Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics

Epicureanism, a Greek philosophical school founded in Athens c. 307 BCE, conceives of “pleasure” (αταρξία) as the ultimate human good. This essay aims to investigate the reception of Epicureanism at Rome in the mid-1st century BCE, drawing on Cicero’s In Pisonem and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura as case studies. Each work addresses the question of whether Epicurus could operate within the framework of Roman cultural and political values and, consequently, whether he should be appropriated into Roman thinking. Through close examination of these two texts, I argue that each author ultimately builds his own version of “Epicurus” to serve his distinctive rhetorical aims. Cicero and Lucretius therefore come together to provide examples of a broader phenomenon surrounding the issue of Hellenization at Rome, namely, that of Greek figures being rewritten and repurposed in different contexts to serve different Roman agendas, revealing the flexible nature of Greek models at Rome and of Romans’ engagement with the Greek past.