A poem explaining that the universe is atoms and void, that the gods take no interest in us, and that death is therefore nothing to fear — written in Latin hexameters in the first century BC to argue someone out of superstition. It survived in a single manuscript found in 1417.
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No other book on this shelf shares a run of seven words with On the Nature of Things that is not a formula. On the evidence of the wording, nothing here quotes it and it quotes nothing here. That is not proof of isolation — this measure cannot cross a translation, so it finds nothing between Virgil and Homer either — but there is no quotation to show.
Of the sixty counted across the shelf, the ones this book names most. A name is counted wherever it is written, whoever is speaking. Each one has a page of its own listing every chapter, in every book, that carries it.
Translator: W. E. Leonard, 1916. Source: Gutenberg 785.
The text here is William Ellery Leonard’s verse translation, 1916, public domain, from Project Gutenberg ebook 785, set unaltered.
The poem breaks off unfinished in the sixth book, in the middle of the plague at Athens. Nothing has been added to round it off.
Public domain, and free to read, copy and quote. Nothing on this page is written by anyone living: the words are the translator’s and the counts are the text’s.