SOURCE: Sedley, David. “The Empedoclean Opening.” In Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, pp. 1-34. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[In the following excerpt, Sedley demonstrates that Lucretius based the proem of his De rerum natura on the work of Empedocles.]

1. CICERO'S LETTER

Lucreti poemata ut scribis ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis. sed cum veneris, virum te putabo si Sallusti Empedoclea legeris, hominem non putabo.

Writing to his brother in 54 bc, Cicero supplies two unique testimonies (Ad Q. fr. ii 9.4). In the first sentence he echoes Quintus' admiration for Lucretius' poem, thus providing the sole allusion to the De rerum natura likely to be more or less contemporary with its publication. In the second, he attests the publication of an Empedoclea by a certain Sallustius, presumably a Latin translation or imitation of Empedocles (compare Cicero's own near-contemporary use of the title Aratea for his translation of Aratus).

But even more striking than the two individual testimonies is their juxtaposition. Modern editors have taken to printing a full stop after sed cum veneris, understanding ‘But when you come … (sc. we will discuss it).’ This suppresses any overt link between the two literary judgements: the first breaks off abruptly with an aposiopesis, and the second, juxtaposed, is to all appearances a quite independent observation. On the equally natural and more fluent reading that can be obtained simply by reverting to the older punctuation,¹ as printed above, with a comma instead of the full stop, the letter is an explicit comparison between the DRN and the Empedoclea:

Lucretius' poetry shows, as you say in your letter, many flashes of genius, yet also much craftsmanship. On the other hand, when you come, I shall consider you a man if you have read Sallustius' Empedoclea, though I won't consider you human.

If this is right, the two works were being directly compared at the time of their publication, and Cicero, at least, judged the Lucretian poem vastly superior.

Why did this particular comparison suggest itself? It is well recognised that Empedocles is, along with Homer, Ennius, and others,² an important literary influence on Lucretius, and it has even been claimed that he was a philosophical influence.³ But I do not believe that the depth and significance of the poem's Empedoclean character have yet been properly understood. If what I shall argue in this chapter is right, Cicero's comparison of the DRN with the Empedoclea will turn out to be an entirely natural one, which Lucretius would have welcomed and indeed invited. My case will be centred on the relation of Lucretius' proem to the proem of Empedocles' On nature.

2 EMPEDOCLES' TWO POEMS

There is plentiful evidence that it was principally if not exclusively in the hexameter poem usually known in antiquity as the On nature … or the Physics …—I shall discuss its actual title in §7—that Empedocles expounded his world system. The central features of the cosmic cycle it described are well known: four enduring elements—earth, air (called ‘aether’),⁴ fire, and water—are periodically united into a homogeneous sphere by a constructive force called Love, then again separated out into the familiar stratified world by the polar force, Strife.⁵ But there is a longstanding scholarly tradition, deriving primarily from Diels' editions published in 1901 and 1903, of attributing all the fragments concerning Empedocles' theories on the pollution and transmigration of the individual spirit, or ‘daimon’, to a second hexameter poem, the Katharmoi, or Purifications.

The original ground for this segregation was the belief that the physical doctrine of the cosmic cycle and the ‘religious’ doctrine of transmigration belonged to radically distinct and probably incompatible areas of Empedocles' thought. But Empedoclean studies have now reached a curious stage. On the one hand, the old dogma has been subjected to searching criticism, and is regarded by many as an anachronistic imposition on fifth-century thought.⁶ On the other hand, the conventional apportionment of fragments between the two poems, which was founded on that dogma, remains largely unchallenged, as if it had some independent authority. I believe that it has none.

One radical challenge to this picture, however, has been developed recently. Catherine Osborne⁷ proposes that there were never two poems: rather, both titles name one and the same work. Although this proposal has found some favour,⁸ and has certainly inspired some important reassessment of the doctrinal relation between the two sides of Empedocles' thought, I do not think that it can be right. Diogenes Laertius is unambiguously speaking of two separate poems when he tells us that ‘On nature and the Katharmoi (viii 77 …) run to 5,000 lines.’⁹ Moreover, a number of the surviving fragments of Empedocles are reported with explicit assignations to one or the other poem, yet not a single one with attributions to both the physical poem and the Katharmoi. Finally, as Jaap Mansfeld has brought to light, Giovanni Aurispa is known to have had a manuscript entitled (in Greek) ‘Empedocles’ Katharmoi' (now tragically lost) in his library at Venice in 1424.¹⁰ Even if this evidence were thought insufficient, I hope that the matter will be put beyond doubt by my next section, where it will turn out that one major fragment cannot be placed in the Katharmoi without glaring inconsistency: Empedocles must have written at least two poems.

If we simply stick to the hard and the relatively hard evidence for what was in the Katharmoi, a different picture will emerge. We do at least have its opening lines.¹¹

Friends, who in the great town of the yellow Acragas dwell on the city's heights, caring about good deeds, I greet you. You see me going about as a divine god, no longer a mortal, honoured amongst all, it seems, and wreathed in ribbons and verdant garlands. [Whenever] I arrive in prosperous towns I am revered by men and women. They follow me in their thousands, asking me where lies their road to advantage, some requesting oracles, while others have asked to hear a healing utterance for ailments of all kinds, long pierced by troublesome [pains].

Thus Empedocles addresses the citizens of his native Acragas, telling how they revere him as a living god, ‘no longer a mortal’. Men and women flock to follow him, pressing him with enquiries, requesting oracles and cures.

Why should we not suppose that the poem was nothing more nor less than a response to these requests, a set of purificatory oracles and ‘healing utterances’?¹²

There is immediate support for this conjecture in the pseudo-Pythagorean Carmen aureum: ‘But abstain from the foods that I spoke of in my Katharmoi and Absolution of the soul.’¹³ This citation, or pseudo-citation, of the author's own Katharmoi invokes it for just the kind of self-purificatory advice that the title itself suggests. And that the allusion is inspired by Empedocles' work of the same name is confirmed just three lines later, where the poem closes with the words ‘You will be an immortal, divine god, no longer a mortal’…, pointedly recalling the famous opening of Empedocles' Katharmoi, ‘You see me going about as a divine god, no longer a mortal’ (b112.4-5). … Whatever the date of this forgery may be, its author clearly knows Empedocles' Katharmoi, and associates it with advice to abstain from certain kinds of food.

That a work with this title should be one dedicated to purificatory advice is unsurprising, since the very word katharmoi means ritual acts of purification. To adherents of the traditional interpretation, it is easy to assume that the poem was one about the wandering spirit's processes of purification, but I know no evidence that the word can mean that:¹⁴ such processes would normally be called katharseis.

Better still, the hypothesis also fits the other two items of evidence known to me for Katharmoi as a literary genre. These two references also resemble the Carmen aureum in fathering the works in question on archaic figures of semi-legendary status. First, Epimenides the Cretan is said to have written Katharmoi, in verse and perhaps also prose,¹⁵ and, although their content is not reported, it can hardly be a coincidence that Epimenides was celebrated above all for his ritual purifications, an expertise that led the Athenians to send for him to purify their city of plague.¹⁶ Second, the remark at Aristophanes, Frogs 1033 that Musaeus taught ‘healing and oracles’ is glossed by a scholiast with the comment that Musaeus ‘composed absolutions [?], initiations, and katharmoi’.¹⁷ Healing and oracles are precisely the two services mentioned by Empedocles at the opening of his Katharmoi. Then why look further for the content of the poem?

Certainly no fragment explicitly attributed to the Katharmoi forces us to look further. Apart from the proem, there are just two such cases. One is b153a: according to Theon of Smyrna (104.1-3), Empedocles ‘hints’ in the Katharmoi that the foetus achieves full human form in seven times seven days. Aetius¹⁸ confirms the report—though not the attribution to the Katharmoi—with the further information that the differentiation of limbs starts at thirty-six days. That Empedocles should only have ‘hinted’ this in the Katharmoi suggests that we are not dealing with an expository account of embryology. We learn from Censorinus¹⁹ (third century ad) that in Greece the pregnant woman does not go out to a shrine before the fortieth day of her pregnancy. This is thought to be linked to the widespread belief that miscarriages are likeliest to occur in the first forty days.²⁰ There is a strong possibility that Empedocles' original remark occurred in the context of ritual advice to pregnant women, perhaps to avoid shrines for the first ‘seven times seven’ days. Here it is important to remember the opening of the Katharmoi, where it is made explicit that the demands for healing and oracles to which Empedocles is responding come from women as well as men.

The other explicit attribution to the Katharmoi—in fact to book ii of the poem—occurs in a fragment first published in 1967, fr. 152 Wright:²¹ ‘For those of them which grow with their roots denser below but their branches more thinly spread …’ Trees, or more generally plants, of this kind were singled out for a reason which cannot now be recovered.²² The context may well have been one concerning the avoidance of certain leaves. According to Plutarch, in a probable but unprovable citation of the Katharmoi, Empedocles urged that all trees should be ‘spared’, but especially the laurel:²³ ‘Keep completely away from the laurel's leaves’ (b140). This has every chance of tying in with Empedocles' views on transmigration—he holds, for example, that the laurel is the best tree to transmigrate into (b127)! But it is significant that here once again, if the link with the injunction about laurel leaves is accepted, the actual fragment may well contain moral or purificatory advice rather than the doctrinal exposition characteristic of the physical poem. To repeat, ritual advice is just what we should expect in a work entitled Katharmoi.

The expectation finds further strong support in the story surrounding fragment b111. We learn that the biographer Satyrus quoted this fragment as confirming the suspicion that Empedocles dabbled in magic.²⁴ Since, according to Apuleius,²⁵ it was Empedocles' Katharmoi that brought upon him just such a suspicion, there is a strong likelihood that b111 is from this poem.²⁶ Significantly, the fragment is once again not a doctrinal exposition but ritual advice: how to influence the weather and to summon up the dead.

b111 uses the second person singular: ‘You [singular] will learn …’ Because the On nature was addressed to an individual, Pausanias, whereas the opening lines of the Katharmoi address the citizens of Acragas in the plural, it has often been thought that any fragments containing the second person singular must be assigned to the former poem. This is a very dubious criterion, since changes of address within a single didactic poem are quite normal. Hesiod's Works and days switches in its first three hundred lines between addresses to the Muses, to Perses, and to the ‘bribe-swallowing princes’.²⁷ That the Katharmoi should, after its opening, move into the second person singular may merely reflect the fact that Empedocles is by now answering the individual requests from his audience of which the proem spoke.

There are no further unambiguously attested fragments of the Katharmoi. But we may, with caution,²⁸ consider as potential fragments of it any citations of Empedocles whose sources explicitly call them katharmoi. The clearest case of this is in Hippolytus,²⁹ who describes prohibitions on marriage and on certain foods as tantamount to teaching the katharmoi of Empedocles. Given this remark, along with the association of the Katharmoi with food prohibitions in the Carmen aureum, it seems safe to assume that the poem carried Empedocles' advice to abstain from slaughter, meat-eating, and perhaps even beans.³⁰ And it seems that abstention from marriage was a further injunction to be found in the same work.³¹

Another plausible such candidate is a fragment preserved by Theon of Smyrna.³² Comparing philosophy as a whole to a religious ritual, Theon calls Plato's five propaedeutic mathematical studies in Republic vii a katharmos, which he immediately proceeds to link with Empedocles' injunction to cleanse oneself by ‘cutting from five springs (in a bowl of) indestructible bronze’ (b143). We are here firmly in the territory of ritual self-purification. Theophrastus' godfearing character, for example, refuses to set out on his daily rounds until he has washed his hands at three springs.³³

Deciding just which other verbatim fragments should be assigned to the Katharmoi is a problem to pursue on another occasion. The argument to which I shall now turn relies on a primarily negative conclusion: there is no reason to attribute to this poem any fragments of Empedocles beyond those offering ritual advice.³⁴

3. THE PROVENANCE OF EMPEDOCLES B115

There is a decree of necessity, an ancient resolution of the gods, sworn by broad oaths, that when one of the daimons which have a share of long life defiles its own limbs, or does wrong and swears a false oath, for thirty thousand years it must wander, away from the blessed ones, being born during that time as every form of mortal creature, exchanging for each other the arduous paths of life. The might of the aether drives it to the sea, the sea spits it out onto the threshold of land, the earth sends it into the rays of the gleaming sun, and the sun hurls it into the whirling aether. One receives it from another, and all hate it. I too am now one of these, a fugitive from the gods and a wanderer, who trust in raving Strife.

These lines (b115),³⁵ which are crucial for explaining the daimon's migrations, have been assigned to the Katharmoi by every editor of Empedocles since Diels.³⁶ The attribution has been questioned by N. van der Ben, and subsequently defended by D. O'Brien.³⁷ But this renewed debate has so far focused excessively on the contexts in which the lines are quoted by our sources, as if one could settle the question of their provenance by counting the allusions in those contexts to katharsis and cognate terms and likewise those to the cosmic cycle. Given the improbability that any ancient reader of Empedocles might have expected the physical poem and the Katharmoi to conflict doctrinally, the provenance of the lines will have mattered less to those who cited them than their value as evidence for Empedocles' views on the katharsis of the soul—a topic on which Platonism had conferred an absolutely pivotal importance.

Plutarch reports that Empedocles used these lines ‘as a preface at the beginning of his philosophy’.³⁸ Is this too vague to be helpful? ‘Philosophy’ certainly might describe the content of the physical poem.³⁹ It might also be appropriate to the Katharmoi, on the traditional view of that poem's content as expository and doctrinal. But it is very much less appropriate if, as I have argued, the Katharmoi was not a doctrinal work but a set of purificatory pronouncements. Indeed, if that suggestion is correct, Plutarch's expression ‘at the beginning of his philosophy’ would immediately gain a much clearer sense. If Empedocles wrote two doctrinal poems, the words ‘his philosophy’ are a desperately vague way of referring to either one of them. But if he wrote just one, they become an entirely natural way of referring to that one.⁴⁰

Plutarch's description in no way indicates that these were the very opening lines of the poem to which they belonged, just that they preceded the philosophy proper. Hence there is little value in the argument⁴¹ that since we have the opening of the Katharmoi and it differs from these lines, they must have opened the physical poem instead. Much more mileage can be got out of the content of the disputed lines. First, it is hardly insignificant that they name five of the six cosmic entities on which Empedocles' physical system is based: the daimon's wanderings are graphically described in terms of its being tossed into and out of each of the four elements in turn; and Strife is named as the cause of its downfall. This at least supports the coherence of the passage with the physical poem.

But far more important, and strangely absent from the debate about its provenance, is the following consideration. In these disputed lines, Empedocles is himself a fallen daimon: ‘I too am now one of these, a fugitive from the gods and a wanderer, who trust in raving Strife.’ Is it credible that these words came in the introductory passage of a poem in whose opening lines Empedocles had moments earlier described himself as ‘a divine god, no longer a mortal’?⁴² Without the straitjacket of the old prejudice that science and religion do not mix, it is hard to believe that anyone would ever have thought of assigning the former text to the Katharmoi. The most natural interpretation is that b115 comes from a poem in which Empedocles classed himself as a fallen daimon still working through its long cycle of transmigrations, whereas in the Katharmoi, opening as it does with his confident self-proclamation as a god, ‘no longer a mortal’, he presented himself as having now completed the cycle and recovered his divinity. I therefore feel a reasonable degree of confidence in placing Empedocles' major fragment on the wanderings of the daimon somewhere in the proem to the On Nature.

Since I first developed this argument several years ago,⁴³ it has received welcome confirmation in the discovery of papyrus fragments from book 1 of Empedocles' On nature.⁴⁴ They include lines denouncing animal slaughter⁴⁵—lines which editors have always hitherto assigned to the Katharmoi. The taboo on slaughter is, famously, one which Empedocles based on his doctrine of transmigration. Hence the transfer of these lines to the opening book of the On nature should do much to obviate any remaining resistance to the conclusion that b115, on the migrations of the daimon, belongs to the proem of that same book.

This conclusion will prove important at a later stage in my argument. Earmarking it for future use, we can now at last turn to Lucretius.

4. LUCRETIUS AND EMPEDOCLES

Numerous echoes of Empedoclean passages have been recognised in Lucretius' poem, with varying degrees of certainty.⁴⁶ It is no part of my purpose to catalogue these. But two observations seem in order. First, the 500 or so extant lines of Empedocles⁴⁷ represent around one-tenth of his poetic output, if we are to trust Diogenes Laertius' figure of 5,000 lines in total,⁴⁸ and even on the most conservative estimates of Empedocles' total output,⁴⁹ not more than one-fifth. Or supposing (as I am inclined to suppose) that Lucretius' interest was exclusively in the On nature, what is extant of that is still likely to be less than a quarter—roughly 450 lines out of 2,000.⁵⁰ This raises the probability that if we had Empedocles' poems intact a great deal more Empedoclean influence would come to light, and our understanding of the DRN be immensely enriched.

Second, I would suggest that Lucretius is likely to owe rather more to Empedocles in terms of poetic technique than is generally recognised. For example, at i 271-97 Lucretius argues for the corporeality of air by means of an intricate analogy between the destructive power of wind and that of water. David West has observed that the number of distinct points of correspondence between the description of the wind and the description of the water greatly exceeds that normally found in the similes of Homer and Apollonius.⁵¹ Lucretius is thus, in West's terminology, a practitioner of the ‘multiple-correspondence simile’, a legacy that he was to pass on to Virgil. What I would myself add is that, although Homer and Apollonius may offer no adequate model for the technique, Empedocles does. In his description of the eye's structure and function as analogous to those of a lantern,⁵² Empedocles reinforces the idea with a set of carefully engineered correspondences between the two halves of the simile.⁵³ As in Lucretius, so already in Empedocles, the multiplicity of correspondences has an argumentative motive, and not merely a descriptive one: the more correspondences there are, the more persuasive the analogy becomes. Here then is a technique, singularly at home in philosophical poetry, which has almost certainly passed from Empedocles, through Lucretius, into the Latin poetic tradition.

Lucretius' reverence for Empedocles is evident in the paean of praise with which he prefaces his criticism of Empedocles' four-element theory at i 716-41:

quorum Acragantinus cum primis Empedocles est
insula quem triquetris terrarum gessit in oris,
quam fluitans circum magnis anfractibus aequor
Ionium glaucis aspargit virus ab undis,
angustoque fretu rapidum mare dividit undis
Aeoliae terrarum oras a finibus eius.
hic est vasta Charybdis et hic Aetnaea minantur
murmura flammarum rursum se colligere iras,
faucibus eruptos iterum vis ut vomat ignis
ad caelumque ferat flammai fulgura rursum.
quae cum magna modis multis miranda videtur
gentibus humanis regio visendaque fertur,
rebus opima bonis, multa munita virum vi,
nil tamen hoc habuisse viro praeclarius in se
nec sanctum magis et mirum carumque videtur.
carmina quin etiam divini pectoris eius
vociferantur et exponunt praeclara reperta,
ut vix humana videatur stripe creatus.
hic tamen et supra quos diximus inferiores
partibus egregie multis multoque minores,
quamquam multa bene ac divinitus invenientes
ex adyto tamquam cordis responsa dedere
sanctius et multo certa ratione magis quam
Pythia quae tripodi a Phoebi lauroque profatur,
principiis tamen in rerum fecere ruinas
et graviter magni magno cecidere ibi casu.

Of these [sc. the four-element theorists] the foremost is Empedocles of Acragas, born within the three-cornered terrestrial coasts of the island [Sicily] around which the Ionian Sea, flowing with its great windings, sprays the brine from its green waves, and from whose boundaries the rushing sea with its narrow strait divides the coasts of the Aeolian land with its waves. Here is destructive Charybdis, and here the rumblings of Etna give warning that they are once more gathering the wrath of their flames so that her violence may again spew out the fire flung from her jaws and hurl once more to the sky the lightning flashes of flame. Although this great region seems in many ways worthy of admiration by the human races, and is said to deserve visiting for its wealth of good things and the great stock of men that fortify it, yet it appears to have had in it nothing more illustrious than this man, nor more holy, admirable, and precious. What is more, the poems sprung from his godlike mind call out and expound his illustrious discoveries, so that he scarcely seems to be born of mortal stock.

But this man and the greatly inferior and far lesser ones whom I mentioned above, although in making their many excellent and godlike discoveries they gave responses, as from the shrine of the mind, in a holier and much more certain way than the Pythia who makes her pronouncements from Apollo's tripod and laurel, nevertheless came crashing down when they dealt with the elementary principles of things. Great as they were, their fall here was a great and heavy one.

This is remarkable praise⁵⁴ to lavish on a philosopher who did, after all, radically misconceive the underlying nature of the world. Where does the emphasis lie? Lucretius speaks highly both of Empedocles' ‘illustrious discoveries’ (praeclara reperta, 732), and of his poetry, which is so sublime as almost to prove his divinity—an honour that in the end Lucretius will reserve for Epicurus alone.⁵⁵ With regard to Empedocles' ‘discoveries’, I am inclined to agree with those who hold that Lucretius is implicitly commending, among other things, the clarity of their exposition, especially by contrast with the obscurities of Heraclitus denounced in the preceding passage.⁵⁶ This, I would further suggest, is supported by the closing remarks in the passage quoted above, where Lucretius expresses his approval both of Empedocles and of his ‘lesser’ colleagues in the pluralist tradition⁵⁷ for revealing their findings ‘in a holier and much more certain way than the Pythia who makes her pronouncements from Apollo's tripod and laurel’ (738-9). This has standardly been understood as crediting those philosophers with an authority comparable to that of an oracle. It would be safer, however, to say that it relies on a contrast—between religious oracles, which Lucretius like any good Epicurean deplores, and the philosopher's rational alternative, delivered ‘as from the shrine of the mind’ (737).⁵⁸ That would amount to a contrast between, on the one hand, the clear, rational and unambiguous assertions of the pluralists, and, on the other, the Delphic ambiguities so characteristic of Heraclitus.⁵⁹ If so, we must be wary of exaggerating the extent to which this eulogy of Empedocles expresses special admiration for his teaching as such. It is largely as an eloquent and straight-talking expositor of his teaching that he is canonised. Empedocles' language may be densely metaphorical (as is Lucretius' own), but at least, as Lucretius sees it, it lacks the multi-layered evasiveness and trickery of Heraclitean prose. About Lucretius' very reserved evaluation of Empedocles' actual teachings I shall say more below.

What purpose is served in this passage by the fulsome praise of Sicily? One object, no doubt, is to compare Empedocles favourably with that other wonder of Sicily, Etna.⁶⁰ But it also has the job of illustrating why Sicily was the birthplace of the four-element theory.⁶¹ The four elements are intricately worked into the travelogue. Empedocles was born within Sicily's ‘terrestrial coasts’ (terrarum … in oris, 717: literally ‘coasts of lands’)—and here terrarum is no ‘otiose addition’ (Bailey), but Lucretius' way of identifying the land of Sicily with the element earth. The elements water and fire are abundantly in evidence in the descriptions of the surrounding sea, of the whirlpool Charybdis, and of the flames of Etna (718-25). Finally (725), those flames are borne ‘to the sky’ (caelum). Now the sky, as the abode both of air and of the heavenly bodies, might in principle symbolise either of the elements air and fire. What surely clinches its identification with air, and thus completes the catalogue of four elements, is the fact that Empedocles himself uses ‘sky’ as a name for his element air (b22.2).⁶²

And the Empedoclean influence goes deeper still. The very idea of using individual phenomena like sea, rain, wind and sun to symbolise the four elemental stuffs is thoroughly Empedoclean. So too is the poetic device of interweaving the four elements into the language of a descriptive passage: we have already seen Empedocles do the same at b115, when he described the tossing of the fallen daimon from aether (= air) to sea, to land, to the sun's rays, and then back once more into the eddies of the aether.

At the very least, then, Lucretius' description of Sicily reveals his intimate knowledge and exploitation of Empedoclean poetry. And it would be unwise to rule out a further possibility: that it is itself a direct imitation of a lost passage of Empedocles.

5. THE ENIGMA OF LUCRETIUS’ PROEM

We are now ready to turn to the most hotly and inconclusively debated passage in Lucretius, the proem to book 1.⁶³ It is structured as follows:

1-20:	praise of Venus as Aeneadum genetrix and the life force of all nature;
21-8:	prayer to Venus to inspire Lucretius' poem, because she alone is responsible for making things pleasing, and because Memmius has always been her favourite;
29-43:	prayer to Venus to intercede with her lover Mars and bring peace to the Roman republic;
44-9:	it is not in the divine nature to concern itself with our affairs;
50-61:	programmatic address to Memmius about the content of the poem;
62-79:	praise of Epicurus' intellectual achievement;
80-101:	attack on the evils of religion, as illustrated by the sacrifice of Iphigeneia;
102-35:	warning to Memmius not to be enticed by false religious tales about the survival and transmigration of the soul;
136-45:	the difficulty of Lucretius' poetic task.

The most enigmatic feature of the proem lies in the first three subdivisions, 1-43. How can Lucretius, as an Epicurean, praise Venus as a controlling force in nature, and even beg her to intervene in human affairs? In Epicureanism, the gods emphatically do not intervene in any way in human affairs—as Lucretius himself paradoxically goes on immediately to point out (44-9 = ii 646-51).

To respond that the proem's treatment of Venus is allegorical is not in itself a solution to the puzzle. As Lucretius himself warns at ii 655-60, allegorical use of divinities' names, e.g. ‘Neptune’ for the sea and ‘Ceres’ for corn, is permissible only if one avoids any false religious implications. Although Venus might, on this principle, get away with symbolising nature, or even perhaps Epicurean pleasure,⁶⁴ the opening address to her as ancestress of the Romans can hardly be judged equally innocent, nor can the prayers to her to intervene in Roman affairs and to inspire Lucretius' poetry.

It is not that these allegorical explanations do not carry any weight at all. I think there is much truth in them. But the most they can do, for readers who have read on and been surprised to learn that this is an Epicurean poem, is mitigate their bafflement. The question remains, what can have impelled Lucretius to start out so misleadingly, undermining exactly that attitude to the gods that the rest of the poem will so energetically promote? It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that he spends the remainder of the poem undoing the damage done by the first forty-three lines.

6. FURLEY'S THESIS

In short, the opening of the proem simply is not like Lucretius. But it is very like Empedocles. In his outstandingly important study of the proem, David Furley has observed the high level of Empedoclean content to be found in it.⁶⁵ My object here will be to augment his observations with further evidence of Empedoclean echoes, but then, in the remainder of the chapter, to propose a very different explanation from his for their presence here.

First, notice the by now familiar technique of working the four elements into a descriptive passage. The poem begins as follows (1-5):

Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas,
alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis
concelebras, per te quoniam genus omne animantum
concipitur visitque exortum lumina solis.

Ancestress of the race of Aeneas, delight of humans and gods, nurturing Venus, who beneath the gliding beacons of the sky pervade the ship-bearing sea and the crop-carrying lands, because it is due to you that every race of living beings is conceived, and born to look upon the sunlight.

Planted in the text already are references to the sky (which we have seen to represent the element air in Empedoclean imagery),⁶⁶ to the heavenly bodies and the sunlight (i.e. fire), to the sea, and to the land. We then launch into a second catalogue of the same four (6-9):

te dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila caeli
adventumque tuum, tibi suavis daedala tellus
summittit flores, tibi rident aequora ponti
placatumque nitet diffuso lumine caelum.

From you, goddess, and your approach the winds and the clouds of the sky flee away. For you the creative earth pushes up sweet flowers. For you the sea's surface laughs, and the sky, made calm, shines with diffused light.

Again, the four elements feature: the winds and clouds of the sky, the earth, the sea, the sunlight. And if all this is still not enough, we need only move on to 29-43, Lucretius' prayer to Venus to intercede with her lover Mars. It has long been recognised that here we have a striking allusion to the joint-protagonists of Empedocles' physical poem, Love and Strife—whom Empedocles himself sometimes calls Aphrodite and Ares.

Furley has noted two other Empedoclean echoes in the proem, to which we will come shortly. But first the question must be asked: why should an Epicurean poem start with an Empedoclean prologue?

It is here that I part company with Furley. He argues that Lucretius' act of piety to Empedocles is the acknowledgement of a philosophical debt. Although Lucretius was himself a committed follower of Epicurus, Furley suggests, he recognised Empedocles as the inaugurator or champion of two traditions to which, as an Epicurean, he too adhered. The first of these is the insistence on absolutely unchanging physical elements. The second is the rejection of a teleological world-view, with all its implications of divine intervention.

But this could hardly explain Lucretius' decision to open with a tribute to Empedocles. No reader of the proems to books iii, v, and vi can doubt that Lucretius' other philosophical debts pale into insignificance when compared with his acknowledged dependence upon Epicurus. Why then would he give his putative philosophical obligation to Empedocles the undeserved and thoroughly misleading prominence that it gains from a position at the poem's opening?

Moreover, the unwritten rules of philosophical allegiance in the ancient world do not normally permit the imputation of authority to anyone other than the founder of your own school, or, at most, to his own acknowledged forerunners.⁶⁷ The Epicurean school was second to none in observing this principle. It seems certain that Empedocles was not regarded by Epicurus or his successors as any sort of philosophical forerunner; and even an acknowledged forerunner like Democritus was treated with limited respect in the school.⁶⁸ Now Lucretius is admittedly in certain ways a non-standard Epicurean, and I shall be arguing in Chapter 3 that he was not a participating member of any Epicurean group. Even so, his declarations of absolute loyalty to Epicurus as the very first philosopher to liberate the human race from fear of the divine⁶⁹ hardly suggest that he was an exception to this usual style of school loyalty. In any case, he certainly knew his Epicurean source texts well enough to be aware of Epicurus' own reserve with regard to his forerunners.

Even on the two philosophical issues picked out by Furley, element theory and anti-teleology, it is doubtful whether Lucretius or any other Epicurean would have been as generous in acknowledging Empedocles' contribution as Furley proposes. Indeed, so far as concerns element theory, Lucretius is emphatic at i 734-41 (translated above pp. 12-13) that this is not a topic on which Empedocles acquitted himself with distinction.

That there is something, singular or plural, that somehow persists through all cosmogonical and other changes is common ground for all physical philosophers from Anaximander on. No doubt Empedocles' elements were more emphatically unchanging than those of his predecessors. At least, he says that as the elements intermingle they both become different things at different times and remain always alike (b17.34-5). He probably means that they form different compound substances but nevertheless retain their own distinctive properties in the mixture. But other interpretations were possible—for example, that in mixtures the elements do retain their original properties, but that these remain dormant until the compounds separate out again. And, at any rate, I see little sign that Lucretius was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on this point. In criticising the four-element theory, he makes no gesture of respect even for the well-advertised indestructibility of Empedocles' elements (b8, b9, b12): on the contrary, his principal ground for rejecting the theory is that stuffs like earth, air, fire, and water are inevitably perishable (i 753-62). As for their unchangeability, he mentions this as no more than a possible interpretation of the theory, and one that would rob it of what little explanatory power it has (i 770-81).

Does Empedocles fare any better in Lucretius' eyes as a champion of anti-teleology? It cannot be denied that Aristotle casts him in that role: in defending the teleological structure of organisms, Aristotle contrasts his view with the zoogonical thesis of Empedocles that originally a set of randomly composed monsters sprang up—graphically described by Empedocles as ‘ox-children man-faced’⁷⁰—of which only the fittest survived. This anticipation of one of the principles of Darwinism has earned Empedocles widespread respect, including, it is sometimes suggested, the respect of the Epicureans. For Lucretius testifies (v 837-77) that they adopted a similar-sounding theory of the survival of the fittest as their basis for the origin of species.

I would not want to deny the probability of a historical link between the Empedoclean and Epicurean theories. But it is a large leap from that to the supposition that the Epicureans acknowledged a debt to Empedocles. Indeed, it can be precisely in those cases where a school is drawing on the ideas of another that it is most at pains to minimise the resemblance and to stress its own originality. This appears to have been the Epicurean attitude to the Empedoclean theory of evolution. Plutarch⁷¹ tells us explicitly that the Epicureans derided Empedocles' ‘ox-children man-faced’. And well they might, for Empedocles' monsters were themselves the bizarre product of random combinations of limbs and organs that in an even earlier stage had sprung up and wandered about on their own!⁷² There is nothing like this in the Epicurean theory, as we hear about it from Lucretius; and I can see no attempt in Lucretius book v to restore to Empedocles the credit which the Epicurean school traditionally denied him.⁷³

Indeed, since Lucretius certainly knew Empedocles' physical poem at first hand and did not have to rely exclusively on Aristotelian-influenced doxography,⁷⁴ it certainly should not be assumed that he read Empedocles as a pioneering opponent of teleology. If Aristotle chooses Empedocles rather than the far more suitable Democritus for that role, it is surely because Empedocles, perhaps alone among the Presocratics, has actually supplied him with an illustration of what a non-teleological explanation of an organism would look like. It does not follow that Empedocles' own intention, taken in context, came over as anti-teleological.⁷⁵ As is well known, he is supposed to have postulated four stages of animal evolution, of which the compounding of the ox-children man-faced was only the second. Either in the first stage, that of solitary animal parts, or perhaps in the third stage, that of the so-called ‘whole-natured forms’, he described the creation of individual animal parts in terms that could hardly have won him the friendship of an anti-teleologist like Lucretius. In b84, already mentioned above, Empedocles describes how Aphrodite⁷⁶ cunningly created the eye, just like someone fitting together a lantern for the preconceived purpose of lighting their way at night. Even if one strips from this the figurative personification of Love as a divine artisan, one is left with the impression of an intelligent and purposive creative force. The architectonic role of Love in Empedocles' cosmic cycle makes it a very hard task indeed to portray him as a pure mechanist.

Why, then, does Lucretius nevertheless speak approvingly of Empedocles' ‘discoveries’ (i 732-3)? To see this in perspective, it is important to note that only four lines later he speaks with equal approval of the ‘discoveries’ of other, unnamed natural philosophers whom he brackets with Empedocles. Lucretius is not, in effect, singling out Empedocles as a uniquely important authority but is expressing an Epicurean's qualified respect for the work of the Presocratic natural philosophers in general. Following Epicurus, he applauds the Presocratic tendency to seek physical, as opposed to theological, explanations for such cosmic phenomena as celestial motions, eclipses, and earthquakes. The Epicurean school's method of handling these phenomena was to catalogue with approval all the available physical explanations of each, adding that any or all might be correct, so that to choose between them would be arbitrary and unscientific. Both Epicurus, in his Letter to Pythocles, and Lucretius, in books v (509-770) and vi, thus come to list as possibilities a range of explanatory theses deriving in large measure from the Presocratic philosophers, including Empedocles. For example, both Epicurus (Letter to Pythocles 101) and Lucretius (vi 204-12) accept as one of the possible explanations of lightning the thesis of Empedocles (a63) that it is fire from the sun trapped in the clouds. It is, I am convinced, only at this level of detail that the Epicureans, Lucretius included, are prepared to applaud the ‘discoveries’ of Empedocles.

7. EMPEDOCLES AS LITERARY FOREBEAR

If, then, Lucretius is not thanking Empedocles for the content of the DRN, perhaps he is thanking him for its form. There are, after all, well-recognised formal correspondences between the two hexameter poems.

Take first their titles. De rerum natura is usually thought to translate [Perì phuseōs], a title conventionally assigned to many Greek cosmological texts, including Empedocles' physical poem, as well of course as being the title of Epicurus' great prose treatise on which, I shall argue in Chapters 4-5, Lucretius was relying. As a matter of fact, though, one late source⁷⁷ reports Empedocles' title as On the nature of the things there are …, which would be closer still to De rerum natura. There is no independent evidence to confirm this title, but it seems highly plausible. The simple ‘On nature’ is so widespread that it has been suspected of being, at least for fifth-century bc authors, no more than a standard title assigned to their works by later scholars.⁷⁸ But someone like Empedocles who wrote at least two poems, not to mention prose works, is less likely to have left them untitled, and we have seen no reason not to accept the title Katharmoi as entirely authentic. As for On the nature of the things there are, his near-contemporary Melissus published a work entitled On nature, or on what there is …, the singular ‘what there is’ proclaiming his Eleatic monism. That Melissus' reported title is authentic is confirmed by the parody published by Empedocles' follower Gorgias, On what there is not, or on nature. … Against this background, Empedocles' choice of On the nature of the things there are, with its plural form …, as a title for what was above all else a pluralist manifesto, makes ready sense.

Apart from the titles, there are other striking formal resemblances. In particular, Lucretius' poem is addressed to a friend, Memmius, as Empedocles' physical poem is to his friend Pausanias. And both at certain points turn to address an invocation to the muse Calliope.⁷⁹

I am now ready to unveil my own hypothesis: the proem of the DRN is, and is meant to be recognised as, an imitation of the proem to Empedocles' physical poem.

The letter of Cicero with which I opened the present chapter constitutes strong evidence that contemporary readers could be expected to recognise this imitation, if such it was. For it attests a literary climate in which Empedocles was on the list of acknowledged Greek authors,⁸⁰ familiar to the well-educated either through direct acquaintance or through Latin translations and imitations. (Even if other Roman literati shared Cicero's inability to struggle through to the end of Sallustius' Empedoclea, many could be assumed, like him, at least to have read the opening.) Above all, it shows us Lucretius being thought about by his contemporaries in an Empedoclean context.

On my hypothesis, Lucretius' purpose is to establish from the outset the precise Greek literary mantle he is assuming (rather as Virgil's Aeneid announces with the opening words arma virumque cano that it will be a combined Iliad-Odyssey). Lucretius, in his poetic manifesto at i 921-50 and his appreciation of Ennius' pedigree at i 117-26 (see pp. 31-2 below), shows himself to be no less concerned with literary pedigree than other Roman poets of his era.

To amplify the hypothesis: Lucretius is imitating Empedocles' proem, but adapting it, as he goes along, (a) to a Roman patriotic theme, and (b) to Epicurean philosophy, at the same time steering us gently away from Empedocles' actual doctrines. His object? To announce himself as the Roman Empedocles—the great Roman poet of nature. In short, he is laying claim to a literary, not a philosophical, heritage. For there can be little doubt that it was to Empedocles, rather than to the only other available candidate, Parmenides, that Lucretius looked as his great Greek forebear in the tradition of cosmological poetry. This was certainly the comparison that regularly occurred to Roman readers,⁸¹ and rightly so. (I shall be exploring Empedoclean features of Lucretius' writing not only in the present chapter but also in Chapter 2, §5, and in Chapter 7, §6.)

A glaring weakness of this hypothesis will already be obvious. We do not have the proem to Empedocles' On nature.⁸² How then can we say anything at all about its resemblance or otherwise to Lucretius' proem?

My answer is twofold. First, we are not altogether without evidence about its content, as I hope to show. Indeed, there is little doubt that some of our familiar fragments of Empedocles are in fact from it. Moreover, thanks to the exciting papyrus find that has been made since I first formulated the argument of this chapter,⁸³ we now have considerably more of Empedocles' proem than was available even a few years ago. The new fragments are believed all to come from a single scroll, which contained book i of Empedocles' physical poem.⁸⁴

Second, if the proposed hypothesis proves capable of explaining features of Lucretius' proem that otherwise remain inexplicable, that in itself would provide some degree of confirmation.

i 1-49. I shall begin my defence of the hypothesis with a re-examination of the opening lines (translated above p. 17):

Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas,
alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis
concelebras …

The linguistic case for a direct Empedoclean model seems to me a rather strong one. The first two words are, of course, a distinctively Roman invocation. But hominum divomque voluptas already bears an Empedoclean fingerprint. The identical phrase recurs, with a small change of syntax, at vi 92-5, in an address to Calliope that has long been recognised as an Empedoclean touch on Lucretius' part.⁸⁵Hominum divomque could translate some variant on the regular hexameter ending … used in Homer's formulaic designation of Zeus as ‘father of men and gods’. Such reworkings of Homeric locutions are an integral feature of Empedocles' poetry.⁸⁶ And voluptas picks up … ‘Delight’, used by Empedocles, like ‘Aphrodite’, as a title for his goddess Love (b17.24). Next, alma, ‘nurturing’, might represent … ‘life-giving’, an attested Empedoclean epithet for Aphrodite (b151); but as a matter of fact there is a much better candidate among the new fragments of Empedocles. These include (in a fragmentary context) the adjective … ‘nurturing’, commonly used in Greek poetry as a stock epithet for divinities.⁸⁷ In addition to being virtually synonymous with the Latin almus, it also shares its leading syllable. …

We then proceed, in 2-9 (quoted p. 17 above), to the elaborate double interweaving of the four elements into the hymn. For Lucretius to expect any reader to identify these as the Empedoclean four in the very opening lines of the poem, without any prior clue, would be wildly optimistic. It is far more credible that he found them already present in his Empedoclean original. We have already noted that interweaving the four elements into a descriptive passage is an authentic Empedoclean device.

Line 3 is remarkable for its pair of compound adjectives: quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis … Lucretius has a well-known penchant for these quasi-Greek formations,⁸⁸ and we will see in the next chapter how they sometimes combine with Greek loan words to build up an evocative context that transports his reader to the Greek world. But there are two unusual features of this particular pair. First, both accurately translate actual Greek compound adjectives. …⁸⁹ Second, although the bold deployment of compound adjectives in pairs, or even in trios, is among the most prominent features of Empedocles' verse,⁹⁰ it is one Empedoclean practice which elsewhere Lucretius studiously avoids. In his whole poem, in fact, such a grouping occurs uniquely here.⁹¹ The double idiosyncrasy suggests that in line 3 some exceptional motivation is at work. The supposition that Lucretius was consciously seeking to capture and reproduce in Latin an actual Empedoclean line would provide such a motivation. In fact, his line practically tumbles unaided into a characteristically Empedoclean Greek hexameter. …⁹²

Lines 10-20 present Lucretius' entrancing portrait of the reproductive frenzy which Venus inspires throughout the animal kingdom in spring. Then in line 21 Venus emerges as the controller of all natura, in the passage (21-8) which also, in line 25, effectively delivers to us the title of the poem:

quae quoniam rerum naturam sola gubernas
nec sine te quicquam dias in luminis oras
exoritur neque fit laetum neque amabile quicquam,
te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse
quos ego de rerum natura pangere conor
Memmiadae nostro, quem tu, dea, tempore in omni
omnibus ornatum voluisti excellere rebus.
quo magis aeternum da dictis, diva, leporem.

Since you alone control the natura of things, and without you nothing springs forth into the realm of light or becomes joyful and delectable, I am eager for you to be my partner in writing the verses which I am trying to set out about the nature of things (de rerum natura) for our friend Memmius, whom you, goddess, have wanted to be at all times outstanding in all things. All the more then, goddess, bestow on my words an everlasting charm.

As Diskin Clay has pointed out, in this context natura (21) tends towards the sense ‘birth’ (through its association with nasci, ‘be born’) rather than simply ‘nature’, thus echoing Empedocles' characteristic use of [phusis] with precisely the same shift from the more familiar ‘nature’ to ‘birth’.⁹³

Leaving aside these linguistic and conceptual echoes, it is in any case eminently plausible that Empedocles' poem should have opened with a hymn to Aphrodite. Hesiod's Works and days, with its opening hymn to Zeus, would constitute ample precedent within the tradition of didactic poetry; and it goes without saying that Aphrodite would be Empedocles' preferred divinity. In b128 he makes it a mark of the Golden Age, in which among other things there was no animal slaughter, that Aphrodite was the only divinity worshipped:

Nor did they have Ares or Strife as a god, nor was Zeus or Cronos or Poseidon their king, but Cypris was queen … Her they propitiated with pious images …

I am not suggesting that this fragment itself comes from Empedocles' proem. But it does reveal a feature of his religious thought that Lucretius could himself use to advantage—namely the idea that the identity of a person's divinities is a function of that person's own moral state.⁹⁴ If you are a peaceful person, Ares is not your god, but Aphrodite is. Lucretius, as an Epicurean, must hold the somewhat similar view that the gods' true nature is peaceful, and that people's tendency to endow them with angry and warlike temperaments is a projection of their own moral maladjustment.⁹⁵ The essence of god is blessed detachment; anger, jealousy and the like are accretions misleadingly superimposed by us on that essence.

This may offer us a lead on the much debated lines 44-9, in which Lucretius presents the correct Epicurean view of the gods as tranquil and detached:

omnis enim per se divom natura necessest
immortali aevo summa cum pace fruatur
semota ab nostris rebus seiunctaque longe;
nam privata dolore omni, privata periclis,
ipsa suis pollens opibus, nil indiga nostri,
nec bene promeritis capitur neque tangitur ira.

For the entire nature of the gods, in its essence, must of necessity enjoy everlasting life along with perfect peace, removed and far separated from our affairs. Without any pain, without dangers, strong through its own resources, with no need of us, it is neither won over by favours nor touched by anger.

These lines occur also at ii 646-51, where they are superficially much more at home, and many editors believe that they are an intrusive gloss in the proem:⁹⁶ it seems anomalous for Lucretius to stress the total detachment of the gods from human affairs directly after his prayer to Venus to intervene and save the Roman republic from war. And yet the sudden reversal is too characteristic of Lucretius to be lightly dismissed. Even when these same lines recur in book ii, they are used similarly to reverse the religious implications of what precedes, this time a seductive allegorical reading of the worship of Cybele as symbolising (at least in its last lines) her direct interest in human affairs.

Imagine now in addition an original Empedoclean proem in which Aphrodite, as Love, is asked to propitiate Ares, as Strife. What Empedocles would have intended by this is not so much an attempt to interfere with the inevitable progression of the cosmic cycle, as a plea to human beings to let their peaceful tendencies calm and suppress the bloodthirsty side of their nature.⁹⁷ If so, Lucretius would welcome this essentially moral use of myth and prayer, and could readily apply it to the current war-torn state of his own country. But since Empcdocles regards Ares/Strife as a real, if less palatable, god, Lucretius might very naturally want to add an Epicurean corrective: that Venus' hoped-for propitiation of Mars represents no more than people's return to the one true conception of the divine nature as tranquil and detached, instead of angry and warlike. Hence the connexion of thought found in the text: Venus, make Mars peaceful, because that alone is the essential nature of divinity (omnis enim per se divom natura …). Or, translated into Epicurean moral terms: Romans, let your belief in a peaceful god overcome your belief in a warlike god, because peacefulness is the true essence of godlike happiness. The connexion of thought could no doubt have been made clearer; but I would be reluctant to rob Lucretius of this important Epicurean modification to Empedoclean theology.

By this stage, it should be noted, I am no longer suggesting direct translation or line-by-line imitation of Empedocles' proem on Lucretius' part, but the deployment of the same sequence of themes as occurred in it, for increasingly Epicurean purposes.

i 50-61. The next section of Lucretius' proem is a programmatic address to Memmius. He asks Memmius to give him his full attention—perhaps an echo of the passage that contained Empedocles' surviving line ‘Listen to me, Pausanias, son of wise Anchiteus’ (b1). He then proceeds to outline the content of the poem. He will explain to Memmius the character of the heaven and the gods, and the elements (56-7)

unde omnis natura creet res auctet alatque
quove eadem rursum natura perempta resolvat.

… from which nature creates, increases, and nurtures all things, and into which that same nature once more resolves them when they are destroyed.

After this he spends four lines naming his cosmic first principles (genitalia corpora, semina rerum, etc.).⁹⁸

This dual process, whereby things combine and are once more dissolved into their constituents, bears a strong formal resemblance to Empedocles' own programmatic description in b17, a passage that is explicitly attested by Simplicius as coming from the opening of the physical poem.⁹⁹ Not only do we have Simplicius' attestation to that effect, but the new papyrus find includes a fragment which at its beginning coincides with lines 31-5 of b17 and then continues it for another 34 lines. Thanks to a line number … preserved in the margin at the end of the new fragment, we can now say that the opening couplet of fragment 17 was probably lines 233-4 of the poem: …

I will tell a double tale. For at one time there grew to be just one thing from many, and at another it grew apart once more to be many out of one.

The symmetrical two-way nature of the process is emphasised repeatedly in similarly balanced antitheses for a further fifteen lines,¹⁰⁰ after which Empedocles, like Lucretius, proceeds to name the cosmic principles underlying the process—the four elements, plus Love and Strife. Empedocles' repetitiveness, a device for emphasising the eternality of his cosmic cycle, is understandably not reproduced by Lucretius. But in other respects the formal parallelism of the two programmatic passages is striking.

It begins to look highly plausible that Empedocles' proem to On nature, having opened with a hymn to Aphrodite, then continued with a programmatic address to Pausanias, of which b17 formed a part. Such a structure would, naturally enough, mimic the opening of Hesiod's Works and days, where a short hymn to Zeus is immediately followed by a personal address to Perses.

Given our new knowledge of Empedocles' line numbering, this hypothesis would mean that the hymn to Aphrodite and the personal address to Pausanias occupied around 230 lines.¹⁰¹ Is this implausibly long? I do not think so. Empedocles is a wordy and repetitive writer, as the new fragments amply confirm. And we have no way of guessing how much personal detail was included in the address to Pausanias (the Hesiodic model would have permitted plenty).¹⁰²

i.62-79. lucretius' next section is his praise of Epicurus' intellectual achievement.¹⁰³ At a time when mankind was wretchedly oppressed by religion, a certain Greek became the first (primum Graius homo, 66) to stand up against its tyranny. Such were his mental powers that he was able to break through the ‘flaming walls of the world’ and traverse with his intellect the measureless universe. By reporting back to us the laws that bind and limit natural processes, he has broken the power of religion.

Once more there is a clear Empedoclean model, b129, almost certainly referring to Pythagoras:

There was among them a man of extraordinary knowledge, possessing a vast treasury of understanding, and master of every kind of wise deed. For when he reached out with all his understanding he easily saw everything there is, over ten and twenty human generations.

As Furley has pointed out,¹⁰⁴ the Lucretian passage unmistakably recalls the Empedoclean. Both men are great historical figures, too august to be named. And both are praised for their intellectual achievement in breaking through the boundaries of ordinary human experience—Pythagoras for his recollection of his former incarnations,¹⁰⁵ Epicurus for his grasp of the nature of the infinite universe beyond our own world.

Doctrinally, it should be noticed, Lucretius and Empedocles are veering ever further apart. Epicurus' discoveries, which secured his victory over religion, are taking the place of an Empedoclean religious doctrine that is anathema to Lucretius, the doctrine of transmigration.

i 80-101. There follows Lucretius' direct attack on the evils of religion, illustrated with the example of Agamemnon's sacrifice of his own daughter Iphigeneia.

Furley is right to point out the clear reminiscence of Empedocles b137, in which Empedocles attacks the sin of animal slaughter with the example of a father unwittingly sacrificing his own son, who has transmigrated into the body of an ox. There is no detailed linguistic imitation, but the close functional parallelism of the two pathetic scenes of sacrifice should leave little doubt that the one passage is written with the other in mind. (Lucretius' description does not, incidentally, appear to be directly modelled on any of the accounts of Iphigeneia's sacrifice extant in Greek tragedy.)

That b137 came from Empedocles' physical poem, and not from the Katharmoi, was until recently a highly unorthodox proposal. Now, however, we have the new papyrus fragments from the opening book of the physical poem, and they include b139, where the speaker expresses his regret that he did not perish before his wicked complicity in the slaughter and consumption of animals. So close is the thematic link between b137 and b139 that they have regularly been assumed to derive from a single original context. That context can now be identified as book i of the physical poem, and very probably its proem.¹⁰⁶

i 102-35. Lucretius continues with a warning to Memmius not to be confused by superstitious tales, such as those about the survival and transmigration of the soul.

Why did he choose to include the topic of transmigration in his proem? In view of all the Empedoclean echoes we have already witnessed, it can hardly be a coincidence that Empedocles likewise outlined his beliefs about transmigration in his proem. It is here that I can at last call upon the findings of §§2-3 of this chapter, in which I defended the attribution of b115, Empedocles' explanation of his doctrine of transmigration, to the proem of his On nature. If I am right, and Lucretius' attack on transmigration is an intended counterpart to Empedocles' exposition of the doctrine at the corresponding point in his own proem, he has now moved yet further in distancing himself philosophically from his principal literary model. Where previously we saw him adapting themes from Empedocles' proem to his Epicurean philosophy, he is now presenting his own matching passage not as an adaptation of Empedocles but as a direct antidote to his teachings.

In the course of making this point, Lucretius names Ennius as the author of just the kind of confusion that he is condemning. Somehow Ennius managed to believe both in transmigration and in the sojourn of departed souls in Hades. The latter is an explicit reference to the dream in which Ennius, in his own proem to the Annales, had described meeting the shade of Homer. However, Lucretius allows, Ennius must be given his due as the great innovator who brought Greek poetry to the medium of the Latin language: ‘… our own Ennius, the first to bring down from lovely Helicon the enduringly-leaved crown which was to achieve glory throughout the Italian peoples’.

Here we should note Lucretius' concern with literary pedigree, and specifically with Ennius' pioneering role in the task which he is himself now engaged in, that of re-creating for Latin readers the poetic genres of the Greeks. There is in fact little doubt that the dream passage in Ennius' own proem is being directly echoed in Lucretius' lines.¹⁰⁷ Lucretius is here distancing himself from Ennius' beliefs, while revering his poetry, in a way that pointedly parallels his treatment of Empedocles.¹⁰⁸ Anyone who may doubt the appropriateness of my distinction between a ‘literary’ and a ‘philosophical’ debt to Empedocles should note that just such a distinction is operating here with regard to Ennius.

i 136-45. Finally we come to the closing section of Lucretius' proem, in which he stresses the magnitude of his poetic task—a task made harder, he says, by the deficiencies of the Latin language and the novelty of the subject matter. It is overwhelmingly tempting to correlate this with the group of fragments (b8-11, b15) in which Empedocles deplores the imprecision of ordinary language in speaking of things' being born and dying, where there is in reality only combination and separation, but adds that he will nevertheless follow the convention. The shared theme of how to cope with the deficiencies of one's own language¹⁰⁹ constitutes a strong link between the two passages. We have no explicit attribution of these fragments to Empedocles' proem, but b8 is at least cited by Simplicius as coming from the opening book of On nature; and even without the Lucretian parallel the proem has always seemed the likeliest location.

8. EMPEDOCLES' PROEM

A little earlier we arrived at the informed guess that Empedocles' proem to On nature opened with a hymn to Aphrodite, followed by a programmatic address to Pausanias. We can now, in the light of our subsequent findings, ask how it went on.

Lucretius' proem offers the following sequence of topics in its latter part (62-145):

(a) Epicurus' intellectual achievement and defeat of religion;

(b) the evils of religion;

(c) the folly of uncritically believing religious tales, such as those about transmigration;

(d) the magnitude of Lucretius' poetic task.

The thematic link between the first three is a perfectly satisfactory one, and the last is, if not directly connected, still an appropriate enough topic to address in a proem. And yet there is something disquietingly specific, not to say arbitrary, about the third topic. Why go to such lengths to criticise the transmigration thesis in particular, when there are countless other offending doctrines? Is it merely in order to introduce a heavily qualified tribute to Ennius?¹¹⁰ My preferred explanation has been that the choice and sequence of topics was in some measure dictated by a further consideration, Lucretius' desire to reproduce the thematic structure of Empedocles' proem. One incidental by-product has been the materials for a scissors-and-paste reconstruction of the latter part of Empedocles' own proem. Now stand back and look at the result. We have supplied Empedocles with the following fluent sequence of topics:

(a) Pythagoras' achievement in recalling past incarnations: an appeal to authority for the doctrine of transmigration;

(b) the evils of animal slaughter, illustrated by the unwitting sacrifice of a deceased and transmigrated son: the moral importance of the doctrine of transmigration;

(c) the origin and nature of transmigration itself;

(d) the folly of being misled by ordinary linguistic usage into supposing that anything literally dies.

This time the thematic coherence of the sequence (a)-(d) is extraordinary. It is much more tight-knit than the corresponding passage in Lucretius, and tells a complete story of its own, one thematically parallel to the Lucretian passage, yet utterly unlike it in detailed content. What is more, the denial of literal birth and death with which it ends not only gives a philosophical basis to the transmigration doctrine that precedes it, but also prepares the ground for the physical exposition to follow, which will likewise be founded on the Parmenidean tenet that nothing literally comes to be or perishes.¹¹¹

This emergence of a reconstructed Empedoclean proem with a coherence and vitality of its own is an additional windfall, which lends welcome support to my hypothesis about Lucretius' proem, quite apart from what it promises to teach us about Empedocles himself.

9. CONCLUSION

The nature of my case has been essentially cumulative. Every main stage of Lucretius' proem has proved to correlate with an Empedoclean original. The first part reads as if it were closely imitating an Empedoclean hymn, while the remainder sustains a virtually unbroken series of thematic links with known or attested passages of Empedocles. Moreover, every one of those Empedoclean originals can plausibly be located in the proem of his On nature, either on independent evidence, or through its thematic coherence with passages that have already been located there.

Lucretius is the servant of two masters. Epicurus is the founder of his philosophy; Empedocles is the father of his genre. It is the unique task of Epicureanism's first poet to combine these two loyalties. And that task is what gives his proem its very distinctive character.

Notes

1. This was the standard punctuation until the late nineteenth century. The repunctuation, with its aposiopesis sed cum veneris (unique, but cf. partial parallels at Ad Att. xii 5a and xiv 20.3), appears to have been introduced by R. Y. Tyrrell in 1886, in his revised text of Cicero's Letters (Tyrrell (1885-1901)), but without offering any evidence or argument—since when it has been repeated, without comment, by all editors.

2. The range of literary influences on Lucretius was considerably enlarged by the finding of Kenney (1970).

3. Furley (1970), discussed below; also Bollack (1959).

4. For ‘aether’, rather than ‘air’, as Empedocles' chosen designation of this element, see Kingsley (1995), ch. 2.

5. The traditional belief that zoogony took place in both halves of this cycle, for which see especially O'Brien (1969), has been powerfully challenged by Bollack (1965-9), Hölscher (1965), Solmsen (1965), and Long (1974), and ably defended by Graham (1988).

6. E.g. Kahn (1960), Barnes (1979) ii 93, Wright (1981), Osborne (1987), Inwood (1992), Kingsley (1995); reservations in Long (1966).

7. Osborne (1987).

8. Cf. its further development in Inwood (1992), pp. 8-19. The reply to Osborne and Inwood in O'Brien (1995) is unfortunately timed: it contains news of the recent papyrus find (see pp. 10 and 28 below), but not the specific information that this now virtually proves at least one ‘Katharmic’ fragment to belong to On nature.

9. See Osborne (1987), pp. 28-9 on the unreliability of the figure 5,000. But as for the separation of the two titles, there is no compelling reason to doubt Diogenes' reliability, especially when no ancient source contradicts him on the point.

10. Mansfeld (1994b), which should also be consulted for its further arguments for the existence of two separate poems. Of course his evidence is not strictly incompatible with the thesis that there was one poem, whose proponents may reply that this was that one poem. But it is uncomfortable for them, since it means that, if they are right, Katharmoi was the official title, contrary to the great bulk of the ancient citations.

11. Empedocles b112. The square-bracketed words represent Greek words apparently corrupt or missing in the quotation as preserved. Here and elsewhere, I use the Diels/Kranz (1951-2) numbering of Empedocles' fragments, although a significantly better text is now available in the valuable edition of Wright (1981). Since the many available numerations are, as I shall argue, all equally misleading as regards the apportionment of fragments between the two poems, it is better for now simply to stick to the standard one.

12. For the scope and content of the relevant notions of pollution and purification, see Parker (1983). I have no particular suggestion to make about the function of the ‘oracles’. The evidence of a purificatory role for oracles is meagre (Parker (1983), p. 86), and I would guess that it is Empedocles' assumed divinity that makes this an appropriate designation for his pronouncements.

13. Carmen aureum 67-8, in Young (1971), 103-4. …

14. The use of [Katharmoi] is usefully surveyed by Guthrie (1969), pp. 244-5.

15. 3a2-3 DK.

16. 3a1, 2, 4, 8 DK.

17. 2a6 DK. There is a close parallel at Plato, Rep. ii 364e-365a. …

18. Aetius v 21.1 = Empedocles a83.

19. Censorinus, De die natali 11.7.

20. See Parker (1983), p. 48.

21. Wright (1981), pp. 151 and 298; not, of course, to be found in Diels/Kranz (1951-2).

22. According to Theophrastus, HP 16.4, all plants have their roots more densely packed than their parts above ground, but some, e.g. the olive tree, have a particularly dense mass of slender roots.

23. Plut. Quaest. conv. 646d, see preamble to b140 DK.

24. DL viii 59.

25. Apuleius, Apol. 27.

26. This attribution is supported, as Inwood (1992), p. 16 has shown, by the fact that Clement (Strom. vi 30.1-3) directly associates b111 with the opening lines of the Katharmoi.

27. See further, Osborne (1987), pp. 31-2, who appositely compares Lucretius' own switches of address.

28. b139, which in Sedley (1989a) I incautiously left in the Katharmoi, can now be shown to belong to the physical poem: see p. 30 below.

29. Hippolytus, Ref. vii 30.3-4; see preamble to b110 in Diels/Kranz.

30. Empedocles b141, carrying the Pythagorean advice to abstain from beans, is condemned as inauthentic by Wright (1981), p. 289, perhaps rightly.

31. Hippolytus loc. cit. presents the advice not to marry as itself Empedoclean: ‘You are dissolving marriages made by God, following the doctrines of Empedocles, in order to preserve the work of Love as one and undivided. For according to Empedocles, marriage divides the one and makes many.’ This is a curious view to take of marriage, although it could well apply to the family.

32. Theon of Smyrna 14-15. …

33. Theophrastus, Char. 16.2. See Parker (1983), pp. 226-7. Cf. Apollonius Rhodius iii 860, where Medea, before preparing an ointment which confers invulnerability, bathes herself in seven streams.

34. I agree with Kingsley (1996), p. 109 that the Katharmoi must have contained some indication of how it is the facts of transmigration that make meat-eating a sin. But Empedocles' declared celebrity at the time of writing this poem hardly suggests that he would need to do very much explaining of his doctrine. I certainly see no necessity on this ground to attribute any specific known fragment (e.g. b137, as Kingsley suggests) to it, beyond those I have listed.

35. I have avoided engaging with the textual difficulties of this passage, which are well discussed by Wright (1981). They do not affect any of the issues I am addressing here.

36. This of course applies to Inwood (1992) only in so far as he identifies the Katharmoi with the whole of Empedocles' poetic œuvre.

37. Van der Ben (1975), pp. 16ff.; O'Brien (1981).

38. Plut., De exilio 607c. …

39. Kingsley (1996) argues, in reply to Sedley (1989a), that ‘philosophy’ to Plutarch would normally mean the kind of moral precepts, tinged with myth and religion, that are associated with the Katharmoi. This may not seem much of a challenge to my position, since I argue that there was a good deal of this kind of material in On nature. But Kingsley's claim is that ‘philosophy’ is precisely the word Plutarch would use to distinguish the ‘philosophical’ Katharmoi from the other, merely ‘physical’ poem. However, his evidence crumbles on examination. At De gen. Socr. 580c Plutarch's speaker Galaxidorus does (on a plausible restoration of the text) say that Pythagoras' philosophy, already full of ‘visions and myths and religious dread’, became positively ‘Bacchic’ in the hands of Empedocles. But in no way does this, as Kingsley seems to think, delimit what Plutarch would mean by the expression ‘Empedocles' philosophy’, and thus exclude physics from it. Plutarch's other speakers often make it abundantly clear that, like anybody else, they regard ‘philosophy’ as including physics (De def. or. 420b, De facie 942b) and logic (De Is. et Os. 387a), as well as contemplation of first principles (ib. 382d-e). And although, as Kingsley notes, at De poet. aud. 14e and 15f, Plutarch recommends the couching of philosophy in versified myth as a didactic device, that tells us nothing about what he means by the word ‘philosophy’, especially when at least one of his speakers, Theon (De Pyth. or. 406e), takes an almost diametrically opposed view of philosophy.

40. Cf. Osborne (1987), pp. 29ff.

41. Van der Ben (1975), p. 16.

42. b112.4, reinforced by b113.2 (‘if I am superior to frequently-perishing mortal human beings’), if, as Sextus' juxtaposition of b113 with b112 suggests, it is also from the Katharmoi. In Empedocles' world, even the generated gods perish eventually, i.e. at the end of each cosmic cycle: hence they are not immortal but ‘long-lived’ (b21.12, b23.8; cf. b115.5 on the daimons). By contrast, mortals are ‘frequently-perishing’, … see Wright (1981), p. 269.

43. In Sedley (1989a).

44. The exciting new Strasbourg papyrus of Empedocles has its editio princeps in Martin/Primavesi (1998). Although, at the time of completing the present book, I had not seen this edition, Oliver Primavesi was kind enough to send me a copy of his habilitationsschrift (the basis of Primavesi (forthcoming)), and both he and Alain Martin have been extremely generous in keeping me informed about their work.

45. b139, see n. 107 below.

46. Esp. Furley (1970); also Kranz (1944), Castner (1987), Gale (1994a), pp. 59-75. I have not seen Jobst (1907), but I understand from Don Fowler that he anticipated Kranz's most important findings. For other studies, see Tatum (1984), p. 178 n. 5.

47. This figure tries to take some account of the new papyrus find. I understand from the editors, Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi, that they have detected in them some new examples of locutions imitated by Lucretius.

48. DL viii 77; for discussion see Osborne (1987), pp. 28-9.

49. Wright (1981), p. 21.

50. 2,000 lines seems to be the figure for the length of the physical poem given by the Suda, s.v. ‘Empedocles’ (= Empedocles a2 DK), despite the slightly odd grammar.

51. West (1970).

52. Empedocles b84. For discussion see Wright (1981), pp. 240-3, Sedley (1992b).

53. These are contained principally in the close linguistic parallelism of lines 4-5 with the final two lines. For comparable prose uses of complex analogy in Hippocratic authors, cf. Lloyd (1966), pp. 345-8.

54. Contrast Edwards (1989), who takes this passage and others in Lucretius as treating Empedocles with a certain disdain.

55. First at iii 15. It is unwise to be too confident that Lucretius is alluding to Empedocles' own profession of divinity at the beginning of the Katharmoi, if, as I would maintain, his interest is otherwise focused entirely on Empedocles' On nature. But the legend of Empedocles' plunge into Etna in a bid to establish his own divinity was probably well enough known by this date to give the remark extra point (cf. Wright (1981), pp. 15-16 and Hor. Ars poet. 463-6).

56. i 635-44, cf. Kollmann (1971), and especially Tatum (1984).

57. The reference is vague, but perhaps picks up the proponents of two elements in i 712-13 as well as the four-element theorists of 714-15. On the Epicurean background to their belittling description, see pp. 142-3 below.

58. On this reading, Lucretius' words distance him from approval of (literal) oracles as effectively as the way in which, for example, those who praise the ‘university of life’ distance themselves from approval of (literal) universities. Thus Lucretius' application of oracular language to his own pronouncements, here and at v 111-12 (fundere fata), is ironic: cf. Obbink (1996), pp. 568-9, commenting on the irony in Philodemus, Piet. 2044-5 … and in Epicurus sv 29, with a comprehensive set of Epicurean parallel uses of oracular language. The evidence listed by Smith (1975), pp. 60-1, note b, does not militate against this picture. …

59. For certus = ‘unambiguous’ see OLD s.v., 9. The same sense fits perfectly into v 111-12, where these lines recur: Lucretius is saying that his quasi-oracular prediction that the world will one day perish (see Chapter 6) is a firm and unambiguous one, unlike those associated with the Delphic oracle. For Heraclitus' ‘Delphic’ ambiguity, cf. his b93 DK. As for sanctius, in a comparison with an oracle this must primarily imply ‘holier’, but the basic meaning of sanctus (from sancire) is ‘ratified’ or ‘confirmed’, and it also has connotations of ‘above board’ or ‘honourable’ (OLD s.v., 4).

60. If the thesis developed below about Lucretius' literary debt to Empedocles is right, it may not be too fanciful to see in the imminent new eruption of Etna (722ff.) a hint at the scheduled rebirth of Empedoclean poetry. And is it really just a coincidence that at 730 Lucretius praises Empedocles as ‘carus’, his own cognomen (for the point, see Fowler (1996), p. 888)? The adjective is not part of his regular vocabulary, this being one of only two occurrences in his poem.

61. This was well spotted by MacKay (1955) and Snyder (1972).

62. As Kingsley (1995), ch. 2, shows, Empedocles' own designation of air is ‘aether’, and aether in early Greek epic is intimately associated with [ouranós].

63. The huge bibliography on this passage prominently includes Giancotti (1959), Kleve (1966), Kenney (1977), pp. 13-17; Clay (1983), pp. 82-110, Gale (1994a) ch. 6, and all the major commentaries.

64. The suggestion of Bignone (1945), pp. 437-44, but one which faces the difficulty that Lucretius' Venus controls all natural coming-to-be (esp. 21ff.), not just animal reproduction. Asmis (1982) proposes that Venus is here an Epicurean deity invented to take over the role assigned to Zeus by the Stoics; but against the supposition that Lucretius is concerned to resist the Stoics, see Ch. 3 below.

65. Furley (1970). The range and depth of Empedoclean nuances in the proem are further enriched by Clay (1983), pp. 22-3, 49ff., 82-110, 253-7.

66. I offer this as a ground for going beyond Furley and detecting all four elements even in lines 1-5.

67. As argued in Sedley (1989b).

68. For Democritus as an acknowledged precursor of Epicurus, see Plut. Col. 1108e-f; for Epicurus' reserved praise of him in On nature, see pp. 142-3 below. Epicurean attacks on Empedocles include those of Hermarchus (see Longo Auricchio (1988), pp. 66-73, 92-9, 125-50, and Vander Waerdt (1988), pp. 89-90, n. 13) and Colotes (Plut. Col. iiiif ff.); see also Cic. ND i 29, Diogenes of Oenoanda 6 ii-iii Smith (1992), with the further passages assembled by Vander Waerdt. In my view (Sedley (1976a)) Epicurus' attitude to his predecessors was more respectful and lenient than that adopted by his followers, but it undoubtedly showed enough coolness to authorise and encourage their attacks.

69. i 62-79, iii 1-22, v 9-13.

70. Empedocles b61.2. Cf. Aristotle, Phys. 198b32, 199b10-12, PA 640a19ff.

71. Plut. Col. 1123b.

72. Empedocles a72, b57.

73. Furley (1970), p. 61 with n. 15, supports his thesis with the claim that Lucretius v 837-41 is a translation of Empedocles b57. Although it may pointedly recall the Empedoclean lines, it is hardly a translation. Where Empedocies describes isolated limbs, Lucretius describes whole organisms with congenital defects—and that represents a crucial difference between the two zoogonical theories.

74. Cf. Clay (1983), pp. 22-3, 289-90 nn. 43-4. Rösler (1973) correctly stresses Lucretius' use of doxography in his critique of Empedocles at i 714-829; but this is, I believe, a special case, in so far as the passage is almost certainly based on Epicurus' own criticism of earlier physical theories in On nature xiv and xv, which in turn will have relied heavily on Theophrastus' Physical opinions (see Ch. 4, §10; Ch. 5, §4; Ch. 6, §7).

75. Teleology was not in Empedocles' day an issue on which sides had to be taken. In what follows, I am describing the impression he was likely to make on later readers attuned to such a debate.

76. b86 confirms that Aphrodite was the artisan in question; see Sedley (1992b).

77. Suda, s.v. ‘Empedocles’ = 31a2 DK.

78. Schmalzriedt (1970).

79. Empedocles b3, b131; Lucretius vi 92-5. See Clay (1983), pp. 253-7.

80. For a judicious discussion of Ennius' possible use of Empedocles, see Skutsch (1985), pp. 160, 164 n. 18, 260, 394ff., 758. Ovid's extensive use of Empedocles in the speech of Pythagoras in Met. xv is impressively discussed in Hardie (1995).

81. E.g. Quintilian Inst. i 4.4; Lactantius, Div. inst. ii 12-14.

82. Van der Ben (1975) offers his own wholesale reconstruction of Empedocles' proem. Most of it rests on guesswork. My grounds for rejecting it will simply be the arguments I offer below for accepting a different reconstruction, based largely on Lucretius.

83. In Sedley (1989a)

84. See above p. 10.

85. vi 94, Calliope, requies hominum divomque voluptas.

86. See the seminal study by Bollack (1965-9), i 277ff. Aristotle, in his lost On poets, called Empedocles [Omērikós] (DL viii 57).

87. There seems little possibility that in the actual fragment the adjective is serving this role.

88. See Bailey (1947), i 132ff. for a convenient catalogue of Lucretius' compound adjectives.

89. This is not unique in Lucretius … but I have spotted very few such cases.

90. Empedocles b20.6-7, b21.11-12, b40, b60-1, b76.1-2, etc. …

91. The closest groupings of compound adjectives, outside i 3, are at ii 1081-3 and v 864-6. In both cases they occur two lines apart, qualifying items which are respectively first and third in a list.

92. In Sedley (1989a) I placed the first two words in the reverse order (perhaps metrically preferable—but cf. e.g. Empedocles b84.6). … Gisela Striker has persuaded me to avoid the jingle which this creates in the second to third foot. Her own suggestion is to retain my original order but change the cases throughout to genitives. This could well be preferable. I retain the accusative merely in order to maximise the isomorphism with the Lucretian line.

93. Empedocles b8. See Clay (1983), pp. 83-95, with the parallels he cites at p. 308 n. 29.

94. Cf. b17.23, where Love is ‘she by whom mortals think friendly thoughts and perform peaceful deeds’.

95. See Long/Sedley (1987), i 139-49. The point stands whether or not, as argued there, Lucretius was wrong to understand Epicurus' gods as objectively real life-forms.

96. See the arguments marshalled by Courtney (1987), pp. 11ff.

97. Eustathius (Od. 310.33ff., ad Hom. Od. viii 367) may imply that Empedocles used the myth of the union of Aphrodite and Ares as an allegory for friendship; and since there is no stage within the cosmic cycle itself at which Love and Strife unite, the likeliest location for that piece of symbolism would indeed be his proem. However, Eustathius' words may mean no more than that some allegorists proposed an Empedoclean interpretation of the myth; cf. Heraclit. Alleg. Hom. 69.8, and Buffière (1956), pp. 168-72.

98. See further, Ch. 2, §3; Ch. 7, §§3 and 6.

99. Simplicius, In Phys. 161.14-15; see preamble to b17 in Diels/Kranz.

100. In the new fragment which continues the passage there appear to be further returns to much the same two-way description of change, as well as a brief preview of the beginning of the cycle, to be resumed in earnest in b35.

101. The numbering was not a system of textual citation but the scribe's way of keeping count of the number of lines he was due to be paid for. It is therefore (I understand from Drs. Martin and Primavesi) possible that his numeration included the title—in which case the number of lines preceding b17 would be slightly reduced. Hence I have rounded my figure down to ‘around 230 lines’.

102. Full discussion of the opening part of the poem and its possible contents must await publication of the new fragments in Martin/Primavesi (1998).

103. I am unpersuaded by the proposal of Edelstein (1940) that the reference is a general one to the presocratic physical tradition. The proems to books iii, v and vi supply ample evidence of Lucretius' belief that Epicurus was the first to make the crucial breakthrough, scientific as well as moral.

104. Furley (1970). See also Burkert (1972), p. 137; Hardie (1986), p. 39 n.17.

105. For the tradition of Pythagoras' multiple incarnations, see Burkert (1972), pp. 137ff.

106. It would be unwise, in the present transitional state of Empedoclean scholarship, to insist that b139 itself came from the proem. The work of Martin and Primavesi, based on its admittedly fragmentary context in the papyrus, is currently favouring a location later in the book, but with the further inference that the daimon's original sin and subsequent fate must already have been described in the proem. Given that b115, which I have argued comes from the proem of the physical poem, ends up with Empedocles' declaration that he is himself one of the fallen daimons—‘I too am now one of these, a fugitive from the gods and a wanderer, who trust in raving Strife’ (above p. 8)—the story of his own downfall could very naturally accompany it.

107. See Skutsch (1985), pp. 12, 155, Clay (1983), p. 310 n. 48, Waszink (1950), pp. 224-5.

108. The point is redoubled if, as seems likely, Ennius' beliefs were themselves influenced by Empedocles: cf. Hardie (1986), pp. 17-22, 79-83.

109. Empedocles does not in the surviving fragments specify that the deficiency is one of his own language, Greek, rather than of language as such. But his contemporary Anaxagoras (b17) makes the same point with explicit reference to Greek usage, and that was a natural enough way to understand Empedocles too.

110. I do not mean to deny that direct reaction to Ennius plays a significant part in this passage. My question concerns the overall thematic structure of the passage. I would tentatively add that even if Lucretius were thought to be reacting to current philosophical trends (which I doubt—see Ch. 3), he would still be unlikely to feel impelled to pick transmigration as a target. To judge from the evidence of Cicero's Tusculan disputations, the current revival of interest in Plato's immortality doctrine played down reincarnation in favour of discarnate survival. Nor does transmigration appear to be an attested feature of first-century bc neo-Pythagoreanism (for which see Dillon (1977), pp. 117-21, and cf. Vander Waerdt (1985), esp. pp. 388-9).

111. See especially b12. The Parmenidean tenet seems to be applied by Empedocles indiscriminately to the soul's survival and to the permanence of the elements: both equally are separated, not destroyed. How coherent this conflation is is another question. Cf. especially Kahn (1960).

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