Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas Mother of Aeneas’ race, pleasure of men and gods
De Rerum Natura
A complete line-for-line English translation of Lucretius’ poem on the Epicurean universe: every one of its 7,412 English lines keyed one-to-one to its Latin line, in plain, exact free verse that keeps his terms rigid and his repetitions verbatim.
Each book opens with a translator’s commentary and closes with its notes. In the margin of the English stands what Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in the margin of the copy he made of the poem with his own hand, about 1497, now Vatican MS Ross. 884: his notes on the swerve and the free mind, his Greek, his marks, each linked to its folio.
Read it
Start anywhere
The poem argues from its first line to its last, but it can be entered at any of its set pieces. Book 1 opens with the hymn to Venus and the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and proves that nothing comes from nothing; Book 2 is the swerve, and the motes in the sunbeam; Book 3 argues that death is nothing to us; Book 4 is the images, the senses, and the diatribe against love; Book 5 is the birth of the world and the history of mankind from the first fire to the first song; Book 6 is thunder, the magnet, and the plague at Athens, on which the poem breaks off.
What’s inside
Line for line
One English line per Latin line, same numbering, so the two can be read side by side; the lacunae are left open, never supplied.
The terms kept rigid
Primordia is first-beginnings every time, inane is void, religio is religion, anima is spirit and never soul; the word atom never appears, because Lucretius never uses it.
The refrains kept
Where the Latin repeats a line, the English repeats its own earlier line word for word.
Annotated
465 notes on the Latin, the doctrine, the text and the translation choices, as endnotes to each book, and a translator’s commentary on every book.
Machiavelli’s margin
Every mark and note in his autograph copy, read from the Vatican Library’s images, transcribed, translated and set beside the line it stands against.
Illustrated
Thirteen pictures in the manner of the wall paintings of Lucretius’ own century, at the passages they show, and a Florentine panel on the margin page.
About the text
The Latin is the Perseus Digital Library’s text, which keeps the standard numbering of Munro and Bailey and follows Munro in its spelling and some of its readings; the translation follows the printed text throughout, keeps the printed order where lines are transposed, and marks the twenty places where the text is lost rather than supplying them. The English translation is original to this project. The source, the build pipeline, and the full record of how each segment was drafted, checked and reviewed live in the repository.
The translation itself is dedicated to the public domain under CC0: copy it, print it, teach it, remix it, no permission needed. The notes, commentary, and the transcription and English of the margin are © 2026 Chris Duffy under CC BY 4.0. The images of Ross. 884 are the Vatican Library’s and are not reproduced here; every entry links to its page on DigiVatLib.
The illustrations are AI-generated (Google Gemini) in the manner of Pompeian wall painting. They are modern pictures of the poem’s scenes, not reproductions of ancient paintings, and the cracks and wear in them are invented.
This is the third of the project’s line-for-line translations. The Iliad is at wrath-sing-goddess.com and the Odyssey at theclaudyssey.com.