Contributor

Lucretius

(c. 95 BC - c. 50 BC)

Little is known about the life of Lucretius: Saint Jerome claimed that he was driven insane by a love potion and committed suicide. His poem On the Nature of Things reveals its author to have been a religious skeptic who rejected the notion of an afterlife and believed that the world was composed of invisible particles. For centuries Lucretius’s sole work was considered lost until a book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini happened upon a copy in a German monastery in 1417; it later influenced Niccolò Machiavelli, Michel de Montaigne, and Thomas Jefferson.

All Writing

A painting of a plague-ridden ancient city, often thought to represent the plague of Athens in 430BC. The painting show people gathered in a town square, some dying and dead on the ground, while others look distressed or care for the ill.

Roundtable

The Nature of Plagues

By Lucretius

A Roman poet revisits an ancient epidemic. More

Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.

—Lucretius, c. 57 BC

Voices In Time

c. 58 | Rome

Jumbled Atoms

A look at Lucretius’ universe.More

What is food to one is to others bitter poison.

—Lucretius, 50 BC

Miscellany

Some four hundred years after the death of Lucretius, Saint Jerome wrote the only existing biography of the philosopher, in two sentences, suggesting that Lucretius “was rendered insane by a love potion” and killed himself. In 1868 Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in “Lucretius” that the philosopher’s wife “dreaming some rival, sought and found a witch / Who brewed the philter which had power, they said, / To lead an errant passion home again. / And this, at times, she mingled with his drink, / And this destroyed him.”