Lucretius, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The line is not atheism, and I will not let it be read so. Look at what I say it is aimed at. I set religion before you as a power that showed her face from the realms of heaven, lowering upon mortals with dreadful mien, while the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling on the earth, crushed beneath her weight.1 The enemy is that face and that weight.
When I come to Aulis, I am not accusing the gods of anything. I am showing you what fear of them did: the chosen chieftains of the Danai staining the altar of the Virgin of the Cross-Roads with the blood of Iphianassa, a girl who knelt tongue-tied among the hidden knives and could not be saved even by having called the king her father.2 Led to the altar not with the cry of Hymen but to fall in the very hour of her marriage under her father's stroke, that the fleet might have a hallowed starting.
Such evil deeds could religion prompt.2 It is the deed, done by men who believed, that condemns the belief. Now the gods themselves. I do not remove them. In the fifth book I say plainly that those who have learnt aright that the gods lead a life free from care are driven back into the old beliefs when they wonder how the courses of sun and moon are carried on, and so they adopt stern overlords whom in their misery they think all-powerful.3
Mark the order: the gods lead a life free from care, and the error is to hand them the steering of the heavens. That is why I promise to show by what power nature, the helmsman, steers the sun and the wanderings of the moon, lest we suppose they roll on by any forethought of the gods.3 The gods keep their quiet; the world goes by its own law.
Nor is true piety what the crowd takes it for. It is no piety to be seen often with veiled head turning towards a stone, to draw near every altar, to lie prostrate with outstretched palms, to sprinkle the shrines with the streaming blood of beasts and link vow to vow. It is rather to be able to look upon all things with a mind at rest.4 And I tell you how the other thing came about: men saw the glorious shapes of the gods with waking mind, and more in sleep, of wondrous bulk, and because those shapes seemed to move their limbs and utter haughty sounds, they credited them with sense and, in time, with rule over the world.5
From that came the shuddering dread that raises new shrines over all the earth.5 The bare fact of the gods is left standing; it is the fear built upon it that I take down, stone by stone, because that fear begets groaning for ourselves and tears for our children to come.4 So call it, if you need a word, a piety of the mind at peace. A god who does nothing and wants nothing is not nothing. He is the pattern of the life that the fear of him would have denied you.
The gods exist, far away, in quiet seats that no care troubles, and the world was not made by them nor for us: it has too many faults for that, and it goes by its own laws. What he attacks is not the gods but religion, the thing that showed her face from heaven lowering upon mortals and made fathers kill their daughters at Aulis; it is religion, not impiety, that breeds crime.6
True piety is to look on all things with a mind at peace, and the hymn to Venus is a poet's figure for the power that brings things to birth, not a prayer. The terror of the thunderbolt and the dread of what comes after death are the two roots of the disease, and the knowledge of nature is the one cure.78
When the the life of _man lay foul to see and _grovelling upon the earth, crushed by the weight of religion, which showed her face from the realms of heaven, lowering upon mortals with dreadful mienOn the Nature of Things, pp. 29–30
Even as at Aulis the chosen chieftains of the Danai, the first of all the host, foully stained with the blood of Iphianassa the altar of the Virgin of the Cross-Roads... Such evil deeds could religion prompt.On the Nature of Things, pp. 30–31
For those who have learnt aright that the gods lead a life free from care, yet if from time to time they wonder by what means all things can be carried on... are borne back again into the old beliefs of religion, and adopt stern overlords, whom in their misery they believe have all powerOn the Nature of Things, pp. 188–189
Nor is it piety at all to be seen often with veiled head turning towards a stone... but rather to be able to contemplate all things with a mind at rest.On the Nature of Things, pp. 226–227
For indeed already the races of mortals used to perceive the glorious shapes of the gods by waking mind, and all the more in sleep with wondrous bulk of body.On the Nature of Things, pp. 224–225
For those who have learnt aright that the gods lead a life free from care, yet if from time to time they wonder by what means all things can be carried on, above all among those things which are descried above our heads in the coasts of heaven, are borne back again into the old beliefs of religion, and adopt stern overlords, whom in their misery they believe have all power, knowing not what Book V, Ul.On the Nature of Things, pp. 189–190
For of the most high law of the -heaven_and and the ons ig will SMR LNA OTN! aerane of things, from aves SOE rohan nature creates all ahs rer: in- See RG TS creases Be ESS le and 'fosters them, and into which nature too ae aR RSAC UN IK TENIEK LOAD PRETEEN me TONIC dissolves them again at their perishing: these in rendering Book I, ll. s8-89 29.On the Nature of Things, pp. 29–30
Nay, but on the other hand, again and again our foe, religion, has given birth to deeds sinful and unholy. Even as at Aulis® the chosen chieftains of the Danai, the first of all the host, foully stained with the blood of Iphianassa the altar of the Virgin of the Cross-Roads." For as soon as the band braided about her virgin locks streamed from her either cheek in equal lengths, as soon as she 30 Book I, ll.On the Nature of Things, pp. 30–31
The reading of him as the first atheist in Europe is as old as the Church Fathers and as new as the Enlightenment; the texts put gods in the world and take the world from the gods.