Biden should approach ageing like the Romans

Last week, Lionel Shriver wrote a characteristically sharp piece about the narcissism of the ageing Joe Biden, egged on by his wife, in standing again for the presidency of the United States. The Roman poet Lucretius (1st century bc) might well have offered a similar opinion, but he would have presented it as an example of a universal and destructive human failing which he described in his magnificent poem On the Nature of the Universe – the dread of death.

Romans, Lucretius claimed, feared the whole idea of dying, because they believed that they had an eternal soul which, after death, would be subject to hideous tortures and punishments if they had been involved in any sort of wrongdoing. But, following the teaching of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, Lucretius showed how the whole universe was constructed of atoms, and from atoms we originated and to atoms we returned. So while we certainly had a soul while we were alive, he came up with 30 arguments for its mortality, one example being that it was a biological feature of the body, located in the chest and diffused throughout the body, which by definition could have no pre-existence nor any post-mortem survival.