Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus, who died in the mid first century before the common era, was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the philosophical poem De rerum natura, usually translated as On the Nature of Things, a didactic poem of some seven thousand four hundred hexameters in six books that sets out the tenets of Epicureanism, including atomism and cosmology. Almost nothing certain is known of his life beyond a link to Gaius Memmius, to whom the poem is dedicated. The poem influenced Virgil and Horace, was nearly lost in the Middle Ages and was found again in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini in a monastery in Germany. It later mattered to the revival of atomism and to Enlightenment thinkers.