On the Nature of Things - Lucretius, Titus
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Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99-55 BC) was a Roman poet and a follower of the Epicurean tradition. His major work, De rerum natura ("On the Nature of Things"), is held as a masterpiece of ancient poetry. This is a didactic poem that also provides a comprehensive view of Epicurus' philosophy -- the supposed structure of the Universe, the origin and evolution of the world, how life and civilization developed, and what the lot of humanity is in this world, created by chance and necessity in the blind dance of the atoms. The world of Epicurus does not need a divine creator, or any divine…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99-55 BC) was a Roman poet and a follower of the Epicurean tradition. His major work, De rerum natura ("On the Nature of Things"), is held as a masterpiece of ancient poetry. This is a didactic poem that also provides a comprehensive view of Epicurus' philosophy -- the supposed structure of the Universe, the origin and evolution of the world, how life and civilization developed, and what the lot of humanity is in this world, created by chance and necessity in the blind dance of the atoms. The world of Epicurus does not need a divine creator, or any divine intervention. Lucretius argues that the gods exist, but that they have nothing to do with our world or the humanity. The philosophy is practically atheistic, and as such it was suppressed during the Middle Ages. From Epicurus' own hand, only a few fragments and letters managed to survive the Middle Ages. Therefore, it was a major event when the humanist Poggio Bracciolini discovered Lucretius' forgotten poem in a German monastery in 1417. For philosophers and intellectual innovators of the Renaissance, there were suddenly an original and sophisticated system as an alternative to the natural philosophy of Plato and Aristotle taught in scholastic Europe. De rerum natura was what may be described as a bible for the scientific revolution. The idea of atoms, the infinite universe and the plurality of worlds, and that mechanical cause and effect lies behind every natural phenomenon -- all this was expressed here. Also, Galileo's laws of motion are in their infancy in the poem; centuries before Christ, Epicurus and Lucretius already understood that an object in motion will continue to move forever, unless something intervene, and that a heavy object does not fall faster than a light one. De rerum natura is considered to provide a fairly unadulterated picture of the Epicurean philosophy, since the differences are insignificant when compared to Epicurus' own fragments and letters. It is published here in a classic 1916 translation by the American poet William Ellery Leonard (1876-1944).
Autorenporträt
Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99 BC - c. 55 BC) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the philosophical poem The Nature of Things, a didactic work about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism. Lucretius has been credited with originating the concept of the three-age system which was formalised in 1836 by C. J. Thomsen. Very little is known about Lucretius's life; the only certain fact is that he was either a friend or client of Gaius Memmius, to whom the poem was addressed and dedicated. The Nature of Things was a considerable influence on the Augustan poets, particularly Virgil (in his Aeneid and Georgics, and to a lesser extent on the Eclogues) and Horace. The work virtually disappeared during the Middle Ages, but was rediscovered in 1417 in a monastery in Germany by Poggio Bracciolini and it played an important role both in the development of atomism (Lucretius was an important influence on Pierre Gassendi) and the efforts of various figures of the Enlightenment era to construct a new Christian humanism. Lucretius's scientific poem The Nature of Things (c. 60 BC) has a remarkable description of Brownian motion of dust particles in Book II. He uses this as a proof of the existence of atoms. Lucretius was probably a member of the aristocratic gens Lucretia, and his work shows an intimate knowledge of the luxurious lifestyle in Rome. Lucretius' love of the countryside invites speculation that he inhabited family-owned rural estates, as did many wealthy Roman families, and he certainly was expensively educated with a mastery of Latin, Greek, literature, and philosophy.