A Reading Of Lucretius De Rerum Natura

Author : Lee Fratantuono
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1498511554
Total Pages : 519 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Reading of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura written by Lee Fratantuono and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucretius’ philosophical epic De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) is a lengthy didactic and narrative celebration of the universe and, in particular, the world of nature and creation in which humanity finds its abode. This earliest surviving full scale epic poem from ancient Rome was of immense influence and significance to the development of the Latin epic tradition, and continues to challenge and haunt its readers to the present day. A Reading of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura offers a comprehensive commentary on this great work of Roman poetry and philosophy. Lee Fratantuono reveals Lucretius to be a poet with deep and abiding interest in the nature of the Roman identity as the children of both Venus (through Aeneas) and Mars (through Romulus); the consequences (both positive and negative) of descent from the immortal powers of love and war are explored in vivid epic narrative, as the poet progresses from his invocation to the mother of the children of Aeneas through to the burning funeral pyres of the plague at Athens. Lucretius’ epic offers the possibility of serenity and peaceful reflection on the mysteries of the nature of the world, even as it shatters any hope of immortality through its bleak vision of post mortem oblivion. And in the process of defining what it means both to be human and Roman, Lucretius offers a horrifying vision of the perils of excessive devotion both to the gods and our fellow men, a commentary on the nature of pietas that would serve as a warning for Virgil in his later depiction of the Trojan Aeneas.

Author : Ada Palmer
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674967089
Total Pages : 415 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance written by Ada Palmer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretius’s Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. Scholars could now challenge Christian patterns of thought by employing the theory of atomistic physics, a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena without appeal to divine participation, and argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God. Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe’s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates, but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met the ideas that would soon transform the world. Renaissance readers—poets and philologists rather than scientists—were moved by their love of classical literature to rescue Lucretius and his atomism, thereby injecting his theories back into scientific discourse. Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europe’s receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.

Author : Gordon Lindsay Campbell
Publisher : Oxford Classical Monographs
ISBN 13 : 9780199263967
Total Pages : 406 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lucretius on Creation and Evolution written by Gordon Lindsay Campbell and published by Oxford Classical Monographs. This book was released on 2003 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucretius' account of the origin of life, the origin of species, and human prehistory is the longest and most detailed account extant from the ancient world. It gives an anti-teleological mechanistic theory of zoogony and the origin of species that does away with the need for any divine aidor design in the process, and accordingly it has been seen as a forerunner of Darwin's theory of evolution. This commentary locates Lucretius in both the ancient and modern contexts, and treats Lucretius' ideas as very much alive rather than as historical concepts. The recent revival of creationismmakes this study particularly relevant to contemporary debate, and indeed, many of the central questions posed by creationists are those Lucretius attempts to answer.

Author : William Ellery Leonard
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN 13 : 9780299003647
Total Pages : 916 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book De Rerum Natura written by William Ellery Leonard and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2008-08-08 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available in paperback, this annotated scholarly edition of the Latin text of De Rerum Natura has long been hailed as one of the finest editions of this monumental work. It features an introduction to Lucretius's life and work by William Ellery Leonard, an introduction to and commentary on the poem by Stanley Barney Smith, the complete Latin text with detailed annotations, and an index of ancient sources. --University of Wisconsin Press.

Author : Donncha O'Rourke
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108421962
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Approaches to Lucretius written by Donncha O'Rourke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Takes stock of existing approaches in the interpretation of Lucretius, innovates within these, and advances in new directions.

Author : Titus Lucretius Carus
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Of the Nature of Things written by Titus Lucretius Carus and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : David Butterfield
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110703745X
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Early Textual History of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura written by David Butterfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first detailed analysis of the fate of Lucretius' De rerum natura from its composition in the 50s BC to the creation of our earliest extant manuscripts during the Carolingian Age. Close investigation of the knowledge of Lucretius' poem among writers throughout the Roman and medieval world allows fresh insight into the work's readership and reception, and a clear assessment of the indirect tradition's value for editing the poem. The first extended analysis of the 170+ subject headings (capitula) that intersperse the text reveals the close engagement of its Roman readers. A fresh inspection and assignation of marginal hands in the poem's most important manuscript (the Oblongus) provides new evidence about the work of Carolingian correctors and offers the basis for a new Lucretian stemma codicum. Further clarification of the interrelationship of Lucretius' Renaissance manuscripts gives additional evidence of the poem's reception and circulation in fifteenth-century Italy.

Author : Titus Lucretius Carus
Publisher : CUP Archive
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4./5 ( download)

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Download or read book Introduction to Lucretius written by Titus Lucretius Carus and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1967 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : W.R. Johnson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1472502272
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lucretius in the Modern World written by W.R. Johnson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucretius' On the Nature of Things - one of the glories of Latin literature - provides a vivid poetic exposition of the doctrines of the Greek atomist, Epicurus. The poem played a crucial role in the reinvention of science in the seventeenth century, its influence on the French Enlightenment was powerful and pervasive, and it became a major battlefield in the wars of religion with science in nineteenth-century England. But in the twentieth century, despite its vital contributions to modern thought and civilisation, it has been largely neglected by common readers and scientists alike. This book offers an extensive description of the poem, with special emphasis on its cheerful version of materialism and on its attempt to devise an ethical system that suits such a universe. It surveys major relevant texts form the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Dryden, Diderot, Voltaire, Tennyson, Santayana) and speculates on why Lucretius and the ancient scientific tradition he championed has become marginalised in the twentieth century. It closes with a discussion of what value the poem has for students of science and technology in the new century: what advice it has to offer us about how to go about reinventing our machines and our morality.

Author : George Kazantzidis
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110722763
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lucretius on Disease written by George Kazantzidis and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The standard view in scholarship is that disease in Lucretius' De rerum natura is mainly a problem to be solved and then dispensed with. However, a closer reading suggests that things are more layered and complex than they appear at first sight: just as morbus causes a radical rearrangement of atoms in the body and makes the patient engage with alternative and up to that point unknown dimensions of the sensible world, so does disease as a theme generate a multiplicity of meanings in the text. The present book argues for a reconsideration of morbus in De rerum natura along those lines: it invites the reader to revisit the topic of disease and reflect on the various, and often contrasting, discourses that unfold around it. More specifically, it illustrates how, apart from calling for therapy, disease, due to its dominant presence in the narrative, transforms at the same time into a concept that is integral both to the poem’s philosophical agenda but also to its wider aesthetic concerns as a literary product. The book thus sheds new light on De rerum natura's intense preoccupation with morbus by showing how disease is not exclusively conceived by Lucretius as a blind, obliterating force but is crucially linked to life and meaning—both inside and outside the text.