Lucretian scholars who combine to a high level the relevant skills in both classical literature and classical philosophy are a rarity. Is there a new generation equipped to take forward the legacy of Don Fowler, Diskin Clay and others of their calibre? Barnaby Taylor's book justifies an optimistic answer.
Lucretius inherited Epicurus’ two-stage theory of the origin of language. Stage 1 consisted of instinctive vocalised responses to the various objects of experience, which proved useful as referring terms in primitive communication. In the rational stage 2, language-users made these communications briefer and clearer, while an intellectual elite extended the vocabulary by adding names for theoretical entities. Lucretius speaks eloquently of stage 1 (5.1028–90), but fails even to mention stage 2, giving some the impression that his interest had waned. Taylor persuasively affirms the opposite. Far from being uninterested in the linguistic work of that elite, Lucretius represents himself as one of its pioneering members. The core of his enterprise is the expansion and repurposing of the Latin language, to make the theoretical entities of Greek atomic physics accessible to a Roman readership. For the purposes of that transition, Taylor argues, he expands the familiar resources of Latin in numerous ways, thereby triumphantly answering the charge of egestas linguae which he initially seemed to concede (1.139).
A taxonomy of the techniques that facilitate Lucretius’ completion of the task constitutes the main subject-matter of Taylor's book. At a purely formal level these are, in Taylor's chosen terminology, such devices as metaphor (necessary and unnecessary), synecdoche, metonymy, diaphora, etymology (explicit and implicit), calques and code-switching. But it is what Lucretius is shown doing with these that matters most. Examples include his controlled manipulation of Greek and Latin intertexts; his continual invention and renewal of Latin metaphors (since the Epicureans did not, as often claimed, demand that words always be used in their primary senses); his strategic imposition of quasi-Greek features on Latin phraseology and word-formation, well exemplified by the deployment of compound adjectives to underwrite a complex intertextuality with the ancestral Latin poetic tradition and with his Greek literary-cum-philosophical model Empedocles.
To quote one example, Lucretius’ repeated insistence that the earth deserves the name ‘mother’ is explicated as an instance of the device Taylor calls ‘unnecessary metaphor’. He develops the point less in terms of a well-known intertext from Euripides’ Chrysippus than via the following skilful reformulation in theoretical Epicurean terms (65):
[M]others share certain ineliminable properties [= Lucretian coniuncta], which are bundled together in the preconception of mother (the primary conception subordinated to the word ‘mother’). Enough of these ineliminable properties are shared by the earth to warrant using the term ‘mother’ in a secondary, metaphorical sense to refer to it. A reader, encountering the phrase ‘mother earth’, may profit by looking to the primary conception subordinated to the word ‘mother’, which would convey to him or her valuable information about the earth's historical generative and nurturing powers.
This is a characteristically acute contribution to the understanding of Epicurean semantic theory. It still, however, like the rest of the book, leaves a key question unasked: even if we can sometimes use etymology diachronically, to trace a word back towards its historical roots, how could we ever identify which (if any) items in our present vocabulary are survivors from the original, naturally uttered words? A tempting answer on Lucretius’ behalf might begin with the example of mater itself — a word whose first syllable, or regional variants thereof, still manifests itself in the instinctive utterances of infants.
Detailed engagement with the Latin tradition of etymological scholarship is among Taylor's leading assets. Much that might otherwise go down as routine assonance or superficial word-play in the DRN is shown instead to embody a range of seriously meant etymologies independently attested by Varro and others. Consider the recurrent derivation of Latin letum (‘death’) from Greek λήθη (‘forgetting’). Even readers not already familiar with that etymology might notice it at 3.674–8, where Lucretius argues that staying alive without memory would barely differ from letum. In principle this same etymology could have returned as a live one a few pages later, in Lucretius’ similar contention (3.847–60) that if after death you were atomically reconstituted, the disruption of memory would leave your old self of no concern to your new one — which is presumably why Taylor classes this passage too under ‘implicit etymologies’. Yet the latter passage neither mentions letum nor, as far as I can see, implies any etymology at all.
The diagnostic tool-kit that Taylor constructs in this outstanding monograph will be a boon to future Lucretian studies. If it also turns out that some of the tools themselves need sharpening, that will be all to the good.
