This volume, which began as T.'s doctoral thesis, is a mature piece of scholarship. Extravagant claims, stretches and jargon are not to be found, while well-demarcated arguments are pursued in careful order with frequent reiterations to guide readers through the study. T. productively engages past and current scholars with respectful charity and writes with an ear attuned to clarity. Legible scholarship – for specialist and generalist audiences alike – deserves especial praise, and T.'s book is that. As the title implies, the monograph is concerned with the nature of language, how it began, how it developed (pre)historically, its physics, the invention and proliferation of metaphor, and the ambit of verbal description of seen and unseen things. More specifically, T. demonstrates how Lucretius adapts Epicurean linguistic theory to address the two (rhetorical and real) hurdles to his task: poverty of the target language (egestas linguae) and novelty of the philosophy's precepts (novitas rerum).
In Chapters 1—2 T. traces Epicurus’ two-stage theory of linguistic development against other competing models in antiquity (e.g. purely referential naturalism). Stage 1 involves primitive humans, at some point, emitting specific sounds, compelled, as it were, to name things by the material impression of atomic vectors shearing off perceived objects. These names, therefore, are physically linked to their respective observed objects. The rigid naturalism at this stage is later attenuated as early linguistic innovators in Stage 2 begin to expand their verbal corpus both by applying natural terms to things conceptually adjacent or near to the primal signifiers and by creating new names and parts of speech radically free from real material referents. Thus, as T. demonstrates, Epicurus did not posit a fully naturalistic or fully contingent genesis and development of language. The upshot that T. underscores, is that there is an archaeology to language and that some terms have a deep, explanatory connection to nature's realities, even while language practitioners are free to innovate terms and metaphors and syntaxes with no correspondence to nature. For Epicurus, as for Lucretius, this does not imply a free-for-all of nomenclature and figures of speech. Instead, as T. shows by close readings of Epicurus and Lucretius, while there can be philosophically justified openness to innovation in lexis and metaphor (even some unnecessary figures of speech like ‘mother earth’), such invention should be constrained by the Garden's end goal: accurate depiction of nature's phenomena to free the student from irrational belief and fear.
Chapter 3 takes readers through a series of shifting, adaptable metaphors that Lucretius employs to draw Epicurean students from known semantic associations towards new, potentially slippery meanings. T. especially examines metaphors of mental perception and sight, crucial as they are to Lucretius’ obligation to help acolytes observe, as it were, atomic particles, motion, cohesion and dissolution. T. also explores how students could misread Lucretius’ wide-ranging metaphors, particularly those that imply external or divine agency, such as sun and moon having ‘living bodies’ (corpora viva), earth as an elaborate machine (machina mundi) or nature's agreed upon boundaries (foedera naturai). The danger of such metaphor is that new initiands misread the verbal devices and regress to imagining gods and design. T. also demonstrates how Lucretius, often in quick succession, spins figurative language implying ideas like atomic personhood and communal activity (atoms participating in coetus and concilium) only to undermine any such literal interpretation.
T.'s attention to Epicurean theories on primitive word formation (i.e. Stage 1) and its resulting strata of language (i.e. some terms can be traced backwards to approximate or arrive at names instigated by nature) pays dividends in Chapter 4. The impulse to etymologise terms, both historically and more contemporaneously, is something Lucretius indulges heartily. T. offers a number of Lucretian etymologies, some explicit (e.g. Avernus), some implied by wordplay (e.g. cultura/colere), some tacitly explicating Greek terms (e.g. λήθη/letum). T. also fruitfully pairs most of these examples with other verbal derivation efforts from nearly contemporaneous Roman authors to show how Lucretius’ etymological poetics were traditional twice over: they cohered with standard Epicurean language development theory, and they formed part of a broader Roman discourse on word derivation. This portion of the book was highly enjoyable to read, and one could wish that word count permitted T. to include more exempla. An avenue of further inquiry would be comparison between Lucretius’ etymologising and, say, Varro's, to determine whether Lucretius might be subtly criticising or otherwise conversing with received derivation practices.
Chapters 5—6 delve further into the mechanics and poetic opportunities involved in translating and transforming Greek terms, syntax and style. T.'s tutelage with D. Sedley is evident in these chapters, although T. produces new readings independent of his mentor's work. A standout section in Chapter 5 is T.'s fresh discussion of the rhetorical power of ‘code-switching’ between transliterated Greek terms and terms adapted to Latin morphology. T. not only reads Lucretius’ own conscientious code-switches, he also teases out how Lucretius creates characters in his poem (men blinded by desire) who describe the objects of their obsession in shifting morphology – now Latin, now Greek – in a confusion of percipience brought about by lust and misapprehension of reality. Chapter 6 is a technical discussion of Lucretius’ attempts to Latinise the apparatus of Epicurean and other philosophical terminology (especially Empedoclean) through his pervasive use of calques and compounds. T. also demonstrates that compounds were already traditional in Latin poetry predating Lucretius (Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius) and that his project was simultaneously an act of poetic reception and innovation. T. sees Lucretius’ linguistic creativity not only as poesis and translation. The author also shows that linguistic expansion and refinement is a continuing feature of Stage 2 language development and implies that Lucretius’ conscientious labour in this vein is the fulfilment of the Garden's evangelising mission.
The text is well edited, and I found no significant errors (I did not run down each primary source, however). The bibliography could be seen as a little on the sparing side, though it comports with the scope of the book and allows for a clean reading experience with notes kept to reasonable numbers and length. This important study forms part of the newest wave of Lucretian scholarship (see, e.g., recent monographs, commentaries, edited collections and editions from W.H. Shearin, L. Fratantuono, T.H.M. Gellar-Goad, D. O'Rourke and M. Deufert) and is a welcome addition to a healthy, ongoing conversation about one of Rome's greatest poets. My only complaint, which is not really a complaint at all, is that there was not enough space in the book to include a thoroughgoing discussion about the physics of language development, its transmission from person to person and diachronically through time and across languages (i.e. the atomics of communication, invention, memory, translation, evolution etc.). T.'s contribution belongs on the shelves of critics and students of Lucretius.
