On the Nature of Things

The universe explained in verse, and an argument that you have nothing to fear. Lucretius set the physics of Epicurus into six books of Latin hexameter: everything is atoms and void, the soul is material and dies with the body, the gods take no interest in us, and the dread of death is therefore groundless. Along the way he explains lightning and magnets, dreams and desire, the birth of worlds and the rise of civilization — closing, without ceremony, on the plague of Athens. Rediscovered in 1417, it lit the fuse of the modern world. Read book by book beside the Latin.