Lucretius in the Modern World.
Johnson, W. R.:
From Fundus-Online GbR Borkert Schwarz Zerfaß, Berlin, Germany
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Quantity: 1From Fundus-Online GbR Borkert Schwarz Zerfaß, Berlin, Germany
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163 p. From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Light sticker residue on binding. Otherwise in very good condition. - Content: Lucretius poem, On the Nature of Things, stands as a powerful representation of classical antiquity s best and most influential effort to speculate on the material universe and the place and condition of human beings in it. Taking the atomic theory of Democritus as reformulated by Epicurus, Lucretius designed for his fellow Romans, half a century before the birth of Christ, a poetic model of the physical world they lived in and an ethical worldview that was compatible with that world, one which stressed how human beings could find ways of reducing their suffering and could then become virtuous by learning to increase their enjoyment of ordinary pleasures. This poem has been variously received since it came out of hiding at the end of the Middle Ages - it has been blamed and praised, ignored and adored. What its future can be no one can guess, but what it has meant in the past and what meanings it now offers are questions worth considering. In the first part of this book, I provide a sketch of what I take to be the poem s central concepts and attempt to describe its ethical project and the values it espouses. In the second part, I examine several representative texts from the centuries just preceding ours, ones which reveal the ways Lucretius was read when the West was becoming modern. Here, I am especially interested in tracing the pattern of reception that created the all too familiar melancholy Lucretius and in describing how contemporary versions of doing science contrast with the Lucretian version. My notes are minimalist. A surname followed by page numbers (or, in a few cases, by a year and page numbers) indicates where the reader can go to find a more extensive discussion of the topic in question, or an opposing view, or a source for a given statement. My quotations of Lucretius are from the Penguin translation by R.E. Latham as revised by John Godwin, and I am grateful to Penguin Books for permission to reproduce them. There are several other good translations of the poem now available, among them Sir Ronald Melville s and W.H.D. Rouse s Loeb translation as revised by M.F. Smith. But in addition to its accuracy and clarity, Godwin s revised Penguin translation is also reader-friendly by virtue of the excellence of its introduction, its notes, its appendices, and its clear indication of how its English text accords with the line-numbering of its Latin original. My thanks go to Susanna Morton Braund and Paul Cartledge for their very helpful suggestions for revisions, and to Deborah Blake for her generous help at every stage of the book s production. ISBN 9780715628829 Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 293. Seller Inventory # 1167058
Bibliographic Details
Title: Lucretius in the Modern World.
Publisher: London: Bristol Classical Press
Publication Date: 2000
Binding: Original paperback.
Condition: Sehr gut
About this title
Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things", one of the glories of Latin literature, provides a vivid poetic exposition of the doctrines of the Greek atomist, Epicurus. The poem played a crucial role in the reinvention of science in the seventeenth century, its influence on the French Enlightenment was powerful and pervasive, and it became a major battlefield in the wars of religion with science in nineteenth-century England. But in the twentieth century, despite its vital contributions to modern thought and civilisation, it has been largely neglected by common readers and scientists alike. This book offers an extensive description of the poem, with special emphasis on its cheerful version of materialism and on its attempt to devise an ethical system that suits such a universe. It surveys major relevant texts form the eighteenth and ninetheenth centuries (Dryden, Diderot, Voltaire, Tennyson, Santayana) and speculates on why Lucretius and the ancient scientific tradition he championed has become marginalised in the twentieth century.It closes with a discussion of what value the poem has for students of science and technology in the new century: what advice it has to offer us about how to go about reinventing our machines and our morality.
W.R. Johnson is John Matthews Manly Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on Latin literature, including Darkness Visible and Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom.
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