Lucretius
c. 99–55 BCE
Biography
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher who lived in the last decades of the Roman Republic, most likely from about 99 to 55 BCE. Almost nothing certain survives about his life. The one link that seems firm is with Gaius Memmius, the man to whom his poem is addressed, though it is not clear whether he was a friend of Memmius or someone who depended on him.
His only known work is De rerum natura, which English readers usually know as On the Nature of Things, a long philosophical poem in hexameter verse. It sets out the teaching of Epicurus: that everything is made of tiny particles moving through empty space, that the soul does not outlast the body, and that fear of the gods and of death rests on mistakes about the world. Lucretius makes these hard ideas vivid with images, direct appeals to the reader and passages of genuine poetic feeling, which is why the poem is still read as literature as well as philosophy.
The poem nearly vanished in the Middle Ages. A copy was recovered in 1417 by the humanist Poggio Bracciolini, who found it in a monastery in Germany, and the poem went on to shape Virgil and Horace. It also helped the revival of atomism in the seventeenth century, through its influence on Pierre Gassendi. The site holds William Ellery Leonard's English translation, so readers can meet the poem without Latin.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
On the Nature of Things
by Titus Lucretius Carus (translated by William Ellery Leonard)
Lucretius's Latin poem sets out the atomic philosophy of Epicurus, arguing that the world was made by no god, that the soul dies with the body, and that the fear of death and of the gods is groundless. William Ellery Leonard's blank-verse translation of 1916 gives each section a…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.