Introduction

Summary

Lucretius’ De rerum natura (hereafter DRN), together with Catullus 64 (a much shorter narrative mythological poem on the wedding of the parents of Achilles, Peleus and Thetis), are the first fully surviving examples of a hexameter epos in Latin. The Greek word epos, ‘epic’ in hexameters, includes both narrative poems on the deeds of heroes (in the line of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey) and didactic poems that give instruction in some body of knowledge (in the line of Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony). This formal link, through the shared metre, between what might appear to be two very different kinds of literary product is important: the DRN is both a poem of instruction and a celebration of the godlike achievement of Lucretius’ philosophical hero Epicurus. Both the DRN and Catullus 64 were massively influential on later Latin poetry, not least because of the intense engagement with them on the part of the classic Roman hexameter poet, Virgil. Lucretius and Catullus are the two giants of Latin poetry at the end of the Roman Republic, without whose innovations and refinements in poetic technique and subject matter it is hard to imagine the works of Augustan classicism by Virgil, Horace, and the rest.

For all the differences between Lucretius and Catullus in terms of themes and poetic persona, they share the status of major contributors to the naturalisation of Greek culture in Rome (the ‘hellenisation of Rome’), a process coextensive with the history of Roman civilisation but which reaches a new intensity and sophistication in the late Republic, to feed into that blend of Roman and Greek that we know as Augustan classicism. Both Lucretius and Catullus are major importers from the post-classical, Hellenistic, Greek world.