Lucretius and the Late Republic: An Essay in Roman Intellectual History

The crisis Rome experienced in the last decades of the Republic was intellectual as well as political, social and military. This crisis was marked by conflicts over values and a growing dichotomy between words and things, as a result of which the key words of the Roman tradition lost their anchor in the inherited, commonly—held percepetion of reality known as the mos maiorum. The crisis was therefore also one of the Latin language itself.
The monograph explores this thesis in discussions of...