To Such Heights Of Evil Are

From Book I of De Rerum Natura, in the passage where Lucretius recounts the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis — ordered by her own father Agamemnon to secure favourable winds for the Greek fleet at Troy. This act of piety, Lucretius argues, is precisely what religion demands when taken seriously: the murder of the innocent to propitiate gods who (on the Epicurean view) do not exist and do not care about human affairs. The line became one of the most quoted anti-religious statements of antiquity and remained controversial through the Renaissance.