Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus lived about 99 to 55 BC. Almost nothing is known of his life except that he wrote a long poem, On the Nature of Things, which sets out the philosophy of Epicurus in six books of beautiful Latin hexameters; Cicero is said to have read and edited it after his death. The poem was almost lost in the Middle Ages, until the humanist Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered it in a German monastery in 1417; it went on to shape the Renaissance, Galileo, Gassendi and the atomic science of the modern age.