This book comes only six years after Oxford's previous volume of collected papers, entitled simply Lucretius, and the Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (both published in 2007).Footnote ¹ The volume adds to these a useful approach that will be appreciated by Lucretian scholars and interested students, but it has high points and low points. Many of its ten chapters make important contributions to Lucretian scholarship, but the volume does not always constructively pursue the paths that S.'s introduction presents. Most noticeably, the inclusion of the word ‘science’ in its subtitle amounts to two brief references comparing Lucretius to Stephen Hawking (Kennedy p. 66, Johnson pp. 103–4). These comparisons are insightful and valuable, but serve more to illustrate Lucretius' style of presentation as a science writer than to criticise the poem's purported role as ‘an anti-creationist sacred text’ (p. 11). More significantly, the intention to explore ‘how poetry mediates the relationship between physics and ethics’ (p. 1) proves problematic, because the contributors disagree fundamentally on what that relationship is, some seeing the physics, others the ethics as primary.

The volume begins and ends with two very strong pieces on intertextuality. In Chapter 1, M. Gale compellingly shows how Lucretius engages in a drawn-out but implicit polemic with Hesiod's Works and Days, not only in its role as the ur-example of the didactic genre, but also because it portrays an un-Epicurean ideology, built around the concepts of Piety, Labour and Justice, that threatened to gain the sympathies of many Roman Republican readers. In Chapter 10, K.M. Earnshaw illuminates Lucretian intertexts in Lucan, particularly in his portrayal of Pompey's dream visions and how they contrast the generic expectations of epic with those of Epicurean philosophy. Chapter 9 offers a third but less convincing contribution on the theme of intertextuality. M. Garani traces a line of influence that runs from Empedocles through Lucretius and Virgil to Ovid. One could easily complain, however, that Garani's argument is often stitched together with too slender a thread.

The central chapters also make important contributions to our understanding of the philosophical aspects of Lucretius' poem. In Chapter 4, M.R. Johnson makes the important distinction that Lucretius' conception of spontaneity (sponte sua) – a quality which he attributes to atoms, animals and humans alike – does not imply that the actions of these entities are produced by accidental chance or pure contingency, a complaint that has dogged Epicureans from the beginning. Rather, he clarifies that sponte sua is best understood ‘as a natural cause of voluntary action, sharply differentiated from external force and coercion’ (p. 125), ‘a conceptual antonym to legal oppression, domination or servitude’ (p. 101) that serves to distinguish mankind's evolution or the atomic swerve as processes devoid of divine influence. In Chapter 5, L. reveals how Lucretius negotiates an inevitable inconsistency when he must at times warn against trusting sense perception, particularly vision, as a tool for discerning truth, while at other times offering visual metaphors and other language that equates ‘seeing’ with knowing, both in the sense of seeing truth and in the moral sense of seeing right and wrong. In Chapter 6, B. Holmes seems to solve a persistent problem in interpreting the continuity of Lucretius' account of the development of early society, not by searching for philosophical precedents as has often been done, but by following the ‘conceptual momentum’ of the ‘poetic narrative’ (p. 179).

S.'s introduction expresses the contributors' intent to ‘bring [their] various positions into dialogue’ (p. 1). Several chapters suffer in large part because they neglect this opportunity. In Chapter 7, D. Konstan suggests that Lucretius – despite his perceived injunction against grieving for the dead who can no longer experience suffering – identifies a kind of animalistic quality to human grief which is beyond intellectual consolation. Thus grief for the dead can be understandable and acceptable even in an Epicurean context, provided that that grief is not aeternus (DRN 3.907, 911). But not all readers will be willing to follow him in identifying this acquiescence to grief in Lucretius, including the author of the volume's subsequent chapter. In Chapter 8, M. finds in this same passage ‘little consolation in Lucretius’ brutally sarcastic words to mourners whose grief is plainly fresh' (p. 218). M.'s chapter offers a starkly opposing reading, that Lucretius intended his reader to offer no sympathy to those who mourn death, even their own deaths. But his reading of Iphianassa's sacrifice in Book 1 as a test of the experienced reader's ability to maintain ataraxia in the face of death (on the order of the Athenian plague at the end of Book 6) is probably going too far in the other direction. Can we really compare the death of the old man in Book 3, presumably from natural causes, to the needless murder of a young maiden by her own father? M.'s argument also overlooks too much the very similar themes presented in C. Segal's Lucretius on Death and Anxiety (1990).

Chapter 2 highlights an area in which the volume, and Lucretian studies in general, is sorely lacking, namely the question of Lucretius' readership. Kennedy offers a pro-imperial reading of DRN, which looks not to uncover authorial intention but to explore reader response. The problem is that Kennedy offers no critical examination of who such a reader might be. This is an important consideration if we are to ask ourselves why such a myopic interpretation of the poem has any value. A sentence from M.'s chapter illustrates this and another problem. He writes, ‘The DRN is a didactic text with a particular project: it aims at teaching its addressee and wider readership the truths of Epicurean philosophy (chiefly physics) …’ (p. 212). Again, we are left wondering whom we mean when we speak of Lucretius' ‘wider readership’. Wider than what, if by ‘addressee’ we mean more than just Memmius?

The above sentence also reveals inconsistencies on the question of the primacy in Epicurean philosophy of its physics or its ethical, therapeutic value. M. places the physics in the ‘chief’ position. But compare L. on the topic: ‘Indeed, for Epicureans the main point of even doing physics in the first place is ethical, the final aim to dispel fear’ (p. 141). There appears to be a contradiction even within this statement. Do Epicurean ethics come ‘in the first place’ – that is, do they supersede atomism in the conception of the philosophy? – or as a ‘final aim’ – the ultimate product but not necessarily the initiatory motive of the philosophy? Can we imagine that Epicurean ethics – a system which requires a secure knowledge of the physical principles – could be conceived before knowledge of the atomism that provides its underpinnings? If Epicurean ethics are in any sense ‘primary’ it must only be in their importance for humanity and not in the order of their conception. Hankinson's discussion of the ‘doctrine of multiple explanations’ in Chapter 3 also suffers on this point. Placing his argument ‘within the fundamental Epicurean framework of the subordination of physics to ethics’ (p. 79) (in the sense of the order of their conception rather than their importance), leads him to the obvious conclusion: ‘Epicureans insist on atomism because it is true’ (p. 93), by which he means not that Epicurean atomism is in fact true, but that Epicureans believed it to be true. One could only pose the question (which Hankinson takes 24 pages to answer) – why did Epicureans ‘insist on atomism’ and not some other explanation that would lead to the same therapeutic effect – if one mistakenly assumes that at some point atomism was a contrived addition to a pre-existing ethical system in search of a plausible explanation.