Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, on the Nature of Things

De rerum natura is one of the greatest attempts to render philosophy into verse. The poem seems to be based closely on epicuruss work on nature, as we can see by comparison with the burnt remains of that work found in herculaneum. Like his contemporary cicero, lucretius works directly with greek texts and attempts to convey ideas from those in a new tongue. He does indeed bring anything to epicureanism beyond his ability to put it into difficult, but beautiful latin hexameter verse.