Atomistic Imagery: Repetition and Reflection of the World in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura

2021 ◽  
pp. 105-136
Keyword(s):  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
The World

scholarly journals Machiavelli e la lezione di Lucrezio

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Centanni
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
The World ◽  
Vita Activa ◽  
The Individual

Machiavelli’s knowledge of Lucretius’ text had been proven thanks to a very relevant discovery by Sergio Bertelli, who in 1961 published an article in which he recognized Machiavelli’s handwriting in the Vatican codex Rossianus 884. This paper analyses the possible repercussions of De rerum natura with respect to the political potential that Lucretius’ thought could had transmitted to Machiavelli, in view of his return to the vita activa. In particular, the notes posted by Machiavelli in the marginalia of the Lucretius’ text he transcribed, prove his reflection on the “clinamen theory”. In the various profiles of the world generated by the vital trigger that the clinamen causes, lies a possibility for us of having a libera mens: the possibility of intercepting and correcting, by our own virtue, the twists and turns of Fate, opposes the individual liberty to the whims of Fortuna, but also to the idea of an ineffable Divine Providence with its mysterious and intractable designs.

Nature

2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bellamy Foster
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Material World ◽  
Complex Word ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The World ◽  
Raymond Williams

This article is adapted from John Bellamy Foster, "Nature," in Kelly Fritsch, Clare O'Connor, and AK Thompson, ed., Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 279-86, http://akpress.org/keywords-for-radicals.html."Nature," wrote Raymond Williams in Keywords, "is perhaps the most complex word in the language." It is derived from the Latin natura, as exemplified by Lucretius's great didactic poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) from the first century BCE. The word "nature" has three primary, interrelated meanings: (1) the intrinsic properties or essence of things or processes; (2) an inherent force that directs or determines the world; and (3) the material world or universe, the object of our sense perceptions—both in its entirety and variously understood as including or excluding God, spirit, mind, human beings, society, history, culture, etc.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Text of the World

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-84
Author(s):  
Stephanie Ann Frampton
Keyword(s):  
Atomic Composition ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Familiar Figure ◽  
The World

It has long been recognized that one of the governing images of Lucretius’s great natural-philosophical poem De rerum natura is the analogy between letters and atoms, both elementa (“elements”) in Latin. At several points in the poem, Lucretius explains the mystery of atomic composition by saying that the atoms are like letters, coming together into physical bodies just as letters come together into words, and words into poetry. Taking seriously the material-cultural roots of Lucretius’s materialist analogy, this chapter approaches the familiar figure in a new way. Using papyri that provide evidence for the methods by which children in antiquity learned to read and write, this chapter shows the debt that Lucretius’s description of writing—and thus his very ideas of atomism and the ; (clinamen) &#“swerve”—owe to one of the most common tools of ancient literate education: the syllabary.

IV. TheAeneid

1998 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 53-101
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Formal Model ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Epic Tradition ◽  
Philosophical Account ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Literary Genealogy ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Roman Epic

At the heart of theAeneidthe hero descends to the world of the dead and in its innermost recess is reunited with his father. Anchises, Aeneas’s link to his destroyed Trojan past, reveals to his son the future of his race in the form of a procession of the souls of Roman heroes as yet unborn. In this place where time past, present, and future is held together, theAeneidalso comes to a heightened consciousness of its own literary genealogy, as literary memory is overlaid on family and racial memory. The whole of the Underworld episode is modelled on Odysseus’ visit to the land of the dead inOdyssey11: Aeneas’ meeting with his father reworks Odysseus’ meeting with his mother Anticleia (Od.11.152–224), which is immediately followed by the Catalogue of Heroines (Od.11.225–332), the formal model for Virgil’s very masculine Parade of Heroes. But the tears and words with which Anchises greets his son (6.684–9) allude to the Roman epic of Ennius and specifically to the scene at the opening of theAnnalsin which Ennius established his own place within the epic tradition, by narrating a dream in which the phantom of Homer explained to the sleeping poet how, through a Pythagorean metempsychosis, the true soul of Homer was reincarnated in the breast of Ennius himself. In restaging this scene of succession in the dreamlike setting of the Underworld Virgil hints at his own relationship to the dead epic poets to whose company he seeks admittance. The encounter of Aeneas and Anchises occurs within a set-piece of Homeric imitation; Anchises’ running commentary on the Parade of Heroes functions as a summary of the matter of Ennius’ historical epic, which it ‘completes’ by extending the story to Augustus’ achievement of world-empire and restoration of a Golden Age (6.791–800). Ennian historical epic is thus framed in a Homeric mythological episode; in the first part of his speech (6.724–51) Anchises encapsulates another branch of the hexameter tradition, with a philosophico-theological account of the nature of the world and of the soul that is indebted both to Anticleia’s explanation to Odysseus of what happens to humans after death (Od.11.216–24) and to the Ennian Homer’s more philosophical account of these matters, but couched in markedly Lucretian language: a miniature didactic ‘de rerum natura’ to set beside the miniatureAnnalsthat is to follow.

Ce´´zanne and Lucretius at the Red Rock

2002 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-85
Author(s):  
Kathryn A Tuma
Keyword(s):  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Roman Poet ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Theoretical Terms ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
New Perspective

ARGUING AGAINST CRITICAL MODELS of Céézanne's pictorial tech nique that posit a delimitable ''unit'' of manufacture as the basis for the composition of his pictures, and challenging certain idéées reççues of Greenbergian modernism that continue to frame our view of Céézanne's art, ''Céézanne and Lucretius at the Red Rock'' offers a new perspective from which to think about meaning and form in Céézanne's painting. The essay takes as its starting point evidence that during the last decade of his life Céézanne was reading Lucretius, the Roman poet whose De rerum natura espouses the ancient philosophy of atomistic materialism. From this connection ''Céézanne and Lucretius at the Red Rock'' does not propose Céézanne as a painter of an atomistic worldview - an argument that would yield for the formal analysis of Céézanne's pictorial technique little more than yet another version of what is frequently characterized as Céézanne's ''constructive stroke.'' Instead, this essay turns on a Lucretius who was a poet profoundly attuned to the complex ways metaphorical figuration functioned in his materialist imagination of the world. On the basis of a scrupulous analysis of one late landscape by Céézanne, ''The Red Rock'' of circa 1895, this essay advances ways that such a materialism - one, in other words, acutely self-aware of its own construction on the basis of metaphor - can be seen as deeply resonant with formal and thematic concerns of Céézanne's art. Using Lucretian materialism as its heuristic in this manner, ''Céézanne and Lucretius at the Red Rock'' also sets forth new proposals about Céézanne's revolutionary use of color, contributes to the long-standing critical effort to articulate more precisely the elusive meaning of one of Céézanne's key theoretical terms, ''realization,'' and concludes with a meditation on the deeper issues involved in the melancholic preoccupations of so many of Céézanne's last canvases.

“The flaming ramparts of the world”

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-243
Author(s):  
Melanie Hacke
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Roman Poet ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Religious Consciousness ◽  
The World

The present article analyses Walter Pater’s novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), focusing particularly on the nexus between the story’s setting in Ancient Rome and its treatment of religion. Even though the abrupt ending of Marius’s Bildung suggests that Pater had not yet succeeded in reconciling his aesthetic philosophy with a religious life in community, the novel encourages its readers to adopt an eclectic religious consciousness. By examining Pater’s references to Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, the article investigates how Pater used the Roman poet to reinforce this message, and to react against the materialism of post-Darwinian Britain. Moreover, it shows how Marius the Epicurean incorporates and subverts some of the motifs that can be found in popular Victorian novels set in Rome.

The Birth of Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-48
Author(s):  
Hanjo Berressem
Keyword(s):  
Early Reading ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
The World

The chapter focuses on the beginning of Deleuze’s career, charting his confrontation with Simondon, from whose work he takes the notion of crystal individuation. It then turns to Deleuze’s early reading of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. Stressing in particular Lucretius’ notion of the ‘light of Venus’, the chapter reads Deleuze’s luminous ontology against Thomas Nail’s argument that Lucretius’ work proposes a fluid and processual ontology. The chapter concludes that the ideas Deleuze distils from Lucretius concern a love of the multiplicity of the world and of life, and that Deleuzian philosophy is a response to the question of where Lucretius’ love of life and of a given multiplicity takes philosophy. Nowhere in Deleuze’s work is the positivity and affirmation that he finds in Lucretius put into question. All horrors are immanent to this more profound love of a multiplicitous life and light, which Deleuze also finds in Nietzsche and Bergson.

Lucretius (c.94–c.55 BC)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Erler
Keyword(s):  
Latin Poetry ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
The World ◽  
Titus Lucretius Carus ◽  
Considerable Size

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman Epicurean philosopher and poet. About his life and personality little can be said with certainty, yet his only known work, ‘On the Nature of Things’ (De rerum natura), is of considerable size and one of the most brilliant achievements of Latin poetry. A didactic poem in six books, it expounds Epicurean physics. Its manifesto is to abolish the fear of gods and of death by demonstrating that the soul is mortal and the world not governed by gods but by mechanical laws.

Lucretius: De Rerum Natura

2008 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
World View ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
The World ◽  
Original Audience ◽  
Scientific Argument

For a work written more than two thousand years ago, in a society in many ways quite alien to our own, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura contains much of striking, even startling, contemporary relevance. This is true, above all, of the fifth book, which begins by putting a strong case against what it has recently become fashionable to call 'intelligent design', and ends with an account of human evolution and the development of society in which the limitations of technological progress form a strong and occasionally explicit subtext. Along the way, the poet touches on many themes which may strike a chord with the twenty-first century reader: the fragility of our ecosystem, the corruption of political life, the futility of consumerism and the desirability of limiting our acquisitive instincts are all highly topical issues for us, as for the poem's original audience. Book V also offers a fascinating introduction to the world-view of the upper-class Roman of the first century BC. This edition (which complements existing Aris and Phillips commentaries on books 3, 4 and 6) will help to make Lucretius' urgent and impassioned argument, and something of his remarkable poetic style, accessible to a wider audience, including those with little or no knowledge of Latin. Both the translation and commentary aim to explain the scientific argument of the book as clearly as possible; and to convey at least some impression of the poetic texture of Lucretius' Latin.

scholarly journals RATIONALISM AND THE THEATRE IN LUCRETIUS

2016 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barnaby Taylor
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
Direct Contribution ◽  
Sufficient Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Ethical Project

Lucretius' primary didactic aim in De Rerum Natura (DRN) is to teach his readers to interpret the world around them in such a way as to avoid the formation of false beliefs. The price of failure is extremely high. Someone who possesses false beliefs is liable to experience fear (of the gods, or of death, or both), and so will not be able to attain the state of tranquillity that, for Epicureans, constitutes the moral end. Equipping readers with sufficient knowledge always to form true beliefs about the phenomena they encounter thus serves no less a purpose than the enabling of their future happiness. This paper is concerned with how Lucretian intertextuality contributes to this primary didactic aim. For reasons to be explained below, I will focus on Lucretian engagement with the texts of Greek and Roman drama. I will show that allusions to drama in DRN, rather than functioning simply as ‘honey on the rim of the cup’, make a direct contribution to Lucretius' ethical project, teaching readers how to respond rationally to the full variety of their cultural experience.

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