Lucretius

Roman philosopher

• Born: c. 98 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Probably Rome (now in Italy)
• Died: October 15, 55 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

Though he in no sense offered an original philosophical outlook, Lucretius’s major work synthesized primary tenets of Greek Epicureanism and atomism and offered a rational, nontheological explanation for the constituents of the universe; all this he accomplished in Latin hexameter verse, and he developed a philosophical vocabulary required for the task.

Early Life

It is much easier to show why most of what has been written about the life of Lucretius (lew-KREE-shee-uhs) is incorrect, doubtful, or malicious than it is to arrive at a reliable account. Relatively little can be deduced from his poem, and there are no substantive contemporary references to him. Consequently, too much credence has been given to the jumbled biographical note written by Saint Jerome, which itself was derived from an unreliable account by the Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus. Jerome miscalculates Lucretius’s dates of birth and death; also, it is unlikely that Lucretius was driven insane by a love potion and wrote De rerum natura (c. 60 b.c.e.; On the Nature of Things, 1682) during periods of lucidity. The latter story seems to have arisen from Lucretius’s treatment of love in section 4 of the poem.

Several details of Lucretius’s early life can, however, be inferred with relative certainty. His name is a strange combination that implies both servile (Carus) and noble origins (from the kinship grouping Gens Lucretia), but he was likely closer to the middle class of his contemporary Cicero. Though Cicero himself did not emend Lucretius’s poetry, as Jerome reports, it is likely that his brother Quintus Cicero oversaw its publication. Like Cicero, Lucretius appears to have evinced an early interest in philosophy, influenced by the Alexandrian movement, though his own poetry has an old Roman spirit reflecting his readings of Quintus Ennius. Cicero considered that Lucretius had the genius of Ennius and the art of the Alexandrians.

Lucretius lived through the turmoil caused by the civil war between aristocrat Lucius Cornelius Sulla and populist Gaius Marius as well as the conspiracy of Lucius Sergius Catilina. He also witnessed the consequent decline of Roman republican government. Perhaps this political uncertainty directed him to the comfortable philosophy of Epicurus, which held that the goal of human existence should be a life of calm pleasure tempered by morality and culture. The atomism of Democritus and Leucippus, which held that the material universe could be understood as random combinations of minute particles (atomoi), provided a rational and scientific means of explaining the cosmos and avoiding what Lucretius came to see as the sterile superstitions of religion.

In all, the impressions one has of Lucretius at this early stage in his life are of a young man, of good background and a good education, who is eager not for the political arena or personal advancement but to explain the world in a reasonable way to Romans with similar education who would read his verse. In addition, he aimed to make living in that rationally explained world as pleasant an experience as possible.

Life’s Work

One can guess how Lucretius lived during the years he was writing On the Nature of Things from its dedication to Gaius Memmius. Memmius held the office of praetor in 58 b.c.e. and fancied himself a poet, primarily of erotic verse in the style of Catullus. Memmius’s shady political dealings eventually caught up with him, and he was driven into exile; nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that Lucretius received some financial support from him. Memmius figures less importantly in the body of the poem, however, and his name is used in places only for metrical convenience.

Details of the poem show the kind of atmosphere Lucretius wished to escape, essentially that of his own city in the final years of the Republic. The world is filled with gloom, war, and decay. The poet wishes to stand on a hill, far removed from wickedness and ambition, and watch the waste and destruction. Passages such as these reveal a man who yearned for tranquil anonymity. Other writers, such as Cicero, would find themselves propelled into a political maelstrom that would ultimately destroy them; Lucretius was determined to avoid this fate.

The times in which Lucretius lived cried out for reasonableness. Educated Romans saw the obvious conflict between their elaborate mythology and their religion, which glorified deities who did everything from seducing women to causing mildew. Even so, Rome continued to fill the various priestly colleges, to take auspices as a means of determining favorable outcomes, and to celebrate public games in honor of these very deities. A century later, Rome would deify its emperors, partly to shift its religious observances to personalities who were incontestably real, and partly to curb the spread of imported cults such as Mithraism and what came to be known as Christianity.

Lucretius had solved this problem, for himself at least, and outlines his position on religion in On the Nature of Things. The creative force of nature is real; it is personified in the goddess Venus. The deities are simply personifications of various aspects of nature, and human beings can free themselves of superstition by seeing the world as constantly recombining atomoi. Death itself is nothing more than atomic dissolution, a preparation for new arrangements of atoms and new creation. If human beings can accept death in these terms, they can cast aside the fear that binds them to religious superstition. This acceptance will prepare them to see that life’s purpose is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

Neither of these theories is new; they are derived from the atomism of Democritus and Leucippus and the teachings of Epicurus. What is new is Lucretius’s synthesis and his offering it as rational scientism to educated Roman readers. One reason almost nothing is known about Lucretius’s personal life is undoubtedly his determination to practice these ideas. Removing himself from the fray to seek philosophical calm necessarily results in a lack of contemporary biographical references, but it is precisely on this score that Lucretian Epicureanism is most misunderstood. It is just the opposite of egocentric gratification, because Lucretius couples it with the mechanics of atomism. Seen in this way, the individual is merely a part in the world machine; immortality exists, but only in the myriad indestructible atomoi that constitute each part.

One can only guess how Lucretius first encountered Epicureanism. There were Greek professors in Rome during the first century b.c.e. who taught the theories of Epicurus. Cicero mentions non-Greek Epicureans who wrote treatises Lucretius might easily have read. The ease with which Lucretius deals with the technical vocabulary of atomism suggests that he was accomplished in Greek. (This would be expected of any educated Roman.) He no doubt read Epicurus, Democritus, and Leucippus in the original language.

Reading Greek gave Lucretius access to other sources such as Empedocles, the philosopher-poet who wrote Peri physeōs (fifth century b.c.e.; On Nature, 1908). What the modern world calls natural selection comes to Lucretius through Empedocles, as does the principle of attraction and repulsion, which Lucretius sees as love and hate. Lucretius’s hexameter meter is used by Empedocles but also by Homer. Indeed, Lucretius borrows from Homer, Euripides, Thucydides, Hippocrates, and various early Roman poets.

Though his philosophy is Greek, Lucretius maintains a very Roman insistence on the primacy of law. In On the Nature of Things, for example, he notes that human beings moved from primitive status to society only after they had agreed on a social contract. Language improved on gesture, and social order prevailed. It is worth noting that similar ideas later appear in the creation account of Ovid in Metamorphoses (c. 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567). Though Lucretius failed to convert the Roman masses, he obviously made inroads among his successors in poetry. Vergil read him, too, and while Vergil’s work is more elegant, there can be little doubt that he was impressed by Lucretius’s descriptions of nature; one can easily see their influence in Vergil’s pastoral poems.

The random nature of the clinamen (“swerve”) that atoms make when they recombine must have troubled Lucretius, as he is generally insistent on the orderly cycle of nature. This bothered others, too, but it is the only way to explain natural differences atomically. The membranae (“films”), which are thrown from objects and thereby produce visual impressions, are another artificial means of describing a natural phenomenon, but On the Nature of Things is, on the whole, free of such difficulties.

The poem’s six books show evidence of unfinished composition, but one cannot deduce Lucretius’s premature death from this fact. The Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, perpetuated Suetonius’s marvelous fiction of Lucretius’s mental illness and death by a love potion, but the author of On the Nature of Things was a very sane man whose entire reason for living was to bring rationality to an irrational world.

Significance

Lucretius noted the creative force of nature, but he in no sense resembled the English Romantic poets in their wonderment at its powers. He was the rare combination of natural scientist, philosopher, and poet, and he strove for clarity and reasonableness in what he wrote. He clearly was not the gaunt, love-crazed, mad genius of Suetonius and Jerome but an evangelizer who appealed to an educated audience, much like twentieth century writers of popular science.

Lucretius thus became a symbol that served the purposes of those who wrote about him. Because the facts of his life remained a mystery, even to the generation that immediately followed his own, he could be portrayed by Suetonius as foreshadowing the Empire’s vice, by Jerome as representing pagan degeneracy, and ultimately by Tennyson as typifying egocentric gratification. Even so, as is true of many great lives, work overshadows personality, and this is clearly what Lucretius intended, for On the Nature of Things opened a world of what would otherwise have remained esoteric Greek philosophy to a popular audience. What is more important, Lucretius presented these ideas as a means of dealing with his own troubled world.

Were one to cancel out Lucretius’s masterly synthesis of Epicureanism and atomism, his contribution to both Roman poetry and the Latin language would remain. Nearly one hundred technical words adapted from the Greek appear within six books of hexameter verse, the epic meter of Homer and of Lucretius’s fellow Roman Ennius. That Lucretius’s work inspired the succeeding generation of Roman poets, which included both Vergil and Ovid, attests its immediate influence. The modern reader, armed with contemporary science and psychology, can object only to the mechanics of the natural phenomena Lucretius discusses; his plea to cast aside superstition and fear strikes a welcome note.

Bibliography

Bailey, Cyril. “Late Republican Poetry.” In Fifty Years (and Twelve) of Classical Scholarship, edited by Maurice Platnauer. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1968. This article discusses Lucretius with special emphasis on editions and translations of his poem, possible sources, textual criticism, and Lucretian thought, philosophy, and natural science.

Duff, J. Wight, and A. M. Duff. A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1960. This companion volume to the Duffs’ study of Silver Age Latin literature devotes a sizable chapter to Lucretius. It records the basic meager details of Lucretius’s life, analyzes his poem, and makes several interesting cross-references to English Romantic and Victorian poets.

Johnson, W. R. Lucretius and the Modern World. London: Duckworth, 2000. In this description of Lucretius’s influential poem, Johnson surveys major texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the works of John Dryden, Voltaire, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and others. Emphasizes Lucretius’s version of materialism and his attempt to devise an ethical system appropriate to the universe.

Latham, R. E., trans. Lucretius: On the Nature of the Universe. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1971. This accurate translation has the great virtue of an introduction that discusses what is known about Lucretius’s life and, more, outlines his poem section by section with line references. It is, by far, the best introduction to Lucretius for one unable to read Latin.

Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Translated by Martin Ferguson Smith. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001. Includes introduction and notes by the translator in addition to bibliography and index.