The paper discusses an anthology of ancient materialists edited in 1936 by the French intellectual Paul Nizan and mostly devoted to Lucretian extracts. Although it has not attracted much attention so far, this work is interesting because it played a role in the definition of a Marxist-oriented interpretative paradigma of Epicureanism, Lucretius, and the debate thereof, which was alive until the end of the Sixties. The paper aims at highlighting on the one hand how the book (especially the introductory essay) is heir to the tradition of historical materialism – because it applied to Lucretius the approach proposed by Marx in his doctoral dissertation (Jena, 1841) as well as models typical of Marxist historiography –, and on the other hand how it influenced some developments within that critical trend around the middle of the XXth century.