Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and Epicurean follower of the first century BC. Almost nothing is securely known of his life; he addressed his poem to the Roman aristocrat Memmius, and it was left unfinished at his death, to be edited, according to later tradition, by Cicero.

His single surviving work, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), is a didactic poem in six books of Latin hexameters setting out the atomic physics and ethics of Epicurus: the nature of atoms and void, the mortality of the soul, the origins of the world and of human society, and the causes of natural phenomena, all aimed at freeing readers from the fear of the gods and of death.