1. Life.
LUCRETIUS.
Very little is known of his life. The subiect of his poem prevented him from telling his own history as Catullus, Horace, and Ovid have done, and his contemporaries seldom refer to him. The name Lucretius suggests that he was descended from one of the most ancient patrician houses of Rome, famous in the early annals of the Republic. He was evidently a man of wealth and position, but he deliberately chose the life of contemplation, and lived apart from the ambitions and follies of his day. Donatus, in his life of Vergil, tells us that Lucretius died on the day on which Vergil assumed the toga virilis, Oct. 15, 55 B.C.
2. Works.
The De Rerum Natura, a didactic poem in hexameter verse in six Books. The poem was left unfinished at his death, and Munro supports the tradition that Cicero both corrected it and superintended its publication. The object of the poem is to deliver men from the fear of death and the terrors of superstition by the new knowledge of Nature:
Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.
This terror of the soul, therefore, and this darkness must be dispelled, not by the rays of the sun or the bright shafts of day, but by the outward aspect and harmonious plan of nature.—S.
The source of these terrors is traced to the general ignorance of certain facts in Nature—ignorance, namely, of the constitution and condition of our minds and bodies, of the means by which the world came into existence and is still maintained, and, lastly, of the causes of many natural phenomena. Thus: