SOURCE: Minyard, John D. “Lucretius and the Late Republic.” In Lucretius and the Late Republic, pp. 1-70. Amsterdam: E. J. Brill, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Minyard analyzes the De rerum natura and discusses the tactics Lucretius employed in the work to demonstrate to readers the failure of old world views and the superiority of Epicureanism.

1. Roman Intellectual History

The history of human values is the history of changing notions about truth and reality, however analytically inarticulate those notions may have been. So, the history of values at Rome is a function of the changes in Roman ideas about reality and truth, is, in fact, the core of Roman intellectual history. It is within the framework of this intellectual history, specifically in the context of the struggle over values based upon competing accounts of truth and reality which constitutes the intellectual crisis of the Late Roman Republic, that the...