C. Suetonius Tranquillus, The Lives of the Caesars
Alexander Thomson, Ed.

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THE information to be derived from ancient writers regarding the personal history of LUCRETIUS is very scanty in amount and somewhat suspicious in character. That he was a Roman, or at least an Italian, by birth, may be inferred from his own words, for he twice speaks of the Latin language as his native tongue. The Eusebian Chronicle fixes B. C. 95 as the date of his birth, adding that he was driven mad by a love potion, that during his lucid intervals he composed several works which were revised by Cicero, and that he perished by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of his age, that is, B.C. 52 or 5i. Donatus, -on the contrary, affirms that his death happened in B. C. 55, on the very day on which Virgil assumed the toga virilis, an event which, in the Eusebian Chronicle, is placed two years later. From what source the tale about the philtre may have been derived we know not. Pomponius Sabinus, in a note on the third Georgic, states that the drug employed was hippomanes, while later writers, twisting a passage in the works of St. Jerome to their own views, have declared that the potion was administered by his own wife Lucilia, in order that she might inspire him with more deep and fervent affection. It has been ingeniously conjectured that the whole story was an invention of some enemy of the Epicureans, who conceived that such an end would be peculiarly appropriate for one who so boldly professed and so zealously advocated the principles of that philosophy.

The work which has immortalized the name of Lucretius, and which, happily, has been preserved entire, is a philosophical didactic poem, divided into six books extending to upwards of seven thousand four hundred lines, addressed to C. Memmius Gemellus, who was praetor in B. C. 58. It is entitled De Rerum Natura, and contains a development of the physical and ethical doctrines of Epicurus. Notwithstanding the nature of the subject, which gave the poet little opportunity for those descripions of the passions and the feelings which generally form the chief charm in poetry, Lucretius has succeeded in imparting -to his didactic and philosophical work much of the real spirit of poetry; and if he had chosen a subject which would have afforded him greater scope for the exercise of his powers, he might have been ranked among the first of poets. Even in the work which has come down to us, we find many passages which are not equalled by the best lines of any Latin poet, and which, for vigour of conception and splendour of diction, will bear a comparison with the best efforts of the poets of any age and country. In no writer does the Latin language display its majesty and stately grandeur so effectively as in Lucretius. There is a power and an energy in his descriptions which we rarely meet with in the Latin poets; and no one who has read his invocation to Venus at the beginning of the poem, or his beautiful picture of the busy pursuits of men at the commencement of the second book, or the progress of the arts and sciences in the fifth, or his description o" the plague which devastated Athens during the Peloponnesian war at the close of the sixth, can refuse to allow Lucretius a high rank among the poets of antiquity.

The object of Lucretius was to inculcate the great doctrine of Epicurus, so frequently misunderstood and misrepresented, that it is the great object of man's life to increase to the utmost his pleasures, and to diminish to the utmost his pains; and since the happiness of man kind was chiefly prevented in his opinion by two things, superstition or a slavish fear of the gods and a dread of death, he endeavours to show that the gods take no interest in and exercise no control over the affairs of mankind, and that the soul is material and perishes with the body. In the first three books he develops the Epicurean tenets respecting the formation of all things from atoms which existed from all eternity, and also maintains the materiality of the soul, which he supposes to be compounded of different kinds of air inhaled from the atmosphere; in the fourth book he inquires into the origin of sense and perception, and the nature and origin of dreams, which leads to a long digression on the follies and miseries of unlawful love; in the fifth he gives an account of the origin and laws of the world, and describes the gradual progress of mankind from a state of nature to civilisation, as well as the origin and progress of the arts and sciences; and in the sixth he attempts to account for a number of extraordinary phenomena, such as waterspouts, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, and pestilential diseases.

The poetry of Lucretius does not appear to have been highly estimated by the majority of his countrymen. Ovid certainly speaks of it in the highest terms; but Quintilian mentions him rather slightingly; and Cicero does not praise him without considerable reservation. The nature of his subject, and the little taste which the Romans in general manifested for speculations like those of Lucretius, may perhaps account for his poetry being estimated below its real merits.