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1st century BC didactic poem by Lucretius

De rerum natura (; On the Nature of Things) is a first century BC didactic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius with the goal of explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. The poem, written in some 7,400 dactylic hexameters, is divided into six untitled books, and explores Epicurean physics through poetic language and metaphors. Namely, Lucretius explores the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna ("chance"), and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities.

To the Greek philosopher Epicurus, the unhappiness and degradation of humans arose largely from the dread which they had of the power of the deities and terror of their wrath. This wrath was supposed to be displayed by the misfortunes inflicted in this life and by the everlasting tortures that were the lot of the guilty in a future state or, where these feelings were not strongly developed, from a vague dread of gloom and misery after death. Epicurus thus made it his mission to remove these fears and thus establish tranquility in the minds of his readers. To do this, Epicurus invoked the atomism of Democritus to demonstrate that the material universe was formed not by a Supreme Being but by the mixing of elemental particles which had existed from all eternity, governed by certain simple laws. He argued that the deities (whose existence he did not deny) lived forever in the enjoyment of absolute peacestrangers to all the passions, desires and fears, which affect humansand are totally indifferent to the world and its inhabitants, unmoved alike by their virtues and their crimes. This meant that humans had nothing to fear from them. Lucretius's task was clearly to state and fully develop these views in an attractive form. His work was an attempt to show through poetry that everything in nature can be explained by natural laws, without the need for the intervention of divine beings. Lucretius identifies the supernatural with the notion that the deities created our world or interfere with its operations in some way. He argues against fear of such deities by demonstrating, through observations and arguments, that the operations of the world can be accounted for in terms of natural phenomena, which are the result of regular but purposeless motions and interactions of tiny atoms in empty space.

The poem consists of six untitled books, in dactylic hexameter. The first three books provide a fundamental account of being and nothingness, matter and space, the atoms and their movement, the infinity of the universe both as regards time and space, the regularity of reproduction (no prodigies, everything in its proper habitat), the nature of mind (animus, directing thought) and spirit (anima, sentience) as material bodily entities, and their mortality, since, according to Lucretius, they and their functions (consciousness, pain) end with the bodies that contain them and with which they are interwoven. The last three books give an atomic and materialist explanation of phenomena preoccupying human reflection, such as vision and the senses, sex and reproduction, natural forces and agriculture, the heavens, and disease. Lucretius opens his poem by addressing Venus not only as the mother of Rome (Aeneadum genetrix) but also as the veritable mother of nature (Alma Venus), urging her to pacify her lover Mars and spare Rome from strife. The choice to address Venus may have been due to Empedocles's belief that Aphrodite represents "the great creative force in the cosmos". Given that Lucretius goes on to argue that the gods are removed from human life, many have thus seen this opening to be contradictory: how can Lucretius pray to Venus and then deny that the gods listen to or care about human affairs? After the opening, the poem commences with an enunciation of the proposition on the nature and being of the deities, which leads to an invective against the evils of superstition. Lucretius then dedicates time to exploring the axiom that nothing can be produced from nothing, and that nothing can be reduced to nothing (Nil fieri ex nihilo, in nihilum nil posse reverti). Following this, the poet argues that the universe comprises an infinite number of Atoms, which are scattered about in an infinite and vast void (Inane). The shape of these atoms, their properties, their movements, the laws under which they enter into combination and assume forms and qualities appreciable by the senses, with other preliminary matters on their nature and affections, together with a refutation of objections and opposing hypotheses, occupy the first two books. This book addresses the origin of the world and of all things therein, the movements of the heavenly bodies, the changing of the seasons, day and night, the rise and progress of humankind, society, political institutions, and the invention of the various arts and sciences which embellish and ennoble life. There are over a dozen references to "Memmius" scattered throughout the long poem in a variety of contexts in translation, such as "Memmius mine", "my Memmius", and "illustrious Memmius". According to Lucretius's frequent statements in his poem, the main purpose of the work was to free Gaius Memmius's mind of the supernatural and the fear of death—and to induct him into a state of ataraxia by expounding the philosophical system of Epicurus, whom Lucretius glorifies as the hero of his epic poem. However, the purpose of the poem is subject to ongoing scholarly debate. Lucretius refers to Memmius by name four times in the first book, three times in the second, five in the fifth, and not at all in the third, fourth, or sixth books. In relation to this discrepancy in the frequency of Lucretius's reference to the apparent subject of his poem, Kannengiesse advances the theory that Lucretius wrote the first version of De rerum natura for the reader at large, and subsequently revised in order to write it for Memmius. However, Memmius' name is central to several critical verses in the poem, and this theory has therefore been largely discredited. The German classicists Ivo Bruns and Samuel Brandt set forth an alternative theory that Lucretius did at first write the poem with Memmius in mind, but that his enthusiasm for his patron cooled over time. Stearns suggests that this is because Memmius reneged on a promise to pay for a new school to be built on the site of the old Epicurean school. There is a certain irony to the poem, namely that while Lucretius extols the virtue of the Epicurean school of thought, Epicurus himself had advised his acolytes from penning poetry because he believed it to make that which was simple overly complicated. Near the end of his first book, Lucretius defends his fusion of Epicureanism and poetry with a simile, arguing that the philosophy he espouses is like a medicine: life saving but often unpleasant. Poetry, on the other hand, is like honey, in that it is "a sweetener that sugarcoats the bitter medicine of Epicurean philosophy and entices the audience to swallow it." (Of note, Lucretius repeats these 25 lines, almost verbatim, in the introduction to the fourth book.)

The state of the poem as it currently exists suggests that it was released in an unfinished state. For instance, the poem concludes rather abruptly while detailing the Plague of Athens, there are redundant passages throughout (e. g., 1.820–821 and 2.1015–1016) alongside other aesthetic "loose ends", and at 5.155 Lucretius mentions that he will spend a great deal of time discussing the nature of the gods, which never comes to pass. Some have suggested that Lucretius died before being able to edit, finalize, and publish his work.

Martin Ferguson Smith notes that Cicero's close friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus, was an Epicurean publisher, and it is possible his slaves made the very first copies of De rerum natura. If this were the case, then it might explain how Cicero came to be familiar with Lucretius's work. In c. AD 380, St. Jerome would contend in his Chronicon that Cicero amended and edited De rerum natura, although most scholars argue that this is an erroneous claim; Nevertheless, a small minority of scholars argue that Jerome's assertion may be credible. Copies of the poem were preserved in a number of medieval libraries, with the earliest extant manuscripts dating to the ninth century. The oldestand, according to David Butterfield, most famousof these is the Codex Oblongus, often called O. This copy has been dated to the early ninth century and was produced by a Carolingian scriptorium (likely a monastery connected to the court of Charlemagne). O is currently housed at Leiden University Libraries as MS VLF 30. The second of these ninth century manuscripts is the Codex Quadratus, often called Q. This manuscript was likely copied after O, sometime in the mid ninth century. Today, Q is also housed at Leiden University Libraries as VLQ 94. The third and final ninth century manuscriptwhich comprises the Schedae Gottorpienses fragment (commonly called G and located in the Kongelige Bibliotek of Copenhagen) and the Schedae Vindobonenses fragments (commonly called V and U and located in the Austrian National Library in Vienna)was christened by Butterfield as S and has been dated to the latter part of the ninth century. Scholars consider manuscripts O, Q, and S to all be descendants of the original archetype, which they dub Ω. However, while O is a direct descendant of the archetype,

While there exist a handful of references to Lucretius in European sources dating between the ninth and fifteenth centuries (references that, according to Ada Palmer, "indicate a tenacious, if spotty knowledge of the poet and some knowledge of [his] poem"), no manuscripts of De rerum natura are known to survive from this span of time. Rather, all the remaining Lucretian manuscripts, apart from the early three discussed above, that are known date from or after the fifteenth century. This is because De rerum natura was rediscovered in January 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini, who probably found the poem in the Benedictine library at Fulda. The manuscript that Poggio discovered did not survive, but a copy (the "Codex Laurentianus 35.30") of it by Poggio's friend, Niccolò de' Niccoli, did, and today it is kept at the Laurentian Library in Florence. This proves that the work was known in select circles long before the official rediscovery by Bracciolini. It has been suggested that Dante (1265–1321) might have read Lucretius's poem, as a few verses of his Divine Comedy exhibit a great affinity with De rerum natura, but there is no conclusive evidence for this hypothesis. The first printed edition of De rerum natura was produced in Brescia, Lombardy, in 1473. Other printed editions followed soon after. Additionally, although only published in 1996, Lucy Hutchinson's translation of De rerum natura was in all likelihood the first in English and was most likely completed some time in the late 1640s or 1650s, though it remained unpublished in manuscript.

The earliest recorded critique of Lucretius's work is in a letter written by the Roman statesman Cicero to his brother Quintus, in which the former claims that Lucretius's poetry is "full of inspired brilliance, but also of great artistry" (Lucreti poemata, ut scribis, ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis). It is also believed that the Roman poet Virgil referenced Lucretius and his work in the second book of his Georgics when he wrote: "Happy is he who has discovered the causes of things and has cast beneath his feet all fears, unavoidable fate, and the din of the devouring Underworld" (felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas/atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum/subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari). According to David Sedley of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "With these admiring words, Virgil neatly encapsulates four dominant themes of the poemuniversal causal explanation, leading to elimination of the threats the world seems to pose, a vindication of free will, and disproof of the soul's survival after death." However, Manilius's poem espouses a Stoic, deterministic understanding of the universe, and by its very nature attacks the very philosophical underpinnings of Lucretius's worldview. (Coincidentally, De rerum natura and the Astronomica were both rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in the early 15th century.) Additionally, Lucretius's work is discussed by the Augustan poet Ovid, who in his Amores writes "the verses of the sublime Lucretius will perish only when a day will bring the end of the world" (Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti / exitio terras cum dabit una dies), and the Silver Age poet Statius, who in his Silvae praises Lucretius as being highly "learned". David Butterfield also writes that "clear echoes and/or responses" to De rerum natura can be detected in the works of the Roman elegiac poets Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, as well as the lyric poet Horace. In regards to prose writers, a number either quote from Lucretius's poem or express great admiration for De rerum natura, including Vitruvius (in De Architectura), Marcus Velleius Paterculus (in the Historiae Romanae), Quintilian (in the Institutio Oratoria), Tacitus (in the Dialogus de oratoribus), Marcus Cornelius Fronto (in De eloquentia), Cornelius Nepos (in the Life of Atticus), Apuleius (in De Deo Socratis), and Gaius Julius Hyginus (in the Fabulae). Additionally, Pliny the Elder lists Lucretius (presumably referring to his De rerum natura) as a source at the beginning of his Naturalis Historia, and Seneca the Younger quoted six passages from De rerum natura across several of his works.

Because Lucretius was critical of religion and the claim of an immortal soul, his poem was disparaged by most early Church Fathers. The Early Christian apologist Lactantius, in particular, heavily cites and critiques Lucretius in his The Divine Institutes and its Epitome, as well as his De ira Dei. After Lactantius's time, Lucretius was almost exclusively referenced or alluded to in a negative manner by the Church Fathers. The one major exception to this was Isidore of Seville, who at the start of the 7th century produced a work on astronomy and natural history dedicated to the Visigothic king Sisebut that was entitled De natura rerum. In both this work, and as well as his more well known Etymologiae (c. AD 600625), Isidore liberally quotes from Lucretius a total of twelve times, drawing verses from all of Lucretius's books except his third. (About a century later, the British historian and Doctor of the Church Bede produced a work also called De natura rerum, partly based on Isidore's work but apparently ignorant of Lucretius's poem.)

Montaigne owned a Latin edition published in Paris, in 1563, by Denis Lambin which he heavily annotated. His Essays contain almost a hundred quotes from De rerum natura. Notable figures who owned copies include Ben Jonson, whose copy is held at the Houghton Library, Harvard; and Thomas Jefferson, who owned at least five Latin editions and English, Italian and French translations. His influence is especially notable in the work of the Spanish American philosopher George Santayana, who praised Lucretiusalong with Dante and Goethein his book Three Philosophical Poets, although he openly admired the poet's system of physics more so than his spiritual musings (referring to the latter as "fumbling, timid and sad"). In 2011, the historian and literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt wrote a popular history book about the poem, entitled The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. In the work, Greenblatt argues that Poggio Bracciolini's discovery of De rerum natura reintroduced important ideas that sparked the modern age. The book was well received, and later earned the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non Fiction and the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction.