Book contents
- Lucretius and the End of Masculinity
- Lucretius and the End of Masculinity
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Odd Men Out
- Chapter 2 Humbled Beginnings
- Chapter 3 Nature’s Assault upon the Senses
- Chapter 4 Death: The Hole That Gapes for All
- Chapter 5 The Ties That Bind
- Chapter 6 Vir Recreandus
- Bibliography
- Index
- Subject Index
Chapter 4 - Death: The Hole That Gapes for All
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023
- Lucretius and the End of Masculinity
- Lucretius and the End of Masculinity
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Odd Men Out
- Chapter 2 Humbled Beginnings
- Chapter 3 Nature’s Assault upon the Senses
- Chapter 4 Death: The Hole That Gapes for All
- Chapter 5 The Ties That Bind
- Chapter 6 Vir Recreandus
- Bibliography
- Index
- Subject Index
Summary
From conception and lived experience, we proceed to death in Chapter 4. Although my focus is on Lucretius’ treatment of death and men’s fears of it, in “The Hole that Gapes for All” I persist with analyzing the themes of wombs, semen, fecundity and the ways by which Lucretius weaves this imagery into his criticism of human appetite for consumables, sex, and protracted life. In Lucretius’ poetics, the universe, the world, and individual human bodies all become sites of decomposition, insemination, and (re)birth. Death itself is shown to be pathologically eroticized as the final object of a man’s fear and lust – a desire Lucretius seeks to reform into an ethical acceptance of death. Lucretius’ point, I argue, is that, regardless of biological maleness and the security it bestows on Roman men, nature’s laws make wombs and tombs of them all in a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth.
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- Lucretius and the End of Masculinity , pp. 83 - 119Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023