Laughing Atoms Laughing Matter

"The aim of this study is to track De Rerum Natura along two paths of satire. One is the broad boulevard of satiric literature from the beginnings of Greek poetry to the plays, essays, and broadcast media of the modern world. The other is the narrower lane of Roman verse satire, satura, whose canon begins in the Middle Republic with Ennius and Lucilius and closes with Juvenal, an author of the Flavian era. The first main portion of this book (chapters 2-3) focuses on Lucretius and Roman satura, while the following chapters broaden the scope to satiric elements of Lucretius more generally, but still with plenty of reference to the poets of Roman satura as satirists par excellence. By examining how Lucretius' poem employs the tools, techniques, and tactics of satire-by evaluating how and where in De Rerum Natura the speaker functions as a satirist-we gain, I argue, a fuller, richer understanding of how the poem works and how its poetry interacts with its purported philosophical program. Attention to the role of De Rerum Natura in the more specific tradition of Roman verse satire demonstrates that Lucretius' poem stands as a detour on the genre's highway, a swerve in the trajectory of satura. The numerous satiric passages and frequently satiric narrator of De Rerum Natura draw on earlier Roman satire, and in turn the poem influences the later satiric verse of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. While De Rerum Natura is not in and of itself a member of the Roman genre of satire, it is an important player in the genre's development"--

With the help of theorists in such fields as psychology, anthropology, physiology, sociology, and folklore as well as literary criticism, Gutwirth perceives that writers across history have attempted to explain laughter in one of three ways - focusing on its social or political function, its emotional rationale, or its intellectual dimension. Offering an array of readings of comic texts and incidents, he constructs a general model of laughter which takes into account its causes, immediate effects, and long-range influence on human affairs. In conclusion, he looks at the unique nature of comic wisdom, particularly as reflected in works by Santayana, Cervantes, and Beckett.

This volume presents a wide range of contributions that analyse the cultural, sociological and communicative significance of tears and crying in Graeco-Roman antiquity. The papers cover the time from the eighth century BCE until late antiquity and take into account a broad variety of literary genres such as epic, tragedy, historiography, elegy, philosophical texts, epigram and the novel. The collection also contains two papers from modern socio-psychology.

The role of Greek thought in the final days of the Roman republic is a topic that has garnered much attention in recent years. This volume of essays, commissioned specially from a distinguished international group of scholars, explores the role and influence of Greek philosophy, specifically Epicureanism, in the late republic. It focuses primarily (although not exclusively) on the works and views of Cicero, premier politician and Roman philosopher of the day, and Lucretius, foremost among the representatives and supporters of Epicureanism at the time. Throughout the volume, the impact of such disparate reception on the part of these leading authors is explored in a way that illuminates the popularity as well as the controversy attached to the followers of Epicurus in Italy, ranging from ethical and political concerns to the understanding of scientific and celestial phenomena. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Disorienting Empire is the first book to examine Republican Latin poetry's recurring interest in characters who become lost. Basil Dufallo explains the prevalence of this theme with reference to the rapid expansion of Rome's empire in the Middle and Late Republic. It was both a threatening and an enticing prospect, Dufallo argues, to imagine the ever-widening spaces of Roman power as a place where one could become disoriented, both in terms of geographical wandering and in a more abstract sense connected with identity and identification, especially as it concerned gender and sexuality. Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, and Catullus, as well as the "triumviral" Horace of Satires, book 1, all reveal an interest in such experiences, particularly in relation to journeys into the Greek world from which these writers drew their source material. Fragmentary authors such as Naevius, Ennius, and Lucilius, as well as prose historians including Polybius and Livy, add depth and context to the discussion. Setting the Republican poets in dialogue with queer theory and postcolonial theory, Dufallo brings to light both anxieties latent in the theme and the exuberance it suggests over new creative possibilities opened up by reorienting oneself toward new horizons, new identifications-by discovering with pleasure that one could be other than one thought. Further, in showing that the Republican poets had been experimenting with such techniques for generations before the Augustan Age, Disorienting Empire offers its close readings as a means of interpreting afresh Aeneas' wandering journey in Vergil's Aeneid.

"Several decades of scholarship by now have demonstrated that Roman thinkers have developed in new and stimulating directions the systems of thought they inherited from the Greeks, and that, taken together, they offer a range of perspectives that are of philosophical interest in their own right. This collection of essays pursues a maximally inclusive approach, covering not only authors such as Augustine, but also poets or historians. It pays attention to the mode in which these works were written (giving rhetoric too its due) and their often conscious reflections on the process of translating, or transferring Greek ideas to Roman contexts"--