DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE MYTH: VIRGIL’S READING OF LUCRETIUS

Abstract

Virgil's didactic poem Georgike was written, among other things, as a kind of an intertextual dialogue with works of the poet’s predecessors and the established masters of this subgenre - Hesiod, Arat, and Lucretius above all. The paper was specifically focused on the controversy between Virgil and Lucretius on clarifying the everyday’s natural phenomena by engaging traditional mythological matrix: like writing the verses on the palimpsest, Virgil adds a new layer of meaning over already "given" Lucretius's text, using fully expected methods of the intertextual "duel", demythologization and dealegorization, thus reviving the myth which was tendentiously demystified and removed by his model.