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Lucretius' Materialist Poetics: Epicurus and the ‘Flawed’ Consolatio of Book 3
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Extract
Book 3 of De Rerum Natura ends with a series of dramatic voices unparallelled anywhere in Lucretius (lines 894-1094). Mourners, the elderly, Nature and Memmius raise their voices to debate the issue of mortality. From Epicurean tenets Lucretius dramatises and creates images for the follies of superstitious fears, passions, ambitions, attachment to nature, guilty fears of retribution for sins, and the blinding desire to live. But this section has been seen to have failed both as effective persuasion of Epicurean ideals and as an artistically polished conclusion to the book. The tone, the arrangement and the ideas of the drama's conclusion have been criticised by commentators from Hadzsits (1935) to Kenney (1971); the most comprehensive and often-cited commentator, Bailey (1947), calls the section a ‘culminating triumph-song over the mortality of the soul’ but finds Lucretius’ response to the mourners ‘not altogether satisfactory’, his ‘consolation…inadequate’, and flatly judges the last eighteen lines ‘unsatisfactory as a conclusion’. Bailey, as well as the others, has stressed the departure from Epicurean doctrine in both tone and imagery.
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References
1. E g., Hadzsits, George Depue, Lucretius and his Influence (London 1935), 99f.Google Scholar: ‘There are strains of impatience that weaken the appeal to humanity…Nature is personified and she taunts the weak for their weakness, she reviles the old for their cowardice; such language offends sensibilities and must have disappointed sincere Epicurean readers’; Cyril|Bailey (ed.), De Rerum Natura (3 vols., Oxford 1947), ii.1131Google Scholar: ‘The arrangement of it [lines 830–1094] is not completely logical or satisfactory, and it is probable that in his usual manner Lucr. wrote it piecemeal, section by section, and never made a final adjustment of the whole’; Strodach, George K. in Lucretius, The Way Things Are, tr. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington and London 1968), 243Google Scholar: ‘By demythologizing hell Lucretius strikes at the root of the vicious nonsense that has been fostered by religion in one form or another from time immemorial. And by showing that fools and knaves create their own psychological hell here and now, he provides himself with the opportunity of emphasizing the positive and more attractive aspects of Epicureanism: the serenity and spiritual peace that result from a rational acceptance of reality. Unfortunately, this opportunity is not fully exploited; instead the poet ends on a note of bitterness, worldweariness, and disgust for those who crave to live’; Minadeo, Richard, The Lyre of Science: Form and Meaning in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (Detroit 1969), 85f.Google Scholar: ‘For the Epicurean, physics alone—and all the reasoned proofs of Book 3—can finally convince the reader of nothing more than that the condition of death is not to be feared. In 3’s close, however, Lucretius attempts a good deal more. He argues the folly of attachment to life, even the folly of lamentation over the dead, and, surely, these instinctive emotions will not dissolve beneath the mere rational arguments that he can bring to bear’; Kenney, E.J. (ed.), De Rerum Natura, Book III (Cambridge 1971Google Scholar), is quoted below, with page numbers in the text.
2. Bailey (n.1 above), ii.1131, 1143, 1146, 1173.
3. Bailey (n.1 above), ii.1132: ‘It is noticeable that Lucr. nowhere touches on the feeling of some people that death is a relief ffom the ills and cares of this life, although Epicurus notices it’; 1143: The mourners’ assertion of their own grief ‘is harder for Lucr. to meet, and his answer, which returns to the fate of the dead man himself, is not altogether satisfactory. Epicurus himself appears to have taken a more natural and human view’; Hadzsits (n.1 above), 100: ‘Such language offends sensibilities and must have disappointed sincere Epicurean readers’; Strodach (n.1 above), 243: ‘The opportunity of emphasizing the positive and more attractive aspects of Epicureanism…is not fully exploited’; Minadeo (n.1 above), 86: ‘Lucretius attempts a great deal more’ than Epicurean physics.
4. Lesky, Albin, A History of Greek Literature, tr. James Willis and Cornells de Heer (London 1966), 683Google Scholar.
5. A rigorous and comprehensive comparison of Epicurus and Lucretius is beyond the scope of this essay. For a recent reappraisal of Epicurus’ thought, and an analysis especially useful for the differences between Epicurus and Lucretius, see Strozier, Robert M., Epicurus and Hellenistic Philosophy (Lanham 1985), especially 141–51Google Scholar. Strozier examines those passages where commentators have traditionally aligned Lucretius and Epicurus, so he does not discuss the passage of which I offer a reading. Whether indeed Lucretius does not possess a sensitivity to and concern with the organisation of consciousness like that of Epicurus—Strozier’s contention (cf. 131–36)—is a question likewise beyond the scope of this essay, although lines along which such a topic might be further pursued may be suggested here.
6. Text from and translation based on Bollack, Jean, Bollack, Mayotte, Wismann, Heinz, La Lettre à Hérodote (Paris 1971Google Scholar). Further citations will be given by sections in the text.
7. See Bernard Frischer’s discussion of how images of Epicurus himself in the first century B.C. and later were used to recall Epicurean dogma by means of association: The Sculpted Word: Epicureanism and Philosophical Recruitment in Ancient Greece (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1982), esp. 87ffGoogle Scholar.
8. Text and translation are from the Loeb edition of W.H.D. Rouse rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (Cambridge Mass. and London 1975). The translation has been modified when a more literal meaning is desired.
9. See West, David, Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius (Edinburgh 1969), 97Google Scholar; and Friedlander, P., ‘Pattern of Sound and Atomistic Theory in Lucretius’, AJP 62 (1941), 16–34Google Scholar.
10. Wasserstein, A., ‘Epicurean Science’, Hermes 106 (1978), 490Google Scholar: ‘It is not the system that determines the clinamen but the wish for the clinamen which determines the structure of the system.’ This point was essentially made by Santayana, George, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante and Goethe (Cambridge Mass. 1935), 31fGoogle Scholar.
11. See Wasserstein’s (n.10 above) summary of the references, 485 n.3.
12. Strozier (n.5 above, 124), however, believes the physical swerve a later, and grosser, addition to Epicureanism: ‘Epicurus simply does not need to claim the existence of the swerve of atoms to argue what he does [about] conscious human choice.’ For an insistence on the limits of Epicurus’ own use of analogia, see ibid, 76.
13. See Kenney (n.1 above), 34, for weaknesses of Epicureanism, already summarised by Santayana (n.10 above), 52f. (quoted by Kenney).
14. See note 3.
15. Cf. Jr.Commager, H. S., ‘Lucretius’ Interpretation of the Plague’, HSCP 62 (1957), 109Google Scholar: ‘The whole of De rerum natura is predicated upon the assumption that we can grasp res caecae from res apertae. Lucretius of necessity sees sermons in stones: to have a mind which habitually imagines intangibles in terms of tangibles is a prerequisite for explaining Epicurean physics.’
16. See Konstan, David, ‘Some Aspects of Epicurean Psychology’, Philosophia Antiqua 15 (1973), 68f.Google Scholar: ‘The mass of men, according to the Epicureans, seek security through fame, wealth or power. Such security would be a good thing, Epicurus admits, if it could be achieved…However, it cannot be achieved that way’; cf. 71: ‘A confused desire for the total unity of friendship, misunderstood as a physical or sexual possibility, was the basis, I suggest, of the Epicurean view of the irrational passion of love.’
17. So Kenney (n.1 above), 31–34; Bailey (n.1 above), ii.1145.
18. This cruelty is entirely overlooked by Kenney (n.1 above, 212), who quotes Sellar, W.Y. (The Roman Poets of the Republic 3 [Oxford 1889]Google Scholar): ‘ “The reverence which other men felt in presence of the ceremonies of religion (Lucretius) feels in presence of the majesty of Nature” (Sellar 301).’ So too Latham, R.E. in the introduction to his translation (Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe [Harmondsworth 1951]), 13Google Scholar: ‘Lucretius…reserved his religious emotions for an impersonal Nature, invoked at the opening of the poem under the conventional guise of Venus. He found Nature blind, soulless and purposeless, but with a breathtaking beauty and majesty that could dispense with any personal attributes.’ Latham’s observations coincide with mine—’blind, soulless and purposeless’—though his conclusions differ. He adds, ‘Above all, Lucretius took a delight in the fruitfulness of Nature. With this went, not unnaturally, a deep appreciation of domestic happiness (3.894–6).’
19. See Clay, Diskin, Lucretius and Epicurus (Ithaca NY 1983), especially 232–66Google Scholar, for discussion of the sweetly covered medicine as a central paradigm in Lucretius. Clay’s view of the poem as gradually unveiling the bitter truths underneath such sweetness accords with the views set forth here.
20. Epicurus’ literary output was enormous, said to comprise over three hundred volumes, and his early followers memorised and devoted their lives to interpreting and adding to these treatises. ‘His disciples studied the works of the Master as if they were a veritable Gospel; they memorized his “Golden Sayings” (kuriai doxai) and devoted themselves almost exclusively to pondering and interpreting his endless treatises’ (Copley, Frank O. in the introduction to his translation (Lucretius, The Nature of Things [New York 1977], xvGoogle Scholar). In his will Epicurus requested that the day of his birth be commemorated; ‘his disciples observed the request for several hundred years’ (Hadzits [n.1 above], 99). This intensity of desire for intellectual independence is to be contrasted with the portrait presented by Santayana (n.10 above), 46: ‘Epicurus had been a pure and tender moralist, but pusillanimous. He was so afraid of hurting and of being hurt, so afraid of running risks or tempting fortune, that he wished to prove that human life was a brief business, not subject to any great transformations, nor capable of any great achievements.’
21. Bailey (n.1 above), ii.1173. Kenney dismisses the concluding lines with a final shrug: ‘Some of the arguments we have admittedly met before, but some are new. Perhaps it suffices to say that it seems as good a way to end the book as any’ (n.1 above, 242).
22. Bailey (n.1 above), ii.1173f.
23. Hadzsits (n.1 above), 99; Bailey (n.1 above), ii.1131.
24. See n.1 above. Kenney says that here ‘L. rides roughshod over human psychology: it would be an oddly constituted man who received any real comfort from such reflections’ (n.1 above, 43).