This is a collection of papers delivered at a conference held at the University of Manchester in 2009. Following an illuminating Introduction by Alison Sharrock, Monica Gale traces Lucretian interactions with Hesiod through Books 2 and 5 of DRN, aiming to show that Lucretius’ accounts of piety, labour and justice may all be read as responding to and rejecting the mythic claims of Hesiod.
Duncan Kennedy's dense and stimulating essay maps the connections in the poem between knowledge and social order. Invoking recent work on the ‘ordering of knowledge’ in the Roman Empire, Kennedy appeals to the ‘legitimating narrative’ of 1.62-79 — where Epicurus’ epistemic mastering of the universe is described, metaphorically, as the journey of a conquering general – to construct a Roman imperial reading of the poem's epistemic politics. Kennedy is surely right to stress the imperial elements of this passage, but not all imperial projects are Roman: the disturbing connotations of Graius homo (1.66) — a phrase used by Ennius (165 Sk.) of Rome's enemy, Pyrrhus of Epirus — may encourage us to read Epicurus’ journey through the infinite as a counternarrative — perhaps the counternarrative — to Roman imperial expansion.
R. J. Hankinson on the logic of multiple explanations is perhaps the highlight of the volume. In a clear and concise investigation of the relations that hold between Epicurean therapy and canonic, Hankinson considers how the method of multiple explanation may have contributed to Epicurean therapeutic goals. He also asks the bigger question of why, if the primary Epicurean goal (the achievement of ataraxia through the removal of fear) may be achieved by any thoroughgoing materialist, Lucretius and Epicurus should be at pains to convince readers of their own particular version of atomism over and above all others. His answers to these questions involve appeals to both epistemological and rhetorical factors. In a volume dedicated (1) to interdisciplinary readings of Lucretius, Hankinson's piece is the most convincing demonstration of what can be achieved when ‘philosophical’ and ‘non-philosophical’ approaches are combined.
Monte Ransome Johnson seeks to decouple Lucretian spontaneity (invoked with the phrase ‘sponte sua’) from the notion of random, accidental or contingent causes. Johnson succeeds in establishing that, for Lucretius, an act is spontaneous if it occurs without external influence or constraint. This analysis of spontaneity is then applied to 2.251–93 (on voluntary action). Given that Johnson regularly claims equivalence between Latin ‘sponte sua’ and Greek ‘automatos’, I would have appreciated some discussion of the relation between Lucretian spontaneity and Epicurus’ notion of to automaton (On Nature 34.27.8–9, 11 Arr.), which appears to play an important rôle in the master's own discussion of voluntary action.
Epicurean epistemology insisted on a strict distinction between perception and other, higher-level cognitive processes that involve the addition of opinion to our raw perceptions. Typically, however, this distinction is not reflected in the semantics of perception verbs: states of affairs referred to using Latin video, for example, often involve rather more than ‘mere’ seeing. Daryn Lehoux offers a useful (if necessarily cursory) account of the language of perception in DRN, the high point of which is an analysis of 1st-person plural forms which rightly stresses the rhetorical and didactic importance of inclusive language in the poem.
Brooke Holmes uses the notion of ‘negative exceptionalism’ (the idea that humans are uniquely vulnerable to the depredations of the natural world) to reintegrate the passage 5.1011–27 (a difficult piece of historical contractarianism) into the wider ‘conceptual context’ of Book 5. This is one of the more powerful essays in the collection, although it remains unclear how we should understand human negative exceptionalism in the light of 5.864–70, where some non-human animals, in need of protection from wild beasts, are described as entering into arrangements with early humans based on mutual utility. The special status apparently granted to such creatures by Lucretius (and, indeed, Epicurus) suggests that humans may in fact be less starkly exceptional than Holmes makes out.
There follow two essays on Epicurean attitudes to mortality. David Konstan, starting from the now-familiar notion that emotional experience in the ancient world was understood to involve a significant element of cognition, establishes an Epicurean distinction between emotions proper and quasi-emotional instinctive responses to perceptions. Konstan uses this distinction to show that a sense of sorrow at the loss of someone we love counts as a natural and instinctive human response, and so should not be outlawed in Epicurean normative ethics. Grief is only a problem when the addition of false beliefs allows it to develop into the full-blown emotional response of mourning. A. D. Morrison traces some interesting points of contact between ethics and aesthetics in DRN, focusing on Lucretian accounts of people about to die. Not all will agree with him that Hdt. 38 shows Epicurus to have preferred literal over figurative uses. The volume ends with two strong papers on Lucretian receptions: Myrto Garani on DRN as a conduit through which Ovid received Empedocles, and K. M. Earnshaw on Lucretian themes and echoes in Pompey's dream at Lucan, Pharsalia 3.8–43.
This is a valuable collection, including several pieces (Hankinson, Holmes, Konstan) that will stand as landmarks in their respective domains. I identified few significant errors. Hankinson's citations of numbered texts appear to have gone awry at 78, 81 and 85.
