Fabio Tutrone | Università degli Studi di Palermo (original) (raw)
Books by Fabio Tutrone
Is it possible to overcome grief after years of mourning? What should a Roman woman do to regain ... more Is it possible to overcome grief after years of mourning? What should a Roman woman do to regain control of her thoughts? This book – the first commentary in English on Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia in forty years, with a revision of the Latin text – explores Seneca’s answers to these and other existential questions, shedding new light on Seneca’s appropriation of the ancient genre of consolation for the sake of Stoic moral therapy.
Cf. https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9783111014845/html?lang=en
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Nel dibattito della nostra epoca la presenza degli animali, e l'insieme dei problemi connessi all... more Nel dibattito della nostra epoca la presenza degli animali, e l'insieme dei problemi connessi alla relazione uomo-animale, sembrano sempre più acquisire un ruolo di primo piano. Ciò vale in egual misura per le scienze naturali e le discipline umanistiche, per la biologia evolutiva come per la filosofia morale. Soprattutto, appare sempre più consistente il peso degli interrogativi etici - bioetici - impliciti nelle questioni zooantropologiche. Questo volume intende riprendere in considerazione l'opera di due fra i più importanti pensatori della cultura romana, l'epicureo Lucrezio e lo stoico Seneca, al fine di ripercorrere attraverso sondaggi selettivi l'ampio dibattito sviluppatosi a Roma, fra tarda repubblica ed età giulio-claudia, in merito al tema della condizione animale. Dalla polemica lucreziana contro l'antropocentrismo all'umanesimo problematico di Seneca, dai dibattiti intorno al vegetarismo alla ricezione del pensiero greco, un viaggio attraverso testi complessi, al confine tra filologia, storia della scienza e antropologia culturale, rivela volti diversi di uomini e animali: volti così distanti, e al contempo così vicini.
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Edited Books by Fabio Tutrone
The main purpose of the volume is to explore and reassess Latin texts where the cultural represen... more The main purpose of the volume is to explore and reassess Latin texts where the cultural representation of time, in a literary and anthropological sense, plays a prominent role. It is a matter of fact that during its multi-faceted development Roman literature produced a wide range of interpretations of time, usually denoting peculiar views of cultural history. The striking multiplicity of Roman reflections on this matter seems to require further investigations taking into proper account the different ideological inputs involved. On the one hand, it is clear that like many other Mediterranean civilizations, Rome elaborated (and tended to reproduce) a culturally embedded conception of time, which made a remarkable impact on traditional values and social patterns. On the other hand, the complex processes of transformation which Roman culture underwent over the course of its long history inevitably affected (and reshaped) traditional chronological categories. Of course, several concurrent factors contributed to such processes, and all of them seem to have exerted an influence on the Latin writers' reading of time as a morally significant object. Philosophical trends, literary orientations and religious beliefs, in particular, introduced substantial changes to previous representations of time, and this was seen, by turns, as a circular, linear or hybrid dimension.
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Articles & Chapters by Fabio Tutrone
It has been widely recognized that until the fourth century AD Christians discussed freely about ... more It has been widely recognized that until the fourth century AD Christians discussed freely about the source and the nature of the soul – the cases of Origen and Tertullian being emblematic of this situation in the East and in the West, respectively. It was only in the fourth century AD – after the so-called conversion of Constantine, with the Church’s increasing entanglement with political and social power and the emergence of a new generation of Platonizing intellectuals from the ranks of the upper class – that Christian bishops and theologians inaugurated a new discourse on the soul, its transcendent origin, immaterial constitution, and immortal destiny, which entailed the banishment and repression of earlier alternative visions. In the present paper, I shall be exploring an episode in this crucial historical transition, which, though limited in scope, can shed light upon the long-standing interactions between Greco-Roman theories of matter, elements, and principles, on the one hand, and Christian ideas of the soul and the afterworld, on the other. I am going to focus on the treatise 'On the City of God' (De Civitate Dei) by Augustine of Hippo, who is usually regarded as one of the most decisive and influential figures in what can be called the Neoplatonic turn of fourth-century AD Christian eschatology. It is too often forgotten that throughout his long engagement with the issue of the nature and origin of the soul Augustine maintained an agnostic position, which is faithfully mirrored in all of his writings. Indeed, I shall attempt to show that Augustine’s troubled reflection on the soul – on what he repeatedly terms as the ‘extremely obscure question of the soul’ (obscurissimam de anima quaestionem) – includes a meaningful dialogue with Book 16 of Varro’s 'Divine Antiquities' (Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum) and its theory that the four elements of the cosmos host four different kinds of souls. I will investigate the philosophical pedigree of Varro’s cosmological-cum-psychological doctrine, with its recognizable mixture of Platonic and Stoic notions, arguing that Varro’s teacher, the Middle Platonist philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon, is its most likely source. However, far from restricting myself to an exercise in Quellenforschung, I shall claim that the Varronian theory reported in Book 7 of Augustine’s City of God should be read in light of Augustine’s sustained reception of the Platonic tradition in Book 8 of the same work, where the view that the body of demons is made up of air is endorsed by Augustine and attests to his serious pondering of the role of the natural elements in the emergence of a creature’s essence.
N.B. This is the final draft of the above-cited article. You are very welcome to cite it as forthcoming, but please refer to the published version and the correct page numbers once the volume is out.
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The last twenty years have witnessed a significant advance in our understanding of the conceptual... more The last twenty years have witnessed a significant advance in our understanding of the conceptual history of 'libertas', especially with regard to the crucial transition from Republic to Empire. It has been convincingly shown that in the first century BC 'libertas' was much more than “a convenient term of political fraud” – to quote Syme’s influential definition – and that an epoch-making conceptual transition occurred in the 40s BC, when, moving away from a juridical notion, the idea of 'libertas' acquired a new moral and universalistic dimension, centered round the 'iudicium' of individual men. In the present paper, I shall attempt to set the only five occurrences of the word 'libertas' in Virgil’s oeuvre against the background of their time and milieu – an attempt that will inevitably result in the exploration of Virgil’s stance before and after Actium, for two of these occurrences appear in Eclogue 1 and three of them can be found in the Aeneid. Both a ‘traditional’ (or ‘communal’) and a ‘revisionist’ (or ‘personalistic’) view of 'libertas' surface in Virgil’s writings, thus reminding us once again of Virgil’s richly ambiguous vision as a poet suspended between the trauma of the civil wars and Augustan discourse. Virgil’s poetry seems to bear witness to the on-going (and still incomplete) assimilation of the new role model of the 'Libertatis Vindex' – which first appears in Eclogue 1 with the 'deus' Octavian (Ecl. 1.27-32) and later re-emerges in Aeneid 6 with L. Junius Brutus, the founder of the 'res publica', judge of his own sons, and ancestor of Caesar’s murderer (Aen. 6. 817-823). Besides these two symbolically meaningful occurrences there are two other passages from the Aeneid – in Books 8 (646-651) and 11 (346-351) – which attest more clearly to Virgil’s persisting memory of the collective experience of 'libertas'.
N.B. This is the final draft of the above-cited article. You are very welcome to cite it as forthcoming, but please refer to the published version and the correct page numbers once the related journal issue is out.
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Over the past few centuries, scholars have often regarded Lucretius’ DRN as a fascinating example... more Over the past few centuries, scholars have often regarded Lucretius’ DRN as a fascinating example of artistic non-finito, mirroring the untimely death of a solitary genius. The present chapter reassesses the literary, philological, and historical evidence supporting this classical view, arguing that a careful reassessment of the ‘degree of completeness’ of Lucretius’ text should be based on a thorough understanding of the special features of Roman didactic poetry and Epicurean therapeutic pedagogy as culturally situated discourses of self-formation. The chapter makes clear that neither the practice of recursive argumentation, with the studied repetition of crucial lines in different books, nor the gradual modification of thematic priorities over the course of Lucretius’ poem can be taken as evidence of unfinishedness as neither is a culturally neutral mode of rhetorical expression. On the contrary, both verbal repetition and thematic adaptability have substantially different implications in the intellectual world of Roman and Epicurean didacticism than in our modern literary sensibility.
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The destiny of silence and oblivion that obscured the figure of Nigidius Figulus seems to have af... more The destiny of silence and oblivion that obscured the figure of Nigidius Figulus seems to have affected with particular severity Nigidius’ works on human and animal biology, of which only tiny fragments survive. In the present paper, I shall attempt to set Nigidius Figulus’ biological fragments against the background of their time, reading them in connection with the renewed interest of late Republican writers in physical laws, animal behavior, and the related moral issues – an interest which was often coupled with a reinterpretation of Peripatetic and Hellenistic zoological knowledge. The years in which Nigidius Figulus wrote his ‘commentationes’ – and, according to Cicero, revived Pythagoreanism – were the same years in which Aristotle’s and Theophrastus’ biological writings attracted increased attention, owing also to their growing availability in both direct and indirect textual traditions. Nigidius’ ‘commentationes’ seem to have been heavily influenced by Aristotle’s History of Animals – especially by its ninth book, which has been reasonably attributed to Theophrastus, has an impressive ‘Nachleben’ in Hellenistic literature, and is widely echoed in both Cicero and Lucretius. As a closer reading of the extant fragments will show, several issues of Peripatetic anatomy, ethology, and epistemology are reframed by Nigidius in the context of Roman culture, religion, and folklore – with an eye on the then prevailing Stoic philosophy and with the clear purpose of offering a thought-provoking contribution to the Roman ‘Republic of Letters’.
N.B. This is the final draft of the above-mentioned chapter. Please refer to the published version for citation purposes.
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It is generally assumed that Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura disappeared with the end of antiquity and... more It is generally assumed that Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura disappeared with the end of antiquity and did not reappear until Poggio Bracciolini’s rediscovery (1417). Yet, the oldest and most valuable manuscripts of DRN were copied in the Carolingian age and reflect a high degree of attention to Lucretius’ text and its content. In the present paper, I argue that by studying more carefully the origin and diffusion of Lucretian manuscripts in Carolingian Europe, it is possible to detect an almost unrecognized connection between textual tradition, grammatical erudition, and literary imitatio. In the first section, I offer an overview of the reception of DRN in such representative ninth-century writers as Ermenrich of Ellwangen, Heiric of Auxerre, Walahfrid Strabo, and John Scottus Eriugena. In these
authors, very much as in Augustan and imperial Latin literature, the echo of Lucretius’ poetry can be perceived through the filter of allusion, intertextuality, and intergeneric adaptation. In the second section, I focus on the special case of Dungal, an Irish monk, scholar, and writer who migrated to Charlemagne’s court and has been identified by Bernhard Bischoff with the corrector Saxonicus of Lucretius’ Codex Oblongus. Dungal’s familiarity with the text of DRN is mirrored in his 811 letter to
Charlemagne on the eclipses (MGH Epistolae IV Karolini aevi II, pp. 570-578). Even if Macrobius and Pliny are prominent among Dungal’s ancient sources, Lucretius’ astronomical doctrine and history of humankind seem to have left a trace in the letter’s literary background. Moreover, Dungal’s acceptance of the antipodes theory might help explain the textual condition of Lucr. 1, 1068-1075 in the Codex Oblongus.
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N.B. These are the uncorrected proofs of the above-mentioned article. It is often assumed that ... more N.B. These are the uncorrected proofs of the above-mentioned article.
It is often assumed that Epicurean philosophy and its foremost Roman prophet, T. Lucretius Carus, adopted a deeply hostile attitude towards both politics and religion. Individualistic (or even solipsistic) interpretations of Epicureanism – as well as of the Epicurean catechism of De Rerum Natura – have long co-existed with, and provided support to, the claim that the Epicureans attached little value to religious experiences. In the present paper, I shall argue that, in this and many other respects, the modern reception of Epicureanism – with its brave aspirations after the liberation of science from social and religious restraints – has had undue influence on our understanding of De Rerum Natura and its culturally embedded discourse on the self. I shall build on the results of some relatively recent studies that have thrown a different light on Epicurus’ social theory and its historical realization, in an attempt to show that, far from being a morally isolationist system of thought, Epicureanism relied on a careful and, so to speak, osmotic connection between self-improvement and altruistic commitment – between scientific knowledge, contemplative awareness, and constructive sociability. In an age in which the inherited models of political participation, rational analysis, and religious sensibility were thoroughly reassessed by the members of the Roman intellectual elite, Lucretius elaborated a thought-provoking recipe for achieving individual and social peace that required a radical transformation of consciousness and the transition to a new form of worship.
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Among the most common and influential stereotypes of Greco-Roman literature is the idea that anim... more Among the most common and influential stereotypes of Greco-Roman literature is the idea that animals are ‘dumb’ (ἄλογα/muta), that is, mute and devoid of reason. In recent years, several explorations of what Stephen Newmyer has aptly called the ‘man alone of animals’ topos have pointed out that in asserting the privileged status of humans the ancients attached special importance to articulate language. Yet, most of these explorations have adopted a thematic rather than historical approach in an attempt to provide a comparative assessment of ancient and modern paradigms. In the present paper, I follow a historical line through the literary representations of animals as ‘dumb’, focusing on two especially crucial moments: the rise of classical and Hellenistic stereotypes, and the Roman appropriation of Greek thought. A detailed account of the evolution of the idea of animal ‘dumbness’ is beyond the scope of this paper, but an overview of some of the most significant stages in the history of classical ‘logocentrism’ can refine our perception of codes, strategies, and devices which are currently being used in the world around us.
N.B. This is the final draft of the above-cited article. Please refer to the published version for the correct page numbers.
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A general overview of the socio-anthropological models underlying some of the most well-known Rom... more A general overview of the socio-anthropological models underlying some of the most well-known Roman myths about twins, Doppelgänger, and foreigners
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Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia embraces the orthodox Stoic view that, when unduly protracted, gri... more Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia embraces the orthodox Stoic view that, when unduly protracted, grief reflects a logical misunderstanding of the natural world, human life, and the limits of the self. Seneca is aware that persuading Marcia to leave her false beliefs is the only way to reawaken her interest in communal life, family reciprocity, and constructive memory. He conceives his consolatory writing as an intellectually engaging didactic work tailored to the needs and disposition of his addressee. The main purpose of the present paper is to show that in this and several other respects the Consolation to Marcia makes a conscious move towards the different but evidently related genre of didactic poetry. I shall focus on the literarily and philosophically dense section on general ‘praecepta’ which follows the opening gallery of ‘exempla’. At the very start of this section (7), Seneca embarks on a skilful (yet almost unrecognized) ‘imitatio/aemulatio’ of Lucretius' famous argument on the mother cow (2.352-366). A closer analysis of Seneca's intertextual allusion to Lucretius' piece of bravura and its Ovidian afterlife (Fast. 4.455-466) will reveal that the strategies of literary amplification and rewriting deployed in the Consolation support the construction of a distinctively Stoic paradigm of natural philosophy. While giving new shape to his poetic models, Seneca substantially revises the intellectual meanings of Lucretius' exposition, in an attempt to replace the Epicurean emphasis on physical diversity and animal cognition with the Stoic doctrine of a uniform, teleologically ordered cosmos.
N.B. These are the uncorrected proofs of my article. Please refer to the published version for citation purposes
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Until recently, Descartes' idea that the human mind is, by definition, a non-extended entity (res... more Until recently, Descartes' idea that the human mind is, by definition, a non-extended entity (res cogitans, non extensa), enclosed in the body but constitutionally different from common bodily and external realities, found wide acceptance among students of cognitive sciences. But in the past few years the barriers between outer and inner worlds have begun to blur, projecting the process of cognition as a complex distributed phenomenon. According to the so-called distributed cognition thesis (and its more “radical” version, the extended mind hypothesis), “the thinker in this world is a very special medium that can provide coordination among many structured media – some internal, some external, some embodied in artefacts, some in ideas, and some in social relationships” (Hutchins 1995: 316). The case of Lucretius and Epicurean philosophy discussed in this paper aims to show that the narrow fortress of the knowing self is not as ancient as some present-day theorists are inclined to think, and that the very concept of distributed cognition, broadly construed, has a history of its own with deep roots in Greco-Roman physiology. Lucretius' poem provides especially compelling evidence that, one the one hand, Epicurean epistemology conceives of cognition as a material process extended across the borders of atomic bodies, and that, on the other hand, true knowledge can be achieved only through cooperative didactic techniques. Standing at the crossroads between poetry and philosophy, Lucretius' didactic method tries to involve the addressee (both intellectually and emotionally) in the cooperative construction of an internalized cognitive artefact: the image of the atomic cosmos, faithfully reflected in the text.
N.B. You are welcome to cite this article as forthcoming, but once it has appeared please refer to the published version. Thanks!
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Since its coinage in the nineteenth century, the concept of Carolingian renaissance has been prim... more Since its coinage in the nineteenth century, the concept of Carolingian renaissance has been primarily based on the revival of classical texts promoted by Charlemagne and his successors. Among the positive consequences of Carolingian classicism is the careful - if discreet - preservation of the text of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, which survives in three valuable ninth-century manuscripts. Whereas rigorous philological studies of these manuscripts have been offered, little attention has been paid to their role in, and connection with, the reception of Lucretius in ninth-century literature. It has been generally assumed that for the Carolingians the DRN was essentially a source for grammatical and metrical usage, and extensive efforts have been made to distinguish between direct and indirect quotations of Lucretian lines. In the present paper, I shall adopt a different approach, starting from the observation that the diffusion of DRN in ninth-century Europe coincided with an increasing interest in its content. I shall argue that a deeper understanding of Lucretius' Carolingian reception can be achieved if one overcomes the dichotomies usually maintained by the philological Quellenforschung, as such dichotomies tend to overshadow the historically and culturally specific features of the early medieval practice of 'imitatio'. By endorsing the perspective of intertextual studies, reception theory, and rhetorical criticism, I shall point out a so far unrecognized 'imitatio Lucretii' in the astronomical work (Liber de Astronomia) of the Irishman Dicuil, whose allusions to Lucretius -particularly to the cosmological treatment of Book 5, the so-called "apology" of Book 1 (921-950 = 4.1-25), and the calf argument of Book 2 (352-366) - are representative of the peculiarities of Carolingian reading culture.
N.B. These are the uncorrected proofs of the above-mentioned article.
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Over the past few decades, the successful emergence of intertextuality, with its careful investig... more Over the past few decades, the successful emergence of intertextuality, with its careful investigation of the dynamics of imitation, allusion, and emulation, has effectively challenged the Romantic notions of creativity and individual authorship. In the wide-open field left by the postmodern ‘death of the author’, however, the territory of culture as a network of patterns hiding behind the text has often been restricted within the boundaries of literary culture. In this paper, I will attempt to enlarge such a text-centred perspective by highlighting the often neglected connections between family education, intergenerational reciprocity, and aesthetic thought in Roman culture. Indeed, long before the neoteroi started to seed their poems with ‘Alexandrian footnotes’, there existed at Rome a culturally embedded set of patterns providing concrete instructions on how a Roman had to imitate his models and compete with them. As emblematically attested in aristocratic epitaphs, a young Roman was expected to consciously situate himself in the line of his 'genus', striving to imitate, and possibly to surpass, the virtues of his ancestors – the 'maiores' immortalized by the masks in the 'atria'. By reassessing Cicero’s, Seneca’s, and Quintilian’s approaches to 'aemulatio' and their underlying sociological backgrounds, I will point to several conceptual traits which cross the boundaries between cultural and literary memory and shape the 'Bildung' of such learned writers as Horace: from the faith in the endlessly advancing progress of generations to the fear of reproducing ancestral vices, from the depiction of previous models as stimulatingly imperfect portraits to the creative manipulation of genealogical identities.
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Over the past few years, students of ancient Mediterranean societies have shown consistent intere... more Over the past few years, students of ancient Mediterranean societies have shown consistent interest in the cultural construction of dogs as reflected in texts, artefacts, and other media. However, whereas the cultural and literary implications of the Greek representation of dogs have been the subject of thorough investigations, Roman dogs have remained at the margins of the scholarly debate. By adopting an interdisciplinary methodology that combines cognitive theory, rhetorical analysis, and socio-anthropological research, the present paper discusses some affordances of dogs (in the terms of James Gibson’s 'ecological approach to visual perception') that are given special significance within the metaphoric universe of Roman culture. In the first section, I shall point to some salient characteristics of dogs emerging from the moral, scientific and religious discourse of the Romans. By reassessing the often-overlooked evidence of Latin 'technical' writings in conjunction with relevant pieces of archaeological evidence, I will attempt to point out the central prominence of liminality as the most distinctive symbolic feature of Roman dogs. In the second part of the paper, I will switch to a vehement piece of forensic rhetoric, Cicero’s speech for Roscius Amerinus, in an attempt to show how Cicero intelligently exploits the traditional depiction of dogs as ambiguous beings, at the same time watchful and deceitful. For the sake of comparison, I shall also consider the case of a poet acting, in several respects, as a cultural outsider: Lucretius. While announcing the gospel of a philosophical community frequently associated with pigs and dogs by its opponents, Lucretius never indulges in the double-sided characterization of the canine most familiar to his readers. On the contrary, though clearly aware of the background of his Roman audience, Lucretius chooses to assign new meanings to old and already existing patterns of representation (the hunting hound, the house pet, the Molossian guard dog, the couple mating at a crossroads).
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A brief sketch of the reception of Epicureanism in early modern natural philosophy and metaphysic... more A brief sketch of the reception of Epicureanism in early modern natural philosophy and metaphysics (15th-18th centuries).
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Tyranny is often regarded as "a perennial problem" (Boesche 1996) on the basis of its ubiquitous ... more Tyranny is often regarded as "a perennial problem" (Boesche 1996) on the basis of its ubiquitous presence in literature. Even more enduring is the problem of how to define human nature, its place in the environment, and its relationship to the divine – a core issue of philosophical anthropology (Pansera 2001, Honenberger 2015). In the present paper, I shall approach the literary construction of the tyrant figure in Greek and Roman tragedy from the holistic perspective of philosophical anthropology. I will focus on three well-known dramas (Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone and Seneca’s Thyestes) which put great emphasis on the moral and cognitive status of tyrants as “exceptional” human types. I will try to show how Sophocles’ Oedipus and Creon and Seneca’s Atreus reflect in different ways the ancient philosophical discussion about the humanizing power of reason and language – a discussion that echoes but at the same time transforms the patterns of folkloric thought. Indeed, not only did a philosophical anthropology sensu proprio develop in the ancient world and refashion traditional mentalities, but Greek and Roman dramatists were also to able to provide a critical response to the models of philosophy. In the age of Presocratic rationalism and Sophistic relativism, Sophocles portrayed his tyrants as masters of speech (λόγος) and intelligence (γνώμη) who dared to challenge divine law but ultimately became inhuman because of their excessive confidence in human cognition. Similarly, though in the largely different context of imperial Rome, Seneca used the tyrant figure to describe the Stoic process of "inversion of reason" (διαστροφὴ τοῦ λόγου) and blamed the degradation of human life from the pursuit of wisdom to the self-conscious promotion of vice.
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In the first book of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes his didactic undertaking as a metaphori... more In the first book of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes his didactic undertaking as a metaphorical process of gift exchange (1.50-53): the obscure and salvific precepts of Epicurean philosophy, skilfully arranged in hexameters, are said to be 'gifts' (dona) that the poet has prepared with loyal zeal (studio fideli). Such a suggestive depiction of Lucretius' relationship to the work's dedicatee, Gaius Memmius, seems to reflect a relevant functional pattern of De Rerum Natura as a coherent system of communication strategies, variously readapting social models and cultural traditions. The present paper employs the interpretative approach of gift theories – the thought-provoking theories elaborated by modern anthropologists in order to explain the structure of archaic societies – as a key to understand the poetics of Lucretius' didactic. Since K. Polanyi's and M. Finley's path-breaking studies, several surveys have pointed to the role of exchange practices in the Graeco-Roman world, remarking on the impact of pre-modern gift-giving patterns on ancient literature (e.g. Gill et al. 1998, Bowditch 2001, Coffee 2009, Satlow 2013). However, much more attention should be paid to the special case of Lucretius in light of the influence of two important backgrounds: the milieu of Roman society, in which patronage relationships and interpersonal transactions played a prominent role (Veyne 1976, Saller 1982), and the tradition of Epicurean communities, which conveyed their doctrinal teachings though a series of reciprocal bonds, ideally supported by a thorough reflection on giving, gratitude, and the transmission of knowledge. The present paper reassesses the evidence provided by Roman and Epicurean sources (especially Philodemus' treatises On Frank Criticism and On Gratitude, Epicurus' fragments, and Diogenes of Oenoanda's inscription) in order to further investigate Lucretius' rhetoric of persuasion.
N.B. This is my own manuscript version of a paper published on HSCP. If you wish to cite this work, please refer to HSCP layout and page numbers.
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Until recently, Philodemus' treatise On Household Management (Περὶ οἰκονομίας, PHerc. 1424) has b... more Until recently, Philodemus' treatise On Household Management (Περὶ οἰκονομίας, PHerc. 1424) has been mainly used as a source for the reconstruction of early Epicurean economic thought (especially of Metrodorus' writing Περὶ πλούτου). Over the past few years, however, scholars have called attention to Philodemus' creative (yet philosophically orthodox) readaptation of Epicurean ethical and social theories to the needs of contemporary Roman society. Following this scholarly line, the present paper reassesses a passage from On Household Management (col. XXII.9-48) which has so far been interpreted as an unoriginal repetition of Metrodorus' arguments, and situates it in the cultural context of the late Roman Republic. By comparing Philodemus', Cicero's, and Cornelius Nepos' approaches to the issues of virtue, wealth, wisdom, and the ways of life, the paper confirms the dating of Περὶ οἰκονομίας to the period after 50 BCE – a dating which was first proposed by Guglielmo Cavallo on merely paleographic grounds. Indeed, Philodemus' claims about the value of practical and theoretical knowledge, his use of previous philosophical traditions (such as the Peripatos), and his choice of poignant historical exempla, all point to the work's embeddedness within the late Republican debate on political engagement, biographical literature, and evergetism.
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Is it possible to overcome grief after years of mourning? What should a Roman woman do to regain ... more Is it possible to overcome grief after years of mourning? What should a Roman woman do to regain control of her thoughts? This book – the first commentary in English on Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia in forty years, with a revision of the Latin text – explores Seneca’s answers to these and other existential questions, shedding new light on Seneca’s appropriation of the ancient genre of consolation for the sake of Stoic moral therapy.
Cf. https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9783111014845/html?lang=en
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Nel dibattito della nostra epoca la presenza degli animali, e l'insieme dei problemi connessi all... more Nel dibattito della nostra epoca la presenza degli animali, e l'insieme dei problemi connessi alla relazione uomo-animale, sembrano sempre più acquisire un ruolo di primo piano. Ciò vale in egual misura per le scienze naturali e le discipline umanistiche, per la biologia evolutiva come per la filosofia morale. Soprattutto, appare sempre più consistente il peso degli interrogativi etici - bioetici - impliciti nelle questioni zooantropologiche. Questo volume intende riprendere in considerazione l'opera di due fra i più importanti pensatori della cultura romana, l'epicureo Lucrezio e lo stoico Seneca, al fine di ripercorrere attraverso sondaggi selettivi l'ampio dibattito sviluppatosi a Roma, fra tarda repubblica ed età giulio-claudia, in merito al tema della condizione animale. Dalla polemica lucreziana contro l'antropocentrismo all'umanesimo problematico di Seneca, dai dibattiti intorno al vegetarismo alla ricezione del pensiero greco, un viaggio attraverso testi complessi, al confine tra filologia, storia della scienza e antropologia culturale, rivela volti diversi di uomini e animali: volti così distanti, e al contempo così vicini.
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The main purpose of the volume is to explore and reassess Latin texts where the cultural represen... more The main purpose of the volume is to explore and reassess Latin texts where the cultural representation of time, in a literary and anthropological sense, plays a prominent role. It is a matter of fact that during its multi-faceted development Roman literature produced a wide range of interpretations of time, usually denoting peculiar views of cultural history. The striking multiplicity of Roman reflections on this matter seems to require further investigations taking into proper account the different ideological inputs involved. On the one hand, it is clear that like many other Mediterranean civilizations, Rome elaborated (and tended to reproduce) a culturally embedded conception of time, which made a remarkable impact on traditional values and social patterns. On the other hand, the complex processes of transformation which Roman culture underwent over the course of its long history inevitably affected (and reshaped) traditional chronological categories. Of course, several concurrent factors contributed to such processes, and all of them seem to have exerted an influence on the Latin writers' reading of time as a morally significant object. Philosophical trends, literary orientations and religious beliefs, in particular, introduced substantial changes to previous representations of time, and this was seen, by turns, as a circular, linear or hybrid dimension.
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It has been widely recognized that until the fourth century AD Christians discussed freely about ... more It has been widely recognized that until the fourth century AD Christians discussed freely about the source and the nature of the soul – the cases of Origen and Tertullian being emblematic of this situation in the East and in the West, respectively. It was only in the fourth century AD – after the so-called conversion of Constantine, with the Church’s increasing entanglement with political and social power and the emergence of a new generation of Platonizing intellectuals from the ranks of the upper class – that Christian bishops and theologians inaugurated a new discourse on the soul, its transcendent origin, immaterial constitution, and immortal destiny, which entailed the banishment and repression of earlier alternative visions. In the present paper, I shall be exploring an episode in this crucial historical transition, which, though limited in scope, can shed light upon the long-standing interactions between Greco-Roman theories of matter, elements, and principles, on the one hand, and Christian ideas of the soul and the afterworld, on the other. I am going to focus on the treatise 'On the City of God' (De Civitate Dei) by Augustine of Hippo, who is usually regarded as one of the most decisive and influential figures in what can be called the Neoplatonic turn of fourth-century AD Christian eschatology. It is too often forgotten that throughout his long engagement with the issue of the nature and origin of the soul Augustine maintained an agnostic position, which is faithfully mirrored in all of his writings. Indeed, I shall attempt to show that Augustine’s troubled reflection on the soul – on what he repeatedly terms as the ‘extremely obscure question of the soul’ (obscurissimam de anima quaestionem) – includes a meaningful dialogue with Book 16 of Varro’s 'Divine Antiquities' (Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum) and its theory that the four elements of the cosmos host four different kinds of souls. I will investigate the philosophical pedigree of Varro’s cosmological-cum-psychological doctrine, with its recognizable mixture of Platonic and Stoic notions, arguing that Varro’s teacher, the Middle Platonist philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon, is its most likely source. However, far from restricting myself to an exercise in Quellenforschung, I shall claim that the Varronian theory reported in Book 7 of Augustine’s City of God should be read in light of Augustine’s sustained reception of the Platonic tradition in Book 8 of the same work, where the view that the body of demons is made up of air is endorsed by Augustine and attests to his serious pondering of the role of the natural elements in the emergence of a creature’s essence.
N.B. This is the final draft of the above-cited article. You are very welcome to cite it as forthcoming, but please refer to the published version and the correct page numbers once the volume is out.
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The last twenty years have witnessed a significant advance in our understanding of the conceptual... more The last twenty years have witnessed a significant advance in our understanding of the conceptual history of 'libertas', especially with regard to the crucial transition from Republic to Empire. It has been convincingly shown that in the first century BC 'libertas' was much more than “a convenient term of political fraud” – to quote Syme’s influential definition – and that an epoch-making conceptual transition occurred in the 40s BC, when, moving away from a juridical notion, the idea of 'libertas' acquired a new moral and universalistic dimension, centered round the 'iudicium' of individual men. In the present paper, I shall attempt to set the only five occurrences of the word 'libertas' in Virgil’s oeuvre against the background of their time and milieu – an attempt that will inevitably result in the exploration of Virgil’s stance before and after Actium, for two of these occurrences appear in Eclogue 1 and three of them can be found in the Aeneid. Both a ‘traditional’ (or ‘communal’) and a ‘revisionist’ (or ‘personalistic’) view of 'libertas' surface in Virgil’s writings, thus reminding us once again of Virgil’s richly ambiguous vision as a poet suspended between the trauma of the civil wars and Augustan discourse. Virgil’s poetry seems to bear witness to the on-going (and still incomplete) assimilation of the new role model of the 'Libertatis Vindex' – which first appears in Eclogue 1 with the 'deus' Octavian (Ecl. 1.27-32) and later re-emerges in Aeneid 6 with L. Junius Brutus, the founder of the 'res publica', judge of his own sons, and ancestor of Caesar’s murderer (Aen. 6. 817-823). Besides these two symbolically meaningful occurrences there are two other passages from the Aeneid – in Books 8 (646-651) and 11 (346-351) – which attest more clearly to Virgil’s persisting memory of the collective experience of 'libertas'.
N.B. This is the final draft of the above-cited article. You are very welcome to cite it as forthcoming, but please refer to the published version and the correct page numbers once the related journal issue is out.
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Over the past few centuries, scholars have often regarded Lucretius’ DRN as a fascinating example... more Over the past few centuries, scholars have often regarded Lucretius’ DRN as a fascinating example of artistic non-finito, mirroring the untimely death of a solitary genius. The present chapter reassesses the literary, philological, and historical evidence supporting this classical view, arguing that a careful reassessment of the ‘degree of completeness’ of Lucretius’ text should be based on a thorough understanding of the special features of Roman didactic poetry and Epicurean therapeutic pedagogy as culturally situated discourses of self-formation. The chapter makes clear that neither the practice of recursive argumentation, with the studied repetition of crucial lines in different books, nor the gradual modification of thematic priorities over the course of Lucretius’ poem can be taken as evidence of unfinishedness as neither is a culturally neutral mode of rhetorical expression. On the contrary, both verbal repetition and thematic adaptability have substantially different implications in the intellectual world of Roman and Epicurean didacticism than in our modern literary sensibility.
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The destiny of silence and oblivion that obscured the figure of Nigidius Figulus seems to have af... more The destiny of silence and oblivion that obscured the figure of Nigidius Figulus seems to have affected with particular severity Nigidius’ works on human and animal biology, of which only tiny fragments survive. In the present paper, I shall attempt to set Nigidius Figulus’ biological fragments against the background of their time, reading them in connection with the renewed interest of late Republican writers in physical laws, animal behavior, and the related moral issues – an interest which was often coupled with a reinterpretation of Peripatetic and Hellenistic zoological knowledge. The years in which Nigidius Figulus wrote his ‘commentationes’ – and, according to Cicero, revived Pythagoreanism – were the same years in which Aristotle’s and Theophrastus’ biological writings attracted increased attention, owing also to their growing availability in both direct and indirect textual traditions. Nigidius’ ‘commentationes’ seem to have been heavily influenced by Aristotle’s History of Animals – especially by its ninth book, which has been reasonably attributed to Theophrastus, has an impressive ‘Nachleben’ in Hellenistic literature, and is widely echoed in both Cicero and Lucretius. As a closer reading of the extant fragments will show, several issues of Peripatetic anatomy, ethology, and epistemology are reframed by Nigidius in the context of Roman culture, religion, and folklore – with an eye on the then prevailing Stoic philosophy and with the clear purpose of offering a thought-provoking contribution to the Roman ‘Republic of Letters’.
N.B. This is the final draft of the above-mentioned chapter. Please refer to the published version for citation purposes.
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It is generally assumed that Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura disappeared with the end of antiquity and... more It is generally assumed that Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura disappeared with the end of antiquity and did not reappear until Poggio Bracciolini’s rediscovery (1417). Yet, the oldest and most valuable manuscripts of DRN were copied in the Carolingian age and reflect a high degree of attention to Lucretius’ text and its content. In the present paper, I argue that by studying more carefully the origin and diffusion of Lucretian manuscripts in Carolingian Europe, it is possible to detect an almost unrecognized connection between textual tradition, grammatical erudition, and literary imitatio. In the first section, I offer an overview of the reception of DRN in such representative ninth-century writers as Ermenrich of Ellwangen, Heiric of Auxerre, Walahfrid Strabo, and John Scottus Eriugena. In these
authors, very much as in Augustan and imperial Latin literature, the echo of Lucretius’ poetry can be perceived through the filter of allusion, intertextuality, and intergeneric adaptation. In the second section, I focus on the special case of Dungal, an Irish monk, scholar, and writer who migrated to Charlemagne’s court and has been identified by Bernhard Bischoff with the corrector Saxonicus of Lucretius’ Codex Oblongus. Dungal’s familiarity with the text of DRN is mirrored in his 811 letter to
Charlemagne on the eclipses (MGH Epistolae IV Karolini aevi II, pp. 570-578). Even if Macrobius and Pliny are prominent among Dungal’s ancient sources, Lucretius’ astronomical doctrine and history of humankind seem to have left a trace in the letter’s literary background. Moreover, Dungal’s acceptance of the antipodes theory might help explain the textual condition of Lucr. 1, 1068-1075 in the Codex Oblongus.
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N.B. These are the uncorrected proofs of the above-mentioned article. It is often assumed that ... more N.B. These are the uncorrected proofs of the above-mentioned article.
It is often assumed that Epicurean philosophy and its foremost Roman prophet, T. Lucretius Carus, adopted a deeply hostile attitude towards both politics and religion. Individualistic (or even solipsistic) interpretations of Epicureanism – as well as of the Epicurean catechism of De Rerum Natura – have long co-existed with, and provided support to, the claim that the Epicureans attached little value to religious experiences. In the present paper, I shall argue that, in this and many other respects, the modern reception of Epicureanism – with its brave aspirations after the liberation of science from social and religious restraints – has had undue influence on our understanding of De Rerum Natura and its culturally embedded discourse on the self. I shall build on the results of some relatively recent studies that have thrown a different light on Epicurus’ social theory and its historical realization, in an attempt to show that, far from being a morally isolationist system of thought, Epicureanism relied on a careful and, so to speak, osmotic connection between self-improvement and altruistic commitment – between scientific knowledge, contemplative awareness, and constructive sociability. In an age in which the inherited models of political participation, rational analysis, and religious sensibility were thoroughly reassessed by the members of the Roman intellectual elite, Lucretius elaborated a thought-provoking recipe for achieving individual and social peace that required a radical transformation of consciousness and the transition to a new form of worship.
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Among the most common and influential stereotypes of Greco-Roman literature is the idea that anim... more Among the most common and influential stereotypes of Greco-Roman literature is the idea that animals are ‘dumb’ (ἄλογα/muta), that is, mute and devoid of reason. In recent years, several explorations of what Stephen Newmyer has aptly called the ‘man alone of animals’ topos have pointed out that in asserting the privileged status of humans the ancients attached special importance to articulate language. Yet, most of these explorations have adopted a thematic rather than historical approach in an attempt to provide a comparative assessment of ancient and modern paradigms. In the present paper, I follow a historical line through the literary representations of animals as ‘dumb’, focusing on two especially crucial moments: the rise of classical and Hellenistic stereotypes, and the Roman appropriation of Greek thought. A detailed account of the evolution of the idea of animal ‘dumbness’ is beyond the scope of this paper, but an overview of some of the most significant stages in the history of classical ‘logocentrism’ can refine our perception of codes, strategies, and devices which are currently being used in the world around us.
N.B. This is the final draft of the above-cited article. Please refer to the published version for the correct page numbers.
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A general overview of the socio-anthropological models underlying some of the most well-known Rom... more A general overview of the socio-anthropological models underlying some of the most well-known Roman myths about twins, Doppelgänger, and foreigners
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Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia embraces the orthodox Stoic view that, when unduly protracted, gri... more Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia embraces the orthodox Stoic view that, when unduly protracted, grief reflects a logical misunderstanding of the natural world, human life, and the limits of the self. Seneca is aware that persuading Marcia to leave her false beliefs is the only way to reawaken her interest in communal life, family reciprocity, and constructive memory. He conceives his consolatory writing as an intellectually engaging didactic work tailored to the needs and disposition of his addressee. The main purpose of the present paper is to show that in this and several other respects the Consolation to Marcia makes a conscious move towards the different but evidently related genre of didactic poetry. I shall focus on the literarily and philosophically dense section on general ‘praecepta’ which follows the opening gallery of ‘exempla’. At the very start of this section (7), Seneca embarks on a skilful (yet almost unrecognized) ‘imitatio/aemulatio’ of Lucretius' famous argument on the mother cow (2.352-366). A closer analysis of Seneca's intertextual allusion to Lucretius' piece of bravura and its Ovidian afterlife (Fast. 4.455-466) will reveal that the strategies of literary amplification and rewriting deployed in the Consolation support the construction of a distinctively Stoic paradigm of natural philosophy. While giving new shape to his poetic models, Seneca substantially revises the intellectual meanings of Lucretius' exposition, in an attempt to replace the Epicurean emphasis on physical diversity and animal cognition with the Stoic doctrine of a uniform, teleologically ordered cosmos.
N.B. These are the uncorrected proofs of my article. Please refer to the published version for citation purposes
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Until recently, Descartes' idea that the human mind is, by definition, a non-extended entity (res... more Until recently, Descartes' idea that the human mind is, by definition, a non-extended entity (res cogitans, non extensa), enclosed in the body but constitutionally different from common bodily and external realities, found wide acceptance among students of cognitive sciences. But in the past few years the barriers between outer and inner worlds have begun to blur, projecting the process of cognition as a complex distributed phenomenon. According to the so-called distributed cognition thesis (and its more “radical” version, the extended mind hypothesis), “the thinker in this world is a very special medium that can provide coordination among many structured media – some internal, some external, some embodied in artefacts, some in ideas, and some in social relationships” (Hutchins 1995: 316). The case of Lucretius and Epicurean philosophy discussed in this paper aims to show that the narrow fortress of the knowing self is not as ancient as some present-day theorists are inclined to think, and that the very concept of distributed cognition, broadly construed, has a history of its own with deep roots in Greco-Roman physiology. Lucretius' poem provides especially compelling evidence that, one the one hand, Epicurean epistemology conceives of cognition as a material process extended across the borders of atomic bodies, and that, on the other hand, true knowledge can be achieved only through cooperative didactic techniques. Standing at the crossroads between poetry and philosophy, Lucretius' didactic method tries to involve the addressee (both intellectually and emotionally) in the cooperative construction of an internalized cognitive artefact: the image of the atomic cosmos, faithfully reflected in the text.
N.B. You are welcome to cite this article as forthcoming, but once it has appeared please refer to the published version. Thanks!
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Since its coinage in the nineteenth century, the concept of Carolingian renaissance has been prim... more Since its coinage in the nineteenth century, the concept of Carolingian renaissance has been primarily based on the revival of classical texts promoted by Charlemagne and his successors. Among the positive consequences of Carolingian classicism is the careful - if discreet - preservation of the text of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, which survives in three valuable ninth-century manuscripts. Whereas rigorous philological studies of these manuscripts have been offered, little attention has been paid to their role in, and connection with, the reception of Lucretius in ninth-century literature. It has been generally assumed that for the Carolingians the DRN was essentially a source for grammatical and metrical usage, and extensive efforts have been made to distinguish between direct and indirect quotations of Lucretian lines. In the present paper, I shall adopt a different approach, starting from the observation that the diffusion of DRN in ninth-century Europe coincided with an increasing interest in its content. I shall argue that a deeper understanding of Lucretius' Carolingian reception can be achieved if one overcomes the dichotomies usually maintained by the philological Quellenforschung, as such dichotomies tend to overshadow the historically and culturally specific features of the early medieval practice of 'imitatio'. By endorsing the perspective of intertextual studies, reception theory, and rhetorical criticism, I shall point out a so far unrecognized 'imitatio Lucretii' in the astronomical work (Liber de Astronomia) of the Irishman Dicuil, whose allusions to Lucretius -particularly to the cosmological treatment of Book 5, the so-called "apology" of Book 1 (921-950 = 4.1-25), and the calf argument of Book 2 (352-366) - are representative of the peculiarities of Carolingian reading culture.
N.B. These are the uncorrected proofs of the above-mentioned article.
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Over the past few decades, the successful emergence of intertextuality, with its careful investig... more Over the past few decades, the successful emergence of intertextuality, with its careful investigation of the dynamics of imitation, allusion, and emulation, has effectively challenged the Romantic notions of creativity and individual authorship. In the wide-open field left by the postmodern ‘death of the author’, however, the territory of culture as a network of patterns hiding behind the text has often been restricted within the boundaries of literary culture. In this paper, I will attempt to enlarge such a text-centred perspective by highlighting the often neglected connections between family education, intergenerational reciprocity, and aesthetic thought in Roman culture. Indeed, long before the neoteroi started to seed their poems with ‘Alexandrian footnotes’, there existed at Rome a culturally embedded set of patterns providing concrete instructions on how a Roman had to imitate his models and compete with them. As emblematically attested in aristocratic epitaphs, a young Roman was expected to consciously situate himself in the line of his 'genus', striving to imitate, and possibly to surpass, the virtues of his ancestors – the 'maiores' immortalized by the masks in the 'atria'. By reassessing Cicero’s, Seneca’s, and Quintilian’s approaches to 'aemulatio' and their underlying sociological backgrounds, I will point to several conceptual traits which cross the boundaries between cultural and literary memory and shape the 'Bildung' of such learned writers as Horace: from the faith in the endlessly advancing progress of generations to the fear of reproducing ancestral vices, from the depiction of previous models as stimulatingly imperfect portraits to the creative manipulation of genealogical identities.
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Over the past few years, students of ancient Mediterranean societies have shown consistent intere... more Over the past few years, students of ancient Mediterranean societies have shown consistent interest in the cultural construction of dogs as reflected in texts, artefacts, and other media. However, whereas the cultural and literary implications of the Greek representation of dogs have been the subject of thorough investigations, Roman dogs have remained at the margins of the scholarly debate. By adopting an interdisciplinary methodology that combines cognitive theory, rhetorical analysis, and socio-anthropological research, the present paper discusses some affordances of dogs (in the terms of James Gibson’s 'ecological approach to visual perception') that are given special significance within the metaphoric universe of Roman culture. In the first section, I shall point to some salient characteristics of dogs emerging from the moral, scientific and religious discourse of the Romans. By reassessing the often-overlooked evidence of Latin 'technical' writings in conjunction with relevant pieces of archaeological evidence, I will attempt to point out the central prominence of liminality as the most distinctive symbolic feature of Roman dogs. In the second part of the paper, I will switch to a vehement piece of forensic rhetoric, Cicero’s speech for Roscius Amerinus, in an attempt to show how Cicero intelligently exploits the traditional depiction of dogs as ambiguous beings, at the same time watchful and deceitful. For the sake of comparison, I shall also consider the case of a poet acting, in several respects, as a cultural outsider: Lucretius. While announcing the gospel of a philosophical community frequently associated with pigs and dogs by its opponents, Lucretius never indulges in the double-sided characterization of the canine most familiar to his readers. On the contrary, though clearly aware of the background of his Roman audience, Lucretius chooses to assign new meanings to old and already existing patterns of representation (the hunting hound, the house pet, the Molossian guard dog, the couple mating at a crossroads).
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A brief sketch of the reception of Epicureanism in early modern natural philosophy and metaphysic... more A brief sketch of the reception of Epicureanism in early modern natural philosophy and metaphysics (15th-18th centuries).
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Tyranny is often regarded as "a perennial problem" (Boesche 1996) on the basis of its ubiquitous ... more Tyranny is often regarded as "a perennial problem" (Boesche 1996) on the basis of its ubiquitous presence in literature. Even more enduring is the problem of how to define human nature, its place in the environment, and its relationship to the divine – a core issue of philosophical anthropology (Pansera 2001, Honenberger 2015). In the present paper, I shall approach the literary construction of the tyrant figure in Greek and Roman tragedy from the holistic perspective of philosophical anthropology. I will focus on three well-known dramas (Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone and Seneca’s Thyestes) which put great emphasis on the moral and cognitive status of tyrants as “exceptional” human types. I will try to show how Sophocles’ Oedipus and Creon and Seneca’s Atreus reflect in different ways the ancient philosophical discussion about the humanizing power of reason and language – a discussion that echoes but at the same time transforms the patterns of folkloric thought. Indeed, not only did a philosophical anthropology sensu proprio develop in the ancient world and refashion traditional mentalities, but Greek and Roman dramatists were also to able to provide a critical response to the models of philosophy. In the age of Presocratic rationalism and Sophistic relativism, Sophocles portrayed his tyrants as masters of speech (λόγος) and intelligence (γνώμη) who dared to challenge divine law but ultimately became inhuman because of their excessive confidence in human cognition. Similarly, though in the largely different context of imperial Rome, Seneca used the tyrant figure to describe the Stoic process of "inversion of reason" (διαστροφὴ τοῦ λόγου) and blamed the degradation of human life from the pursuit of wisdom to the self-conscious promotion of vice.
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In the first book of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes his didactic undertaking as a metaphori... more In the first book of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes his didactic undertaking as a metaphorical process of gift exchange (1.50-53): the obscure and salvific precepts of Epicurean philosophy, skilfully arranged in hexameters, are said to be 'gifts' (dona) that the poet has prepared with loyal zeal (studio fideli). Such a suggestive depiction of Lucretius' relationship to the work's dedicatee, Gaius Memmius, seems to reflect a relevant functional pattern of De Rerum Natura as a coherent system of communication strategies, variously readapting social models and cultural traditions. The present paper employs the interpretative approach of gift theories – the thought-provoking theories elaborated by modern anthropologists in order to explain the structure of archaic societies – as a key to understand the poetics of Lucretius' didactic. Since K. Polanyi's and M. Finley's path-breaking studies, several surveys have pointed to the role of exchange practices in the Graeco-Roman world, remarking on the impact of pre-modern gift-giving patterns on ancient literature (e.g. Gill et al. 1998, Bowditch 2001, Coffee 2009, Satlow 2013). However, much more attention should be paid to the special case of Lucretius in light of the influence of two important backgrounds: the milieu of Roman society, in which patronage relationships and interpersonal transactions played a prominent role (Veyne 1976, Saller 1982), and the tradition of Epicurean communities, which conveyed their doctrinal teachings though a series of reciprocal bonds, ideally supported by a thorough reflection on giving, gratitude, and the transmission of knowledge. The present paper reassesses the evidence provided by Roman and Epicurean sources (especially Philodemus' treatises On Frank Criticism and On Gratitude, Epicurus' fragments, and Diogenes of Oenoanda's inscription) in order to further investigate Lucretius' rhetoric of persuasion.
N.B. This is my own manuscript version of a paper published on HSCP. If you wish to cite this work, please refer to HSCP layout and page numbers.
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Until recently, Philodemus' treatise On Household Management (Περὶ οἰκονομίας, PHerc. 1424) has b... more Until recently, Philodemus' treatise On Household Management (Περὶ οἰκονομίας, PHerc. 1424) has been mainly used as a source for the reconstruction of early Epicurean economic thought (especially of Metrodorus' writing Περὶ πλούτου). Over the past few years, however, scholars have called attention to Philodemus' creative (yet philosophically orthodox) readaptation of Epicurean ethical and social theories to the needs of contemporary Roman society. Following this scholarly line, the present paper reassesses a passage from On Household Management (col. XXII.9-48) which has so far been interpreted as an unoriginal repetition of Metrodorus' arguments, and situates it in the cultural context of the late Roman Republic. By comparing Philodemus', Cicero's, and Cornelius Nepos' approaches to the issues of virtue, wealth, wisdom, and the ways of life, the paper confirms the dating of Περὶ οἰκονομίας to the period after 50 BCE – a dating which was first proposed by Guglielmo Cavallo on merely paleographic grounds. Indeed, Philodemus' claims about the value of practical and theoretical knowledge, his use of previous philosophical traditions (such as the Peripatos), and his choice of poignant historical exempla, all point to the work's embeddedness within the late Republican debate on political engagement, biographical literature, and evergetism.
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It is generally recognized that Lucretius' treatment of earthquakes and pestilences (6.535-607; ... more It is generally recognized that Lucretius' treatment of earthquakes and pestilences (6.535-607; 1090-1286) exerted great influence on Book 6 of Seneca's Natural Questions. But while a large consensus exists that both authors tend to emphasize the moral value of scientific knowledge, further research is needed with respect to Seneca's “technical” re-use of Epicurean physics and meteorology.
In the present paper, I shall address this issue in three stages. First, I will analyze the structure and intellectual goals of Seneca's “doxographic” review of seismological theories (6.5-20). Far from being a doxographic account sensu proprio, such a careful review constructs the inspiring image of an intergenerational community of inquirers engaged in a virtually neverending effort. Second, I will focus on the skilful assimilation of Lucretius' atomism in Seneca's account of post-earthquake plagues (6.27-28). The special interest of this aetiological sub-section lies in its creative manipulation of Lucretius' theories, for Seneca succeeds in readapting the Epicurean explanation of the origin of diseases and its typically atomistic consideration of matter to the Stoic view of physical elements. Third and last, I will suggest that the chapter immediately following the aetiology of plagues (6.29) entails a subtle allusion to the climate of the late Republic – if not to the fate of Lucretius himself.
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The present paper reassesses the intellectual background of Lucretius' treatment of infertility i... more The present paper reassesses the intellectual background of Lucretius' treatment of infertility in 4.1233-1241, pointing out the author's ability to combine genuine Epicurean doctrine and Roman cultural patterns. Lucretius' denigration of religious mentality and his efforts to offer an entirely rational explanation of (in)fertility are interpreted in light of both internal evidence in the De Rerum Natura (e.g. 1.1-20; 248-264; 2.581-660) and differents kinds of external evidence – including the so-called Laudatio Turiae, Rome's fertility cults, and underused Epicurean sources such as PHerc 908/1390. Indeed, while systematically delegitimizing the traditional connection between supernatural powers and generation, the poet endeavors to convert his readers to a comprehensive Epicurean worldview in which death and birth, fecundity and sterility, reflect the existence of a material 'great chain of being'
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A critical overview of the papers collected in (and of the Lucretian passages discussed by) C. Sa... more A critical overview of the papers collected in (and of the Lucretian passages discussed by) C. Salemme in his recent book 'Contributi lucreziani' (Bari, Cacucci, 2020).
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Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Aug 2009
Si fornisce una recensione analitica dei diversi contributi che compongono il volume in oggetto, ... more Si fornisce una recensione analitica dei diversi contributi che compongono il volume in oggetto, nonché della silloge nel suo insieme. Attraverso tale esame sono messi in luce e discussi alcuni nodi tematici essenziali della contemporanea critica lucreziana, con opportuni ...
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An overview and discussion of the most relevant fragments of Nigidius Figulus' two biological wor... more An overview and discussion of the most relevant fragments of Nigidius Figulus' two biological works, 'On Animals' and 'On the Nature of Humans'
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A two-day international and interdisciplinary conference on the career and work of Publius Nigidi... more A two-day international and interdisciplinary conference on the career and work of Publius Nigidius Figulus (c. 98-45 BCE), organized by the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean at Columbia University.
Registration: https://forms.gle/uX8iVQGQypKCDsfF8
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A one-day workshop on the Herculaneum papyri and their historical and cultural background
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A guest lecture by Prof. Stephen T. Newmyer (Duquesne University), with an open debate about the ... more A guest lecture by Prof. Stephen T. Newmyer (Duquesne University), with an open debate about the "special" status of the human species in ancient and contemporary thought
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A seminar series organized by the University of Palermo (Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche), th... more A seminar series organized by the University of Palermo (Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche), the Archaeological Park of Segesta, and the Municipality of Calatafimi Segesta.
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An international workshop on various treatments of earlier literature in Seneca's philosophical w... more An international workshop on various treatments of earlier literature in Seneca's philosophical works
Organized by the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Classics and the Swedish Institute of Athens
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