it may be no surprise that Karl Marx turned out to be one of the greatest admirers of Lucretius.Marx launched his career as a philosopher by writing a PhD thesis on the differences between Democritean and Epicurean atomism. Epicurus was for Marx"the greatest representative of Greek enlightenment.21 Marx shared the view with Epicurus and Lucretius before him that matter preceded thought. There could be no philosophy, no elaboration of an idea which did not have its basis in a material reality. As Mank writes in Das Kapital: "The ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and tran- scended into forms of thought 22 Moreover, Mark's historical materialism finds no closer parallel than Lucretius' conception of time in this passage. When Lucretius writes, "no one has a sense of time distinct from the movement of things or from their quiet rest', he echoes Mark's belief that history has to be understood as the sum of man's material conditions. But despite the emphasis on materialism, Lucretius' conception of history falls short of Marx's dialectical materialism. In the Lucretian world view the purpose of history is entirely lost in a world of random causation.