The Nature of Things by Lucretius – SOLD OUT

This Great Books class is sold out. Please email human@unc.edu with your First & Last name, and phone number to be added to the waitlist.

featuring James J. O’Hara, George L. Paddison Professor of Classics

The epic poem that changed the course of human thought forever

This great poem stands with Virgil’s Aeneid as one of the vital and enduring achievements of Latin literature. Lost for more than a thousand years, its return to circulation in 1417 reintroduced dangerous ideas about the nature and meaning of existence and helped shape the modern world. —W.W. Norton Publishing

Even to modern readers, the sweep of Lucretius’s observations is remarkable. A careful observer of nature, he writes with an innocent curiosity into how things are put together—from the oceans, lands, and stars to a mound of poppy seeds, from the “applause” of a rooster’s wings to the human mind and soul. The poem, then, is about the universe and how human beings ought to live in it. —Johns Hopkins University Press

This famous work by Lucretius is a masterpiece of didactic poetry, and it still stands today as the finest exposition of Epicurean philosophy ever written —Audible.com

“A plague…tests us in unique ways. Only if you can face the invisible bullets all around us, and still keep calm, remain rational, and somehow find it possible to take pleasure in life, have you learned the lesson that [The Nature of Things] set out to teach.” —Stephen Greenblatt, The New Yorker

Meeting Dates: Tuesdays, March 23 and 30

Cost: $35, includes a copy of the book shipped to your home

Register online or call 919.962.1544