Lucretius-a-thon!

Pictured: Athens-Clarke County Mayor, Kelly Girtz

In recent years the Department of Classics, joined by UGA administrators, faculty, students, and the Athens-Clarke County community, to stage a series of public readings of important classical authors. We began with Homer’s Iliad in 2018 and continued with the Odyssey in 2022.

Spring 2025 marked our first production of a Latin author, the poet Lucretius, whose de rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), was translated for the Penguin series by UGA Classics alumna and MacArthur Fellow A.E. Stallings, who is presently serving as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.

Lucretius’ fascinating text combines literary elements, along with important contributions to the development of European science, including physics, biology, meteorology, and human anthropology. Lucretius is particularly important for using the rudiments of atomic theory to explain the workings of the universe as the product of natural forces and without appeal to traditional mythological explanations of creation and change.

After three events devoted to individual authors, we are rebranding our productions under the name of ANTHOLOGY, a word derived from the Greek word for gathering flowers. Our flowers will be of the literary and scientific variety as we include traditional literary texts with important contributions from ancient science and mathematics. The result we hope will be a garland that reflects the broad range of interests in the ancient world and offers nuanced approaches to the importance of science in the contemporary world.