This collection of essays presents a series of case studies which demonstrates the sophisticated ways in which different readers across the world have approached and interpreted Lucretius' remarkable poem De rerum natura over the centuries, from Lucretius' contemporary audience to the European Enlightenment.

• List of Illustrations


• List of Contributors


• Note on Editions


• Introduction


• 1: Stephen Harrison: Epicurean Subversion? Lucretius' First Proem and Contemporary Roman Culture


• 2: David Butterfield: Lucretius in the Early Modern Period: Texts and Contexts


• 3: Alison Brown: Lucretian Naturalism and the Evolution of Machiavelli's Ethics


• 4: Yasmin Haskell: Poetic Flights or Retreats? Latin Lucretian Poems in Sixteenth-Century Italy


• 5: Nicholas Davidson: Lucretius, Irreligion, and Atheism in Early Modern Venice


• 6: Wes Williams: 'Well said/well thought': How Montaigne Read his Lucretius


• 7: Line Cottegnies: Michel de Marolles's 1650 Translation of Lucretius and its Reception in England


• 8: William Poole: Lucretianism and Some Seventeenth-Century Theories of Human Origin


• 9: Nicholas Hardy: Natural Reason and the Laws of Nature in Early Modern Versions of Lucretius


• 10: David Norbrook: Atheists and Republicans: Interpreting Lucretius in Revolutionary England


• 11: Catherine Wilson: Political Philosophy in a Lucretian Mode


• Bibliography


• Index

David Norbrook is Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford.
Philip Hardie is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.
Stephen Harrison is a Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford.