An article by Associate Professor of Classics Jesse Weiner was recently published in Lucretian Receptions in Prose, a peer reviewed volume from De Gruyter, edited by George Kazantzidis.
In his essay, “Lucretius, Pliny the Younger, and the Volcano,” Weiner argues that Lucretius served as an important intertextual model for the Younger Pliny’s Vesuvius letters (Ep. 6.16 and 6.20; our first hand evidence for the experience of the eruption of Vesuvius of 79 CE) and their descriptions of volcanic activity.
Weiner suggests, based on structure, that we might see a further allusion to Lucretius opening Ep. 6.21, and argues that Lucretius served as a literary, philosophic, aesthetic, and emotional model for Pliny to write about the Vesuvius eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum.
