Lucretius
Roman Epicurean poet and philosopher (c. 99 – c. 55 BCE), about whom almost nothing is known with biographical certainty —not even the exact years of his birth and death— beyond a late legend, transmitted by Saint Jerome, according to which he wrote his work during intervals of madness caused by a love potion and later took his own life, an account most scholars regard as later Christian slander with no reliable basis, aimed at discrediting Epicureanism. His only known work, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), is a didactic poem in six books and some seven thousand five hundred hexameters that expounds, with totalising ambition and extraordinary poetic beauty, the entire philosophical system of Epicurus —the only complete and systematic exposition of it to survive in a classical Western language— aimed at making accessible in Latin a Greek philosophy that Lucretius considered a genuine medicine for the soul. In it he defends the atomist physics of Democritus and Epicurus —the universe is matter (atoms) and void, infinite and without a divine creator, and even the gods, if they exist, live indifferent to human affairs in the spaces between worlds—, vehemently attacks religious superstition and the fear of death as the chief sources of human suffering, arguing that the soul is mortal and material and that death is therefore 'nothing to us', and celebrates the rational contemplation of nature as the path to ataraxia, the imperturbable tranquillity that constitutes the ultimate goal of the good life. Dedicated to the politician Gaius Memmius, the poem virtually disappeared during the Middle Ages, transmitted only by a handful of manuscripts, and was fortuitously rediscovered in 1417 by the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini in a German monastery — a find that, as the historian Stephen Greenblatt has argued, played a decisive role in the intellectual 'swerve' that ushered in the Renaissance and modern science.