| Popis: |
Between Terence and Lucretius’s floruit (ca. 50s BCE), the boundaries of Roman power moved far outward again. And it is no coincidence that among the most disorienting images in all of ancient poetry stands Lucretius’s portrayal of Epicurus’s mental journey across the immeasurable universe, a heroic quest from which the Greek philosopher, like a conquering Roman general, brings back knowledge as a preferable form of imperial plunder (De rerum natura [DRN] 1.72–77). Lucretius thus depicts the Greek Epicurus as potentially more appealing—and specifically more masculine—than an audience of first-century BCE Romans might be inclined to regard him, given stereotypes of Epicureans as queerly deviant where Roman gender norms were concerned. The passage also creates a salient contrast between Epicurus and the wandering Odysseus of Homer’s Odyssey. After contextualizing Lucretius’s work through the “becoming lost” theme in fragmentary poetry between him and Terence (Pacuvius, Accius, and Lucilius), Chapter 3 argues that this image of Epicurus is not alone within DRN in the attitude toward Roman expansion that it encourages. There are pervasive aspects of the whole poem that anticipate and reinforce Lucretius’s approach here to both the positive and negative aspects of expansion, as well as the link that Lucretius fashions between them and his own poetic craft. We discern these connections especially by focusing on two interrelated, though opposed, semantic fields denoting wide-ranging, non-systematic movement: error/errare and vagus/vagari. Within DRN, these can designate, respectively, an Odyssean aimlessness in life and an Epicurean existence in harmony with the natural motions of the atoms. |
