Lucretius

Almost nothing is known about the life of Titus Lucretius Carus. Jerome, writing four centuries later, claims he was driven mad by a love potion, wrote his poem in intervals of lucidity, and killed himself at the age of forty-three. The story is almost certainly false — it has the shape of a morality tale invented by Christians uncomfortable with Lucretius's uncompromising atheism.

What survives is a single poem: De Rerum Natura, 'On the Nature of Things,' six books of didactic hexameter verse setting out the physics, cosmology, and ethics of Epicurus. The universe, Lucretius argues, is made of atoms and void. The soul is material and mortal. The gods exist but take no interest in human affairs. Death is nothing to us. There is no afterlife, no divine punishment, no reason to fear. The purpose of philosophy is to free the mind from superstition and achieve tranquillity.

The poem's power lies not in the arguments alone — Epicurus made them first — but in the poetry. Lucretius writes about atoms with the passion of a man describing a lover. His account of the plague at Athens, modelled on Thucydides, is one of the most harrowing passages in Latin literature. His evocation of the natural world — thunderstorms, volcanoes, the behaviour of magnets, the movements of dust motes in a sunbeam — transforms physics into vision.

The poem was known to Cicero, who may have edited it after Lucretius's death. It was read throughout antiquity but nearly lost in the Middle Ages. A single manuscript, discovered in a German monastery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, brought it back. Its rediscovery helped ignite the Renaissance and, ultimately, the scientific revolution.