Lucretius

Almost nothing is known of Lucretius' life. Saint Jerome says a love potion drove him mad, that he wrote in lucid intervals and killed himself at forty-four, which is probably a Christian slander on an atheist. What is certain is that he lived in the turbulent last years of the Republic, dedicated his poem to a nobleman named Memmius, and that Cicero read the manuscript and praised its genius and craft alike.

On the Nature of Things has six books: the principles of atoms and void, atomic motion and the swerve, the material and mortal soul, sensation and thought, the origin of the world and of civilisation, and finally celestial phenomena and plague. Its aim is therapeutic: to dispel with reason the fears that religion imposes. Between the opening prayer to Venus and the closing description of the plague at Athens lies a complete materialist cosmology.

The poem nearly vanished in the Middle Ages; in 1417 the humanist Poggio found a manuscript in a German monastery. It went on to influence Bruno, Gassendi, Newton and the whole Enlightenment, and Marx's doctoral thesis was on the Epicurean swerve. He wrote philosophy as poetry, he said, as one smears honey on the rim of a cup of bitter medicine.