Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher who lived in the last century of the Republic, most likely between the 90s and the 50s BC, according to the estimates most scholars accept. He is known above all for a single surviving work, the didactic poem De rerum natura, in which he sets out Epicureanism and its atomist physics. He matters because he is one of the main routes by which the thought of Epicurus reached the Latin world and, through the tradition that rescued it, modern science.

Very little is known about his life. There is no secure basis for fixing the dates of his birth and death, and his contemporaries barely mention him. The three main ancient sources, Saint Jerome, Donatus and Cicero, offer contradictory or doubtful information. Jerome, writing four centuries later, says he died at the age of forty-four and that he wrote some books during lucid moments, later corrected by Cicero; this detail is considered unreliable. The one thing that seems certain is that he was a friend, or client, of Gaius Memmius, to whom the poem is addressed. His probable membership of the aristocratic gens Lucretia and his costly education in Latin, Greek and philosophy suggest a well-off family, perhaps with rural estates, which his evident love of the countryside seems to confirm.

A legend also surrounds his death. He is said to have gone mad from a love potion and taken his own life. Several scholars regard this as a hostile invention aimed at an atheist and materialist author, while others find suicide plausible given the mood of anguish that runs through the poem. The sources do not allow a firm verdict.

De rerum natura, some 7,400 hexameters divided into six books, explains the physics of atoms, which move through the void and combine to form everything that exists. Lucretius holds that the soul is made of fine particles that scatter at death, so there is nothing to fear from punishment or from gods who intervene in the world. His ethics, rooted in Epicurus, aims to free people from anxiety about death and the divine, and the poem joins this doctrine to images of great beauty. It also traces the origins of life, perception, the mind and humanity's technical progress, from stone weapons to iron. His view of the world is mechanistic rather than teleological: no divine plan lies behind natural events.

His influence was felt among the poets of the Augustan age, above all Virgil, in the Aeneid and the Georgics, and Horace. The poem was considered almost lost in the Middle Ages until Poggio Bracciolini recovered it in 1417 in a German monastery, probably Fulda. Afterwards it inspired Giordano Bruno, Montaigne, Gassendi and Marx, and it helped revive atomism. Stephen Greenblatt brought it to a modern readership in The Swerve, a Pulitzer Prize winner.