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During the Enlightenment period, the French Jesuits were busy planting ornamental natural philosophy in the Virgilian soil; however, their counterparts in Rome were tilling rougher grounds and sowing Lucretius's seeds far below the surface. While, in general, French Jesuits are commended for leading Italy intellectually and culturally in the Enlightenment period, it was the Italian Jesuits who produced the most rigorous scientific didactic poems. Indeed, the best-known ‘Lucretian’ poem of the period was written by the Frenchman Cardinal Melchoir de Polignac; however, he was surpassed by the seventeenth-century Italian Jesuit Tommaso Ceva with his Philosophia novo-antiqua, and moreover was debunked by Benedict Stay, a young prodigy who wrote his magnum opus, the Philosophiae recentoris libri x [= Pr]. This chapter discusses the development of scientific poetry in the age of the Enlightenment in Rome. Its focus is on the analysis of some of the exemplary works of Roman poets. The chapter also provides an overview of the contemporary Italian criticism on didactic poetry, particularly those related to scientific subjects.

This chapter talks about the fragility of the physical bookroll from a Roman poet's point of view. It focuses on the ways in which the poets, even while recognizing material texts as the vehicle for gaining a wide and lasting audience, repeatedly expressed anxieties over the corruptibility and impermanence of the physical text. The image of the bookroll is linked with the ceremonial presentation copy that associates with anxieties over public reception and isolation of the work from the poet's control.

This chapter begins by arguing for the centrality of performative language to understanding De rerum natura. Among other things, this discussion connects performativity to Lucretius’ acts of linguistic creation and moments where he is figured as poeta creator. The chapter then focuses upon a specific performative act, the promise, examining portions of Lucretius text that trade heavily in the language of promising. Drawing largely upon Roman lexicographical sources, the chapter ultimately contends that, at least in certain structural ways, we should view Lucretius as a fetial priest, that is, as a maker of treaties and agreements, in particular those treaties, the so-called foedera naturae, that structure the natural world.

This chapter looks further at the translation of work by Greek and Roman women poets, here examining more complete poems by poets such as Anyte, Nossis, Sulpicia, Sulpicia the Satirist, and Julia Balbilla. Versions discussed include those by Josephine Balmer in Classical Women Poets, alongside versions by H.D., and Simon Armitage.

This chapter focuses on poems that represent storyworld communication as written rather than spoken and thus raise a different set of questions about how this storyworld communication relates to the poetic discourse. A written collection of poetry was by no means radical and new in the days of Catullus, Propertius, and Horace. Yet it still was a phenomenon that starkly distanced these poets from some of the most important models in the literary tradition. In an ironic twist, the representation of their poetry as a written form of communication brings the Roman poets back closer to the situation of the archaic Greek lyrists, since in both cases the form in which the poem reaches its extended audience is echoed in the storyworld. The chapter then studies Catullus's epistolary poems and the poems of Horace's first book of Epistles. Each poet shines a spotlight on how the written form can be perceived as mediating between communicative partners.

This chapter examines further the importance of scholarship and research in classical poetry translation, with particular reference to the translation of fragmented works by Greek and Roman women poets. Through discussions of poets such as Corinna, Telesilla, Praxilla, Hedyle, and Erinna, and translations from Josephine Balmer’s Classical Women Poets (1996), as well as versions by Diane Rayor and Michael Longley, it explores the creative leaps that working on such incomplete, tattered sources might require.