  Such an agenda manifests itself at various strategically significant points of the poem, in the form of Lucretius’ uplifting pleas for Epicurean values. The magnificent finale of book 3 (830–1094) is a diatribe against the fear of death, taking as its starting point the preceding demonstration that death is simply annihilation. To fear a future state of death, Lucretius argues, is to make the conceptual blunder of supposing yourself present to regret and bewail your own non-existence. The reality is that being dead will be no worse (just as it will be no better) than it was, long ago, not yet to have been born. This Lucretian ‘symmetry argument’ (see Warren 2004; also Death 2.3), which has enjoyed widespread discussion in the recent philosophical literature on death, is found in company with a whole battery of further arguments for acquiescing in the prospect of one’s own dissolution. Book 4’s treatment of sexual passion (1037–1287) includes a matching diatribe, comically denouncing the folly of enslaving oneself to any individual (1121–1191).