Lucretius
99–55 BC 2 entries
Biography
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher of the first century BC, the author of the long poem On the Nature of Things. Almost nothing is known about his life: he probably lived from about 99 to about 55 BC, and a late and doubtful story tells of a love potion that drove him mad. Cicero, who read his poem, praised it in a letter to his brother for its many flashes of genius and its great art.
In six books of Latin verse he set out the teaching of Epicurus: that everything is made of atoms moving through the void, that the world was not made by the gods, and that the soul dies with the body, so that death is nothing to fear. His aim was to free his readers from the fear of the gods and of death. The poem was almost lost in the Middle Ages, until the humanist Poggio Bracciolini found a manuscript in a German monastery in 1417; it then helped to shape the science and philosophy of the modern age.
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