Titus Lucretius Carus

Titus Lucretius Carus
Modern bust of Lucretius
Born	c. 15 October 99 BC
Died	c. 55 BC (aged around 44)
Era	Hellenistic philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Epicureanism
Main interests	Ethics, metaphysics
Influences Gaius Memmius, Epicurus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle
Influenced Cicero, Virgil, Pierre Gassendi, Stephen Greenblatt, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze

Titus Lucretius Carus (/ˈtaɪtəs lʊˈkriːʃəs/; c. 15 October 99 BC – c. 55 BC) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the didactic philosophical poem De rerum natura about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism, and which is usually translated into English as On the Nature of Things. Lucretius has been credited with originating the concept of the three-age system which was formalised from 1834 by C. J. Thomsen.

Very little is known about Lucretius's life; the only certain fact is that he was either a friend or client of Gaius Memmius, to whom the poem was addressed and dedicated.

De rerum natura was a considerable influence on the Augustan poets, particularly Virgil (in his Aeneid and Georgics, and to a lesser extent on the Eclogues) and Horace. The work virtually disappeared during the Middle Ages but was rediscovered in 1417 in a monastery in Germany by Poggio Bracciolini, and it played an important role both in the development of atomism (Lucretius was an important influence on Pierre Gassendi) and the efforts of various figures of the Enlightenment era to construct a new Christian humanism.