The goddess of love doesn’t usually inspire disquisitions on atoms. For the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, however, alma Venus, or “sweet Venus,” presided over the tiniest twitches in the fabric of matter. He witnessed her tutelage in everything from laundry drying on a clothesline to the heavings of volcanoes. For him, as a good Epicurean, she represented supreme pleasure, or voluptas, which means not only enjoyment, both physical and mental, but freedom from pain.

Contrary to popular belief, the Epicurean is no unfettered voluptuary. For if the final good in a human life is tranquillity and inner peace, then desire, which spurs us to satisfy our impulses at every turn, is actually the fiercest enemy of pleasure. This conviction leads to the surprising anomaly that the most devout Epicurean is often, at one and the same time, the most thoroughgoing ascetic: Pleasure deferred is pleasure maximized.

Of Lucretius himself we know almost nothing. He was probably born around 98 B.C.E. but the date of his death remains a mystery; he was a contemporary of Catullus as well as of Cicero, who edited his great unfinished poem, “On the Nature of Things” (De rerum natura). He was learned; his allusions to writings in both Greek and Latin make that abundantly plain. He was an astute observer, especially of natural phenomena, which he depicted with loving precision.

His scientific bent sharpened his Latin, which is tightly wrought and brought to a high burnish. I suspect, too, that he was a bit of an intellectual bully; he has no patience for human foibles. When he lambasts our common frailty – railing, say, against our fear of death – his rationalism, though compelling, casts a chill. A deeply religious man who detested official religion, he saw reality, the way things are in themselves, as the ultimate source of wonder. His considerable piety was reserved for the actual.

Lucretius based his masterpiece on a Greek poem of the same title by the pre-Socratic thinker Empedocles, one of several legendary sages who committed their cosmological theories to verse. If a physicist or cosmologist today – a Steven Weinberg or Stephen Hawking – were to publish his findings in dactylic hexameter, we might be amused and even impressed, but we would also wonder about his mental balance. But Lucretius stood in an ancient tradition in which the roles of the poet, the scientist, and the philosopher were not strictly demarcated. (The influential, if tarnished, philosopher Martin Heidegger tried strenuously to revive this connection but – perhaps happily for readers of poetry – never succeeded.)

Why read a long poem that is not only written in difficult Latin but is so drastically wrong? Can we still learn anything about “the nature of things” from Lucretius, with his ponderous materialism, his unsubtle atomism? I think we can.

There is first of all the verse itself. Lucretius has been often, and well, translated, so the Latin isn’t a major obstacle. My favorite version is that by the English poet C.H. Sisson, who renders the title “The Poem on Nature” (Routledge Books, 210 pages, $16.95). Sisson, who died in 2003, was not well known here but was one of the strongest poets of the past half-century; he wrote a tough, stripped, almost bony verse at once blunt and highly musical, and he was a superb translator (his version of Dante is, in my opinion, the best available in English). Sisson’s translation is plain, and I like that about it. The plainness captures something of Lucretius’s own qualities – in particular, the way his Latin hugs the things it evokes, as though even his syllables were composed of those indestructible atoms he finds in everything from the winds of heaven to the human soul. When you come upon a line like “frondiferasque domos avium camposque virentis” (“in the birds’ leafy recesses, on the verdescent plains,” in Sisson’s version) and sound it out in the original, you seem to brush up against the living things themselves. Lucretius loves to illustrate abstruse notions by homely images. In combating the notion that anything can come from nothing he begins with a picture of sheep:

So the well-fleshed herds sink down in the happy grass
And the udders swell to bursting with each day’s milk;
So the lambs are driven to dance on their tottering legs
And play as if mothers’ milk had turned their brains.
Nothing indeed is lost of perceptible things.
One thing is made of another, and nature allows
No new creation except at the price of death.

Again, in trying to convince his reader that particles of matter exist too small to be seen, he adduces a sequence of everyday observations:

Then observe, if you hang clothes out where the waves are breaking,
They get wet, just as they dry if they’re spread in the sun. Yet nobody ever saw how the damp gets into them Or how it gets out when the weather is hot. It follows that moisture must be composed of particles So small it is not possible they should be seen. In the same way, if you wear a ring on your finger, After many years it will wear perceptibly thin; A drip will hollow a stone; the blade of a plough In time will secretly wear away in the fields; And paving-stones grow smooth and thin with crowds Who tread on them year by year.

Though immensely sophisticated, Lucretius is something of a village explainer; he considers nothing to be beyond the reach of elucidation. In his six books, he tackles everything from magnets to elephantiasis to the dynamics of lightning. His outlook is not comforting: Matter, of which all is composed, is indestructible, but we are not, and there is no immortality; all goes back into the restless crucible of matter to reappear on the “shores of light.”

This should be depressing but somehow isn’t, perhaps because Lucretius is himself so bluff and unsparing. Here he is on the fear of death:

Yet you hesitate and think it hard to die,
You who are half-dead while you are still alive?
Who pass the larger part of your life in sleep?
Who snore when you are awake and never stop dreaming?
Whose mind is exacerbated by pointless terrors?
Who do not know what is wrong with you, as often as not?

Lucretius wrote in a time of troubles, like the present. He knew boredom and futility and was, in his own way, as jittery as Catullus:

A man may rush out of a magnificent palace
Because he is sick of the place, then go straight back
Because he feels no better anywhere else.
He drives like mad to reach his country house
As if he were going there to put out a fire
And yawns immediately he reaches the door;
Or falls into heavy sleep, to try to forget.

For all his genius as a poet, Lucretius was mistaken about most aspects of “nature.” Yet his inaccuracy neither vitiates nor dates his mighty work. The freshness of his eye, at once unforgiving and voluptuous, ensures that.