Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus lived in the first century BC and left almost no biographical trace; the only certainty is that he knew Gaius Memmius, the man to whom he addressed his sole work. That work, De rerum natura, is a didactic poem laying out Epicurean philosophy in Latin hexameter. It influenced the Augustan poets—Virgil drew on it for the Aeneid and Georgics, Horace less directly—but then sank into obscurity through the Middle Ages. In 1417 a humanist named Poggio Bracciolini found a manuscript copy in a German monastery. The rediscovery fed the Enlightenment's interest in atomism and helped…