1. Lucretius in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Etching by W. Unger after G. O. May (1779). Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe._Etching_by_W._Unger_after_G._O._Wellcome_V0002292.jpg John Ruskin, who had read Lucretius’s De rerum natura in his student days as a set book at Oxford, commented in later years: ‘I have ever since held it the most hopeless sign of a man’s mind being made of flint-shingle if he liked Lucretius.