Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (review)

"Lucretius used poetry to illuminate philosophy. My aim in this book is to use philosophy to illuminate poetry" (xv). This opening remark will take many by surprise, especially those familiar with Sedley's specialist work on ancient philosophy. General readers will associate him primarily with The Hellenistic Philosophers (edited by A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, Cambridge University Press, 1987), a work which excerpts the ancient literary texts which it takes as sources, fragmenting them in the interests of philosophical reconstruction; but in this tightly argued new book Sedley reverses the process, taking as his aim the proper understanding of a whole work, De Rerum Natura, and wielding an unparalleled mastery of the fragmentary philosophical literature written during the half-millennium which begins with Plato.

Students of Lucretius will recognize the tradition, for Sedley signals his deliberate continuity with the work of Bailey (xi) and states that his main audience is "readers who have themselves come to Lucretius through the study of Latin poetry" (xviii). He develops a sustained argument for the propositions (1) that Lucretius used only Epicurus' On Nature as a source; (2) that he did so in a spirit of "fundamentalist" reverence for the founder of his school; (3) that Lucretius' principal literary model was Empedocles; and (4) that in the poem there exist clear signs of two plans of composition and that our DRN represents an incomplete revision of an earlier plan. This will be for many the most important conclusion of Sedley's work, but Latinists and ancient philosophers alike will also learn much from his analysis of Lucretius' method of translation and adaptation from his Greek prose source and from his reconstruction of Epicurus' own intellectual environment.

Chapter 1 builds a case for the view that Lucretius' proem was modeled on the now fragmentary On Nature of Empedocles (and, more specifically, on the proem of that work). Sedley argues (1-2), from a careful rereading of Cicero Ad Quintum Fratrem 2.9.4, that Cicero meant to offer a direct comparison of Lucretius and the Empedoclea of Sallustius, and that a contemporary reader would have recognized the Empedoclean character of DRN. He then tackles several problems in Empedoclean scholarship, taking account of the newly discovered papyrus fragments of Empedocles and arguing, for example, that Purifications was a separate poem offering only ritual advice and that a good deal of what used to be assigned to the "religious" poem, especially B115 DK, belongs in On Nature. He subsumes many familiar observations about Empedoclean features of DRN and exploits the puzzle of Lucretius' sympathy for Empedocles to support his argument.

Chapter 2 will interest anyone dealing with the Roman reception of Greek literature and culture. The analysis of Lucretius' and Cicero's handling of technical terms from Greek philosophy shows how distinctively poetic Lucretius' response to the challenge was, and how subtly he emulated the poetic qualities of his model Empedocles in adapting the technical prose of Epicurus. Bailey's treatment of Grecisms in Lucretius is rejected in favor of a demonstration that such borrowings are used intentionally in nontechnical contexts, simultaneously to signal the foreignness of Greek philosophy and to display, through the conversion of technical matters into Latin verse, the universality of Epicurus' gospel.

Chapter 3 is the core of the book. Here Sedley reestablishes the once standard view on Lucretius' philosophical sources, that he looked only to Epicurus' On Nature as a source. If this is right, then what sort of picture does this paint of Lucretius as an intellectual? Epicurus had been dead for two centuries, centuries which had seen enormous developments in philosophy, even within the conservative Epicurean school. Moreover, Lucretius lived during a philosophical revival centered in Italy, marked by a particular strength in the very school he adhered to. Yet he ignored all of this and looked only to Epicurus. This, Sedley argues, is the work of a "fundamentalist," a man obsessed with the vital importance of only one thing.

Establishing the sources for...