For the better part of the last decade, Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics Matthew Gorey, has finally published his book centered on Lucretian imagery in Virgil’s Aeneid.
“There are many competing theories of what the universe is made of and how it operates in antiquity. The least popular, the most widely hated of the theories is atomism,” said Gorey.
Although Gorey’s professional discipline is in the Classics, he finds his work on the publication of this book as anything but limited,
“I am, like, the 10,000th person in the last 2000 years to write a book about the Aeneid, but it is fun, because of how Virgil embodied education in a way similar to how we use liberal arts today.
For the most part, the process and work that went into his book was enjoyable; however, there were times where it was anything but straightforward.
“I shopped around a short article version of one of the chapters that was rejected by three different journals, but with every setback allowed for later parts of the process to run smoothly,” said Gorey.
Gorey is excited to finally to be able to publish – after a year delay due to COVID-19, but is excited for what is to come. “I am looking at how nonphilosophers talk about the philosophy of atomism throughout Greek and Roman literature.
