The construction of the image of the crazy poet in the St. Jerome fragment on Lucretius

In St. Jerome's translation of the Chronicon of Eusebius of Caesarea, we find some of the little information about the life of the Latin poet Lucretius, a follower of Epicurus. The account of the extremes of the poet's existence - birth and death, the ingestion of a love potion, madness, the writing of some books in moments of sanity, the posthumous edition of Lucretius' work by Cicero and suicide, is not casual, but it serves, as we shall see, to build the image of a mad poet, whose madness would not be of a clinical order, but rather a materialistic madness, contrary to the propositions of Christianity expressed by Saint Jerome and other Church Fathers.