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A Lucretian Version of Pastoral1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Aya Betensky
Aya Betensky*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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On the infrequent occasions when De Rerum Natura is discussed in terms of pastoral, it is assumed that Lucretius describes the typical locus amoenus familiar since Plato's Phaedrus, and critics concentrate either on tracing his Hellenistic sources or on the basic contrast between luxury and simplicity. But there is more to Lucretian pastoral, just as there is more to Lucretius' atomic universe, than meets the eye. The essence of his pastoral is original, centered around animals rather than shepherds, and his use of pastoral pervades the poem and is integral to its design.

The most inclusive definition of pastoral possible is Empson's, the expression of the complex through the simple. It is more useful, however, to think of pastoral as the expression of an unfulfillable longing for a simpler and happier life, which may include a return from the city to the country, from politics to the land, from the Iron Age to the Golden Age, from war to peace, from vice to virtue, or from adulthood to childhood. Traditional pastoral is usually set in the country among shepherds and flocks, and man and nature interact harmoniously according to what has been called since Ruskin the ‘pathetic fallacy’. Plato ‘creates’ pastoral by contrasting city and country in the Phaedrus. Roman poetry uses elements of the urban-rural contrast not only in pastoral poetry as such but in satire, elegy and epic as well. The varied directions in which individual poets take the generic pastoral form are as interesting as the persistence of the form itself, and Lucretius' version, occurring as it does in a didactic epic, is extremely individual when viewed both from within and without the classical tradition of pastoral.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , 1976 , pp. 45 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1976

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Footnotes

1.

I would like to thank Tom Cole, Phillip DeLacy, John Herington, and Barbara Pavlock for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

References

2. See Gillis, D. J., ‘Pastoral Poetry in Lucretius’, Latomus 26 (1967), 339–362.Google Scholar

3. See Segal, C. P., ‘Delubra Decora: Lucretius 11.352–366’, Latomus 29 (1970), 104–118.Google Scholar

4. Empson, William, Some Versions of Pastoral (London 1950).Google Scholar

5. This capsule definition of pastoral as a search for a simpler and happier life is Leo Marx’s. On the inevitable return from pastoral, see his The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York 1964).Google Scholar

6. See Parry, Adam, ‘Landscape in Greek Poetry’, Yale Classical Studies 15 (1957), 3–29.Google Scholar

7. Pastoral interludes show what has been lost through ‘progress’ in Horace Satires 2.6, Propertius 1.18, Aeneid 8, and Juvenal 3, among others.

8. The text of DRN is Bailey’s 1947 Oxford edition; translations are mine.

9. With a similar ideal in mind, Horace’s moneylender Alfius (Epode 2) ironically expresses a longing for the charms of the countryside; he has no intention of indulging his longing. For Lucretius this longing is beyond irony. His image of the country is a serious ideal because it offers a demonstration of atomic laws working for all natural elements, including people. This is discussed below.

10. The conceit that any sort of fruit could appear on any tree in any season, and similar Golden Age traditions, are firmly rejected by Lucretius several times by means of adunata, e.g. 1.159–214.

11. Although Lucretius does see poetry, painting and sculpture as positive progress (5.1450–51), he also sees progress as decline: see the end of Book 5, and note 38 below.

12. See, for example, Poggioli, Renato, ‘The Oaten Flute’, Harvard Library Bulletin 11 (1957), 147–84Google Scholar, and ‘The Pastoral of the Self’, Daedalus 88 (1959), 686–99Google Scholar, now included in his posthumous The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).Google Scholar

13. There is certainly no evidence of co-operative farm life in DRN. Farming is mentioned rarely and negatively (conterimusque boves et viris agricolarum, ‘and we exhaust the oxen and farmers’ strength’, 2.1161), and farm labor is viewed as a necessary evil (5.213).

14. Cosmos, 2.1122–45. Stars grazing, 5.523–25; sheep grazing, 2.317–19. People pasturing (pasco) their eyes, 1.36, 2.419; their desires, 3.1003. People nourishing the wound of love (alo), 4.1068. Pabula as food for animals and people, 4.1063, 5.944, 991. People and animals are also grouped together at 1.161–63, 4.1197–98, 5.228, and elsewhere.

15. I owe the concept of a cycle which encompasses the poem partly to Minadeo’s, RichardThe Lyre of Science: Form and Meaning in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (Detroit 1969).Google Scholar

16. For example, animals can communicate with emotions as well as people can with speech, 5.1059–61. The balance of predator and prey is described best at 2.875–80.

17. Another example: the motions and wanderings of atoms are a valueless fact of nature (nam quoniam per inane vagantur, 2.83); but for people wandering signifies a failure to understand true doctrine, a straying off the path (avius a vera longe ratione vagaris, 2.84).

18. This kind of harmony goes back to Hesiod, Works and Days 225–37, where people bloom when cities flourish. Justice is correlated with fertility, as it is at the end of the Eumenides. This is partly true for the Georgics as well, but not for Lucretius’ amoral world.

19. Pecudes is translated ‘herds’ for consistency. The word is used variously in the poem (cattle, sheep, goats, fish, chimerical creatures). ‘Joyously rich pastures’ is my attempt to give both senses of pabula laeta.

20. See DeLacy, Phillip, ‘Distant Views: The Imagery of Lucretius’ Book 2’, Classical Journal 60 (1964), 49–55.Google Scholar

21. An analogue to this select landscape is found in the Virgilian locus amoenus which Eleanor Leach discusses and compares with sacral/idyllic wall paintings in Vergil’s Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience (Ithaca 1974Google Scholar). Henry David Thoreau had an approach similar to Lucretius’ in a different era, trying to ‘reduce’ life to its ‘lowest terms’ (Walden, or, Life in the Woods [New York 1960, orig. 1854], 66Google ScholarPubMed), and describing the landscape at Walden Pond as follows: ‘Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my imagination. The low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men’ (pp. 63–64). Robert Frost made the particular landscape of New Hampshire into a universalized Arcadia (see John F. Lynen, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost [New Haven I960]), but a farming-oriented Arcadia much closer to the Georgics than Eclogues (see Bacon, Helen H., ‘In- and Outdoor Schooling: Robert Frost and the Classics’, American Scholar 43 [1974], 640–49).Google Scholar

22. Lucretius makes it clear early in the poem that he disapproves of sacrifice, in the famous description of Iphigeneia (1.84–101), whose language is echoed in the calf’s sacrifice (2.352–54). Other remarks against sacrifice occur at 2.414–17; 3.51–54; 4.1233–39; 6.68–79. Segal’s discussion (n. 3 above) of the contrast between luxury and simplicity centers on this passage.

23. This passage is meant partly, I think, to be an anticipation of the discussion of death and grief in Book 3.

24. In the immediate surroundings of this passage animals are described in human terms, in anticipation of this climactic scene: mater and proles recognize each other (2.349–51), and, if Bentley’s emendation is correct, for the only time in the poem an animal is called laetus (laeta armenta, ‘joyous cattle’, 343).

25. Such a grouping occurs in 2.317 ff.; see the discussion above. Pabula laeta occurs seven times in the poem as a clausula (1.14, 257; 2.317, 364, 596, 875, 1159). An interplay between pabula laeta for animals and laetus for people seems to fuse people and animals together within the natural cycle.

26. The text for Virgil is Mynors’ 1969 OCT edition. The translations of this passage and G.4.511 ff. below are mine.

27. Leach aptly characterizes the bull as a ‘swain’ (n. 21 above, 236–37).

28. Virgil avoids the rest of the story, which would force him into an Ovidian grotesqueness.

29. The first three words of this line = Lucr. 2.30.

30. The episode of the bull who is defeated in a love triangle (G.3.209–41) is a more serious and pessimistic development of the Eclogues’ yielding to love, with a similar conclusion: amor omnibus idem (‘love is the same for all’, 244).

31. The translation is H. R. Fairclough’s in the Loeb edition, Cambridge, Mass., 1935, p. 191.

32. Lucretius doesn’t use such personalized scenes in his description of the plague in Book 6. He wants to show that it is inevitable and natural, and that only the philosopher’s understanding, not grief and unity of feeling, will make it bearable. The plague unites the world for him only insofar as the whole world is subject to it.

33. See Parry, Adam, ‘The Idea of Art in Virgil’s Georgics’, Arethusa 5 (1972), 35–52Google Scholar; and Segal, Charles, ‘Orpheus and the Fourth Georgic: Virgil on Nature and Civilization’, American journal of Philology 87 (1966), 307–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. The gap between natural ideal and man-made reality which the calf’s sacrifice exposes is further illustrated in a symbolic description of an ‘abandoned’ baby, whose fate is harsh in comparison with the easy life daedala natura lavishes on animals (5.222–34). He cannot survive without weapons and fortifications: again mankind is shown humanizing and thereby perverting nature. The antithesis between nature and civilization begins at 1.14–40. Herds running wild because Venus has made them share in the energy of creation (ferae pecudes, 1.14) are contrasted with the wild but human brutality of war caused by Mars (fera moenera militiai, belli fera moenera, ‘the savage works of war’, 1.29,32). Although Venus soothes iVIars temporarily (1.33–40), he always rebounds and stirs up new human violence.

35. It has always been easy to compare stupid, slothful people to cattle: e.g., Cicero, Pis. 9.19; Sallust, Cat. 1; Horace, S. 1.3.100.

36. Compare Davus’ characterization of his master in Horace S. 2.7.

37. Three Philosophical Poets (Cambridge, Mass. 1910), 56Google Scholar.

38. See especially the proems of Books 1, 4, 5, and 6 for creation and the endings of Books 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 for destruction. Klingner, discusses these alternations in ‘Philosophie und Dichtkunst am Ende des II Buch des Lukrez’, Hermes 80 (1952), 1–31Google Scholar. Giancotti sees a balance between creative and destructive forces in II Preludio di Lucrezio (Messina 1959Google Scholar). So does Minadeo (n. 15 above). And Nethercut, William speaks of the ‘rhythm of growth and decline which animates the structure of the poem’, in ‘The Conclusion of Lucretius’ Fifth Book: Further Remarks’, Classical Journal 63 (1967), 97–106, p. 106.Google Scholar For a persuasive argument that Lucretius was not despairing and depressed simply because some of his material was about depressing things, see Kinsey, T. E., ‘The Melancholy of Lucretius’, Arion 3 (1964), 115–30.Google Scholar This is a counter-balance to Anderson’s, W. S. conclusions in ‘Discontinuity in Lucretian Symbolism’, TAP A 91 (1960), 1–29.Google Scholar

39. In his statement of poetic originality, it is possible that Lucretius is making a claim about pastoral as well as didactic:

Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
trita solo, iuvat integros accedere fontis
atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae.
(1.926–30; 4.1–5)

I travel along pathless tracts of the Pierides as yet untrodden by any foot. It is a joy to approach virgin springs and to drink their waters, a joy to pluck fresh flowers and to gather a glorious garland for my head from fields whose blossoms the Muses have never yet placed round any brow.

These lines combine the vocabulary of inspiration traditional since Hesiod (for support of the assumption that Lucretius was influenced by Hellenistic and Neoteric literature, see Ferrero, L., Poetica nuova in Lucrezio [Florence 1949]Google Scholar; and Kenney, E. J., ‘Doctus Lucretius’, Mnemosyne 23 [1970], 366–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar); the vocabulary of heroic trailblazing which Lucretius himself uses about Epicurus (see 1.73, where Epicurus bursts through flammantia moenia mundi, ‘the flaming ramparts of the universe’); and Lucretius’ own use of pastoral vocabulary in the poem (compare Virgil’s use of Gallus in Eclogue 10 for a similar mix of disparate poetic traditions). The deserted place, the fountains, the flowers, are symbols which represent something very real. To paraphrase Santayana, they are the poetry of the source of pastoral.