Philip Hardie is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College and Honorary Professor of Latin Literature in the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. His previous publications include Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (1986), Virgil's Epic Successors (1993), and Ovid's Poetics of Illusion (2002). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (2002) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (2007).

• Introduction; Part I. Time, History, Culture: 1. Cultural and historical narratives in Virgil's Eclogues and Lucretius; 2. Virgilian and Horatian didactic: freedom and innovation; Part II. Sublime Visions: 3. Virgil's Fama and the Lucretian and Ennian sublime; 4. The Speech of Pythagoras in Ovid Metamorphoses 15: Empedoclean epos; 5. Lucretian visions in Virgil; 6. Horace's sublime yearnings; Lucretian ironies; Part III. Certainties and Uncertainties: 7. Lucretian multiple explanations and their reception in Latin didactic and epic; 8. The presence of Lucretius in Paradise Lost.