Note 55 — NOTES.1

“Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus). Born at Rome, probably about 96 B.C., died October 15, 55 B.C. A celebrated Roman philosophical poet. He was the author of ‘De rerum natura,’ a didactic and philosophical poem in six books, treating of physics, of psychology, and (briefly) of ethics from the Epicurean point of view. He committed suicide probably in a fit of insanity. According to a popular but doubtless erroneous tradition, his madness was due to a love-philter administered to him by his wife.”68