comparative obscurity of the earlier age we pass into a full blaze of
daylight. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Rome of Cicero is
as familiar to modern English readers as the London of Queen Anne, to
readers in modern France as the Paris of Louis Quatorze. We can still
follow with unabated interest the daily fluctuations of its politics, the
current gossip and scandal of its society, the passing fashions of
domestic life as revealed in private correspondence or the disclosures of
the law courts. Yet in the very centre of this brilliantly lighted world,
one of its most remarkable figures is veiled in almost complete darkness.
The poem of Lucretius, _On the Nature of Things_, though it not only
revealed a profound and extraordinary genius, but marked an entirely new
technical level in Latin poetry, stole into the world all but unnoticed;
and of its author's life, though a pure Roman of one of the great
governing families, only one or two doubtful and isolated facts could be
recovered by the curiosity of later commentators. The single sentence in
St. Jerome's _Chronicle_ which practically sums up the whole of our
information runs as follows, under the year 94 B.C:--

_Titus Lucretius poeta nascitur, posted amatorio poculo in furorem versus
cum aliquot libros per intervalla insaniae conscripsisset quos postea
Cicero emendavit, propria se manu interfecit anno aetatis xliiii._

Brief and straightforward as the sentence is, every clause in it has
given rise to volumes of controversy. Was Lucretius born in the year
named, or is another tradition correct, which, connecting his death with
a particular event in the youth of Virgil, makes him either be born a few
years earlier or die a few years younger? Did he ever, whether from a
poisonous philtre or otherwise, lose his reason? and can a poem which
ranks among the great masterpieces of genius have been built up into its
stately fabric--for this is not a question of brief lyrics like those of