Lucretius Puns

Hey all. I’m writing a research paper on social criticism in Lucretius and wanted to crowdsource some resources. Do you guys have any good articles/chapters/papers on that topic? Thanks in advance!

>What loss were ours, if we had known not birth?
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>Let living men to longer life aspire,
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>While fond affection binds their hearts to earth:
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>But whoso ne'er hath tasted life's desire,
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>Unborn, impersonal, can feel no dearth.

— Lucretius, De rerum natura

Is “On the Nature of Things” mostly an Epicurean scientific explanation of things, or does it contain a lot of the practical philosophy of Epicurus, similar to what is in “Letter to Menoeceus”?

Thanks!

Thus, therefore, he, who feels the fiery dart

Of strong desire transfix his amorous heart,

Whether some beauteous boy’s alluring face,

Or lovelier maid, with unresisting grace,

From her each part the wingèd arrow sends,

From whence he first was struck he thither tends;

Restless he roams, impatient to be freed,

And eager to inject the sprightly seed;

For fierce desire does all his mind employ,

And ardent love assures approaching joy.

Such is the nature of that pleasing smart,

Whose burning drops distil upon the heart,

The fever of the soul shot from the fair,

And the cold ague of succeeding care.

If absent, her idea still appears,

And her sweet name is chiming in your ears.

But strive those pleasing phantoms to remove,

And shun the aërial images of love,

That feed the flame: when one molests thy mind,

Discharge thy loins on all the leaky kind;

For that’s a wiser way, than to restrain

Within thy swelling nerves that hoard of pain.

For every hour some deadlier symptom shews,

And by delay the gathering venom grows,

When kindly applications are not used;

The scorpion, love, must on the wound be bruised.

On that one object ’tis not safe to stay,

But force the tide of thought some other way;

The squandered spirits prodigally throw,

And in the common glebe of nature sow.

Nor wants he all the bliss that lovers feign,

Who takes the pleasure, and avoids the pain;

For purer joys in purer health abound,

And less affect the sickly than the sound.

When love its utmost vigour does employ,

Even then ’tis but a restless wandering joy;

Nor knows the lover in that wild excess,

With hands or eyes, what first he would possess;

But strains at all, and, fastening where he strains,

Too closely presses with his frantic pains;

With biting kisses hurts the twining fair,

Which shews his joys imperfect, insincere:

For, stung with inward rage, he flings around,

And strives to avenge the smart on that which gave the wound.

But love those eager bitings does restrain,

And mingling pleasure mollifies the pain.

For ardent hope still flatters anxious grief,

And sends him to his foe to seek relief:

Which yet the nature of the thing denies;

For love, and love alone of all our joys,

By full possession does but fan the fire;

The more we still enjoy, the more we still desire.

Nature for meat and drink provides a space,

And, when received, they fill their certain place;

Hence thirst and hunger may be satisfied,

But this repletion is to love den

>A human baby’s like a sailor washed up on a beach
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>By the battering of the surf, naked, lacking the power of speech,
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>Possessing no means of survival, when first Nature pours
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>Him forth with birth-pangs from his mother’s womb upon Light’s shores.
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>He fills the room up with his sorrowful squalls, and rightly so! —
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>Just think what lies in store for him, Life’s full supply of woe.

— Lucretius, The Nature of Things

Hey everyone! This might be a dumb question so please bear with me. I believe i've seen 2 or 3 busts of what Lucretius was supposed to look like and he's always sporting a short beard. It is also my understanding that beards were considered uncivilized and barbaric in the roman empire around the 1st Century BCE.

My questions are: considereing how much of what we know of Lucretius' life and work are posthumous constructions, what sources do we have of his image?

Is it possible that Lucretius' beard is actually a representation (posthumous or not) of the connections of epicurean philosophy to the Greek culture? Or maybe a pejorative representation of how deeply"un-roman" epicurean philosophy was?

This post is about some common themes I've noticed between these author's descriptions of individuals experiencing spiritual ascents to heaven and returning with philosophical knowledge.

Lucretius offers a sort of naturalistic take on this form, explaining how Epicurus defeated the superstition of common religion.

> On The Nature of Things 1.60-80

> It used to be that human life, polluted, was lying in the dirt before our eyes, crushed by the weight of religion, which stretched out its head on display from the regions of heaven, threatening mortals from above with its horrible-looking face. It was a Greek man who first dared to raise his mortal eyes against religion, and who first fought back against it. Neither stories of the gods, nor thunderbolts, nor the sky with its threatening rumbles held him back, but provoked all the more the fierce sharpness of his mind, so that he desired to be the first to shatter the imprisoning bolts of the gates of nature. As a result the vital force of his mind was victorious, and he traveled far beyond the flaming walls of the world and trekked throughout the measureless universe in mind and spirit. As victor he brings back from there knowledge of what can come to be, what cannot, in short, by what process each thing has its power limited, and its deep-set boundary stone. And so the tables are turned. Religion lies crushed beneath our feat, and his victory raises us to the sky.

Philo of Alexandria describes his own experience of what he elsewhere calls the "dying" and "rising" of God's son the Logos within the soul of a person.

>Special Laws 3.1-6

> There was once a time when, devoting my leisure to philosophy and to the contemplation of the world and the things in it, I reaped the fruit of excellent, and desirable, and blessed intellectual feelings, being always living among the divine oracles and doctrines, on which I fed incessantly and insatiably, to my great delight, never entertaining any low or grovelling thoughts, nor ever wallowing in the pursuit of glory or wealth, or the delights of the body, but **I appeared to be raised on high and borne aloft by a certain inspiration of the soul, and to dwell in the regions of the sun and moon, and to associate with the whole heaven, and the whole universal world. At that time, therefore, looking down from above, from the air, and straining the eye of my mind as from a watch-tower, I surveyed the unspeakable contemplation of all the

I would like to read Lucretius book on the nature of things, please recommend me the best translated version of his work

“Until there presents a least; a point where division ends, the smallest bodies will individually consist of infinite parts. In that case any half of the part of any body will always have its own half, nor will anything set a limit to this division. What, therefore, would be the difference in their nature between the largest and smallest of bodies? It would not be possible that there is any difference, for, the whole entire sum of things or the universe be infinite, yet, the smallest things that exist in it would equally consist of infinite parts.” -Titus Lucretius Carus ‘De Rerum Natura’ (on the nature of things) ~45 BC

Stephen Greenblatt's book The Swerve has sold millions of copies and won many prestigious awards, and so eventually came to the attention of Latinists who were surprised by the author's claim that Lucretius had been forgotten for 1000 years, and by other claims made by the author.

In 2013, David Butterfield, who is preparing the next Oxford Classical Texts edition of Lucretius, published a book entitled The Early Textual History of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, which makes a very strong contrast to Greenblatt's prizewinning book. By examining what Butterfield has to say about the indirect transmission of Lucretius, we get the impression that Lucretius was not forgotten for 1000 years. Not that many people necessarily thought that he had been, before the startling claims made by Greenblatt. https://thewrongmonkey.blogspot.com/2019/12/david-butterfield-on-indirect-tradition.html

According to Richard Jenkyns’ Introduction to “The Nature of Things,” Lucretius and Epicurus believed that “romantic love... is to be avoided, as it involves loss of rationality and self-control” (ix).

Feels good to have aro philosophical forebears

I'm working my way (slowly) through Lucretius De Rerum Natura, and came across the word "cupiret" at the end of line 71 of book 1. I can't seem to find any word that works for it in any of my dictionaries, and even when I gave up and resorted to perseus, I still couldn't find any information on it. If you know what the word is, that would be very helpful (my instinct is to guess its related to Cupio, but for the life of me I still can't find it). Thanks!!!

On another note: I've heard people say Lucretius makes up some vocabulary sometimes. Whats a good source for information on this. I know there are a few modern commentaries, such as the green and yellow, which I'm sure discuss this, although I'm working with the OCT and don't really feel like sinking any extra money on a Cambridge text. If you know of any other resources, I would be extremely grateful!!!

I'm interested in starting to work with Lucretius's De Rerum Natura and was wondering what people's experience with the original Latin is like. I have two years of college level Latin experience (including working with Vergil and a smattering of Plautus), and was wondering if it is a particularly difficult text for this level of Latin experience. In addition, I was wondering if anyone has any recommended commentaries for the Lucretius. Thanks1

My mind boggles when reading, "De Rerum Natura."

It seems so incredibly modern, and I understand it had a great impact on many figures of the Renaissance.

Lucretius lays some groundwork for the theory of Evolution, deduces the existence of atoms, and holds that everything in nature can be explained by natural laws, without the need for the intervention of divine beings.

We know the ideas are based on Epicurean physics. But do we know anything about how the work came about,and how revolutionary it was at the time? Would ancient Romans have been wowed by this work, as were Renaissance thinkers? Or were the ideas old enough that it wouldn't have been considered that revolutionary?

Butterfield seems to be very conservative, repeatedly rejecting what others have treated as evidence of readership of Lucretius. Still, there's enough evidence from up until the end of the 10th century to fill a very interesting medium-sized book. https://thewrongmonkey.blogspot.com/2019/12/david-butterfield-on-indirect-tradition.html

Can anyone recommend me best translation for On the Nature of Things.

Hi, I would like to read Lucretius book, please recommend me the best translation.