Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman philosopher and poet, best known for his philosophical poem "On the Nature of Things." Very little is known of his life, except that he was a friend of Gaius Memmius (a friend to many Roman orators and poets), and that his poetry was read and possibly edited by the orator Cicero. St. Jerome, the one true scholar of Lucretius's life, maintained that he went insane after drinking a "love philtre," wrote his best work as a result of this insanity, and killed himself afterwards. However, it is most likely that Jerome wrote this to discredit Lucretius's philosophy, which went directly against that of the early Church.

(From the ArcaMax Web site bio of Lucretius.)


Read Lucretius's famous poem, On the Nature of Things.

Can anyone shed any light on the mysterious Lucretius? Personally, I only read a little of his work in my college Latin classes, although I know quite a bit about Cicero. It seems to me that being edited by Cicero might be a bad thing -- he was fairly opinionated and arrogant. What might he have done to the original if that's true?