This book charts the role of the sublime in first-century debates about how and why we investigate the natural world. The sublimity of the study of nature—in other words, the scientific sublime—is an animating force in Manilius, Seneca’s Natural Questions, Lucan, the Aetna, and, in the book’s epilogue, the Elder Pliny. These authors work with, and sometimes against, multiple traditions of ancient philosophy and ancient science, including early Greek natural philosophy, Stoic and Epicurean physics and meteorology, and mathematical astronomy and astrology. Despite this shared intellectual background, each author inflects the scientific sublime differently, and even though they do not explicitly theorize the sublime, they repeatedly juxtapose competing modes of sublimity and push readers to think about their relative merits and social functions. As the nature of Roman imperium and public life evolve, the scientific sublime figures the experience of infinite and unending empire, functions as an antidote to the corrupting influences of the seamy present, collapses under the weight of its own pretensions, and makes way for the appreciation of wonders that we cannot comprehend, the spectacle of nature. From this perspective, the scientific sublime constitutes a medium of philosophical communication and debate that fuels a vital current of Latin literary production. This book, then, tells a new story about the study of nature at Rome, locates the sublimity of that study at the center of early imperial Latin literature, and thereby renders the classical sublime more expansive, dynamic, and contested.
