This is a superb edition of Lucretius De Rerum Natura 2.1-332 and of great value to all Lucretius scholars.Īs the title of the edition indicates, Fowler’s commentary covers the section of the De Rerum Natura in which Lucretius discusses the motions of atoms and explains Epicurus’ three types of atomic motion: downward motion caused by the weight of the atoms, motion in all directions caused by collisions of atoms, and the “swerve” ( clinamen) of atoms, a random motion of the atoms in a minimum of space. 1 In the present work Fowler demonstrates his impressive, wide-ranging skills as a philologist, literary critic, and interpreter of ancient philosophy. Fowler was perhaps best known for his “postmodern” readings of Latin literature, many of which were collected in his Roman Constructions published in 2000. the afterlife).Don Fowler’s death in 1999 at the age of 46 was a great loss to the study of ancient poetry and philosophy, as we are reminded by this posthumous publication of a revised version of his 1984 Oxford doctoral thesis on Lucretius. That helped Machiavelli then think about how to make his own ethics, which is completely different, but operates in the same way, as a closed-lid system, that doesn’t worry about how any outside divinity might judge things, or about the possibility of leaving the terrarium (i.e.

When Machiavelli read Lucretius, and we know from his annotations that he read the atomist sections with extraordinary–in fact unique–interest, I think he saw Epicurean ethics and was excited by it as an example of how you could create an ethics that operates by itself, inside the terrarium.

Now, Machiavelli’s new utilitarian ethics is nothing like Lucretius’s ethics, but Lucretius offered Machiavelli a way of thinking in which there are beings outside the terrarium, but the beings never look at it or open the lid, so we don’t need to worry about them. In a sense you can call utilitarianism a kind of “closed system” ethics– if we had a bunch of organisms that lived in a terrarium, Machiavelli’s utilitarianism would involve the organisms deciding what to do based on the needs of the community inside the terrarium, without worrying about the enormous beings outside that sometimes reach in and interfere, or worrying about what might happen if one of the organisms ever left the terrarium (i.e.

Lucretius de rerum natura english