SOURCE: Minadeo, Richard. “The Great Design.” In The Lyre of Science: Form and Meaning in Lucretius's “De Rerum Natura,” pp. 31-54. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969.

[In the following excerpt, Minadeo attempts to explain the meaning of De rerum natura largely through study of its design and structure.]

The biographical tradition on Titus Lucretius Carus is meager indeed, and those notices that are at all striking are both late in source and so compromising as to seem the work of a master ironist. As the result of a love potion, the tradition runs, the poet went insane, composed De Rerum Natura during intervals of lucidity and ultimately committed suicide. Save for the miracle of the poem itself, there is plainly nothing here that reflects the promised fruits of the Epicurean ethical life; and the fact that the poem was written, it must be stressed, is the one item in the story for which we have any evidence except the biographer's word. I shall not be the first to suggest that the tradition is suspicious enough to demand the most careful circumspection.

Yet, surely, nothing has more impeded critical progress on De Rerum Natura than these few scraps of biographical data. First, predictably enough, they have distracted a great deal of scholarly interest from poem to poet, which is rarely a promising circumstance. But their deeper bane has been something more subtle. Most of the small body of criticism that has come forth on Lucretius speaks ever and again of antimony, discontinuity, conflict and confusion. I submit that the biographical tradition more than anything else has inspired this obvious critical preoccupation with impressions of disorder. Here the entire question of Lucretius' private life will be given a wide berth. It is after all irrelevant enough. Now as ever, only his art can finally illuminate his poetry.

This study, in concerning itself with the form of De Rerum Natura, aims at revealing not only the chief traits of Lucretius' art, but also the work, proximate and ultimate, performed by the art. It aims, that is, at recovering the poem's meaning as defined, through the medium of its art, by its form. The present chapter will deal first with the work's over-all design and then with a few of the techniques employed by the poet to implement that same design throughout the body of the poem. Book by book, the succeeding chapter will reveal and analyze the design thus implemented. So much will furnish a working familiarity with the poem's form and thereby prepare us for the final chapter, a statement of its meaning as established by the form.

If we may for the moment assume, and later prove, a point that is in grave doubt, namely, that De Rerum Natura leaves off quite where Lucretius intended it to close, the problem of winning our way to the poem's grand design will be considerably facilitated. Such an approach may appear to place last things first; but a moment's reflection will show that, even if the poem's intended ending were our primary concern, we could not establish it except on the basis of the poem's intended design. Hence, besides all justification, there is urgent need to penetrate to the design as simply and directly as possible.

Book I of our poem begins with an invocation of Venus as the creative force in nature; Book VI, the poem's last, closes with a lengthy description of the ruinous Athenian plague. The two passages together, aided, to be sure, by a slight dash of imagination, clearly describe the cycle of creation and destruction in nature. This cycle of creation and destruction, supported by numerous others of parallel figure, provides the poem with its formal design.

Reasonably careful study will show that the proems and closes of almost all the individual books conform to the cyclical pattern of the whole. In addition to Book VI, Books I, II, III and IV close pointedly on the theme of destruction; meanwhile, Books III, IV, V and VI, though not so manifestly as Book I in this respect, start on the theme of creation. Thus, only the beginning of II and the close of V fail to participate in the leitmotif—for such it is—of the cycle. The reasons for these omissions, significant reasons indeed, will be more feasibly treated later on.

Let us get some of these passages before us; first, as a matter of convenience, those dealing with death or destruction. Book I, cutting thereby a nice antithesis with its Venus invocation, closes with a portrait of universal cataclysm. Unfortunately, a lacuna of eight lines bars us from seeing how the passage was introduced and may even purloin a part of the description. Even as they stand, however, the verses deliver their formal burden with magnificent finality:

ne volucri ritu flammarum moenia mundi
diffugiant subito magnum per inane soluta
et ne cetera consimili ratione sequantur
neve ruant caeli tonitralia templa superne
terraque se pedibus raptim subducat et omnis
inter permixtas rerum caelique ruinas
corpora solventis abeat per inane profundum,
temporis ut puncto nil extet reliquiarum
desertum praeter spatium et primordia caeca.
nam quacumque prius de parti corpora desse
constitues, haec rebus erit pars ianua leti.
hac se turba feras dabit omnis materiai.

(I, 1102-13)¹

… lest, swift as flame, the walls of the world fall apart, suddenly dissolved through the vast void, and all else follow in the same manner, and lest the thundering tracts of sky collapse and the land, swooning beneath our feet, vanish through the deep void amid the murderous wrack of earth and sky, so that in an instant nothing remain behind besides space and the invisible atoms. For wherever you suppose the bodies of matter are first insufficient, this side will be the door of death for things. Here will the whole mass of matter rush forth.

Book II closes on the more famous, more fatalistic, grandis arator passage. The passage's theme (decline and death) is clinched, and Venus once more antithesized, in the last two verses by a grim reminder on the sure mortality of things.

iamque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator
crebrius, incassum magnos cecidisse labores,
et cum tempora temporibus praesentia confert
praeteritis, laudat fortunas saepe parentis.
tristis item vetulae vitis sator atque vietae
temporis incusat momen saeclumque fatigat,
et crepat, antiquum genus ut pietate repletum
perfacile angustis tolerarit finibus aevum,
cum minor esset agri multo modus ante viritim.
nec tenet omnia paulatim tabescere et ire
ad capulum spatio aetatis defessa vetusto.

(II, 1164-74)²

Now the aged farmer, shaking his head, sighs again and again that his mighty labors have perished emptily, and when he compares the present times with days gone by, he often lauds his father's blessings. And, too, the planter of the gnarled, ancestral vine assails the trend of the times, condemns the age and mutters to reflect how the good men of old, when each man's acreage was much smaller than now, made an easy living from a tiny plot. But he does not comprehend that everything is decaying bit by bit and proceeds to the grave, done in by its failing lease on life.

The close of Book III—the nil igitur mors est ad nos section (ll. 830-1094)—fits so clearly into the pattern of the cycle as to need no citation. We should note before passing, however, the careful progression made in these three terminal passages from the abstract notice of destruction at the close of Book I, through II's more personalized, though yet ruminative recollection of mortality to the utterly direct confrontation with death in the great cadenza³ of Book III. It is a definitely climactic progression,⁴ and, on the one side, as we are led to expect by its deadly pursuit of the individual, it climaxes with the triumph of mortality over man. This conquest is made explicit several times within the cadenza, but nowhere more distinctly than at its close:

nec prorsum vitam ducendo demimus hilum
tempore de mortis nec delibare valemus,
quo minus esse diu possimus forte perempti.
proinde licet quot vis vivendo condere saecla;
mors aeterna tamen nilo minus illa manebit,
nec minus ille diu iam non erit, ex hodierno
lumine qui finem vitai fecit, et ille,
mensibus atque annis qui multis occidit ante.

We take away not an instant from the duration of death by prolonging life, nor can we diminish its span a trice, so as to be less long dead. So put behind you as many generations as you like. Death everlasting will await you all the same. Nor will the man who expires with this day's light more briefly cease to be than he who died many months and years ago.

This resolution, however, contains its own counter-resolution; for it is precisely because death triumphs over the individual that the individual triumphs over the superstitious fear of death; hence, when Lucretius says “death therefore is nothing to us,” the igitur rests both upon the proofs of the soul's mortality set forth in the body of Book III and upon the force of the progression in the terminal passages under study. To put this last even more precisely, the whole weight of the poem's cyclical movement up to this point, by stressing the unavoidable onset of mortality, builds toward this peculiar triumph of man in III's close. By any standard, it is all scrupulously well made, and, considering besides the art the magnitude of the triumph itself (nil … mors est ad nos) as it pertains both to the philosophy and to the doctrinal objectives of the poem, we may well mistake this climax in III as the poem's truest. But the remarkable truth is that a yet more forceful and triumphant climax remains, destined to arrive, as we should expect, with the close of Book VI. Meanwhile, however, the poet has closed down the first half of the poem with all the exquisite might that is its due.

Only at the end of Book IV does Lucretius permit himself to become elegantly subtle—and then for the sake neither of elegance or subtlety—in the main tracery of the destruction motif. Venus, who entered the poem as the sublime strength of all creation, reappears here to turn common destroyer. The formative antithesis is thus adroitly turned, and, in large part, while depicting the ravages of love, Lucretius himself turns to his wrier side: the hopeless lover anointing the “haughty” doorstep; the catalogue of graces with which women are blindly attributed; and then, to cap all, the fork-tongued final couplet with its ironic twist of phallic wit:

nonne vides etiam guttas in saxa cadentis
umoris longo in spatio pertundere saxa?(5)

Do you not see also how drops of water falling on rocks bore through the rocks over a long stretch of time?

The main elegance, however, is not of wit, but of form. That Venus should antithesize herself so neatly—that we should finish Book IV precisely where we started the poem and yet completely opposite that start and still experience exquisite formal perfection—is the most delicate of elegances. Charmed, we smile and prepare to pass on.

But we have missed almost everything. For, these graces aside, a profound doctrinal irony clings to the split role of Venus; the fact that creative and destructive forces are, at their base, totally indistinguishable. More than a fact, this is a fundamental Epicurean law of the universe, for, amid the milling sea of atoms (and, therefore, everywhere) that force which has gone to create one composite has necessarily lent to the destruction of another, and that which destroys one lends necessarily to the creation of another. Our ambivalent Venus, then, turns out to be nothing other than this ambivalence dramatized, and, it need scarcely be added, she assumes an infinitely firmer place in the fabric of the poem by having thus entered quam maxime also into its doctrinal substance. Such felicitous capitalization on her qualities, beyond all considerations of elegance or subtlety is, I submit, supreme art.

As we have noticed, Book V alone does not end on the theme of destruction; as for Book VI's close, we need at this point only notice that its denouement reiterates the theme once and for all.

Before turning to evidences of the creation theme at the commencements of the several books after Book I, we would do well to glance at the proem of I as a unit. It is scarcely open to question that, from the standpoint of form, no portion of a literary work of art is of more critical importance than its beginning. Here, in some manner at least, the author must establish the pattern of things to come. If he makes his beginning with so conscious an overture as a proem, we may reasonably expect this piece to be a miniature of the whole. From Lucretius, then, if he plans to form his work on the cycle of creation and destruction in nature, we may certainly expect a bold delineation of that cycle in the first proem, one configured ideally at its terminal points. To be brief, these expectations are met almost to the letter. The proem's great cycle begins, of course, with Venus and comes to a close with the section 80-135 (ending, thus, just ten lines short of the proem's own end), where death and the superstitious fear of death are insistently recurring themes down to the section's last line and its reminder of those quorum tellus amplectitur ossa. When we note further that this verse is preceded by the phrase somnoque sepultis and, later on, that practically the last lines of the poem itself (VI, 1278-81) are,

nec mos ille sepulturae remanebat in urbe
quo prius hic populus semper consuerat humari;
perturbatus enim totus trepidabat, et unus
quisque suum pro re (compostum) maestus humabat

Nor did those ceremonies of burial endure in the city with which this people had ever been accustomed to be buried. For the entire populace was in panic confusion and each and all mournfully interred his dead as circumstances offered,

we discover that the cycle of the first poem is deliberately moulded to the cycle of the whole. Hence, another specific evidence of the poem's grand design.⁶

Except for the first poem, the theme of creation in the exordia of the several books is considerably more recondite than that of destruction in their closing passages.⁷ Once its terms are understood, however, the theme emerges distinctly and performs its functions with something precious to spare. Meanwhile, the devices themselves introduce us to yet another facet of Lucretius' rare sense of craft.

Properly enough, the main device emerges amid the first lines of the poem, where its relation to the cycle motif seems, however, only tributary and incidental. This from the first proem (ll. 62-79):

Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret
in terris oppressa gravi sub religione
quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat
horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans
primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra
est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra
quem neque fama deum nec fulmina nec minitanti
murmure compressit caelum, sed eo magis acrem
irritat animi virtutem, effringere ut arta
naturae primus portarum claustra cupiret.
ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
processit longe flammantia moenia mundi
atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque,
unde refert nobis victor quid possit oriri,
quid nequeat, finita potestas denique cuique
quanam sit ratione atque alte terminus haerens.
quare religio pedibus subiecta vicissim
obteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo.

When human life lay cowering for all to see upon the earth, ground beneath the heel of religion, which, showing its head from celestial regions, lorded it over mortals with chilling mein, a mortal man of Greece first dared to raise his eyes in defiance and take up a stand; neither the tales of the gods nor thunderbolts nor heaven itself with its menacing rumblings cowed him, but all the more spurred his boldness of mind to be the first to force the gates of nature. And so his puissant mind prevailed and he coursed out far beyond the fiery battlements of the world and in intellect and spirit explored the boundless whole, whence, victorious, he brings back to us report of all that can come into being, all that cannot, the law by which each thing has its power limited and its deep-driven boundary stone. Thus is religion in turn tumbled beneath our feet and victory makes us peers of heaven.

If, on the side of form, there are any key words in this passage, they are primum (l. 66), primusque (l. 67), and, again, the repeated primus (l. 71). These are equivalent to establishing Epicurus, as indeed he is later literally established (III, 9), as inventor rerum and (in the same line) as pater.⁸ In fine, they prepare us for meeting him as creator and then, by degrees, even as a divine creator. As such, he—or, where he is absent, the same devices which make him such—supplies the creation theme for the beginnings of Books III, IV, V, and VI; theme and eulogy are thus wedded, and, as Lucretius no doubt desired, Epicurus enters the essential poetry (the cycle) of the work.

But the art of it is not realized until we comprehend the full significance of Epicurus' designation as, of all things, a god. On the one hand, it is a piece of rhetorical hyperbole designed to confer the ultimate in praise. It succeeds, of course; but this is the least of its effects. A more important one is that this fiction of his deity, since it palpably associates him with the great goddess of the first proem, imparts something of her own magical grandeur to his role as creator and so immensely strengthens the formal impact of the proems in which he appears. This, an impressive gain, becomes all the more so when we realize that the poet has all but purloined it from a directly opposite tendency in the very same poetry. For, surely, however much he wanted its illusion, Lucretius could not allow even the smallest positive suggestion of true divinity to cling to his Venus genetrix; and, accordingly, perhaps beyond all other intentions, he meant his deification of Epicurus to act as a reductio ad absurdum not only, indeed, of her own godhood, but of that also of any but the authentic Epicurean gods.⁹

To appreciate fully how this comes about, we must first recall the results of the Cybele passage in Book II (ll. 592ff.)—a point, incidentally, prior to the first intimations of Epicurus' divinity. Cybele, though, of course, she is not the same as Venus genetrix, resembles her closely enough so that conclusions which bear on the divinity of the one must also bear intrinsically on that of the other. Now, the conclusion on Cybele's divinity is that she is not divine at all. In fact, Lucretius not only goes to toilsome lengths to rationalize every aspect of her worship, but ends with a statement of the true nature of the gods¹⁰ and then subjoins the reflection that, if one likes to call the sea “Neptune,” the grain “Ceres,” etc., he is free to do so, provided only he does not corrupt his mind with religious superstition. All of which involves Venus; and then, with this denial for a precedent, her divinity is left to gradual but complete corrosion as we learn that a mere mortal—his very death is stressed in the close of III (ll. 1042ff.) and again in the last proem—has, in fact, a sounder claim than any Roman deity to godhood. But the gradualness and seemingly incidental manner of her rejection must be appreciated. It is in particular important to note that, though always implicated in the poet's denials, Venus is herself never directly impugned; for the result of this strict abstinence toward her is that Lucretius is able all the while he subverts her divinity to retain and even intensify the lovely fiction of its reality, so that she subsists, indeed as if a goddess (and thus far more than a bare symbol) as the awesome central persona of the poem, the all-radiant mask through which creation speaks and is celebrated. Meanwhile, for all that he is the agent of her destruction, such a persona also is Epicurus-deus, and, as we have noticed, the two as such have momentous formal commerce in the elaboration of the creation theme.¹¹

But let us have a closer look at these proems. Except for the faint and perhaps fortuitous recall of Venus genetrix in lines 32-33 (praesertim cum tempestas arridet et anni / tempora conspergunt viridantis floribus herbas) the proem to Book II contains nothing direct on the creation theme at all. This is as we have already noticed. There are, however, two important links to the Epicurus-creator device that will provide the theme in succeeding proems. The first comes in lines 14ff.:

o miseras hominum mentis, o pectora caeca!
qualibus in tenebris vitae quantisque periclis
degitur hoc aevi quodcumquest!

O wretched minds, o blind hearts of men, in what existential darkness, in what dangers do you spend your paltry sum of days!

The second appears in line 54:

omnis cum in tenebris praesertim vita laboret.

Especially since all of life is a toiling in darkness.

These tenebrae vitae consist, of course, in ignorance of Epicurus' precepts and are offset in the first two verses of Book III by the tam clarum lumen which Epicurus first (primus) availed to raise, revealing thereby the commoda vitae. Proem, then, leads to proem and motif to motif.

The entire body of motifs on the creation theme comes together for the first time in III's proem. Here, as we have just seen, the thematic word primus bobs up again; here Epicurus becomes inventor rerum; here light, the symbol of creation,¹² is intimately attached to the master; here emerge the first hints of his divinity and here he first comes into the epithet pater. That epithet deserves special notice. Coupled with tu patria nobis suppeditas praecepta, it is aimed directly at the Roman's patriarchal feelings, and so would have been even more keenly felt by Lucretius' primary audience than it can be by us.

A tranquil air of celebration pervades the thematic matter in the proem of Book IV. It may at first seem strange that, after the tremendous, death-filled close of Book III, Lucretius should have resumed the leitmotif and, into the bargain, began the whole second half of the poem with so delicate a hand. There is perfect justification, however. First, as we have seen, the close of III laid stress on death as vanquished rather than, as normally hitherto, triumphant, and, hence, the proem's joyful little “dawn song” becomes, more than admissable, exquisitely right. Second, as Bailey shows, the poem's subject matter breaks naturally into three parts as well as, according to Barra, two;¹³ accordingly, Lucretius takes no serious formal risk in commencing Book IV as quietly as he does. The proem required merely some representation of the theme, not necessarily a bold one.

Its poetry makes such use of established motifs that, in a firm yet unobtrusive way, the poet allows himself a share in his master's creative achievement.¹⁴ The opening lines are most significant:

Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis
atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae.

I explore the virgin haunts of the Pierides never once trodden by the foot of man. I exult to discover fresh fountains, to drink their waters down. I exult to pluck new flowers and weave them into a chaplet of fame for my brow, blooms with which the muses have graced the temples of none before.

The verses immediately establish a correlation (without, however, once repeating the word itself) with the primus motif in the Epicurus-proems. No less than four times does the notion arise: avia … loca nullius ante trita solo; integros fontis; novos flores and unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae. We should notice the arrangement of these allusions to the word—two direct ones enclosing two metaphors. Noteworthy, too, if only as a delicacy, is the way Lucretius sharpens the distinction between the two pairs by his distributions of nullius and nulli, iuvat and iuvatque. With such modesty and charm does he inform us that he too is a creator. Finally, there is the force of avia … loca. The words correspond (with, alas, the intrusion of some unintended bathetic comicality) to the extra longe flammantia moenia mundi of the first proem, thus linking Lucretius even closer to Epicurus in the creation theme.¹⁵

The reentry of an image of light in line 8 (deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango / carmina) represents an attempt to establish a further such connection, but it achieves only a very qualified success. Insofar as the image does occur and, therefore, does keep a pattern which runs also through proems III, V, and VI, we can grant Lucretius some formal advantage. But the image flounders in contradiction. First of all, the philosophy which was earlier tam clarum lumen now infelicitously becomes obscura; there is thus a complete turnabout in imagery. More serious is a parallel contradiction in symbolism. For, just as light is the poem's symbol for birth and creation, so, inevitably, darkness symbolizes death and destruction.¹⁶ In the present use of the image, accordingly, the philosophy becomes associated with destruction—an unhappy contradiction indeed.¹⁷

But if we are nonetheless willing to grant lucida at least a strained and arbitrary symbolism, the carmina of Lucretius become life-giving, and we are thus led smoothly into the long metaphor that closes the proem. The metaphor's true inner burden is this: just as the physician with his healing potion revives the ailing child, so Lucretius with his healing verses restores the ailing man. The effect of his verses, that is, is to show the profit (utilitatem) of knowing the nature of things, which profit is nothing less than salvation. “Poetry” as the “trick” which brings it all off, far from showing Lucretius' actual concept of his art, is a mere piece of poetic expediency.¹⁸Recreata, the key word of the metaphor—and, indeed, of the whole proem—points to his true view: art, his art, at any rate, is life-bearing.¹⁹

Despite its blemish, then, the proem delicately succeeds in celebrating Lucretius as both colleague and agent of Epicurus in the presentation of a new way of life. It is the poet's own little proem, his buoyant and beautiful self-eulogy.

Book V's proem nicely explicates the established pattern of motifs on the creation theme. Two little thematic hints, parta (l. 5) and cretus (l. 6), lead into the motifs. Then (l. 8) arises one broached in the proem of III: … deus ille fuit, deus … ; and immediately thereafter the primus sequence further unfolds in the word princeps. Once again, therefore, Epicurus is made to share, by plundering, Venus' creative powers and once again he becomes rerum inventor and, thereby, creator. On the heels of this (ll. 11f.) arrives the familiar darkness-light symbolism, this time legitimate, and then, to come full turn, a reversion to the deus motif with divina … reperta (l. 13).²⁰ This motif persists, occurring again at line 19 and then once more, to sum up the proem, at lines 49ff. Its prevalence has two connected purposes, the main drift of which we have already seen. First, as a rational absurdity, it mocks and magnifies the absurdities of religious beliefs in general;²¹ thus, while yet playing on the creation theme, it prepares us for the principal matter of the book: false (superstitious) and true (Epicurean) notions on the origin and development of the universe. Second, still as a rational absurdity, it squeezes Venus genetrix finally dry of every trace of actual divinity. After this proem, indeed, all that remains where once were the Olympian gods is that sublime aura of creation borrowed artfully from a fictive Venus for a fictive Epicurus all in the cause of form. But the form is everything, the hint of creation everything, these particular gods nothing.²²

Although the primary formal significance of VI's proem happens not to lie in its internal order, we had yet best attend first to its arrangement, and so complete our most immediate business, the analysis of the proems' creation theme. On this, we meet more of the established and familiar. The primus motif rounds itself off with the double occurrence of primae (ll. 1, 4). (The coupling of the word with Athens is a deliberate means of emphasizing that city which, as we shall presently see, is in every way the main player in this proem.) The deus motif subsides as quietly as it first arose in divina reperta (l. 7). As for light imagery and its symbolism, this very subtly comes forth in praeclaro nomine and quite as delicately, but with a sharper metaphorical force, expires in the word extincti. We ought not miss a peculiar bit of appropriateness in the use of the two images: here, in the last proem, they at last delineate the little life cycle of the master himself: his birth with its attendant glow, his death and ensuing darkness.

So much for the formal pattern. Standing outside of it but lending an inestimable force to the theme is the characteristically Lucretian phrase frugiparos fetus (l. 1). It contains no less than three hints of the creation theme. Also without the pattern is the familiar thematic word recreaverunt (l. 3). Both notions attach to Athens and help thrust the city forward as the proem's emphatic agent of creation.

Even if that were the whole of it, we could agree that Lucretius met the proem's formal demands with admirable grace and style. But Athens blooms into prominence here for purposes that reach far beyond the proem itself. Indeed, we need merely leaf back a page in the text to find a signal hint of broader intentions. The entire close of Book V, it will be recalled, described man's gradual rise from primeval savagery to civilization and culture; the book closes with the lines:

sic unumquicquid paulatim protrahit aetas
in medium ratioque in luminis erigit oras.
namque alid ex alio clarescere corde videbant,
artibus ad summum donec venere cacumen.

Thus, little by little, time reveals everything and reason lifts it into the shores of light. For men saw one thing after another crystallize in their minds until they reached the very pinnacle of arts.

Note that cacumen, otherwise emphasized by summum, is the last word of Book V. Where was this “utmost pinnacle of culture” attained? Surely, at Athens. Hence, we cannot but suspect a calculated formal purpose behind the city's large prominence in the verses that immediately follow. Now that we know Lucretius' methods, the obvious next step is to look to the end of Book VI: Athens again, but this time in the grip of destruction. These few pointed associations reveal perhaps the greatest masterstroke in the poem's design. First, Athens as the home of creation and Athens as the place of destruction provide a superlative cyclical frame for Book VI itself. More important, the city's place as the goal of Book VI tends to make a formal unity of the entire segment of the poem that stretches from V, 925 through to the end of VI. For, the beginnings of man described at V, 925ff. together with the whole story of man's gradual cultural progress itself forms an immense cycle, clearly pointed up by the closing lines of V, with the description of the plague at Athens.²³ Most important of all, this gigantic arch, subsuming as it does the whole history of man's upward struggle to glory, the brief glory itself, and then, symbolically in the plague, the pathetic, death-stained lapse from glory—all this provides the poem with a magnificent dramatic close.

And the drama has a quintessential appropriateness. Its design, to begin with, is of the whole; it is of the poem's own nature.²⁴ Furthermore, it keeps for the last and proper place the most meaningful distillation in human terms of everything that the poem has through its nature and design thus far taught. We have seen but little of that all; extensive and compelling as it is, however, it is merely preparatory to this ultimate affirmation of the cycle. Here the poem finally lays hands on the reader. The abstract Venus, threats of universal collapse, the ebb and flow of other things, even the inspired mixture of reason and passion in III's close he could assent to without real self-commitment. But to stand aloof from this encroachment of human history itself would require, as it turns out, dissociation from both past and future and from the very human condition. By narrowing, then, the compass of the cycle has become too large; each man, each individual effort is swept up by forces which are seen to govern all men and all efforts. Yet they are not unkind forces. They are, in fact, absolutely neutral, being the way of the ancient universe itself and of its “outer form and inner law.”²⁵

Perhaps we have already sufficiently uncovered the actual lines of force in the poem to discern that, in the reader's thus absorbing the exact personal significance of the omnipresent naturae species ratioque, the whole of the poem's experience, aesthetic, didactic, and philosophical comes intimately home to him. If not, we have here at least caught a precious first glimpse of that point where form releases perfected meaning. But even this lies beyond our immediate concern, which is merely the poem's over-all design, whose various threads we may now pause to draw together.

Counting the proem and close of each book as distinct units, we find twelve main structural segments in the poem's design.²⁶ Of these, ten, five proems and five closes, are built on the creation-destruction leitmotif. Since we have regarded it as a formal microcosm of the whole we may take the proem of I also into account and note once again that it is both formed on the leitmotif and shows at its close a very evident anticipation of the poem's own final verses. Though each has certain functional connections, only two units of the above-mentioned twelve, the proem of II and the close of V, fail to figure directly in the leitmotif. In effect, we have already detected the cause of the motif's absence at the end of V; its intrusion would have fatally disturbed the blending of that book's close with the proem of VI. The theme's interruption in the proem of II, meanwhile, is to be explained as a symmetric compensation for the interruption at the end of V, symmetric since, among the twelve units of the poem, the second proem stands third from the start of the poem, the close of V third from its end. There is, accordingly, no trace of disorder on the score of the interruptions.

It is also worth noting that these intermissions occur at the only two points in the poem where a suspension of the leitmotif is feasible. Again, according to the findings of Bailey and Barra,²⁷ the poem breaks structurally both into thirds and halves. These considerations taken together would have necessitated a representation of the leitmotif at the beginnings of Books I, III, IV, and V and at the closes of II, III, IV, and VI. Add to this the requirement of thematic stuff also at the close of I and the beginning of VI—since these books are, as the terminal segments of the poem, fundamental structural units—and only the commencement of II and the close of V are left to the poet to deal with as he would.

More important, of course, is the extreme compactness which these thematic exordia and closes bring to the poem's structure. Venus and the plague draw all of the structural components tightly together and, at the same time, each is made itself separately compact by its own cyclical configuration. Meanwhile they are interlaced one with another; for Venus starts a cycle that closes not only with the description of the plague, but with the thematic matter at the closes also of I, II, III and IV. Similarly, each proem begins a cycle that is resolved in every subsequent close (the beginning of II and the close of V, of course, omitted) and, as a corollary, every close resolves the cycle commenced in each preceding proem. Viewed thus, the poem already begins to disclose a complicated network of inner bonds. As the next chapter will show, there is a great deal more to that network.

Such, then, is the design of De Rerum Natura and also its structure. Together they propound a definite and deliberate unity which, once recognized, automatically settles the question earlier left unanswered. Obviously, the poem was quite intended to end where it ends.²⁸

But, before we leave the subject of over-all architecture, what is to be said of the poem's incomparable music? I would like nothing better than to be able to confirm this too as an organic component of its design. To furnish clear proof of intent on this matter, however, would require considerably more space and skill than I have at my disposal. For, unless I mistake its nature, the full rhythm—this organic music—of Lucretius springs not alone from the meter, but from the sound-pattern as well and also, as I suspect, from the vocabulary, imagery and even in part from the very sense and tone of the verses.²⁹ Meanwhile, beneath all, enabling all to come to form, is the nature of the subject itself. Clearly, to analyze all of these together with such sure discernment as to recover anything like the deliberate acts of synthesis by which they became objective pattern (all of which would be requisite for an adequate proof) would require, besides a rare critical acumen, an elaborately technical, full-length study of its own. To indicate a de facto harmony between rhythm and design, however, and to show such desirability in that harmony as would surely have made it an object of conscious art will not be at all impossible even in a short space, provided we can only agree on a certain eminent feature of the rhythm.

Leonard leads the way when, at the beginning of his lucid introduction to the poem, he cites the “long roll” of its opening hexameter. That sort of roll, I suggest, does not cease with the first line but continues prominently on, as voluptuous as it is grave, throughout the seven thousand and more that follow. For those who will not hear it, we may suggest that Lucretius' fondness for multisyllabic words and for frequent correspondence of ictus and word accent, since these tend to impart a protracted and even, while firmly stressed, fluency to the hexameter, conduce to just such an undulation as Leonard mentions. More, even supposing that the roll were not there as a special effect of Lucretius' art, it would inevitably come, as I think all will agree, with the very nature of the hexameter. What Latin hexameters, after all, do not roll? Add to this the long, liquid explication of such random but oft-occurring words as corrumpere, dissolvere, the enormous sense of grandeur in phrases like immensum profundum, magnum per inane, or even in words, themselves ordinary, longe, omnia, vaste, summa, which by their frequency create the same image and feeling—words and phrases which, like their numerous counterparts, arise almost spontaneously out of the subject matter itself—and we see that, even had he wished, Lucretius could hardly have avoided an expansive surge and fall in the general sensory impact of his verses.

The next thing to see is that he had every reason to woo this quality. For, in terms of rhythm, this constant roll is to poetry precisely what the explicit verbal cycle is in terms of idea. Or, that is the way we are forced to put it analytically. In our actual experience of the poetry, provided only that we hear and feel this steady roll, both merge in a single rhythm, itself also idea, which is the poem's whole concept and vital force and, once appreciated, its very essence.

If all of this is true, then there indeed exists a de facto harmony between rhythm and design that was worth the poet's most careful attention. I am aware I have not properly proved the harmony; much less have I proved that Lucretius deliberately instilled it; but I am also certain that any reader who misses profound sensuous involvement in this music's solemn rise and fall misses half the poem's formal might and, given all that this deficiency presumes, practically its entire effective meaning.

We may conclude this chapter with a notice of some of the other means—other, that is, than the music's suggested effect—by which the cycle is implemented in the internal stretches of the poem. It should be cautioned, however, that, though it has general relevance, our survey will lead to only a comparative few of the most essential interior cycles, since the construction of but few will submit to out-of-context description.

The first device, the symbolic use of imagery, we have already touched upon. We have, in fact, treated it fully enough to ascertain that Lucretius was not fastidious in his employment of it. The critical purists among us will no doubt discover further grounds for the same conclusion. Yet I think that we shall all largely agree that he turned this sort of imagery which, it is fair to say, would have found its way into his poem whether he liked its arduous formal demands or not, to very good advantage.

Those occasional images that are drawn by some peculiar symbolism or other into the nexus of the cycles must await their appearance for their exposition. Here we are primarily interested in those recurring pairs of images whose members bear both an antithetical relationship to each other and corresponding hints of birth and death. Where such images occur (the familiar ones of light and darkness are obvious prototypes), we may safely attribute symbolic suggestions of creation and destruction. So it is with images of warmth and cold, starting and stopping, awakening and sleeping. The pairs, however, are not always quite so regular. At times, by extension, a symbolism, or at least a part in the symbolic play, is transferred to images which cannot themselves lay claim to it. Whiteness and blackness, for instance, paralleling light and dark, play on the master theme even though the quality of whiteness has no clear suggestive connection of its own with birth. Or, again, in other instances where but one member of an antithesis carries a distinct thematic hint, the poet may employ it to the complete exclusion of its opposite. Plainly, such a technique can apply only where the specific image carries a compelling symbolic force, as with stillness, for example, to symbolize death.³⁰

So much will serve to give a notion of the device. We shall avoid exaggerating its importance to the full scheme of the cycles by quietly passing on.

Next is the device of repetition. In itself, repetition is, of course, indispensable to the poem's cyclical movement and to the rhythm of that movement. Apart from its indispensability, however, it makes decisive independent contributions to the movement's sensory and emotional impact. It is in the repetition that the rhythm becomes huge, the movement immense. Through the repetition too, and particularly through its endlessness, the movement acquires its final emotional significance for the poem. The emotion can hardly be named in its own terms; it amounts, rather, to a solemn knowledge—grown solemn in the repetition—of the rhythm itself. In any case, since it underlies the final emotion, the repetition underlies the cycle's poetry as well and, therein, the poem's whole formal concept.

It should be made clear, however, that the effective formative-poetic force of repetition is not limited to the recurrence of the explicit cycle alone. For just as cyclical movement is impossible without repetition, so is it impossible for either prolonged or widespread repetition in poetry not to impart a feeling of cyclical movement.³¹ This would be so even in poems where such movement and its rhythmic burden is not, as in ours, the whole informing aesthetic. In De Rerum Natura it only becomes significantly the more so. Clearly then, all of the poem's innumerable repetitions, since they participate in the reiterative, cyclical rhythm of the whole, assume a definite voice in its formal poetry.

Hence, when the poet introduces Book IV with a passage already perused in Book I, he elaborates the poem's design according to its prescribed formative principle. The same occurs not only in the repetition of other lyrical passages, long and short, but also in the reiteration of the poem's various maxims and formulas and, in fact, once the device takes hold, everywhere that the language gives definite reminiscence of earlier language. Instances of the last cannot be catalogued to every reader's satisfaction; yet, every reader must agree that they are practically omnipresent in the poem. We may now see that, in proportion to their presence, the steadying influence of form is present.

A noteworthy result is that, owing to his poem's design, Lucretius was promised greater, not less, aesthetic force as a result of fixity in the patterns of his language—even of his barest, most technical language. When we realize that, despite its threat of monotony, just such fixity was urged by didactic and dialectical as well as by scientific-expository considerations, that, in short, the whole nature of the poem's content made it the only feasible mode of exposition, we can hardly estimate how reassuring this congruence of form and substance must have been.

We can, however, even better appreciate the felicity of it all when we grasp that the influence of design (that one true and infallible muse of the poem) extends so far as to stir the very skeletons of the arguments and expositions into poetic life. Again and again, as every reader knows, the declarations roll out in the sequel principio, praeterea, denique, postremo, with variations and additions, of course, but always keeping a recognizably recurrent pattern. Once more the feeling, through the force of repetition, is distinctly cyclical and, therefore, in this work, part of the essential poetic flow.

We must nonetheless be careful not to exaggerate the role of repetition; for, despite its harmony with the poetry's central aesthetic, the device does not figure essentially in the formation of the work's internal cycles. To Lucretius (and here we can see his caution) the literal cycle was all but exclusively fit for that kind of service. As the next chapter will reveal, he relied on the force of the device to supplement and corroborate, perhaps even to deepen, the work of the literal cycle, but almost never—if, indeed, ever at all—to assume its place. In fact, the final analysis will possibly establish the device as one of the many elements of the poem's music.

Finally, there are those methods and mannerisms in the poetry which fix the setting, spatial, temporal and psychological, of the cycle's operation. In its fundamentals, the complete setting is provided in the first two books, where Lucretius introduces us to the spectacular world of the atoms. Nothing about that world is more significant to the poetry than its vastness and volatility, or more exactly, than the spectacle of the eternally seething intercourse of matter within infinity that its description evokes. This is the milieu within which things, all save the imperishable divine, rise into and pass out of being, the medium within which the poetry's—which is to say, the cycle's—fullest drama evolves and will evolve.

There is, of course, nothing novel in designating the boundless, changing universe as the poetry's true setting. Entirely absent until now, however, has been anything near a right estimate of the setting's psychological function and of the relation of this to the true poetry. By any standard, the whole of Lucretius is meant to draw the reader irrevocably out of his shriveled world of self-absorption.³² The grandeur of his universe, made palpable by our constant immersion in its infinite store of milling matter, is the poet's chief means of effecting—we may even say, of forcing—that self-release. Inevitably, the reader shrinks in self-importance as the universe burgeons sensibly larger, and by the end of the first two books this removal has proceeded to the ultimate degree possible. If the reader has not by then learned his place beneath the aspects of infinite space and time, he never will; and if he has not by then acquired a proper humility, he has not learned. Now, since, as we shall later see, the final and most momentous didactic effect of the poem's cycle is precisely to refine that sense of humility, so engendered, by giving it ethical direction, the cycle's setting, specifically in its psychological aspect, becomes as intrinsic to the poetry's evolution and goal as the cycle itself.

If this is so, we must take notice of how the setting is kept before us throughout the length of the work. After Book II, the surface dimensions narrow, drastically in III and IV, where Lucretius turns to analyze atomic processes that reside chiefly in the individual himself, and, meanwhile, the broadening of scope in the final two books never quite reattains the literal universal compass of I and II. Yet, as far as art can provide, the universal setting is nowhere submerged. For, just as we have elsewhere found artistic and didactic purposes to blend as one, so here also it is art quite as much as pedagogy that insures the constant reemergence of those primary conditions that maintain in the universe: the atoms and the void, motion, collision and change—and particularly, always and everywhere, the atoms, the atoms, the atoms. Behind these the universe itself sensibly lurks, omniform, omnipresent.

But vastness and volatility are a very mood of the poem, and, as there is hardly anything in Lucretius which does not somehow contribute to that mood, the setting is in this way too made immediate. A confused antagonist “longe aberrat a vera ratione”; time passes amid “innumerable lustrations of the circling sun”; death is “immortalis”; or, open the poem almost anywhere and you are likely to learn that “… quapropter simulacra pari ratione necessest / immemorabile per spatium transcurrere posse …”; and so, in its countless figures, images and epithets, the poem ever broods on the grand dimensions of things. Meanwhile, its rapid pace and urgent tone, coupled with the sinuous intricacy of its composition, create an atmosphere of electric mobility—the volatility of mood corresponding to the vastness just noticed. A constant eagerness to get on with things (“nunc age,” thunders the poet), a tendency to race the reader through arguments, to build a crescendo of arguments, to cross-refer the arguments, to enfold one or more within another and, finally, even the seemingly counter tendency of breaking off abruptly into a digression—all of these mannerisms inject a tumultuous vitality into the poem that seems to mimic and finally even become the vital tumult of the atoms themselves as they race through the boundless void.

Yet, clearly, all of this swirling immensity would amount only to the magnificent disorder that its critics have seen in the poem were it not for the secret transfiguration effected by the cycle. Under its influence, the turbulence takes on dramatic design, furious haste is transmuted into a solemn rhythm, imponderable vastness becomes functional milieu. Order, unity, control, proportion set in, spontaneously in part, and yet so evidently solicited by the conscious hand of the poet that we can at last seize the superlative truth in Cicero's little remark: “… multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis. …”

Notes

1. The four-line coda (1114-17), while it obviates a strict close on the theme of destruction, produces actually more formal benefit than harm. First, we may a priori agree that such a protreptic is in place at the close of the first “lesson” in so rigorous and demanding a work. Second, as will presently become clear, the four verses, in their light-darkness imagery, themselves contain cyclical material and therefore do not depart from the general formal contours of the poem. Third, and this was probably the fundamental reason for their inclusion, they foreshadow the final four verses of Book V, which, as we shall see, are the most important formal hinge of the entire poem and are therefore in need of all the advertisement they can get.

2. In this passage, grandis, cecidisse, vetulae, vietae, saeclum, antiquum, finibus and modus are all to be regarded as thematic words; but this we shall better see when we have worked deeper into Lucretius' methods.

3. I use the word in its root sense to connote a falling, concluding movement in the theme.

4. The climatic movement is developed also by a progressive increase in the lengths of the terminal thematic passages. At the close of I, as we have seen, the theme is indicated by a relatively few verses; the grandis arator passage which I have quoted for III constitutes actually only the finale of a deep cyclical movement that begins with line 1105 and turns emphatically to the theme of destruction as early as line 1131; III's thematic close occupies the whole final segment of the book.

5. The couplet's function cannot be understood without awareness that the guttae here are a conscious formal reprise of the dulcedinis gutta with which the book's closing section began. On the matter of the verb's erotic suggestion cf. Catullus' far more blunt usage in 32.11.

6. A further, equally strong evidence of such accommodation lies in morbo (I, 133), which prefigures the plague itself, just as sepultis prefigures the results of the plague and VI's final lines. The accommodation, of course, would have been neater had Lucretius ended the first proem precisely with these lines, and it will perhaps be instructive to speculate on the formal possibilities of his having done so. There would seem to be within the proem two possible alternative locations for the passage 136-45. The one is post line 49, the other post line 61. Might Lucretius have been tempted to transpose them to either place? We can make no worthwhile speculation on their movement to a position after 49, for, even as the text stands, there is the problem of a proper transition from an address to Venus to an address to Memmius—a problem, moreover, which this transition would hardly appear to alleviate. Meanwhile, there are strong formal grounds for not transferring them to a position after 61. As we shall presently observe, the words primum and primusque (ll. 66, 67) are extremely crucial to the creation theme. They are, however, not obviously so, and one means by which Lucretius tries to point their relevance is to juxtapose them to the same words employed in description of the atoms as creative bodies (ll. 58-61: genitalia, semina, prima, primis). To separate these clue words by the interpolation of several lines from the words they are meant to illuminate would clearly be poor formal practice—poor enough to Lucretius' mind, we may suppose, to outweigh the formal advantage of removing 136-45 from their present, obstructive position.

   In sum, then, the structure of the proem would appear to have left no likelier place for the lines than the one in which they stand.

   But rather than allow these inquiries to come to an indecisive close, we may cite yet more evidence of the accommodation of the proem's ending to that of the poem. The close of Book III shows that the correspondences we have seen in morbus and in notions of death and burial are not fortuitous. Here we meet many of the elements that were implanted in the close of proem I, and all that are to reemerge in Book VI's close. The Acherusia templa (I, 120) reappear (III, 978ff.); Homer (I, 124) reappears (III, 1037); burial (III, 1035, with ossa echoing I, 135) reappears and cremation (III, 906) appears, itself to reemerge at the poem's very end; morbus gets passing notice; and, finally, III, 1046ff. very evidently echo (with mali taking the place of morbo in the earlier lines) the crucial I, 132-33. The coincidences are too many to be fortuitous. Rather, surely, they are strands of the subtle web that binds the poem together into a meaningful unity.

7. Though it is true that Lucretius was at complete liberty to end, but not to begin, his books as he wished, this difference does not in itself explain the relative obscurity of the creation theme in the proems. As we shall see, his method was to blend the theme with the extraneous matter of the proems, mainly with the eulogy of Epicurus. When we observe its effects, we will agree that this blend was the poet's most urgent formal goal in the proems and that it was in order to achieve it that he risked veiling the theme.

8. It is to be noticed that this primus motif gets its start at line 12 in connection with Venus. Looking ahead, moreover, we may see a small but significant sign of its conscious development in the correspondence between tam clarum extollere lumen / qui primus … (III, 1f.) and the primum … tollere here.

9. Included, of course, would be the “godhood” of the Venus destructrix of Book IV's close.

10. The identical passage occurs in the proem of I (44-49), but on this see the following note.

11. The reader may object that if I, 44-49 are to be accepted as genuine the rejection of Venus' deity becomes so blunt as to preclude entirely to gradualness of which I have spoken. This is true only if the lines are interpreted—as they must be at II, 646ff.—as an outright statement of Epicurean theology. They were not meant to be so taken, however.

    The passage is this:

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

    Certainly, no other verses in the poem have been regarded with as much suspicion. The history of their treatment can be fairly summed up by noting that Marullus was the first to suppress them and that they have recently been deleted without vestige in a translation of the poem.

    The main inconsistency to be seen if they are a direct statement of Epicurean theology is that, by introducing such notions so abruptly after his appeal to Venus, Lucretius makes a mockery of the appeal itself, thereby stultifying everything he has attempted to accomplish so far. It does not beg the question, I think, to stress that nothing up to line 44 leads the reader to expect a declaration of Epicurean theology at this point. It follows that, if he appears to find one, his first response should be to try the snytax a second time. Herein lies the solution. The key to the lines lies in allowing semota and seiuncta a perfectly legitimate temporal force. The passage thus translates: “For it must necessarily be that the whole nature of the gods enjoys its everlasting life in fullest peace when removed and far disjoined from our affairs. For being (in that case) relieved of all pain and relieved of hazards, mighty in its own resources, lacking nothing of us, it is neither beguiled by virtuous service nor touched by wrath.”

    Taken thus, the passage follows naturally on the preceding appeal to Venus to intercede with Mars in the name of peace, which appeal amounts, after all, to a petition to remove him from mortal affairs. So taken, also, Mars is subjected to a piece of irony that would not be half so exquisite did it not come from the mouth of an Epicurean. He is represented as, by nature, best suited to live summa cum pace. So far, however, Venus is not at all impugned as goddess. But there remains an obvious second edge of the argument which introduces just the proper degree of doubt. It is evident that, if Venus is persuaded by the poet's fictive appeal to reason, she can comply with its requirements only by violating them. That is, she can remove Mars from mortal affairs only by surrendering herself to them. She is therefore left quite suspended in dilemma—and how better could the poet have left her? The all important fiction of her deity remains intact, and so surely does the poet's Epicureanism. It is precisely with this passage, then, that Lucretius commences to work the goddess gently out of the poem—all but her fiction. The technique of the whole is the more effective in that the same lines become the poet's absolute statement of Epicurean theology in Book II.

    The problem of a probable lacuna after 49, it is true, remains. But, plainly, that difficulty is made no less vexing by the deletion of 44-49.

12. The symbolism is beautifully established by the association of light with Venus genetrix in the first proem and is clinched by the phrase in luminis oras. At times, Lucretius uses the image of light metaphorically to symbolize life. In other connections, also, it will take on other metaphorical significances. No serious confusion results, however, since the image will almost always be used in conjunction with images of darkness, the symbol of death, where it is intended to symbolize creation.

13. Bailey, op. cit., I, 31. Bailey's groupings are I and II, III and IV, V and VI. G. Barra in his Struttura e Composizione del De Rerum Natura di Lucrezio (Naples, 1952), argues for a principal structural division into two parts, I-III and IV-VI. His grounds are that Lucretius mainfestly undertakes to set out the positive scientific essentials of Epicurean doctrine in the first three books, while reserving the final three for those phenomena the misunderstanding of which leads to injurious belief in the divine. The argument is not without merit. Even if accepted whole, however, it does not suggest the need of a different sort of proem for III. Indeed, given this division, the celebratory air that the proem possesses appears quite fitting as the poet looks ahead to the conquests of reason that follow.

    There is, by the way, no reason why we cannot accept both Bailey's and Barra's observations side by side—a structural break both into threes and twos, but on different principles.

14. The proem is a nearly verbatim repetition of I, 926-50, but the lines cannot be said to establish as much there on the theme, because they occur before the pattern of thematic motifs has solidified. Also, the discrepancy in the final line detracts from the thematic force of the earlier passage.

15. That is, both are primi and, hereby, creators, and both range far (cf. peragro here and peragravit I, 75) into exclusive domains for the substance of their creation. The parallel is explicit. It is to be noted also that the primus motif as it relates to Epicurus first arose in connection with this passage in Book I. The parallel is important.

16. The oft-occurring phrase nigror mortis establishes it as such.

17. The marvel of it is that these difficulties appear not to have disturbed our poet in the least. Yet, not only does the same image arise perforce in I, 926-50, but twice also in the closing verses of proem I (136ff.). Their occurrence in the first proem, of course, is meant to give the first clue to an eventual tie between Epicurus and Lucretius in the creation theme but the same criticism that applies to the symbolism in the latter passages applies here also and, meanwhile, the images here do not have the support of the thematic material that occurs in the later passages. It is especially striking that, though in all passages it is the word obscura that causes the difficulty (it does not matter that it means little more than “abstruse”), Lucretius seems to have had no temptation to change it. True, such a change would have destroyed the nice equipoise of the images, but this perhaps would not have been too great a cost for the resultant relief to the symbolism. The poet, however, appears not to have thought in terms of relief. As it would seem, he at the least felt that some formal symbolism yet clings to the images of light in all passages despite the difficulty of obscura. But even here, seeing that the very philosophy which, as he implies, his poetry causes to be life-giving is in the next breath linked with destruction, such symbolism as remains is not only purely formal but forced and arbitrary. There is no sign that the poet could have cared less.

    A similarly cool aloofness to the resistance of detail is practiced in the proem of III, where, following Homer, the poet describes the abodes of the gods. There the words semper (que) innubilis aether / integit et largo diffuso lumine ridet magnificently capture the Homeric description; but, as V, 1188-93, when logically conjoined with the description in V, 1205, will clearly show, this aether cannot possibly be part of the actual Epicurean intermundia.

    It seems, in sum, that this master of formal construction could wink at form where it stood in his way. But this is perhaps one of the secrets of his mastery.

18. That is to say, the turn on the “sweet honey of the muse” merely afforded Lucretius an attractive entry into the metaphor. Its importance is functional, not substantial.

19. It ought perhaps to be made explicit that, given the metaphor's structure, the utilitatem which the reader experiences corresponds directly to recreata valescat.

20. We must notice the thematic arrangement of the mythological allusions: first come Ceres and Liber (l. 14), signifying creation, and then, with Hercules as a bridge, the cluster of monsters (ll. 24ff.), emblematic of destruction.

21. I am proposing that to Lucretius, as to us, and in accordance with Epicurean tenets, Epicurus-as-god was a rational absurdity. That Epicurus (qui princeps vitae rationem invenit) had just claim to the title of creator, however, he believed implicitly. It is the two ideas working together that effects the mockery of religious persuasions. The hidden argument is: if one who genuinely creates is not a god, so much the less are they who do not create at all.

    This is not to ignore Cicero's testimony (Tusc. I, 21, 48; De Nat. Deor. I, 16, 43) on the Epicurean tendency—Lucretius no doubt included in his charge—to revere the master as a god. (Bailey's suggestion—op. cit., 1322—that they worshiped him as such is certainly based on an overinterpretation of the passages.) The only real question for us is whether or not Lucretius meant to represent Epicurus as one of the true gods, who can only be the inhabitants of the intermundia. Unless he was indulging himself in a mad illogicality, he obviously did not intend anything of the sort. Epicurus-the-god, then, is purely a figurative representation, a persona of the poem.

22. The fact that Lucretius later mentions attendance at the shrines of the gods (VI, 75) does not modify this assertion. The gods whose contemplation is involved are clearly not the Olympians of ancient belief.

23. Lucretius, of course, does not represent the plague as the cause of Athen's decline, but merely as its symbol.

24. The fact that the plague is a naturally, materially caused catastrophe renders it even more firmly an expression of the poem's own essence. How much more effective such an ending is than Santayana's suggested portrait of Mars sallying out in blind fury etc. (see Chapter I), the poem itself tells us in its every line. As for Bignone's suggested ending (see note 27), this would have been artistically far worse than Santayana's even though on the surface it might appear academically sounder.

25. The suggestion that Lucretius should have posed a cultural cycle and an atom-grounded natural cycle as participants in the very same process may at first seem startling or even absurd. To us, to be sure, they are quite separate logical propositions; but, just as surely, when dealing with Lucretius propositions, we must refer them to the Lucretian, not our own, view of things. Culture, whatever it is, must be the product of the application of mind to matter. In the Epicurean philosophy, the mind is explicitly held to be itself material. Hence, culture—an abstraction, by the way, to which the poet never specifically refers—is the issue of an interworking of matter and matter; manifestly, this interworking cannot but be subject to the laws that govern generally in matter. These, collectively, are the ratio naturae. Likewise, they cannot but show that outer configuration which the ratio always produces, the species naturae. We are thus on completely safe grounds when we infer that the cultural ebb and flow is just another species of the ratio naturae and that the ratio, the same that works within the movements of the atoms, works within the ebb and flow itself.

    We therefore see that, in the Lucretian scheme of things, a cycle in culture, since it derives from the laws that govern in matter, is as fundamental a truth as a cycle of creation and destruction in nature, that, in fact, the two are the same cycle and the same truth.

    As the final chapter will disclose, these conclusions, which are easily enough derived once the reader grasps the poem's formal principles, have a momentous influence on the work's final meaning.

26. The bodies of the various books are here left out of consideration, as they have been throughout this chapter, since they do not figure in the core of the poem's design.

27. See note 13.

28. What, then, of Lucretius' unfulfilled promise to “tell more about the gods?” Our main concern is to understand that, even if he in fact ever did contemplate such a description, he could not have meant to append it, as most critics suppose he did, to the present close of the poem. This, as we may now see, would have entailed the deliberate ruination of the work's design. Next, it will be worth our while to inquire whether he ever proposed such a description at all, whether, in fine, the poem makes any promises that it does not quite fulfill. The answer, I think, is that it does not.

    The passage in which the promise occurs (V 146-55) is this:

    Illud item non est ut possis credere, sedis
    esse deum sanctas in mundi partibus ullis.
    tenuis enim natura deum longeque remota
    sensibus ab nostris animi vix mente videtur;
    quae quoniam manuum tactum suffugit et ictum,
    tactile nil nobis quod sit contingere debet.
    tangere enim non quit quod tangi non licet ipsum.
    quare etiam sedes quoque nostris sedibus esse
    dissimiles debent, tenues de corpore eorum;
    quae tibi posterius largo sermone probabo.

    Bailey translates the final line, “… all of which I will hereafter prove to you with plenteous discourse.” That “prove” is the right word is well attested by the seven other uses of probari in the poem (I, 513, 858; II, 94, 499, 528, 934; IV, 477). It is a logical demonstration then, that we are to expect.

    This understood, three preliminary facts concerning the passage and its implications must command our attention. First, if Lucretius is at all contemplating a treatment of things divine, the stress is decidedly on the godly abodes, not on the gods themselves. Second, as U. Pizzani perceptively points out—Il problema del testo e della composizione del De rerum natura di Lucrezio (Rome, 1959), p. 177—the passage is keyed to negative assertions concerning the divine abodes, the first and principal statement being that they cannot be located in any part of our world. Third (and it is stunning that this point should have been universally ignored before), it is quite evident that an outright description, however long, of the divine abodes would not fulfill the promise in the least, since merely to be told once more that these environs are different from ours because of their tenuity (which itself cannot be directly proven) would neither prove anything in itself nor add anything substantial to the proofs already given.

    A fresh approach to the passage is therefore required. Clearly, the promised logical demonstration, the proof, must involve the following train of argument, which lies behind the “quae” of the final verse: 1. The nature of the gods is so fine as to be scarcely seen by the understanding of the mind; 2. Since this nature cannot be touched by the hand, it cannot touch anything which can be touched by us, since nothing can touch which cannot itself be touched; 3. Accordingly, the abodes of the gods must be different from our own (since there must be sensible contact between the gods and their abodes); 4. They must therefore be as delicately constituted as their bodies.

    “Quae probabo …,” says Lucretius. The words can only disclose that he does not feel the proof just given for the difference-because-of-tenuity of the divine abodes to be sufficient. Yet, it is not at all likely that he promises to strengthen it by bringing to bear other arguments of a similar kind. If this were so, we must first of all suppose that he had at his disposal an abundance (largo sermone) of material both similar and somewhat superior to that of proof already given. Beyond this we must assume that, having chosen to postpone his better arguments, he either forgot or abandoned them, or, perhaps, could find no place for their inclusion, or, last and most dismal, intended to subjoin them to the description of the plague as a kind of poetic postscript. More arguments like that of 146-54, then, are all but out of the question. Yet, again, unless probabo does not imply argumentation at all, which is impossible, neither does it predict a mere description of the divine abodes. This leaves but one possibility that will fulfill the implications of the word: a treatment largo sermone of the abodes of man. That is to say, if, following the reasoning (and the hither-worldly grounding) of the argument as already set down, Lucretius proceeds to demonstrate that our abodes are perfectly sensible to us, he will all the more convincingly demonstrate that they are unsuited to the gods, that they are therefore different from those of the gods, and that, by a condition already attached to the dissimilitude, the divine environment is fine according to the fineness of the divine nature.

    The question naturally arises whether this will be a meaningful demonstration. For all the answer that is required, we need merely refer to the Epicurean imperative of argument according to directly sensible phenomena (Ep. ad Hdt., 38). It is clear that the reasoning as so far proffered hardly fulfills Epicurus' requirement to the letter. It is founded wholly in appeals to the fact that we do not sense the nature of the gods. Accordingly, an implementation of the argument by way of immediately perceptible phenomena will constitute the methodological core of his proof. Hence the word probabo.

    Now, such a continuation of the argument certainly exists. It may be said, in fact, that almost the whole remainder of the poem deals in some way or other with the abodes of man—that is, with the things (entities, phenomena, forces) with which he has sensible contact. If we want a list of those that are discussed explicitly (some of them occurring even before the point of the promise) we need merely refer to the very next place where Lucretius takes up the question of abodes (V, 1188ff.) to find a nearly complete one:

    in caeloque deum sedis et templa locarunt,
    per caelum volvi quia nox et luna videtur,
    luna dies et nox et noctis signa severa
    noctivagaeque faces caeli flammaeque volantes,
    nubila sol imbres nix venti fulmina grando
    et rapidi fremitus et murmura magna minarum.

    The passage, however, represents immensely more than a simple list. To begin with, it is not fortuitous that here, as earlier, the context is negative. We are reminded of where the godly abodes are not, not told where they are or what they are. So much secures a tidy formal continuity of argument. Next, being so cast and representing the first reversion to the question of abodes, the passage naturally puts us on the alert for the promised proof. Nor is our attention unsolicited poetically. For, finally, the queer repetitiousness of the passage (in this quality there is none like it in De Rerum Natura) is anything but accidental. In their overlapping succession, the images contained become, as it were, an ever stronger radiance cleaving the darkness, then gradual day, then the weather of day in its full range, the whole passing from strictly visual images to strictly aural, from serenity to violence, the whole strikingly vivid. The verses are a deliberate assault on the senses. Can we doubt the reason, seeing that the whole argument hitherto has been rooted exclusively in the senses? These are our abodes. We are driven to sense them. Sensing them, by merely becoming conscious of their sensible existence, we know through our recollection of the former argument that they cannot be the abodes of the gods, that their abodes, being by nature insensible to us, are necessarily different, necessarily more delicate. Just so, when we become aware of the same and still other sensible phenomena of our environment in other contexts, as we do almost everywhere in the latter part of the poem, we deepen and expand that identical piece of knowledge.

    Hence, through a brilliant piece of dialectical insinuation keyed to this passage, yet with complete canonical soundness, the promised plenteous logical demonstration is delivered. Seeing that it appears—and, indeed, can scarcely appear—in any other form, we may cease to look for it in any other form.

    In view of these findings, Bignone's attempt to outline the sequel of Book VI in Storia della Letteratura Latina (1945), II, 318ff. is, of course, entirely out of place.

29. The chief studies of the meter have been those of Bailey (op. cit., 109-123) and of W. A. Merrill: The Lucretian Hexameter (Berkeley, 1922-23); The Metrical Technique of Lucretius and Cicero (Berkeley, 1924); The Characteristics of Lucretius' Verse (Berkeley, 1924); Lucretian and Virgilian Rhythm (Berkeley, 1929). On the sound-pattern, Rosamund Deutsch's The Pattern of Sound in Lucretius (Bryn Mawr, 1939) is the main study. All are useful and unimaginative, leaving a great deal to be done in these areas.

30. E.g., warmth and cold, VI, 840-87; starting and stopping, II, 251-93; awakening and sleeping, the images of waking at IV, 927 and 995ff. amid Lucretius' discourse on sleep and dreams; blackness and whiteness, II, 757-94, 810-25; as for stillness, the master image and symbol would lie in III, 910.

31. The case for prolonged repetition is, I think, self-evident. Widespread repetition, meanwhile, would impart a sense of cyclical movement, if by no other means, through the continual recurrence of the motif of repetition itself. Where it is used in conjunction with prolonged repetition, of course, it will derive cyclical force also from the latter.

    A fair representation of the two types used in conjunction lies in Homer's Iliad, where, as I feel it, the repetition (in itself not appreciably longer in either quality, though it is of a different sort, than that of De Rerum Natura) gives rise to a very definite sense of cyclical movement.

32. The motive becomes quite explicit in the close of III (see especially 1024-52), where the poet takes his readers, all “defendants,” to task for dreaming of that immunity to death that is given to no one, not even the most magnificent.