was the most remarkable of the Roman writers, as he united the precision of the philosopher to the fire and fancy of the poet; and, while he seems to have had no perfect model among the Greeks, has left a production unrivalled, (perhaps not to be rivalled,) by any of the same kind in later ages.
Of the life of Lucretius very little is known: He lived at a period abounding with great political actors, and full of portentous events—a period when every bosom was agitated with terror or hope, and when it must have been the chief study of a prudent man, especially if a votary of philosophy and the Muses, to hide himself as much as possible amid the shades. The year of his birth is uncertain. According to the chronicle of Eusebius, he was born in 658, being thus nine years younger than Cicero, and two or three younger than Cæsar. To judge from his style, he might be supposed older than either: but this, as appears from the example of Sallust, is no certain test, as his archaisms may have arisen from the imitation of ancient writers; and we know that he was a fond admirer of Ennius.
A taste for Greek philosophy had been excited at Rome for a considerable time before this era, and Lucretius was sent, with other young Romans of rank, to study at Athens. The different schools of philosophy in that city seem, about this period, to have been frequented according as they received a temporary fashion from the comparative abilities of the professors who presided in them. Cicero, for example, who had attended the Epicurean school at Athens, and became himself an Academic, intrusted his son to the care of Cratippus, a peripatetic philosopher. After the death of its great founder, the school of Epicurus had for some time declined in Greece: but at the period when Lucretius was sent to Athens, it had again revived under the patronage of L. Memmius, whose son was a fellow-student of Lucretius; as were also Cicero, his brother Quintus, Cassius, and Pomponius Atticus. At the time when frequented by these illustrious youths, the Gardens of Epicurus were superintended by Zeno and Phædrus, both of whom, but particularly the latter, have been honoured with the panegyric of Cicero. “We formerly, when we were boys,” says he, in a letter to Caius Memmius, “knew him as a profound philosopher, and we still recollect him as a kind and worthy man, ever solicitous for our improvement(430).”