Some four hundred years after the death of Lucretius, St. Jerome wrote the only existing biography of the philosopher, in two sentences, suggesting that Lucretius “was rendered insane by a love potion” and killed himself. In 1868 Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in “Lucretius” that the philosopher’s wife “dreaming some rival, sought and found a witch/Who brewed the philter which had power, they said,/To lead an errant passion home again./And this, at times, she mingled with his drink,/And this destroyed him.”