Lucretius

Almost nothing certain is known of the life of Lucretius. The earliest mention is a letter of February 54 BC, in which Cicero tells his brother Quintus that the poems of Lucretius show flashes of genius and great skill. A story told four centuries later by Saint Jerome, that a love potion drove him mad and that he wrote between fits before taking his own life, is generally regarded as legend.

On the Nature of Things, in Latin De rerum natura, is addressed to a Roman named Memmius. It argues that everything, the soul included, is made of tiny particles, so that at death we simply cease to be and there is nothing left to suffer. Where the Stoics saw a providential reason guiding the universe, Lucretius saw atoms meeting by chance. The poem is also full of close observation: dust drifting in a sunbeam, paving stones worn down by passing feet, the plague at Athens.

The poem was nearly lost. Only a handful of medieval copies survived, and in 1417 the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini found one in a monastery library, probably at Fulda in Germany, and had it copied for Italy. Its ideas fed the scientific thinking of the centuries that followed.