But this concurrence with the stream of speculation in. the present day is really the least of his permanent claims on the attention of the world. His position both among ancient and modern writers is unique. No one else combines in the same degree the contemplative enthusiasm of a philosopher, the earnest purpose of a reformer and moral teacher, and the profound pathos and sense of beauty of a great poet. He stands alone among his countrymen as much in the ardour with which he observes and reasons on the processes of nature as in the elevation of feeling with which he recognizes the majesty of her laws, and the vivid sympathy with which he interprets the manifold variety of her life. It would have been an instructive study to have traced some connexion between his personal circumstances and the intellectual and moral position which he holds. We naturally ask what influence of teachers in Rome or Athens first attracted him to this study and observation of natural phenomena, what early impressions or experience gave so sombre a colouring to his view of life, how far the delight, so strange in an ancient Roman, which he seems to find in a kind of recluse communion with nature, and the spirit of pathetic or indignant satire in which he treats the more violent phases of passion and the more extravagant modes of luxury, was a recoil from the fascination of pleasures in which his contemporaries and equals freely indulged. We should like also to know how far the serene heights which he professed to have attained procured him exemption from or alleviation of the actual sorrows of life. But such questions, suggested by the strong interest which the impress of personal feeling and character stamped on the poem awakens in the reader, can only be raised; there are no ascertained facts by which they can be settled. There is no ancient poet, with the exception of Homer, of whose history so little is positively known. Unlike Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus, and nearly all the great Roman writers, he is absolutely silent on the subject of his own position and fortunes. Nor is this silence compensated by any personal reference to him in the works of his two eminent contemporaries by whom the social life of their age is so amply illustrated, Cicero and Catullus, although it is certain that each of them read his poem almost immediately after it was given to the world. The great poets of the following ages were influenced by his genius, but they tell us nothing as to his career. So consistently does he seem to have followed the maxim of his master, “Pass through life unnoticed,” and to have realized, in the midst of the excited political, intellectual, and social life of the last years of the republic, the ideal of those “who do not wish to be known even while living.”

Our sole information concerning his life is found in the brief summary of Jerome, written more than four centuries after the poet’s death. Scholars are now agreed that in these summaries, added to his translation of the Eusebian Chronicle, Jerome followed, often carelessly and inaccurately, the accounts contained in the lost work of Suetonius De Kiris Ill·ustribus. But that work was written about two centuries after the death of Lucretius; and, although it is likely that Suetonius used the information transmitted by earlier grammarians, there is nothing to guide us to the original sources from which the tradition concerning the life of Lucretius was derived. The strange character of the story which has been transmitted to us, and the want of any support to it from external evidence, oblige us to receive it with a certain reserve.

According to this account the poet was born in the year 94 B.c.; he became mad (“in furorem versus”) in consequence of the administration of a love-philtre; and after composing several books in his lucid intervals, which were subsequently corrected by Cicero, he died by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of his age. The statement of Donatus in his life of Virgil, a work also based on the lost work of Suetonius, that Lucretius died on the 15th of October 55 b.c., the same day on which Virgil assumed the toga virHis i is inconsistent either with the date assigned for the poet’s birth or with the age at which he is said to have died. A single mention of the poem (which from the condition in which it has reached us may be assumed to have been published posthumously) in a letter of Cicero’s, written early in 54 b.c., is confirmatory of the date given by Donatus as that of the poet’s death. Similar errors in chronology are common in the summaries of Jerome; and, where there is an inconsistency between the date assigned for the birth of any author and the age at which he is said to have died (as, for instance, in the case of Catullus), there are grounds for believing that the error lies in the first date. Taking the statements of Donatus and of Jerome together, we may consider it probable that Lucretius died in the October of 55 b.c., in the forty-fourth year of his age, and that he was born either late in the year 99 b.c. or early in the year 98 b.c. He would thus be about seven years younger than Cicero, a year or two younger than Julius Caesar, about the same age as Memmius, to whom the poem is dedicated, and about fifteen years older than Catullus and Calvus, the younger poets of his generation, from whom he is widely separated both by his more archaic style and rhythm and by the greater seriousness of his art and the more earnest dignity of his character. The other statements of Jerome have been questioned or disbelieved on the ground of their intrinsic improbability. They have been regarded as a fiction invented in a later time by the enemies of Epicureanism, with the view of discrediting the most powerful work ever produced by any disciple of that sect. It is more in conformity with ancient credulity than with modern science to attribute a permanent tendency to derangement to the accidental administration of any drug, however potent. A work characterized by such strength, consistency, and continuity of thought is not likely to have been composed “per intervalla insaniae.” Donatus, in mentioning the poet’s death, gives no hint of the act of suicide. The poets of the Augustan age, who were deeply interested both in his philosophy and his poetry, are entirely silent about the tragical story of his life, Cicero, by his professed antagonism to the doctrines of Epicurus, by his inadequate appreciation of Lucretius himself, and by the indifference which he shows to other contemporary poets, seems to have been neither fitted for the task of correcting the unfinished work of a writer whose genius was so distinct from his own, nor likely to have cordially undertaken such a task.

Yet these considerations do not lead to the absolute rejection of the story as a pure invention of a hostile and uncritical age. The evidence afforded by the poem rather leads to the conclusion that the tradition contains some germ of fact. We need not attach any importance to the supposed efficacy of the love-philtre in producing mental alienation, nor are we called upon to think of Lucretius as one liable to recurring fits of insanity, in the ordinary sense of the word. But it is remarkable, as was first observed by Mr Munro, his English editor, that in more than one passage of his poem he writes with extraordinary vividness of the impression produced both by dreams and by waking visions. It is true that the philosophy of Epicurus put great stress on these, as affording the explanation of the origin of supernatural beliefs. But the insistence with which Lucretius returns to the subject, and the horror with which he recalls the effects of such abnormal phenomena, suggest the inference that he himself may have been liable to such hallucinations, which are said to be consistent with perfect sanity, though they may be the precursors either of madness or of a state of despair and melancholy which often ends in suicide. Other passages in his poem, as, for instance, the lines

“Nos agere hoc autem, et naturam quaerere rerum, Semper et inventam patriis exponere chartis,” where he describes himself as ever engaged, even in his dreams, on his task of inquiry and composition, produce the impression of an unrelieved strain of mind and feeling, which may have ended in some extreme reaction of spirit, or in some failure of intellectual power, from the consciousness of which he may, in accordance with examples which he himself quotes, have taken refuge in suicide. But the strongest confirmation of the existence of some germ of fact in the tradition is found in the unfinished condition in which the poem has reached us. The subject appears indeed to have been fully treated in accordance with the plan sketched out in the introduction to the first book. But that book is the only one which is finished in style and in the arrangement of its matter. In all the others, and especially in the last three, the continuity of the argument is frequently broken by passages which must have been inserted after the first draft of the arguments was written out. Thus, for instance, in his account of the transition from savage to civilized life, he assumes at v. 1011 the discovery of the use of skins, fire, <fcc., and the first beginning of civil society, and proceeds at 1028 to explain the origin of language, and then again returns, from 1090 to 1160, to speculate upon the first use of fire and the earliest stages of political life. These breaks in the continuity of the argument show what might also be inferred from frequent repetitions of lines which have appeared earlier in the poem, and from the rough workmanship of passages in the later books, that the poem could not have received the final revision of the author, and must have been given to the world by some editor after his death. Nor is there any great difficulty in believing that that editor was Cicero. It is not necessary to press the meaning of the word “emendavit” as applied to the task fulfilled by him. Cicero certainly was incapable of “improving” any of the poetry of Lucretius, and the slight mention which he makes of the poem in a letter to his brother (“the poem of Lucretius is, as you describe it, a work not of much genius but of much art”) seems to imply that he was not very capable of appreciating it. But other motives, besides appreciation of the poet’s genius or sympathy with his doctrines, may have induced him to undertake a task which has not been very successfully performed. It may be remarked further that scepticism as to statements about their lives is less warranted in the case of the great Roman than of the great Greek writers, from the fact that the work of criticism went on at Rome contemporaneously with the progress of original creation, and that the line of grammarians and commentators by whom these statements were transmitted continued unbroken almost from the first beginning of Latin literature.

We find in the instance of nearly all the other Latin poets, even of the most obscure among them, that their birthplace has been recorded, and it has often been remarked that Latin poetry was an Italian and provincial rather than a purely Roman product. From the absence of any claim on the part of any other district of Italy to the honour of having given birth to Lucretius it is inferred that he was an exception to the rule, and was of purely Roman origin. No writer certainly is more purely Roman in personal character and in strength of understanding. He seems to speak of Rome as his native state in such expressions as “patriai tempore iniquo,” “patrii sermonis egestas,” and “patriis chartis.” His silence on the subject of Roman greatness and glory as contrasted with the prominence of these subjects in the poetry of men of provincial birth such as Ennius, Virgil, and Horace, may be explained by the principle that the familiarity of long-inherited traditions had made the subject one of less wonder and novelty to him. The Lucretian gens to which he belonged was one of the oldest of the great Roman houses, nor do we hear of the name, as we do of other great family names, as being diffused over other parts of Italy, or as designating men of obscure or servile origin. It seems from the evidence of the name, confirmed by the tone in which he writes, as probable as any such inference can be that Lucretius was a member of the Roman aristocracy, belonging either to a senatorian or to one of the great equestrian families, living in easy circumstances, and familiar with the spectacle of luxury and artistic enjoyment which the great houses of Rome and the great country houses in the most beautiful parts of Italy presented. If the Roman aristocracy of his time had lost much of the virtue and of the governing qualities of their ancestors, they showed in the last years before the establishment of monarchy a taste for intellectual culture which might have made Rome as great in literature as in arms and law, if the republic could have continued. The discussions which Cicero puts in the mouth of Velleius, Cotta, <fcc., indicate the new taste for philosophy developed among members of the governing class during the youth of Lucretius; and we hear of eminent Greek teachers of the Epicurean sect being settled at Rome at the same time, and living on terms of intimacy with them. The inference that Lucretius belonged to this class, and shared in the liberal culture which it received, is confirmed by the tone in which he addresses Memmius, a man of an eminent senatorian family, and of considerable oratorical and poetical accomplishment, to whom the poem is dedicated. His tone to Memmius is quite unlike that in which Virgil or even Horace addresses Maecenas. He addresses him as an equal; he expresses sympathy with the prominent part his friend played in public life, and admiration for his varied accomplishment, but on his own subject claims to speak to him in the tones of authority.

Although our conception of the poet’s life and circumstances is necessarily vague and meagre, yet his personal force is so remarkable and so vividly impressed on his poem, and his language bears so unmistakably the stamp of sincerity, that we seem able to form a consistent idea of his tastes and habits, his sympathies and convictions, his moral and emotional nature. If we know nothing of the particular experience which determined his passionate adherence to the Epicurean creed and his attitude of spiritual and social isolation from the ordinary course of Roman life and belief, we can at least say that the choice of a contemplative life was not the result of indifference to the fate of the world, or of any natural coldness or even calmness of temperament. In some of his most powerful poetry, as in the opening lines of the second and of the third books, we can mark the strong recoil of a humane and sensitive spirit from the horrors of the reign of terror which he witnessed in his youth, and from the anarchy and confusion which prevailed at Rome during the later years of his life; while his vivid realization of the pains and disappointments of passion, of the unsatisfying nature of all violent emotion, and of the restlessness and weariness of life which excessive luxury entails, suggest at least the inference that he had not been through his whole career so much estranged from the social life of his day as he seems to have been in his later years. Passages in his poem attest his familiarity with the pomp and luxury of city life, with the attractions of the public games, and with the pageantry of great military spectacles. But much the greater mass of the illustrations of his philosophy scattered through the poem indicate that, while engaged in its composition, and in the studies preparatory to it, he must have lived in the country or by the sea-shore, and that he must have passed much of his time in the open air, exercising at once the keen observation of a naturalist and the contemplative vision of a poet. He shows a fellow feeling with the habits and moods of the animals associated with human toil and adventure. He seems to have found a pleasure, more congenial to the modern than to the ancient temperament, in ascending mountains or wandering among their solitudes (vi. 469, iv. 575). References to companionship in these wanderings, and the well-known description of the charm of a rustic meal (ii. 29) enjoyed with comrades amid beautiful scenery and in fine weather, speak of kindly sociality rather than of any austere separation from his fellows.

Other expressions in his poem (e.g., iii. 10, <fcc.) imply that he was an ardent student of books, as well as a sympathetic observer of outward phenomena. Foremost among these were the writings of his master Epicurus; but he had also an intimate knowledge and appreciation of the philosophical poem of Empedocles, and at least an acquaintance with the works of Democritus, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Plato, and the Stoical writers. Of other Greek prose writers he knew Thucydides and Hippocrates; while of the poets he expresses in more than one passage the highest admiration of Homer, whom he has imitated in several places. Next to Homer Euripides is most frequently reproduced by him. There is an evident struggle between the impulses of his imaginative temperament, prompting him to recognize the supremacy of the great masters in art and poetry, and the influence of the teaching of Epicurus, in accordance with which the old poets and painters of Greece are condemned as the authors and propagators of false ideas both of nature and the gods. But his poetical sympathy was not limited to the poets of Greece. For his own countryman Ennius he expresses an affectionate admiration; and he imitates his language, his rhythm, and his manner in many places. The fragments of the old tragedian Pacuvius and of the satirist Lucilius show that Lucretius had made use of their expressions and materials. In his studies he was attracted by the older writers, both Greek and Roman, in whose masculine temperament and understanding he recognized an affinity with his own. He had a most enthusiastic admiration foι genius, especially when exercised in the investigation and discovery of truth. His devotion to Epicurus seems at first sight more difficult to explain than his enthusiasm for Empedocles or Ennius. Probably he found in his calmness of temperament, in his natural or acquired indifference to all violent emotion, even...