Lucretius

Che posto occupavano gli animali nell’antichità? Come noi oggi, anche i Greci e i Romani avevano a che fare con cani, cavalli, galline; avevano allevamenti, vivari, acquari, e adottavano pratiche zootecniche. Amavano i loro animali da affezione, mentre ne uccidevano altri e li mangiavano (magari dopo averli sacrificati in onore di una divinità). Conoscevano e usavano animali selvatici o feroci, o esotici come elefanti e pappagalli. Non mancavano, nel loro immaginario, creature aliene che si credeva popolassero paesi lontani, come l’India e l’Etiopia, patrie dei manticora, dei cinocefali e dei grifoni. Quello che per noi sono i dinosauri per loro erano i ciclopi, i pegasi, le chimere, gli uomini-toro. Un affresco suggestivo che restituisce per intero l’esotismo di un mondo scomparso.

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history , people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion. 1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical on-tology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly " liquid " and " mobile modernity " is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century. 2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids. 3

On line, sul blog del Centro AMA (Antropologia e Mondo Antico) di Siena, i materiali della Summer School tenutasi a Pontignano dal 25 al 27 agosto. In quell'occasione, ho tenuto un laboratorio didattico sulla comparazione delle rappresentazioni culturali del futuro fra antichità e modernità

Cet article propose de voir à quoi correspond, dans l’Antiquité, la catégorie d’ « épopée didactique » (ou « poésie didactique »), couramment utilisée par les savants modernes pour rendre compte d’œuvres comme les Travaux et les jours, le De rerum natura ou encore les Géorgiques, en opposition avec la catégorie d’« épopée narrative » (ou parfois simplement d’« épopée »), qui comprendrait les poèmes d’Homère, l’Énéide, etc. Une enquête anthropologique et pragmatique montre que la catégorie de « poésie didactique » n’existait pas chez les Anciens. Dans un deuxième temps, on essaie de voir à quel moment on commence à parler de « poésie didactique ».

The author first explains wisdom and its importance to moral philosophy. Secondly, he follows with a consideration of the nature of things and the soul as told by Lucretius. Then he presents a brief summary on St. Thomas understanding of soul and how his faculty psychology is a superior explanation of moral philosophy. The author concludes by showing how Lucretius’ ethical system fails and to attain true happiness we must take up a faculty psychology aimed at virtue and the perfection of the soul, the principle form of the human person.

Edição bilíngue integral do poema De Rerum Natura de Lucrécio
https://grupoautentica.com.br/autentica/livros/sobre-a-natureza-das-coisas/2025
https://www.amazon.com.br/Sobre-Natureza-das-Coisas-Lucr%C3%A9cio/dp/6559280799/ref=rvi_5/139-4214272-9123822?pd_rd_w=G2wIU&pf_rd_p=efdee74a-69c9-4b49-9f9d-7952b2b8eb2e&pf_rd_r=HXT9EQA1Z337M3Y5E2B1&pd_rd_r=14727686-9499-4a00-9540-631ae8bde5ab&pd_rd_wg=JQSJ2&pd_rd_i=6559280799&psc=1

PENULTIMATE PROOFS: please do not quote.
To quote or cite, please see to http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hop0000105
History of Psychology, Vol 22(2), May 2019, 113-129

A common view among ancient historians about Roman attentiveness to children's psychological development needs reconsideration. The view holds that Romans ignored children's cognitive ontogeny, perceiving early childhood as a largely undifferentiated life stage. A separate but related issue is the problematic claim that Roman childhood was entirely a matter of social construction. I present evidence from over four hundred years of Roman writing to make three points against Roman neglect of children and radical social construction. First, a consensus (granted our limited number of sources) about "developmental psychology" prevailed from the late republic to late antiquity. Second, this consensus is consistent with modern findings and theories. In particular, the Roman material maps onto a developmental timeline featuring a "2-month revolution," when the infant engages in dyadic protoconversations with adults, and a "9-month revolution," when the infant shares attention triadically with adults toward third objects. In the Roman consensus, both dyadic protoconversations and triadic joint attention were central to cultural learning. Third, when the Roman consensus about children's minds did change, it was because of the Christian doctrine of original sin, according to which even newborns were psychologically corrupt. Nonetheless , I argue, this rupture in the Roman consensus does not entail that we should suppose childhood to have been entirely a social construction or merely a projection of a religious or other ideology. Rather, any construction of childhood-even the late-antique Christian one-will necessarily rest upon a foundation of, and thus be constrained by, certain inescapable biological and psychological "givens."

This chapter examines the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus from book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose two bodies are merged into one. A series of connections are drawn between Hermaphroditus and the representation of the primordial universe at the beginning of the Metamorphoses, where there is a continual oscillation between binary oppositions. By placing the Hermaphroditus narrative alongside the other ‘mythological’ stories of corporeal transformation, Ovid highlights how the apparent boundaries which exist in terms of textual genre are as fluid and unstable as those which are perceived to exist between genders. Ovid conveys this through the use of multiple allusions to ‘scientific’ accounts of ‘intersex’ beings in Empedocles, Plato’s Symposium and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. Ovid’s portrayal of Hermaphroditus expresses the breakdown of corporeal distinction through blurring the divisions between truth and falsehood, while undermining the use of opposition as a basic organizing principle across the cultural spectrum.

This essay won the California Classics Association Award for Excellence in Classics Writing and is published in the California Classics Association Northern Section newsletter Notanda Borea Volume X no. 2. Fall 2014/ Winter 2015. http://www.ccanorth.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/NotandaBorea10-2.27090349.pdf

The article aims to analyze the section of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura concerning the problem of the color (II, 730-864) from a double perspective : firstly, it will confront the passage with other sources about the Epicurean doctrine of color, in order to verify the orthodoxy of Lucretius’ presentation ; secondly, it will try to highlight the literary, rhetorical, didactic strategies the Latin poet carries out to adequately and persuasively display that doctrine to his public.

In De Rerum Natura III 963-971, Lucretius argues that death should not be feared because it is a necessary part of the natural cycle of life and death. This argument has received little philosophical attention, except by Martha Nussbaum, who asserts it is quite strong. However, Nussbaum's view is unsustainable, and I offer my own reading. I agree with Nussbaum that, as she construes it, the cycle of life argument is quite distinct from the better-known Epicurean arguments: not only does it start from different premises, but it is a completely different type of argument. However, thus construed, it is deeply problematic. It relies on premises that are much more at home in Stoic than in Epicurean ethics, and Lucretius' appeal to nature in this argument contradicts what he says elsewhere in De Rerum Natura. I consider why Lucretius offers what appears to be such a flawed argument, and I propose a reading on which the cycle of life argument could be offered consistently by an Epicurean. The cycle of life argument, unlike the better-known arguments, does not attempt directly to show that death is not a bad thing. Instead, it targets certain destructive attitudes towards one's life that result in one fearing death. By helping relieve the interlocutor of these attitudes, the argument aims at reducing his fear of death.

This article examines three sections of the proem to Lucretius' De rerum natura: the so-called hymn to Venus (Lucr. 1.1-43), the praise of Epicurus (1.62-79), and the Iphigenia passage (1.80-101). The article's goal is to show that distinct, interconnected political echoes are perceptible in these three sections of Lucretius' proem, and that Lucretius intertwines his philosophical teaching with Roman political culture in such a way as to make his Epicurean message more acceptable to Roman audiences. The article demonstrates Lucretius' interaction with the use of myth in political language in Rome in the 60s and 50s bce. It analyzes the relevance of the Mithridatic wars to Roman discussions of imperialism and Lucretius' exploitation of this conflict's iconic status. This article suggests that Memmius' political action in the 60s may have made him a particularly suitable addressee for Lucretius' poem. It also explores the implications of this new reading of the proem for the date of Lucretius' De rerum natura.

This paper explores Hobbes's relationship to Lucretius. Building on scholarship dealing with Hobbes's knowledge and use of Lucretius, I show that Hobbes decisively rejected central features of Lucretius' argument in Leviathan. Hobbes's rejection of these features, in turn, highlight the distinctiveness of key features of his argument about the passions and language, the distinctively authoritarian version of his contract theory, and his ultimate rejection of Lucretius' Epicurean project.

The author is trying to retrace the structural pattern responsible for the coherence of Jan Kochanowski's "Elegiarum libri quattuor", a collection of 46 Latin elegies by Polish most prominent Renaissance poet. In order to achieve this he takes into account the characters hailing from the Trojan myth (Paris, Hector, Ifigenia, Ulysse...) as they apparently play a serious role in the poetic expression of different stages of the collection' s protagonist's emotional journey he takes as Lydia's infortunate lover but, more importantly, an adolescent becoming a grown man

Ancient conceptualization of dreams is based on a duality that splits the oneiric field into two hierarchically ordered modalities. The opposition between these dream categories finds its clearest expression in Artemidorus' Oneirocritica, in the distinction between oneiros and enhypnion. This article critically examines Artemidorus' dualistic terminology. Uncovering the Oneirocritica's internal inconsistencies , the article aims to show how Artemidorus' systematization of dreams attempts to resolve an ambiguity that was essential to the Greek experience. As a case study, I examine three Homeric dreams in such a way as to restore the ambiguity suppressed by Artemidorus' logic.

La riscrittura della natura ne Il partito preso delle cose di Ponge, nella Piccola cosmogonia portatile di Queneau e in Palomar di Calvino segue il modello lucreziano per l’osservazione e la descrizione dei fenomeni naturali e delle loro leggi fisiche. Paesaggi, elementi ed oggetti contemporanei vengono descritti con una minuzia scientifica di stampo materialista unita ad una commozione cosmica, che ricorda il tono dei versi di Lucrezio e, in molti casi,  ad un po' di ironia. Le tre opere, ricche di consapevoli riferimenti a recenti scoperte scientifiche, inseguono le choses attraverso la letteratura, che si tratti di versi o di prosa, investendo il linguaggio letterario di un potere disvelativo e considerandolo come ponte per raggiungere l'essenza dell'oggetto. Specialmente nel caso di Ponge e di Calvino, la letteratura ha un fine conoscitivo che allontana l'intentio auctoris dall'applicazione dell'atomismo lucreziano in senso combinatorio e postmodernista: essa è piuttosto il punto di partenza per conoscere il mondo nella sua intera fisicità e continuità, dagli atomi alle leggi cosmiche e dal naturale all’artificiale, come se ogni elemento del creato contenesse sempre la risonanza di una sola cosmogonia, una sola natura.

In 1525, Isabella d’Este’s son, Federico, commissioned architect Giulio Romano to build him a pleasure palace at the family’s stables at the south end of Mantua. Giulio took the mantle of Mannerism from the late Andrea Mantegna and created a masterwork of iconographically rich trompe l’oeil frescoes on the interior surfaces. Two of the corner rooms are particularly significant, the lyrical room of Amor and Psyche, and the Room of the Fall of the Giants, which depicts a massive architectural collapse. The palace’s outer walls manifested a bizarre articulation — including falling triglyphs and rising keystones — that scholars have debated the meaning of for years. This essay shows the complex interconnections within the complex, the city, and the Roman classical heritage, by which these façades form a manifesto, in which Giulio Romano confronts the meaning of architectural language as well as the role of the architect as intermediary between Form and Matter.

The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last 40 years.

Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura.

This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

Chapter 1 of Epicurus' Ethical Theory.  The Pleasures of Invulnerability (1988)
This paper was written forty years ago and it is online here as part of a book published in the '80s.  I have changed my mind about many things which I think were wrong including the question of whether Epicurus is a eudaimonist.  For more recent thoughts I have posted in drafts "Epicurus on Desire and Pleasure".

Con la presente ristampa anastatica dell’editio princeps del De rerum natura si restituisce all’attenzione degli studiosi di Lucrezio e agli storici del libro un’opera di eccezionale valore storico. La riscoperta di Lucrezio durante il quindicesimo secolo diede un impulso decisivo al rinnovamento della cultura europea. Anche se studi recenti hanno via via dipanato lo straordinario impatto storico del De rerum natura, la genealogia della prima edizione a stampa (Brescia, 1472-73) è rimasta avvolta nell’oscurità. Una delle ragioni principali della scarsa attenzione ricevuta da questo libro è quasi sicuramente dovuta alla sua estrema rarità. Dell’editio princeps infatti sono conosciute solo quattro copie. Eppure, il testo stampato dal tipografo bresciano Tommaso Ferrando è decisamente più corretto rispetto alle edizioni successive del 1486 e 1495 e si basa su un manoscritto non ancora identificato. Anche solo per queste ragioni una ristampa della princeps offre un contributo fondamentale alla storia della diffusione del De rerum natura durante il Rinascimento. La copia di cui si presenta la ristampa anastatica fu acquistata dal collezionista Angelo Maria d’Elci (1751-1824), aristocratico di origine senese, ed è oggi conservata presso la Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze. Pur con una lacuna di due carte, l’esemplare della Laurenziana è di particolare interesse perché è quello di cui si conoscono meglio le vicissitudini storiche. Inoltre è proprio a questo esemplare che dobbiamo i primi tentativi di ricostruire la storia dell’edizione. La ristampa è preceduta da un’ampia introduzione critica.

The novel Bonjour tristesse was published in 1954, when its author Françoise Sagan was only 18 years old. The book can be considered a philosophical, Epicurean-leaning novel. The main character, Cécile, and her father Raymond live a dolce vita, which constitutes a banalized application of Epicurean ethics. The novelist seemingly had access to Classical philosophical sources, especially Lucretius. Against this Epicurean attitude, the character of Anne, who tries to guide the lives of the father and the daughter, embodies the Socratic-Stoic position. Both visions of the world conflict with each other. With the aim of getting rid of Anne, Cécile tries to handle the course of events. The unwanted, tragic outcome explains the sadness of the novel, which in its turn evokes the pessimism of Lucretian philosophy.

Le roman Bonjour tristesse a été publié en 1954 alors que son auteur, Françoise Sagan (1935-2004), n’avait que 18 ans. Nous pouvons considérer le livre comme un roman philosophique épicurien. La protagoniste, Cécile, et son père Raymond mènent la dolce vita, qui constitue une application banalisée de la philosophie épicurienne. Il est très possible que l’auteur ait eu accès aux sources classiques de l’épicurisme, à Lucrèce par exemple. Opposée à l’épicurisme, le personnage d’Anne, figure de l’attitude socratique et stoïcienne, tente de canaliser et de diriger en ce sens les vies du père et de la fille. Ainsi, les deux manières d’aborder la vie s’affrontent-elles dans le roman. La protagoniste met en œuvre un plan pervers pour se débarrasser d’Anne mais le résultat est tragique. La fin explique la tristesse du roman qui nous évoque le pessimisme propre à la philosophie de Lucrèce.

Nel dibattito della nostra epoca la presenza degli animali, e l'insieme dei problemi connessi alla relazione uomo-animale, sembrano sempre più acquisire un ruolo di primo piano. Ciò vale in egual misura per le scienze naturali e le discipline umanistiche, per la biologia evolutiva come per la filosofia morale. Soprattutto, appare sempre più consistente il peso degli interrogativi etici - bioetici - impliciti nelle questioni zooantropologiche. Questo volume intende riprendere in considerazione l'opera di due fra i più importanti pensatori della cultura romana, l'epicureo Lucrezio e lo stoico Seneca, al fine di ripercorrere attraverso sondaggi selettivi l'ampio dibattito sviluppatosi a Roma, fra tarda repubblica ed età giulio-claudia, in merito al tema della condizione animale. Dalla polemica lucreziana contro l'antropocentrismo all'umanesimo problematico di Seneca, dai dibattiti intorno al vegetarismo alla ricezione del pensiero greco, un viaggio attraverso testi complessi, al confine tra filologia, storia della scienza e antropologia culturale, rivela volti diversi di uomini e animali: volti così distanti, e al contempo così vicini.

How is the family different from other basic social institutions? Using Aristotle's distinction between a thing's form and its matter, I argue that the family produces society's matter while a market, pact, and political constitution are, at least in part, society's form. I draw upon Lucretius, John Rawls, and recent findings in endocrinology to argue that family life prepares adults for social cooperation and helps them evaluate whether their society is just. In other words, the family is important not only for bearing and raising children to become functioning members of society. It also conditions adults for constructive participation in society.