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As has been mentioned several places, Emily Austin speculates in Chapter 22 of "Living For Pleasure" that Lucretius might have intended to track the full story of the Plague of Athens, which ends in the original version with an additional paragraph to which there is no parallel in Lucretius. What jumps out when we review the last paragraph which is not in Lucretius is that this is where it is relayed that the confrontation with death caused the Athenians to turn away from worries about gods and …

I'm not going to push anybody. (I would *never* do that would I Joshua or any of our other poets here?) However we have some very creative minds in this group who are very good with poetry and imagery and even if we came up with a hundred different versions, none of which would compare to Lucretius, the exercise I think would be very enjoyable and educational. So it ought to be possible to combine some of the flourishes that we have in the Vatican Sayings, and it strikes me the Torquatus narrati…

Joshua has me thinking about this subject again due to his post about the plague. Rather than put this note in that thread and disrupt the chain of thought, I will add this here: If in fact the point of the ending is related to the point that the citizens of Athens who lived through the Plague were thereby freed from their religious superstitions (as Emily Austin suggests), it strikes me that the famous lines from Virgil might actually fit at the very end of the poem too. Felix qui potuit rerum …

(Quote from Don) Very good question but if so I am not aware of anything to establish that. Isn't one of the only ancient comments someone (a church father?) making the comment about Cicero "emending" it?

You know that line from Virgil really does kind of sum up the whole poem, doesn't it? But it would still need the kind of transition from Thucydides that Emily Austin suggests to get from what is now actually the last line to Virgil's kind of finale / flourish of a statement. Also: Probably interesting to not also that the sentiments of VS47 could also fit for what a person of Epicurean attitude among those people would have been thinking as well. Some type of connection might also explain the o…