In this interview David Sedley reflects on some important points of hisseminal interpretation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura six centuries after its discovery in1417 by Poggio Bracciolini (Terranuova, now Terranuova Bracciolini, 1380 – Florence,1459)

VERDE, FRANCESCO

Lexicon Philosophicum: International Journal for the History of Texts and Ideas

INTERVIEWS - LPh 5, 2017 
ISSN 2283-7833 
http://lexicon.cnr.it/ 
 
LUCRETIUS AND HIS DE RERUM NATURA 
SIX CENTURIES AFTER 
A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID SEDLEY 
by 
FRANCESCO VERDE 
ABSTRACT: In this interview David Sedley reflects on some important points of his 
seminal interpretation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura six centuries after its discovery in 
1417 by Poggio Bracciolini (Terranuova, now Terranuova Bracciolini, 1380 – Florence, 
1459). 
KEYWORDS: Lucretius’ De rerum natura; Epicurus; Empedocles; Herculanum Papyri; 
Ancient Philosophy, Hellenistic Philosophy  
***** 
QUESTION: What is distinctive about this text among other famous works of ancient 
philosophers which by good luck have been preserved? 
ANSWER: What is most remarkable about the De rerum natura is that to all 
appearances it was written, and achieved fame, as a contribution to the 
Roman literary canon, and was not treated as a specifically philosophical 
text and source until a much later date; yet for us it is by far the fullest and 
most informative available source on Epicurean physics, and among our 
best sources on Epicurean ethics as well. 
QUESTION: Please could you summarize the outcome of your research on the close 
relationship between Lucretius’ poem, Empedocles, and the Herculaneum Papyri, which 
you studied in your seminal book Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom 
published in Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) in 1998? By the way, what exactly 
does the title of this volume mean?  
Lucretius and his De rerum natura Six Centuries after 
 
 190 
ANSWER: In my book I argue for the following closely connected claims.  
(a) Lucretius makes a firm distinction between his literary and his 
philosophical debts, and, correspondingly, between his poem’s form and its 
content. The content is, as he concedes, the difficult and demanding 
subject of the world’s true nature, which he compares to bitter medicine 
that will nevertheless, if we persist with it, ultimately transform our lives 
for the better. The form, which he compares to the honey on the rim of a 
cup that enables children to take their medicine, is the seductive poetic 
medium.  
(b) This latter, formal aspect is unmistakably derived from the Greek 
master of his genre, the 5th century poet of nature Empedocles.  
(c) For the content, analogously, Lucretius draws directly on his 
philosophical master, Epicurus himself, and not on lesser, intermediate 
sources. Specifically, his material on Epicurean physics comes from 
Epicurus’ major treatise On Nature, and mainly from the first fifteen of 
that work’s thirty-seven books. The Herculaneum library has provided us 
not only with evidence for the availability of this treatise in first-century 
BCE Italy, where Lucretius worked, but also with valuable information 
regarding the specific content of many of its individual books. Hence my 
hypothesis about Lucretius’ source can be tested, and is systematically 
tested in my book, by reference to a substantial body of data.  
(d) As that same hypothesis predicts, Lucretius’ arguments and polemics 
constantly reflect the philosophical context in which Epicurus was writing, 
and do not show signs of any updating in the light of developments that 
occurred in the two centuries separating Lucretius from Epicurus, 
including the various debates that had taken place between Epicureans and 
Stoics. On this ground I call Lucretius an Epicurean ‘fundamentalist’: like 
other fundamentalists, he is content to rely on his school’s foundational 
scriptures, and does not expect that consultation of any writings postdating 
them would add anything significant.  
(e) Nevertheless, because Epicureanism promises salvation from suffering 
to all mankind, and not just to Greeks, Lucretius recognizes the need to 
make Epicurus’ philosophy fully at home in his native Latin culture. In aid 
of that ambition, he develops a native Roman mode of exposition, 
exploiting the resources of the Latin language to the full in order to save 
Epicureanism from the appearance of an alien import.  
(f) It is primarily to this cultural transformation that my book’s title refers. 
But it also, if secondarily, refers to Lucretius’ philosophical transformation 
Lucretius and his De rerum natura Six Centuries after 
 191 
of his great Greek poetic forerunner and model, in adapting Empedocles’ 
didactic genre so as to voice the one true philosophy, Epicureanism. 
QUESTION: Despite some studies which consider Lucretius as ‘son of his time’, in dialogue 
with other philosophical schools and informed about the doctrinal developments of the 
Epicurean school (e.g. J. Schmidt, Lukrez, der Kepos und Die Stoiker: Untersuchungen zur 
Schule Epikurs und zu den Quellen von De rerum natura, Frankfurt/M.-Bern-New York-
Paris, Peter Lang, 1990; and the more recent volumes by F. Montarese, Lucretius and his 
Sources: A Study of Lucretius, De rerum natura I 635-920, Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, 
2012, and F. A. Bakker, Epicurean Meteorology: Sources, Method, Scope and Organization, 
Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2016), do you continue to consider Lucretius an ‘Epicurean 
fundamentalist’ (as you argue in your book, Ch. 3), and, therefore, to believe that the 
sources of the poem are exclusively attributable to the works of Epicurus (primarily, his 
On Nature)? 
ANSWER: Yes, I do. Some of the work you mention has provided a valuable 
counterweight to my case, but not of sufficient quantity or cogency to 
make me reconsider my original contention. I had already remarked in my 
book (p. 91) that even if one or two instances were to be identified in 
which Lucretius did appear to have taken into account some philosophical 
development that postdated Epicurus, it would not alter the overall case, 
based as this is on the poem’s overwhelming concentration on the issues 
and debates that belong to Epicurus’ own time, in stark contrast to the 
updated presentations of Epicureanism that we meet in Lucretius’ 
contemporaries Cicero and Philodemus. Bakker has made the most skilful 
case so far for the presence of at any rate one anti-Stoic polemic (at DRN 
1.1052-93), but concedes that, even if well founded, it need not be enough 
to damage my overall contention. 
QUESTION: Do you believe the hypothesis (recently once again questioned by M. Capasso, 
“Il preteso Lucrezio ercolanese”, Atene e Roma, n.s. 8/3-4, 2014, p. 145-171) of the 
Norwegian classical scholar Knut Kleve (starting from his pioneering article “Lucretius in 
Herculaneum”, Cronache Ercolanesi, 19, 1989, p. 5-27) that a copy of the De rerum natura 
was preserved in the so-called ‘Villa dei Papiri’? What are the consequences of the presence 
or absence of this text in the Epicurean circle of Philodemus of Gadara? More in general, 
what is the relationship between the De rerum natura and the works of Philodemus 
preserved by the Herculaneum Papyri? 
ANSWER: I have great admiration for Kleve, but I was never convinced by his 
claims to have found Lucretian fragments among the Herculaneum papyri. 
Small and damaged fragments apparently attributable to two great Latin 
poets, Ennius and Lucretius, were identified only because Kleve was 
Lucretius and his De rerum natura Six Centuries after 
 
 192 
actively looking for them. This is a high-risk methodology, and 
unsurprisingly the attributions have, one by one, had to be modified or 
altogether withdrawn. The negative case has been well and succinctly made 
by David Butterfield, The Early Textual History of Lucretius’ De rerum 
natura (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 5-6.  
Even if fragments of De rerum natura were one day to turn up among the 
remains of Philodemus’ book collection, that would not significantly 
strengthen the case for direct contact between Lucretius and the circle of 
Philodemus. The owner of this Epicurean library could, like anyone else, 
readily buy books on the open market.  
There are, however, reasons why I do not expect such a discovery ever to 
occur. Philodemus, if his surviving works are at all representative, worked 
extensively on ethics, aesthetics and philosophical history, but had very 
little interest in physics. Nor was he likely to read philosophical works in 
Latin, any more than other Greek philosophers in the ancient world did. 
There was therefore very little apparent motivation for him ever to acquire 
a copy of the De rerum natura. 
QUESTION: What role does a revolutionary text such as the De rerum natura play in 
contemporary scientific and philosophical debates? 
ANSWER: The rediscovery of Lucretius’ poem in the Renaissance helped in 
due course to inspire early modern atomism, and we must always be 
grateful for that. Although Lucretius is no longer a direct contributor to 
any scientific debate, he would be able to boast that, among all the 
philosophical systems of antiquity, his was the only one whose 
fundamental contentions about man’s place in the universe have been 
strengthened, rather than overturned, by modern science. 
FRANCESCO VERDE 
Sapienza Università di Roma / Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg 
francesco.verde@uniroma1.it 


LUCRETIUS AND HIS DE RERUM NATURA SIX CENTURIES AFTER A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID SEDLEY

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LUCRETIUS AND HIS DE RERUM NATURA SIX CENTURIES AFTER A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID SEDLEY

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Lexicon Philosophicum: International Journal for the History of Texts and Ideas