5 - Lucretian architecture: the structure and argument of the De rerum natura

Summary

Introduction

From the arrangement of individual phrases to the grand structure of the entire poem, Lucretius uses poetic form with economy and imagination to attract the reader’s attention and to drive home his philosophical message. In their main lines, the structure and content of the poem’s argument derive from earlier Epicurean and other philosophical models, and Lucretius’ debts to some of his predecessors are quite detailed. But his handling of this material is distinctive, and his greatest originality lies in the reshaping of a philosophical exposition adapted from previous writers to produce a poem whose form instantiates the main points of its argument at every level and is aesthetically satisfying as well.

The order of argument and the question of Lucretius’ source

A long-standing question is: to what extent was Lucretius an original thinker as opposed to a versifier of received wisdom? For the purposes of this chapter, that question reduces to a related one: to what extent is the structure of the DRN Lucretius’ own design as opposed to something borrowed from a previous work? The first scholars to address this issue simply assumed that Lucretius closely followed some particular source. At length scholars started to leave this question aside, and the assumption that Lucretius worked without a single primary model in mind gained some appeal. More recently, the Herculaneum papyri have provided enough evidence to reopen the question.