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Lucretius and his Message: A Study in the Prologues of the De Rerum Natura1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

A. S. Cox
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Extract

That the De Rerum Natura has a message is not clear from a cursory survey of its subject-matter. Book I (we read in the Penguin table of contents), Matter and Space; Book II, Movements and Shapes of Atoms; Book III, Life and Mind; Book IV, Sensation and Sex; Book V, Cosmology and Sociology; Book VI, Meteorology and Geology. Is this nothing more than a science textbook—and a potted one at that? One may be forgiven for thinking so. Even Bailey accepted that emphasis when he wrote that Lucretius' aim was ‘to set forth the physical theories of Epicurus’ and that other aspects of Epicureanism such as the moral theory ‘crop up from time to time in the poem, but only incidentally and in a partial treatment, which is subordinated to the main purpose and structure’. As a description this is misleading to the point of distortion. The work is indeed structured upon an exposition of physical theory, but its main purpose is to win converts to Epicureanism—and the ‘incidental’ non-technical passages do not ‘crop up’ by some chance intrusion but form a series of deliberate reminders of the overriding evangelical aim. We may guess at the tactical considerations which led Lucretius to adopt this form. His call to the Epicurean way of life would consist of two elements—impassioned appeals (appropriate to the central moral theory) and systematic exposition (needed for the supporting technical arguments): since the former had the greater potential impact but much less bulk, he chose to deploy them as a series of interjections in the latter. Thus what are in structural terms ‘digressions’ lie closest of all to the heart of the work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , April 1971 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1971

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References

page 1 note 2 Bailey, C., Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (Oxford, 1947), 22.Google Scholar

page 2 note 1 See Quint, iv. i. 5.

page 2 note 2 The start of a Hymn to Epicurus at line 62 is clear proof that the preceding lines are prefatory to the whole work. Interpretation of the Invocation to Venus (i. 1–43) is not germane to this article: but see p. 16.

page 6 note 1 Cf. also iii. 37–40: metus … omnia suffundens mortis nigrore. The other recurrent image in the prologues is the storm at sea, which seems to offer parallel allusion to curae: see for example vi. 34 (volvere curarum tristis in pectore fluctus), and note that the ideal Epicurean peace of mind was traditionally described as a ‘sea-calm’, γαληνισμός. The images of darkness and storm are fused at v. 10–12, just as their associated themes timor and curae) are linked throughout the prologues.

page 7 note 1 For what follows see Minadeo, art. cit.

page 8 note 1 For both points see Boyancé, op. cit. 35.

page 9 note 1 See Boyancé, op. cit. 58.

page 11 note 1 They are i. 127–35, iii. 31–41. v. 56–77, vi. 43 ff. Critics have neglected these programme-passages on the natural assumption that they are dull and unimportant, but I hope to have shown that they cast light on the all-important topic of the poet's conception of his own poem.

page 12 note 1 Credit for unearthing this undoubted motif must go to Minadeo, art. cit.

page 12 note 2 See further p. 15.

page 14 note 1 The two-part structure of the book is less clearly marked here than in the Book VI retrospective summary, and special interpretation is needed of the displacement of one item in the list: see p. 15 n. 1.

page 14 note 2 See p. 11.

page 15 note 1 The special significance of celestial phenomena in the fight against superstition explains why that item is displaced in the prospective summary of Book V: by leaving it to the end (76–7) Lucretius secures an easier transition to the set-piece warning against religio which concludes the preface (82 ff. = vi. 58 ff.). Two other examples of lists which do not tally with the order of treatment are i. 127 ff. (discussed on p. 13) and i. 54–5 (a generalized summary of the whole work, the reference to celestial phenomena being there brought forward for emphasis). Such displacements should warn us that these programme-passages are not tables of contents: they are used to underline items, not to list them.

page 15 note 2 For a summary in similar terms see Boyancé, op. cit. 77.

page 15 note 3 See pp. 12–13. Professor D. E. Eichholz (who kindly took an interest in the formulation of this article during my term in Bristol University) agrees that the ‘inadequacy’ of the Book IV summaries may have been deliberate but sees in this a tactical manœuvre: ‘it was a shrewd move to appeal to popular interest in ghosts (simulacra) and then to launch readers into a disquisition on simulacra as sense-data before they could take breath’. But this interpretation could not apply to the retrospective summary of Book IV in v. 62–3.

page 16 note 1 For a brief discussion and fuller references see Cox, ap. Higginbotham, op. cit. 137–40.

page 16 note 2 Op. cit. 34–5.