Three of the Wythe Collection sources ( Dean's Memo, Brown's Bibliography and George Wythe's Library on LibraryThing) include the 1714 edition of Of the Nature of Things. 8vo." and gave it to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Thomas Jefferson listed it in his inventory of Wythe's Library as "Lucretius by Creech. Wythe" on the title page of volume one (the doctor's name is stamped). Library in Colonial Williamsburg contains the inscription "Of Doctor James Blair's executor bought by G. Wythe definitely owned this title-a copy of the 1714 edition at the John D. 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." Evidence for Inclusion in Wythe's Library "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." Lucretius wrote with a clear and organizational purpose even " 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." Each book has a prologue and a conclusion. ĭe Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, the only known work of Lucretius, is a poem in six books. Little is known about Lucretius, although various contemporary authors have written about his life. Titus Lucretius Carus (c.99 – c.55 BCE), known simply as Lucretius, was a Roman poet who believed in Epicurean philosophy: a "strictly mechanistic account of all phenoma" that atoms make up everything in the world, from physical objects to the mind to the soul. Bookplate of the Earls of Macclesfield, front pastedown.
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