and then to show that the death of others can not be a loss to us and should not be feared either. The first step is based on an analysis of the corpse whose ambiguity suggest a possible identification of the living men to the dead men. Showing that these two entities are mutually exclusive and can never coincide, Lucretius destroys the foundations of a possible identification: the corpse is no longer an individual prone to pleasure or pain. Therefore, there is nothing to fear in death. The fears fueled by the living only proceed from worthless projections on the dead from whom they are irrevocably separated. The second step undertakes to highlight that if the personal and individual death of someone else cannot cause me suffering, then death of others should not be feared. Once again Lucretius aims to emphasize that dark thoughts feeding the grief are only the result of the multiple projections from the living over the dead, such projections being owed to a misunderstanding of the laws of nature according to which death is a common rule.
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