<Formerly 230A-G>. Study of Lucretius, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, or other topics in Latin poetry from Ennius to Juvenal.

Spring 2024: Lucretius’ De rerum natura is a provocative and absorbing poem. In this seminar, we will try to come to grips with some of the questions it raises, while familiarizing ourselves with basic aspects of the poem and its study. Some areas over which where our reading and discussion will range: • the DRN’s presentation of Epicurean physical doctrine, but also Epicurean ethics, psychology, and epistemology; while “Lucretian” Epicureanism is not heterodox or original, we will be as regularly preoccupied as Lucretius is with the significance of the Latin and poetic form by which this legacy of doctrinal “content” is delivered • a wide range of subjects that includes: zoology, anthropology, history, sex, politics, myth, the gods, religion, Epicurus, cosmology, death, fear, pleasure, perception and sensation, language, nature, culture, technology • notable features of the DRN’s poetics, including: metapoetics, genre and rhetorical mode, polemic, allusion, metaphor and simile, structure, style, evangelism, self-representation • the poem’s literary relations with Lucretius’ predecessors (Homer, Hesiod, Empedocles, Thucydides, Hellenistic poets, Ennius) • the poem’s situation within the literary, intellectual, and historical world of the late Republic by considering connections to the work and literary projects of Catullus, Cicero, and Sallust.

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