Lucretius



Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99 BC – ca. 55 BC) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the epic philosophical poem De rerum natura about the beliefs of Epicureanism, and which is translated into English as On the Nature of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe".

Virtually nothing is known about the life of Lucretius. Jerome tells how he was driven mad by a love potion and wrote his poetry between fits of insanity, eventually committing suicide in middle age; but modern scholarship suggests this account was likely an invention. T

Life
Very little is known about Lucretius's life; the only certain fact is that he was either a friend or client of Gaius Memmius, to whom De Rerum Natura was addressed and dedicated. In a letter by Cicero to his brother Quintus in February 54 BC, Cicero said that: "The poems of Lucretius are as you write: they exhibit many flashes of genius, and yet show great mastership." By this time, both Cicero and his brother had read De Rerum Natura, and so might have many other Romans. However, a literary evaluation of Lucretius' work reveals some repetition and a sudden end to Book 6 during a description of the plague at Athens. The poem appears to have been published without a final revision, possibly due to its author's death. If this is true, Lucretius must have been dead by 54 BC.

In the work of another author in late Republican Rome, Virgil writes in the second book of his Georgics, clearly referring to Lucretius, that "Happy is he who has discovered the causes of things and has cast beneath his feet all fears, unavoidable fate, and the din of the devouring Underworld."

A brief biographical note is found in Aelius Donatus's Life of Virgil, which seems to be derived from an earlier work by Suetonius. The note reads: "The first years of his life Virgil spent in Cremona, right until the assumption of his toga virilis, which he accepted on his 17th birthday, when the same two men held the consulate, as when he was born, and it so happened that on the very same day Lucretius the poet passed away." However, although Lucretius certainly lived and died around the time that Virgil and Cicero flourished, the information in this particular testimony is internally inconsistent. Virgil was born in 70 BC, and his 17th birthday therefore took place in 53 BC. Also, the two consuls of 70 BC, Pompey and Crassus, stood together as consuls again in 55, not 53.

Nor is there sufficient basis for a confident assertion of the date of Lucretius' birth or death in other sources. Another yet briefer note is found in the Chronicon of Donatus's pupil, Jerome. Writing four centuries after Lucretius' death, he enters under the 171st Olympiad the following line: "Titus Lucretius the poet is born. Later he was driven mad by a love potion, and when, during the intervals of his insanity, he had written a number of books, which were later emended by Cicero, he killed himself by his own hand in the 44th year of his life." The claim that he was driven mad by a love potion, although defended by such scholars as Reale and Catan, is often dismissed as the result of historical confusion, or anti-Epicurean slander. Jerome's image of Lucretius as a lovesick, mad poet continued to have significant influence on modern scholarship until quite recently, though it is now accepted such a report is inaccurate. Similarly, the statement that Cicero emended (emendavit) the work prior to publication is doubtful. The exact date of his birth varies by manuscript; in most it is tallied under 94 BC, but in others under 93 or 96. Lucretius (an atheist writer) and Jerome (a Christian priest) also write for opposing purposes, and whether or not Jerome had attempted to disparage Lucretius' work as the work of a madman is an open question.

It's impossible to know the credibility of the accounts of Donatus and Jerome, since they wrote long after the poet's death, the latter author belonged to a theological tradition explicitly hostile to Epicureanism, and the sources of their off-hand comments are unknown. However, if 55 BC is Lucretius's most likely year of death, and if Jerome is accurate about Lucretius's age (43) when he died, it can then be concluded he was born in 99 or 98 BC. These are a lot of ifs, and it may be wisest to simply say that Lucretius was born in the 90s BC and died in the 50s BC. This ties in well with the poem's many allusions to the tumultuous state of political affairs in Rome and its civil strife.

Lucretius was probably a member of the aristocratic gens Lucretia, and his work shows an intimate knowledge of the luxurious lifestyle in Rome. Lucretius' love of the countryside invites speculation that he inhabited family-owned rural estates, as did many wealthy Roman families, and he was certainly expensively educated with mastery of Latin, Greek, literature, and philosophy.

Writing
His poem De Rerum Natura (usually translated as "On the Nature of Things" or "On the Nature of the Universe") transmits the ideas of Epicurean physics, which includes Atomism, and psychology. Lucretius was the first writer to introduce Roman readers to Epicurean philosophy.

Lucretius compares his work in this poem to that of a doctor healing a child: just as the doctor may put honey on the rim of a cup containing bitter wormwood (most likely Absinth Wormwood) believed to have healing properties, the patient is "tricked" into accepting something beneficial but difficult to swallow, "but not deceived" by the doctor. The meaning of this refrain found throughout the poem is debatable.

Theme
According to Lucretius's frequent statements in his poem, the main purpose of the work was to free Gaius Memmius's mind of the supernatural and the fear of death—and to induct him into a state of ataraxia. He attempts this by expounding the philosophical system of Epicurus, whom Lucretius glorifies as the hero of his epic poem. However, the purpose of the poem is subject to ongoing scholarly debate. Lucretius refers to Memmius by name four times in the first book, three times in the second, five in the fifth, and not at all in the third, fourth, or sixth books. In relation to this discrepancy in the frequency of Lucretius' reference to the apparent subject of his poem, Kannengiesse advances the theory that Lucretius wrote the first version of De rerum natura for the reader at large, and subsequently revised in order to write it for Memmius. However, Memmius' name is central to several critical verses in the poem, and this theory has therefore been largely discredited. Bruns and Brandt have set forth an alternative theory that Lucretius did at first write the poem with Memmius in mind, but that his enthusiasm for his patron cooled. Stearns suggests that this is because Memmius reneged on a promise to pay for a new school to be built on the site of the old Epicurean school. Memmius was also a tribune in 66, praetor in 58, governor of Bithynia in 57, and was a candidate for the consulship in 54 but was disqualified for bribery, and Stearns suggests that the warm relationship between patron and client may have cooled.

Lucretius identifies the supernatural with the notion that the gods created our world or interfere with its operations in some way. He argues against fear of such gods by demonstrating through observations and argument that the operations of the world can be accounted for in terms of natural phenomena—the regular but purposeless motions and interactions of tiny atoms in empty space.

He argues against the fear of death by stating that death is the dissipation of a being's material mind. Lucretius uses the analogy of a vessel, stating that the physical body is the vessel that holds both the mind (mens) and spirit (anima) of a human being. Neither the mind nor spirit can survive independent of the body. Thus Lucretius states that once the vessel (the body) shatters (dies) its contents (mind and spirit) can no longer exist. So, as a simple ceasing-to-be, death can be neither good nor bad for this being. Being completely devoid of sensation and thought, a dead person cannot miss being alive. According to Lucretius, fear of death is a projection of terrors experienced in life, of pain that only a living (intact) mind can feel. Lucretius also puts forward the 'symmetry argument' against the fear of death. In it, he says that people who fear the prospect of eternal non-existence after death should think back to the eternity of non-existence before their birth, which they probably do not fear.

Form
The poem consists of six untitled books, in Dactylic hexameter. The first three books provide a fundamental account of being and nothingness, matter and space, the atoms and their movement, the infinity of the universe both as regards time and space, the regularity of reproduction (no prodigies, everything in its proper habitat), the nature of mind (animus, directing thought) and spirit (anima, sentience) as material bodily entities, and their mortality, since, according to Lucretius, they and their functions (consciousness, pain) end with the bodies that contain them and with which they are interwoven. The last three books give an atomic and materialist explanation of phenomena preoccupying human reflection, such as vision and the senses, sex and reproduction, natural forces and agriculture, the heavens, and disease.

Recognition

 * The earliest recorded verdict of Lucretius' work is by Cicero, who calls Lucretius's poetry "full of inspired brilliance, but also of great artistry". However, Cicero is elsewhere critical of Lucretius and the Epicureans, and disparaged them for their omission from their work of historical study.
 * Cornelius Nepos, in his Life Of Atticus, mentions Lucretius as one of the greatest poets of his times.
 * he De rerum natura was a considerable influence on the Augustan poets, particularly Virgil (in his Aeneid and Georgics, and to a lesser extent in his Eclogues) and Horace.
 * Ovid, in his Amores, writes: Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti / exitio terras cum dabit una dies (which means "the verses of the sublime Lucretius will perish only when a day will bring the end of the world").
 * Vitruvius (in the De Architectura), Quintilian (in his Institutiones Oratoriae) and Statius (in the Silvae) also show great admiration for the De Rerum Natura.
 * It virtually disappeared during the Middle Ages, but was rediscovered in a monastery in Germany in 1417, by Poggio Bracciolini, and played an important role both in the development of atomism.
 * Michel de Montaigne, in one of his Essays, On Books, lists Lucretius along with Virgil, Horace, and Catullus as his four top poets.
 * Lucretius was an important influence on Pierre Gassendi) and the efforts of various figures of the Enlightenment era to construct a new Christian humanism.
 * Antoine de Saint-Exupery, notes Lucretius in "Southern Mail/ Night Flight" on page 20.
 * Lucretius has also had a marked influence upon modern philosophy, as perhaps the most complete expositor of Epicurean thought. His influence is especially notable in Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, who praised Lucretius (along with Dante and Goethe) in his book 'Three Philosophical Poets.'

Collected editions

 * Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. (3 vols. Latin text Books I-VI. Comprehensive commentary by Cyril Bailey), Oxford University Press 1947.
 * On the Nature of Things, (1951 prose translation by R. E. Latham), introduction and notes by John Godwin, Penguin revised edition 1994, ISBN 0-14-044610-9
 * Lucretius (1971). De Rerum Natura Book III. (Latin version of Book III only– 37 pp., with extensive commentary by E. J. Kenney– 171 pp.), Cambridge University Press corrected reprint 1984. ISBN 0-521-29177-1
 * Lucretius (2008 [1997, 1999]), On the Nature of the Universe (tr. Melville, Robert) (introduction and notes by Fowler, Don; Fowler, Peta). Oxford University Press [Oxford World Classics], ISBN 978-0-19-955514-7

Criticism

 * Anthony M. Esolen, Lucretius On the Nature of Things (Baltimore, 1995).
 * Marcus Deufert, Pseudo-Lukrezisches im Lukrez (Berlin-New York, 1996).
 * Ronald Melville, Lucretius: On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford, 1997).
 * D. Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge, 1998).
 * Don Fowler, Lucretius on Atomic Motion: A Commentary on De rerum natura 2. 1–332 (Oxford, Oxford UP, 2002).
 * Gordon Campbell, Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura Book Five, Lines 772–1104 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
 * David N. Sedley. Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge, CUP, 2003).
 * Godwin, John, Lucretius (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004) ("Ancient in Action" Series).
 * Monica R. Gale (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Lucretius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
 * Garani, Myrto, Empedocles Redivivus: poetry and analogy in Lucretius. Studies in classics (London; New York: Routledge, 2007).
 * Daniel Marković, The Rhetoric of Explanation in Lucretius’ De rerum natura (Leiden, Brill, 2008) (Mnemosyne, Supplements, 294).
 * DeMay, Philip, Lucretius: Poet and Epicurean (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) (Greece & Rome: texts and contexts).