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Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for Lucretius.

So Lucretius, or to give him his full name, Titus Lucretius Carrus, was born just after 100 BCE,

and he lived to sort of his mid-40s.

He died probably before 55 BCE.

And as you can tell from the fact that I'm not particularly sure on the dates, it's not because I didn't bother learning them.

It's because we don't really know. And that is surprising. I know I've said on this stage roughly 2,000 times. Yeah, we just don't know very much about them anyway. But normally that's because that person has been lost in the midst of time, right? Like Sappho or Homer, they existed before alphabetic writing. So we just don't have that much information.

But in the case of Lucretius, it's surprising

because he's a contemporary of Julius Caesar, of Cicero.

It's weird that we don't have more biographical detail about him

because he was alive by the standards of the ancient world

a relatively well-documented time. Maybe because of that,

we can conclude that he wasn't that interested in politics, because we've got no record of him

standing for office, and that's how we can track Cicero so successfully through time. But of course,

it's always risky, arguing a conclusion from an absence of evidence. But to be fair,

his work also suggests that he was,

let's say, not interested in politics and didn't think you should be either. What is that work?

Why have we chosen him for the show? It's legitimate questions that you're psychically projecting at me.

The work that Lucretius is famous for, or at least in the ancient world was famous for,

is a poem called De Rarum Natura. It's a six-book poem on Epicurean philosophy and physics.

I do acknowledge this might sound a little bit dry to us, but he was hugely prized as a poet by his contemporaries

and immediate poetic descendants. So one scholar writing about 100 years ago reckons that roughly

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