Synopses & Reviews
A new series of beautiful hardcover nonfiction classics, with covers designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith
World-changing ideas meet eye-catching design: the best titles of the extraordinarily successful Great Ideas series are now packaged in Coralie Bickford-Smiths distinctive,award-winning covers. Whether on a well-curated shelf or in your back pocket, these timeless works of philosophical, political, and psychological thought are absolute musthaves for book collectors as well as design enthusiasts.
Synopsis
One of a major new Classics series - books that have changed the history of thought, in sumptuous, clothbound hardbacks.
Lucretius' poem On the Nature of Things combines a scientific and philosophical treatise with some of the greatest poetry ever written. With intense moral fervour he demonstrates to humanity that in death there is nothing to fear since the soul is mortal, and the world and everything in it is governed by the mechanical laws of nature and not by gods; and that by believing this men can live in peace of mind and happiness. He bases this on the atomic theory expounded by the Greek philosopher Epicurus, and continues with an examination of sensation, sex, cosmology, meteorology, and geology, all of these subjects made more attractive by the poetry with which he illustrates them.
About the Author
Titus LUCRETIUS Carus (died c. 50 BC) was an Epicurean poet writing in the middle years of the first century BC. His six-book Latin hexameter poem De rerum natura survives virtually intact, although it is disputed whether he lived to complete it.
A. E. STALLINGS (editor/translator) studied classics at the University of Georgia and the University of Oxford. Her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry series and has received numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize, and the Frederick Bock Prize. Her first poetry collection, Archaic Smile, was awarded the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award by judge Dana Gioia. Stallings lives in Athens, Greece.
RICHARD JENKYNS (introducer) is a professor of classics at the University of Oxford, a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, and the author of The Victorians and Ancient Greece and Dignity and Decadence: Some Classical Aspects of Victorian Art and Architecture.