Ennian Historiography in Lucretius

This chapter meets the Annales on its own narrative terms, arguing that Lucretius responds to the Annales’ conceptualization of history and time in a comprehensively revisionist way. Lucretius alludes repeatedly to historical episodes and personalities from Ennius’ Annales that would appear to valorize Roman hegemony and exemplarity, only to remove whatever value they may have had in their Ennian context. This procedure is, of course, tendentious, because Lucretius both suggests what value these elements had in the Annales and then strips them of it. Lucretius implies that the Annales presents universal history as diachronic and teleological and that individual historical episodes like the wars with Pyrrhus of Epirus and the Carthaginians all build cumulatively to Rome’s imperium sine fine over the cosmos itself. The Epicurean explanations of natural history in the DRN regularly reject this implied Ennian perspective.