Author: Salvatore Di Domenico

In "De Rerum Natura", written during the republican era and rediscovered only in the fifteenth century, Lucretius stages the description of the Athens plague of 430 BC: the picture is deliberately bleak and bears the mythical features of the space-time indefiniteness that characterizes the crepuscular epochs. Once the subjects and the space-time horizons have definitively fallen, what remains is a gloomy picture of death with spectacular and macabre shapes, which the author nevertheless uses to convey an ethical criticism, making use of a solemnly rich lexicon of archaisms, capable of to probe unexplored places of the human soul and of the word itself.