Josh’s Blog Post: Political Discourse

Back at the beginning of this session we read and discussed Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. One of the questions relating to the poem was: Why does Lucretius contradict himself between Book I and Book V? In Book I, Lucretius gives praise to Venus (Aphrodite) and pays tribute to a Roman orator named Memmius. Then, in Book V, Lucretius discusses why he believes all the gods and goddesses to be a farce. In the footnotes, the translator suggest Memmius was a “patron” of Lucretius but I think that On the Nature of Things was actually a political discourse between the two.

In line 24, Lucretius asks Venus to help write this poem for his “friend,” Memmius, and says:

I ask you to befriend me as I try to pen these verses On the Nature of Things for my friend Memmius whom you, goddess, have ever caused to excel, accomplished in all things.

This sounds as though Lucretius is complimenting Memmius at first but I feel as though this was with some tongue-in-cheek because later, in Book V, Lucretius basically calls him a fool. From line 1 to 18 of Book V, Lucretius is suggesting that mankind is incapable of communicating to, let alone persuading, the immortal creators and therefore they would not care if people questioned their religion. From there to line 25, Lucretius writes:

Memmius, to invent such errors and paste them one to the next is stupid.

Without knowing anything of Memmius as a historical figure, or any of his speeches, I have derived that he was probably a popular preacher of the gods and goddesses in his time after reading On the Nature of Things. In my mind, if Memmius had read something similar to Hesiod’s Theogony to the Roman Republic, Lucretius would have written On the Nature of Things as a counterargument. Is political discourse and sarcasm not the same today as it was over 2000 years ago?