Articles by Erin McKenna Hanses
Afterlives of the Garden: Receptions of Epicurean Thought in the Early Empire and Late Antiquity, 2024
Lucretius’s diatribe against love in Book Four of the De rerum natura includes an idea rarely mad... more Lucretius’s diatribe against love in Book Four of the De rerum natura includes an idea rarely made explicit in male-authored Roman poetry: the Epicurean acknowledges that there is mutua voluptas between men and women, and that both partners can experience pleasure in matters of sex. While Lucretius does not condone any attendant erotic attachments to this “shared pleasure,” I argue here that the persona Sulpicia of Corpus Tibullianum 3.8-18 provides an emphatic endorsement and vivid illustration of this Lucretian image of mutua voluptas. Through a rich array of verbal parallels to Lucretius’ diatribe, Sulpicia presents herself as the kind of woman envisioned at De rerum natura 4.1192-1208, though she ultimately provides a rebuke of Lucretius’ warnings against love and a promotion of mutuality. Additional allusions to Philodemus’ epigrams in general, and to his relationship with Xanthippe in particular, demonstrate that Sulpicia is engaging philosophically with Epicureanism and developing her own, rival ideas on love—ideas which are themselves exceptional within the elegiac canon.
Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid as Philosopher, 2022
Within several of his works that take love as their subject, Ovid employs parrhesia or “frank cri... more Within several of his works that take love as their subject, Ovid employs parrhesia or “frank criticism,” a typically Epicurean instructional mode, to criticize Lucretian and Epicurean views on love. Throughout his Amores, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris, Ovid plays on the didactic relationships present in Lucretius’ philosophical poem as he shifts his own persona from that of student of love to teacher of love and finally to doctor of love. In doing so, Ovid offers a critique of Lucretius that presents an alternate view of love to that of the Epicureans. Whereas Lucretius advises a rejection of amor through embracing Epicurean philosophy, Ovid promises that love can be managed if one has the skills to do so. As he unveils his own experiences in the Amores and then offers instruction in the Ars and Remedia, Ovid speaks frankly not only to his audience of “students,” but also to his “teacher” Lucretius, regarding his own philosophy of love.
Vergilius, 2021
Although Vergil’s Georgics is a poem that elaborates on the beauty and bounty of Nature at great ... more Although Vergil’s Georgics is a poem that elaborates on the beauty and bounty of Nature at great length, the word natura appears only a handful of times across its four books. I argue here that the noun’s seven discrete appearances are judiciously placed and carefully nuanced to constitute a response to one of the central concepts of Lucretius’s De rerum natura. In Lucretius’s poem, Nature is a female-bodied personification inextricably entwined with the poet’s materialist universe. Vergil distances natura in the Georgics from the female embodiment that Lucretius put forth, thereby reasserting the role of the gods—in particular of male gods—in Earth’s manifold acts of creation, as part of his larger critique of Epicurean materialism.
eds. Elena Giusti and Victoria Rimell, Special issue of the journal Vergilius, 2021
Do we still need, as Elaine Showalter predicted, ‘even more drastic re-estimations of the old mas... more Do we still need, as Elaine Showalter predicted, ‘even more drastic re-estimations of the old masters?’ Vergil, so-called ‘Father of the West’, has not escaped scrutiny by feminist criticism, yet feminist approaches to Vergil, or readings alert to reading his works through the lens of gender, still represent a tiny portion of modern scholarship. And unlike Homer or Ovid, he has traditionally not been seen as fertile territory for feminist philosophy. This special volume of Vergilius, which has its origins in the Vergilian Society’s Symposium Cumanum 2019 on the same theme, asks how ever-evolving contemporary feminisms might engage in new dialogues with the Aeneid, Eclogues and Georgics, and aims to reassess, through Vergil, the role and potential of feminist modes of reading within classical philology.
Conference Presentations by Erin McKenna Hanses
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Articles by Erin McKenna Hanses
Conference Presentations by Erin McKenna Hanses