In his epic poem On the Nature of Things, Lucretius depicts Epicurus as the hero who crushed the monster Religion through educating the people in what was possible in atoms and what was not possible in atoms. However, Epicurus expressed a non-aggressive attitude characterized by his statement:
However, according to science historian Charles Coulston Gillispie:
The possibility of a vacuum was accepted—or rejected—together with atoms and atomism, for the vacuum was part of that same theory.