Lucretius c. 99 BC – c. 55 BC

Titus Lucretius Carus was a 1st-century BC Roman poet and Epicurean philosopher, known for his sole surviving work, the long Latin poem De Rerum Natura, On the Nature of Things. Composed in six books of dactylic hexameter, the poem expounds Epicurean physics, atomism, the mortality of the soul, the gods' indifference to human affairs, and the path to a tranquil life through correct understanding of the natural world. His passionate naturalism, materialism, and critique of religious fear shaped subsequent thinkers including Montaigne, Hobbes, Spinoza, and the early modern scientific revolution. The rediscovery of his manuscript by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417 was a major moment of the Italian Renaissance. His poetry remains one of the masterpieces of Latin literature.

Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99–55 BC) is the author of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), the longest and most beautiful Epicurean philosophical work to survive from antiquity. Almost nothing is known of his life with certainty; the early Christian writer Jerome, on uncertain authority, reports that Lucretius was driven mad by a love potion, composed his poem in lucid intervals, and committed suicide.

De Rerum Natura is a six-book Latin philosophical poem that expounds Epicurean physics, psychology, and ethics. Books I and II develop the atomist physics; III treats the mortality of the soul and the rational dissolution of the fear of death; IV treats sense-perception and sexual love; V develops a comprehensive natural history of the cosmos and human society; VI treats meteorological and natural phenomena that excite irrational fears. The philosophical project is ethical throughout: the careful study of nature dispels superstitious fear of the gods and of death, and so makes possible the ataraxia in which the good Epicurean life consists.

Lucretius was rediscovered for the modern world by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, and the text became one of the most consequential single rediscoveries of the Italian Renaissance. Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (2011) traces the line from this rediscovery through Montaigne, Gassendi, Newton, and the Enlightenment philosophers who treated De Rerum Natura as a foundational text.