![]() ![]() He himself in his preface describes this title as ‘simple, forthright, insistent, peremptory’. It is a mark of Rolfe Humphries’ attractive contrariness that he drops the almost universally used English title in favour of the slightly more confrontational and all-encompassing The ways things are. The title is usually translated into English as On the Nature of Things. Just 7,500 lines comprehensively describing Epicurus’s atomic materialism and his ‘scientific’, rationalist worldview. No heroes, no gods, no battles, no epic speeches. His only known work is the philosophical poem De rerum natura, a didactic epic poem of some 7,500 lines, written entirely to promote the abstract philosophy of Epicureanism. Lucretius was a Roman poet and philosopher who lived from about 99 to about 55 BC. (Book V, lines 1,140 and 1,141) Titus Lucretius Carus What once was too-much-feared becomes in time Sometimes slipping in slangy phrases for the hell of it: ![]() Sometimes like the guy sitting next to you at the bar: Wheel in their courses, and what impulse moves It has an attractive variety of tones, from the lofty and heroic to the accessible and demotic, sometimes sounding like Milton: Fluent, full of force and vigour, it captures not only the argumentative, didactic nature of the poem but dresses it in consistently fine phrasing. This is a hugely enjoyable translation of Lucretius’s epic poem De rerum natura which literally translates as ‘On the nature of things’. ![]()
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