It was from the hands of these Alexandrian writers that the genius of didactic poetry passed over to Rome, since, although it is possible that some of the lost works of the early republic, and in particular those of Ennius, may have possessed an educational character, the first and by far the greatest didactic Latin poet known to us is Lucretius. A highly finished translation by Cicero into Latin hexameters of the principal works of Aratus is believed to have drawn the attention of Lucretius to this school of Greek poetry, and it was not without reference to the Greeks, although in a more archaic and far purer taste, that he composed, in the 1st century before Christ, his magnificent _De rerum natura_. By universal consent, this is the noblest didactic poem in the literature of the world. It was intended to instruct mankind in the interpretation and in the working of the system of philosophy revealed by Epicurus, which at that time was exciting the sympathetic attention of all classes of Roman society. What gave the poem of Lucretius its extraordinary interest, and what has prolonged and even increased its vitality, was the imaginative and illustrative insight of the author, piercing and lighting up the recesses of human experience. On a lower intellectual level, but of a still greater technical excellence, was the _Georgics_ of Virgil, a poem on the processes of agriculture, published about 30 B.C. The brilliant execution of this famous work has justly made it the type and unapproachable standard of all poetry which desires to impart useful information in the guise of exquisite literature. Himself once a farmer on the banks of the Mincio, Virgil, at the apex of his genius, set himself in his Campanian villa to recall whatever had been essential in the agricultural life of his boyish home, and the result, in spite of the ardours of the subject, was what J. W. Mackail has called "the most splendid literary production of the Empire." In the rest of surviving Latin didactic poetry, the influence and the imitation of Virgil and Lucretius are manifest. Manilius, turning again to Alexandria, produced a fine _Astronomica_ towards the close of the reign of Augustus. Columella, regretting that Virgil had omitted to sing of gardens, composed a smooth poem on horticulture. Natural philosophy inspired Lucilius junior, of whom a didactic poem on Etna survives. Long afterwards, under Diocletian, a poet of Carthage, Nemesianus, wrote in the manner of Virgil the _Cynegetica_, a poem on hunting with dogs, which has had numerous imitations in later European literatures. These are the most important specimens of didactic poetry which ancient Rome has handed down to us.