Amorous Embrace (2023)

Amorous Embrace (2023)
Suzanne Moore and Titus Lucretius Carus (trans. A.E. Stallings)
Artist’s manuscript, stub bound to stone cover, tinted thread, gold leaf, kozo, paste paper. H220 x W148 mm. 12 pages. Unique.
Acquired from the artist, 5 February 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Sometime in the first century BCE, the Roman poet Lucretius wrote the didactic epic De rerum natura (The Nature of Things). It celebrates the atomistic physics and philosophy that Epicurus and his followers recorded two hundred plus years before in thirty-seven volumes. Imagine the determination to press that Greek vision of the world from atoms to the cosmos into six volumes of Latin poetry. We’ll have to await further papyrology applied to the cinders of the Herculaneum library of scrolls and hope that it reveals more scraps of the Greek’s Περὶ φύσεως (On Nature). Only then will we know whether Lucretius based his poem directly on them.

In the meantime, wonder also that somehow …

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