This book studies Virgil's ideas of nature, history, sense of nation, and sense of identity, combined with the study of attitudes towards nature throughout antiquity. Blending literature with history, and in the case of Lucretius, philosophy, it offers a vision and an interpretation of the culture of the 1st century B.C. as a whole. It argues that Lucretius and Virgil affected a revolution in Western sensibility; claiming that a book about poetry...