Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Lucretius on the Nature of Things: Translated From the Latin Into English Verse
Of Titus Lucretius Carus, one of the world's great poets, we know hardly anything. One of the maxims which his beloved Master, Epicurus, impressed upon his followers was, 'Hide thyself, and pass through life unknown;' and so successfully has his pupil followed his advice, that no details of his life and works have come down to us. Although the contemporary of Cicero and Catullus, we know nothing of him beyond the fact, which Mr. Monro thinks certain, that he was born at Rome in 99 B. C., and died at the age of forty-four in 55 B. C. A story is told, on which Tennyson has founded his poem on Lucretius, how, after being driven mad by a love potion administered by a jealous woman, possibly his wife, he committed suicide in the forty-fourth year of his age. The story, originating as it does some three or four centuries later, and otherwise unsupported, may be dismissed. On the same authority we are informed that Cicero edited his unfinished work. We have indeed a letter from the great orator to his brother Quintus, written a few months after the poets death, in which he says (I follow the rendering of Mr. Shuckburgh): 4 'The poems of Lucretius are, as you say, full of brilliant flashes of genius, yet very technical.'
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