Abstract
Lucretius’s poem is commonly understood as intended to win the friendship of its addressee, the politician Memmius, and to convert him to Epicureanism. While Lucretius expresses a desire for friendship with Memmius, there are significant obstacles—as seen in the account of love and death—to Memmius’s conversion. Lucretius, at times rather subtly, indicates that Memmius may not be fit for philosophic life. The picture he draws of Memmius, and of political ambition more generally, reveals his political career to be a great barrier to his conversion. To understand Lucretius’s true intention, one must appreciate the depth of his reflections on the fraught relationship between philosophy and politics. Lucretius’s account of the development of political society reveals the philosophic life’s difficult relationship with the political community. This tension was expressed at the outset as philosophy’s perceived impiety (I, 80–81).
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Notes
Suetonius, On Grammarians, trans. J. C. Rolfe, vol.2 (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1914), 14.
Plutarch, Lives, trans. Dryden (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 690–691.
Cicero, Letter to Atticus, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey , vol. 24 (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1999), I.18.
Cicero Letters to Quintus and Brutus, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, vol. 28 (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 2002), 70;
A Ovid, Tristia, trans. G. P. Gould (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1924), 2, 433.
Catullus, The Poems of Catullus, trans. F. W. Cornish (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1950),13 and 33.
Smith W., Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (London: John Murray, 1873); Cicero, Letter to Atticus, vol. 24, II, 12;
Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, trans. J. C. Rolfe, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1914), 15.
See Cyril Bailey, Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 623.
G. B. Townsend, “The Fading of Memmius,” The Classical Quarterly 28, no. 2., (1978): 267;
Walter Allen, “On the Friendship of Lucretius with Memmius,” Classical Philology 33, no.2 (1938): 181;
Duane Roller, “Gaius Memmius: Patron of Lucretius,” Classical Philology 65, no. 4 (1970): 247;
and T. P. Wiseman, Cinna the Poet and Other Roman Essays (Leicester: Leicester University Press 1974), 38–43.
Benjamin Farrington, “Lucretius and Memmius,” Anales de Filologi a 7, Bueno Aires, (1959): 13.
James Nichols, Epicurean Political Philosophy: The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 45.
See Strauss’s suggestion that Memmius is a new Paris. Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989): 89.
See also Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans., W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1992), V, 1–5, I, 925–929. Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 102.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 112.
Compare Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10–14.
A Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Einarson and De Lacy, vol. 14 (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 2004), 1126e–1127e.
Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1958), 379–380.
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© 2012 John Colman
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Colman, J. (2012). O’ Mortal, O’ Fool, O’ Criminal, O’ Memmius. In: Lucretius as Theorist of Political Life. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292322_5
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