The rediscovery in the fifteenth century of Lucretius's De rerum natura was a challenge to received ideas. The poem offered a vision of the creation of the universe, the origins and goals of human life, and the formation of the state, all without reference to divine intervention. It has been hailed in Stephen Greenblatt's best-selling book, The Swerve, as the poem that invented modernity. But how modern did early modern readers want to become? From Lucretius' contemporary audience to the European (...) Enlightenment, this collection of essays offers a series of case studies which demonstrates the sophisticated ways in which some readers might relate the poem to received ideas, assimilating Lucretius to theories of natural law and even natural theology, while others were at once attracted to Lucretius's subversiveness and driven to dissociate themselves from him. (shrink)

The Homeric description of the shield made for Achilles by Hephaestus is the type for all later ecphrases of works of art in ancient literature. It stands out as an extravagant example of the epic poet's powers of elaborate and vivid description, so extravagant that one notable ancient critic at least, Zenodotus, felt that it was more comfortable simply to athetize the greater bulk of the passage. More symphathetic commentators of modern times have sought ways of integrating the scenes displayed (...) on the divine artefact with the primary subject-matter of theIliad; the most common approach is to take the Shield as a summary of all human life, a mirror of society in all its aspects, against which to measure the significance of the narrow range of warfare and death that dominates the rest of the poem.The requirements of internal coherence and external relevance also guided the interpretative strategy of ancient critics less austere than Zenodotus. This paper is an inquiry into the ways that antiquity perceived and exploited the Homeric Shield of Achilles. In the first section I examine early Greek responses to the question of the contextual function of a decorated shield such as that of Achilles. (shrink)

Ovidians continue to be puzzled by the 404-line speech put into the mouth of Pythagoras in book 15 of the Metamorphoses. Questions of literary decorum and quality are insistently raised: how does the philosopher's popular science consort with the predominantly mythological matter of the preceding fourteen books? Do Pythagoras' revelations provide some kind of unifying ground, a ‘key’, for the endless variety of the poem? Can one take the Speech as a serious essay in philosophical didactic, or is it all (...) a mighty spoof, as intentionally laughable, perhaps, as the imperial panegyric with which the narrative of book 15 concludes? Or should we beware of imposing modern tastes on Ovid's original audience, and respect the Hellenistic and Roman predilection for scientific poetry? This article seeks to establish further contexts for the evaluation of the Speech of Pythagoras through a study of Ovid's allusive practice within the Greco-Roman tradition of hexameter epos. The figure who provides a foundation for Ovid's construction of his own poetic genealogy turns out to be the Greek philosophical poet Empedocles. The resulting reflections on Ovid's manipulation of generic conventions may be timely in the light of the recent appearance of sophisticated and fresh approaches to the question of whether the Metamorphoses is, or is not, an epic. (shrink)

Lucretius' didactic poem De rerum natura ('On the Nature of Things') is an impassioned and visionary presentation of the materialist philosophy of Epicurus, and one of the most powerful poetic texts of antiquity. After its rediscovery in 1417 it became a controversial and seminal work in successive phases of literary history, the history of science, and the Enlightenment. In this Cambridge Companion experts in the history of literature, philosophy and science discuss the poem in its ancient contexts and in its (...) reception both as a literary text and as a vehicle for progressive ideas. The Companion is designed both as an accessible handbook for the general reader who wishes to learn about Lucretius, and as a series of stimulating essays for students of classical antiquity and its reception. It is completely accessible to the reader who has only read Lucretius in translation. (shrink)

The magnificence of Augustan Rome is the indispensable setting for Ovid the urbane love poet, rusticitas is the one unforgivable sin. Yet in Ovid's perpetuum carmen cities are for the most part invisible, at best incidental backdrops; the countryside, present in many vividly drawn landscapes, constantly thrusts itself on our attention, a place where mysterious powers menace the individual's identity. This neglect of the city makes a striking, and deliberate, contrast with the Aeneid, a ktistic epic whose meaning is governed (...) by constant reference forward to the ‘altae moenia Romae’. Ovid, whose main epic time-scale does include the foundation of Rome, devotes five words to the making of those walls. The one major exception to this indifference to the central theme of Virgilian epic is the Theban episode in Metamorphoses 3.1–4.603. The story of Cadmus and his family forms a self-contained unit within the flux of Ovid's epic of transformation. It tells of a ktisis that goes wrong: Cadmus obeys Apollo's injunction to found a city , but in the end the exile who had founded a new home is driven into a second exile: ‘exit | conditor urbe sua’. (shrink)

Pease ad loc.: ‘Roman writers often use axis… in a figurative sense… for the caelum as a whole, and in our passage, while the force is applied by Atlas to the axis of the sphere, yet the whole sphere is apparently in mind, as the phrase stellis ardentibus aptum indicates.’ It is lexicographical commonplace that axis is used, especially in the poets, as a synonym for the sky, yet the oddity of the synecdoche by which a scientific, or pseudoscientific, term (...) for the axis of the universe is transferred to mean the heavens in general has been little commented on; unanalytic recognition of the semantic fact is the norm . I believe that a more precise account of this transference can be given, and in particular I will argue that Virgilian usage in the Aeneid is central to the history of this process. (shrink)

John Conington was a towering figure in Victorian scholarship, not least because of his remarkably sensitive and literate commentaries on Virgil’s _Aeneid. _The three-volume cloth edition of _The Works of Virgil_, begun by Conington in 1852, has been unavailable for over a century, except in rare second-hand sets. Now, for the first time, the whole of Conington’s work is being reissued in a set of six paperback volumes. Each volume includes a new introduction by an established scholar, setting Conington's commentary (...) in context, as well as a general introduction to Conington’s work by Philip Hardie, who offers a fresh appreciation of the work. (shrink)

John Conington was a towering figure in Victorian scholarship, not least because of his remarkably sensitive and literate commentaries on Virgil’s _Aeneid. _The three-volume cloth edition of _The Works of Virgil_, begun by Conington in 1852, has been unavailable for over a century, except in rare second-hand sets. Now, for the first time, the whole of Conington’s work is being reissued in a set of six paperback volumes. Each volume includes a new introduction by an established scholar, setting Conington's commentary (...) in context, as well as a general introduction to Conington’s work by Philip Hardie, who offers a fresh appreciation of the work. (shrink)

John Conington was a towering figure in Victorian scholarship, not least because of his remarkably sensitive and literate commentaries on Virgil’s _Aeneid. _The three-volume cloth edition of _The Works of Virgil_, begun by Conington in 1852, has been unavailable for over a century, except in rare second-hand sets. Now, for the first time, the whole of Conington’s work is being reissued in a set of six paperback volumes. Each volume includes a new introduction by an established scholar, setting Conington's commentary (...) in context, as well as a general introduction to Conington’s work by Philip Hardie, who offers a fresh appreciation of the work. (shrink)