Lucretius: Author and Audience

The pre-socratic Empedocles is widely acknowledged as an important model for Lucretius’ philosophical poetry, but his description of this predecessor (DRN 1.716-733) has played little role in the scholarship on form and content. This paper bridges that gap by identifying two layers of didactic persona in this passage, showing how a philosopher’s stern lesson is intertwined with a poet’s playful commentary on literary style.

This paper focuses on the relationship of the two main images used by Lucretius in order to describe his audience. On the one hand, the readers of De rerum natura are presented as sick children in the need of treatment. As patients, they are forced to put themselves entirely in the power of their teachers, completely giving up their autonomy. On the other hand, the readers are compared to a well-trained hunting dog, following up by themselves the vestigia certa of a particular argument (DRN 1, 406-407).

Lucretius’ De rerum natura is widely regarded as the didactic poem par excellence in Latin literature. As such, it displays one of the most characteristic features of the genre, which is a close relationship between the poet/teacher and the addressee/pupil, who is not only spurred to the learning of Epicurean doctrine, but himself takes the floor, reacting to Lucretius’ teachings.

Seneca knew Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura well. Quotations from DRN appear at a number of moments in Seneca’s prose works (e.g. Ep. 106.8, Ep. 110.6, de Tranq. 2.14), and certain scenes from his tragedies clearly recall Lucretius’ work (the plague of Oedipus, the second choral ode of Troades). Lucretius offers Seneca a rival exemplum of a philosopher-poet, but from a competing philosophical school.