Note 1 — Chapter XI

The well-known statement of Jerome is to this effect,—'The poet Lucretius was born in the year 94 b.c. He became mad from the administration of a love-philtre, and after composing, in his lucid intervals, several books which were afterwards corrected by Cicero, he died by his own hand in his forty-fourth year.' The date of his death would thus be 50 b.c. But this date is contradicted by the statement of Donatus in his life of Virgil, that Lucretius died (he says nothing of his supposed suicide) on the day on which Virgil assumed the 'toga virilis,' viz. October 15, 55 b.c. And this date derives confirmation from the fact that the first notice of the poem appears in a letter of Cicero to his brother, written in the beginning of 54 b.c. As the condition in which the poem has reached us confirms the statement that it was left by the author in an unfinished state, it must have been given to the world by some other hand after the poet's death; and, as Mr. Munro observes, we should expect to find that it first attracted notice some three or four months after that event. We must accordingly conclude that here, as in many other cases, Jerome has been careless in his dates, and that Lucretius was either born some years before 94 b.c., or that he died before his forty-fourth year. His most recent Editors, accordingly, assign his birth to the end of the year 99 b.c. or the beginning of 98 b.c. He would thus be some seven or eight years younger than Cicero, three or four years younger than Julius Caesar1, about the same age as Memmius to whom the poem is dedicated, and from about twelve to fifteen years older than Catullus and the younger poets of that generation2.