Two edited volumes on Lucretius appeared in 2020: Approaches to Lucretius and Lucretius, Poet and Philosopher (ed. by P.R. Hardie, V. Prosperi and D. Zucca; cf. CR 71 [2021], 97–100). Both books are the end-product of two conferences, held respectively in Edinburgh (2013) and Sassari (2017). Despite the topic, form and occasion being similar, the two publications are significantly different.
Even though my purpose is not to review both volumes, drawing a brief comparison seems mandatory. Lucretius, Poet and Philosopher places particular emphasis on Lucretian reception: the three central sections – that is, more than half of the volume – cover the ancient, early modern and modern receptions of the poem. On the contrary, while not disregarding the poem's reception, the book under review promises to turn its attention ‘back’ to the De rerum natura (DRN) itself, ‘with a heightened awareness of how every interpretation is mediated by, and a product of, its tradition’ (p. 4). As mentioned, the book sprung out of a conference, ‘Lucretius in Theory’, whose aims were to situate the poem's text at the centre of its interpretation, to find opportunities for discussion between literary and philosophical approaches to the DRN and to read the poem in the light of literary-critical theories.
The result is a heterogeneous collection of essays, which, in varying degrees, are all valuable contributions to Lucretian scholarship. The papers are considerably different from each other in terms of scope and approach, and, at first glance, one can hardly identify unifying threads among them. Therefore, the effort on the editor's part to find common denominators between essays that are rather diverse is remarkable and overall successful. The editor organises the book around five themes or ‘categories of critical approach’ (p. 4): textual criticism; author and reader; the analogy between atoms and letters; literary and philosophical sources; and politics ‘broadly defined’ (history, political theory, history of theory).
Chapter 1 by D. Butterfield is the sole essay on textual criticism. Butterfield surveys the critical responses to ‘the most difficult textual problem’ in the DRN. According to Butterfield, lines 1.44–9 are not Lucretian in their current location; rather, they were initially only in Book 2.646–51. Subsequently, an ancient reader copied them into the margin of Book 1, alongside lines 43–50. Finally, they infiltrated the text. Butterfield brilliantly resorts to the capitula – subject headings, added marginally in late antiquity and transmitted in the Lucretian tradition – to solve the textual enigma.
In the first essay (Chapter 2) of Part 2 N. Goldschmidt, applying modern literary criticism to the DRN, draws on W. Booth's idea of ‘implied author’ (Rhetoric of Fiction [1961]) to examine the textually constructed Lucretius. Goldschmidt illustrates how the Lucretian persona and the ‘implied author’ emerge from reading the poem. Given that the ‘implied author’ is a construct ‘encoded in the text and picked up in reception by readers’ (pp. 57–8), this interpretation shall hopefully contribute to free the poem from centuries of ‘author centred’ reception, dominated by the biographical legend of the madness of Lucretius.
Chapter 3 shifts the focus from the author to the readers. B. Taylor observes that Lucretius’ use of first-person plurals presents some ambiguities. In the DRN nos can be interpreted universally/inclusively to refer to ‘all of us’ or exclusively to ‘us’ as Epicureans; according to Taylor, the reader each time is free to adopt one of the alternative readings. Therefore, Lucretius’ text can speak differently to different readers and to the same reader at different stages in their Epicurean training. A close analysis of the most relevant passages completes Taylor's chapter, which stands out for clarity and accuracy.
In Chapter 4 F. Tutrone considers Epicurus’ theory of mind in the light of the most recent theories of cognition, and particularly the extended mind hypothesis (EM), first proposed by A. Clark and D. Chalmers (Analysis 58 [1998]). These approaches usually refer to cognition as a situated and distributed phenomenon in which the environment plays an active role. Tutrone presents Epicurus’ theory of mind as an ancient version of these paradigms of cognition and depicts Lucretius’ poem as an ‘extended cognitive device’ (p. 95). Tutrone's pioneering research ultimately aims to show that long before Descartes’s epistemological ‘internalism’ – and its ‘externalist’ responses – there were non-internalist paradigms of cognition such as that put forward by Epicurus and Lucretius.
Part 3 is devoted to a well-studied Lucretian theme: ‘atomology’ (i.e. the analogy between atoms and letters). According to this notion, the DRN is an imago mundi composed of elementa (‘letters’), whose arrangement corresponds to that of the physical elementa (‘atoms’). Developing and offering new insights into this metaphor, in Chapter 5 O'Rourke shows that Lucretius adopted different strategies – such as false closure, serial repetition and evocation of the sublime – to double Epicurus’ infinite universe within the boundaries of the DRN.
The harmony between form and content is the focus of Chapter 6. J. Nethercut, taking as a methodological principle the concept that the poetic form of the DRN mirrors its philosophical content, analyses a passage in Book 4 (4.572–94), in which Lucretius discusses the phenomenon of echo. Nethercut observes that there appear to be a number of allusions to previous texts, such as the Homeric Hymn to Pan (HH 19.1–3) and an epigram attributed to Plato (Anth. Pal. 9.823.3–4). He concludes that Lucretius adopted poetic strategies, such as allusivity to earlier texts (form), to mirror the atomic explanation of the phenomenon of echo (content). Nethercut's interpretation seems plausible, even though he would have made his case stronger if he had provided more examples.
W.H. Shearin, in the final chapter of this section, aims to challenge the well-studied letters-atoms analogy by considering Saussure's anagrams, especially those concerning Epicurus and Lucretius. Shearin first emphasises elementa as written marks rather than sounds; he then proceeds to compare Saussure's anagrams to the DRN, showing that written letters have significant creative powers in both authors. They may be dispersed through a text and still, by combining in innovative ways, ‘point beyond themselves’, create significance and even bind ‘the divine to the text’ (p. 151). Shearin's hypothesis is suggestive; nevertheless, many of the examples he puts forward seem arbitrary, just as Saussure's anagrams.
Part 4 addresses, from different perspectives, another well-studied theme: the literary and philosophical sources of the DRN. Chapter 8, by A.D. Morrison, recognises two trends in how the DRN is usually read: ‘master text’ and ‘intertextual’ modes of reading. Master-text readings usually subordinate the DRN to another text (e.g. Epicurus’ On Nature) while the intertextual method assumes a broader range of potential reference points. The first mode is more common among philosophers, whereas literary critics most commonly adopt the ‘intertextual’ way. The foreseeable conclusion of Morrison's ‘metacritical’ analysis is that, thanks to its complexity, Lucretius’ poem ‘accommodates far more than one type of reader’ (p. 176).
In his thought-provoking essay (Chapter 9) T. O'Keefe illustrates how Lucretius’ use of literary persuasion might be considered original philosophically and not just poetically. Examples of literary and rhetorical persuasiveness in the DRN are: (1) using vivid imagery to evoke emotions (e.g. the sacrifice of Iphigenia); (2) redeploying powerful cultural tropes (e.g. eulogies of Epicurus, described as an epic hero); and (3) ridicule (of rival philosophical schools, such as Pythagoreans or Platonists). O'Keefe concludes that there is a philosophical (notably Epicurean) significance in using non-rational methods of persuasion: the emotional reactions triggered by Lucretius’ poetry counteract the irrational attitude of readers towards misguided beliefs about religion, love or other doctrines.
In Chapter 10 E. Gee considers Lucretius’ argument for the soul's mortality in Book 3 of the DRN. Gee linguistically compares DRN with the Stoic Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus and Cicero's Aratea. She surprisingly identifies in Lucretius a recurrent topic of ancient intelligent-design philosophies: the kinship between soul and stars. Adopting the concept of ‘intertextual metaphor’, Gee shows that, despite holding an opposite view to Cleanthes and Cicero, Lucretius used their words or expressions to suggest that the soul's nature is the same as that of the heavenly bodies (that is, they both share the identical atomic make-up). Gee provides many examples, but some of them do not seem compelling, given that Lucretius could have resorted to the same words used by Cicero for different reasons (metrics, for instance).
The essays in the last section, ‘Worldviews’, do not seem to have much in common, but, taken separately, they all provide valuable insights into the poem and its reception. In Chapter 11 J. Farrell compares the DRN to Philodemus’ On the Good King According to Homer. The focus is on Lucretius’ and Philodemus’ respective addressees: Memmius and Piso. Through a detailed historical reconstruction, Farrell's analysis arrives at a reasonable conclusion: the two Epicurean authors’ suggestions to their addressees differ, being appropriate to each man. Unlike Philodemus, Lucretius believed that his addressee was a ‘bad king’, who needed conversion from a life of consuming political ambition. He, therefore, encouraged Memmius towards a life of philosophical (Epicurean) detachment.
In Chapter 12 E. Asmis examines a renowned, but not well-studied, text: Karl Marx's dissertation on Epicurus. In her insightful and deep analysis Asmis observes that Marx interprets Lucretius’ swerve as an abstract principle of individual self-consciousness, which exists at the core of atomic physics. According to Marx human self-consciousness emerges in opposition to concrete reality, governed by universal law, and manages to dissolve its opposite into abstract possibility. Asmis's analysis of Marx's bold interpretation shows the attempt of a great thinker to deal with one of the thorniest issues for which neither Epicurus nor Lucretius seem to have offered an ultimate solution, that is, whether we should assign priority to universal law or human freedom.
In the last chapter D.F. Kennedy pinpoints a common feature of both Plato's and Lucretius’ philosophies: they both believed that beyond visible phenomena there lies truth or reality, which is not directly accessible through the senses. According to both philosophers, it is through thinking that one can transcend the barrier between things as they appear and as they are. A key concept in Kennedy's intriguing paper is theôria (‘vision, contemplation’), an experience that, in both Plato and Lucretius, is undertaken by a member of the human race (such as Epicurus in the DRN) who sets out on an extraordinary journey to discover the reality of things.
Three helpful instruments complete the volume: a bibliography, an index locorum and an index rerum. They are most useful for readers wishing to find their own ‘bespoke ways of assembling Approaches to Lucretius’ (p. 15), as suggested by the editor in the introduction. Hence, the volume is a valuable resource for those with some knowledge of the DRN who wish to delve into a number of ‘Lucretian themes’ and gain fresh insights into the poem.
