philosophy · 1st century BCE · 2 crossings

De Rerum Natura

Name: De Rerum Natura
Author: Lucretius

De rerum natura

Epicurus in Latin verse: atoms, void, and freedom from fear. The book slept through the Middle Ages in a few Carolingian copies until a papal secretary found one in 1417.

The chain

c. 55 BCE Latin original

written by Lucretius in Rome

1682 Latin English translation attested

translated by Thomas Creech in Oxford

The first complete English verse translation to be published, two and a half centuries after Poggio pulled the poem back into circulation. Lucy Hutchinson's complete version of the 1650s stayed in manuscript until 1996.
- Thomas Creech 1682
1916 Latin English translation attested

translated by William Ellery Leonard in London

Leonard's verse translation; the text carried in this library.
- William Ellery Leonard 1916
- Thothica 2026

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Worth knowing

Carolingian monks copied the poem in the ninth century and then the world forgot to read it; two of those copies, the Oblongus and the Quadratus, sleep through the whole story in northern libraries, unknown to the humanists. In January 1417 Poggio Bracciolini, hunting manuscripts on leave from the Council of Constance, found a descendant of that copying in a German monastery he never named, probably Fulda. His find is lost; the transcription Niccoli made from it survives in Florence, along with Poggio's letters demanding his book back for fourteen years. Creech gave the poem published English verse in 1682; the Leonard verse translation of 1916 is the one this library carries.

Sources for this work

Machine-readable: de-rerum-natura.md