Titi Lucretii Cari. De Rerum Natura Libri Sex
by Titus Lucretius Carus
| De Rerum Natura Libri Sex | ||
 at the College of William & Mary. |
||
| Author | Titus Lucretius Carus | |
| Published | Cantabrigiæ: Ex officina Joann. Hayes, Impensis W. Morden | |
| Date | 1675 or 1686 | |
Titus Lucretius Carus (c.99 – c.55 BCE), known simply as Lucretius, was a Roman poet who believed in Epicurean philosophy:[1] a “strictly mechanistic account of all phenoma” that atoms make up everything in the world, from physical objects to the mind to the soul.[2] Little is known about Lucretius, although various contemporary authors have written about his life.[3]
De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, the only known work of Lucretius, is a poem in six books. "The purpose of the poem is to free men from a sense of guilt and the fear of death by demonstrating that fear of the intervention of gods in this world and of punishment of the soul after death are groundless: the world and everything in it are material and governed by the mechanical laws of nature, and the soul is mortal and perishes with the body."[4] Lucretius wrote with a clear and organizational purpose; even "[the] division of the text corresponds to the Epicurean stress on the intelligibility of phenomena: everything has a systematic explanation, the world can be analysed and understood."[5] Each book has a prologue and a conclusion. The prologue in Book 1 "opens with a famous invocation of Venus, goddess of creative life, to grant to the poet inspiration and to Rome peace."[6]
Evidence for Inclusion in Wythe's Library
Listed in the Jefferson Inventory of Wythe's Library as "do. [Lucretius.] Tanaquil Fabri. 12mo." and kept by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson later sold it to the Library of Congress, but the copy no longer survives to verify the edition or Wythe's previous ownership.[7] The Brown Bibliography[8] lists a 1675 edition published in Cambridge and edited by Tanneguy Le Fèvre based in part on Millicent Sowerby's entry in Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson.[9] George Wythe's Library[10] on LibraryThing states "Precise edition unknown. Duodecimo editions were published by Hayes in 1675 and 1686." The Wolf Law Library has yet to find an edition of Lucretius edited by Tanneguy Le Fèvre.
See also
- De Rerum Natura Libri Sex ad Optimorum Exemplarium Fidem Recensiti
- Jefferson Inventory
- Of the Nature of Things
- Titi Lucretii Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex: ex Editione Thomae Creech
- Wythe's Library
References
- ↑ "Lucrē'tius" in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. by M.C. Howatson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- ↑ "Epicū'rus" in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. by M.C. Howatson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- ↑ "Lucrē'tius" in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ "Lucrētius" in Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World, ed. by John Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
- ↑ "Lucrē'tius” in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature.
- ↑ E. Millicent Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, (Washington, D.C.: The Library of Congress, 1952-1959), 4:500 [no.4459].
- ↑ Bennie Brown, "The Library of George Wythe of Williamsburg and Richmond," (unpublished manuscript, 2009, rev. 2023) Microsoft Word document, (on file at Wolf Law Library, College of William & Mary).
- ↑ Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson,
- ↑ LibraryThing, s.v. "Member: George Wythe," accessed on July 10, 2025.