The Swerve--How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt makes the argument that Lucretius’s “De rerum natura” (“On the Nature of Things”), unearthed, after centuries of being lost, in an unknown monastery by the book hunter Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, allowed European civilization to edge away from the religiosity of the Christian Middle Ages and move into a world view that is increasingly secular. Or at the very least it influenced people who made the 'swerve' away from a stalwart belief in the supremacy of the Church to a belief in science.
The book-length Latin poem, written in the 1st century B.C. by the Roman poet, is so remarkably beautiful and gripping, without being any less a didactic work of Epicurean philosophy, one that sets forth a resolutely materialist view of “the nature of things.” According to Lucretius, the gods may exist, but they are utterly indifferent to humankind. Atoms — very much like our modern idea of atoms — are the sole building blocks of the cosmos. Because the atoms occasionally wobble or swerve as they fall through space, collisions result, and from these collisions various complicated, sophisticated agglomerations are created, including people. Souls do not exist, and there is no afterlife. When we eventually die, our atoms disperse and our particular selves utterly disappear. Consequently, it is foolish to fear death since, in effect, we’ll never know we’re dead. Instead, we should simply enjoy this world and relish its pleasures (of which sex is a prominent example). The most truly wise, advice Lucretius makes is for the quiet enjoyment of plain but good food, the conversation of friends, an existence far removed from ambition.