![]() ![]() ![]() But then Virgil had read him more acutely and more intently than anyone had done: the Georgics as a whole is saturated in Lucretius’ influence. In an eloquent tribute in the second book of the Georgics, Virgil celebrates Lucretius as the man with intellectual grasp, the one who has been able to penetrate, to understand. Ironically, the one person anywhere near his own time who praises him as a philosopher is a poet – Virgil. Yet Cicero, who greatly admired him as a poet, never mentions him as a philosopher, and Seneca is equally neglectful. Lucretius’ single poem, De Rerum Natura, which can be translated ‘On the Nature of Things’ or (as it is here) ‘On the Nature of the Universe’, may well be thought the best philosophy in classical Latin, superior to Cicero or Seneca in intellectual seriousness and sustained power of argument. If we will only accept the truth of the philosophy of Epicurus, and live in accordance with its precepts, we shall be freed from the fear of death – indeed, death will become a matter of indifference to us – and enjoy a life worthy of the gods. ![]() ![]() For he is an evangelist, and his aim is to save us unmistakably, he is a man who has been through a conversion experience, and he now wants to convert us, too. Lucretius is unique among the great poets of the world – and he ranks with the greatest – in having failed completely in his central purpose not only in his own time but ever since. ![]()
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