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ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE |
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R. E. Latham's excellent translation of Lucretius was first published in 1951 and is still the best translation on the market. This revision has been undertaken for two reasons: first to bring it more into line with what is now the generally agreed text of Lucretius and second to provide more assistance and background information to the reader than was available in the first edition. The textual revision is necessary in the light of the research that continues to be devoted to the corruptions and gaps in the manuscript readings, which has advanced a long way over the last forty years: the places where I have disagreed with the Oxford Classical Text of Lucretius are listed and (briefly) discussed in Appendix D. Gaps in the text that have been filled by proposed emendations are enclosed in angle brackets ( < > ). Material that is suspected of being interpolated into the text is enclosed in square brackets ([ ]). The extra critical apparatus is required because the Penguin Classics series is increasingly being used as a textbook in courses in classical civilization, philosophy and ancient history, and the student who is attempting to come to grips with the detail and the context of this text without knowing much -- or any -- Latin needs considerable help in the notes, introduction and appendices. The footnotes are brief and are not intended to be a substitute for the detailed commentaries that exist on this text; the introduction attempts to cover the background and the problems of the poem in a brief and readable compass; points that I considered to merit further discussion - but that would have held up the argument of the introduction - are relegated to a series of appendices at the end of the volume. At no point do I claim to have covered all the answers - or even all the questions - and the serious student is referred to the bibliography for further reading. No editor of Lucretius is an island, and one of the reasons for producing this revision is to give the student a digest of recent scholarship in accessible form, which will, I hope, justify my plundering the ideas and discoveries of the many scholars working in this field. In particular this revision owes a great deal to the kind assistance and time of Desmond Costa, Chris Emlyn-Jones and David West, who all read parts of the typescript and saved me from many mistakes. Those that remain are all my own.
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