ABSTRACT
In December 1865, the sculptor Thomas Woolner gave a memorable dinner party which, in a Victorian version of the Homeric games, generated a sportive clash between two of the age's heroes. The guests included William Ewart Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, William Holman Hunt, and the Bristol physician John Addington Symonds. Tennyson's classical vision, if there is such a thing, is harder to get at, since he never gave it the kind of full-blown discursive form that we find in Gladstone. Each of the heroes is doomed to frustration whether he gains the object of his quest or not, because the Olympian deities are able to fend him off or betray him through mystery. The poem "Lucretius" considers the alternative possibilities that a Venus who oversees the disintegration of the questing poet-philosopher is either one or the other, quiet deities of the De rerum or a jealous Homeric goddess intent upon revenge for his slighting of her in her several mythic guises.
