c. 99–55 BC · Ancient Rome

Roman poet and Epicurean, of whose life almost nothing is known. His single work, On the Nature of Things, sets the atomic physics and ethics of Epicurus into six books of Latin hexameter, arguing that the universe is atoms and void, that the soul is material and dies with the body, and that the fear of death is therefore groundless.
Imaginative engraving of Lucretius — CC0, via Wikimedia Commons