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Lucretius' Cure for Love in the "De Rerum Natura"
From beginning to end, the De rerum natura upsets expectations. This book's premise is that Lucretius intentionally provokes his imagined male audience, playfully and forcefully proving to them that they are not the men they suppose themselves to be. From astral bodies to the magnetic draw of human sexuality to the social bonds linking parents to children, Lucretius shows that everything is compounded material, both a source of atomic issue and receptacle of atomic ingress. The universe, as Lucretius presents it, is a never-ending cycle of material interpenetration, connectivity, and dissolution. Roman men, in the vastness of it all, are only exceptional in their self-defeating fantasies. Close analysis of Lucretius' poetics reveals an unremitting assault upon the fictions that comprise Roman masculinity, from seminal conception in utero to existential decomposition in the grave. Nevertheless, Lucretius offers an Epicurean vision of masculinity that just might save the Republic.
Lucretius’ didactic poem on Epicurean philosophy (De rerum natura, DRN) is the earliest example of Roman didactic poetry that has survived in its entirety. Comprising six books and approximately 7400 hexameters, it provides a comprehensive introduction to Epicurus’ atomism. The representation of atomistic physics is systematic and straightforward; the forms of argumentation correspond to the methods of proof used in ancient science but are also informed by contemporary rhetoric. The didactic passages of the poem are framed by proems and finales, which transcend the representation of Epicurean physics and link this with the ethics of Epicurus. The verse structure and language of the poem adhere much more strictly to ‘pre-classical’ poetry than to contemporary neoteric poetry. This traditionalism, along with the numerous puns and onomatopoetic figures that depict the atomistic structure of the world, is a persuasive technique to lure the audience. As a poeta doctus, Lucretius incorporates literary models of various genera into his poem. Far from being derivative, he consistently exploits imitation to surpass and distinguish himself from his predecessors. The structure of DRN is that of didactic epic. On the one hand, it combines typical generic patterns of Hesiodic, Presocratic, and Hellenistic didactic poetry. On the other hand, DRN’s scope, its division into individual books, and its numerous intertextual references link it to heroic epic. Yet with his rationalist account, Lucretius challenges the genre’s most important representatives, Homer and Ennius. For the philosophical content of the poem, Lucretius’ sources are not only the writings of Epicurus, but also quite possibly figures from contemporary Epicureanism, including the philosopher Philodemus of Gadara. Lucretius does not adopt Epicurean philosophy dogmatically, but adapts it to the needs of Roman society. Encouraging his Roman readers to distance themselves from traditional life models and to adopt a new point of view, he tries to convince them of the model of Epicurean otium. DRN itself turns out to be a poem, which, as a product of the poet’s own otium, confirms the validity of Epicurean philosophy.
„Rette deine Seele!“, „Lebe im Verborgenen!“ Das sind die populären Parolen des Epikureismus. Es wäre zwar vermessen, eine der wichtigsten hellenistischen Philosophien auf Parolen zu reduzieren. Gleichwohl geben diese eine Grundstimmung des Hellenismus wieder: Das Ende des gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalts der polis des 5. Jahrhunderts weckt ein neues Bedürfnis nach Antworten auf grundsätzliche ethische Fragen.
This article offers a new examination of the place of philosophy in Catullus’ Carmina. It focuses on Egnatius, the ‘smiling Spaniard’ of poems 37 and 39, and argues that Catullus’ attacks on this character make use of many standard invective tropes against Epicureans in the late Republic. More than merely an opportunity to show off his whitened teeth, Egnatius’ smile may well have been proof of his philosophical detachment and ataraxia. Yet Catullus maliciously misrepresents this mark of Epicurean virtue as a social gaffe, and an unflattering reminder of Egnatius’ provincial origins. I then reinterpret poems 37, 38, and 39 as a poetic series unified by the ‘banalization’ of philosophical ideas. Ultimately, Catullus creates his own singular voice – the arbiter of style and taste – by representing aspects of other people's behaviour as trite and ordinary. To banalize is an act of power, and it is a weapon that Catullus wields to articulate a sense of difference from other poets and thinkers in his intellectual world.
In a poem setting forth the way things are in nature, it is fitting for Lucretius to address, among many other phenomena, human conception and embryonic determination. With an eye toward ethics, Lucretius demonstrates how sexual reproduction at the seminal level can be explained by Epicurean atomism. In this paper, I am concerned with the biological ‘how’ of conception as explained in De Rerum Natura (= DRN ) but also with the ethical ‘therefore’ for Lucretius’ readership and (over)estimations of male autonomy. For modern audiences with a basic grasp of procreation that includes sperm supplied by a male and egg supplied by a female, encountering Lucretius’ verses on women contributing semen ( semina ) to the process of conception can be surprising (4.1209–62). The idea of female semen may give us pause as we calibrate it with our understanding of eggs and ovulation, but Lucretius, in his time, was not advancing some novel theory. Wading into established debates on male-only or joint male-female semen production and gendered insemination (that is, who produces semen and whose semen is active at conception), Lucretius sides with those promulgating mutuality for both questions (for example Democritus [DK 24 A13]) and rejects Aristotle's representative exclusivist claim of male activity vs female passivity (τὸ ἄρρεν ἐστὶν ὡς κινοῦν καὶ ποιοῦν, τὸ δὲ θῆλυ ὡς παθητικόν, Gen. an. 729a28–30; cf. 726a30–6). That is to say, a sexually mature female, like her male counterpart, emits semen that has determining potency in the formation of a human embryo (Lucr. 4.1209–62). Although the discharge and activity of female semen is the focus of this paper, my investigation is not a Quellenforschung or historical survey of Greco-Roman ideas about women's contributions to insemination and fertility, since others have treated these matters extensively. I concentrate rather on how Lucretius employs the concept of female semen in terms of his poetics in Book 4 and what I see as an ethical argument against the domineering nature of Roman masculinity. The problem of female semen, from the point of view of Lucretius’ Roman male audience, is that it is potentially costly to men because it rivals and threatens their status from the physiological to the discursive level. Iain Lonie broaches the same issue from Greek perspectives.
A lo largo de nuestro trabajo se ha llevado a cabo un riguroso análisis de la presencia en El amor en los tiempos del cólera de motivos y tópicos amatorios procedentes todos ellos en última instancia de la tradición clásica. Dicho análisis ha presentado una doble vertiente: por un lado se ha estudiado la forma que presentan esos motivos y tópicos en la novela de Gabriel García Márquez, comparando en cada caso la recreación que hace el novelista colombiano de cada uno de ellos con la forma originaria que estos presentaban en la tradición de la literatura grecolatina. Así se ha determinado en cada caso en qué aspectos se mantiene García Márquez fiel a la tradición del tópico y en qué otros aspectos subvierte dicha tradición. En definitiva, se ha estudiado el binomio tradición y originalidad en la recreación de cada uno de esos tópicos que realiza el novelista colombiano en su obra.
Por otro lado, se ha determinado qué función real cumple cada uno de esos tópicos en la novela y el grado de importancia que tiene cada uno de ellos en el desarrollo de la trama. Así, se ha demostrado claramente que existen tres tópicos dentro de El amor en los tiempos del cólera que tienen un peso específico mucho mayor que el resto, ya que su constante presencia a lo largo de la novela los convierte en motivos dentro de la misma con una función no sólo temática sino además estructural. La estructura interna de la novela descansa sobre estos tres motivos principales que son la enfermedad de amor, la erotodidaxis o enseñanza del amor y la fidelidad entre los amantes. Aparte de estos tres motivos fundamentales en la novela, García Márquez recurre a infinidad de tópicos amatorios para caracterizar las relaciones entre su trío protagonista y, al igual que con los motivos, lo hace combinando tradición e innovación.
En definitiva, lo que ha demostrado este trabajo es que con respecto a la concepción literaria del amor, en su novela García Márquez demuestra que sabe perfectamente dónde está, es decir, toda la tradición anterior de los tópicos amatorios clásicos, y hacia dónde quiere llevarla: su visión personal de la misma. Así García Márquez no se deja subyugar por toda esa tradición anterior y consigue resultar original a pesar de tratar tópicos tan utilizados como la metáfora del amor como enfermedad, la erotodidaxis o la fidelidad entre los amantes, por citar sólo algunos.
"Love hurts"-as the saying goes-and a certain amount of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since adversity can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other components of a life well-lived. But other times, love can be downright dangerous. It may bind a spouse to her domestic abuser, draw an unscrupulous adult toward sexual involvement with a child, put someone under the insidious spell of a cult leader, and even inspire jealousy-fueled homicide. How might these perilous devotions be diminished? The ancients thought that treatments such as phlebotomy, exercise, or bloodletting could "cure" an individual of love. But modern neuroscience and emerging developments in psychopharmacology open up a range of possible interventions that might actually work. These developments raise profound moral questions about the potential uses-and misuses-of such anti-love biotechnology. In this article, we describe a number of prospective love-diminishing interventions, and offer a preliminary ethical framework for dealing with them responsibly should they arise.
En el presente artículo nos proponemos llevar a cabo un análisis desde una perspectiva comparatista de la presencia del tópico literario de la “enfermedad de amor” en la obra de dos autores coetáneos como son Lucrecio y Catulo. Este análisis nos permitirá, no sólo conocer mejor la manera de pensar de cada uno de estos autores, sino, además y más importante aún, mostrar el modo en que el tópico evolucionó con ellos e indagar en las razones de dicha evolución. ABSTRACT: Our intention with the present article is to analyze from the comparative perspective the presence of the literary thopic “lovesickness” in the works of two contemporary authors as Lucretius and Catullus. This analysis will allow us, not only to improve our knowledge of the way of thinking of each one of these authors, but, besides and even more important, it will allow us to show the way the thopic evolutioned with them and to inquire into the reasons of this evolution.
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