Lucretius Bust

Lucretius made a poem out of an explanation of the physical world. De rerum natura, usually translated as On the Nature of Things, presents Epicurean philosophy in six books of Latin verse. Bodies, sensations, and the world around us are explained through matter and motion.

The argument has an ethical purpose. Understanding natural causes is meant to loosen the grip of fear, including fear of divine intervention and of death. Poetry carries that difficult argument through images and comparisons that a reader can picture, rather than through propositions alone.

The poet himself remains much less accessible than his work. His birth and death dates are uncertain, and later stories about madness and suicide cannot be treated as a secure biography. A portrait bust gives him a definite face; the surviving historical evidence does not give us an equally definite life.