SOURCE: Allison, Robert. “Introduction.” In Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, pp. vii-xxxii. London: Hatchards, 1925.

[In the following excerpt, Allison describes the early circumstances of Lucretius, the factors that led him to become a devoted follower of Epicurus, and Lucretius's views on nature and the human race.]

Of Titus Lucretius Carus, one of the world's great poets, we know hardly anything. One of the maxims which his beloved Master, Epicurus, impressed upon his followers was, ‘Hide thyself, and pass through life unknown’; and so successfully has his pupil followed his advice, that no details of his life and works have come down to us. Although the contemporary of Cicero and Catullus, we know nothing of him beyond the fact, which Mr. Monro thinks certain, that he was born at Rome in 99 b.c., and died at the age of forty-four in 55 b.c. A story is told, on which Tennyson has founded his poem on Lucretius, how, after being driven mad by a love potion administered by a jealous woman, possibly his wife, he committed suicide in the forty-fourth year of his age. The story, originating as it does some three or four centuries later, and otherwise unsupported, may be dismissed. On the same authority we are informed that Cicero edited his unfinished work. We have indeed a letter¹ from the great orator to his brother Quintus, written a few months after the poet's death, in which he says (I follow the rendering of Mr. Shuckburgh): ‘The poems of Lucretius are, as you say, full of brilliant flashes of genius, yet very technical.’ In these words he is probably contrasting the fine poetical passages with the dry details of the long philosophical disquisitions with which the poet's work abounds, which have led some to assert that out of the seven or eight thousand lines, seven hundred only can be termed poetry. But there is nothing to lead us to suppose he edited it, and indeed it seems unlikely he should edit a work which in its main doctrines conflicts so strongly with his own on the existence of the Gods, and the fear of death. In one of his letters he calls Epicurianism ‘the philosophy of the kitchen.’ That Lucretius left his work unfinished and without his final revision is certain, and there are passages in the poem which seem to render it not impossible that he died by his own hand. Thus in his third book (iii. 941) he says:

                                                  If life itself disgusts
Why seek to add to it, to lose again
And perish all in vain? Why not prefer
To make an end of life and labour too?

And again (iii. 79):

                                                                                                                        Oft again,
From fear of death, disgust of light and life
Seizes on men, and with a saddened heart
They do themselves to death.

He was, we cannot doubt, disgusted with the world he saw around him, with the squalid passions and disputes unloosed on every side, and in his very first lines he calls upon the goddess of peace and love to supplicate the god of war to still the wild tumult of the surging storm, and once more to bring back rest and concord to the troubled world:

Oh, while he lies within thy fond embrace,
Pour low sweet words from thy soft lips, and ask
Peace, gentle peace for Rome.(2)

But the peace so earnestly longed for came not, and Lucretius alone, apart, hangs like one of his own storm clouds—

                                                                                Such are the clouds
Which oft we see to gather in the sky,
Blot the fair face of heaven, and as they go
Caress the air. Oft giant forces seem
To hurry past, their shadows leave behind—(3)

over the troubled scenes of the closing years of the great republic with a profound sadness, a countenance of sorrow rather than of anger, which is the dominant note of his great poem. If ever there was a mind in earnest it was that of Lucretius. He saw around him the decay and dissolution of that old régime which had been so great a power in the ancient world—he felt something had gone wrong, and he endeavoured to apply a remedy to all the ills and troubles of mankind.

It is by a stroke of irony, that of Caius Memmius, to whom the poem is dedicated, and for whose instruction it would seem to have been written, we know far more than we do of the author of the work, who seems, however, to have been his friend and admirer. He was the son and nephew of well-known public men at Rome, and himself took a considerable part in the political life of the State, having been tribune in 66 b.c. and prætor in 58 b.c. On this latter occasion he opposed the plans of Julius Cæsar, and it is in reference to this that we have an allusion in the poem when it says:

                                                  Nor yet can Memmius' son
At such an hour be wanting to the state.(4)

It was probably after his prætorship that he was assigned the province of Bithynia, whither he was accompanied by the poet Catullus, who gives a not very favourable account of his life and character. In 54 b.c. he was a candidate for the office of Consul, and being accused of bribery was exiled and afterwards lived at Athens. We have a letter⁵ from Cicero to him, which goes to show that he was not a very ardent follower of Epicurus, though he perhaps adopted the more pleasant and easy-going of the great master's tenets. According to Cicero's letter he had secured a lease from the Areopagus, at Athens, of ‘some tumble-down house or other of Epicurus’ (nescio quid illud Epicuri parietinarum) for the purpose of erecting on it a residence for himself. The Society of Epicureans objected. They said the buildings in question had been left to them in perpetuity, and requested the good services of Cicero to induce Memmius to surrender them. Their earnestness, he says, is rather laughable, but they are an innocent, simple-minded set, and we should indulge them, for their error, such as it is, is one of silliness, not knavery. We are not told the result of the application. Memmius, as we have said, was no very earnest Epicurean. He was, Cicero says elsewhere,⁶ indolent and indifferent, and avoiding trouble not only in speaking, but in thinking too.

His name is connected with some unpleasant intrigues with women of note, and he would seem, on the whole, to have been unworthy of the friendship Lucretius lavished on him.

Lucretius' own work is as silent about himself as are other people's about him. But it is important we should remember the main events of the period in which he lived. It was a wild and lurid sky into which the sun of the great republic sank. The poet might have said, he did say, probably, with Hamlet:

The world is out of joint; oh, cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right.

From his tenth year onward riot and bloodshed were ever before his eyes. He saw Sylla drive Marius from Rome, the city hitherto inviolate besieged, the fighting in the streets: the return of Marius signalised again by slaughter lasting many days and nights: the subsequent triumph of Sylla, with its terrible battle at the Colline Gate and its fresh massacres. Six thousand victims were butchered almost before the Senate's eyes, and when they protested the conqueror replied, ‘Be seated: 'tis nothing: some wretches undergoing the punishment they deserve.’ For six months the proscriptions of the dictator lasted: each day produced its fresh list of victims, and no one knew how long he would be safe. There was no appeal to law. ‘Talk not of laws,’ said Sylla, ‘to him who bears the sword.’ No, there was no law, human or divine; religion was with impunity defied; or, what is yet more degrading, received a mocking reverence from those who made it a partaker in their crimes. At a later period, when he was thirty-five, he witnessed the suppression of the conspiracy of Catiline at the hands of Cicero, and the subsequent strangling of those incriminated, in the Tullianum—the dark underground prison whose smell, as Sallust tells us, was foul, and its look appalling.

It was still violence—always violence. Was law, men asked, never to resume its reign? Were the lives and properties of citizens to be ever at the mercy of the strong? A little later followed the squalid story of Clodius—his intrigue with Cæsar's wife, and his intrusion on the Vestal Virgins while engaged under her presidency in the new-fangled worship of the Bona Dea. For this offence he was acquitted by a jury bribed on his behalf—it may be with the consent of Cæsar himself, who, though he divorced his wife, did not wish to quarrel with one who might be useful in the ambitious schemes that were already in his view. To render the situation complete, Cæsar, though an avowed Atheist, was at the time Pontifex Maximus, and charged with the protection and maintenance of all religious rites and ceremonies. There was, indeed, a complete subversion of public and private morals.

When Lucretius was eighteen, Cicero, who was seven or eight years older, appeared as counsel in his first great case. A brief account of it may enable us to understand something of the condition of Society. S. Roscius, a wealthy citizen of Ameria, was murdered in the streets of Rome as he was returning home at night. The murderers were neighbours and distant kinsmen of his own. To cover their crimes they induced one Chrysogonus, a favourite freedman of Sylla's, to get Roscius' name inserted in the Proscription list. His property was then confiscated, and sold at a sham auction, where Chrysogonus bought it for an old song. But Roscius had an only son, who if he could not be got out of the way, might be inconvenient to the conspirators. Accordingly an accusation was brought against him that he had himself murdered his father. The position of Chrysogonus, as the great dictator's favourite, made them think they could go any length. No advocate, they fancied, would dare to present himself in defence of Roscius. But the case was Cicero's opportunity. In his great speech he threw away all disguise, and gave voice to the feelings which were in the mind of every citizen, and vibrated in a thousand hearts. Sick of the reign of bloodshed and terror they had so long endured, it was as when Leon Gambetta, the famous French statesman, appeared in a great trial in the courts of Paris on behalf of M. Delescluze in 1868, and denounced the rulers of the Second Empire as frauds and impostors. Roscius was acquitted, and Rome, like Paris, discovered that another great orator and brave man had been found in the day of trial among her sons. Cicero, in his speech, declared that if some remedy for the condition of affairs could not be found, it would be better to go and live among the wild beasts than at Rome.

Such was the atmosphere surrounding Lucretius in his early years. He has been often termed a pessimist: but was it possible for any honest man in his surroundings to be aught else? To whom was he to turn? To the old Deities? Plautus had laughed them off the stage a century before, when, in his plays, he presented Jupiter himself engaged in a squalid intrigue with the wife of Amphitryon, and accounted for a dark morning by the fact that Apollo had too long tarried in his cups the night before. Other worships of foreign origin had been introduced, as that of the Magna Mater, the goddess mother described by Lucretius,⁷ but these had only served as fresh inducements to immorality and lust. The old mythologies had ceased to command the belief, or influence the conduct of mankind. In despair men turned to the philosophies of Greece. Even there the lofty ideals of Plato were found too vague, the subtleties of Aristotle too hard and cold to satisfy men's craving for a guide. They became Epicureans or Stoics, as their bent inclined. Merivale, in his history of the Roman Empire, thus describes the condition of affairs (chapter xxii.): ‘Rome overflowed with the impure spawn of superstition. Conjurers, soothsayers, astrologers, and fortune-tellers filled every street, and introduced themselves into every home. The dreams of Cæsar and Pompeius were gravely related; Cicero collected the records of supernatural phenomena; Vatinius invoked the shades of the dead, and read, it was said, the will of the gods in the entrails of a murdered child. … The belief in portents and omens exercised an unconscious sway over thousands, who openly derided all spiritual existence, and professed atheists trembled in secret at the mysterious potency of magical incantations.’

As M. Arnold says:

On that hard Pagan world disgust
          And secret loathing fell;
And weariness and sated lust
          Made human life a hell.

Lucretius, endeavouring to escape this hell, became a follower of Epicurus, and never had master a more devoted adherent. Epicurus, who was at once both prophet and physician, was born at Samos in 341 b.c., the son of a poor schoolmaster, and established himself at Athens, where he lived a simple, temperate life—taught his scholars in the gardens which he left to them—and where, after long suffering from a painful disease heroically borne, he ultimately died. In the eyes of his young and glowing convert he was the greatest benefactor of mankind, who far surpassed all men in intellect: outshone them all as in the heavens the sun outshines the stars.⁸ His enthusiasm for his master knows no limits, and no religious teacher could have sounded a more earnest and emphatic call to all men to find rest in the haven where he has discovered it himself. He approaches and describes his master's theories with all the burning energy of a deep conviction. There is no other instance of a man of high genius so completely possessed and dominated by another mind.

And what was this teaching of Epicurus? It is easy to represent it as having pleasure and pleasure only as its first objective—and possibly some of its more easy-going adherents, like Memmius himself, were drawn to it in this way, Probably no teacher has been more monstrously calumniated than Epicurus. For centuries he was believed to be a sensualist, and to have preached such doctrine to his followers. But such was certainly not the faith that attracted Lucretius' eager soul. There was nothing of the Epicure in its worse and modern sense about the master he adored. I am not sure that this atheistic Epicure is not in a true sense the most religious of all poets. Seneca,⁹ himself a Stoic, said of the creed: ‘For myself I think, and venture in opposition to the opinion of many to say, that the moral teaching of Epicurus is sane and right and even austere for those who rightly apprehend it: I do not venture to say, as many of our school do, that it is a school of debauchery: it does not deserve to be so described.’ And Cicero says of Epicurus himself: ‘What crowds of chosen friends he gathered round him: what close affection to their master they displayed!’¹⁰ And in his will Epicurus bade his heirs to defray the expense of gathering together at stated times the philosophers his friends ‘in honour of his memory.’ How gladly we can imagine Lucretius joining in the homage thus paid. What troubled and saddened him was that the discredited Deities were still paraded by poets and priests as the creators of the world, and the maintainers of its fabric, still able to affect for good or ill the destiny of man in this and another existence to follow after death. Even long after Lucretius' day, when Rome fell before the Goths, men were inclined to believe that the disaster was to be ascribed to the anger felt by the old Roman deities at the neglect of their worship and their rites: and St. Augustine argues in reply that it was not the rise of Christianity, but the views of Paganism that brought about the fall.

But what chiefly attracted the keen and ever-inquiring soul of Lucretius, thinking to escape from the haunting fear of Gods and the threatened torments of the future, in the teaching of Epicurus, was his theory of the nature and origin of the world—the Atomic theory as it is termed. Borrowed in the main from Democritus, a Greek, who lived a hundred years before him, it taught that everything was formed of indivisible particles or atoms, eternal and unchangeable, and that these atoms by various combinations in infinite time, with the void in which they move, formed the universe, the summa rerum, we see to-day. We must remember that it was a theory entertained in whole or part by Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Boyle, and Dalton. It was indeed a forbidding subject for a poet to unfold—a ‘lourd fardeau,’ as M. Martha terms it, the heaviest ever laid on a poetic genius to accomplish. We recognise this all the more when we compare it with some of the writings of Epicurus himself, which were discovered at Herculaneum in 1752. But a God, a very God, he was in the eyes of his young and ardent disciple, and he determines to throw round his arid theories the Muse's charm. The walls of the great world part asunder before his eyes, and the poet sees the working of things throughout the void as they move along, ever making and unmaking fresh figures in their æonian dance. He had, as he reminds us, almost a new language to create:

                                                                                          The rise
And long fall of the hexameter

to perfect for the task. But no pains were to be spared: he speaks of the

Toilsome path to watch the long nights through,
Seeking the words by which, and in what verse
I may at length shed round your mind a light
Which will display to you the hidden things.(11)

And again, speaking of what men think of in their sleep, he says:

While we pursue our task, and seek to learn
What is the nature of the world around;
When found, relate it in our native tongue.(12)

But dry and arid as the subject was he clothes it with poetic charm, and becomes as interested in the motion of his atoms, as they clash, rebound, unite and separate, as ever was Homer in the battles of the heroes he commemorates. It is touching indeed to watch the young aristocrat sitting calmly down amid the vices and corruptions of the day, and painfully devoting himself to rousing the men of his time to a higher and nobler conception of the world they saw around them, and their position in it. And first as to its origin. According to Epicurus, as his theory is unfolded in the first and second books of the poem, the world was not the work of Gods:

                                                  Ah, when they think the Gods
Made all these things for man, they seem to me
To wander very far from reason's path.(13)

Not that Epicurus rejected the idea of Gods altogether: he worshipped the Gods, but not in the ordinary fashion. ‘Not he,’ he said, ‘is godless, who rejects the Gods of the crowd, but rather he who accepts them.’ The Gods to him were eternal and immortal beings, whose blessedness excluded every thought of care or occupation of any kind. They were to live, as Tennyson describes them, in

The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
The sacred everlasting calm.

They are to be examples to, but not the creators or guides of man. Epicurus worshipped in the temples, as Lucretius himself speaks of doing. But they never interfered with the course of nature. The only Deity worthy of worship was Nature herself, ‘Natura gubernans,’ as Lucretius calls it, whose laws must be followed and obeyed. Some have seen in this Natura gubernans a sort of adumbration of the Deity or great First Cause on the part of Lucretius. As Bacon says in his Essay on Atheism, ‘God it is certain worketh nothing in Nature but by Second Causes.’ And so, under the direction of this Natura gubernans, according to our poet, the world was formed by natural forces working in illimitable time. Infinite atoms falling through infinite space in innumerable ways, like the snowflakes in a storm, or the motes that you see playing in the sunbeams in the corner of a room,

Trying all motions and all unions too,
They reached at last to dispositions such
As now has formed this universe of ours,
By which it is preserved through the great years.(14)

And again:

                                                                                                              So the seeds
To-day have the same motion, that they had
In days gone by, and will have to the end:
What was begot will be begotten still
By the same law: will be, will grow and wax
As long as Nature's laws permit to each.(15)

And yet in spite of the laws which guide them—the Natura or fortuna gubernans under which they work, it was still felt that man's will was free, that he was his own master for good or ill: and so there is, as the poet explains, a power of declination in the motes and atoms, a certain swerve which enables them to accommodate themselves to the fact of which our senses inform us (and the senses, according to Epicurus and as Lucretius emphatically lays down, are the court of final appeal), that man is a free agent, possessed of power that has been arrested from the fates, and that, as the poet says:

Nothing hinders, why we should not lead
A life in all things worthy of the Gods.(16)

We are not the slaves of circumstance: we are the authors of our own well-being and salvation, as we are responsible for our undoing and our fall. These atoms move in a void, which is the other component part of the universe, and the two great laws laid down are that nothing comes from nothing, and that nothing is ever dissolved into nothing. And then the mind and the soul too, to which Lucretius devotes his third book, they too are formed of atoms lighter and more rare, for nothing is more nimble than the mind, yet, like the body, dying when it dies. The poet gives some twenty or more reasons why the mind and soul are mortal like the body, and then sums up in the famous pæan at the end of the book:

So death is nought to us, no, not a jot,

a shout as triumphal, though for a different reason as St. Paul's when he cries, ‘O death, where is thy sting?’ Mr. Tyrrell in his work on Latin literature parallels it with Walt Whitman when he cries:

                                                                                          Praise, praise, praise
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

And again:

I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean,
Lav'd in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.

And we must remember in considering his views that Lucretius wrote a century before the Gospel brought life and immortality to light: that the immortality of the soul was then no currently accepted doctrine: Julius Cæsar denied it openly before the Senate at the very time he was Pontifex Maximus, and even in the Psalms, the world's manual of devotion, we find passages which leave the impression of a final triumph of death, and the complete annihilation of consciousness. Thus in Psalm cxv. 17: ‘The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence.’ Then again in Psalm cxlvi. 4: ‘His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth: in that very day his thoughts perish.’ We all know how difficult it is even to-day

To make our doubts remove,
          The gloomy doubts that rise,
And view the Canaan that we love
          With unbeclouded eyes.

And so we need not be astonished at Lucretius in the circumstances in which he wrote arriving at the conclusion at which he did. And there is this further to be said: in the world of his day the lower regions assigned to the dead were but an enlarged tomb, where they remained in the black darkness of eternal night. Cicero tells us that the fear of death weighed on the ancient world like the famous rock on the unfortunate Tantalus. Virgil has painted it for us in his fourth Georgie:—

There, startled by his song, wan spectres flocked
Forth from the utmost deeps of Erebus—
Dim phantoms that had lost the light of day:
Matrons and husbands, and the forms long dead
Of high-souled heroes, boys, and spouseless girls,
And well-loved youths, who in their parents' sight
Were laid to rest upon untimely pyres;
All these were they whom black Cocytus binds
With darkling ooze, with fringe of loathly reeds,
With sleepy waves that lap the loveless shore:
They whom abhorrent Styx for ever chains,
Girt with the ninefold fetters of his flood.(17)

Virgil, indeed, subsequently, in a similar passage in his sixth Æneid, added the Elysian fields to this somewhat unsavoury district, but the way to them was long, the escape to them uncertain, and arbitrarily conferred. Lucretius' conclusion—and it is a very practical one—is that hell is here among us: that the veriest hell is that which fools make of their own lives.

Having thus established that the mind and soul die with the body to which they have been attached in life, if this is so, if they really perish, how is it that we have a belief in ghosts and images of the dead reappearing to us? His answer in the fourth book deals with the whole question of sensation—sight, hearing, touch, and smell. How do they all arise? His explanation is that all objects are incessantly throwing off thin films or images of themselves, which strike our senses, and so give rise by the impact to the sensations which we feel on eye, or ear, or tongue, as the case may be. Thought is explained in a like way, and so are dreams. The book concludes with a disquisition on love, introduced by the images of the loved one, so frequently occurring to the lover's mind, and the great dangers it involves. And with a scathing satire on the lover's perils the book closes.

The fifth book shows how this infinite concourse of atoms described in the earlier part of the poem has in the end produced the world, and life, and human society as we see it to-day. It is not, he affirms again, the work of gods—it has been brought into existence by natural causes, by the motions and contacts of the atoms, the heavier ones gradually sinking down to form the earth, the lighter rising to produce the sun and moon and stars. It has been termed the most magnificent account of the progress of the human race that ever proceeded from mortal pen. The main cause of progress, as he indicates, has been the want men feel of this or that for comfort and convenience—the experience which teaches them gradually to satisfy their wants, and finally the reason which co-ordinates the various experiences, and, as he says,

                                                            brings everything
To man's attention; reason raises them
Into the light of day: for things must grow
One on another clearer and more bright
In arts until they've reached their topmost height.(18)

Man in his early stages, though naked and unarmed, was strong and vigorous; he had to fight for bare existence, lived on such fruit as earth produced, and waged a continual struggle against wild beasts and other foes. Then discoveries mark his gradual advance: he learns to clothe himself, to make himself a hut to dwell in, and last, and most important, to light a fire for warmth. Then by degrees their habits become less wild: men and women live together in one family and have children, the weak are protected, law and custom come into force, civilisation has begun. It is the Contract Social of Rousseau, who followed Lucretius closely in his Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité. Then language is invented. The discovery of fire and its use for melting metals gives rise to industries, men till the soil, the various arts and sciences follow in their turn: they begin to dwell in towns, and ships sail upon the sea. Lucretius was clearly one of the first to trace the progress of the human race, a fact for which perhaps he has not received all the credit he deserves. Virgil recognised his value when he sang of him:

He sung the secret seeds of Nature's frame—
How seas, and earth, and air, and active flame
Fell through the mighty void, and in their fall
Were blindly gathered in this goodly ball.
The tender soil then stiffening by degrees
Shut from the bounding earth the bounding seas.
Then earth and ocean various forms disclose,
And a new sun to a new world arose.
And mists condensed to cloud obscure the sky:
And clouds dissolved the thirsty ground supply.
The rising trees the lofty mountains grace,
The lofty mountains feed the savage race,
Yet few, and strangers in the unpeopled place.
From hence the birth of man the song pursued,
And how the world was lost and how renewed.(19)

In the sixth book he deals, after a third eulogium of Epicurus, with various other phenomena hitherto unnoticed, alleging, as he has done before, several possible causes which may account for them, though admitting that he is entirely in doubt which may be the true explanation. Then he proceeds to deal with the theory and history of disease, and concludes with a long and detailed account of the plague at Athens, in which he closely follows the account of Thucydides. The work is evidently unfinished, and was interrupted by his death.

Such is the poem of Lucretius. Much of his science no doubt is false, and even palpably absurd, as when he states the sun is no larger than it seems to us to be; but after all he is in very early days a keen inquirer, a genuine seeker after truth. His errors do not detract from his merits. They were such as in his day no one could avoid; his genius is his own. Amid the vices and corruptions of his day, he endeavoured to turn men's thoughts to higher and sterner purposes: to endeavour to understand the nature of the world around them, and the place they ought to fill in it. It was a novel path, and he made great mistakes, but yet the germs of much in modern science may be discovered in his lines. He told before Lamarck of the successive efforts by which the elements have sought to gather and effect a stable combination; before Darwin of the ideas of natural selection and evolution, of the species, once existing, which have disappeared because they had not strength, or cunning, or agility to protect them in the stern battle of life; before Spencer of the development of worlds like individuals, and destined like them to decay and death. ‘After all,’ as Dr. Masson says, ‘there is only one Lucretius, and it has taxed all my powers, and demands far higher, to make him what he is—the comrade of all fighters against superstition, the ally of the man of science, the poet who so loved our earth and every changing feature of her face, in whom sadness and high fervour are so strangely blended, who felt for children terror-stricken in the dark, and who set forth exulting in his bright new-found weapons, with his heart on fire, to deliver his fellows from care and fear.’²⁰ He is the supreme example of the scientific and imaginative spirit combined and reacting on each other: a close observer of nature, he uses his imagination to enlarge his view and widen his outlook, and has so been able to arrive at, and anticipate, many of the discoveries of modern scientists. Speculation and imagination are not incompatible: the latter connects and amplifies the former. The vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. Dr. Tyndall, in his lecture at Belfast, spoke of his strong scientific imagination. And then, beside, there is the ethical side of his teaching, which must not be overlooked. Atheist and Epicurean if you like, he is one of the most religious of all poets. ‘Unless the heart is pure,’ what dangers lie round us on every side. ‘The narrow path’ along which we have to walk, so familiar to us in Holy Writ, is pointed out; the vices of avarice, and luxury, and illicit indulgence are scourged with a heavy hand; the height to which a man can soar, the depth to which he may fall, the contrast between the simple and the splendid life, the folly of the ambition and feverish unrest of those around him: these are his themes, all touched with a master's skill. Wine is never mentioned but to be condemned, and even when he paints the pleasant picnic

Beside the flowing stream beneath the trees,

there is no mention of the Falernian, which Horace would undoubtedly have introduced. Mr. Myers says: ‘No voice like his has ever proclaimed the nothingness of momentary man; no prophet so convincing has ever thundered in our ears the appalling gospel of Death.’ In his case, as in that of Juvenal, ‘facit indignatio versum.’

His close observation and love of nature have caused him to be likened to Wordsworth among our poets, and Wordsworth has many imitations of him. The sacrifice of Iphigenia,²¹ the procession of Cybele,²² the succession of the seasons,²³ are all described with a closeness and accuracy that marks the master-hand. Among other passages, the cow wandering the meadows²⁴ in search of its calf, the sheep grazing on the distant hill²⁵ that seem a single spot of white, the dance of the motes in the sunbeams in the room,²⁶ the sea-beach with all its varied shells,²⁷ the fantastic shapes the clouds assume,²⁸ the wearing of the streets by the passers' feet, and of the ring upon your hand,²⁹ the wet clothes drying in the sunshine on the beach,³⁰ the scythe-bearing chariots covered with gore, the limbs of stricken soldiers on the field endeavouring still to move,³¹ these are some of the illustrations that are all familiar to those who read him, purple passages which none forget.

There are not many allusions to Lucretius in the works of his contemporaries; it may be his earnestness and lofty teaching were uncongenial amid the sea of filth and depravity on which his lot was cast. But his influence was on them all the same. There is another passage in Virgil's Georgics where he manifestly alludes to him:

For happy is the sage whose master-mind
Grasps the dim secrets of the universe:
Who tramples underfoot all fear of death,
All dread of an inexorable doom,
And the loud roar of greedy Acheron.(32)

And often, both in thought and language, Virgil follows in his footsteps. There were some, Tacitus says, who preferred him to the later poet. Ovid is more outspoken:

Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti,
Exitio terras cum dabit una dies.(33)

Horace seems to admit he was once his pupil, though, startled by thunder in a clear sky, he laid his epicureanism aside.³⁴ But later on the fact that he was an atheist no doubt militated against his popularity, so much so that in the seventh century his poem's existence is said to have hung on the slender thread of a single manuscript, which has now disappeared. He was unknown to Dante and the Middle Ages, though Dante places in his Hell Epicurus and

                                                                                all his followers
Who with the body make the spirit die.(35)

But in the fifteenth century a copy of the original manuscript came to light, and the first edition followed. There was quick recognition of his value. Lambinus, a competent critic, terms him ‘elegantissimus et purissimus, idemque gravissimus atque ornatissimus’ of all the Latin poets. Lucy Hutchinson, the wife of the Puritan colonel, and John Evelyn, the Royalist, were alike attracted, and each published a translation of the poem. Old Montaigne, in his Essays, quotes him continually, and when he reads a fine passage from Lucretius, is in doubt if he does not prefer him to Virgil. Milton has many phrases that he borrowed from him. Dryden says his distinguishing character is ‘a certain kind of noble pride and positive assertion of his opinions, and that sufficiently warms.’ From this same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his expressions and the perpetual torrent of his verse. Shakespeare knew him, probably through Montaigne. He was the chosen companion of Frederick the Great in his arduous campaigns, and writing to his secretary he says: ‘Before going to bed, I shall read my book of consolation, the third book of Lucretius. As you know, this is my favourite reading in days of care and sorrow. This man helps me.’ Miss Berry writes to Horace Walpole: ‘Listen indiscriminately to those who praise Lucretius. You will plunge with the writer into a sea of pure delight if you have the poetic spirit. His science is worth nothing, but his poetry is divine: Virgil is mere prettiness.” Victor Hugo tells how, at Romorantin, in a poor cottage which he had, he first came on the marvellous book, and read on seeing nothing, hearing nothing from dawn to sunset. His book, says Goethe, is one of the most remarkable documents in the world. Macaulay says that ‘in energy, perspicuity, variety of illustration, knowledge of life and manners, talent for description, sense of the beauty of the external world, and elevation and dignity of moral feeling, he had hardly ever an equal.’ Of Mrs. Browning's verdict there is no doubt:

Lucretius—nobler than his mood:
Who dropped his plummet down the broad
Deep universe, and said, “No God,”
Finding no bottom: he denied
Divinely the divine, and died
Chief poet on the Tiber-side.

Tennyson showed his love of him by his frequent imitations, and by his poem on him, though he chose an unhappy and unsupported incident in his life for his theme. And last of all, so fine a judge as Lord Morley has devoted no less than ten pages of his recently published Recollections to memories of a poet who he says is one of the great figures in literature. When he is praised by these, he need not fear to be condemned by others.

The version used for this translation is that of Munro, in his second and revised edition of 1866. Variations from it are noted.

Notes

1. Cf. Letter dxxx. Tyrrell's Edition.

2. Cf. i. 38.

3. Cf. iv. 136.

4. Cf. i. 42.

5. Cf. Letter cxcix. Tyrrell's Edition.

6. Cf. Brutus, 247.

7. Cf. ii. 600.

8. Cf. iii. 1041.

9. Cf. De vitâ beatâ, 13.

10. Cf. De Fin. i. 20.

11. i. 142.

12. iv. 966.

13. ii. 165.

14. i. 1027.

15. ii. 297.

16. iii. 326.

17. Georgics, iv. 467, Lord Burghclere's translation.

18. Cf. v. 1445.

19. Virgil, Eclogues, vi. 31.

20. Dr. Masson, Lucretius, Epicurean and Poet, Preface, page x.

21. i. 84.

22. ii. 600.

23. v. 737.

24. ii. 355.

25. ii. 317.

26. ii. 114.

27. ii. 374.

28. iv. 136.

29. i. 312.

30. i. 305; vi. 470.

31. iii. 642.

32. Virgil, Georgics, ii. 490, Lord Burghclere's translation.

33. Cf. Ovid, Amor. i. 15. 23.

34. Cf. Horace, Odes, i. 34; Satires, i. 5. 102.

35. Cf. Dante, Inferno, x. 15.