Book 3 ofDe Rerum Naturaends with a series of dramatic voices unparallelled anywhere in Lucretius (lines 894-1094). Mourners, the elderly, Nature and Memmius raise their voices to debate the issue of mortality. From Epicurean tenets Lucretius dramatises and creates images for the follies of superstitious fears, passions, ambitions, attachment to nature, guilty fears of retribution for sins, and the blinding desire to live. But this section has been seen to have failed both as effective persuasion of Epicurean ideals and as an artistically polished conclusion to the book. The tone, the arrangement and the ideas of the drama's conclusion have been criticised by commentators from Hadzsits (1935) to Kenney (1971); the most comprehensive and often-cited commentator, Bailey (1947), calls the section a ‘culminating triumph-song over the mortality of the soul’ but finds Lucretius’ response to the mourners ‘not altogether satisfactory’, his ‘consolation…inadequate’, and flatly judges the last eighteen lines ‘unsatisfactory as a conclusion’. Bailey, as well as the others, has stressed the departure from Epicurean doctrine in both tone and imagery.