Lucretius
Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17First version:
I read about half of De Rerum Natura when I was younger and my Latin was better; when I am older and my Latin is better I should like to translate the whole thing. The Leonard translation is on-line, but I don't like it very much. The translation by Anthony Esolen, not on-line, is the best I've run across. (When I am much older, I should like to translate it into literary Chinese, and Chuang Tzu into Latin, to confound the philologists of the future.)
- Recommended (utterly inadequate):
- Ada Palmer, "Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance", Journal of the History of Ideas 73 (2012): 395--416
- A. E. Stallings, The Nature of Things [New translation by a very good contemporary poet]
- Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity
- Not entirely recommended:
- Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
- To read:
- Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence
- David Butterfield, The Early Textual History of Lucretius' De rerum natura
- Gordon Campbell, Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Commentary on De Rerum Nature Book Five, Lines 772--1104 [Review in BMCR, 2004.06.26]
- George Hadzsitis, Lucretius and His Influence
- Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance [Expansion of her JHI article. Interview with Palmer about this; Review in BMCR]
- Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition
- David N. Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom
