Gowers, Emily. "Thoroughly Modern Lucretius." TLS October 1, 2008.

• Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Trans. A. E. Stallings. Intro. Richard Jenkyns. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008.
• Gillespie, Stuart, and Philip Hardie, eds. Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Cambridge: CUP, 2008.

On the wall of a house at Pompeii are scratched the words “suabe mari magno . . .” (“It is sweet on the great sea . . .”). These are the first words of the second book of Lucretius’ Epicurean poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), and the sentence ends, “. . . to watch from the shore other people drowning”. The house in question overlooks the Bay of Naples, whose villas and libraries offered Lucretius’ contemporaries a comfortable daily view of the hazards of seafaring and where Epicureanism, the Greek panacea that blended soul-soothing with materialist physics, enjoyed a brief resurgence in the first century bc. Lucretius was no early promoter of Schadenfreude. His serene spectator enjoyed a higher kind of pleasure: remoteness from his own suffering. Though Lucretius revived many of Epicurus’ life-saving mantras – steer clear of stress, channel your desires safely, don’t be afraid of death, the gods are not vindictive – this evangelist probably never aspired to convert his fellow Romans en masse. His was a philosophy of detachment in every sense, espoused by drop-outs, aesthetes, atheists, scientists and Democritean observers through the ages: rational scepticism combined with physical aloofness. (Thomas Gray’s “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife” is a Lucretian adaptation.) . . .

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