Rome Remembers: The Memory and Ethics in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211120.096How to use a DOI?

Keywords

De Rerum Natura; Lucretius; Roman history; Memory

Abstract

The history and public memory of Roman history have been extensively studied from various kinds of materials, except the poetry in the late Republic. Being a significant figure of Roman literature, Lucretius and his work De Rerum Natura (DRN) has been extensively studied for its philosophical and political meanings in the Republic, while the ethics and the impressions of history in the poem still left for further investigation. Through the conduct of semantic analysis and reception theory, the paper investigates into the ethical part of Roman memory, to see what moral standard and pattern did the Roman people, especially the elites possess, and how they interact mutually in the literature. The self-understanding of Roman elites would be explored to gradually answer the question that to what extent do the records of aristocrats fit the definition of Roman history as “the deeds of the Roman people”. This paper aims to prove that poetry could serve as means to investigate memory of Rome, and shed light on the studies of ethics in Roman literature. Further, my research could reveal more information of Lucretius, with different approached applied to investigate his work DRN.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jingying Mo
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/11/29
TI  - Rome Remembers: The Memory and Ethics in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 3rd International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 509
EP  - 519
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211120.096
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211120.096
ID  - Mo2021
ER  -