 This early form of social life had various advantages: among others, the relative scarcity of goods prevented excessive competition (sharing was obligatory for survival) and thereby set limits on those unnatural desires that at a later, richer phase of society would lead to wars and other disturbances. It would appear too that, before language had developed fully, words more or less conformed to their original or primitive objects, and were not yet a source of mental confusion. But thanks to a gradual accumulation of wealth, the struggle over goods came to infect social relations, and there emerged kings or tyrants who ruled over others not by virtue of their physical strength but by dint of gold. These autocrats in turn were overthrown, and after a subsequent period of violent anarchy people finally saw the wisdom of living under the rule of law. This might seem to represent the highest attainment in political organization, but that is not so for the Epicureans. For with law came the generalized fear of punishment that has contaminated the blessings of life (Lucretius 5.1151; cf. [Philodemus] On Choices and Avoidances col. XII). Lucretius at this point gives an acount of the origin of religious superstition and dread of the gods, and although he does not relate this anxiety directly to the fear of punishment under human law, he does state that thunder and lightning are interpreted as signs that the gods are angry at human sins (5.1218–25). While primitive people in the presocial or early communal stages might have been awed by such manifestations of natural power and ascribed them to the action of the gods, they would not necessarily have explained them as chastisement for human crimes before the concept of punishment became familiar under the regime of law. People at an early time knew that gods exist thanks to the simulacra that they give off, although the precise nature of the gods according to Epicurus remains obscure (for contrasting intepretations, see Konstan 2011 and Sedley 2011); but the gods, for him, do not interest themselves in human affairs, since this would compromise their beatitude (see Obbink 1996: 321–23).