How The Aeneid drew on On the Nature of Things
A documented line of influence: Virgil demonstrably engaged Lucretius’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
On the Nature of Things
Lucretius · c. 55 BCE
Ancient RomeThe influenced
The Aeneid
Virgil · 19 BCE
Ancient RomeRelevance
8/10
On The Aeneid’s page
- The hexameters behind the Aeneid are Lucretius' — Virgil imitated whole lines and passages of On the Nature of Things, and his vocabulary of the soul rests on Lucretian precedent
- Read it first and you'll hear the debt and the quarrel at once: the Aeneid's storm reworks Lucretius' atomistic weather, but Virgil restores the gods and the afterlife the Epicurean poem set out to abolish
- The richest way to read Aeneas's descent is against the poem that denied any underworld existed
On On the Nature of Things’s page
- Virgil wrote his epic in pointedly Lucretian hexameter — borrowing not just single words but whole lines and passages of On the Nature of Things
- The Aeneid's great storm re-mythologizes Lucretius' atomistic meteorology; even Virgilian emotion-language is built on Lucretian precedent
- The deepest debt is also an argument: Virgil takes Lucretius' verse texture and underworld matter, then inverts the Epicurean denial of gods and afterlife it was written to prove