Cicero and Lucretius on Deifying the Great Man

Author: Hardie, Philip
Title: Cicero and Lucretius on Deifying the Great Man
Review/Collection: in : George Kazantzidis, Lucretian Receptions in Prose, de Gruyter, 2024 220 pages
Place edition: Berlin Boston
Editor: De Gruyter
Year edition: 2024
Pages: 7-22
Keywords: Philosophie - Filosofia - Philosophy
Description: This paper surveys and supplements the evidence that Cicero’s De re publica responds to Lucretius’ De rerum natura in the mode of an ‘anti-Lucrèce’ (rather than Lucretius responding to Cicero). Cicero’s response is in dialogue with Lucretius’ own polemical appropriation of political imagery and slogans. The second part of the paper anchors Lucretius’ “deification” of his philosophical “god” Epicurus within the history of the idea of deification in mid-first-century BC Rome, and argues that Cicero’s sustained engagement in the De re publica with the idea that the Roman ruler or statesman may attain divinity is, in turn, partly a response to Lucretius. [Author]
Works:
Author initials: Hardie 2024