  Because early Christianity branded Lucretius an enemy of religion, his life and death had to be depicted as appropriately wretched. Thus, according to St Jerome, he was driven mad by a love philtre, wrote poetry in his lucid intervals, and died by his own hand, leaving his poem to be edited posthumously by Cicero. This—apart from the last detail, which some have found credible—is a palpable fabrication. Its portrayal of wretched insanity is implicitly contradicted by Lucretius’ younger contemporary and admirer Virgil, who felt able to write of him in his Georgics, a didactic poem heavily in Lucretius’ debt, the celebrated lines (2.490–2) ‘Happy he who was able to know the causes of things (felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas), and who trampled beneath his feet all fears, inexorable fate, and the roar of devouring hell’. With these admiring words, Virgil neatly encapsulates four dominant themes of the poem—universal causal explanation, leading to elimination of the threats the world seems to pose, a vindication of free will, and disproof of the soul’s survival after death. But he also, in advertising Lucretius’ philosophical understanding as his enviable source of happiness, makes it implausible that the author of DRN had by this date acquired his later reputation as a suicidal psychotic.