Die Ordnung der Welt

Lucretius' "De Rerum Natura" describes and explains the cosmos and everything in it as an ordered composition of atoms. This simple as well as fundamental statement serves as the starting point of the present study. A reading of the atomic doctrine worked out in the first two books of De Rerum Natura, shows the contours of a specific Lucretian concept of order in the tension field of stasis and dynamics. At the center of the study is the linguistic constitution of these forms of order. It examines how the figures of analogy, metaphor, and comparison succeed in making the invisible plane of the world vivid and thus convey the atomic cosmos as an ordered one. In addition, alphabet letter analogies and kinetics are examined for their order and presentation principles. These are recognizable in a view of the entire work as elementary components of the aesthetic, philosophical, and didactic constitution of Lucretius' didactic poem.