Afterlives of the garden : receptions of Epicurean thought in the early empire and late antiquity

Open Access The collection of essays in this volume offers fresh insights into varied modalities of reception of Epicurean thought among Roman authors of the late Republican and Imperial eras. Its generic purview encompasses prose as well as poetic texts by both minor and major writers in the Latin literary canon, including the anonymous poems, __Ciris__ and __Aetna__, and an elegy from the Tibullan corpus by the female poet, Sulpicia. Major figures include the Augustan poets, Vergil and Horace, and the late antique Christian theologian, Augustine. The method of analysis employed in the essays is uniformly interdisciplinary and reveals the depth of the engagement of each ancient author with major preoccupations of Epicurean thought, such as the balanced pursuit of erotic pleasure in the context of human flourishing and the role of the gods in relation to human existence. The ensemble of nuanced interpretations testifies to the immense vitality of the Epicurean philosophical tradition throughout Greco-Roman antiquity and thereby provides a welcome and substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of reception studies. Contents List of Contributors Abbreviations Introduction: Afterlives of the Garden, Modalities of Reception of Epicurean Thought in Proto-Imperial and Imperial Rome Chapter 1 Amator miser: Epicurean Aspects of the Portrayal of Infelicitous Amor in Horatian Lyric Chapter 2 Evidence and Anger: Epicurean Cognition in the Finale of the Aeneid Chapter 3 A Woman’s Pleasure: Sulpicia and the Epicurean Discourse on Love Chapter 4 The Epicurean Project of the Ciris Chapter 5 Volcanos and Roman Epicureanism: Traces of Epicurean Theory in the Poet of the Aetna Chapter 6 Epicurus in the Roman Imperial Age: Four Case-Studies (Aristocles of Messene, Atticus, Dionysius of Alexandria and Plotinus) Chapter 7 Augustine and Epicureanism Bibliography Index Locorum