Lucretius

Lucretius was a Roman of the last years of the republic about whom nothing is known but the poem, and Jerome’s story that he wrote it in the intervals of a madness brought on by a love potion and killed himself. On the Nature of Things sets out the philosophy of Epicurus in six books of Latin hexameters: that everything is atoms and void, that the soul dies with the body, that the gods do not care, and that fear of death is the root of human misery. Virgil learned his verse from it, the Middle Ages lost it, a single manuscript found in 1417 restored it, and it shaped the modern picture of the world.