author
Titus Lucretius Carus
-95–-55
Little is known for certain about his life, but his surviving poem became one of the great works of Latin literature. In six books of dazzling verse, it sets out the Epicurean view of nature, the soul, and human fear.
3 Audiobooks
On the Nature of Things
by Titus Lucretius Carus
Virgil & Lucretius Passages translated by William Stebbing
by Virgil, Titus Lucretius Carus
Translations from Lucretius
by Titus Lucretius Carus
About the author
A Roman poet and philosopher writing in the 1st century BCE, he is known for a single surviving work: De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). That long didactic poem presents Epicurean ideas in Latin verse and remains the fullest ancient account of that philosophy to survive.
Ancient evidence for his life is sparse, so even basic dates are uncertain. Standard modern references place him in the 1st century BCE and agree that very little can be said about him with confidence beyond his authorship of De rerum natura.
What has lasted is the force of the poem itself: its clear-eyed attempt to explain the world through nature rather than superstition, and its enduring influence on literature, philosophy, and the history of ideas.