“The Ties that Bind,” takes us in a new direction as we begin to explore Lucretius’ curative efforts toward his male audience. Quite naturally then, we train our focus on the famous honey-rimmed cup of medicine metaphor of 1.921–50 (4.1–25). We find that the verses present a figure denser than the simple doctor-patient-medicine schema. Rather surprisingly, Lucretius has woven into the image a complex set of allusions to mythical female characters. In overlapping ways, Lucretius identifies his authorial voice with Circe, Helen, and the Sirens as he seeks to seduce, drug, and divert his audience away from what they might imagine to be their dearest goals in life. Lucretius reveals that the emasculating web of deceit he spins becomes a safety net to rescue his audience from the trap of self-delusion and superstition in the face of nature’s laws.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the polemical dismissal of Epicurean teachings as sub-masculine and morally suspect. Epicureans are shown to figured as sexually receptive and effeminate by their ideological opponents. I argue that Lucretius accepts these criticisms and turns them around to show that Roman men are equally effeminate and penetrable. Objective, empirical observation of nature and physics proves that everyone, regardless of biological sex and sociological gender, is rendered penetrable and vulnerable by the constant issue and reception of atoms.

We resume the above discussion about sense perception and violence and delve further into the campaign Lucretius wages against presumed subjectivity. This chapter is a combination of two previously published articles (“Ocular Penetration, Grammatical Objectivity, and an Indecent Proposal in De Rerum Natura” and “Seminal Verse: Atomic Orality and Aurality in De Rerum Natura” ) both of which have undergone revision and expansion for the present volume. The weight of inquiry falls especially on sight and hearing, which are, perhaps not coincidentally, the primary modes of experiencing the poem or – to put it more in Lucretius’ parlance – the senses being assailed by the poem itself. Shown to be less than powerful in the womb in Chapter 2, here we find that Lucretius alters this uterine imagery to prove that men and their sense orifices are involuntary, womb-like repositories for nature’s inseminating forces.

In the sixth and final chapter, we continue to trace how Lucretius rehabilitates Roman men and their performed gender. Although I resume exploring the sexual language and figures by which Lucretius depreciates male presumptions of anatomical and sociological advantage, in “Vir Recreandus” I also tease out from the poem a positive argument about masculinity. Following the poet’s cues, I construct what an Epicurean man is, what he can do, what he is for, and how he can flourish in Lucretius’ reordering of the world. This Epicurean homo turns out to be manly in behaviors that, in part, map onto traditional scripts for a vir even while acting and self-regarding in ways that Romans would deem strange indeed. Much to Cicero’s vexation, Epicurean men become Rome’s true patriots.

From conception and lived experience, we proceed to death in Chapter 4. Although my focus is on Lucretius’ treatment of death and men’s fears of it, in “The Hole that Gapes for All” I persist with analyzing the themes of wombs, semen, fecundity and the ways by which Lucretius weaves this imagery into his criticism of human appetite for consumables, sex, and protracted life. In Lucretius’ poetics, the universe, the world, and individual human bodies all become sites of decomposition, insemination, and (re)birth. Death itself is shown to be pathologically eroticized as the final object of a man’s fear and lust – a desire Lucretius seeks to reform into an ethical acceptance of death. Lucretius’ point, I argue, is that, regardless of biological maleness and the security it bestows on Roman men, nature’s laws make wombs and tombs of them all in a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth.

The chapter takes us to the moment of biological conception and explores the question of male autonomy in embryonic fertilization and development. We will follow Lucretius’ lead into the reproductive organs of men and women to show how generative material supplied by female and male sexual partners both competes and cooperates at conception. What Lucretius reveals in forceful language and imagery is that men are impotent in the face of universal physics and that female reproductive assertiveness gives the lie to exclusive male dominion from the moment when genetic material from both parents first coheres in utero.