A “BATALHA SEMÂNTICA” PELA RELIGIO PUBLICA ROMANA NO DE RERUM NATURA DE LUCRÉCIO (original) (raw)

2018, PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM HISTÓRIA DA UNIRIO

The aim of the present thesis is to investigate the intellectual commitment of Lucretius, Roman poet and philosopher of the 1st century BC, to public action programs based on a pietas and a political attitude empowered by the epicurean ratio. The author engaged in the "semantic battle" between the competitive branches of the Late Republican elite for the establishment and control of the definition of civic-religious vocabulary. The dissension reached the legal-normative arrangement of the Republic, especially the Roman binomial of religious auctoritas, kept by senators and priests, and potestas cum imperio, in charge of higher magistrates and military officers. The increasing friction between these two functions, brought about by the new circumstances imposed by the civil wars and the expansion of the empire, demanded the restoration of its balance of reciprocal complementarity and exclusion. In the De rerum natura, Lucretius worked hard to reformulate the Roman tradition and the ancestral past: he praised Epicurus as a new political-social authority. Moreover, on the path towards the process of religio publica rationalization and the flourishing of theological literature, the author superseded, on epicurean bases, the knowledge on which the religious auctoritas depended. With the goal of recovering the premise of rationality, which should be the groundwork of the “civic pact” between the citizens and the gods, he entrenched the divine non-intervention in human affairs. Lucretius addressed his fight against religious terror toward the field of divination and observation of the auspices, which had become, in the mid- 1st century BCE, indispensable instruments in the political contest for resources of power and authority. The outcome of his powerful and thought-provoking review of the ruling Roman elite ritual forms of handling the divine signs in their strategies of political action is the systematization of the ratio “popularis”, defined as the political-religious orientation brought on by the convergence of the epicurean ratio and the “popularis” intellectual tradition.