Production fulfils the making of a thing by bringing it to public scrutiny. Production is therefore the cutting edge of rhetorical performance in law, politics, media, and all aspects of civic and social life. The appeal to ‘making with’ has been a technique favoured by orators throughout the history of political rhetoric. Donald Trump employed it when he famously said, ‘we have to build a wall, folks’. Perhaps he borrowed the technique from his background in business and sales, for the appeal to ‘making with’ is also pervasive in modern marketing practices. Companies seeking to sell their goods and services become so beholden to the public that the public as co-Producer begins to market its demands to the supplier. When this dynamic operates in a political context, it can be a force for good and a model of democratic, devolved government, or it can amplify errors by forcing a political leader to pipe whatever tune the public pays for. In the case of Donald Trump, perhaps his more extreme and illogical utterances have less do to with his own manifesto than with maintaining the brand that his market demands.

There is a long history in Lucretian scholarship of finding conflict in the DRN between its philosophical content and its poetic form. Recent criticism has emphasized rather how the poem’s poetic form complements its Epicurean message. This chapter argues for important differences between literary and philosophical approaches to the poem, in particular with regard to its relationship with other texts, in order to identify some important differences in common modes of reading the poem. The chapter examines a ‘master-text’ model of reading, in which the DRN is related in strong fashion to another text on which it is dependent. The precise nature and identity of this ‘master-text’ can vary, according to the purpose or use to which the DRN is put. The approach of such ‘master-text’ readings is strikingly different from the dominant intertextual mode. In the examples of intertextual reading examined, the relationship to the other text is not one of subordination, but a tool used by the DRN to serve a particular function within the poem itself. The modes of reading explored in this chapter can lead to real differences in interpretation: e.g., on the end of the DRN, or on how uncompromising or sympathetic we should view certain parts of the poem. One important consequence is the need to acknowledge the differences in our reading practices and theoretical assumptions.

This paper addresses the role of first-person plural expressions in DRN. I begin by outlining some ambiguities in the Latin first person plural before going on to demonstrate how those ambiguities may function for readers of DRN. First I show how ambiguity between inclusive and exclusive uses of the first person plural allow such expressions as quod inane vocamus to be interpreted differently by readers at different stages of their Epicurean education. I then discuss Lucretius’ use of inclusive first-person plural forms to characterize his own relationships with his reader. Finally, I discuss the role of collective first-person plurals in the argumentation of the poem, and its implications for Lucretius’ avowed empiricism. A central aim of the paper is to show how the ambiguities inherent in the language of Lucretian didaxis allow for different responses by different groups of readers.