Titus Lucretius Carus 99—c. 55 B.C.E.

On a warm afternoon in the late Roman Republic, in a modest house somewhere near Rome, a man sits at a wooden table, writing verse about atoms. Outside, the streets are noisy with politics: senators scheming in marble halls, generals chasing glory, crowds in the Forum roaring for bread and spectacle. Inside, this man is engaged in something quieter but, in his view, much more urgent. He is trying to free human beings from terror—terror of the gods, of death, of fate—by showing them that everything in the universe is made of small, unseen particles moving through empty space. His name is Titus Lucretius Carus, and the poem taking shape under his hand, De Rerum Natura, On the Nature of Things, will become the most powerful poetic expression of Epicurean moral philosophy that survives from antiquity.Selenius Media