SOURCE: Minyard, John D. “Lucretius and the Late Republic.” In Lucretius and the Late Republic, pp. 1-70. Amsterdam: E. J. Brill, 1985.

[In the following excerpt, Minyard analyzes the De rerum natura and discusses the tactics Lucretius employed in the work to demonstrate to readers the failure of old world views and the superiority of Epicureanism.]

1. ROMAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

The history of human values is the history of changing notions about truth and reality, however analytically inarticulate those notions may have been. So, the history of values at Rome is a function of the changes in Roman ideas about reality and truth, is, in fact, the core of Roman intellectual history. It is within the framework of this intellectual history, specifically in the context of the struggle over values based upon competing accounts of truth and reality which constitutes the intellectual crisis of the Late Roman Republic, that the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius can most powerfully and accurately be understood and, above all, evaluated.

The world in which Lucretius lived, the entire Mediterranean world of the First Century b.c., experienced a crisis as profound as can be imagined absent its elimination. This crisis was general and from it emerged, first, the Augustan arrangement, or pax, and, last, the reorientation of life by Christianity. The crisis was, at least, political, military, cultural, and intellectual. It was perhaps also social and economic. At any rate, it had deep consequences for the social and economic organization and content of this world, if it did not alter modes of production and the class framework. It was much more than simply a Roman crisis, but, since, in its last stages before the pax, it was a function of the way Rome became the Mediterranean world and the way the Mediterranean world became Rome, in the period of our concern it is distinguishable from the crisis at Rome only conceptually.

This Mediterranean crisis, in its intellectual as well as its other aspects, manifested itself along three fault lines. First was that which ran through the structures of Roman society itself, where movement was produced by the various shocks resulting proximately or ultimately from the process of Roman expansion. Second was one which ran through the societies of the Greek East, movement along which antedated Roman expansion into that area and whose causes can be traced back to the activity of Philip of Macedon and ultimately to internal developments in the old world of the polis itself. Movement here was then exacerbated and confirmed by Roman expansion. Third was a line created by the clash between Roman and Hellenistic imperializing cultures, along which occurred the struggle for cultural, intellectual, political, military, and economic dominance, during the last period of Greek influence upon Republican Rome, in the Middle and Late Republics. All three fault lines are evident in the De Rerum Natura and can be identified as its historical context, indeed, as its historical causes making this poem a quintessentially Late Republican document, bearing the clear stamp of its cultural environment. It could have come from no other period of Roman history, for Lucretius' poem is the direct product of the genuine crisis of civitas Romana.

The world of civitas, and with it its account of the way the world works, had been shattered by its own success, and this shattering set its members free to act on their own versions of truth and reality, to find their own sets of values, with the end that, by giving citizens freedom from their citizenship, the crisis cost them the freedom their citizenship had given. Civitas had lost its place as the center and source of understanding and purpose, had lost its power to organize life. Only some words and the shells of old habits, which we call the institutions of the Republic and their articulation in law, remained. The old structure of ideas, purposes, and values no longer offered what everyone accepted as the explanation of the nature of things.

Roman imperial expansion, had Hellenic civilization never been, would have produced eventually internal institutional crisis. Because there was such a civilization, because it owned such cultural power, because all Roman history had been characterized by the infusion of Roman life by Hellenic culture, and because Hellenic society had already passed through its own version of this crisis, or was in the last stages of its version, the internal crisis at Rome was worked out ultimately in the forms of Greek experience and became part of the last stage of the general crisis of the Hellenic world. In this sense, the terms in which it was expressed and the basis of the arrangement which contained it, the crisis represented the last step in the Hellenization of Rome.

It is the process of Hellenization, in conjunction with the growth and expansion of Rome, the steps by which Rome was incorporated within the frame of Hellenic culture and the Hellenic and Mediterranean world was reformed by Roman power, that constitutes the framework of Roman intellectual history, just as the model of Hellenic ideas and institutions was the engine of change and the core of its content. It is the perception of this general structure of Roman intellectual history that forms the necessary basis for understanding the structure and tensions of the intellectual life of the Late Republic.

Roman intellectual history up to the end of the Republic divides into five principal stages: (1) the Indo-European heritage of the Italic peoples; (2) the Italian experience of the Indo-European immigrants (which overlaps all the later stages); (3) the first age of Hellenic influence, during the Regal period, which is closely bound up with Etruscan influence, the two sometimes being the same thing; (4) the second age of Hellenic influence, including the elimination of Etruscan impact, during the Early Republic; (5) the third age of Hellenic influence, resulting from the widescale infusion of Roman power into the Greek world and the consequent indiscriminate infusion of Greek culture into Rome, during the Middle and Late Republics. These stages should be as clearly distinguished as evidence and theory allow, and especially should we not speak of Greek influence on Rome as if it were one thing, when the term refers to what were historically three different things, flowing from very different sets of historical circumstances, caused by very different relationships between the two cultures, taking very different forms at each stage, and producing very different results.

There were Greek communities in the Italian peninsula as long as legend and ascertainable fact tell us there was something that could be called a Roman community. The history of Rome as a distinct entity on the banks of the Tiber is coeval with the Greek presence in Italy. Because of its location, and other factors, the Roman community was never isolated from its broader cultural environment. Indeed, the history we can write of its ideas and values is the history of its dealing with external influence. As a result, the separation of the various strands in the structure of Roman ideas and institutions (Indo-European, Italic, Roman, Etruscan, Greek) is extraordinarily difficult. Especially controversial are the separation of Greek elements from Etruscan and the distinction between the direct impact of Greek patterns and that mediated through Etruria. The point important for this study is the antiquity and pervasiveness of the Greek influence. Whatever roles other peoples played in the development of Roman ideas and intellectual life, Greece seems always to have had some impact, and Greek influence was the most various, persistent, profound, and important.

The history of literacy itself at Rome is the history of Greek influence, since the Roman alphabet is the Greek alphabet. In its Etruscan period, if the process had not begun earlier, Rome entered the world of Greek art, architecture, mythology, law, and religion. And it is during the Etruscan era that we can discern clearly the first stages in the Hellenization, i.e. the politicization or civilization, of the City Rome. No important aspect of Roman culture is immune to the imputation of Greek origin or influence, including such features so typically and anciently Roman as the triumph, the Laws of the Twelve Tables, the foundation myths of Romulus and Aeneas, the story (and perhaps the fact) of the expulsion of the “tyrant” Tarquinius Superbus, the inauguration of the institutions of the Republic, and the Saturnian verse. Rome originated on the fringe of Hellenic civilization and was not very old before it was surrounded by the results of the spread of that civilization.¹

Conclusions important for the consideration of Lucretius flow from these observations. When it is argued that the De Rerum Natura represents part of the reaction of its time against the inherited account of the world expressed in the mos maiorum, it is not assumed that this tradition of idea and value was itself unaffected by Greek influence or that Greek influence was the new factor causing this reaction. All of Roman history shows the effects of contact with Hellenic culture. What is new in the time of Lucretius, or, actually, in the period of which Lucretius and his contemporaries represent the last stage, is the nature, scope, and effect of Greek influence.

The process of which the Rome of the Late Republic was the product and which we usually mean when we speak of the influence of Greece upon Rome, was the third stage of Hellenic influence and was the conversion of Rome into a Hellenistic metropolis, the cosmopolitanization of the urbs Romana and ultimately of civitas Romana, and has little to do with the fact of Greek influence per se. These are separable features of Roman history. Greek influence, by itself, was independent of Roman expansion. That is, it did not need that expansion to take place. It needed only contact and was, in fact, the product of Greek expansion. This influence was gradual and controllable by the civitas. It flowed slowly in channels Rome dug. However Rome might be changed physically and constitutionally, this influence was not overwhelming, in the sense that it threatened the community's basic perceptions and arrangement of itself and its ideas about the nature of reality and hierarchy of values. The third stage of influence required Roman expansion, that is, a fundamental alteration in the objective character of Roman society and the world of which the Romans had experience, such that fundamental alterations in the pattern of Roman life and in Roman ideas became necessary, even inevitable, in order for Rome to manage its objectively different situation. This influence was overwhelming, because the change was so relatively rapid and beyond control, and because the alterations in the Roman world were so both vast and profound. This was the stage of Greek influence that radically threatened the mos maiorum and the society it had rationalized and supported.²

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7. LUCRETIUS

It is from this context of intellectual conflict that the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius takes its origin and gains its form. Whatever the problems presented by the relationship of Lucretius and his poem to the history of Epicureanism and the Epicurean communities of contemporary Italy, and there are many, there is no difficulty in relating them to the cultural environment of Late Republican Rome.³

As an event in the history of technical philosophy, it takes long, involved, and special argument to consider the De Rerum Natura anything but a sport. As a philosophical treatise, it is unlike anything in the tradition after the discovery of the dialectic. It is also specifically unlike what Epicurus declared to be the form of discourse proper to philosophy, unlike anything we know, directly or indirectly, about the Epicurean treatises of the First Century b.c. in Greek or Latin. On the basis of a knowledge of Epicureanism before Lucretius and of Epicureanism in contemporary Italy outside Lucretius, it would have been difficult to predict or expect this poem. In this case, the gap between expectation and event, between the previous history of Epicureanism and this event in Epicurean history, is very great, if, indeed, the facts allow us to consider this poem an event in Epicurean history. Observes of Epicureanism would not only not have expected the De Rerum Natura, they would confidently have predicted the impossibility of authentic Epicureanism taking such a turn. Of all the events likely to have been caused by Epicureanism, this one was likely to so small a degree that it could easily have been thought impossible. Of course Philodemus wrote poetry. But his poetry was like that of Catullus, like the tradition of Hellenistic epigram from which the poetry of Catullus took its start. When he came to write philosophy, he wrote it the way Epicurus said it should be written.

It is difficult to see how Lucretius cannot be thought isolated from the philosophical community of his time. Nothing in the form or method of his work suggests he was a schoolman or even a disciple of the schoolmen of the Garden or its colonies in any technical or official sense. We can point to no evidence that Lucretian innovations in doctrine, should any be found, would have been recognized as valid by the School. That is, while he clearly claims to be a follower of Epicurus, is this anything more than his claim? An Epicurean in the broad, cultural sense he surely was, but can we call him, in terms of the historical realities, an Epicurean in the narrow sense, i.e. an officially and publicly recognized, not to say authorized, exponent of doctrine?⁴

In the framework of the literary and intellectual history of Rome, the De Rerum Natura presents no such gap between expectation and actuality. Lucretius and his poem look like perfectly logical consequences of the general set of circumstances, the tendencies, pressures, and interests, of the culture of the Late Republic. It is possible to point to many previous events leading in its direction, as well as many contemporary events in harmony with it. His poem reflects all the major literary fashions and trends of the age. If we were to judge the nature of contemporary philosophy from Lucretius' poem, we should have a very odd idea of what it was like. But it is easy to see what the rest of Late Republican literature was like from the De Rerum Natura. If we were allowed to have the work of one author only from this period as evidence of its literature, it would be difficult to find an example more comprehensively indicative.

Indeed, the De Rerum Natura makes no claim to be an event in the history of philosophy. It does not declare that it contributes to the development of philosophical method or knowledge but to Roman moral understanding and cultural life. It attempts to apply a philosophical system to the realm of Roman social behavior. This is, of course, what Epicurus did in a Greek context, but after he had developed method and knowledge, created a system and a school, with followers and philosophical argument, confuting his technical opponents as well as making positive technical contributions. Lucretius is a literate and literary Roman who sees, as a man of culture, observer of history, and an ambitious poet, the historical, social, moral, and poetic utility of this accomplishment, not to say the literary main chance. The context in which he places his poem is Roman, oligarchic, and literary, not Greek, scholastic, and philosophical.

It is important to set the proper frame in which to interpret the work of Lucretius. Without a frame of reference, it is not possible accurately to perceive an event, let alone judge its causes, consequences, and significance. Without agreement on the world of a work, it is not even possible for readers to discuss it, because divergence in the ground of expectation, evaluation, and interpretation will produce a series of monologues, even soliloquies, masquerading as dialogue. The history of Roman literature and the intellectual crisis of the Late Republic explain the form and content of the De Rerum Natura, and the relationship between its form and content: why this content was chosen and then put in, of all things, this form. Within this frame, the poem is perfectly intelligible. It is hardly intelligible as a coherent whole as a philosophical treatise at this point in the history of philosophical discourse and method.⁵

Its famous First Proem sets a Roman, historical, and civic context for the De Rerum Natura by its allusions to contemporary strife and such language as “Aeneadum” (1), “patriai tempore iniquo” (41), “communi … saluti” (43), “impia” (81), “civis” (91), “felix faustusque” (100), “virtus” (140), and “amicitiae” (141), along with the address to the oligarch Memmius and the criticism of the heritage of religio which begins here and runs through the poem. The addition to these elements of Greek philosophy (“Graius homo” at 66), Greek mythology (the story of what happened at Aulis at 84-100), Greek literature (the association of Ennius, Helicon, and Homer at 117-126), and the universal descriptions and prescriptions offered as remedies for human ills, unrooted as they are in the particular experience of any specific people as an historical entity, imparts a radically cosmopolitan ambience which both gives the poem a dual origin and reveals its uncivil point. The De Rerum Natura is made to emerge from the ruin of civil order as the non-civic remedy for the errors and evil inherent in that order as the seeds of its own destruction.

The first sixty-one verses of the proem contrast two ways of dealing with the world, that of civitas and that of, as we later learn, Epicurus. The first verse gives us voluptas and verse 43 communis salus, suggesting two opposing aims of life, at least as the phrase communis salus is understood in its civic context. Although Lucretius prays for peace because he cannot set about his task with an even temper amid such civil strife and Memmius cannot devote himself to instruction because he cannot desert the cause of the welfare of the community, in fact, the point of the poem will be precisely to argue the preservation of an even temper amid all circumstance, based on vera ratio rerum, and that Memmius should desert the communis salus as traditionally understood because the category is empty of intellectual and moral value. Indeed devotion to communis salus has led to the very crisis at which Rome now finds itself. What Lucretius will be doing in the poem to come will be instructing Memmius in what amounts to a conception of true salus.

The opening section of the First Proem is artful in all senses, not exactly misleading the reader, in terms of his ultimate understanding, but using words and expressions he thinks he understands already in order to get him to follow the new path Lucretius is tracing. The end of this will be the creation of a different meaning for the opening of the poem in the eyes of the reader. As a hint of this, Lucretius affords a brief vision of his goal in verses 44-49, designed to shock the reader into a confusion about the coherence of this assertion with the preceding hymn. The poem will move repeatedly by this method of contradiction and abrupt transition to force the reader into perception of a larger, and deeper, order in the poem and in the world than that of which he, on the basis of his falsa ratio, is presently aware.

Having prayed to a Venus which the Romans understand as a force in nature and history, alluded to Memmius' duty to communis salus, and then declared the material basis of reality and the absence of providence from the world, Lucretius leads his perhaps shaken but surely aroused reader through a devastation of the civic inheritance by striking at what he considers its core, the category named religio. After what the poet has just said about the indifferent gods, it is clear that religio must represent a false notion of reality, an empty set in terms of its claimed reference, and a terrible scandal in social life, since it is around this name that the inherited community was organized and on this basis that its history has been interpreted. For this poet, however, instead of referring to the principal line of interaction between humanity and divinity, along with its positive corollary pietas, and being thus central to the true understanding of reality and well-being (salus), it is a heavy oppression upon mankind.

The close connection between religio and pietas in the traditional account of reality, as opposite sides of the same coin and interdependent elements of a coherent intellectual structure, Lucretius recognizes in verse 81, where he acknowledges that his reader may think he is seducing him to impiety by his denunciation of religio. He could simply deny this potential allegation, but he does not. He could empty the category pietas of content and treat it with scorn too, but he does not do this either, even though, given the interdependence of religio and pietas, this is what we might have expected him to do. What he does do is to give us verse 83: “religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta.” This assertion, in the structure of traditional Latin, is madness. On the basis of the meaning of Latin words, it cannot be true. Religio is divorced from pietas and converted into its opposite: religio is impia. The point is even repeated, as the dictum of verse 101: “tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.” It is the verses between 83 and 101, in which Lucretius performs the surgery of separating pietas from religio, that distil most clearly the method and purpose of the poem, as well as the poet's striking dialectical and poetic originality, power, and genius. The interpretation of this passage provides the key to Lucretius' procedure, aims, and relation to the Latin language.

The sacrifice of Iphigeneia (Iphianassa) by her father Agamemnon is part of the most famous and culturally important of the Greek mythic cycles. The Trojan legends embodied the core of Greek values, provided the content for the most famous works of Greek literature, and, in their Homeric form, were the center of Greek education. In picking a legend from this group, Lucretius strikes the heart of Classical literary, ethical, and political culture. He chooses a Greek story rather than an incident from Roman history because his aim is reformation of the literary tradition by provision of a new kind of epic and hero, replacing the Iliad as a source of knowledge and Achilles as a model with a philosophically sound epic and Epicurus as a model, much the way Plato sought to substitute for them the dialectic and Socrates and Virgil in the next generation will offer a world reshaped by Roman imperialism an epic of modern historical and philosophical content and Aeneas as the representative, imitable hero. Since Lucretius' target is the whole shape and content of civic culture in the Greco-Roman form it has now realized at Rome, the story of Iphigeneia has special pertinence. What better illustration of service to communis salus than the epic and tragic sacrifice of a daughter by her father for the common welfare at the direction of divinity in order to fight a war which will gain for its heroes greatest reknown and value? This tale from the center of civic literature will stir to life in any Roman mind all the grand categories: religio, pietas, familia, communis salus, gloria, laus, virtus, pater, fides.

In this story, the mythology, literature, and pattern of life of the civic tradition coalesce to play right into Lucretius' hands. They deliver themselves as evidence against themselves to show how the Epicurean philosophy can furnish the basis for a coherence between fact and values in literature and life and, by implication, for a new literature and ethic. The sacrifice of Iphianassa, in attonement and purification to remove the guilt incurred by violating what was sacer to a divinity, evokes the world of pietas (and its verb pio), an act of which is here enjoined to cleanse the pater and rex who has been stained by a violation of the prohibitions of religio. But pietas is also the foundation of the religion of the family and is thus the bond of obligation that gives separate form to each family. The passage flourishes conflict within the category pietas, between the pietas of pater and that of rex, as Lucretius hammers away at the relationship between Iphianassa and Agamemnon and the violation of the expectations arising from that relationship under the pressure of religio: “ante aras adstare parentem / sensit” (89-90), “patrio princeps donarat nomine regem” (94), and “parentis” (99). More than this, since the king's daughter was brought to Aulis on the pretext of marriage, religio makes mock of the very foundation of familial pietas, a mockery perpetrated by the abrogation of fides. The agents of the deception, in addition to the rex, denying his obligation as pater, are the “ductores delecti”, the “prima virorum”, and the “civis”. The princess is led to the altar supported “virum manibus”. No Roman reading this passage could escape thinking of nobiles, civitas, and virtus. The purpose of this filthy bloodshed—and surely “foede” in 85 is meant to mock the meaning of pio and pietas—is described in the ancient civic formula of verse 100: “exitus ut classi felix faustusque daretur.” The civic classes and their purposes conspire in the name of religio to accomplish impia facta. The aim of civic life is a lie and the consequences of its ethic are its own condemnation.

The key words for which the mos maiorum asserted coherence and mutual justification (religio, pietas, fides, pater, familia, civitas, virtus) are set at odds with one another. Lucretius does not so much shred the inheritance in this passage as allow it to shred itself, by the simple device of citing one of its own self-justifying stories. What before were interdependent entities become inimical to each other, and the old structure collapses from its own inner contradictions. No strategy for demolishing the civic idea could have been more effective or have accomplished more of his goals than the one Lucretius chose. Rather than succumbing to the temptation of scornful denunciation of the view he opposes, he allows it to denounce itself. He accepts the story of Iphianassa and her father as true. Literature does not here tell a false tale but a true one about what happens when people have a false view of the world. Where the ancestral literature is false is in its assumptions about reality and in the conclusions about purpose and value it draws from the events it relates. This is a condition Lucretius seeks to rectify. Since the literature is part of the unified civic tradition, illustrating its self-contradiction and errors attacks the whole of the inheritance and launches the Lucretian enterprise of reshaping Roman life and the literary tradition on the standard of the true Epicurean account of reality. The poet's purpose is not philosophical innovation or instruction for its own sake, or instruction itself as the tool of reform. The innovations have been made already and the instruction is available elsewhere. If instruction itself were to be his instrument and philosophical reform his aim, the standard form of Epicurean discourse was a more efficient, direct, and unambiguous medium. His aim was to show the ramifications of doctrine for civic life and literary innovation by the creation of a new literature acceptable to modern knowledge founded on received doctrine to replace the old literature founded on a received and scientifically naive mythology. He begins his journey to both literary and civic ends by selecting a story from the literary handling of the mythological heritage that illustrates the self-induced fissures in the civic system of ideas.

In this passage, Lucretius achieves a positive as well as a negative result, for he begins the process of rearranging the Roman perception of reality by commencing the rearrangement of the Roman language for that reality. As an Epicurean, he could not accept religio, but he could accept pietas, if the role of the gods were properly defined. Indeed, he would want to accept a reformed understanding of pietas, because it was a category potentially important to Epicurean ethics as a support to its conception of the attitude of men toward the gods. So, he does not reject the name pietas. He divorces it from religio and saves the word for redefinition by condemning religio as its enemy.

Lucretius' procedure is exactly the opposite of Cicero's. Cicero applied the test of the civic system to Greek systems and accepted or rejected on that basis. Epicureanism failed this test, partly because it could not meet the requirements of both religio and pietas. Lucretius subjects civitas to the test of Epicureanism and accepts and rejects on that basis. This is a test which pietas, when properly instructed, can be made to pass and religio cannot. For Cicero, the mos maiorum has proven itself because the test of truth is the test of historical experience and is social. For Lucretius, Epicureanism has proven itself because the test of truth is sense perception interpreted by accurate science or rule (the canonic or ratio) and is private. The insights and observations of Epicureanism contain the warrant or credit (fides) of statements about the world. Religio, therefore, is a lie.

A neat tactic enables Lucretius to symbolize both his view of the origin of knowledge and the fact that he is holding Roman social traditionalism to the standard of Hellenic rationalism. In verse 66, he refers to Epicurus in his description of that philosopher's great service to man by his triumph over the gods, but he does not name him. He uses the phrase “Graius homo”.⁶ This sharpens the conflict between mankind and the gods of tradition, emphasizing the human sources of knowledge. It stresses the notion that the source of truth is individual, not societal. In this connection, Lucretius also suggests a new meaning, or at least a new application, for virtus, when, at verse 70, he makes Epicurus' rebellion against the heart of civil order (religio) flow from his animi virtus. This contradiction of the inherited social notion of virtus, and its separation from religio, lays the foundation for the new socially deracinated conception of pietas in the Iphianassa passage to follow. Again, we contrast Cicero, who denigrated the achievements of individual Greek law-givers and speculators, in comparison to the experience of res publica Romana over many generations.

If we think so often of the Ciceronian position in the First Proem, we are also reminded of Catullus in verse 79. Epicurus' insights have raised humanity to the level of the gods: “nos exaequat victoria caelo.” This is the true source of supreme human happiness, that which can be called divine, not the celebration of a triumphus or victory in one of the great Greek games, let alone the association with the beloved of a faithful heart we find in Catullus' extrapolation of Sappho in Poem 51, whose perspective Catullus recalls in Poem 72, when he tells us that once upon a time Lesbia's story was that she preferred him to Jupiter.

We may recall both Cicero and Catullus at verse 141, in the phrase “suavis amicitiae”. Not only can we think of the importance of amicitia as a civic pattern and Cicero's later handling of the topic in his De Amicitia, but we can compare Catullus' “sanctae foedus amicitiae” in Poem 109, an amicitia founded on passion and guaranteed by the fides or credit of personal feeling, and his concern with the nature of friendship in so many of his poems, particularly the contrast between personal and civil friendships.

The First Proem outlines the Lucretian revaluation of the Roman inheritance of knowledge, which will be worked out and justified in detail in the rest of the poem. It devastates religio and dispenses with fama as a source of knowing, because “fama deum” (68, and compare 5.1133-1135) is a lie whose defeat is secured by mens, virtus animi, and vivida vis animi, the private process of intellect that will supplant the social mos maiorum on the basis of a new source of fides. A new frame of reference is indicated for pietas, virtus, victor (75), and victoria (79), and possibly salus (43). The other side of this reshaping consists in the elevation of other old words to the status of fundamental categories of analysis: voluptas, ratio, and res. The principal subdivisions of the idea of res are named, here and later in Book 1: primordia, semina, and corpora, i.e. the constituents of res can be looked at from different points of view. After the proem, Lucretius adds inane, which with res will refer to the fundamental bifurcation of reality, the sum beyond which there is nothing real. The new virtus, insofar as it exists at all, is intellectual, and the new pietas recognizes the serene indifference of divinity. The new aim of life is voluptas, replacing or redefining communis salus. The source of knowledge will not be fama or social experience but sense perceptions (naturae species), which will be the new locus of fides, and the Epicurean or vera ratio of these sense perceptions will replace the mos maiorum as the evaluation or account of, the calculation or judgment upon this knowledge. The true accounting or ratio will rely on the fides of activity in the physical not the social world. Social experience will no longer provide the key to understanding nature. Nature will explain the true character and status of social experience. The new order of relations finds a paradigm at 1.422-425:

corpus enim per se communis dedicat esse
sensus; cui nisi prima fides fundata valebit,
haud erit occultis de rebus quo referentes
confirmare animi quicquam ratione queamus.

Sensus, res, and ratio replace civitas and its mos as the world of fides and knowledge.

Whatever else Lucretius has in mind by way of Greek terms when he uses ratio, and when he contrasts vera and falsa ratio, he must be thinking at least of the canonic, which otherwise seems to find no direct reference in his poem. This interpretation will cohere best with the core of meaning in the Latin word (as distinguished from its various references or applications) and cause its extensions of reference (e.g., “caeli rationes” at 5.1183) to fly distinctive Epicurean colors everywhere. Truthfulness of statements about reality and value will now be tested on the standard of vera ratio, because it is based ultimately on the perception of the world's own figures or bookkeeping, e.g. “caeli rationes”. With the true method of accounting, it will be possible to add up the sum correctly and strike an accurate balance.⁷

The centrality to the De Rerum Natura of the revaluation of the linguistic categories of reality in order to achieve civic and literary ends is confirmed near the end of the First Proem by verses 136-145, where, after the passage about Homer, Ennius, and the transference of Greek literature to Italy, all three factors combine to lay the basis for the poem's goal of enlightenment (146-148). They establish a literary and civic purpose for the enlightenment, which will require categorical shifts.

Nec me animi fallit Graiorum obscura reperta
difficile inlustrare Latinis versibus esse,
multa novis verbis praesertim cum sit agendum
propter egestatem linguae et rerum novitatem;
sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas
suavis amicitiae quemvis efferre laborem
suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas
quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti,
res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis.

The passage stresses the poetic mode of presentation and the poetic problem: “difficile inlustrare Latinis versibus”, “laborem”, and “dictis quibus et quo carmine”. Lucretius' concern is the composition and employment of Latin verses, the choice of diction, and the choice of poetic form. This is encompassed within the larger linguistic difficulty: “multa novis verbis” and “propter egestatem linguae”. Latin as it exists does not provide the terms, the categories, necessary to explain the true nature of reality. The other side of the coin is that the Latin of the mos maiorum does not give a true account of reality. So Lucretius ascribes his problem not only to the “Graiorum obscura reperta” but to its Roman novelty: “novis verbis” and “rerum novitatem”.

Newness at Rome was a far stronger, far more ominous category than it can be in an age or society where it has taken the rank of a primordial value. The political connotations of “novis” and “novitatem” could not be avoided in a language in which novus homo and novae res and novae tabellae were terms of such power or in an age when conspiracy and revolution were the air of political life. We might also remember, especially in connection with the line taken in the discussion of Catullus, that Lucretius' poetically revolutionary contemporary began his book by calling it a “novum libellum” (1.1) and dedicated it to a man to whose audacia as a writer Catullus referred explicitly. Thus, for Lucretius the Hesiodic and Alexandrian associations of such phrasing would also have lain close to the surface, since his direct reference is to novelty of diction and subject in a poem and his words are followed so soon by the poetically loaded “laborem”, as Catullus followed “novum libellum” and “ausus es” in his poem with “laboriosis” (1.7). The civic point becomes unambiguous in “virtus” and “suavis amicitiae”. Suggestion of civic reform will flow not only from the picture given previously of “virtus” but from its association here with the talk of novelty and “sperata voluptas” immediately after. The implications are strengthened by the contrast between Greek and Latin cultures, repeated from “Graius homo” at 66, and the location of knowledge in Greek thought, particularly if we keep the contrary position of Cicero in mind.

The hope of this novel poem is a novel value, the realization of new purpose in life. The new poetry and the new life will be achieved through the enlightenment of the private intellect (“tuae … menti”) and a resulting true perception of reality, up to now hidden not only from view but from the Latin language and Roman ways (“res … occultas”). The instrument of this enlightenment will not be the old education to civitas, based on the interpretation of life in the mos maiorum, but the location of fides in “naturae species” whose standard of interpretation will be ratio. Everything coheres. The philosophy is foundation and provocation of the poetry, whose end is intellectual and therefore civic revolution. The problem Lucretius has to solve is not philosophical—that has been solved already and is a given—but a matter of linguistic reform and literary revolution directed toward civic crisis.

Even if the description of these verses to this point be taken to sharpen and clarify the origin and thrust of 136-148, it must create a difficulty for understanding “novis verbis” at 138, since the interpretation offered claims that Lucretius' procedure is the redeployment of old words, not the creation of new ones. The style of the De Rerum Natura is inventive and even idiosyncratic.⁸ It is characterized by new coinages, hapax legomena which are probably quite often Lucretian in origin, and borrowings from Greek vocabulary. What is to the present point, however, is that much of the invention and idiosyncracy does not involve the creation of a new vocabulary, and so is irrelevant to understanding the passage, and that so little of what is new in the words involves the language of philosophical analysis. Coinages such as “frugiferentis”, “largifluum”, or “lauricomos” are literary in character, pretty much standard fare in the old Latin poetic style, and have no philosophical reference. Others, such as “adumbratim”, “moderatim”, “praecipitanter”, “mactatus”, “opinatus”, and “summatus” are not only not particularly philosophical, they are formed on such normal rules of Latin morphology as to be transparent even when, and if, new. They are also hardly central to Lucretius' intellectual structure.

These and other features, including the elaborate periphrases, which often do have technical analytic reference, contribute to the abundance, difficulty, and richly personal character of Lucretius' style, but they do not fulfill the implied promise of a new philosophical vocabulary, the necessity for creating which increases the hardship of illuminating the dark discoveries of the Greeks. What is most striking about Lucretius' diction in this repect is its employment of familiar Latin words to express technical Epicurean concepts: e.g., inane, res, natura, semina, corpora, primordia/principia, ratio, simulacra, imago, materia/materies, spatium, species, concilium, plagae, motus, discidium, sensus, voluptas. He does, of course, invent new terms such as clinamen and momen (though this may hardly be considered very new), but this is an unusual feature of his writing and by no means lives up to “multa novis verbis”. And we do not get the justification of this promise if we add all the Greek words in the poem. They are not used to create a technical Epicurean vocabulary for Latin. By and large, they are literary and common or restricted to the narrow areas of meteorology or music and thus serve a very limited purpose, hardly touching the central issues or vast expanse of the De Rerum Natura.⁹

Using the old Latin words in fact increased the difficulty of communication for Lucretius, a difficulty which would have been lessened had he simply imported the established Greek terms for his principal technical categories. Had his purpose been purely explanatory, didactic, and descriptive, purely philosophical, this is what he should have done. Greek was well-known to his oligarchic audience—and the De Rerum Natura is nothing if not an oligarchic poem¹⁰—and it would have been no longer a task to indicate their technical meaning than that required by his Latin words. He would have had the advantage of beginning with terms that had no distracting references or distorting emotional associations, and his explanations in Latin would have been controlled by the Greek technical meanings. Ultimately, his presentation would have gained in analytic clarity.¹¹

Lucretius' decision not to adopt a Greek technical vocabulary posed a problem for him, but it also sharpens our perception of his purpose, which becomes comparable to the purposes of Catullus and Cicero. The former solution would not have been literary, specifically poetic, and he does want to write a poem. Beyond this, he wants his poem to revaluate the literary heritage and rearrange Roman culture, to reform the language itself and the society based on it. He does not simply want to set out a philosophical system. He wants to create a direct effect for that system on the pattern of life and thought. This cannot be accomplished by ignoring the language that reflects and embeds the inherited social form of thought and motivates a pattern of life it fossilizes and inspires. It can only be accomplished by dealing with the traditional vocabulary (and restructuring the relations of the words to one another) and with the traditional literary forms (revaluating the worth and point of the various kinds and their typical content). He can then also recapitulate the typical Epicurean tactic of moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar¹²—in the case of words, from the familiar erroneous meanings to new content (which will refer to what is presently unfamiliar but true).

These considerations bring us to the reason Lucretius spends so much time with religio. This name is the central category of the mos maiorum. If the poet can portray it as a snare and a delusion, the name of an empty set, if he can drain it of meaning, if he can separate it from pietas, which will then require a new definition in order to continue in use, then the house of ancient city thought, deprived of its jointures, will tumble. He will then have wakened his audience to his purpose, brought them to a consciousness of the sources of their ideas and actions, and reshaped the world before their eyes. Whether or not the oligarchs believed they still believed in the force of religio, their world view and pattern of life was rooted in it—perhaps even more firmly than if they had been aware of the fact. If the link between their world of ideas and religio can be shown, and if religio can be demolished as a category of analysis, then they will have no choice but to admit their ideas have no anchor in reality. There will be no choice but to find a new source of thought in a new account of reality, with the consequences of this new world view for their pattern of life.

If religio goes, a new theory about the way of the world is required. If that theory stems from an observation of nature and not the experience of civitas, then the centrality of civitas will go too, and with it the last claim to primacy of the mos maiorum. Employing Latin words enables Lucretius to make the link between idea and action, and to show the social consequences of his ideas. If he had used Greek technical terms or technical coinages, he could not have shown the way in which Roman values were tied to the language of social life and stemmed from the centrality of religio. As an intellectual strategy, the cleverness of this approach is enhanced if the oligarchs do not in fact take religio seriously anymore. If he shows that a term of analysis they admit to be vain is the foundation of their life, then their position is much more indefensible on their own terms than if he had attacked a still living idea. If, in addition, he can save many of the old categories by showing they have a true relation to reality and what that relation is, when reality is properly understood, he has much more chance of persuasion than if he attempts to void every word.

The same is true of Lucretius' approach to literature. He does not say that the story of Iphigeneia is false but that its point is not understood. Interpreted correctly, it is important evidence for the proper way of behavior and the evil of the old system. The interpretation is not allegorical but strictly historical. It does not find hidden meaning about the way of the world in the story but shows that the story requires a new, explicit account of that way. Literature does not have to be discarded or allegorized in order to save it as an activity. Its elements can be rearranged and reinterpreted to construct a new tradition which will give form to the Epicurean view of the world, similarly to the manner in which it had traditionally given form to civic knowledge and value. The wise man can not only discuss and interpret literature best, the wise man can write poetry.

From the First Proem on, Lucretius builds not simply a new world for the oligarchs, or a new literature for this world, but, necessarily, a new language for the description of reality and as the substance of its literature. He eliminates some categories as irredeemably empty of content or value: religio, imperium, and civitas. The last simply does not, for understandable reasons, exist in Lucretius and is dispensed with by being allowed no application in the real world. The only related word to occur is “civis”, used to refer to the ordinary “citizens” who aid in the falsehearted and impious killing of Iphigeneia. So much for citizenry as a guarantee of truth, fides, honor, and pietas. Imperium finds its fate in Book 3 at verse 998, in the course of the diatribe that serves as the book's close. Sisyphus' ever vain toiling uphill with his rock is symbolic of the life of civic ambition. He stands for the man “qui petere a populo fascis saevasque securis / imbibit et semper victus tristisque recedit” (996-997), a not very complimentary portrait of the pattern of civitas, for the goal of the contest for civil honor is in truth an empty name: “nam petere imperium quod inanest nec datur umquam” (998). Imperium is a name without a reference in the world of things. It is, in Epicurean terms, part of the void.

Religio, although dismissed early on from the new language, is yet favored not only with mention elsewhere, mainly in the civic proems to the other five books but also with a lengthy treatment in the course of the satire on civic history in Book 5 at verses 1161-1240. Religio is a name not used there, but it is the subject of the description and denunciation, as Lucretius explains its historical origin. This is an event for which, he says, it is not difficult to present the rule of interpretation in words: “rationem reddere verbis” (1168). Lucretius' true interpretation (ratio) of the process by which religio grew is that it was based on the false understanding (i.e. ratio) by human beings of their true perceptions. Because people lacked the true principle of interpretation (“rationis egestas” at 1211) of evidence, they developed a false theory of reality, of which religio is the center.

Lucretius follows his purely historical interpretation with a satire or diatribe against this origin and the role of religio in human affairs (1194-1240), similar to his satirical intervention or Epicurean diatribe at 1117-1135, where he begins by asserting that vera ratio will lead to correct conclusions about what is true wealth, and 1148-1160. While much of the comment is universal in application, the Roman and civic point is prominent: “induperatorem classis” (1227), “legionibus” (1228—although “elephantis” here incorporates foreigners into the picture), “divum pacem votis” (1229), “pulchros fascis saevasque securis” (1234). The reader is reminded, by implication and allusion, that religio is the heart and foundation of civic life. All is shown vain and frustrate. The civil allusions draw out the point at the beginning of the satirical comment at 1194-1203, for Lucretius started from the ridicule of the specific forms of religio Romana: “velatum” (1198), “ad lapidem” (1199), “accedere ad aras” (1199), “procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas” (1200), “aras sanguine multo / spargere quadrupedem nec votis nectere vota” (1201-1202). While some of this language could have wider application in the life of the ancient city, “velatum” is clearly Roman and no Roman reader could fail to imagine anything other than the familiar rites of Roman citizenry.¹³ In any case, Lucretius' explicit point dictates the reference to Rome: the definition of the category pietas. He starts with “nec pietas ullast” (1198) and then shows what pietas is not. As in the Iphigeneia passage, it is not observation and performance of the rules of religio. Here, however, he goes on to give a positive definition of the category: “sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri” (1203)—“But more is it the ability to watch everthing with an ordered (i.e. serene) intellect.” This is the Epicurean salvation of pietas, giving Lucretius' destructive description a positive product. He then proceeds to illustrate the futility of prayer (1229) and the vanity of civic forms before the real working of the world—which must reshape the understanding of his prayer for civic peace at the opening of the poem.

The separation of pietas from the civic structure, begun in the First Proem and completed with a positive uncivil definition in Book 5, also played a role in the proem to Book 3, where it is associated as a candidate for redemption with amicitia.¹⁴ At verses 3.31-90, Lucretius discourses once more on the common pattern of civic life, the evil it represents, and the source of that pattern and its evils in a false account of the world: the notion of Acheron and religio with the attendant fear of death. This is perhaps the clearest statement in the poem that the form of civic life stems from religio and the explanation it offers of the working of the world. The fear of death, which is a part, or result, or cause of religio leads to the destruction of all moral value: “hunc vexare pudorem, hunc vincula amicitiai / rumpere et in summa pietatem evertere suadet” (83-84). Amicitia and pudor, along with pietas, are separated from civic order. Religio, instead of being their support and justification, destroys them.

The rest of the proem to Book 3 undertakes the same task of intellectual revolution. The terms in which Epicurus is praised at the very beginning of the book are famous, but the civil implications give that praise its contemporary point and ethical force: “tu pater es, rerum inventor, tu patria nobis / suppeditas praecepta” (8-9), and it is Epicurus' “aurea dicta” (12) which are “dignissima” (13). Not the mos maiorum, not the pater familias, not the civic patres, not the dignitas of Republican honor, not even the civic poet pater Ennius, but Epicurus is the source of wisdom, knowledge, and worth. This is a new version of paternal authority, and a new source of dignitas, leading to “quaedam divina voluptas” at verse 28. The description of Epicurus' achievement and its implications for civic reform are linked with the goal of reforming the inherited literature in verses 19-22: the reapplication of the quotation from Odyssey 6.42-46 on the abodes of the gods to a new and Epicurean purpose. From this, Lucretius proceeds to his standard dismantling of the mos maiorum, and we may note, in addition to the points already made his references to the parentalia (“parentant” at 51), “manibu' divis” (52), “inferias” (53), “religionem” (54), “honorum caeca cupido” (59), “sanguine civili” (70), “caedem caede accumulantes” (71), “potentem” (75), “claro … honore” (76), “statuarum et nominis ergo” (78), and “patriam carosque parentis” (85). Those who perish “for the sake of a name” are perishing for nothing but the names of empty sets in the civic order of thought, as “nominis ergo” must allude to the Lucretian theme of the relationship between nomina and res—compare the account of the origin of “rerum … nomina” (5.1051) in Book 5, a theme of the age as a whole.

Religio, imperium, civitas, pietas, amicitia, and pudor take on new roles in the world, divorced from their old coherent structure. New words are elevated to the status of fundamental categories. The source of fides is shifted from civitas to natura, from social to private knowledge, from, as it were, history to ‘’logic” (in its most general sense of rationalistic argument), or, better, from authority to reason.¹⁵Fides is always anchored in sense perception in Lucretius: “quid maiore fide porro quam sensus habere / debet?” (4.482-483.) It is linked with ratio and the new salus at 4.500-506:

et si non poterit ratio dissolvere causam,
cur ea quae fuerint iuxtim quadrata, procul sint
visa rutunda, tamen praestat rationis egentem
reddere mendose causas utriusque figurae,
quam manibus manifesta suis emittere quoquam
et violare fidem primam et convellere tota
fundamenta quibus nixatur vita salusque.

Here ratio must be “rule of interpretation”, or the canonic, and salus is not the welfare of the cives of the civitas but an individual wellbeing grounded in the facts of nature properly interpreted. So, the redefinition of salus perhaps hinted at in the First Proem has by this point been given positive substance by its own anchoring in the new reality.

Ius is demoted from the status of a category of analysis to an ordinary word. It appears eight times in the De Rerum Natura, and its adjective twice. Five of these appearances are as the idiom (or dead metaphor) iure and have no analytic significance. The form iura appears twice, three verses apart in Book 5 (1144 and 1147), in the account of the establishment of civil society and its laws, where it is used to refer to a stage of activity in history and not as a term of analysis. It is not differentiated from leges, in conjunction with which it occurs both times. Iuris occurs at 3.61 in the phrase “transcendere finis / iuris”, which, in context, refers to illegal campaigning and means little more than “breaking the law”.

This interpretation gains support from the occurrences of iustus. At 3.950, in the rebuke of man's fear of death by Nature, the phrase is “iustam intendere litem”, a metaphor from the sphere of legal action and not analytical. The phrase “praeter iustum” at 4.1241 comes from the description of sterility and is nothing more than a casual idiom. Once again, then, the poet redefines a basic civic category, in this case not draining it of content or shifting its reference but rendering it intellectually trivial by depriving it of analytic function. This is precisely opposite to the Ciceronian position, in which ius plays a central role as the link between the natural and social orders, and perfectly consonant with standard Epicurean thought.¹⁶

The case of virtus is at first more ambiguous. Verses 1.70 and 1.140, referring first to Epicurus' achievement and secondly associating the word with voluptas, suggest a redefinition in Epicurean terms parallel to much that was happening to the word in other contemporary thought. This potential, however, is never developed. At 5.858 and 863, virtus refers simply to the physical aggressiveness of animals, a demotion or trivialization even greater than that meted out to ius. How can an animal have “manhood”? This is an application of virtus to which Cicero objects openly: “Nam nec arboris nec equi virtus, quae dicitur, in quo abutimur nomine, in opinione sita est, sed in natura.” (De Legibus 1.45.) Here again a sharp line divides Cicero and Lucretius, as Cicero rebukes the manner in which Lucretius and others demean the name of civil manhood. At 5.966, virtus is used of human beings in the primitive stage of development with a meaning scarcely more elevated than bestial forwardness. This leaves 2.642, where the reference is traditional (“virtute velint patriam defendere terram”) but is part of the allegorical interpretation of the rites of the Magna Mater immediately to be rejected (645), as repudiated by the true rule of interpretation (“a vera ratione repulsa”).

While, therefore, the First Proem leads us to expect something from virtus of the sort we get with pietas, amicitia, and fides, nothing comes of our expectations. Like civitas and ius, virtus proves uninteresting and unuseful to Lucretius the Epicurean. Civitas is the order he wishes to destroy, and ius and virtus, while not as noxious as religio, were too much pillars of that order to be securely separable from it. They could not be saved for Epicurean analysis, and, indeed, had no Epicurean utility, since rerum natura and ratio, and the denial of divine providence, left no place for ius, and redefinition of virtus as voluptas, or an effect of voluptas, would have been, at best, an otiose exercise. Voluptas is the required concept and leaves nothing important for virtus to do.¹⁷

This consideration of Lucretius' intellectual vocabulary has still not advanced solution of the problem of “multa novis verbis” at 1.138. It adds justification, as if justification were needed, for the claim of “rerum novitatem” and the complaint of “egestatem linguae” at 1.139, but we have not yet found new words. On the basis of what Lucretius actually does, we should have expected a phrase like “multa nova patriis verbis”, but this is not what he says. It is, however, about what he must have had in mind. At least it represents the real difficulty with which he dealt and the actual accomplishment of his poem. Lucretius creates his new world mainly by the new use of old words, using the inherited names in novel ways and with new relations to one another—promoting, demoting, and transferring to new assignments—to explain his many new things. Novelty of rank and application, “words used in new ways”, is not what “novis verbis” means, but it is what the phrase refers to, if it has any reference at all.

The larger result of this account of Lucretius' assault on the civic categories is an explanation of the structure of the poem, and ultimately of the relation of that structure to its literary form and Lucretius' literary ambition. In this light, the observations on the nature of Latin and the poet's linguistic difficulties become central to his work in its historical context and as a document in intellectual history. His concern with religio becomes fundamental not only to Lucretius' imagination and personality but to his impersonal task. We begin to see that Lucretius must demonstrate that even those people who think they disregard portions of the inheritance of knowledge (e.g., religio) only ignore certain inconveniences of that heritage. Their fundamental way of looking at the world, as shown by their pattern of life and value, is the old way. They, more perhaps than others, must be shown the interdependence of the parts, that, if one goes, all must go, and so they must be taught the analytical and ethical consequences of their own indifference, an indifference whose significance they clearly do not themselves understand. The perception of the poet's awareness of the civic roots of the system of knowledge he must destroy, if he is to win a way for Epicureanism, and therefore of the necessarily civic purpose of the poem, sharpens perception of the way in which Lucretius has arranged his material and gives intellectual significance to the pattern.

Each of the six books of the De Rerum Natura begins with a civic proem to set the context and goal and predict the effect of the Epicurean description to follow. This includes the proem to Book 4, when the relation between Lucretius' literary ambition and his civil point is understood, though, admittedly, some special argument is required to place this proem in a civic context. Each of the last four books also closes with a satire on civic life,¹⁸ setting them off from the first two books. We have now lain the foundation for asking the point of this pattern and for illuminating the civic purpose in those sections where it might not be clear immediately, for example, the ends of Books 4 and 6. We have looked already at the proems to Books 1 and 3. A glance at the others will draw out into stronger relief the nature and extent of the poem's statement of its frame of reference and aims and bring the outlines of the satires into focus.

In the proem to Book 2, Lucretius advocates the philosophical withdrawal and spirit of detachment criticized by Cicero. Nothing is sweeter than the abstention from the contest for nobilitas, which Cicero condemns as the lack of virtus. Instead of the mark of greatness and worth in life, the struggle for honor is the product of wretchedness of intellect and blindness of heart. Nobilitas is thereby removed as a value. The poet then tells us that the desire for wealth is vanity, and we are exhorted to life according to uncivilized—i.e. not primitive or bestial, but uncitied or unpoliticized—nature. This is the radical denunciation of the value of civil culture and a claim for the radical unreality, emptiness, of civic categories, summed up in verses 37-39:

quapropter quoniam nil nostro in corpore gazae
proficiunt neque nobilitas nec gloria regni,
quod superest, animo quoque nil prodesse putandum.

Social institutions are founded on ethical delusion. They are not natural, in the sense that they do not flow from nature's demands and so are not connected to nature by knowledge. They are the product of human impositions upon nature. They are not real, in the sense that they originate in delusory dreams about the real nature of the world, from a false rule of interpretation of the significance of our real perceptions. They are “natural” in the modern, English sense of that word, in its equivocal references, but this is an English problem with categories of analysis, not Lucretius'. A distinction must be made between what is natural, in the sense of deriving from knowledge of the order of nature, and what is usual in human behavior, which may derive from ignorance of reality. Something may be often, even always, the case, without being natural in the normative Epicurean sense, or joined to reality by knowledge. Only the world of uncivilized nature (in the meaning of the Classical concept and not the English category “primitive”) is real. The rest of the proem extends the criticism of the emptiness of the civic forms in its talk of “legiones per loca campi” (40), “belli” (41), “classem” (43a), “religiones” (44), “sonitus armorum … fera tela” (49), “inter reges rerumque potentis” (50), “purpureai” (52). The cure for the distress of life is, of course, observation of nature and the rule of interpretation: “naturae species ratioque” (61).

While we can allow the Second Proem to remind us of the Ciceronian ideal, the target is more properly the unrefined civic life, not the sophisticated Ciceronian defense. We should think more of the spectacular careers of the famous cosmopolitan politicians (careers oxymoronic in name as they were paradoxical in fact) of the Late Republic: Great Pompey, Lucullus, Crassus, Verres, Gabinius, L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, C. Memmius, and, of course, C. Julius Caesar.

The Fifth Proem continues and refines the Lucretian contrast between the two fundamental sources of knowledge set up by the poem, the civic and the Epicurean. On the one hand, the mythology of the old religion tells us that great gifts of knowledge and order were bestowed by Ceres, Liber, and Hercules. The last Lucretius demeans particularly. Many of his labors are listed and ridiculed, not because the stories about them are false but because the labors were insignificant. As in the Iphianassa passage, the facts have not been estimated correctly: “Herculis antistare si facta putabis / longius a vera multo ratione ferere” (21-22). If you will judge that the deeds of Hercules are more important than those of Epicurus, you will be carried much further away from the true interpretation than you were in evaluating the gifts of Ceres and Liber. In his role as the symbol of the process of civilization, of the establishment of order, and as the great servant of mankind, Hercules is the quintessentially civil hero, which will lead Virgil, in one of his many rebukes of Lucretius, to make so much of him in Aeneid 8. If Lucretius is attacking Stoicism and its accomodation to the ethic of the mos maiorum anywhere, it must be here, and no noble reader could fail to think of Stoicism at this point. But if this is attack, it is only by implication and extension, since the poet's real target is civitas. If that can be destroyed, the Stoic accomodations are nullified automatically.¹⁹

If, on the other hand, we identify the source of knowledge with divinity, then Epicurus was a god. In the course of Lucretius' extrapolation of the praise of Epicurus from the Third Proem, he strengthens the assertion that he is the source of what is called wisdom (“sapientia” at verse 10) because he is the man who first discovered the principle of understanding life, “vitae rationem” (9).²⁰ All knowledge comes from Epicurus, and no tales of the gods embedded in the civic account as the justification of its forms and religiones can compete with this. This is the point Lucretius develops in verses 56-90, where he contrasts the Epicurean account of the evidence about reality with that of civil religio: “neve aliqua divum volvi ratione putemus” (81) and “rursus in antiquas referuntur religiones” (86). Lucretius also revives the linguistic theme, particularly of the origin of names of things: “quove modo genus humanum variante loquella / coeperit inter se vesci per nomina rerum” (71). In all of this, the poet also stresses his own literary ambition and concomitant lack of philosophical pretension. He is writing a poem: “Quis potis est dignum pollenti pectore carmen / condere pro rerum maiestate hisque repertis?” (1-2.) The goal is to write one worthy of the philosophical insight he has wholly derived from another: “Cuius ego ingressus vestigia dum rationes / persequor ac doceo dictis” (54-55). Epicurus is the new source of knowing and understanding from which everyone, including Lucretius, will now derive his conception of reality and value.

If Epicurus and his system are to replace civic divinity and its mythology as the foundation of life, it would contradict Lucretius' purpose, as shown by all he has said about Epicurus as deus and the exaltation of his accomplishment above the reputations of Ceres, Liber, and Hercules, for the poet to claim philosophic ambition. Lucretius is to be the new Homer, or Ennius, the founder of the new literature of Epicureanism, i.e. an entirely new literary tradition that will be for Epicureanism what Homer and Ennius were for civitas. It is here that we see not only the coalescence of the civic and literary goals of the poem, that they are sides of the same Lucretian coin, since it is impossible in the Classical world for literature, as part of the unified and indivisible civic inheritance, not to have civic ramifications, but also therefore the civic significance of Book 1.921-950, verses 926-950 of which are repeated as the proem to Book 4. While philosophically Lucretius traces the tracks of Epicurus (“ingressus vestigia” at 5.55), poetically he sets out over trackless places, where no one has walked before: “avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante / trita solo” (926-927). His attempt and inspiration are novel: “integros … fontes” (927), “novos … flores” (928), and “unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae” (930). The novelty is double: of subject and purpose. He is writing poetry on an obscure subject: “obscura de re tam lucida pango / carmina” (933-934). His purpose is not the expression of the values of civic life but the overthrow of its foundations: “religionum animum nodis exsolvere” (932).

It is not the aim of this essay to argue the question of the relationship between Epicureanism and poetry. The clear facts do, however, invite conclusions. Lucretius added a literary dimension to Epicureanism, and in this he was novel both as an Epicurean and as a poet. To this point, there had been no poetic rendition of Epicurean doctrines. Lucretius' motivation, aside from his ambition to do something new as a poet, stemmed entirely from the pressure of the poem's civic purpose. He clearly believed that if Epicureanism was to take root in society at large, specifically in Roman society, it must reach out to the wider audience in the form and on the terms to which that audience was used. Just as Epicureanism could not have had full effect until the civitas was enlightened about the real foundation of its view of the world in religio, so also it could not take root while, no matter what people said they believed, their culture, including their literary culture, was civil. Just as it was necessary to replace the old source of knowing and the old standard of interpretation, so it was necessary to replace the old poetry.

It may have been the civic character of the inherited literature, as much as the inadequacy of poetic expression for analytic argument, that caused Epicurus to say that the wise man will not write poetry, believing that poetry could have only one ethic.²¹ Since it was also analytically useless, there could be no point in it. If so, Lucretius is saying that all of life must have an Epicurean character, if life is to be lived according to Epicurean principles. He attempts to save this position philosophically by the famous simile of the physicians' honied cups of medicine, a simile he would never have constructed if there had not been a need to justify the writing of an Epicurean philosophical poem. His claim to novelty in this regard is correct, and it is a novelty he expected would create some surprise and discomfort. Whether or not the writing of philosophical poetry does in fact contradict basic Epicurean attitudes, it does contradict the history of Epicurean practice, and for that practice there must have been a reason fundamental to the history of philosophy since Socrates as well as to Epicureanism in particular. Lucretius' position will, then, have had potential theoretical ramifications, if the schoolmen paid any attention to his work as an authentic Epicurean document, which is hardly likely, but they are ramifications he does not work out—and could not have, if he were to live up to his claim to trace the tracks of Epicurus.²²

Analysis and art are two fundamentally different and differing modes of knowing. Epicurus recognized the former and not the latter. Lucretius seems to have believed that poetry can tell the truth and communicate authentic knowledge. The difficulties here are enormous and intricate, and they do not seem likely to be moved toward solution by any of several lines of periphrastic special pleading that end, wherever they begin, by blurring an utterly basic and crucially important distinction, that was also of great historical importance in Classical thought for the exponents of the claims of philosophy, rhetoric, and poetry, at least since the time of Plato and Isokrates up to Philodemus, not to draw the line beyond the age of Lucretius.²³ One result of recognizing this distinction and controversy is that it sharpens our perception of the civic origin of the poetic claims in the De Rerum Natura, and the interdependence of the Epicurean subject, the theme of poetry, and the civic purpose. In this light, the civil character of the Fourth Proem becomes clear and gains in force.

The civic theme of the proems reaches its climax in the Sixth, where Lucretius evaluates the greatest of the old-style cities. Like Ceres, Liber, Hercules, and others, Athens had a famous reputation and made great claims for its benefits to humanity. It was far and away the grandest representative and example of the accomplishment and value of civic life. Lucretius admits these gifts of knowledge and adds one more: Epicurus. Whatever the other and earlier presents of Athens, mankind was left still in care and lamentation: “anxia corda” (14) and “saevire querellis” (16). It was Epicurus who showed the truth about life and its proper goal, marking out the path by which mankind ought to walk. This makes him, not its civic pattern, Athens' greatest gift, the man who, ironically, came to show the limits and failings in Athens' past accomplishments.

The rest of the proem sets out again the relationship of Epicureanism, civic aim, and poetic ambition (43-95). Again and again, Lucretius stresses the importance of a proper ratio of phenomena: “ratioque” (41), “nulla ratione” (56), “qua ratione” (59), “ratione” (66), “caeca ratione” (67), “verissima ratio” (80), “ratio [terrae] caelique tenenda” (83), “nulla ratione” (90). It is caeca ratio that leads men in their ignorance back into “antiquas … religiones” (62), from which the poem is designed to free them by application of verissima ratio. From this process there will arise a new definition for another category, pax deorum: “pacis eorum” (69).²⁴ The notion of true peace is as central to the passage as ratio: “placato” (49), “pacis” (69), “placida cum pace” (73), “placido” (75), “tranquilla pace” (78). The employment of true ratio and the redefinition of pax will be secured by the final destruction of religio in the new poetry: “sunt ornanda politis / versibus” (82-83). Lucretius closes with an invocation to Calliope, who is defined as “requies” and “voluptas” (94), the Epicurean and literary sum of the passage, and with the reiteration of his poetic ambition: “ut insigni capiam cum laude coronam” (75).

Book 6 is Athens' book, and it ends where it began. The closing section must be interpreted in terms of the book's beginning and in light of the method of the whole, which method is the same here as elsewhere. After the proem on Athens and Epicurus, the poet presents the true way of interpreting those phenomena which impinge most directly upon daily life. These include, for the Egyptians, the flooding of the Nile, and pestilential lakes, and lead up to the general account of disease and the Great Plague at Athens (1138-1286). Why close with Athens and the Plague? This obviously makes the end cohere with the subject and pattern of the book, but the answer is once more found in civic purpose. The final section is a satire or diatribe against Athenian life.

Lucretius has just presented the true, Epicurean account of disease. But the Plague occurred in Athens before the birth of Epicurus. So, all the best of the old cities could rely on to deal with the overwhelming assault of the real (natural) world was the knowledge it then owned, its system of civic forms and responses. This did not give any true understanding or way of dealing with the crisis. All the citizens (“civibus” at 1140) could employ were those forms of thought that increased their panic and proved the intellectual and moral futility of their inheritance. Indeed, the passage is proof of what Lucretius says Epicurus found in the life of man when he looked about him, proof of the failure of the old way of truth.

The preceding account in the book establishes the standard of interpretation on which the satire is to be based: “haec ratio quondam morborum” (1138). Without this true account, the reader would not be able to perceive the satirical thrust of the description, its Epicurean point, or that the failure of polity is the subject. Just as Epicurus found men with “anxia corda” (14) and raging with lamentations (“saevire querellis” at 16), so the reaction to the plague was characterized by “anxius angor” (1158) and “gemitu commixta querella” (1159). Those weary with disease uttered appealing cries mingled with lament: “blandaque lassorum vox mixta voce querellae” (1245). Nothing they knew how to do, none of the great Athenian gifts, enabled them to deal with the plague, understand its causes, or adopt the proper attitude. Their science was helpless: “mussabat tacito medicina timore” (1179). Some of the sick mutilated their bodies from that fear of death, in the folly of which the poem has long instructed us: “et graviter partim metuentes limina leti” (1208) and “mortis metus … acer” (1212). The disaster even brought to some a loss of what had been known: “atque etiam quosdam cepere oblivia rerum / cunctarum” (1213-1214). The forms of civic life, convicted now of emptiness and pointlessness, were abandoned: “incomitata rapi certabant funera vasta” (1225), “nec iam religio divum nec numina magni / pendebantur” (1276-1277), and “nec mos ille sepulturae remanebit in urbe” (1278). The shrines and temples of the gods were piled high with the bodies of the dead their religio could not save. Religio ends the poem, as it began it, and in the way it began it. In the breakdown of civitas, all the structure of harmony and order was lost: “perturbatus enim totus” (1280) and “multo cum sanguine saepe / rixantes” (1285-1286).

This was the state of affairs at Athens, even Athens, before Epicurus told men the truth. Without the preceding description of the way of the world and the earlier civic criticism, we could not see the point of this closing picture. It is more than the tale of disaster. There is a reason for the way men behaved. They were left abandoned intellectually and morally by the way of life that was supposed to give them the method of understanding and dealing with the world. Here truly is the final bankruptcy of religio, when the temples have become the warehouses of the products of its failure. The point of this ending is contained in the Book's proem. Civitas is empty. It stands convicted of futility. Mankind waits for Epicurus and his truth.

The method of Book 6 flows from that in Books 3-5 and the foundation of the general ratio naturae set in Books 1 and 2. In all cases, the Epicurean narrative of nature is necessary for understanding the civic satire, and the civic satire lets the Epicurean natural narrative play a role in the contemporary intellectual crisis at Rome. In this way, the De Rerum Natura is far more than an Epicurea, has far more importance and deeper significance for its period than Sallustius' Empedoclea and Cicero's Aratea, which enrich Roman culture with Greek but do not challenge a way of life or offer a solution to the challenge of a crisis of institution and idea.

Satire, if it is to be effective, requires an understanding on the part of his audience of an author's standard of value and truth, the standard against which the object of satire is measured. It does not depend on an agreement between author and audience about the validity of the standard, but it does need clear perception of what the standard is, if his comments are to be seen as satire, as anything more than a kind of floating bitterness. Lucretius could and did draw on his readers' acquaintance with the long tradition of Hellenistic popular ethical criticism as a frame of reference,²⁵ as, for example, in the diatribes that close Books 3 and 4 and in the references to the standard vices at the beginning of Book 5: “superbia”, “spurcitia”, “petulantia”, “luxus”, “desidia” (47-48). This is the frame within which Epicurean moral criticism could also be located, but, if the poet were to make his own criticism of civitas and its mos specifically Epicurean, to insist that these evils were proof of the need for Epicureanism and that Epicureanism was their only cure, he had to do much more than that.

What had to be done was to make his satire flow from an Epicurean account of reality. Lucretius does not simply criticize the world of the citizen for being false to its own standards or false to standards of rational behavior in general. He does not offer a catalogue of isolated follies or even the description of a pattern of folly. He criticizes the intellectual foundation of citizenry by presenting a rival interpretation of reality, the effect of which he deepens and sharpens by rearranging the world of his audience before its eyes, by reshaping the structure of their language for describing reality. He rearranges the perceived relationship between words and things. The consequence of his strategy is that the tradition of satire on civic life is made to confirm Epicureanism, to be an added proof of not only the necessity for some alternative but for this alternative. In this respect, he uses the diatribe and the satirical themes in the way he used Iphigeneia and the quotation from the Odyssey at 3.19-22: the inherited literature, properly understood, contains evidence for the non-civic truth of Epicureanism. While the satirical description of city life, i.e. the recognition of its ignorance and folly, is made a conclusion of argument drawn from Epicurean knowledge, and Epicurean knowledge itself is made a conclusion of psychological need drawn from the observed insufficiency of civic life. The satire becomes consequence and justification of Epicurean doctrine.

Lucretius thus controls the response of his audience to his satire by rooting that satire firmly in an Epicurean narrative. Books 1 and 2 set out the fundamental structure of nature, to which all the description in Books 3-6 is subsidiary. This is the absolutely necessary foundation of knowledge, before anything else about nature or politics can be said, but by the end of Book 2 we are presented with conclusions closer to the events and feelings of ordinary life. As we have seen, the proems to 1 and 2 have already established an ethical dimension for the poem, and Books 3-6 open with similar proems. Then, the description in Book 3 of the true nature of the soul, including its mortality, lays the basis for the satire on the fear of death and punishment in the Underworld and of related follies of civic life. The satire on the passion and literature of love, with concluding advice on sex and procreation, in Book 4 is founded in the description of sensation and human psychology which comprises the book's Epicurean narrative. Lucretius' narration of the origin and growth of the universe in Book 5 provides the framework for his description of the origin of human life and the history of human culture. In this historical satire, he presents the stages by which the follies of contemporary life, described here and in the satires that close Books 3 and 4, arose through deviations from the life according to nature. Book 6 pictures the real status of those specific natural phenomena most obviously part of human life, including disease, which allows Lucretius to narrow the historical focus of his satire from Book 5, as he has narrowed the natural focus of his descriptions, to the single, representative example of Athens.

The diatribe against the fear of death that closes Book 3 is not obviously civic or Roman in its point. This fear is made the cause, however, of the patterns of behavior found in citizenship, and these patterns keep surfacing as objects of criticism, as the outcome of this brand of ignorant folly. The picture of the restless discontent of modern life (1053-1094) is a commonplace of Hellenistic thought, and the range of observations in 3.830-1094 seems rooted in the more general experience of life in the new-style cities of the Hellenistic world and so specific neither to Rome nor to the world of the older civic communities. The origin of the section on Acheron (978-1023) is to be sought through earlier Epicurean and Platonic writing ultimately in the end of Odyssey 11. It describes a universal condition of mankind, certainly not one peculiar to Rome, although, since it is a universal condition, it is therefore true also of Rome. There are portions of the close of Book 3, however, which do breathe the atmosphere of the Late Republic. The section on Sisyphus as a symbol of the pattern of oligarchy, cast in the vocabulary of Roman public life, has been mentioned already. It is here that imperium is emptied of content (998). Special to Rome too are verses 1025-1035 and their examples drawn from Roman history: Ancus, Scipio, the war with Carthage. All the power and glory of the kings and great leaders of the civic past were delusions in the face of the ineluctable reality of death, which is nothing to fear, a point made more implicitly but at greater length in the description of the Athenian Plague.

The criticisms applicable to Roman life are not limited to the old Republican ethic and metropolitan social problems. They also encompass the ideas represented by Catullus. Tityos is assigned by myth to Acheron, but the reality he has is as a name or symbol for a category of human experience, in this case the passion of love. He represents the man “in amore iacentem” (992) whom “scindunt cuppedine curae” (994). The reference is not specific to Catullus and will include all such people everywhere, plentifully exemplified in Hellenistic literature, such as the poems of Philodemus, but it includes Catullus also, as the representative of a contemporary theory of value.

The position of Catullus is handled much more extensively in the diatribe against love at the end of Book 4 (verses 1058-1287), especially verses 1153-1191.²⁶ In the first part of this passage, the dichotomy between words and things, lovers' language and things as they are, is the subject. This is the Platonic variation on that theme,²⁷ something Lucretius may have gotten directly from Plato or intermediately from Epicurus. The gap between representation and reality is as great for those who set up the passion of love as the end of life as for those who aim at the glories of citizenship. Amor as ultimate value (summum bonum) rests on no better an account of the world than civitas, and incorporates no stronger a standard of truth. We cannot help but think of Catullus here, although the passage begins in Plato, the language is Greek, and there is nothing in it, initially, directly reminiscent of Catullus. If anything in the passage comes from the world of poetry, it seems to stem from Hellenistic epigram and speak the language of the poems of Philodemus. It is easy to believe that Lucretius had little use for this Garden schoolman who lived in comfort with so apparently vast a gap between the pretensions of his austere technical treatises in the tradition of the Founder, on the one hand, and, on the other, both the pattern of his dance of attendance on the oligarchic princes of Republican empire and the monuments to triviality in his easy-going epigrammatic celebrations of the fluctuations of common passion.²⁸

The Greek of these verses will suggest the literature of Greece and, if allowed contemporary application, the literature of the Greeks in Late Republican Italy, but there is at least one phrase that may point directly to Catullus: “tota merum sal” (1162). Here we can think readily of Poem 86, in which Catullus distinguishes between the qualities attributed to Quintia and the true requirements of the adjective formosa, which can be applied to Lesbia alone, high among which is possession of sal. The quality of sal is a recurring theme in Catullus, as is the character of the person truly worthy of love, the subject of Poem 6. It must be admitted, however, that Catullus is concerned throughout his poems with a firm relation between words and things in poetry and love, as well as in the world of civic life (e.g., Poem 29). In the case of Suffenus (Poem 22), there is a split between poetic and personal style. In Poems 6 and 86, the one truly worthy of love or praise must reflect in her inner character the same qualities shown in physical appearance. It is because Flavius knows this (in Poem 6) that he wants to hide his girlfriend. The same point is made in Poems 41 and 43 about the mistress of Mamurra (called Ameana in our modern texts). On this ground, then, if Lucretius' target is Catullus, the criticism is unfair. On the other hand, the general proposition of the diatribe in Book 4 that true value cannot be located in passion and the relationships founded on passion (where Catullus places fides, amicitia, and pietas) is a response to the values found in Catullus' poems. In this light, the plight of the exclusus amator in verses 1177-1191 may remind us of Poem 67 or perhaps Poems 32 or 51, as well as the general world of the Catullan pattern of life.²⁹

The longest treatment of the civic system occurs in the history of the rise of civilization in Book 5 (verses 772-1457). This narrative should be juxtaposed to Cicero's record of the development of Rome in the De Re Publica, in which exactly opposite conclusions are reached about the value of human society as it developed historically and the origin of vices and evils. The development of civic society has, for Lucretius, removed man progressively farther from reality by adding to the false notions of the way the world works certain concepts, practices, institutions, and temptations that were not present to primitive man, who, of course, had his own misconceptions and troubles.³⁰ The developed form of society, as man has swerved more and more from clear understanding because of successive layers of false interpretation and intervening institutions, has perpetuated and multiplied the ways in which truth is concealed from him. The civic experience that for Cicero is the test of truth and the visible reflection of the real structure of the world is for Lucretius a veil, a snare, a delusion, the firm fossilization of error.

Lucretius returns to the relationship of names and things (nomina rerum) at 5.1028-1090. The origin of names is not found in a natural relation between word and thing or in the activity of a linguistic legislator but in the interrelationship of natura (1028), utilitas (1029), and sensus (1058, 1087). The importance of this point of view is that the growth of language is according to nature, but the absence of a natural relation and an original all-knowing legislator, and the role of utilitas and sensus, allows language to be reformed and the meanings of nomina refashioned in accordance with a better interpretation of sensus and thus an alteration in the pressure of utilitas. The conventionality of the nomina themselves, their instrumental status, makes them particularly susceptible to reforms of knowledge and so sanctions Lucretius' linguistic activity in the De Rerum Natura.

The mythological account of the world is again allowed to act as its own refutation (878-924) in the stories of the Centaurs, Scylla, and the Chimaera. The argument that such creatures could have arisen during the earth's youth is dismissed as a reliance “in hoc uno novitatis nomine inani” (909), an argument from an empty name or unjustified category alone, not by reasoning from a true analysis of the world of nature by understanding things unseen on the basis of things seen.

Lucretius begins his narration of the rise of civil society at 1105 with the origin of monarchy. This history is universal in source and application, but it does provide the foundation for specific criticism of civitas Romana. The general history is brought home to Rome by the frequent recurrence of the Roman civic categories as targets of ridicule or revision and of the theme of religio: “ad summum succedere honorem” (1123), “regere imperio res” (1130), “imperium” (1142), “magistratum” (1143), “communia foedera pacis” (1155), “sollemnia sacra” (1163), “pietas” (1198), “induperatorem classis” (1227), “divum pacem” (1229), “pulchros fascis saevasque securis” (1234), “purpurea” (1428), “plebeia” (1429), “auxilia ac socios iam pacto foedere habebant” (1443). As described above, the civil satire culminates in the revised evaluation of Athens' contributions in the proem to Book 6 and the satire on civil helplessness which is that book's close.

Since what Lucretius says contradicts so flatly what his audience believes its experience to have been and what it considers to be the reasonable conclusions from that experience, the ground of this new interpretation and the link between experience and observation must be made ostentatious. He must make his audience agree that it does see what he sees and then find a way of winning it to the notion that there is an iron chain linking observation, idea, and action, so that conclusions become inevitable obligations, not matters of choice. This is the service performed by his formulaic style,³¹ which emerges from his metrical form of expression and recalls the ancient manner of narrative literature, as well as the feelings and sense of grandeur his audience attached to that literature.

At the beginning of his verses, as a regular rhythm of sound, idea, and argument, he stabilizes certain phrases and verbal nuclei that put on display the structure of his reasoning: “nunc age”, “principio”, “propterea quia”, “praeterea”, “quapropter”, “quod superest”, “deinde quod usque adeo”, “iamne vides igitur”, “quare etiam atque etiam”, “sed magis”, for example. Only a reading of the poem at a stretch can evaluate the effect of this. The unrolling of the presentation of nature is blocked out in a steady form and rhythm, so that the reader begins to feel it as a shape, and a rhythm, to sense reasoning itself as physical form and movement, as something of art. The poem conveys thereby a sense of rightness and inevitability in the narration of reality that is not simply rhetorically effective but becomes eventually positively astounding in its emotional sway. The reader begins to feel persuaded, whether he is convinced or not, to believe this is the way things are. The waves of assertion become tides of plausibility. A new sense of order, based on a new poetic vocabulary, a newly and unusually poeticized vocabulary, emerges as the structure of feeling as well as of thought for this new world. The formulas for order at the beginnings of the verses are partnered by the formulas for truth, reality, appearance, and compulsion at the ends. The allowable forms of video occur 229 out of 256 times at the end of a verse. Combinations involving “rerum/rebus”, “inane/inani”, “semina”, “corpora”, “primordia”, and “exordia” close the verse regularly and frequently. “Materiai” always does so, and “voluptas” 18 out of 21 times. “Ratione” also appears regularly in formulas for closing a verse. Perhaps the most striking of these formulas, however, are those constructed around “necessest”, which ends 96 verses, out of its 105 occurrences. Compulsion arises when the close observation of the substance of reality is guided by the true method of interpretation. It is not fitting or seemly (decet) that we draw certain conclusions. That would be the method of civic reason, in which correct outward behavior on purely social standards is the central consideration. Lucretius is not after social appearances, but the use of natural appearances to give real understanding for ordering inward disposition. It is also not our duty (oportet) to draw these conclusions. This is a consideration based on the standard of civic virtus. It is the ineluctable power of reality itself, when once it has been observed and understood, that compels us to draw these conclusions. This is a requirement of perception and reason, which leaves no choice because the facts admit of no other genuine solution.

The Lucretian style creates its own new poetic order to give a feeling of order to the Epicurean explanation of the world, to develop a new lexicon of poetic reference and grammar of imagery, and to attach the force of rhetoric and literary association to Epicurean observation and analysis, to make out of this observation and analysis a new kind of narrative. The attachment of a feeling to Epicurean description and the revision of feeling about the inherited res publica is a necessary part of weening a non-philosophical audience from the old ideas and fixing them to the new. It requires poetry or rhetoric, not logic, because analysis can only convince. It cannot persuade. It cannot make people want to change. Only supplanting their emotional attachment to the old order by a stronger and better attachment to the new, and, if possible, detaching them from the old by making them feel toward it as they do their enemies, can accomplish this. This is the point and purpose of Lucretius' Epicurean poem: (1) the Epicurean content provides the foundation for making the criticism of civic virtue provoked by modern historical circumstance substantive, systematic, and purposive; (2) the poetic technique and form assimilates Epicureanism to inherited forms of feeling to wed a positive feeling to philosophy and detach from the inherited community the inherited feelings which were its mainstay.

The description of the relationship of style, structure, form, and purpose leads us to the conclusive sense of wholeness in the De Rerum Natura. Wherever we begin, whether from observation of nature, which, interpreted through the canonic, leads us to certain judgments on civic life, or from observation of civic life, whose inadequacies lead us to questions about the structure of nature, which is then to be interpreted by the combination of observation and rule, from that beginning we are led to the same conclusions, the same conclusions about physics and politics. We cannot accept the old account of reality and, therefore, we cannot accept the practice of civic virtue. Or, we see that civic virtue leads to misery, and, therefore, we are led to believe that reality must be different from the account of it which has been handed down to us. The wholeness reflects the wholeness of the original philosophy, but it is created and evaluated, shaped for feeling, by the wholeness in the form of the poem, which Lucretius makes the physical manifestation of that intellectual and emotional wholeness.

In such considerations we have the explanation of the importance of the satires on civic life to the whole poem.³² It cannot work without them. Without them, it cannot function as both a true poem and a true representation of the Epicurean sensibility. It is the creation of this consistent sensibility, linking physics to civil satire, that is ultimately the most powerful mechanism of subtle persuasion in the poem. In this respect, Lucretius shows his understanding, conscious or not, of a great historical and psychological truth: ideas lead to thought, they do not begin in thought. They begin in feeling: the feelings which are our immediate and instinctive evaluations of our experience of the world. Lucretius' advocacy of the sufficiency of a rationalistic foundation for life rests on his sense of the emotional foundation of rationalism. In his vast appreciation of this fact of human nature, Lucretius shows the same understanding of the roots of intellectual life as Cicero and Catullus. All three point up what may have been the limit of Caesar's genius and a fundamental inner cause of his ruin, a limitation Augustus did not share.

In writing the De Rerum Natura, Lucretius was not simply unrolling his enthusiasm for a philosophy which, for some unaccounted and on the evidence unaccountable reason, was appealing to him personally. It may be true, ought certainly to have been true, that his personality was the sort to be attracted to Epicurus' sort of philosophy. But that is hardly interesting, and it is not significant. What is both interesting and significant are the implications of the event of this poem. That it is a poem is itself an event. It is not a poem due to a personal interest in Epicureanism. A merely personal interest in Epicureanism, if it perchance led to writing, would have led naturally to the usual kind of Epicurean writing. There is clearly something much more going on, something impersonal and highly intellectual. The De Rerum Natura is meant to be a service to the redefined communis salus of the Roman world. It rejects the Caesarian notion that there is no such thing except as it exists as a function of Caesarian ambition. It rejects the Catullan notion that real salus is purely emotional. And it rejects the Ciceronian idea that the reality of communis salus is to be located in the intellectual order of the mos maiorum as enriched by the compatible discoveries of Greek philosophy. Communis salus is to be located in the framework of voluptas, amicitia, pietas, fides, and pax (hominum divumque) in their Epicurean definitions, and in the riddance from our minds of civil religio, imperium, ius, and virtus. The De Rerum Natura is designed as a tract for its times. This is the key to its purpose, form, structure, and role, which gained their definition from the world in and for which it was composed. Cicero, Caesar, and Catullus will have understood it, because it lives in their intellectual world. We cannot understand it, unless we understand that world and the languages it spoke.

Notes

1. The study of the early period of the Roman community is notoriously difficult and controversial. Among the most lucid and convenient surveys of the field are A. Momigliano, “An Interim Report on the Origins of Rome”, JRS 53 (1963) 95-121; the same author's “The Origins of the Roman Republic”, Charles S. Singleton (ed.), Interpretation: Theory and Practice (Baltimore 1969) 1-34 (particularly 15-18 and 31-32 on Greek influence); and R. M. Ogilvie, Early Rome and the Etruscans (Atlantic Highlands, N.J. 1976), including especially the bibliographical essay “Further Reading”, 177-184. All the fundamental studies are mentioned by Ogilvie. Particularly relevant to the specific points raised here are: J. Huergon, The Rise of Rome to 264 B.C. (London 1973); G. K. Galinsky, Aeneas, Sicily and Rome (Princeton 1969); H. Versnel, Triumphus (Leiden 1970); and R. Bloch, The Origins of Rome (New York 1960), particularly 14, 107-108, 114, 117, 143-148 on Greek influence. In addition to Ogilvie's citations, the following are useful. On the Saturnian verse, see T. Cole, “The Saturnian Verse”, YCS 21 (1969) 1-73, particularly 46-73, for a survey of the problems of the structure and origin of the meter and of possible influences upon it. On the Roman alphabet, see A. E. Gordon, “On the Origins of the Latin Alphabet: Modern Views”, CSCA 2 (1969) 157-170, who surveys the scholarship on the question and advocates Etruscan mediation. Whatever the truth, the alphabet is ultimately Greek and an example, direct or indirect, of Greek influence on the world in which Rome lived. Even Gordon admits that how the Romans learned the sound values of certain letters, even if they borrowed the forms from the Etruscans, presents a problem, saying only that they “of course needed them and may somehow have learned their value in Greek” (166). Why not from the Greeks themselves, with whom Romans had early direct contact? There is also a problem associated with the pronunciation of X, the simplest solution of which would appear to be direct encounter with Greeks. Was there no writing on the Greek vases (mostly Attic) imported into Rome all during the Sixth Century b.c. (see Bloch, 89, 92-93, 96, 108)? That hardly seems likely. They will have been important vehicles for direct knowledge of Greek writing. Finally, both Gordon (160) and Ogilvie (49) stress the significance of the Praenestine Fibula as evidence for the proximate Etruscan origin of Roman writing. If, however, Margherita Guarducci's demonstration in La cosiddetta Fibula Prenestina (Roma 1980) that the fibula is a Nineteenth Century forgery stands, this document becomes a nullity, and the case for at least partial direct Greek influence is strengthened. Gordon accepts Guarducci in his review of her book, CJ 78 (1982) 64-70, with reference to his own article, “The Inscribed Fibula Praenestina, Problems of Authenticity”, Univ. Calif. Classic. Studies 16 (1975) 3-24, but no mention of his position in CSCA. Since the Romans wrote in the same direction as the Greeks and oppositely from the Etruscans, it might seem likely that the Greeks played a role in teaching the Romans how to write.

2. This is the insight offered by Roman historical writers, in their own categories of analysis, when they date the beginning of moral decline at Rome: for example, Livy 39.6.7 on the triumph of Cn. Manlius Vulso (187 b.c.) “de Gallis qui Asiam incolunt” (39.6.3), “Luxuriae enim peregrinae origo ab exercitu Asiatico invecta in urbem est.” Also compare 39.6.9: “Vix tamen illa, quae tum conspiciebantur, semina erant futurae luxuriae.” Sallust, of course, (Bellum Catilinae 11.5) places the beginnings of luxuria only in the Asian campaign of Sulla, but in language more suggestive than that of Livy: “Huc accedebat quod L. Sulla exercitum quem in Asia ductaverat, quo sibi fidum faceret, contra morem maiorum luxuriose nimisque liberaliter habuerat.” The general decline of the mos maiorum Sallust dates from 146 b.c. and the final fall of Carthage (Bellum Catilinae 10 and Bellum Jugurthinum 41). On this whole topic, see D. C. Earl, The Political Thought of Sallust (Cambridge 1961) 41-59.

3. … Two recent surveys of the issues in Lucretian studies, with bibliography of major works attached, are M. F. Smith, Lucretius: De Rerum Natura (Cambridge, Mass. 1975) ix-lx and E. J. Kenney, Lucretius (Oxford 1977). On Lucretius and poetry, see: E. E. Sikes, Lucretius: Poet and Philosopher (Cambridge 1931); J. H. Waszink, Lucretius and Poetry (Amsterdam 1954); P. H. Schrijvers, Horror ac Divina Voluptas (Amsterdam 1970), with review by E. J. Kenney, CR 22 (1972) 348-351; and J. D. Minyard, Mode and Value in the De Rerum Natura: A Study in Lucretius's Metrical Language (Wiesbaden 1978), 1-7 and 87-102. On Lucretius and Epicureanism, see P. Boyancé, Lucrèce et l'épicurisme (Paris 1963) and, now, D. Clay, Lucretius and Epicurus (Ithaca 1983).

4. See below, note 34, for some studies relevant to this question, and also the discussion in section 8, “The Consequences of Crisis”, for observations on the illusion of Lucretius' cultural isolation. The issue of Lucretius' relation to his times, “The idea of Lucretius as a lone hand” (as Kenney puts it on page 6 of his Lucretius), is twofold, philosophical and literary. Isolation in one sphere does not imply isolation in another. Kenney's summary (Lucretius 7) is to the point: “The most important and the most reliable inferences that can properly be made from the D.R.N. are of a literary order. Mention has been made of the wide culture pervading the poem. Lucretius, however, was not only well read, observant, and intelligent. He was more especially a professional poet, professional in the sense that he wrote as one dedicated to the futherance of an ancient poetic tradition, the didactic epos; and his poem belongs to the mainstream of ancient literary development.” This essay is an attempt to provide additional support for this point of view, but we should not allow such wholly correct observations to obscure the fact that Lucretius' poem was the most original poetic document in the history of the Classical literatures. Poetry was no longer the medium for real philosophy and was not supposed ever to be the medium for Epicureanism: no one had written a poem about a philosophical system which forbade the philosophical use of poetry. And we should remember that Epicureanism was a living system with a school. This is not true of the ancient and dead philosophy, dead as a still-creative independent system, and one which never had a school, of Empedocles. Whatever Sallustius did, he was not facing the issues Lucretius faced. Lucretius did not intend simply to give a poetic reproduction or literary turn to a philosophical or scientific topic. He intended to set literature on a new path. This is not, however, the kind of originality suggested by D. Clay, “De Rerum Natura: Greek Physis and Epicurean Physiologia (Lucretius 1.1-148)”, TAPA 100 (1969) 31-47, although he well observes (32) the distinction between Lucretius' poem and Ennius' Epicharmus, Cicero's Aratea, and Sallustius' Empedoclea. See now D. Clay, Lucretius and Epicurus (above, note 18) 82-110. See also Kenney's Lucretius: De Rerum Natura Book III (Cambridge 1971) for many detailed observations on the poem's literary character.

5. There are more studies than there used to be attempting to relate Lucretius to his age and to Roman culture. Important among these are: E. J. Kenney, “Doctus Lucretius”, Mn 23 (1970) 366-392; P. Grimal, “Le Poème de Lucrèce en son Temps” in Entretiens Hardt XXIV (Genève 1978) 233-270 (which reaches some conclusions very different from those of this essay about that relationship, particularly in regard to Caesar); see also, A. K. Michels, “Lucretius, Clodius and Magna Mater” in Mélanges … offerts à J. Carcopino (Paris 1966) 675-679, on a specific point of contact between the poem and contemporary life. The works of Farrington (above, note 8) also place Lucretius in his historical setting.

6. L. Edelstein, “Primum Graius Homo (Lucretius 1.66)”, TAPA 71 (1940) 78-90, does not believe Lucretius had Epicurus in mind here. His arguments seem to me farfetched and based on a misreading of the poem, to wit (89): “Moreover, one should not overemphasize the importance of religion for Lucretius' thinking and consequently not overestimate the importance which the liberation from religious fears through Epicureanism has for the poet's mind.” The entire present essay is an answer to this point of view. Edelstein's argument, however, rightly emphasizes the generality of the Lucretian phrase: that the poet at this point stresses the Greekness of the accomplishment, rather than the identity of the individual. Compare “Graiorum obscura reperta” at 1.136. On Lucretius as a follower of Epicurus, see D. J. Furley, “Lucretius the Epicurean”, Entretiens Hardt XXIV (Genève 1978) 1-6. On the centrality of the struggle against religion to Epicurus, see Farrington, Science and Politics (above, note 8) 87-129, 148-159, and 172-216 (on Lucretius), and The Faith of Epicurus (above, note 8) 63-104.

7. See C. Bailey, Titi Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex (Oxford 1947) 1227-1229, introducing his comments on 4.379-468, the description of false inferences of the mind, which he says (1228), “goes right back to the foundation of the Epicurean metaphysic expressed in the Canonice” and 1177, where he notes that much of 4.1-822 “is concerned with Epicurus' Canonice. …” At 4.384-385, Lucretius states the relation of sense perception to understanding: “hoc animi demum ratio discernere debet, / nec possunt oculi naturam noscere rerum.” The use of ratio here (“animi … ratio”) is very important to the point of the present argument. See D. J. Furley, “Lucretius the Epicurean” (above, note 21) 8: “… the pre-Epicurean terror and darkness of mind must be dismissed by naturae species ratioque …—that is, by looking at nature and interpreting it.” The close association of species and ratio in the Lucretian phrase, making of the expression a nearly undivided concept, finds its foundation in the Epicurean rooting of judgment and thought directly in sensation. See the account of the Epicurean canonic in J. M. Rist, Epicurus: An Introduction (Cambridge 1972) 14-40. The importance of this understanding of ratio for the topic at hand is indicated by Rist's remarks on 15: “Epicurean canonic, therefore, is an enquiry into the nature of the tools we possess for knowing the external world and an evaluation of the information with which these tools supply us. As such, it is in the first instance an investigation of what the Greeks were accustomed to call the criterion of truth or the criterion of reality. … The criterion is a criterion of the exisistence or of the reality of particular things … but it is also a criterion of truth and falsehood. This can only mean that the criterion may be used not only to judge problems about the possible existence or non-existence of objects in the world, but also to settle questions about the truth-value of propositions about such existent or non-existent objects.”

8. See Bailey (above, note 22) 132-171, for a survey of Lucretian style, on which I have relied for the information in this discussion, and W. S. Maguiness, “The Language of Lucretius” in D. R. Dudley (ed.), Lucretius (New York 1965) 69-93, which covers the same basic material and coheres with the point of view expressed here about Lucretius' inventiveness.

9. Compare M. P. O. Morford (above, note 17) for a discussion of Cicero's handling of some of the same problems in his Aratea.

10. Here I agree with Kenney, Lucretius (above, note 18) 3, 7n.3, and see 4: “Now the one thing that cannot be said of the D.R.N. is that it is on the whole easy reading.” Indeed not. Thus, against T. P. Wiseman, “The Two Worlds of Titus Lucretius”, in Cinna the Poet and Other Roman Essays (Leicester 1974) 11-43. See B. Farrington, The Faith of Epicurus (above, note 8) 139, on the apparent contrast between the Epicurean prose propagandists and Lucretius. The De Rerum Natura shows the oligrachic education and culture. It is addressed to an oligarch. The problems it raises are the problems of oligarchy (the evils of nobilitas, not of the obscure life to which Epicureanism is the exhortation), and the solutions it offers are those available to oligarchs. Wiseman restates his position in “Pete nobiles amicos: Poets and Patrons in Late Republican Rome”, in B. K. Gold (ed.), Literary and Artistic Patronage in Ancient Rome (Austin 1982) 35-38. Religio is not the problem of the man in the street, as Lucretius defines it. It is the underpinning of nobilitas, even if the nobiles do not recognize this. His aim is to show the link, and by rendering religio vain and ridiculous, by implicitly comparing the nobiles to the untutored vulgus, to show them that therefore their whole pattern of life is intellectually no better than that of the lowest, most uncultured element of society.

11. Lucretius' approach to the problem of expressing new concepts by old words is similar to Catullus' and seems to me to mitigate the force of Rubino's argument (above, note 13), particularly on 293. Catullus may have had no choice about using the inherited language, while Lucretius did, but Lucretius' choice and practice shows how far the reinterpretation of old words was possible. I would argue that Catullus and Lucretius, in their different aims, so far succeeded that it took Virgil a lifetime to put the inheritance back into its old frame of reference (see below, section 8), with help from Horace and Livy, hindered by the subversions of Propertius and Ovid.

12. Compare Bailey (above, note 22) 58-59.

13. So Bailey (above, note 22) on 5.1198-1203, and 1198 in particular, against which P. Boyancé, “Velatum … ad lapidem”, Latomus 35 (1976) 550-554, arguing for reference to a Greek custom, is not convincing in context here or the general ambience of the poem.

14. On piety and the other Epicurean “virtues”, see N. W. DeWitt (above, note 10) 249-288 and 289-327, but also B. Farrington, The Faith of Epicurus (above, note 8) 20-32 (“Friendship versus Justice”) and Rist, Epicurus: An Introduction (above, note 22) 127-139 (“The Problem of Friendship”). A contemporary discussion of the Epicurean virtues is found in Torquatus' exposition in Cicero's De Finibus 1.42-70, and particularly 65-70, an account of debate among Epicureans themselves over amicitia.

15. De Rerum Natura 5.1133-1135: “quandoquidem sapiunt alieno ex ore petuntque / res ex auditis potius quam sensibus ipsis, / nec magis id nunc est neque erit mox quam fuit ante.”

16. See Rist (above, note 22) 122-124 and Farrington, The Faith of Epicurus (above, note 8) 20-32.

17. Compare Rist (above, note 22) 125 and DeWitt (above, note 10) 245-248 (“The Relation of Pleasure to Virtue”). For vera voluptas as goal and standard, note De Rerum Natura 5.1433. Also compare Cicero's litany of the old words in the section from the introduction to the De Re Publica quoted in the text above, section 6.

18. On Lucretius and satire, see: H. P. Houghton, “Lucretius as Satirist”, TAPA 43 (1912) xxxiv-xxxix; C. Murley, “Lucretius and Roman Satire”, TAPA 67 (1936) xliv; C. Murley, “Lucretius and the History of Satire”, TAPA 70 (1939) 380-395; R. Waltz, “Lucrèce satirique”, Lettres d'humanité 8 (1949) 78-103; D. R. Dudley, “The Satiric Element in Lucretius” in D. R. Dudley (above, note 23), 115-130; B. P. Wallach, Lucretius and the Diatribe Against the Fear of Death (Leiden 1976); and E. J. Kenney, Lucretius: De Rerum Natura Book III (above, note 19), especially 17-20 and 199-244. The last two are fundamental explorations of the topic.

19. The question of Lucretius and Stoicism is allied to the larger question of his philosophical originality. On this subject, see especially: P. H. DeLacy, “Lucretius and the History of Epicureanism”, TAPA 79 (1948) 12-23; D. J. Furley, “Lucretius and the Stoics”, BICS 13 (1966) 13-33; K. Kleve, “The Philosophical Polemics in Lucretius”, Entretiens Hardt XXIV (Genève 1978) 39-75; D. J. Furley, “Lucretius the Epicurean” (above, note 21) in the same volume; and P. H. DeLacy, “Lucretius and Plato” in … Studi sull'Epicureismo greco e romano offerti a Marcello Gigante 291-307. A. D. Winspear (above, note 10), 1-15, makes an argument for Lucretian originality which seems to me to amount to little more than praise of his inventive style and presentation. The fragmentary state of the sources does not easily allow any argument to be made for the philosophical originality of Lucretius. We must either claim nothing for Lucretius himself, on the basis of a necessary historical agnosticism, or, if we make a claim from the evidence, we must say Lucretius made no original contribution to philosophy, whether or not he got everything from Epicurus. Everything in DeLacy's “Lucretius and Plato”, for instance, seems to me able to have come from Epicurus himself. Compare the relationship of Plato to Epicurus portrayed by Farrington in The Faith of Epicurus (above, note 8) and Science and Politics (above, note 8) 130-147. See Furley's conclusion to his “Lucretius and the Stoics” (31-32), especially his final sentence, on Lucretius (32): “Wisely, or perhaps just luckily, he avoided these side issues and concentrated his fire on the main enemy: De Rerum Natura is the Atomists' answer to the Aristotelian world-picture.” This will cohere with the description of the world view of the First Century b.c. found in Thornton (above, note 7). Both Thornton and Furley will serve to place Lucretius in his proper intellectual context and explain the reason for the persistence of his attack on religio and the notion of divine providence, both of which were the categorical pillars of the fundamental ideas about the universe among the intellectual class, and among the mass, of the Late Republic. Plato and Aristotle erected the defense of an intellectually refined civic heritage. This is why Epicurus attacked their conclusions, however much he also borrowed. This attack Lucretius transferred to Rome. He did not attack the Stoics or other late anti-Epicurean arguments directly, because he was not a creative philosophical thinker (he was a creative poetic thinker) and because he did not have to. His enemy was civitas Romana as an intellectual structure. If he could destroy that, what need was there to bother with subsidiary defenses of what had been demolished? They would go the way of the nullified system. Lucretius was in the forefront of the intellectual controversy of his time, but as a poet not as analytical thinker. Philosophically, while Lucretius of course knew and knew of the schoolmen, in the narrow world of oligarchy and its Greek dependents, he was isolated from their school structure and took no part in their debates. He and Catullus lived in the same literary world, for that was where their talents lay.

    Reference should perhaps also be made to J. H. Nichols, Jr., Epicurean Political Philosophy (Ithaca 1976), which covers much of the conceptual material of this essay. Nichols' discussion seems to me, however, to be too little rooted in the realities of historical developments in the Classical world, Roman society, and Greek and Latin words to be of much use in understanding more than the surface shape of Lucretius' pattern of thought. He does not take us very far into the literary, historical, and intellectual depths of the poem. This leads to an unsatisfactory account throughout of Lucretius' attitude to “politics”, and his demonstration of Lucretian atheism (148-167) appears not only to misconceive the method of the poem (and wrongly to interpret Lucretius on analytic grounds), but to misunderstand the nature of the debate over the gods (which turned more on the issue of divine providence than divine existence) and the nature of ancient (civic) religion and its connection with “politics”. Indeed, in any discussion of “religion” in Lucretius, pietas must be considered as much as religio and direct mention of the gods, and pietas is saved by Lucretius in an Epicurean sense. This will save part of “religion”. Indeed, in the De Rerum Natura, the enemy is religio, not “religion”.

20. See D. J. Furley, “Lucretius the Epicurean” (above, note 21) 6-9.

21. Diogenes Laertius 10.120; Plutarch, Mor. 1086f-1087a; Cicero, De Finibus 1.72, Torquatus' praise of Epicurus: “An ille tempus aut in poetis evolvendis, ut ego et Triarius te hortatore facimus, consumeret, in quibus nulla solida utilitas omnisque puerilis est delectatio. …” See DeWitt (above, note 10) 107-108, but the example of Philodemus is neither here nor there with regard to Lucretius.

22. That is, he could not claim to be both a faithful follower of Epicurus and argue a role for poetry contrary to Epicurus' ideas. It is doubtful, of course, if Lucretius could have invented an analytically satisfactory argument by himself. There is a difference between feeling something to be true, even knowing it to be true, and being able to demonstrate its truth analytically with arguments of one's own invention cast in an acceptable logical form. Putting arguments in clear logical form does not seem to have been among Lucretius' talents. It certainly was not his aim.

23. See Minyard (above, note 18) 1-7 and 96-102.

24. Compare “divum pacem” at 5.1229.

25. See Wallach and Kenney (above, note 33).

26. See Kenney, “Doctus Lucretius” (above, note 20), 380-390.

27. Plato, Rep. 474d-475a.

28. On the identification of Philodemus the philosopher and Philodemus the poet, which hardly seems a subject for productive doubt, see A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page, The Greek Anthology (Cambridge 1968) 2.371-374 and on Poem XXIII (393); C. L. Neudling, A Prosopography to Catullus (Oxford 1955) 42-45, 123, and 137-141; DeLacy (above, note 11).

29. It may be noted here, in connection with Catullus above, the attitude of Lucretius, and all that is to be said below about the place of Lucretius and Catullus in the crisis, that the Epicureans opposed ερως and pιλία, while Catullus linked amor and amicitia, perhaps influenced by etymology. See Rist (above, note 22) 127-139, especially 127-129. This will be a clear divergence of Catullus from Epicureanism.

30. See Furley (above, note 21), for full discussion of this section of the poem. While each stage of human history exhibits its own evils and misconceptions, and so, as Furley notes (9-10), the issue of progress or decline is strictly irrelevant to Lucretius' presentation, as society develops more institutions, instruments, practices, and resources based on misinterpretation of nature or providing wider field for misinterpretation, it must, therefore, by devising more wrongly-based activities and values, have erected more barriers to understanding, thereby removing man further from nature. This is an intellectual rather than a moral issue. Modern man does not necessarily behave worse than primitive man, and he has created some instruments for controlling evil behavior, but his life is more distant from nature. See P. H. DeLacy, “Process and Value: An Epicurean Dilemma”, TAPA 88 (1957) 114-126, for what might be conceived as a difficulty for Lucretius, in an Epicurean framework, perhaps caused by a conflict in the views of the Founder himself, in recounting the development of civilization. Perhaps the difficulties we perceive in Book 5 (and elsewhere) stem often from Lucretius' limitations as an original analytic thinker, from tensions in Epicurean thought he was not capable of resolving, but which he was brilliantly capable of representing, perhaps without fully realizing it. See, e.g., D. J. Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists (Princeton 1967) 41.

31. See J. D. Minyard (above, note 18) for a complete description of Lucretian formulas and their function, as well as a discussion of the implications of this style for understanding this poet's poem.

32. See Kenney, Lucretius: De Rerum Natura Book III (above, note 33) 9-12. There is more ethical poetry in Lucretius than Kenney's description may be taken to imply, as his own treatment of Lucretian satire (17-20) should indicate. Ethical poetry was entirely possible, as the satiric tradition shows, and, contrary to the claim (10n.1) that Lucretius has reversed the traditional Epicurean subordination of Canonics and Physics to Ethics, the aim of the present essay is to show that the De Rerum Natura preserves the Epicurean hierarchy of philosophic parts and that the aim of the poem, in structure as well as thought, is relentlessly ethical. Lucretius, read closely, can be seen to insist on this nearly everywhere.