Lucretius on the Narrow Road

Abstract

older and more illustrious writers. In this as in so many other respects he appears to have stood quite aloof from the prevailing fashions of his day; for the great mass of contemporary poets, among them even Catullus at all events in his heroic and elegiac poems, chose to form their style after Euphorion of Chalcis and the affected Alexandrine school of poets, Callimachus and the rest, whose influence extended far into the Augustan age, though they wrote in what was to themselves really a dead language.1