Empedocles in the Aetna?
Empedocles in the Aetna?

Summary/Abstract: The author discusses one unnoticed echo of Empedocles in the pseudo-Vergilian poem Aetna. The allusion opens a long periodic sentence (224–250), the end of which describes the pleasure of understanding natural phenomena through vocabulary borrowed from Lucretius’ De rerum natura. The allusion to Lucretius is certainly deliberate, and so is probably the allusion to Empedocles. The connection between understanding, divinity, and pleasure in Lucretian and Empedoclean intertexts enhances the meaning of the Aetna passage and puts it in a proper perspective. In addition to this, Vergil’s Georgics 2.475–502 confirms that, in a poem on natural phenomena, both Empedocles and Lucretius are likely to be associated with this particular nexus of ideas.

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