Lucretius
c. 99–c. 55 BCE · Ancient Rome
“Nothing can be created out of nothing.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Lucretius
Drew From(2)
who shaped Lucretius
- Lucretius frames his Epicurean poem with the Iliad — naming Homer as poetry's standard-bearer in the Book 3 proem and reworking the famous shield-passage into a vision of the world
- The epic is his deliberate model and foil: he writes didactic verse in Homer's high register, then turns it toward atoms and the void
- With the Iliad behind you, the proems read as what they are — an invitation to read the oldest epic through Epicurus's eyes
- Lucretius opens by summoning the Muses — a deliberate nod to the proems of Homer, Ennius, and Hesiod, the convention Hesiod founded
- He lifts the Golden-Age coloring of Hesiod's Works and Days for his own picture of early humanity, then strips out the interfering gods — the whole point of an Epicurean rewrite
- Hesiod is the ancestor of the form On the Nature of Things perfects: verse that explains the cosmos rather than narrates a war
Inspired(6)
who Lucretius shaped
via The Georgics
- The Latin didactic poem Virgil set out to answer — its influence on The Georgics is, in scholarly terms, perhaps stronger than any one poet ever exerted on another
- Virgil took the De Rerum Natura as his model and saturated his farming poem in Lucretian thought, composition, and diction
- The famous cattle-plague that closes Georgics Book 3 reaches straight back to Lucretius's plague of Athens in Books 5–6
- One of Montaigne's deepest sources — the Essays quote Lucretius nearly a hundred times
- His own heavily annotated copy of the De rerum natura survives, finished, by his own hand, on 16 October 1564
- The Lucretian thread runs thickest where Montaigne is most himself — "To philosophise is to learn to die" and the "Apology for Raymond Sebond"
via Metamorphoses
- Ovid takes Lucretius's cosmic sweep and runs it backward — into myth
- The Pythagoras discourse that closes the Metamorphoses adopts Lucretius's didactic mode and his vision of a universe in constant flux, even as it inverts the godless Epicurean physics underneath
- Where Lucretius explained natural phenomena to banish the gods, Ovid re-mythologizes the same wonders to put them back
- Seneca read Lucretius closely — and quotes him in the Letters
- The Epicurean's images of cosmic decay, the "rotten stones" of a universe wearing down, resurface in Letters 12, 30, and 58
- Seneca sparring with the great Epicurean poet's verses, then bending them toward Stoic ends, is one of the running pleasures of the Letters
- Horace knew Lucretius's verses intimately, and On the Nature of Things is the dominant philosophical current in the Odes — Epicureanism colors roughly twice as many odes as Stoicism
- The melting-spring opening of Odes 1.4 echoes the proem of On the Nature of Things, with its Venus-and-spring tableau
- Lucretius supplied Horace the frame for his great theme: the world renews, but you will not — so seize the day
- Voltaire read Lucretius and prized him — he found De rerum natura a useful weapon against the Church and ranked him among the great philosopher-poets
- The Epicurean garden Lucretius preserved is the one Voltaire reaches for at the close of Candide: "we must cultivate our garden"
Portraits
The most-reprinted likeness of Lucretius: an imagined head engraved by Michael Burghers for the frontispiece of Thomas Creech's 1682 English translation of De rerum natura. No contemporary portrait survives.
Michael Burghers, 1682
High-resolution frontispiece portrait of Lucretius from the 1916 metrical translation 'Of the Nature of Things'. A traditional imagined likeness, clean and editorial-friendly; no contemporary portrait exists.
1916
Famous Quotes
“So great the evils to which religion could prompt!”
“Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.”
“It is sweet, when the winds trouble the waters of a great sea, to watch from land the struggles of another.”
“Whilst human kind throughout the lands lay miserably crushed before all eyes beneath Religion — who would show her head along the region skies, glowering on mortals with her hideous face.”
About Lucretius
Roman poet and philosopher whose single surviving work, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), is a six-book didactic poem expounding Epicurean physics and philosophy. Almost nothing is known about his life. His poem's atomic theory and rejection of divine intervention were rediscovered in 1417 and helped catalyze the Renaissance and the scientific revolution.