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ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE |
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APPENDIX B Memmius Much of ancient poetry was dedicated to a named individual, in a long tradition of literary patronage. Virgil dedicated his Georgics for instance to Augustus' friend and political associate Maecenas, Horace dedicated his poems to a wide range of friends and patrons. This poem is repeatedly addressed to a certain Memmius, and it must be worth examining what we know about this figure. It is worth saying at the outset, however, that Lucretius' dedication of the poem is not simply an empty convention. The poet did not compose the work and then find a name on which to pin it: on the contrary, the poet addresses Memmius many times in the course of the poem in terms which suggest that the desire to convert the addressee is at least one main reason for writing the poem in the first place. The Memmius addressed is usually agreed to be Gaius Memmius who married a daughter of the dictator Sulla. He was quaestor to Pompey in Spain in 77, tribune in 66 and praetor in 58 BC. It was in that year of street violence and political uncertainty that he attacked Caesar in the Senate (Suetonius, Julius Caesar 23); In the following year he went to Bithynia as governor, returning to Rome to stand for the consulship with the support of that same Caesar whom he had attacked as praetor in 58. His failure to secure election was the result of an electoral scandal in which he attempted to do a deal with the consuls of 54 to secure his election for 53 (on which, see Cicero, Letters to his Brother Quintus 3.2.3; 8.3., and E. S. Gruen, The Consular Elections for 53 B C' in J. Bibauw, Hommages a Marcel Renard). It failed, and he was convicted of bribery and went into exile in Athens in 52. We do not know if he ever came back to Rome before his death sometime before 46. His literary tastes are well known. He was apparently something of an expert in Greek literature but contemptuous of Latin (Cicero Brutus 70.247) and would have been a formidable orator if he had not avoided 'the labor not only of speaking but even of thinking'. When he was governor in Bithynia he was accompanied by the poets Catullus and Helvius Cinna - that famous 'Cinna the poet' whom Shakespeare shows us being murdered by the mob after Caesar's death (Julius Caesar III.3). This encouragement of young poets was not unparalleled - Tibullus, for instance, was going to join the staff of Messala in the East (Tibullus 1.3.2). Memmius' own attempts to write love poetry are mentioned by Ovid (Tristia 2.433) and Pliny (5.3.5). His private life was also well known, and was scandalous in an age not easily scandalized: he tried, for instance, to seduce the wife of Pompey the Great by sending her an amorous letter (Suetonius, On Grammarians 14), and his wife Fausta was also famous for the number of her lovers. His relations with the Epicureans in Athens where he settled in exile were not good: he acquired the ruins of Epicurus' old house and declared his intention of demolishing them and erecting a new building on the site. The head of the Epicurean group in Athens, Patro, met Cicero and asked him to intervene with Memmius for the safety of the house. The letter which Cicero wrote to him is preserved (Letters to his Friends13.1) and makes fascinating reading, not least because it contains not a single word about Lucretius or any debt of obligation which the dedication of this great literary work could have occasioned in Memmius. (It is even suggested, for example by D .P. Fowler, 'Lucretius and Politics' in Griffin and Barnes, Philosophia Togata, 122, that Cicero apologizes for the poem; he pleads with Memmius: 'if your feelings have been hurt, however little, by the unreasonable behavior of certain persons ...' referring perhaps to the unwelcome mockery caused by dedicating an Epicurean epic to so unphilosophical a man as Memmius.) Or, alternatively, one might conjecture that the patron had failed to encourage the poet, causing Lucretius (and his circle, if he had one) to grumble about the ingratitude of the patron - leading Cicero not to mention Lucretius by name but to refer to the 'behavior of certain people'. All this is pure speculation, of course, attempting to fill the gaps in our knowledge about the relations between poet and patron. There is, at any rate, something odd about a poet dedicating a major epic to a man whose life and character put him out of sympathy with the philosophy being expounded. Would the rake and scoundrel actually read the thing? The references in the poem to 'an illustrious scion of the house of Memmius' (1.42-3), or the poet's desire that his verses should be 'worthy of your calling and character' probably put the identification of the well-known patron beyond doubt. What we know of his ruthless unscrupulous political tactics, his notorious sex drive and his intellectual laziness make him an ideal subject for persuasion - Lucretius was not intending to preach to the converted or to tilt at windmills. M. F. Smith has argued interestingly (Loeb xlvii-xlviii) that Memmius may perhaps have expressed interest in Epicureanism when he heard that it elevated pleasure to the highest good, only to lose heart when he discovered that it required disciplined philosophical study rather than simply physical gratification. Lucretius appears to tire of his addressee as the poem progresses (Wormell, 'The Personal World of Lucretius' in Dudley, Lucretius, 42), and it has been shown that the frequency with which Memmius is personally named diminishes in the course of the work (see Townend, 'The Fading of Memmius', Classical Quarterly 28 (1978) 267-283). It has further been urged - more speculatively - that Lucretius originally dedicated the work to Caesar, changing to Memmius later on (Louise Adam Hollands, Lucretius and the Transpadanes 101-115 ). All these in their different ways point to the same phenomenon: Memmius is more than merely a token dedicatee, but he is not kept centre-stage throughout; and the poem is not written exclusively for him. To some extent this is in itself not surprising, since most ancient poems stand or fall by other criteria than simply their suitability for the named addressee. If not, then reading poems might become a form of legal eavesdropping. A superficially more promising line of inquiry would use Memmius to help explain the use of Venus in the prelude to the poem (on which see Appendix A): it has been pointed out (by Munro, vol. 2, 121) that coins of the Memmii in the Galeria tribe have Venus on them: one might add that Virgil, Aeneid 5.117 (explicitly linking Memmius with the Trojan Mnestheus) gives an excellent reason for opening the poem addressed to him with the title 'Sons of Aeneas'. Alas, the evidence of the coinage is not watertight - our Memmius may belong to a different part of the family than the Memmii on the coins (Wiseman, 'The Two Worlds of Titus Lucretius' in Cinna the Poet, 38-9 & nn.). It can still be urged, however (as, for example, by M. F. Smith, Loeb edition xlix-l), that Lucretius uses Memmius almost as an excuse to compose the sort of poetry which Epicurus would have despised, to suit the patron whom he wished to convert: the poetry is more than once described as the honey on the cup to trick the reader into drinking the (otherwise bitter) medicine (1.921-50, 4.1-25), and an addressee of literary taste but dubious moral and intellectual gifts would therefore need precisely this sort or an enticement to read on. This may indeed help to explain the choice of poetry to persuade Memmius, but it only pushes the question further back: why not choose to address a more philosophical and worthy man, and thus keep faith with both patron and master? Did the poet 'sell out' to the un-Epicurean world of politics in his recognition that 'at such a crisis (Memmius) cannot withhold his service from the common weal' at 1.41-3? Does he contradict his thesis that gods do not listen to our prayers by praying to Venus simply as a bouquet to Memmius' patron deity? It is difficult to imagine Lucretius letting the tail wag the dog in this way, and further thoughts on the famous prelude are to be found in Appendix A.
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