Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and Epicurean philosopher whose poem On the Nature of Things presents a materialist account of the universe and human life.

Epicureanism: An ancient Greek philosophical school that sought tranquility through pleasure, friendship, and freedom from fear. Lucretius adapted this school’s physics and ethics for a Roman audience.
On the Nature of Things: Lucretius’s six-book Latin poem presenting Epicurean accounts of nature, the mind, society, and death. It is the work through which Lucretius develops his philosophy in verse.
Epicurus: A Greek philosopher who founded the Epicurean school in Athens around 307 BCE. Lucretius presents Epicurus as the source of the philosophy his poem teaches.
Pierre Gassendi: A French philosopher and priest who revived atomism while reconciling it with Christianity in the seventeenth century. Gassendi helped make Epicurean atomism discussable in early modern philosophy.
Stoicism: An ancient philosophical school that taught virtue as the highest good and emphasized a rationally ordered cosmos. Its providential cosmos differs from Lucretius’s world of atoms without divine design.
Atomism: The view that matter consists of indivisible units moving through empty space. Lucretius makes atoms and void the foundations of the natural world.
Swerve (Epicureanism): The Epicurean hypothesis that atoms can deviate unpredictably from their downward paths. Lucretius’s account of atomic motion includes this deviation as a source of collisions.
Ennius: A Roman poet of the second century BCE, known for bringing Greek literary forms into Latin poetry. Lucretius inherits a Roman poetic tradition that Ennius helped establish.
Michel de Montaigne: A French Renaissance essayist whose writings engage with classical skepticism and ancient philosophy. Montaigne drew on Lucretius while examining human judgment and the limits of knowledge.
Platonism: A philosophical tradition based on Plato’s teachings, often distinguishing intelligible realities from the changing sensible world. Lucretius rejects explanations that place enduring reality beyond material bodies.

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