It’s very possible that the property development by Memmius provided the occasion for the composition of one of the most famous poems of antiquity, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius.
Still, within a few decades, the philosophers were beginning to return, and rich Romans such as Cicero would send their sons to Greece to acquire an education. In 88 BCE, the Roman general Sulla had crushed a revolt in Greece and closed the philosophical schools on suspicion of political sedition. At the time, Athens was far from being the philosophical centre it had been in previous centuries. According to Cicero, the land contained the ruins of the school founded by the philosopher Epicurus, which Memmius intended to level to provide space for his new villa.
On arrival, he bought a plot of land on which he planned to build a house. After being accused of electoral fraud in Rome, he retired to Athens in about 54 BCE, where he wrote erotic poems. By all accounts, Gaius Memmius was not a very nice man.
0 kommentar(er)
