Lucretius

Roman Epicurean philosopher and poet who wrote De Rerum Natura — the most sustained and beautiful Latin philosophical poem — presenting Epicurean atomism as a liberation from the fear of gods and death.

Everything is composed of atoms and void; the soul is material and mortal; the gods do not intervene in human affairs; death is not to be feared because there is no afterlife. Lucretius added the clinamen — the random swerve of atoms — to account for free will and novelty.