Lucretius

Abstract

The De rerum natura (usually translated as On the Nature of Things or On the Nature of the Universe) is a Latin poem in six books composed in the mid-1st century bce by Titus Lucretius Carus to introduce a Roman audience to the philosophy of the Greek materialist thinker Epicurus (341–270 bce). The loss of much of Epicurus’s own output means that Lucretius has become the most important source for Epicurean philosophy, but the creative transformation of that philosophy in Lucretius’s poem has left its distinctive mark on the reception of Epicurean physics and ethics in the Western materialist tradition. Virtually nothing is known of Lucretius himself, and little can be reliably inferred about him from the poem. The sole contemporary reference to the poet and his poem comes in a letter of Cicero to his brother from February 54 bce in which Cicero (a critic of Epicureanism in his own philosophical writings) echoes his brother’s marked admiration for its literary qualities. That admiration is echoed in the Roman literary tradition, but the poem’s impassioned rejection of the notions of divine creation of (or intervention in) the world, and of life after death made it a repeated target in later centuries for Christian polemic. This may underlie the biographical tradition attested in Late Antiquity (though now largely rejected) of the poet’s suicide, driven mad by a love potion. The poem was effectively unknown for a millennium after the fall of the western Roman Empire, but following the rediscovery and copying of a manuscript by the humanist Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, it has played an important and continuing role in the history of ideas and theories of materialism. It became the chief vehicle for the dissemination of ancient atomism in Renaissance and early modern thought as well as a focus or proxy for anticreationist views and a precursor of some aspects of evolutionary theory. In the modern period, its views on atomic motion (particularly the swerve of atoms), and its arguments against the fear of death continue to be invoked to frame debate, while its self-conscious response to the challenge of transmitting ideas across time, and the boundaries of language and culture, address the relationship of language and philosophy.