De rerum natura (1962)
De rerum natura is a 1962 latin didactic poetry book written by Titus Lucretius Carus.
Lucretius set the whole of Epicurean science into Latin verse. Across six books of hexameter, De rerum natura argues that the world is only atoms and void, that the soul dies with the body, and that the gods, real but remote, take no interest in human affairs. From this he draws a strange comfort: freed of the fear of death and divine punishment, a person can live calmly on nature's plain pleasures. The poem ranges from the swerve of atoms to thunderstorms, the first taming of fire, and the folly of romantic longing, all in supple, sensuous poetry.
Similar books
Explore De rerum natura guides
A few thoughts on De rerum natura
Anyone taken by the poem's cosmic sweep should watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos, a series carried by the same wonder at a universe run by natural law rather than divine whim. Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life reaches for a similar scale, setting one family's grief against the vastness of matter and deep time.
Ancient philosophy that tells you how to live
Lucretius wrote De rerum natura to talk readers out of fearing death: atoms scatter, the soul goes with the body, the gods stay busy elsewhere. These books treat philosophy as a regimen you practise rather than a system you admire. Epicurus in his own words, Marcus Aurelius keeping himself honest in private, Montaigne testing the received wisdom against his own life.
Roman poets worth reading in translation
De rerum natura runs six books of Latin hexameter, and most readers meet it in translation, where the argument survives intact and the translator has to rebuild the music. Ovid is the obvious next step: the letters of the Heroides, the poems sent home from exile on the Black Sea, the mock handbook for falling out of love. Lucretius took his own swing at romantic longing in book four.
Big-picture science with a sense of awe
Lucretius explains thunderstorms, the swerve of atoms and the first taming of fire in hexameter that makes you feel the scale of the thing. Sagan works the same seam on television and Malick works it on film. Logicomix draws the hunt for the foundations of mathematics, and Orb turns a heliocentric measurement into a thriller about people who risk everything for it.
Ancient Rome from prestige TV to manga
Lucretius wrote for Romans around 55 BC, addressing a patron and arguing against the state religion of his own city. These come at that world from other angles: HBO's Rome down at street level, Romulus staged in reconstructed Latin, Quo Vadis under Nero, Thermae Romae treating the bath house as the centre of civilisation, and Asterix mocking the whole empire.