Lucretius and the Early Modern

The rediscovery in the fifteenth century of Lucretius'' De rerum natura was a challenge to received ideas. The poem offered a vision of the creation of the universe, the origins and goals of human life, and the formation of the state, all without reference to divine intervention. It has been hailed in Stephen Greenblatt''s best-selling book, The Swerve, as the poem that invented modernity. But how...