LUCRETILIS MONS, a mountain in Sabine territory, men tioned by Horace as visible from his farm, generally (and rightly) identified with Monte Gennaro, a limestone peak 4,160 ft. high. Excavations on the site of Horace's farm have led to the dis covery of the building itself, with baths added at a later date. LUCRETIUS [TITUS LUCRETIUS CARUS] (C. 98-55 B•C.) one of the greatest of Roman poets, is biographically one of the most obscure. All that we know of his life is contained in the following notices: 1. Jerome's Chronica Eusebii has under the year 94 B.C. the entry: "Titus Lucretius the poet is born. After wards he was rendered insane by a love potion and, after writing, in the intervals of insanity, some books, which Cicero afterwards emended, he killed himself by his own hand in the 43rd year of his age." 2. Donatus, Vita V ergilii, 6, says that Lucretius died on the day that Virgil assumed the toga virilis, and that the consuls for the year were the same as in the year of Virgil's birth, i.e., M. Licinius Crassus and Cn. Pompeius Magnus, consuls in 7o and in 55 B.C. 3. Cicero Ad Quintum fratrem II. IX. [XI.] , a letter written in Feb. 54 B.C., says "The poems of Lucretius are as you say in your letter—they show many gleams of genius, yet also much art. But more of this when you come." The statement of Donatus coupled with Cicero's letter seems to make it pretty certain that Lucretius died in 55 B.C. To bring Jerome's statement into harmony with Donatus we must alter either "94" or, what is far more'probable, "43rd." The statement that Cicero "emended" the poems need mean no more than that he, as we should say, "saw them through the press," and in view of the interest which Cicero had in the poems, as shown by the letter to his brother, that seems natural enough. The statements of Jerome have been questioned or disbelieved on the grounds of their intrinsic improbability. They have been regarded as a fiction invented later by the enemies of Epicureanism with the view of discrediting the most powerful work ever produced by any disciple of that sect.
The story of insanity which might easily arise from such a chance phrase as docti furor arduus Lucreti (Statius; Si/v. ii. 7, 76), is incapable either of proof or disproof, and is irrelevant. His great didactic epic De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) takes its title from the Greek (De Natura) which was the title of didactic epics by Xenophanes of Colophon, Parmenides of Elea, Empedocles of Agrigentum, as also of the chief prose work of Epicurus, whose teaching it is the purpose of the poem of Lucretius to expound. In briefest outline the doc trine of Epicurus, based on the atomic theory of Democritus of Abdera, is as follows. I. Nothing is created out of nothing (Epicur. Ad Herod. 38, Lucr. i. 159-214). The universe does not change (Epicur. Ad Herod. 39, Lucr. i. 67o, ii. 297 sqq. 304 sqq.). The universe is infinite (Epicur. Ad Herod. 41, Lucr. 958 sqq.). The universe is made up of bodies corpora) and space or void (Toros, Kev6v, x6pa, &vac/As locus, inane, spatium, intactile: cf. Lucr. i. 454, Tactus corporibus cunctis, intactus inani: Epicur. Ad Herod. 39-4o, Lucr. i. 419 sqq.). The existence of bodies is witnessed by the senses, the existence of space is a necessary postulate to explain the possibility of motion and to account for the difference in the specific gravity of different solid bodies: Lucr. i. 422, Corpus enim per se communis dedicat esse Sensus; . . . Turn porro locus et spatium, quod inane vocamus, Si nullurn foret, hand usquam sita corpora possent Esse neque omnino quoquam diversa meare. The bodies (aroma, primordia), which are of different shapes (Lucr. ii. 478 seq.), are and always have been unceasingly in motion (Epicur. Ad Herod. 42-43, Lucr. ii. 8o-332), all moving with equal velocity, and it is by their collisions, due to an inherent swerve clinamen, Lucr. ii. 216-293) that so-called solid bodies are formed.