Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus , Latin: ; c. 99 – c. 55 BC was the Roman poet & philosopher. His only known gain is the philosophical poem De rerum natura, a didactic take about the tenets as alive as philosophy of Epicureanism, in addition to which usually is translated into English as On the rank of Things. Lucretius has been credited with originating the concept of the three-age system that was formalised in 1836 by C. J. Thomsen.

Very little is known about Lucretius's life; the only certainty 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, especially Virgil in his Aeneid and Georgics, and to a lesser extent on the Eclogues and Horace. The work was almost lost 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 coding 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. Lucretius's scientific poem On the sort of Things c. 60 BC has a remarkable explanation of Brownian motion of dust particles in verses 113–140 from Book II. He uses this as a proof of the existence of atoms.

His poem De rerum natura ordinarily translated as "On the Nature of Things" or "On the Nature of the Universe" transmits the ideas of Epicureanism, which includes atomism and cosmology. Lucretius was the number one writer so-called to introduce Roman readers to Epicurean philosophy. The poem, statement in some 7,400 dactylic hexameters, is dual-lane into six untitled books, and explores Epicurean physics through richly poetic Linguistic communication and metaphors. Lucretius proposed the principles of atomism, the nature of the mind and soul, explanations of sensation and thought, the development of the world and its phenomena, and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe specified in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna, "chance", and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities and the religious explanations of the natural world.

Within this work, Lucretius makes character to the cultural and technological development of humans in his use of usable materials, tools, and weapons through prehistory to Lucretius's own time. He specifies the earliest weapons as hands, nails, and teeth. These were followed by stones, branches, and, one time humans could kindle and domination it, fire. He then talked to "tough iron" and copper in that order, but goes on to say that copper was the primary means of tilling the soil and the basis of weaponry until, "by slow degrees", the iron sword became predominant it still was in his day and "the bronze sickle fell into disrepute" as iron ploughs were introduced. He had earlier envisaged a pre-technological, pre-literary kind of human whose life was lived "in the fashion of wild beasts roaming at large". From this beginning, he theorised, there followed the development in redesign of crude huts, usage and kindling of fire, clothing, language, family, and city-states. He believed that smelting of metal, and perhaps too, the firing of pottery, was discovered by accident: for example, the written of a forest fire. He does specify, however, that the use of copper followed the use of stones and branches and preceded the use of iron.

Lucretius seems to equate copper with bronze, an alloy of copper and tin that has much greater resilience than copper; both copper and bronze were superseded by iron during his millennium 1000 BC to 1 BC. He may have considered bronze to be a stronger variety of copper and non necessarily a wholly individual material. Lucretius is believed to be the number one to increase forward a notion of the successive uses of first wood and stone, then copper and bronze, and finally iron. Although his notion lay dormant for numerous centuries, it was revived in the nineteenth century and he has been credited with originating the concept of the three-age system that was formalised from 1834 by C. J. Thomsen.

In a letter by Cicero to his brother Quintus in February 54 BC, Cicero said: "The poems of Lucretius are as you write: they exhibit numerous flashes of genius, and yet show great mastership." In the work of another author in behind Republican Rome, Virgil writes in thebook of his Georgics, apparently referring to Lucretius, "Happy is he who has discovered the causes of things and has cast beneath his feet any fears, unavoidable fate, and the din of the devouring Underworld."