Lucretius

Lucretius (c. 99-55 bc), the familiar name of Titus Lucretius Carus, the Roman poet whose great didactic poem in six books, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), presents the theories of the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus and is the main source for contemporary knowledge of Epicurus's thought. Lucretius sought to free humanity from the fear of death and of the gods, which he considered the main cause of human unhappiness, and his material is designed to instruct and convince rather than please. His characterization of the universe as a fortuitous aggregation of atoms moving in the void; his insistence that the soul is not a distinct, immaterial entity but a chance combination of atoms that does not survive the body; and his postulation of purely natural causes for earthly phenomena are all designed to prove that the world is not directed by divine agency and thus that fear of the supernatural is without reasonable foundation. Lucretius does not deny the existence of gods, but he conceives of them as having no concern with the affairs or destiny of mortals. One of the most famous parts of De Rerum Natura is the description of the development of primitive life and the birth of civilization. Many passages of Milton's Paradise Lost imitate Lucretius.