Biography Essay

"When a single day brings the world to destruction, only then will the poetry of the sublime Lucretius pass away." This judgment by the Roman poet Ovid, written in the generation after Lucretius's death, has been echoed by such writers as Voltaire and George Santayana; the author of De Rerum Natura holds a place in world literature as one of the great philosopher-poets. Of the life of Titus Lucretius Carus scholars know less, perhaps, than in the case of any other Roman poet. The dates assigned to his birth and death are based primarily on a brief notice in a chronicle compiled by St. Jerome in the fourth century A.D., placing Lucretius's birth in 94/93 B.C. and his death in his forty-fourth year. Jerome makes two other claims about Lucretius's life, both of which have plagued scholars: first, that after he had been driven to...