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ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE |
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APPENDIX E The Ending of the Poem It has often been noted that there is a stark contrast between the eulogistic paean with which this poem opens and the dismal threnody with which it ends. The symmetrical contrast between the opening of the poem in the address to Venus - full of hope, life and joy - and the closing account of the plague at Athens with its despair, death and misery, is puzzling, if the purpose of the poem is thought to be positive and encouraging. The closely argued pages of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War (2.47-55) are either translated directly or reworked into a rhetorical and chilling account of the suffering, both mental and physical, of the Athenian plague of 430 BC. The problem of the ending of the poem is actually no less controversial than that surrounding the ending of Virgil's Aeneid, but there seems to be general agreement about one thing: L. intended to finish his poem with the plague - it is the longest piece of descriptive writing in the poem and well suited to bring the work to a climax, Athens being both familiar and unfamiliar, a distant foreign capital but also one where many a Roman - such as Memmius the dedicatee - spent years of his life. The problem is simply that of understanding why this poet proclaiming the good news of Epicurean serenity and happiness freed from fear should leave us with this dreary saga of pain and futile death. Some critics have seen it as the arch-example of 'l'anti-Lucrece chez Lucrece' whereby the poet's 'real' melancholy won over his attempts to hide it under a facade of facile optimism - this, linked with the apparent neurosis of his denunciation of romantic love in Book Four and St. Jerome's tales of Lucretius' love-potions and suicide, gives a picture of L. as a sick recluse losing a long battle with depression. It has something to recommend it if we avoid patronizing psychoanalytic terms but see it instead as the poet's ultimate recognition that optimism has to be tempered with insight into the tragic side of life. The ending of the poem thus becomes a display of the real suffering to be faced - remember Epicurus' own painful death (Diogenes Laertius x. 15 ) - and a reassurance to the reader of the way true philosophy can endure even this. Death is after all 'nothing to us' (3.830), and the true Epicurean would even be happy when being roasted to death in the bronze bull of Phalaris, compared with which a plague is relatively commonplace! There are however other possible lines of argument. Minyard sees it as a form of satire against Athenian life: a demonstration that the old-style world of the Greek city-state would fail until the day Epicurus appeared with his truth. (Lucretius and the Late Republic 60-61.) Muller ('Die Finalia der sechs Bucher des Lukrez' in Lucrece (Fondations Hardt Entretiens 24,220), on the other hand, is surely right to stress the universal nature of the plague as something that could recur at any time as part of the nature of the world as we know it. Besides, Minyard's account would make Lucretius promote the apolitical side of Epicureanism by using the plague as a 'proof' that political societies do not work: it attempts to turn the Hippocratean catalogue of symptoms into 'satire', which it patently is not: and it is inconceivable that L. would have left the 'before and after' point so obscurely drawn if that were the point of the whole passage. The theory is not wholly without merits, however. The ending of Book Five shows us the growth of 'civilization' and the way that even now mankind is still racked with fear and superstition: the poet is concerned neither to praise progress nor to sentimentalize primitivism, but simply to argue that material progress will only improve our lives if we listen to Epicurus. Turn to the opening of Book Five and we find praising Epicurus in contrast to the great 'benefactors' of mankind such as Hercules: once again, the progress made in material terms is futile until we hear the message of Epicurus. The plague, seen in these terms, is an extreme example of the opposite point: not the futility of the 'good' things without Epicurus, but the bleak nihilistic pain which is all that 'bad' things give us - without Epicurus. The connection is not explicitly drawn - perhaps as a result of the unfinished state of the poem but this would at least link the plague with the rest of the poem and with Lucretius' evangelistic mission in general. It has also been suggested (for example, Arragon, 'Poetic Art as a Philosophic Medium for Lucretius', Essays in Criticism II (1961) 386-7) that the 'artist' in L. got carried away with the experience of describing the plague and 'forgot' the distressing moral effect on the reader. More perceptively Commager ('Lucretius' interpretation of the plague' Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 62 (1957) 105-18) has shown how the so-called 'mistranslations' of Thucydides' account of the plague are in fact re-interpretations of physical symptoms in more psychological terms, brought about by the way the picture of 'a diseased population burning with an insatiable and self-destructive thirst ... may have obscurely reminded Lucretius of his own image of man'. We all suffer from the inner plague of weariness, anxiety and thirst for contentment, and the plague thus has a symbolic and paradigmatic function far beyond the mere recital of gory symptoms. It is thus, as Segal argues (Lucretius on Death and Anxiety 234), a sort of moral allegory of our need for Epicurus' teaching in facing death and a historical allegory of the failure of society to cope with suffering. The disease, in short, is symbolic of a spiritual malaise that only Epicurus can cure. This 'optimistic' reading of the epilogue, it seems to me, goes too far the other way: at the end of the poem this symbolism is not made explicit, the allegory is not unpacked, and the whole thrust of the passage is that the plague killed everybody, good and bad alike - the good by their heroic caring for the sick, the bad despite their craven refusal to care for them (1240-46). There is no distinction drawn between 'good death' and 'bad death' - there is only death - and the squabbling selfishness of the wretched survivors shows us not the stock picture of the 'unenlightened' but simply the moral effects of the sickness on human behavior. The plague was an extraordinary event that made people behave in an extraordinary way: Lucretius' lines afford insight into their plight and above all deep compassion for their pain, rather than a cryptic sermon for our own lives to be deciphered. That would after all remove all the humane sympathy from the passage and turn it into a lame tract pruriently dwelling on the suffering of the sick and wallowing in Epicurean Schadenfreude and self-righteousness. Lucretius has been accused of that in, for example, 2.1ff. and also 3.59-86, but in both cases he points the Epicurean message in contrast to the anxiety and frustration of human striving. This differs utterly from the malady described here, an agony without any cure. A further point that has not, to my knowledge, been stressed adequately before is this: Lucretius chooses to finish his poem with the plague for the same reason as he chose to finish Book Four with the similarly 'pessimistic' attack on the passion of love - in both passages man is 'sick' (aeger) and 'wretched'. The purpose in both is to bring the 'atomic' demonstrations of impersonal nature back to the experience of man himself and to prove once and for all that the atomic theory is not just a pretty set of arguments, but that what it describes and explains actually matters to us. The Epicurean may choose to dwell in his little garden but he is no ivory-tower recluse with no knowledge of the world: the very theory itself tells him the awful truth of human imperfection ( cf. 6.12-23) and the fact that the world is not a kind place (5.195-234) - indeed some of the atoms flying around are harmful and cause plague (1090ff.). There would be less cause to seek the serenity of the garden if there were not ghastly realities of life such as the great plague of Athens. We can never give a conclusive answer to the question of what Lucretius might have done with the end of a probably unfinished poem: but the final lines of this book do succeed in bringing the somewhat recondite physics of the earlier sections very much into the field of human experience - with the decisive twist, however, that whereas we now understand the mechanics of plague and (being good Epicureans) would not dream of either blaming the gods for the disease or of seeking their help in dealing with it, this understanding does not in fact make the pain hurt any the less. The ending of the book is abrupt, and Martin accordingly proposed the transposition of 1247-51I to the end of the book to give something of a rounded ending. The fact remains, however, that there is nothing in the text that offers any crumb of consolation to the philosopher, no glimmer of serenity available in the agony and the angst. The only shred of pleasure left is of course the pleasure of the poetry itself, which conveys the pain so beautifully - indeed Arragon points out well that this passage is not conventionally beautiful poetic imagery to sweeten the sour doctrine, but rather it is the doctrine which sweetens the sourly painted truth in the poetry. The plague thus encapsulates the tragic insight into human existence that is necessary to offset what may seem facile optimism: it expounds the working of a particularly sensational 'divine' event in purely mechanical atomistic terms, thus reinforcing one more time the anti-theological view the poem has proclaimed throughout: and it leaves the poetry alone, when the values of human joy and society are dead, as of indestructible beauty, setting out the central dilemma of human life with no facile attempt to resolve it, the only harmony available emerging from the artistic perfection of the means of its exposition. No lesser aim would be sufficient to end this great poem.
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