# Loeb Lucretius still carries Garden counsel against ambitious public works as empty

Date: 1916

## The fact

W. H. D. Rouse’s 1924 Loeb Lucretius, with the Perseus text as public Greek/Latin carrier, transmits the Garden attack on empty civic ambition, including chasing monuments. The dated public instrument is the Loeb-era English poem, not a 55 BCE recitation.

## Context

Criticism of empty monuments can be sane. It can also starve public building when read as a ban on shared crafts. Split Lucretius’s own praise of arts onto the improving technology row.

[Epicurus](/people/epicurus) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official edition, museum, archive, or agency page and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: Lucretius, De rerum natura — Perseus (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Lucr.; Perseus Digital Library / Tufts).

## Significance

Anti-ambition teaching can weaken industrial-policy energy when office and works are treated as traps.

Anti-ambition teaching can weaken industrial-policy energy when office and works are treated as traps.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

(Perseus Digital Library / Tufts). The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

## People

- Epicurus: https://factrail.ai/people/epicurus

## Drivers

- Industrial-Policy Activism: https://factrail.ai/drivers/industrial-policy-activism

## Sources

- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/785
- https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Lucr.

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/ep-withdrawal-from-crafts