Lucretius

c. 99–55 BCE

Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman poet of the late Republic, set out the whole physics and ethics of Epicurus in six books of Latin hexameters: the atoms and the void, the mortality of the soul, the senses and the mind, the origins of the world and of civilisation, and the plague at Athens. De rerum natura is the fullest statement of ancient atomism to survive, and one of the great poems of the Latin language.