This great didactic poem stands with Vergil's
Aeneid as on e of the most monumental and lasting achievements of Latin literature. Rendered into contemporary English by today's foremost translator of Latin epic, Frank O. Copley, it is again revealed as a work of lasting poetic beauty and continuing modern interest.
Based on the tenets of Epicurean philosophy, The Nature of Things sets forth a world view anticipating our own. All that exists is composed of atoms that unite to form matter and dissipate with time. Even the soul is made up of atoms; however, there is no place in the Epicurean universe for the Roman gods, whose existence Lucretius refutes. Lucretius considers the fear of death to be the source of most human ills, and seeks to dispel it by demonstrating that the soul, like the body, dissolves painlessly into its constituent atoms after death. There is no afterlife, therefore no cause for fear.
Frank O. Copley has rendered the original Latin hexameters line for line into "a somewhat loosened form" of iambic pentatmeter, as in his well-known verse translation of Vergil's Aeneid. An introduction provides biographical and philosophical backgrounds to the poem, and there are extensive notes.
