De Rerum Natura
Rome · -55
L
Lucretius
Lucretius
c. 99 BCE–c. 55 BCE · Rome
Epicurean poet whose De Rerum Natura ('On the Nature of Things') expounds atomism and a universe without divine interference.
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→
✦
Stop 1 of 199 BCE–55 BCEActive
RomeרומאItaly
What they did here
Epicurean poet, author of De rerum natura, dedicated to the Roman aristocrat Memmius. His dates are uncertain: Jerome's Chronicle gives 94–51/50 BCE, while Donatus' Life of Virgil implies death in 55 BCE. Little is known of his life, and a residence at Rome is assumed rather than attested.
Rome in this era
In the late Republic (2nd-1st centuries BCE) Rome was a city-state ruling a Mediterranean empire, governed by the Senate and annual magistrates amid growing civil wars. Educated Romans studied Greek philosophy and rhetoric, and Latin writers such as Lucretius and Cicero set out to carry Greek thought into Latin.
About Rome
Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.
In Rome at the same time
Posidonius of Apamea, Nepos, Cornelius, Cicero, Quintus Tullius Cicero, Sallust, Parthenius of Nicaea
Across the traditions, in Rome at the same time
In the same place & time
✦
Sages whose lives overlapped with Lucretius’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
The world in their lifetime
✦
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Lucretius’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.