Lucretius, the Poem That Nearly Disappeared

Everything known about Epicurean physics in its fullest, most persuasive form survives chiefly through one poem by one Roman follower writing more than two centuries after Epicurus's own death. Titus Lucretius Carus's De Rerum Natura, On the Nature of Things, cast Epicurus's atomism, his account of the soul's mortality and his argument against fearing death or the gods into six books of Latin hexameter verse, deliberately sweetening what he called the wormwood of philosophy with poetry so a reluctant reader would swallow it. For most of the medieval period almost no one did; only a handful of manuscript copies are known to have survived at all, and the poem's flat materialism and denial of an afterlife made it a marginal, sometimes suspect text wherever it was known. In 1417 the Italian scholar and papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini found a copy in a German monastery library while hunting for lost classical texts, and the poem's return to circulation is now credited with reintroducing Epicurean physics into European thought at exactly the moment Renaissance and early modern thinkers were questioning inherited authority on nature. Its influence reached Galileo's atomism, Gassendi's attempt to reconcile atomism with Christianity, and eventually the Enlightenment's own materialist currents, all of it descending from a poem whose survival to the present day was, on its own account of chance and atoms colliding without purpose, itself simply a matter of chance.