Approaches to Lucretius

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 163 reader of Latin poetry with some interesting things to say about these fragments. This chapter should stir up productive debate. Poetry and History is the third collection of essays on the Annales to have appeared in the last fifteen years.6 How does it compare? Next to the others, this volume is a touch unwieldy, and perhaps less deserving of a cover-to-cover read. On the other hand, the general quality of its individual chapters is every bit as remarkably high. And, besides, if this 2020 book seems unwieldy next to the ones published in 2006/7, that may just be a testament to how lively Ennian studies have become in the intervening years. For this we should be grateful. Now (at the risk of my seeming the opposite), can I ask that the next Ennian collection please focus on a text other than the Annales? Why not a conference on Ennius the dramatist, the satirist, the singer of fish? University of British Columbia Jesse Hill Approaches to Lucretius: Traditions and Innovations in Reading the DE RERUM NATURA. Edited by Donncha O'Rourke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. Pp. xii, 326. This conference volume rounds out a banner year for Lucretius in 2020, joining monographs by two of this volume’s contributors (Jason S. Nethercut, Ennius Noster: Lucretius and the Annales [Oxford]; Barnaby Taylor, Lucretius and the Language of Nature [Oxford]) and one of my own (Laughing Atoms, Laughing Matter: Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Satire [Michigan]). The essays contained in the volume tackle familiar passages and interpretive cruxes of DRN with an eye on literary and social-science theory, the history of the text, and its historical readers. Many chapters are tough reading, like much theoretically informed work; but readers looking for contributions to be in conversation with one another will be pleased with the attention and intention that the editor has given to cross-pollination. His Introduction proffers an impressive survey of scholarship on the reception of Lucretius as prefatory to the volume’s essays, which return to big themes in the work of Lucretius with the tradition in the forefront of the authors’ minds. Chapter One, by David Butterfield, opens with an excellent overview of the history of the text, then argues that DRN 1.44–49 do not belong where they appear and have replaced now-lost lines of Lucretius’ own composition. Butterfield makes a maximal case for their being out of place, but he does not do a fully fair job of considering the case for retaining them in his refutation, and he relies on a liberal dose of coercive argumentation (e.g., 21–22, 26, nn. 29–30, 30, 32). I am reminded of the long-running controversy in Propertian studies between so-called textual radicals and conservatives, the former ready to transpose away all aesthetically or narratively difficult couplets, the latter committed to explaining rather than emending them. For his part, Butterfield basically rejects as unconvincing all the literary-critical interpretive explanations of DRN 1.44–49. In Chapter Two, Nora Goldschmidt brings reader-response theory to bear on our sense of the author of DRN—the implied author rather than the historical Lucretius or the Lucretius-ego narrating the poem. She argues for using traditional interpretations 6 A. Rossi and B. Breed (eds.), Ennius and the Invention of Roman Epic (Arethusa 39.3; Baltimore 2006); W. Fitzgerald and E. Gowers (eds.), Ennius Perennis (PCPS Suppl. 31; Cambridge 2007). 164 PHOENIX of DRN, including Patin’s infamous anti-Lucrèce chez Lucrèce,1 as evidence for the phenomenological effects created by the text of the poem. My reading of Goldschmidt’s reading of Lucretius’ readers detected perhaps too much emphasis on the doom-andgloom version of Lucretius presented by Jerome and the Romantics (Tennyson, Arnold, Jebb). Goldschmidt takes as given a depressive negativity in the poem’s implied author that does not ring true to my ears, as for instance her claim that at DRN 1.136–145 (on the egestas linguae), “the language of the poem is made to encode the struggle within the poet’s psyche” (52). All readings are true, of course, at

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