Greece & Rome · c. 99–55 BCE
Lucretius
Roman poet who set Epicurus’ philosophy in verse
His Latin poem explains atoms, the “swerve” that allows free will, the mortality of the soul and the natural origin of civilisation, to free readers from fear of the gods and of death. Its rediscovery in 1417 helped spark early modern science.
Life and thought
Almost nothing reliable is known about Titus Lucretius Carus, except that he wrote one long poem in the last years of the Roman Republic, dedicated to the aristocrat Memmius and read by Cicero by 54 BCE. Jerome’s late story that a love potion drove him mad and he took his own life is generally distrusted. The poem, On the Nature of Things, survived in only a few manuscripts; Poggio Bracciolini found one in a German monastery in 1417.
It sets out Epicurus’ philosophy in six books of Latin hexameters, to free readers from fear of the gods and of death. It explains atoms and void; the “swerve” that lets atoms, and so minds, break the chain of fate; the soul’s death with the body; and the natural rise of language, technology and society without divine help. Its vivid images, such as dust motes dancing in a sunbeam as a sign of unseen atoms in motion, made it a source for Renaissance and early modern scientists and freethinkers.