Lucretius on the Ennian Cosmos

This chapter approaches Lucretius’ engagement with Ennius on Lucretius’ own terms and explores how the Annales serves Lucretius as a model (or a foil, rather) for poetry about the universe. Lucretius makes clear his identification of Ennius and Ennius’ Homer as poets who also write on “the nature of things” when he singles them out by name in the proem to the DRN (1.117–126). Obviously, the whole tradition of interpreting epic poetry from Homer onward as allegorical philosophy is behind these lines. Throughout the DRN, Lucretius recurrently figures his universe as a direct response to the Ennian cosmos in a procedure that involves philosophical polemics as much as poetic polemics. In so doing, Lucretius articulates a universe whose philosophical dynamics are anti-Ennian, precisely because they are emphatically Epicurean.