The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (review)

Reception (the currently favoured word) is today everywhere to be found within Classics. We now like to say that the discipline involves not only the study of classical antiquity ‘in itself’ but also its place in the cultural imaginary of the West (and beyond) down to our own time. So it is significant that when Cambridge University Press started to include classical authors in its acclaimed and ever more extensive series of Companions, the Classics editor Pauline Hire decided that all the volumes on classical authors and themes would include a section on reception, and that only those authors would be chosen who had a certain standing in European culture as a whole. The first two (Virgil and Greek Tragedy) appeared in 1997, and the Press has generally stuck to this policy since. Indeed this new Companion, which bears all the marks of careful design and immaculate editing, allots more space explicitly to reception than any of its predecessors. The editors, Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, claim that it ‘is divided . . . more or less equally between Lucretius in his ancient contexts, and Lucretius’ reception’. That is a distinction many a reception theorist will itch to deconstruct (on this more in a moment), but even in their own terms this is an underestimation. In Part 3 (‘Reception’) there are eight chapters, treating the Middle Ages to the present day, particularly in Britain, France, and Italy, but the four chapters in Part 2 (‘Themes’) are also concerned with reception, as their titles show (‘Lucretius and the history of science’, ‘Moral and political philosophy: readings of Lucretius from Virgil to Voltaire’, ‘Lucretius and the sublime’, and ‘Religion and enlightenment in the neo-Latin reception of Lucretius’); even in Part 1 (‘Antiquity’) the seventh and final chapter is an insightful account by Hardie of the reception of the De Rerum Natura (itself a crucial stage in the reception of Greek philosophy and science in Rome, as the thought-provoking introduction notes) by later writers in antiquity. There is always the problem of how far you can differentiate the reception of Lucretius from that of a more generalized Epicureanism or atomism. But this is pretty successfully negotiated here, and Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson in the chapter on the history of science even suggest, intriguingly, that the success of corpuscularianism in early modern science ‘had as much to do with the charm of Lucretius’ presentation, and its appeal to the senses and imagination, as it did with argument, observation and evidence’.

To anyone like myself who may have felt that Lucretius has not had quite the central position in the Western tradition held by Homer or Virgil or Ovid, this volume will come as something of a revelation, since it shows in considerable detail how rich and how significant a reception the DRN has enjoyed, particularly since its ‘rediscovery’ by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417 – a reception, as the editors note, which can assume an ‘unusually combative’ character. Religious orthodoxy often led readers to adopt, for self-protection, what Valentina Prosperi in her chapter on the Italian Renaissance calls a ‘dissimulatory code’, and the combination of homage and rejection Lucretius displays towards his poetic predecessors noted by Hardie is often replicated in later responses, which makes any simple distinction between ‘Lucretius’ and ‘anti-Lucretius’ a trifle crude. The DRN is an important text for a number of fields, including the history of philosophy, of ideas, of science, and of atheism, as well as influencing a great number of major writers. Enthusiasts included Bruno, Montaigne (who, we learn, quotes Lucretius 147 times, more often than he quotes any other poet except Horace, and whose annotated copy of Lucretius survives), Bacon, Newton (whose statue by Roubiliac in Trinity College Cambridge appropriately has a Lucretian inscription), Voltaire, and Kant among the thinkers. Among the poets (who, however, tended to favour a fairly limited number of passages, including the opening address to Venus) are numbered Ronsard, Tasso, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Shelley, and Tennyson (whose...