The historian who claimed that persons of Epicurean belief dominated the conspiracy against Caesar, and that Epicureanism, creatively reformulated in the fifth book of Lucretius, underpinned the anti-monarchic rebellion of these ‘Epicureans in revolt’, was Arnaldo Momigliano. His belligerent essay is compelling but largely unfounded, especially in its central tenets: that the conspirators and later republican fighters were mostly ‘unconventional’ (that is, politically committed) Epicureans, and that Lucretius was their formative reading. It remains a good article on the aesthetic level, extolling the ‘heroic’ nexus between Epicureanism in philosophy and militant libertarian republicanism in politics. For Momigliano, writing that daring essay was a kind of catharsis, after years of prose calibrated according to its compatibility with the ‘controlled tolerance’ of fascism and that of the Enciclopedia Italiana. For the sake of his thesis he expands the circle of the Epicureans,3 and, if by chance any are hostile to the conspiracy or want nothing to do with it, they are enlisted all the same. This is the case with Statilius, an ‘Epicurean’ who, Plutarch clearly affirms, immediately rejected the advances of the person who wanted to bring him into the conspiracy - no less a figure than Marcus Junius Brutus in person. That man might not be the same Statilius who had been in Africa with Cato and then died at Philippi: at least, there is no reliable confirmation of it.