Lucretius Links
In the list below, many links are no longer functional. Items that I have checked recently have <cq> next to them (a copy-editor’s abbreviation used in journalism, which means “cadit quaestio” or “the inquiry (question of whether this is right) falls/collapses (i.e. has been taken care of) so there is no need to check it”)
Texts in Latin or English of Lucretius and related authors
Perseus site: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Annotated Latin text, with links to dictionary entries for each word <cq>
Lucretius: Text in Latin at the Latin Library (Full Latin text of DRN) <cq>
DRN in Latin (German website with a summary of DRN in Latin, plus Latin text of the poem) <cq>
DRN text in Latin (French site with text in one big file) <cq>
The Internet Classics Archive | On the Nature of Things by Lucretius (Contains a [downloadable] translation by W. E. Leonard of the whole DRN) <cq>
Sites on Lucretius:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Lucretius https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lucretius/ <cq>
- 1. Life
- 2. The poem’s structure
- 3. Epicurean background
- 4. Physics
- 5. Ethics
- 6. Religion
- 7. Influence
- Bibliography
On the ninth-century codex oblongus (the rectangular manuscript) of Lucretius, with one photo www.mmdc.nl/static/site/highlights/352/Scribe_and_corrector.html <cq>
A close-up of the codex oblongus showing corrections by an Irish scribe and monk called Dungal is one of the photos here: https://medievalfragments.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/classical-manuscripts-in-the-leiden-university-collections/ <cq>
Lucretius: http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub399/entry-6328.html <cq>
On tendencies in Lucretius’ hexameter: https://hexameter.co/authors/lucretius <cq>
Lucretius podcasts: over 50 episodes: https://newepicurean.com/category/lucretius-today-podcast/ <cq>
Great cartoon about the dance of atoms in 2.113-40: https://thefreeon.net/?p=213 <cq>
Blog on L and movement:
https://philosophyofmovementblog.com/2019/04/07/returning-to-lucretius/ <cq>
Lucretius tweets (only in 2014): https://twitter.com/lucretiusquotes <cq>
British Museum illustrations of Lucretius: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG36403 <cq>
Great blogpost on illustrations in editions of Lucretius:
https://kbender.blogspot.com/2011/10/of-nature-of-things-illustrated.html <cq>
Bibliographies online:
Links to five bibliographies: http://ancientbibliographies.libs.uga.edu/wiki/Lucretius_Bibliographies <cq>
Annotated Bibliography:
Gordon Lindsay Campbell, “Lucretius,” Oxford Bibliographies Online. Available through Davis library catalogue: https://www-oxfordbibliographies-com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/view/document/obo-9780195389661/obo-9780195389661-0034.xml <cq>
Annotated Bibliography:
Duncan F. Kennedy, “Lucretius,” Oxford (Philosophy) Bibliographies Online. Available through Davis library catalogue; https://www-oxfordbibliographies-com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/view/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0291.xml <cq>
Epicurus (341 BCE – 270 BCE)
· Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Epicurus https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/ <cq>
1. Sources
· 2. Life
o Editions, translations, commentaries
Philodemus (first century BCE Epicurean, new fragments from Herculaneum near Pompeii)
Philodemus Project Home Page (Really neat UCLA page on the Philodemus Project and the Herculaneum papyri. Contains a description of the project, pictures of the papyri, etc.) <cq>
Philodemus: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philodemus/ <cq>
The Herculaneum Society Supporting World Heritage at Herculaneum www.herculaneum.ox.ac.uk/?q=books <cq>
Oxford Bibliographies Herculaneum Papyri W. Benjamin Henry <cq>
Some Tools for Classics or for Latin Poetry
Perseus Digital Library of classical and other texts, images and reference works www.perseus.tufts.edu <cq>
https://logeion.uchicago.edu/ tool providing simultaneous lookup of entries in the many reference works that make up the Perseus Classical collection <cq>
Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples <cq>
Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges at Perseus <cq>
Diotíma (v. 3.0), a resource for information on women, gender, sex, sexualities, race, ethnicity, class, status, masculinity, enslavement, disability, and the intersections among them in the ancient Mediterranean world.<cq>
Kentucky “Sites on the Web Potentially Useful for Students of Classics” https://mcl.as.uky.edu/sites-web <cq>
TOCSIN: Search in Tables of Contents of Journals of Interest to Classicists projects.chass.utoronto.ca/amphoras/tocs.html
Great search tool for recent articles in Classics <cq>
Some simple help from JOH on the hexameter: basic rules (actually this is a Vergil handout), and practical rules for scansion <cq>
Bibliography on metrics
Courses, Study Aids, or Bibliography on Lucretius and/or Epicureanism
Study Guide on Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things (Part I: Books 1–3) https://artsofliberty.udallas.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FINAL-Lucretius-study-guide-8.13.13_0.pdf <cq>
Blogppost LEARNING FROM LUCRETIUS IN THE SHADOW OF CORONAVIRUS andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2020/02/learning-from-lucretius-in-shadow-of.html <cq>
LUCRETIUS: SOME QUESTIONS ON EPICUREANISM www.csun.edu/%7Ehcfll004/lucrques.html <cq>
Links for aids to the study of Epicureanism (http://www.csun.edu/%7Ehcfll004/epicurhelp.html) <cq>
Outline of Lucretius (Outline of the whole DRN by Prof. John Paul Adams) <cq>
Outline of a lecture on Lucretius amd philosophy by Bruce MacLennan of UT-Knoxville <cq>
Titus Lucretius Carus: On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura)
Summary by Michael McGoodwin, prepared 1997 https://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/otherbooks/tlc_rerumnatura.html <cq>
Encyclopedia-type articles ((not checked lately))
Lucretius [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] (Contains info on the life, work, and philosophy of L., with a short bibliography)
Lucretius [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] (Fairly detailed description and discussion of Lucretius’ life and philosophy)
Lucretius on Encyclopedia.com 2002 (A very basic online encyclopedia article on Lucretius)
Lucretius Carus (Lukrez) (A very brief biography of the poet in German.)
Titus Lucretius Carus (A paragraph on Lucretius from the Woodberry Forest School; very basic)
Lucretius (Description from Middlebury of Lucretius and his philosophy)
Lucretius (Short discussion of Lucretius in Hungarian)
Reception of Lucretius by later authors, thinkers ((most not checked lately))
“The Answer Man: An ancient poem was rediscovered—and the world swerved.” By Stephen Greenblatt August 1, 2011 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/08/the-answer-man-stephen-greenblatt
Realted to this 2011 book The Swerve
2013: “ 25-minute orchestral piece about nature and science, at least as understood by the first-century B.C. Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. It borrows its title from Lucretius’ long poem, and its six movements, played without pause, echo the six “books” of the philosophical poem.”
https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/architecture/2013/11/07/new-robert-xavier-rodriguez-composition-to-help-inaugurate-utd-building/ <cq>
See also http://www.robertxavierrodriguez.com/works/sheets/de-rerum-natura.html
Poetry Magazine, John Sokol, Holiday 2001 (A poem inspired by a line of Lucretius)
Freud’s *The Interpretation of Dreams* Chapter One (Freud quotes and discusses DRN IV. 962 on the relation of the dream to the waking state)
Letter to William Short (1819 letter of Thomas Jefferson in which he claims to be Epicurean)
Lucretius (A link to Tennyson’s poem about Lucretius, plus everything you could ever want to know about the Chandler family and their Toyota MR2s)
BROOKE ON TENNYSON’S LUCRETIUS (Two paragraphs celebrating Tennyson’s interpretation of Lucretius; goes with link to the poem above.)
Chapter Five: Other Times, Other Cultures, Other Selves (A website for the study of Victorianism. Brief mention of Tennyson’s reaction to Lucretius)
Chapter Seven: The Late Phase (From the same website above; a chapter from James Kincaid’s book on Tennyson–brief discussion of Tennyson’s reception of Lucretius)
ChemTeam: De Rerum Natura (17th century English essay on DRN 1 in verse!)
Anti-Lucretius (Prof. Glei) (Pictures of and information about Cardinal Melchior de Polignac and his Anti-Lucretius poem, in German)
ANTI-LUCRéCE – Dictionnaire philosophique (Info. in French and citations from Cardinal de Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius)
Michel Serres (Description of the French philosopher/writer/physicist Serres, with a brief description of how he thinks that Lucretius anticipated modern physics)
N2K: Lightness/Leggerezza (an experimental web site centered on the emerging narrative and cognitive form of the “encyclopedic hyper-novel,” as developed by Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco in their essays and novels. Some Lucretius)
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) The Dunciad: Book IV (Online text of The Dunciad with notes, in which Pope mentions Lucretius)
Other Neat Stuff
The Atomic Swerve band (MP3 songs) (Link to Classics majors’ band at Reed College. Songs (playable!) include “Greek Top 40” and “Lefty Scaevola” (possibly the best song ever written about Gaius Mucius Scaevola)
New historicist Stephen Greenblatt interview, with a few words (2/3 of the way down) on the “huge resurgence of studies in Epicureanism and in Lucretius”
Lyrics to John Lennon, “Imagine” (“Imagine there’s no heaven”) <cq>
Lyrics to Madonna, “Material Girl” <cq>
Lyrics to Julie Andrews, “A Spoonful of Sugar” (“… makes the medicine go down…”) and song on YouTube <cq>
Lyrics to Julie Andrews, “Something Good” (“Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could”) and song on Youtube <cq>
Lyrics to Nick Cave, Into My Arms (“I don’t believe in an interventionist God”) <cq>
Lyrics to The Doors, “Break On Through (To The Other Side)” <cq?
Lyrics to Bruce Springsteen Atlantic City and video on Youtube (“Well, now, everything dies, baby, that’s a fact / But maybe everything that dies someday comes back”) <cq>
Words to William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.”) <cq>
Easier to read text.
The Arms of the Company (A link to a British association for engineers, whose motto is certare ingenio) <cq>
Biographies of Textual Critics (Biography of Lachmann, who created the stemma for Lucretius; very interesting also for description of textual criticism) <cq>
Friedrich Nietzsche (Information on Nietzsche, who was a student of Lachmann, the famous editor of Lucretius) <cq>
Lots of info about textual criticism <cq>
No. 334: Lucretius (Link from the Engineering Dept. at U. of Houston with an analysis of DRN and its relation to physics. Kind of simple; cf. esp: “Writing in Latin was an uphill battle. It was a simple, direct language — not good for handling complex ideas. But he made it work. He reshaped Latin and created beauty on the way.” Apparently this is a nationally syndicated radio program!)<cq>
Stuff we haven’t categorized yet, weird stuff, stuff that doesn’t work
Lucretius is a molecular dynamics simulation program (Enough said)
Lucretius (one sentence on Lucretius etc.)
Pythagoras of Samos – A Resource Document (site with information about Pythagoreanism; a little strange)
Lucretius quotation (Brief quotation in English from the DRN.)
Lucretius (Contains Lucretius’ dates, a quotation from Mark Van Doren, and a brief quotation from DRN in translation)
Li-Lu: Positive Atheism’s Big List of Quotations (Some quotes from Lucretius and other prominent “L’s”)
Barry Sanders? (odd, and insulting, comparison of running back Barry Sanders to “some Lucretian god”)