The story
De rerum natura, 'On the Nature of Things', is a Latin poem of about 7,400 lines in six books by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, probably written in the 50s BCE and left unfinished at his death. Almost nothing is known of Lucretius' life. The poem is addressed to Memmius, a Roman politician, and sets out in hexameter verse the philosophy of Epicurus, who held that everything is made of atoms and void and that the gods take no interest in human affairs.
Lucretius argues that nothing comes from nothing, that the soul is made of atoms and dies with the body, and that fear of death and of divine punishment is the cause of human misery. He explains thunder, disease, sight and the origins of civilization by natural causes, and describes a world that formed by chance collisions of atoms, with hints of evolution. Famously, he compares his verse to honey smeared on the rim of a cup of bitter medicine. The poem was little copied in the Middle Ages, and the scholar Poggio Bracciolini found a manuscript in a monastery in 1417. Its ideas then spread through Renaissance Europe, informing Gassendi's atomism and Enlightenment materialism, and Thomas Jefferson owned several editions.
Why it mattered
- The poem preserved Epicurean physics and ethics in the fullest form that survives from antiquity.
- Its 1417 rediscovery fed Renaissance debates about nature, religion and pleasure.
- Atomism in its pages reached Gassendi and early modern natural philosophers who revived the idea of atoms.
Sources
- On the Nature of Things Britannica
- Lucretius Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Poggio Rediscovers Lucretius's De rerum natura History of Information
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