TO BE RESCHEDULED, F'26:

Patrick Owens, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of the Classics.

Melchior Cardinal Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius is one of the strangest and most ambitious philosophical poems of the early eighteenth century: a full-scale refutation of the Epicurean worldview written in a genre made canonical by the very poet he seeks to overthrow.

This lecture explores how a humanist prince of the Church, writing in the age of Newton, appropriates the literary form, rhetorical strategies, and even the scientific prestige of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) in order to refute Epicureanism. The talk situates the Anti-Lucretius within Classical reception and at the fault line between the tradition of Renaissance classicism and Enlightenment thought, arguing that it represents not a nostalgic anachronism but a sophisticated bid to reclaim a literary genre and the authority of reason, poetry, and theology against the growing prestige of materialism.

Refreshments will be provided.

All are welcome.