How The Complete Essays drew on On the Nature of Things
A documented line of influence: Michel de Montaigne demonstrably engaged Lucretius’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
On the Nature of Things
Lucretius · c. 55 BCE
Ancient RomeThe influenced
The Complete Essays
Michel de Montaigne · 1580
RenaissanceRelevance
9/10
On The Complete Essays’s page
- Lucretius is woven through the Essays — quoted nearly a hundred times, and never more than where Montaigne confronts death and doubt
- Montaigne's surviving copy of On the Nature of Things, annotated in his own hand, is a direct window into how hard he read it
- Reading Lucretius first sharpens "To philosophise is to learn to die" and the "Apology for Raymond Sebond" — you'll hear the source under Montaigne's voice
On On the Nature of Things’s page
- One of Montaigne's deepest sources — the Essays quote Lucretius nearly a hundred times
- His own heavily annotated copy of the De rerum natura survives, finished, by his own hand, on 16 October 1564
- The Lucretian thread runs thickest where Montaigne is most himself — "To philosophise is to learn to die" and the "Apology for Raymond Sebond"