Lucretius
Understanding nature to free the mind from fear.
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet of the generation of Cicero and Caesar who set out the philosophy of Epicurus in On the Nature of Things, a Latin poem in six books. Almost nothing reliable is known of his life; the poem presents him as a teacher who uses an account of atoms, void and chance to free readers from fear of the gods and of death.
Why should death be nothing to us?
Biography
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet of the generation of Cicero and Caesar who set out the philosophy of Epicurus in On the Nature of Things, a Latin poem in six books. Almost nothing reliable is known of his life; the poem presents him as a teacher who uses an account of atoms, void and chance to free readers from fear of the gods and of death.
02 /Philosophy
Everything that exists is either body or empty space; bodies are compounds of indivisible, eternal particles, so that nothing arises from nothing and nothing is annihilated.
03 /Reading guides
Original introductions to enter the works, discover their central questions and take the reflection further.
04 /Bibliography
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
A first reading.
Physics against fear
Follow how atoms, void and the mortality of the mind support the claim that death is nothing to us in On the Nature of Things.
On the Nature of ThingsThe first attested reader
Read Cicero’s single sentence on the poems of Lucretius, its date and its disputed wording, as evidence of the poem’s first circulation in Rome.
Cicero, Letter to His Brother QuintusUntangling a legend
Separate the dates, the love potion, the madness and Cicero’s editing in Jerome’s brief notice, and weigh each claim against earlier evidence.
Jerome, Chronicle