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ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE |
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Lucretius and the Didactic Epic Lucretius of course was more a poet than a pamphleteer, and no introduction to this great work would be complete without some account of his poetry and the tradition in which he was writing. Unlike some writers in the ancient world, we know almost nothing about Lucretius the man except from the occasional autobiographical aside delivered in the poem itself. We have no extant Life as we do in the case of other poets such as Virgil and Horace, and the tiny remarks that we do possess are of dubious value and interpretation. There is the infamous statement of St Jerome, for instance, which simply says, under the year 94 BC: The poet Titus Lucretius Carus was born. A love-potion drove him mad, and he composed, in the intervals of his insanity, several books which Cicero corrected. He committed suicide aged 43. Then there is a brief but interesting remark in a letter from Cicero to his brother: 'The poems of Lucretius contain, as you say in your letter, many flashes of inspiration and also much poetic skill' (Letters to his brother Quintus 2.9). A more poignant testimony to the man comes in the lines from Virgil's second Georgic (490-92) where he pays tribute to his didactic predecessor, clearly referring to 3.25-7 of the poem: Happy is he who has discovered the causes of things and has cast beneath his feet all fears, unavoidable fate and the din of the devouring Underworld. As M. F. Smith argues in the Introduction to his Loeb text of the poem, this is excellent evidence to fire against St Jerome's insanity theory: Virgil would have been a heartless sarcastic cynic to write these sublime lines about a man who in fact had taken his life in deranged depression. More than that we simply cannot say and must content ourselves with the poem itself, the best and only evidence for the achievement of the poet. So what kind of poetry is this? The verse is composed in hexameter metre (with six stresses to the line, each metrical stress being followed by either two short syllables or one long) as was all Greek and Latin epic poetry, and its length also puts it into the category of epic. This is not, however, a tale of war (like Homer's Iliad) or a hero and his homecoming (like Homer's Odyssey), or both (like Virgil's Aeneid): if Homer is the father of narrative epic, we must look elsewhere for the origin of the genre perfected in this poem. Its first exponent in Greek is Hesiod, a poet living in Boeotia in about 700 BC who claimed inspiration from the Muses as he tended sheep on Mount Helicon; they gave him the 'divine voice' to sing of 'things that will be and things that have already been.' (Theogony 31-2), and he went on in that poem to tell of the birth and legends of the gods. His other major surviving work is the Works and Days, addressed to his brother Perses, in which he gives practical advice and moral exhortation. Both poems fall under the broad heading of Wisdom literature (see M. L. West's magisterial commentary on Works and Days pp. 3-25 for an examination of the genre in a wide range of cultures) and were the inspiration for later philosophical poetry. In the sixth century Xenophanes satirized the anthropomorphic gods of contemporary worship in this sort of verse and also wrote a hexameter poem On Nature (KRS 163-80, Barnes 82-3). In the following century both Parmenides and Empedocles wrote philosophical poems in hexameters (KRS 241-62, 282-321). Prose literature grew in stature with the achievements of men such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, but the genre of the didactic (educational, instructive) epic enjoyed a resurgence in the so-called Hellenistic period, after the death of Alexander the Great, when the centres of Greek culture were no longer exclusively in Greece. Aratus (c. 31 5-240 BC) was a poet in the court of King Antigonus Gonatas of Macedonia and composed didactic poetry on such topics as anatomy, pharmacology and (most famously) astronomy: his Phainomena was later translated into Latin by Cicero (among others), who clearly admired it enormously. Later Nicander of Colophon (second century BC) produced didactic poetry with such unattractive titles as Venomous Reptiles, Antidotes to Poisons and Things changed into other things (Metamorphoses). Now Aratus quarried the prose treatise of the astronomer Eudoxus for the raw factual material for his transforming poetic skill, and Nicander also will have used prose manuals, creating poetry out of prose and versifying a subject of which they themselves had little or no direct knowledge. The term metaphrast was coined to describe this sort of indirect poetry, produced often as tours de force to demonstrate the consummate technical mastery of the art of verse-writing required to translate dry and complex subjects into clever lines of verse. The style of the metaphrast can be the main interest in the verse, the pleasure consisting in the appreciation of clever verbal tricks and neatness of expression, and the ironic awareness of the gap between the ostensible audience of peasants or sailors being 'instructed' and the real audience of the urban sophisticates being 'entertained'. Nobody seriously imagines real farmers having Nicander's Venomous Reptiles on their bookshelves in case a snake bites them - nor can we seriously see Virgil's contemporary farmers ploughing the land with the Georgics tucked into their tunics. The all-important question is then whether Lucretius is primarily a clever poet who randomly chose Epicureanism as his vehicle but whose purpose is to entertain and impress, or whether we need to take his words at face value and accept that he intends to change our minds and our lives. Contemporaries are not much help here, alas. We know little about Lucretius and cannot tell, for instance, whether he belonged to an Epicurean circle. We know little about the addressee of the poem, Memmius - on whom see Appendix B. We do know of other didactic poems from this period with similar-sounding titles - and the title 'On Nature' ( __ de rerum natura) was by now conventional after the work of Xenophanes, Empedocles etc.: an Empedoclea by a Sallust (not the historian), and a De Rerum Natura by Egnatius - but we cannot say whether they were 'sincere' or 'metaphrastic'. Ultimately we cannot be certain of Lucretius' own degree of 'sincerity', but the following points deserve to be made. In the first place, the poem is of a scale and a size that makes it more than a mere jeu d'esprit. It is ambitious and perfectionist, unfinished in the form in which we have it but still full of flashes of imagination and original apercus as well as a thorough knowledge of Epicurean theory. This poet, in other words, has done more than simply translate Epicurus into Latin and make it scan: he has breathed his own life into it, amplifying his master's ideas with corrections and illustrations of his own and giving the whole thing a contemporary Roman flavor -e.g., in the famous diatribe against the folly of romantic love at the end of Book Four. This argues for a degree of creative originality in Lucretius well beyond the limited word-wizardry of the metaphrast. We have to be careful here, however. Scholars often polarize the argument into two sides, the poet versus the philosopher, and then take sides themselves as to whether Lucretius is really the one or the other. There is even the theory that Lucretius himself was in two minds about many of his doctrines and that on occasions the poet in him revealed his true feelings, denied or suppressed in the 'philosophy', a theory first put forward by Patin as 'l' anti-Lucrece chez Lucrece' (on which see Appendix A). The poet's own words would suggest that the poetry is the honey round the cup of Epicurus' medicine, a means to the end of persuading us to drink unattractive truths about the world rather than the end in itself (see 1.933- 50); we need also to remember that, ever since Ennius, Roman poets had prized the quality of learning, or erudition (doctrina) in their poetry, ensuring that most subsequent poetry would be intellectual and allusive especially allusive to the work of other poets - rather than simply emotion recollected in tranquility. When Lucretius therefore uses phrases, ideas and whole passages from a vast range of earlier writers (both Greek and Roman), he is keeping true to this tradition of 'learned' poetry. (See Kenney 'Doctus Lucretius' Mnemosyne 23 (1970) 366-92.) It does not mean that the whole poem is there just to parade a collection of quotations culled from other sources; but it does show us a writer familiar with virtually every genre available to the ancients. If he chose Epicureanism as his theme, it was not because that was all he knew about. The choice of Epicureanism was astonishingly apt for a poet of his gifts. In the first place, the dogmatic stress on the primacy of the senses - and our capacity to see the truth if we will only open our eyes and look - is ideal for a poet who will use his verse to paint the real world before the eyes of our mind with clarity and sharpness of perception. Through his eyes we see everyday sights such as rainstorms (6.256-61), leaps of historical imagination such as the description of early man (5.925-1447) and social behavior such as that of mourners (3. 894-911) or the impotent husband (4.1233-9) or the pathetic lover (4.1121-91 ) satirized and dramatized with merciless accuracy. In the second place, Epicureanism is primarily an ethical theory based on a scientific reading of the world: but the physics is also invested with an emotional interest of its own. For the poet who found ideas exciting, who could invest cerebral concepts with emotional significance, this philosophy was perfect. Time after time he applies the facts to the values he will infer, the physics to the ethics. It is not enough to say that we are mortal and leave it at that: he goes on to show us how we ought to behave in the face of inexorable and eternal death. Not content with showing us the mechanics of the production and emission of sperm from the body, he shows us how to conduct our sex lives. Most controversial of all, he tells us the facts behind the spread of diseases and then concludes the whole poem with a bleak and stark vision of a city dying of the plague. (On the problems of the ending see Appendix E.) Nowhere does Lucretius hide behind the objectivity of scientific inquiry and refuse to face the human consequences of his teachings: on the contrary, his scientific teaching is there primarily to provide the understanding of the physics of the universe which will in turn show us that the lifestyle he enjoins is a rational and necessary response to the world of proven facts. The artist's eye for detail convinces the audience of the accuracy of his observation, the mixture of logical argumentation and rhetorical diatribe hammers the theories home against all opposition, and the indefinable emotional effects of the poetry make it the ideal medium for this instructor of minds and converter of souls. The poetry is, however, not just turned on for the purple passages: nor is it applied like a final coat of color to a drab wall of physics - 'poetry cannot be spread on things like butter', in Santayana's famous remark (Three Philosophical Poets (1922) 16). Lucretius intended to smear everything with the honey of the Muses (4.9), not simply the flourishes or the similes. This is, of course, impossible for any translation to bring out, and the reader without the Latin can only receive a faint impression of the poetic effects at work in the original. One device which I have tried to reproduce in the translation, however, is metaphor, and this is a device which Lucretius uses to devastating effect. Not just the brief metaphors such as sleep 'fettering our limbs in pleasant slumber' (4.4j 3), but also sustained metaphors such as the following: At other times a violent squall of wind falls upon a cloud already pregnant with a full-grown thunderbolt. The wind rips open the cloud, and in that moment out drops that fiery whirlwind which is what we in our traditional language call a thunderbolt. (6.295-7) Here the violence of the wind is clearly compared to that of a particularly savage Caesarean section on a pregnant woman ripping the child (the whirlwind) out of her womb and causing it to drop (be born) and then receive its name. Besides the metaphor of childbirth there is here also perhaps an implicit myth of ironic intent: the thunderbolt falls out fully armed with fire, as Athena was born fully armed out of the head of Zeus. Yet the poet has been arguing all along that thunderbolts are not sent by Zeus, despite what popular superstition thinks - Lucretius thus uses the hint of a mythical allusion to point up an ironic contrast between the rationalism of the theory being explained and the 'poetic' legends the theory will displace. (This account will not fully explain the prelude to the poem, however, on which see Appendix A. On implicit myth - a notion not accepted by all scholars - see Lyne Further Voices in Virgil's Aeneid 139-40.) Then there are the fuller masterpieces of sustained writing such as the opening to the second book: a dominant metaphor of the wise man looking down from a high and safe vantage point onto the struggles of his less enlightened fellows: ships on the stormy sea, then battle on land are adduced as metaphors of futile stress. The metaphors are both of men being attacked by threatening violence - so what better to depict the invulnerability of the philosopher than metaphors of being 'fortified' and 'elevated' as if in a high and stout citadel? The poet returns to struggling mankind (lines 10-13) with a caricature: explicit social comment and implicit myth (Sisyphus is perhaps suggested in the futile attempt to scale the heights - see now D. P. Fowler, 'Lucretius and Politics' in Griffin and Barnes, Philosophia Togata 140 n.79). The term 'caricature' does not seem out of place here for this mixing of imagery in a way that is both critical and amusing: for other examples, see the ludicrous figures of the gods practicing their marksmanship with thunderbolts (6.396-405) and the Sceptic philosopher standing on his head (4.471-2.). The poet then waxes rhetorical with all the exclamatory force of a Cicero ('O joyless hearts of men! O minds without vision! ...') before going back into social criticism of the rich and gilded luxuries that can never make us happy contrasted with the easy life of those content with the free pleasures of nature, the 'pleasures' in both cases being spelled out in graphic detail. The poet continues his harangue with Roman color (troops on the Campus Martius), rhetorical questions fired at the patron by name, the personification of the fears that terrorize us as 'stalking unabashed among princes and potentates', and he rounds off the section with the familiar simile of the unenlightened being like children frightened in the dark. This is poetry of a rare degree of sophistication and interest - but it is also, as Lucretius intended it, not aimed solely at the scholar. This is a book which can be read by everyone - and this, in the last analysis, is the clinching reason for thinking that the poem is not simply an ironic entertainment for the salon, but a work that speaks from conviction and passion.
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