All Formats & Editions

This is a new verse translation of Lucretius's only known work, a didactic poem written in six books of hexameters. Melville's particularly literal translation of the use of metaphor is especially helpful to those looking at the text from a scientific or philosophical point of... Read Full Overview

This great poem stands with Virgil's Aeneid as one of the vital and enduring achievements of Latin literature. Lost for more than a thousand years, its return to circulation in 1417 reintroduced dangerous ideas about the nature and meaning of existence and helped shape the modern... Read Full Overview

Atomic atheism in verse.

This great poem stands with Virgil's Aeneid as one of the vital and enduring achievements of Latin literature. Lost for more than a thousand years, its return to circulation in 1417 reintroduced dangerous ideas about the nature and meaning of existence and helped shape the modern... Read Full Overview

" . . . [captures] the relentless urgency of Lucretius' didacticism, his passionate conviction and proselytizing fervour.' --The Classical Review

A seminal text of Epicurean science and philosophy With a new introduction and commentary and a revised translation, this edition acknowledges advances in textual research and also provides more background information for the reader. Epicurians discarded both the idea of immortality... Read Full Overview

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,... Read Full Overview

Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99-55 B. C.) is known primarily as the Roman author of the long didactic poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). In it, he set out to explicate the universe, embracing and refuting ideas of the great Greek philosophers.
Now available... Read Full Overview

This great poem stands with Virgil's Aeneid as one of the vital and enduring achievements of Latin literature. Lost for more than a thousand years, its return to circulation in 1417 reintroduced dangerous ideas about the nature and meaning of existence and helped shape the modern... Read Full Overview

Titus Lucretius Carus was probably born in the early first century B.C., and died in the year 55. Little is known of his life, although two tantalizing bits of gossip were passed on by St. Jerome: that he was poisoned by a madness-inducing aphrodisiac given him by his wife,... Read Full Overview

"Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's great tribulation; not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive you are free of them yourself is pleasant."

On The Nature of Things... Read Full Overview

This elegant new translation at last restores the poetry to one of the greatest and most influential poems in the Western tradition. De Rerum Natura is Lucretius's majestic elaboration of Greek Epicurean physics and psychology in an epic that unfolds over the course of six books... Read Full Overview