This opening chapter surveys the broad range of critical responses to the difficulties presented by DRN 1.44–9 (on the immortality and tranquility of the gods) from Renaissance accounts to the most recent discussions of the problem. The status of the passage as a locus nondum sanatus and its high-profile appearance in the poem’s proem render these verses the most difficult passage for the Lucretian editor. The present discussion weighs complex theories about the verses’ purpose against text-critical theories about the work’s composition and transmission.

Plato’s writings play a crucial role in bootstrapping the discourses that came to be called metaphysics, which see their task as exploring distinctions between seeming and being, reality and appearance, and what we can sense and what lies beyond our senses. Central to them is the notion of ‘theory’, which, as Andrea Nightingale has argued, Plato develops out of the social institution of theōria: a representative of the city attends a Panhellenic festival, observes what happens, and reports back on what he has seen. This model structures the story (in Republic) of the prisoner leaving the cave, ascending to the light, and reporting back to those he left behind – a structure that Lucretius reprises in the ‘theoretical’ journey of Epicurus across the universe in DRN 1. Plato’s stories are subject to a process of reception Hans Blumenberg has described as ‘re-occupation’ so as to express metaphysical positions that are at odds with Plato’s. This essay explores Lucretius’ re-occupation of a number of Platonic motifs (the cave, the pitfall of Thales in Theaetetus, the representation of Socrates as a thinking subject) to highlight the role that these motifs have played (and continue to play) in the metaphysical tradition.

The Introduction offers a brief overview of historical responses and scholarly approaches to the DRN as context for the chapters of the present volume. Five categories of Lucretian criticism (corresponding to the sections of the volume) are then singled out for special attention: textual criticism; constructs of the author and the reader; metapoetic and ‘atomological’ readings; literary and philosophical intertextuality; politics and ideology.

Until recently, Descartes’ idea that the human mind is, by definition, a non-extended entity, enclosed in the body but constitutionally different from common bodily and external realities, found wide acceptance among students of cognitive sciences. But in the past few years the barriers between outer and inner worlds have begun to blur, projecting the process of cognition as a complex distributed phenomenon. The case of Lucretius and Epicurean philosophy discussed in this paper aims to show that the narrow fortress of the knowing self is not as ancient as some present-day theorists are inclined to think, and that the very concept of distributed cognition, broadly construed, has a history of its own with deep roots in Greco-Roman physiology. Lucretius’ poem provides especially compelling evidence that, on the one hand, Epicurean epistemology conceives of cognition as a material process extended across the borders of atomic bodies, and that, on the other hand, true knowledge can be achieved only through cooperative didactic techniques. Standing at the crossroads between poetry and philosophy, Lucretius’ didactic method tries to involve the addressee (both intellectually and emotionally) in the cooperative construction of an internalized cognitive artefact: the image of the atomic cosmos, faithfully reflected in the text.

Much has been written on the ‘implied reader’ in Lucretius’ DRN. From G. B. Conte’s textually constructed reader to recent work on Lucretian receptions, Lucretius’ readers or their textual condition have received substantial scholarly attention. What remains largely undiscussed – and what has left generation upon generation of the poem’s readers spellbound – is not so much other readers of the DRN, but the elusive ‘author’ himself. Jerome famously claimed that Lucretius wrote the DRN between intervals of insanity brought on by a love potion, and increasingly wild biographies of Lucretius crop up again and again in the reception traditions of the poem – from death-bed hallucinations brought on by his wicked wife to his beautiful but unresponsive male paramour. Taking some of these biographies as its point of inspiration, this chapter uses the concept of the ‘implied author’ to investigate what exactly it is about Lucretius’ text that inspired and inspires such imaginative, but arguably still textually grounded, portraits of its author.

This chapter offers a reconsideration of the well-known letters–atoms analogy in Lucretius’ DRN. By reviewing two readings of this analogy and then turning to the anagrammatic ‘readings’ of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (who in three unpublished cahiers found significant names hidden in DRN), the chapter highlights gaps and omissions in the two existing interpretations. In particular, whereas the previous interpretations use the analogy as license to focus on either the sound of syllables or the arrangement of letters, Saussure instead allows us to think that the force of the analogy may lie not only in the written or spoken properties of letters but also in their creative power, their performative ability to create new words and denote new objects in the world.

This chapter shows how Lucretius repeatedly draws parallels between the human soul and the stars in DRN 3. These parallels are achieved through intertextual reference to the Aratea, Cicero’s poem on the stars. In drawing as densely on the Aratea as it demonstrably does, the DRN creates a problem for its interpretation. The Aratea, a translation of the Phaenomena of the Hellenistic poet Aratus, is a text with a markedly Stoic orientation, as I’ve shown elsewhere (Gee 2001 and 2013). The Stoic approach to the stars and the soul is that of an intelligent-design philosophy, and therefore in opposition to Lucretius’ atomist understanding of the universe and mankind. What then is the meaning of Lucretius’ tapestry of allusions to the Aratea? This chapter shows how Lucretius deliberately hijacks a text in the opposing philosophical tradition as part of his polemical strategy. Through close readings it becomes clear that Lucretius eviscerates Cicero’s poem of its intelligent-design substance and substitutes his own Epicurean content in its stead. The reader familiar with the Aratea now views the Stoic poem through the mesh of allusions in the DRN, with the result that Lucretius has partially eclipsed the worldview of the Aratea and replaced it with his own.

The first part of this paper looks into the question of Lucretius’ philosophical sources and whether he draws almost exclusively from Epicurus himself or also from later Epicurean texts. I argue that such debates are inconclusive and likely will remain so, even if additional Epicurean texts are discovered, and that even if we were able to ascertain Lucretius’ philosophical sources, doing so would add little to our understanding of the DRN. The second part of the paper turns to a consideration of what Lucretius does with his philosophical sources. The arguments within the DRN are not original. Nonetheless, the way Lucretius presents these arguments establishes him as a distinctive philosopher. Lucretius deploys non-argumentative methods of persuasion such as appealing to emotions, redeploying powerful cultural tropes, and ridicule. These methods of persuasion do not undercut or displace reasoned argumentation. Instead, they complement it. Lucretius’ use of these methods is rooted in his understanding of human psychology, that we have been culturally conditioned to have empty desires, false beliefs and destructive emotions, ones that are often subconscious. Effective persuasion must take into account the biases, stereotypes and other psychological factors that hinder people from accepting Epicurus’ healing gospel.

This chapter takes a metapoetic approach to Lucretian allusion to show that the DRN figures the phenomenon of echo as a metaphor for literary appropriation. Lucretius culminates his discussion of acoustic phenomena and hearing with the example of the echo (DRN 4.549–94). Insofar as echo is introduced as the most prominent effect in the perceptible world of the atomic reverberations that give rise to auditory aisthēsis, I argue that Lucretius' multiple allusions to earlier poetry in this passage also serve to illustrate metapoetically the process itself of hearing. The ideas inherent in this Lucretian passage find parallels in the fragmentary papyri of Philodemus.

There is a long history in Lucretian scholarship of finding conflict in the DRN between its philosophical content and its poetic form. Recent criticism has emphasized rather how the poem’s poetic form complements its Epicurean message. This chapter argues for important differences between literary and philosophical approaches to the poem, in particular with regard to its relationship with other texts, in order to identify some important differences in common modes of reading the poem. The chapter examines a ‘master-text’ model of reading, in which the DRN is related in strong fashion to another text on which it is dependent. The precise nature and identity of this ‘master-text’ can vary, according to the purpose or use to which the DRN is put. The approach of such ‘master-text’ readings is strikingly different from the dominant intertextual mode. In the examples of intertextual reading examined, the relationship to the other text is not one of subordination, but a tool used by the DRN to serve a particular function within the poem itself. The modes of reading explored in this chapter can lead to real differences in interpretation: e.g., on the end of the DRN, or on how uncompromising or sympathetic we should view certain parts of the poem. One important consequence is the need to acknowledge the differences in our reading practices and theoretical assumptions.