Titi Lucretii Cari. De Rerum Natura Libri Sex

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by Titus Lucretius Carus

De Rerum Natura Libri Sex
George Wythe bookplate.jpg
Title not held by The Wolf Law Library
at the College of William & Mary.
 
Author Titus Lucretius Carus
Editor
Translator
Published Cantabrigiæ: Ex officina Joann. Hayes, Impensis W. Morden
Date 1675 or 1686
Edition
Language
Volumes volume set
Pages
Desc.

Titus Lucretius Carus (c.99 – c.55 BCE), known simply as Lucretius, was a Roman poet who believed in Epicurean philosophy:[1] a “strictly mechanistic account of all phenoma” that atoms make up everything in the world, from physical objects to the mind to the soul.[2] Little is known about Lucretius, although various contemporary authors have written about his life.[3]

De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, the only known work of Lucretius, is a poem in six books. "The purpose of the poem is to free men from a sense of guilt and the fear of death by demonstrating that fear of the intervention of gods in this world and of punishment of the soul after death are groundless: the world and everything in it are material and governed by the mechanical laws of nature, and the soul is mortal and perishes with the body."[4] Lucretius wrote with a clear and organizational purpose; even "[the] division of the text corresponds to the Epicurean stress on the intelligibility of phenomena: everything has a systematic explanation, the world can be analysed and understood."[5] Each book has a prologue and a conclusion. The prologue in Book 1 "opens with a famous invocation of Venus, goddess of creative life, to grant to the poet inspiration and to Rome peace."[6]

Evidence for Inclusion in Wythe's Library

See also

References

  1. "Lucrē'tius" in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. by M.C. Howatson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
  2. "Epicū'rus" in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. by M.C. Howatson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
  3. "Lucrē'tius" in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature.
  4. Ibid.
  5. "Lucrētius" in Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World, ed. by John Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
  6. "Lucrē'tius” in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature.