ABSTRACT
In a letter to Richard Bentley in 1753, Horace Walpole described a small pew hung with green damask as “a modernity which beats all antiquities for curiosity” In the first century bce, in his epic philosophical texts, De rerum natura (The Nature of Things), the Roman philosopher Lucretius, distinguished anxiety from fear almost two thousand years before Soren Kierkegaard did so. Lucretius distinguished between anxiety and the more palpable fears and desires, for which he used the term timor, upsurges of which prevented the stoical imperturbability that some had considered within their grasp through the operation of reason. In these verses Lucretius can be read as signifying ‘home’ not only to indicate the literal dwelling place, but the innermost one, the mind itself. The description is beautiful, capturing as it does forcefully and concisely the involvement of the whole body as the anguish breaks its mental confines.
