Lucretius' Progressive Revelation of Nature in "DRN" 1.149-502

Abstract

and uneven presentation in an eclectic didactic poet like Vergil or Horace, but it requires fuller explanation in a poet who treads in the footsteps of Epicurus. Volk (2002) has recently provided a welcome re-evaluation of the genre markers of didactic poetry, and her chapter on Lucretius (despite her stated misgivings as to intentional fallacy) demonstrates once and for all how important it was for the poet to set up a productive relationship with the Roman reader, construed as a possible but distrustful Epicurean convert. Epicureans were notoriously distrustful of both the emotional appeal and the communicative ambiguities of Homer's epic in particular, and they accused mythographers of contributing to humanity's insecurities and ignorance.3 As Philodemus shows in his works on rhetoric, on 1Although Anglo-American scholars appear more skeptical both of Jerome's biography and of Patin's anti-Lucrhce than their European counterparts, a widespread view remains that Lucretius' priorities are literary rather than philosophical: Kenney (1970) presents the work firmly within the genre of Hesiodic epic, analogous to Vergil's Georgics, as does Donahue (1993), who suggests that Lucretius' main inspiration was Callimachus; West (1994) sees no other aim to Lucretius' imagery than aesthetic.