No other ancient author used Lucretius as intensively as the Christian Lactantius did. This has been widely examined for Lactantius' prose writings. But also in his elegy De ave Phoenice, the first Christian poem following classical poetic tradition, we find Lucretius' influence, especially in the epilogue (Phoen. 161–170), where the bird Phoenix appears as an allegory of the redeemed man. Here Lactantius converts Lucretius' famous equation (1, 1–3) ‘Venus=pleasure=living nature’ into its opposite: For Phoenix, death=pleasure =Venus, as he ‘gains eternal life by the good of death.’