Lucretius
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We know very little about Lucretius' life; one source of information (generally considered unreliable) is St. Jerome, who mentions Lucretius in the Chronica Eusebia. According to Jerome, Lucretius was born in 94 BC, and died at the age of 44. He claims that much of Lucretius's work was written under the influence of drugs, and he died after drinking a love-potion. These claims about Lucretius' life have been discredited for two main reasons: firstly, the Epicurean philosophy expounded by Lucretius sets great store on reason and discourages romantic attachments; and secondly, it seems likely that Jerome, as one of the early church fathers, would have wanted to discredit Lucretius's philosophy, which includes disbelief in any kind of life after death and in any divinity concerned with man's welfare.
Cicero implies in one of his letters to his brother that they had once read Lucretius' poem. This is the last mention of Lucretius until Donatus, in his "Life" of Virgil, while stating that Virgil assumed the toga virilis on October 15, 55 BC, adds "it happened on that very day Lucretius the poet died." If Jerome is accurate about Lucretius' age (44) when he died, then based on other evidence that confirms 55 BC as Lucretius' year of death we can then conclude he was born in 99 BC.
However, the only certain fact of Lucretius' life is that he was either a friend or a client of Gaius Memmius, to whom he dedicated his poem On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura). This poem is also unfinished, although Jerome says that Cicero "amended" it -- which may mean he edited it for its eventual publication.
Lucretius attempts in his poem On the Nature of Things to present a total Epicurean worldview. Ranging from the nature of matter to sex, politics, and death, the poem is encyclopedic, and is considered one of the masterpieces of Latin verse.
His use of the hexameter is very individual and ruggedly distinct from the smooth urbanity of Virgil or Ovid. His use of heterodynes, assonance and oddly syncopated Latin forms create a harsh acoustic. The sustained energy of Lucretius' writing is unparallelled in Latin literature, with the possible exception of parts of Tacitus's Annals, or perhaps books II and IV of the Aeneid.
External links
- Project Gutenberg e-text of On The Nature Of Things (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=785)
- Template:PerseusAuthor
- On the Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature -- Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation, 1841 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/index.htm)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lucretius/)de:Lukrez
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