SOURCE: Esolen, Anthony M. “Introduction.” In Lucretius: “On the Nature of Things: De rerum natura,” edited and translated by Anthony M. Esolen. pp. 1-21. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Esolen explains that Lucretius wrote the De rerum natura to fight superstition. He also examines Lucretius's influence on Vergil, Cicero, Horace, and other writers.]

LUCRETIUS'S MILIEU

We know little about Titus Lucretius Carus. He was probably born in the early first century b.c., with 99 and 95 the limits of possibility. The year 55 is usually given for his death. Saint Jerome, following a lost work by the historian Suetonius, relates two tantalizing bits of gossip about Lucretius: that Cicero edited his great poem, and that he was poisoned by a madness-inducing aphrodisiac given him by his wife. As for the first assertion, scholars doubt that Cicero had more than a perfunctory role in assembling Lucretius's pages for publication, if he did even that much. And we have no evidence for the second.

Certain things about Lucretius's life we can infer from the decades he lived through. The Republic was tottering. Soldiers swore loyalty not to Rome but to generals and booty-dealers like Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar. Says William Leonard:

It was an age when a Verres plundered the province which the Senate had sent him to govern, when a nobleman Clodius got himself adopted into a plebeian family for election to the Tribunate for sinister political ends, when a Catiline (if we may believe Cicero and Sallust) gathered the riffraff of Sulla's army and the reckless gamblers and libertines of old families in order to burn the city and cancel huge debts. An age of desperate and bloody self-seeking on the part of the few; while the populace in the city cried now for one leader and now for another, knowing only that it was hungry; and while the yeoman in the Italian fields was run down by disbanded soldiery or bewildered by ever-diminishing returns from his plowing and sowing a depleted soil which he had neither science nor means to restore.

(6)

Cicero prided himself on saving the Republic at its eleventh hour, but he ignored a truth that he recognized elsewhere, namely, that a republican government requires a republican spirit in the people. But for better and for worse, Roman culture had from the time of the younger Scipio become increasingly Greek: slaves from Athens and not Roman patriarchs taught upper-class children; eastern mystery cults promised salvation for initiates, while Hellenistic philosophy (including Epicureanism) cast doubt upon the nature of the gods. All this could only weaken Roman devotion to its religion of family and state. In Rome as elsewhere, affluence and military success accentuated the differences among social classes while removing any strong incentive for people to join in a common cause. Rome's politics grew individualistic and treacherous, her highlife wanton, her piety introspective and morbid.

Into this world Lucretius is thrust—erudite, aristocratic, old-fashioned in his admiration of stern Roman morality. In his way he is a patriot. He boasts about “our” Ennius, the first great poet of Italy, and he calls himself the first to turn Greek philosophy into “our” Latin. Yet he shows no interest in reforming Rome. Perhaps he gave it up for hopeless. Instead of an aggressive civic life, he offers retreat into a quiet community of wisdom and friendship. The key to this retreat is an understanding of the teachings of Epicurus (341-271) about the way the world works.

THE MASTER

Epicurus was born to Athenian citizens on the island of Samos. Like Lucretius, Epicurus lived through troubled times: the Greek city-states were being swallowed up by the Macedonian king Philip II, whose son Alexander would succeed him and spread despotism from the Adriatic to the Indus River. Men were not citizens but subjects, ruled by bureaucrats who were in turn ruled by a distant monarch. In such a world it was natural that philosophers turned to the strain of thought in Plato and Aristotle which focused not upon political organization but upon the life of the individual.

Epicurus was a loyal son and an irritating student. Fiercely independent, he derided his teachers for their timidity and never acknowledged an intellectual debt. Still, we should note a few philosophical currents that helped form his beliefs. One was the skepticism of Pyrrho. This is surprising at first, since Epicurus based his epistemology upon firm trust in the senses. We can know things for certain, he says, because our senses are never deceived; all deception arises from the false interpretations of the mind. Pyrrho, by contrast, taught that nothing can be known for certain. He preached equanimity (ataraxia), insisting, as George Panichas says, that a wise man should keep aloof from the vain pursuits of others (20). Epicurus adopted Pyrrho's ideal of ataraxia while linking it to a materialist epistemology. Yet there are traces of the skeptic in Epicurus's indifferentism. It does not matter, he says, which of many explanations for the motion of the stars is true, so long as they all rule out the intervention of the gods. Epicurus was more moralist than scientist.

Another important influence on Epicurus was the broad Greek tradition of the care of the psyche, a tradition embodied in Socrates. Like most Greeks, Epicurus viewed philosophy as the road to a fully human life. He disagreed with Plato on what that life is—in Epicurus there is no room for the soaring visions of love found in Symposium and Phaedrus—but the good life was his object nonetheless, and like Plato he sees that “of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship” (Prin. Doc. 27).

Atomism, however, was to lend intellectual justification for Epicurus's moral teachings. Epicurus did not invent atomism: Leucippus (fl. 430) and his disciple Democritus (460?-357) have that honor. Democritus in particular was a brilliant polymath, well-versed in physics, mathematics, and aesthetics. (The specifics of atomism are discussed below; Epicurus's most salient contribution was his notorious atomic “swerve,” a kind of physical exception which he believed would allow for free will.) From the atomists Epicurus learned that knowledge begins with sense impressions and that supernatural intervention is not needed to explain the phenomena of the world. Atomism confirmed his distrust of dialectic and mathematics; there could be no realm of eternal truth and goodness beyond this world of material objects impinging upon our senses.

With the foregoing in mind, it is easy to see the origin of Epicureanism. Epicurus believed, with the Socratics, that the care of the soul was the philosopher's all-important task. He agreed with Pyrrho that most men are slaves to superstition and custom. The atomists taught him that physical law (inferred from sense impressions) and not the gods ruled the world. Thus it makes sense that Epicurus used atomism to equate good and evil with pleasure and pain and that he valued the pleasures of the mind more than the pleasures of the body—although we must remember that for a materialist these pleasures are not strictly separable. Finally, Epicurus altered Aristotle's definition of man as a political animal. The wise man, reports Epicurus's biographer Diogenes Laertius, “will be fond of his country,” but he will shun public life (Life 119-20). Neither recluse nor statesman, he is to spend his life in the company of friends.

By 311, Epicurus was ready to start teaching on his own. Driven out of Mytilene for alleged impiety (Epicurus never got on with other philosophers), he moved from place to place, gathering lifelong friends along the way. In 306 he settled in Athens, where he bought a house with a garden and set up a private school open to men and women. There he and his followers lived in simplicity and peace. As Panichas puts it, “gentleness, persuasion, sympathy, compassion, and complete honesty and firmness” marked the discipline of the school, whereby teachers and students alike were urged to help in the purification of each other. “Epicurean education, in short, sought to bring about the moral perfaction of the individual” (23). According to Diogenes, “[Epicurus's] country honored him with bronze statues,” and “his friends [were] so numerous that they could not even be reckoned by entire cities” (Life 9). That his school survived for centuries after his death testifies to his followers' love for their benevolent teacher.

Epicurus wrote about three hundred treatises, almost all lost. Diogenes has preserved his letters to his disciples Herodotus, Menoeceus, and Pythocles; these discuss the basics of Epicurean physics and morality. He also gives us the forty Principal Doctrines, a collection of aphorisms which form the Epicurean creed. There are also the so-called Vatican Collection (eighty-one aphorisms similar to the Doctrines) and fragments preserved in Cicero, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Philodemus, Porphyry, and others. Finally there is Lucretius's epic De rerum natura, our most spectacular cache of Epicurean thought.

THE USEFULNESS OF RATIONAL INQUIRY

De rerum natura, then, could never be just a poem about the physical world. Of course, in large part it is about that world. Although we cannot expect scientific method, Lucretius was usually a careful observer of nature. His poetry is steeped with an innocent curiosity about how things are put together. The sweep of his observations will still strike a modern reader as remarkable. One thinks of his comparing water to a mound of poppy seeds, evincing a kinetic imagination that a polymer chemist would recognize. Then there are the boys spinning around and making themselves so dizzy they think the roofs are about to tumble upon them; snakeskins dangling from the briars; the yelp of a dog when she licks her puppies, and the different yelp when she slinks away from a beating; the “applause” of a rooster's wings; the shimmering blue and coral plumage that rings the throat of a dove. Lucretius delights in such homely details of things in plain sight. But one of the tenets of Epicureanism is that, in fact, things in plain sight give us a glimpse of what is too small or too far for our senses to observe. Thus for Lucretius it is a short mental step from the ordinary to the sublime, as when he asks us to look into a puddle in the street where we see, in silent reflection, a spangled universe as deep as the skies above.

His is a poem about the physical universe, and not a page goes by without some artful observation of a curious, usually common, phenomenon. Lucretius is no romantic. He does not allow the world to be absorbed into human symbols, to be posted when the terrain ahead is poetical. Nature, for Lucretius, is what it is—fascinating, purposeless, beautiful, deadly. It may evoke emotion, and Lucretius will, for instance, seize upon the delight of watching a sunrise. But our delight is not a part of that dawn. Epicureans contend that once we see what Nature is and how it works, we will free ourselves from the superstitious fears that it arouses in the ignorant. Lucretius's project, then, is neither to advance our technological dominion over Nature nor to see in Nature an extension of our existential concerns. The former is futile, since our lives inevitably end, as will the world itself. The latter is a pollution, for we must learn to live with Nature as she is: lovely and terrible, creative and destructive. Acting without design, she makes nectar for the bees and carrion for the buzzards. Our duty is to live with her in a way that will make us both as human and as godlike as we can be. Epicurean physics and morality converge. Lucretius's poem is about the universe and how human beings ought to live in it.

Lucretius thus writes under the pressure of a great directive outward: to explore what things are really like and to set forth his findings in irresistible argument and music. His zeal takes him out of the realm of self-reference and self-promotion and leads him to what he feels will be timelessly important for his readers. His motives are religious in the deepest sense. He thinks the tales of the gods are hogwash and denies the public utility of traditional religion; but for those very reasons he is devoted to converting his readers to a healthier way of life. He brings the gospel of Epicurus. There is nothing to hope for in death and nothing to fear, since the soul dies with the body. Atoms create the wheeling stars and the planets; no power above awaits the time to punish. Our miseries are largely self-inflicted; we can shun the trials of ambition, greed, and lust. Reason cannot make us perfect; we will never be sure why the sun and moon make their circuits. But reason can tell us enough about ourselves and the world that despite our flaws we too may, as Epicurus says, “live like a god among men” (To Menoeceus 135).

That gospel made big claims. But in the last years of republican Rome, marred by debauches of bloodshed, such lessons may have been like the trickle of a brook calling men away from the dust of the Forum. We must take Lucretius at his word: he really believes that in Epicureanism lies our best hope for happiness, and he very much wants to let us in on the secret, so that we may be as happy as is possible in a world imperfectly suited for our existence. The work is addressed to one Memmius, a young libertine in need of a teaching as severe and clean as Lucretius's. But the poet addresses a wider audience besides. He invites all his readers into the Epicurean universe, and into the Epicurean garden of friendship.

As for that Epicurean universe, it has unhappily been argued that Lucretius was a great poet with a topic ill-suited for great poetry. Such critics like to spot oases of pure poetry in deserts of argument. But this is a bad lapse in sensibility and in the understanding of Lucretius's project. For the argument is the poetry, and it has its own vigor. It informs whatever images Lucretius uses that are commonly called poetic, and it gives us lines of brutal simplicity and power and acuity, lines like

Utter illogic they accept as proof

and

I have good reason too for doing this

and

These things, however ingeniously presented,
True reason must emphatically reject.

Argument has its crescendos and codas, as Lucretius knew.

But beyond that, the charge that the Epicurean universe is unpoetic is absurd. The skeletal tenets of the system do not, at first glance, appear exciting. The universe is made of two things, atoms and empty space, the “void.” Atoms are, literally, indivisibles. They are the basic indestructible stuff of all things. They are infinite in number, finite in kind; and the number of each kind of atom is infinite. They have a finite number of shapes; but other than shape, size, and weight, they have no qualities at all. They move constantly. Their natural tendency is to plummet—if “down” can mean anything in an infinite universe—but they also are prone to infinitesimal and unpredictable tilts in motion. Things are brought into being by the chance entangling of atoms. As for the void, it stretches boundless in all directions, untouching, untouchable. Gods there are, but they have no effect on anything that touches us. The soul too is material. Perception occurs when we are struck by a series of singly insensible “simulacra,” hulls or films that sheer away from the surfaces of things. Imagination occurs when these simulacra are so tenuous that they can be perceived only by the soul, which lurks as a kind of organ in the body.

So presented, Epicurean physics and epistemology seem interesting for their dogged materialism and for such insights as the creativity of chance. But what is really exciting about atomism is its insight into a world inaccessible to the senses but accessible to reason. Imagine that beneath the appearances of this world there is another world, one of ceaseless, senseless activity. Streams of atoms flood in upon us from sun, stars, and moon, streaking at incomprehensible speeds, clashing against each other, ramming and ricocheting, hooking up and working their way free, jostling and realigning, never quite stable and yet for all that bound by the physical laws inherent in their constitutions. Endless space yawns round us like a gulf; the earth and sky will crumble to ruin; atoms in themselves invisible and impotent create earth, sun, rivers, pasture, sheep, woodlands, cities, children. True enough, the universe is made up of matter and void. But what glorious matter it is, which, when tossed into the right combinations,

Became the origin of mighty things.

For Lucretius, possessed of an eye for detail and a relentless imagination, the atomic world becomes our world just as our world is, fundamentally, the atomic world. It is one thing to say that the universe consists of atoms and void. It is quite another to allow us to know these atoms intimately by presenting them as just like things we see—things that, after all, are made up of the very atoms of which they are the metaphorical vehicle. So we have squadrons of atoms skirmishing like motes in a sunbeam, and like, in fact, squadrons of human beings observed from a far overlook. Atoms are purposeless; yet Lucretius anthropomorphizes them to show us most vividly how they behave. The atoms meet in congress, swim, swerve, fight, wed, worm their way through tunnels, and elbow through a bottlenecked exit. They are like poppy seeds, or hooks, or thickets. Sometimes Lucretius exaggerates the pathetic fallacy to the point of burlesque, especially when he teaches us that the atoms are unlike anything human. For instance, the atoms

                                        do not hold council, assigning
Order to each, or flexing their keen minds with
Questions of place or rank or who goes where.

But they are the vital seeds of all we see, animate and inanimate. Like our subatomic quarks, they are worthy of our curiosity, and even manage to command what can only be called affection. And their simplicity and indivisibility lead to all kinds of riddles. Can we use the few tenets of atomism to explain why a ball of lead weighs more than a ball of wool? Why wood burns? Why honey is stickier than water? How we can see images of non-existent Centaurs and Chimeras, or even of the dead?

The danger of Lucretius's atomism was not that it was arid but that it could become so richly clandestine and phantasmagorical as to leave the world of phenomena far behind. Yet Lucretius always brings us back to the shores of light, to this world we can readily see and know. Other than that Lucretius was a great poet who knew what he was doing, there are, I think, two reasons for this faithful return.

First, Lucretius genuinely likes the world. He likes what those atoms produce and destroy. Renaissance scholars say that Petrarch was the first man to climb a mountain for the sake of climbing it, but Lucretius evidently made an enjoyable habit of mountain walks, and he did not then turn around and allegorize all the joy away. Lucretius loves animals—he even projects his imagination into their minds in order to give us perceptions from their points of view. Children, fields of glossy corn, the beauty of a landscape plotted and pieced, awnings flapping at the theater, dancers moving their supple arms, saplings shooting up, the rose of the morning sun—all point to Lucretius's fascination with the energetic world that these restless atoms produce. But of course, since the world is not obligingly made for our enjoyment, and since what the atoms ally to create they will secede to destroy, Lucretius's portrayal of this world is evenhanded. He examines both the ugly and the beautiful because they are both true. Thus he shows us flash floods, epileptics, sick dogs twitching in the streets, the wail of a funeral procession, the swarms of maggots seething like a tide in the guts of a corpse. Things are born and things die, and

Round the short track all generations change
Like racers passing on the torch of life.

At such moments the terrible beauty of death merges with Lucretius's ruthless honesty, and we have poetry that even Vergil could only imitate, never surpass.

But again, all this observation of Nature is carried on for a purpose: to convert the reader. The poem's didacticism does not ease. Lucretius cannot abandon himself to speculation about the behavior of atoms, because he has a job to do. Again and again he reminds us why we study the teachings of Epicurus: to free our minds from the crush of superstition. The Christian God of love and consolation was unavailable to Lucretius. Greek and Roman gods were to be feared, propitiated. The Psalmist may behold the stars and wonder at the smallness of man and the unreasonable love of God, that He should not only give a passing thought to something so trivial but indeed should make man little less than an angel. Lucretius's men look at the stars and are overawed; they cringe and worry that all the power that whirls the stars may be aimed squarely at them. Thus, the first purpose of studying atoms is to train the mind to find explanations for what looms above. Any explanation, even the faulty, will do, so long as it shows that the universe can have come about by means of the random collisions of atoms. Before Epicurus, says Lucretius, religion thrust its monstrous head from the sky, grimacing upon us, menacing. Human life was abject. But Epicurus's discovery of rational laws has set our spirits free.

Related to this fear of the gods is fear of death. Religions may work more efficiently when they threaten eternal torment than when they promise eternal bliss; it seems more urgent to avoid the former than to obtain the latter. But if the gods

Enjoy eternity in highest bliss,
Withdrawn and far removed from our affairs,

then death cannot frighten us. It is a long sleep, or not even a sleep—it literally has nothing to do with us, since as long as we are, we are alive, but when we are dead, there ceases to be a “we” to care about it. One may complain that Lucretius turns his back on the mystery of death. But Lucretius does not just preach that death is

nothing to us, no concern,

since he shows, unceasingly, that death is another name for the burgeoning life we now enjoy. Strictly speaking, death is not the end of life but one of the poles of our existence. Life is the tireless shuffling of atoms, like the turmoil-whipped motes in the sunbeam. Death is our means of life, for Nature can only create from atoms, and these atoms must be supplied by sunlight, water, earth, and other living creatures. Nature cannot allow

a birth, without a corresponding death.

To fear death, then, is to mistake life. It is to fear our own cradles.

What would life be like, if men did not fear death? I suspect that we might give up our strenuous attempts to secure various sorts of surrogate immortality. We might no longer worry so much about devotion to such institutions as clans or nations or churches, which outlast the individual. We might not pursue fame so doggedly, or the creation of monuments of intelligence and ingenuity. Fear of death can be a great motor for human activity, and without energetic activity there can be no bubbling up of civilization. Unfortunately, human activity has its own atomic randomness; it is seldom directed by any design for the common good. Fearing death, men make their lives lethal by grasping after wealth and power, those delusive stays against insecurity. Since men will not accept that there is a limit to their lives, they believe that their pleasures should be limitless too, and they die like ill-mannered banqueters who resent ever having to leave the table. Not that such lusts bring pleasure to the banqueter, who is so worried about what he thinks he needs that he cannot enjoy what he has.

Thus, for Lucretius, the beginning of folly is the fear of death. If that fear could be eased, men would not fight over territory or wealth. For along with accepting the fact of death, the Epicurean accepts limits to pleasure and pain. Epicurean ataraxia is negative: it is peace, the freedom from cares, desires, and fears. It does not offer men spasms of joy. It is calm, wise, benignant, and happy.

If men lived in this Epicurean state, they would enjoy the most Epicurean of delights, friendship. Lucretius contrasts the pomp of opulent clothing and glittering chandeliers and military drills with what we nowadays call a picnic:

When friends in the long grass will lie at ease,
In the shade of a tall tree at the riverside,
Their bodies refreshed and gladdened, at no great cost,
Most pleasantly when the weather smiles and the season
Sprinkles the meadow with fresh and lusty flowers.

It seems the poet himself has enjoyed such outings. This is no primitivism or distrust of civilization. Lucretius's point is just that our needs are very few. If we understood this, we could live in friendship, provide for those needs, and still enjoy the horse races, the festivals in town, the “artful polish of sculpture,” and

The honey of music that the nimble fingers
Fashion and bring to life on the guitar.

If the highest joy of life is friendship, then people must be thought capable of living pleasantly and harmoniously together. So they are, we find. Lucretius aims much invective at his own Roman world, rife with militaristic pomp, political huckstering, greed, and shameless lusts. Yet he never soured on the human race. If ever a man had reason, in experience and philosophy, for assuming that people are worthless, Lucretius had. When he discusses prepolitical men—a discussion that Hobbes was to adopt for his own pessimistic “state of nature”—he presents them as atoms of rapaciousness in a cruel struggle for survival:

Every man, learned in staying strong, surviving,
Kept for himself the spoils that Fortune offered.

And the species is propagated by means of lust, force, or bribery:

Mutual desire might win a woman over,
Or the man's violent strength and reckless lust,
Or a present: wild strawberries, nuts, or the choicest pears.

But that last humorous detail—the object of romance refuses to settle for any old pears, since she's a savage with class—shows where Lucretius parts company with Hobbes. As Wormell suggests, it is not human nature so much as the material conditions of human life which make the savages behave as they do (59). They have not learned any better. Their life is brutish; yet without the discoveries of language and fire leading to the moral discoveries of villages and families, how else could they live? Moreover, for all the brutishness, their life has moments of charm, and the brutes themselves are admirable for their strength and tenacity. Unlike superstitious Romans, these savages are not afraid of ghosts or gods or other bogeymen of the intellectual night. What they fear at night is real: prowling beasts.

Human happiness, then, is ready to be grasped. Human nature does not bar the way, since even the savages are basically amiable. Two conditions must be met. We must have enough material comforts to satisfy our bodies. As Lucretius tells us time and again, that “enough” is little indeed. We must also be socially and spiritually prepared for Epicurean friendship. Again, Lucretius does not require much. On the positive side, we need language, community life, and the social contract not to harm each other. The negative requirements are just those to which Lucretius has dedicated his instructive poetry. We are to give up our fear of the gods, knowing that all events in the world come about by natural causes; we are to accept limits for both life itself and the pleasures of that life.

On that last point Lucretius is vulnerable. Like many of the Greeks, he accepts the notion that people never knowingly do evil. If we are mired in wickedness, it is because we have not scaled those philosophic heights,

The temples of truth, the strongholds of the wise.

Unfortunately, history provides little evidence for the hope that people might have the sourness leached out of them by philosophy. Not ignorance but desire fuels our greed—as it fuels many other things too, like romantic love, patriotism, and technological and artistic progress. None of these things does Lucretius accept wholeheartedly, and in particular he is deeply suspicious of romantic love. All things in moderation. The trouble is, the traditional moderator has been religion itself, which in Lucretius's own words clamps its bit in our mouths and reins us in. But if religion does not bridle us, what will? Epicurus's answer is the prospect of a life of calm friendship and sunny confidence in the face of death. It does not matter that few will be wise enough to accept the offer. Epicureans do not presume to save society, just those sociable beings who replace the old fear of the gods with a sane desire to live in peace. Epicureans are optimistic about human nature, holding that all men can, without much effort or cost, live a life worthy of the gods. Such a life, too, is in the highest sense social—its great attraction is friendship. Yet there is a cost. Epicureans must turn away from the deepest desires of their fellow human beings, the most energetic motors of creativity and human power. We cannot live forever, they tell us forthrightly. We can enjoy no union with the gods. Our lives are part of no design. We cannot care about the distant past or the distant future. Our technological advances, after a point soon reached, bring misery. Our dreams of romance are diseases of the mind, to be cured by a cool promiscuity. Whoever is unwilling to give over these desires—several of which, one may note, beat at the heart of the Divine Comedy and other religious-romantic myths inaccessible to the Epicurean—is to be pitied and abandoned. Despite Lucretius's disclaimer, there is a smugness in his admission that the trials of others make our own safety more pleasant:

How sweet, to watch from the shore the wind-whipped ocean
Toss someone else's ship in a mighty struggle;
Not that the man's distress is cause for mirth—
Your freedom from those troubles is what's sweet.

Lucretius does nothing by halves. Although he is loyal to his land, he is really out to subvert some basic Roman ways. Take war, for instance. Roman heroes, other than an occasional Numa who instilled religion in an ignorant populace, were war heroes, and they earned special names to commemorate their feats: Torquatus, Coriolanus, Africanus. But war is the ultimate betrayal of Epicurean principles, as is even intimated by the Latin words for friendship and enmity: amicitia and inimicitia, literally “friendship” and “lack of friendship.” Where war or its spirit reigns, there can be no Epicurean peace. Thus, in the general proem to De rerum natura, the grand hymn to Venus, Lucretius prays that Venus will subdue Mars with the “eternal wound of love.” A modicum of peace is necessary if Lucretius is to write his pacifist poem at all. A peace brought by the bursting power of Nature herself, by Venus the legendary mother of Romans, would be a welcome change for the people of Lucretius's day, who surely had more of Mars than they knew what to do with. And it would bring them into accord with the gods themselves, who

Enjoy eternity in highest peace,
Withdrawn and far removed from our affairs.

Romans will not be apotheosized for carnage. But if they give up their craving for wealth and power, they may live divinely here and now.

And so Lucretius never mentions courage or heroism when discussing warfare. His war scenes are tableaus of grotesque slaughter: lopped limbs, animals gone mad, dying men dabbling in their own gore. What is surprising is just how often Lucretius turns to war when he needs a metaphor for unremitting, chaotic atomic activity. One senses how pervasive war and its accouterments were in Lucretius's Rome. But something happens to that warfare when Lucretius uses it to describe, for example, the motes in a sunbeam

                                                                      realigning their squadrons, never
Stopping for breath, assailed by alliance, secession.

The maneuvering motes, of course, become all the more dramatic. But the implied soldiers in turn become no more than inoffensive specks of dust. Lucretius uses the similarity of physical behavior to rob war of nobility and purpose. The activity is interesting as pure activity; to make any greater claims for it would be pompous. Imagine, secessions of atoms! But isn't that as absurd as squadrons of men fighting for some scrap of land?

A further indignity for militarists, in the same passage, is Lucretius's use of a drill scene to show that despite appearances of stability, atomic turmoil underlies everything. The atoms are so small that, as it were, we observe their action at a great distance, and from that distance their random movements resolve into stasis. Lucretius begins by comparing the atoms to a flock of sheep on a pleasant hillside. They graze and move lazily about; the lambs “frisk in their merry play,” yet from far off the flock appears to be but a white glow on the green countryside. To drive the point home with an example of what looks to be purposive, frentic activity, Lucretius directs our gaze to the drill field, giving us an engaging synesthetic display of martial razzle-dazzle. But if you observe the men from a distant overlook (surely the overlook of Epicurean wisdom, which we are invited to climb),

They stand still in the field, one steady glow.

Again, the use of military activity, so apparently grand and purposive, to illuminate atomic activity, so minuscule and purposeless, lends greater interest in the atom while it reduces the military to a case in point, a phenomenon as interesting as a flock of sheep browsing peacefully. As interesting, perhaps, but less instructive morally: for while the sheep feed and play and enjoy the morning sun, the men carry with them their own bad weather, flashing their lightning to the skies and pounding the earth with thunderous hooves. In vain, as Lucretius might say. Wisdom resolves all their action into the manifestation of a simple physical or moral law.

Thus, Lucretius assaults one of the most Roman of Roman values. If war is waged for inane luxuries, how can preparation for war instill virtue? It cannot, he says. Captains and foot soldiers never do give up their fear of death. Only reason, only the Epicurean way, can make a man fearless. It follows that the only true war hero is Epicurus, the man strong enough to conquer with words, not weapons. Epicurus is accorded praise worthy of the noblest Roman (not Greek!) of them all. In the proem to book 1 he leads a mental guerrilla expedition:

His vigor of mind prevailed, and he strode far
Beyond the fiery battlements of the world,
Raiding the fields of the unmeasured All.

and brings back spoils more valuable than gold:

Our victor returns with knowledge of what can arise,
What cannot, what law grants each thing its own
Deep-driven boundary stone and finite scope.

The result is more glorious than mere rule of the known world:

Religion now lies trampled beneath our feet
And we are made gods by the victory.

Storm trooper of pacifism, Epicurus is also the paterfamilias, the male head of the Roman household. This is important to Lucretius, but not just for selling Epicureanism to Romans. His consigning religion to irrelevance, as well as Epicureanism's attenuation of patriotism and of concern for the past and the future, might loose the ties between generations. The risk is anarchy. To mitigate this risk, Lucretius takes devotion to Roman traditions and transfers it to devotion to Epicurus, who is not just the founder of a philosophical school:

You, father, are the founder of truth; you confirm us
With a father's lessons, and from your pages, sir,
As bees sip all in the brambles decked with flowers,
So we partake of all your golden words,
Golden, and worthy of eternal life.

Epicurus himself asked his followers to celebrate his birthday on the twentieth of each month (Life, 18); he became the object of their piety, not as a god, but as that one man who taught us how to live.

And so Epicurus is pater, as Nature is our mater. She does not voluntarily nurture or give birth. But because of the infinitude of atoms and their many shapes and ways, she bursts into production and destruction. The wedlock of father and mother here is the wedlock of Epicurean truth with Natura rerum—and its progeny are those who are content with little, who are not afraid of thunder or eclipses, and who recognize that birth and death are part of the ceaseless atomic activity which we know as the world.

LUCRETIUS'S INFLUENCE

It has been preached to millions of pupils that what Homer was by nature, Vergil was by art; that Vergil altered the Homeric ideal of heroism to suit the Roman ideal of pietas; that Aeneas is a pale copy of Odysseus and Achilles, but that Vergil makes up for it with his haunting music. Granted that in a Homeric epic with Homeric characters we ought to expect adaptations of Homeric verse; still, I would argue that the most important intellectual and poetic influence upon Vergil was neither Homer nor Homer's Roman admirer Ennius but Lucretius.

Perhaps influence is the wrong word, suggesting as it does the impact of some outside force, or the contribution of a stream to the broader river. For Vergil was steeped in Lucretius. One critic estimates that every twelfth line of Vergil's is indebted to the Epicurean; in the Georgics the ratio seems so high as to make estimation pointless. There are Vergil's overt tributes to Lucretius and his philosophy, as when he declares,

felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas
[Happy the man who knows the causes of things!]

And there are lines that adopt Lucretius's didactic stance and diction for the explaining of nature:

continuo has leges aeternaque foedera certis
imposuit natura locis
[These laws and everlasting pacts has Nature
Ever imposed on certain regions.]

And catchwords, mannerisms, brush strokes too numerous to mention, from the archaic imperative contemplator enim, to the lovely luminis oras, “the shores of light.”

But the deepest poetic influence is intellectual, not aural. Lucretius excited and disturbed Vergil, as I think he did most of the poets of the early Empire and, much later, the poets of the Renaissance. By Vergil's day it had become impossible for a sophisticated person to believe all of the myths of the Greek and Roman gods; Ovid, for one, subjected them to gleeful burlesque. But Vergil longed for some divinity in things, some plan or fate that men had to obey and that would justify Rome's dominance in the world. Lucretius posed a serious problem for him. On the one hand, he understood both Lucretius's love of nature and his desire to reveal how the universe works. And for both poets this revelation had moral implications for human beings—hence, Vergil's meshing of agriculture and politics in his poems about Earth, the Georgics. The long, noble roll of the Lucretian hexameter was a perfect vehicle for the Epicurean's high argument, and Vergil made good use of his predecessor's example. On the other hand, there were strains in Lucretius which stirred Vergil to intellectual struggle: the emphasis on chance, the retreat from the political, the utter disdain for war, the meaninglessness of history.

A trace of this struggle shows when Palinurus, Aeneas's helmsman, asks him to take him along across the Styx, a crossing forbidden for one whose body has not had the due funeral rites. Aeneas's guide, the Sybil, reproaches Palinurus:

Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando.
[Stop trying to sway by prayers the gods' decrees.]

That the gods cannot be supplicated is an Epicurean tenet, and this is not the only instance in the Aeneid of divine unapproachability. A cynic might wonder what purpose Vergil's gods serve, and ask whether they are just literary ciphers used to slip the poem past a naive populace and to wipe out any residual religion among the literati. Such a reader might translate the line in this way:

Don't hope to bend the course of fate by prayer,

where fate is the blind falling out of events. But fata is a form of the old verb fare, “to speak,” and so fate may be literally what the gods have spoken. Perhaps, since it has been spoken, it cannot be retracted: it is meant to be, whether there is some anthropomorphic divinity behind it or no. Palinurus's prayer is ineffective, not because there is no fate, but because fate has been set, and for a purpose too:

Cease praying that what must occur can change.

As usual, Vergil leaves us with an ambiguity, born of a powerful and ardent mind whose search for truth has led him to reject his epic master but has not allowed him to settle upon any certainty.

Prolific during the years when Octavian had not yet become Augustus but was still jockeying for power, Cicero is another writer whose debt to Lucretius is huge but underestimated. Cicero mentions Lucretius only once, in an odd postscript in a letter to his brother that Lucretius's poem is brightened by many moments of genius (or ingenuity?), and much art in spite of that (or to boot?). We cannot be sure what Cicero thought of Lucretius, but that he thought of him, deeply and with many reservations, is incontestable. During the latter part of his life, after Lucretius had died and De rerum natura had become well known in the great city, Cicero turned his talents toward philosophy, writing, among other works, the De finibus (On Moral Ends), De amicitia (On Friendship), Academici and Lucullus (epistemological treatises), De divinatione (On Prophecy), De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), and Tusculanarum disputationum (The Tusculan Disputations, on death and immortality). Over and over we find Cicero wrestling with the questions for which Lucretius provided his sect's answers, yet rejecting the notion that the senses are always to be trusted, that chance can have created so orderly a world, that friendship is based on mutual advantage, that the gods are corporeal, that the soul dies with the body.

Often Cicero's rejection of Epicureanism is abrupt and scornful, as in the Tusculans when he wishes to examine the nature of the soul: “We will not bother to discuss Democritus, a great man surely, but one who made the soul out of light and roly-poly little particles by means of some accidental collision or other” (1.22). But behind that quick dismissal is a mind that takes questions seriously and faults the Epicureans rather for their glibness than for the certain falsity of what they say. Like Vergil, Cicero wished to see divine purpose in the world, and this wish grew all the stronger as he advanced in years, witnessing the waning of republican ideals and suffering the death of his beloved young daughter. Thus, in the Tusculans he argues, as did the Socrates of the Phaedo, that death is not to be regarded as an evil, since either it is nothing at all, as the Epicureans say, or it is a chance to be with the likes of Scipio and Fabricius and the Decii, Roman heroes on earth, now immortals in the heavens. The Tusculans are heavily indebted to Lucretius's discussion of the soul, sometimes using Lucretius's own arguments as means to a different end. Lucretius says that the soul's quickness shows that it is made of the subtlest atoms; Cicero counters that atoms so subtle might very well remain intact and rise beyond the atmosphere (1.43). But ultimately Cicero's heart lay with Rome, not with a personal hope for salvation or with a clique of friends retiring from public life. The soul must live, he says, because “without great hope for immortality no one would ever give his life for his country” (1.32).

As for other important writers, Lucretius was admired by most, thought old-fashioned by some, and studied by all. Ovid loved his materialism and his spoofing the gods, and nobly wrote that the song of Lucretius would die only with the dissolution of the world. Horace took a cue from Lucretius's satirical set pieces, and though he could never be magniloquent without smiling at himself, he sometimes reverted to the massive, rough-hewn rhythms of the older poet. Petronius became a kind of black-humored renegade from the Lucretian flock. He took the earnestness out of Epicureanism and celebrated the very debauchery he mocked, yet showed that underneath the festivities all friendships were hollow and the fear of death still gnawed away at men's hearts.

Lucretius continued to be read and quoted through the fall of the empire. For Christians like Lactantius he was the poet they loved to hate; they admired his artistry and ridiculed his ideas. Yet a few enthusiasts, like Arnobius, believed that Christianity could be reconciled with Lucretian atomism. In general, the Greek calm of the Epicurean gods could not appeal to Christian fervor, and Lucretius fell into oblivion for over a thousand years until the recovery of his poem in the fifteenth century. His influence was felt almost immediately. Often, as it was with Vergil and Cicero, that influence was a spur to reaction, or to adaptation and correction. Such influence is notable in Torquato Tasso, whose Jerusalem Delivered is a careful transformation of the materialist's chance into the Catholic's Providence; in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, where the great hymn to Venus is translated entire but with an emphasis on creation, action, and ardent Christian sexuality; and in Salluste du Bartas's Divine Weeks, where discussions of celestial phenomena are lifted wholesale from Lucretius's book 6, while Epicureans are attacked for their pernicious atheism. For a subsequent generation of writers, however, Lucretius was the great poet who may have actually found out the truth about the cosmos. These philosophers, scientists, and political thinkers saw in Lucretius what they saw in themselves, a fearless opponent of superstition. Bacon, Montaigne, Gassendi, Hobbes, and Newton come to mind in particular; centuries later, Shelley would continue the fight. Finally, there were writers who responded to the satirical in Lucretius and used him to show the folly of man while reserving theological decisions to themselves; of these we may number Molière, Swift, Dryden, and Byron. And that does not even touch upon Milton, who made his devils materialists, or Tennyson, whose great monologue “Lucretius” is but one more entry in the list of works for which Lucretius is both foe and inspiration.

NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

Lucretius's meter is dactylic hexameter, the meter of classical epic. In English, only the blank verse of a Milton captures its inexorable forward roll. The hexameter line includes six feet, each a dactyl (long-short-short, like our word indigo) or a spondee (long-long, like our straight flush). The fifth foot is very rarely spondaic, and the sixth foot contains only two syllables, the second of which may be either long or short. Classical meter is quantitative, not accentual. The “length” of a syllable depends not upon pitch or stress, as in English, but upon how long it takes to be uttered. With some exceptions, a long syllable contains a long vowel or a diphthong, or a short vowel followed by two consonants. Hexameters alternate combinations of spondees and dactyls to produce great rhythmic variety. A line may sweep along with dactyls:

nam fierent iuuenes subit' ex infantibu' parvis (1.186)
[A little baby is—presto! a young man]

or pound away with spondees:

paulatim crescunt, ut par est, semine certo (1.189)
                                                                                [little by little
Things grow, as is proper, from a certain seed]

of the metrical complexity afforded the epic poet. Unfortunately, not even Milton's verse can replicate all of its main features. Hexameters keep regular time while varying the number of syllables; blank verse keeps regular numbers of syllables while varying the speed of the line. In hexameter, a syllable's length may clash or coincide with the accent of the word; in English, an accent is an accent and there is little a poet can do about it. Yet the English poet has great leeway for placing his accented syllables, while the Latin poet must follow a long with a long or with two shorts, and then repeat the process. Just about any word may somehow be shoehorned into blank verse, while there are thousands of words which cannot fit into hexameter—for instance, any word with syllables long-short-long.

And so a translator makes choices, hoping that a gain here will offset a loss there, that if he cannot attain perfect accuracy, rhythm, tone, freshness of imagery, and power, he can at least choose what he wishes to convey at all costs, what he will work hard to convey, what he will convey with fair reliability, and what he will accept as a gift from a sporadic Muse. I have tried to be scrupulously literal in rendering Lucretius's metaphors and puns. If suppeditat means “supports, as of a building's foundation,” then I translate to preserve that building: “props up.” I retain the rhythm of Lucretius's paragraphs, usually translating phrase by phrase and clause by clause, using enjambment and punctuation and odd syntax to stress in my English lines what Lucretius used other methods to stress in his Latin ones. My paragraphs are end-stopped, like Lucretius's; his one-line aphorisms are one-liners for me too; his capping a point with some tersely regular line is for me a return to strict iambic pentameter. My meter is accentual pentameter, with five strong beats and a variable number of short beats (but never three short beats in a row). The normative line, occurring about two-fifths of the time, is iambic pentameter.

I am deeply indebted to the thorough and sensitive notes in the edition by William Ellery Leonard and Stanley Barney Smith, and to H. A. Munro, Rolfe Humphries, and F. A. Copley, my predecessors in translation; David West's The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius has been a delightful source of inspiration. I have always thought that one should gather from a translation as little of the translator as possible. He should be like Lucretius's “oil of the odorless olive,” a base for distilling another's perfume. The best a translator can hope for is that he will be read with enjoyment and impatience, after which sales of the original will, here and there, be a little brisker.