The author of one of the strangest and most impressive poetic works in history was born sometime around 99 or 95 B.C. The exact date is uncertain; but we are lucky to know even this morsel of information. Titus Lucretius Carus remains one of the most elusive poets of antiquity. He was an Epicurean, and this philosophy was not exactly congenial to the Roman character.
One gets the impression that there was a conspiracy of silence about him, that he may have been some grand embarrassment that needed to be hidden from view.
The centuries certainly conspired to bury his work, and he was almost completely forgotten in the Middle Ages; had the Renaissance humanist Poggio Bracciolini not found him moldering on a monastery shelf, he might have been entirely obliterated from history.
Quintus Curtius 
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