Lucretius

(b. Italy, ca. 95 B.C.; d. ca. 55 B.C.), natural philosophy.

Lucretius followed the Epicurean maxim “Live unnoticed” so well that almost nothing is known for certain about him. His “poemata” were known to Cicero and his brother in 54 B.C.¹ St, Jerome reports that he was born in 94 (or 93 or 96, according to other manuscripts), that he was driven mad by an aphrodisiac, that in the intervals between fits of madness he wrote several books, which Cicero afterwards edited or corrected (emendavit), and that he took his own life at the age of forty-four.² In the life of Vergil attributed to Donatus, it is said that Lucretius died on the same day that Vergil took the toga virilis, but the date of this event is stated ambiguously and may be either 55 or 53.

Lucretius was probably a Roman, and probably of aristocratic family, although other views have been advanced. His only work, the poem De rerum natura, shows familiarity with Roman life and with Roman literature. It is written for “Memmius,“probably C. Memmi us, a Roman aristocrat who was praetor in 58 B.C. and later governor of Bithynia. The poem is written in Latin hexameters and divided by the poet into six “books.“The title itself is a translation of ??p? ?ú???s, the name of many Greek works of natural philosophy, including a hexameter poem by Empedocles and a long prose treatise by Epicurus, of which only mutilated fragments survive. There is some indication that the poem was not finished—there are repetitious passages (although some may be deliberate), some books are more polished than others, and the end of book VI does not seem to be the intended end of the whole poem.

Books I and II contain an exposition of the elements of the atomic theory. Books III and IV are about the soul. Book V, which is the longest, describes the origin of the cosmos and the natural growth of living creatures and of civilization. Book VI is on sundry natural phenomena of the sky and earth.

The core of Epicurean natural philosophy is given in books I, II, and V, and there are signs that these were the first books in order of composition. There is some correspondence between the order and proportion of these three books and Epicurus“outline of the subject in the extant Letter to Herodotus. In the absence of Epicurus’ major work, On Nature, it is impossible to say how closely Lucretius follows him, but there is perhaps little or nothing in the natural philosophy of Lucretius that was not in that of Epicurus: The poem shows astonishingly little consciousness of such post-Epicurean philosophies as Stoicism. The Italian imagery and the animadversions on Roman life and morality are no doubt Lucretius’ own.

The existence of this long poem on the Epicurean world picture is surprising in itself. The extant work of Epicurus shows a prosaic mind; and the rather impoverished utilitarianism that he taught gives little obvious encouragement to a poet, although there is evidence that Epicureans were interested in poetry and music in the fragments of work by Lucretius contemporary Philodemus. But for all one knows, it was lonely poetic genius that produced this poem–one of the greatest in the Latin language.

If one compares Lucretius’ poem with the extant writings of Epicurus and with the general picture of Epicurus’ philosophy given by ancient critics, certain changes of emphasis are noticeable. Lucretius devoted two whole books, set in the middle of the exposition of the atomic cosmology, to the structure and functions of the soul—a much higher proportion than in Epicurus Letter to Herodotusy’. Theory of knowledge or “canonic“received little attention from Lucretius. Moreover, the moral lessons, although they are certainly not omitted, occur mainly in the introductions to each book, or in the form of satire on Roman life; there is little preaching in the manner of Epicurus’ Letter to Menoeceus. For all these differences, the De rerum natura remains purely Epicurean in that the acknowledged motive is not disinterested scientific curiosity, but peace of mind.

Lucretius’ atomic theory can be understood best by comparing it with the world picture of Plato and Aristotle. In contrast with the finite, single world of Platonic and Aristotelian theory, later adopted by Christian philosophers, the atomists argued that the universe is infinitely large and contains an unlimited number of cosmoi, past, present, and future.³ The single Aristotelian cosmos was without beginning or end in time; there was thus no problem for Aristotelians about the origin of its parts and of their order. The atomic theory, on the other hand, was committed to explaining the origin of everything in the world. Atoms and void were ungenerated and indestructible, but the earth, sea, air, and stars were compounds that came into being at a particular time; their origin had to be explained.

Plato and Aristotle preferred teleological explanations in their natural philosophies. Plato’s Timaeus offers some grounds for this preference in the notion that the cosmos was created by an intelligent craftsman; the Christian world picture was similar in this respect. Aristotle’s eternal cosmos had no creator; the evidence of order and design showed that the cosmos is an ordered whole, but did not point to a designer. Epicurean atomism rejected this teleology, and sought to explain everything by mechanical causes.⁴ It was therefore necessary to find plausible explanations for apparently purposive or highly ordered phenomena, and some of Lucretius’ most earnest arguments were devoted to this end. The hypothesis of the infinity of the universe was a vital premise in these arguments: in infinite time an infinite supply of atoms moving in infinite space will produce everything that atoms can possibly produce by their coin binations.⁵

The theory held that all atoms are too small to be perceived individually. They are all made of the same material, and have no properties other than shape, size, and weight; their weight is the cause of their natural motion downward through the void. This motion could be interrupted by two causes: an unexplained swerve (clinamen)—postulated by Epicurus to explain the formation of compounds and to free the movements of the soul from “fate“—and collisions with other atoms.⁶ The perceptible qualities of compounds were explained by relating them to atomic shapes and to the proportion of void in the compound, Atoms in compounds move continually, with very frequent collisions in dense compounds, but more freely in compounds containing a greater proportion of void.⁷

Lucretius presented a simple causal theory of perception: all compounds throw off “films” of atoms (simulacra) from their surfaces, and these somehow mark their pattern on the soul atoms by direct contact.⁸ The soul itself is a mixture of atoms of four kinds—something like heat, something like pneuma, something like air. and a fourth unnamed kind.⁹ All the soul atoms are highly mobile, but they are not themselves alive; like other atoms they possess no properties other than shape, size, and weight.¹⁰ At death they simply disperse into the air (the theory so confidently rebutted in Plato’s Phaedo, 70a ff.).¹¹

Book V of Lucretius’ poem puts the elements of the atomic theory into action, so to speak, to show how the cosmos and all things in it originated from atoms moving in the void, without any divine plan or direction. First the world masses were formed, then the earth began to grow vegetation spontaneously, and finally animal species also emerged from the earth. Once having come from earth, a species survived if it were so adapted as to nourish and reproduce itself; otherwise it simply died out as soon as the earth, growing old, ceased to be spontaneously productive. (The theory thus includes the origin of species and the survival of the fittest, but not the evolution of the species.) It was this account of the natural origin of everything, denying Providence and divine creation, that, along with the denial of the survival of the soul, most antagonized Christian philosophers.¹²

The fatal weakness of the ancient atomic theory, considered as a framework on which to build explanations of natural phenomena, was that it could not offer any laws describing the elementary interactions of atoms. The whole theory depended on the effects of shape, size, and weight of atoms when they collided with each other; but the mechanics of the theory relied on simple intuitions and analogies, such as the vague principle of “like to like” taken over from Democritus. In the ancient world the teleological explanation adopted by Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics was clearly more satisfying, especially in biology.

During the early part of the Christian era, Lucretius was first attacked for denying Providence, then, later, forgotten except by grammarians and lexicographers. His poem may have been known in Padua in the thirteenth century,¹³ but it was Gian Francesco Poggio’s rediscovery of a manuscript early in the fifteenth century that began the great revival of interest in his work. Both the anti-Aristotelian cosmology and the beauty of Lucretius’ poetry attracted writers of the Italian Renaissance. Ficino studied him, but rejected his doctrines. Bruno found support in Lucretius’ doctrine of the infinite universe and plurality of worlds, and wrote Latin poems in imitation of him. With the full revival of atomism in Western Europe, especially as manifested by Gassendi. it became harder to distinguish the influence of Lucretius from that of Democritus, who was known mainly through Aristotle’s polemics, and from that of Epicurus.

NOTES

1. Cicero, Ad Q. Fratrem, 2, 9, 3.

2. St Jerome, on Eusebius’ Chronicle 94.

3.De rerum natura, I, 951-1082; II, 1023-1089.

4.Ibid., IV, 822–876; V, 110–234.

5.idbi.,, I, 1021–1051; II, 1058–1063; V,419–431.

6.Ibid., II, 62–293.

7.Ibid., II, 332–521; 730 864.

8.Ibid., IV, 26–857.

9.Ibid., Ill, 177–369.

10.Ibid,, II, 865–1022.

11.Ibid., 111,417–829.

12. E.g., Lactantius, De ira dei, 10.

13. Billanovich, “Veterum vestigia vatum.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. The editio princeps of De rerum mtura was that of T. Ferrandus (Brescia, 1473). The best modern English ed. is that of C, Bailey (Oxford, 1947, repr. with corrections, 1949), although the commentary is weak on philosophical matters. Other particularly interesting eds. are those of H. A. J. Munro (Cambridge. 1864) and C. Giussani (Milan, 1896–1898). There is a useful commentary by A. Ernout and L. Robin (Paris, 1925–1926). A reliable but dull English trans, in prose is that of R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth, 1951); a more exciting one, in verse, is by Rolfe Humphries, deplorably entitled Lucretius; The Way Things Are(Bloomington, Ind., 1968).

II. Secondary Literature. E. Bignone, Storia della letteratura Latino, II (Florence, 1945), 456–462; and C. Bailey and D. E. W. Wormell in M. Platnauer, ed., Fifty Years (and Twelve) of Classical Scholarship (Oxford, 1968) contain good secondary bibliographies.

On Lucretius as a natural philosopher see V. E. Alfieri, Atomos Idea (Florence, 1953); Anne Amory, “Obscura de re lucida carmina: Science and Poetry in De Rerum Natura,” in Yale Classical Studies, 21 (1969), 145–168; C. Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus (Oxford. 1928; repr. New York, 1964); and E. Bignone, cited above. Also see G. Billanovich, “Veterum vestigia vatum,” in Italia Medioerale e Unranistica, 1 (1958), 155–243: P. Boyanee, Lucrece et l’Epicurisme (Paris, 1963); P. De Lacy, “Limit and Variation in the Epicurean Philosophy,” in Phoenix, 23 (1969), 104–113; and D. R. Dudley, ed., Lucretius(London, 1965; seven essays by different authors), B. Farrington’s Science and Politics in the Ancient World (London, 1935) was reviewed by A. Momigliano in Journal of Roman Studies (1941), 149 ff.

Other studies include D. J, Furley, “Lucretius and the Stoics,“in Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies,13 (1966), 13–33; and “Variations on Themes From Empedoeles in Lucretius’ Proem,“ibid., 17(1970), 55–64; G. D. Hadzits, Lucretius and His influence (Sew York, 1935); Gerhard Miiller, Die Durst elhmg dcr Kinetik bet Lukrez (Berlin, 1959); G. Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante and Goethe (Cambridge, 1910); F. Solm-sen, “Epicurus and Cosmological Heresies,“in American Journal of Philology,62 (1951), 1 ff.; “Epicurus on the Growth and Decline of the Cosmos,” ibid., 64 (1953), 34 ff.; and W. Spoerri, Spdthellenistische Berichte fiber Welt, Kultur find Cotter (Basel, 1959)

David J. Furley