oxford readings in lucretius oct 2007

[...]... perceived as threatening and blasphemous An early response to the threat was to dismiss the poet asquite literallyinsane: Jerome infamously reports in his Chronicle that Lucretius went mad after drinking a love potion and, having composed the DRN during the intervals between bouts of insanity, committed suicide The story is memorably embodied in 1 On the dating of the poem, see now G O Hutchinson, The Date... anthropological theory in a rich and stimulating study of Lucretius handling of the themes of violence, death, and dissolution There are also some indications that the search for unity in Lucretius poem has come, under the inXuence of postmodern theory, to seem less important and indeed less intellectually valid a goal Don and Peta Fowler close their entry on Lucretius in the third edition of the Oxford Classical... creative forces of nature (hence sunshine and Xowers greet her coming, and animals are inspired to reproduce their kind), or for a combination of the two.48 Others remain open: there is still considerable dispute about the interpretation of the ending, and indeed about whether the poem should in fact end where it does in our manuscripts.49 But perhaps the most striking change in attitudes over the course of... 3 as centring on Epicurus moral thought and his carefully formulated ethical maxims, or patria praecepta, some of which can be seen in the Latin of the De rerum natura.2 But this focus is too narrow In Epicurus, the word ọỹũ (road) and questions of method are more prominent in his physiology than in his ethical writings.3 When, in the proem to Book 5, Lucretius speaks again of following in Epicurus... Imperium (n 13); and D C Feeney, The Gods in Epic (Oxford, 1991); Don Fowler presents strong arguments against imposing artiWcial barriers between literary and philosophical reception in his article Philosophy and Literature in Lucretian Intertextuality (n 35) Introduction 13 Lucretius has also been well served in recent years by a resurgence of ă interest in genre criticism Systematic studies such... startling) ending, by drawing on the theoretical treatment of closure in Barbara Herrnstein Smiths classic study, Poetic Closure.42 Feminist theory, too, has provided the destinatario nell epos didascalico (Pisa, 1993 ẳ MD 31), 11128; G B Conte, Instructions for a Sublime Reader: Form of the Text and Form of the Addressee in Lucretius De Rerum Natura, in Genres and Readers: Lucretius, Love Elegy, Plinys Encyclopedia... particularly inXuential in demonstrating how Lucretius employs patterns of argumentation typical of his age, for which parallels can be found both in rhetorical theory and practice and in philosophical/scientiWc writing Since the 1960s, too, the idea that the poetry of the DRN is in itself a kind of rhetorical tacticthat is, that the poems language is designed not just to explain the principles of Epicurean... Feminine Principal: Gender in the De Rerum Natura, in G Giannantoni and M Gigante (eds.), Epicureismo greco e romano (Naples, 1996), 81322, reprinted as Appendix C in id., Lucretius on Atomic Motion: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura 2 1332 (Oxford, 2002), 44452; S G Nugent, Mater Matters: The Female in Lucretius De Rerum Natura, Colby Quarterly 30 (1994), 179205; A M Keith, Engendering Rome: Women in Latin... Seeing the Invisible, Ch 11 below 27 J M Snyder, Puns and Poetry in Lucretius De Rerum Natura (Amsterdam, 1980); see also ead., The SigniWcant Name in Lucretius (1978), Ch 16 of this volume Introduction 9 theory that verbal structures are intimately linked to the meaning of the poem was taken still further by Ivano Dionigi in Lucrezio: le parole e le cose (Bologna, 1988) A more explicit stand against... http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classics/lics 35 Sappho: E A Hahn, Lucretius Prooemion with Reference to Sappho and Catullus, CW 60 (1966), 1349; D P Fowler, Philosophy and Literature in Lucretian Intertextuality, in his Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin (Oxford, 2000), 13855, at 14854; Thucydides: H S Commager, Lucretius Interpretation of the Plague (1957), Ch 8 of this volume; Callimachus: R D Brown, Lucretius and Callimachus . available in paperback Oxford Readings in Classical Studies Lucretius Edited by MONICA R. GALE 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It. trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Oxford University Press 2007 The moral. trend, embodied in M. Patin’s infamous phrase l’anti-Lucre ` ce chez Lucre ` ce. Patin’s phrase, coined in a series of lectures delivered in 1859–60,9 owed its origins to the eighteenth-century, neo-Latin