Titus Lucretius Carus

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet of the first century BC about whose life almost nothing is reliably known; a late story that he went mad from a love potion and killed himself is probably invention. His single surviving work, On the Nature of Things, sets out the atomic philosophy of Epicurus in six books of Latin hexameters, arguing that the universe is made of atoms and void, that the soul perishes with the body and that fear of death and of the gods is the chief source of human misery. The poem survived antiquity in a handful of manuscripts and became a founding text of modern materialism.