Beautiful Phlegm

The bittersweet quality of the plague is evident, to name one especially potent example, in Lucretius’ description of the phlegm coughed up by the sick as one of the early symptoms of disease. In this instance, simply using words such as foedus or taeter is insufficient for producing both pleasure and disgust. Lucretius instead evokes our deep revulsion and curiosity through the poetically heightened description of a sticky, slimy bodily fluid, a substance that conforms to numerous major theories of disgust:Footnote ¹²

By describing something disgusting with such poetically pleasing, even beautiful language, Lucretius creates a discordant juxtaposition.Footnote ¹³ This is diseased phlegm that befits the most refined, polished poetic song. The asyndeton, the assonance of ‘o’, ‘u’, and ‘au’, and the alliteration of ‘t’ and ‘c’ all develop the description's poetic richness. Line 1188 is a stylistic tour de force that would more fittingly describe a beautiful work of art—tenuis is a word that can denote finely spun fabric. On a metapoetic level, the phlegm's thinness befits Callimachean refinement and highly wrought verse.Footnote ¹⁴ The saffron color, which Fratantuono remarks ‘is completely out of place’,Footnote ¹⁵ is similarly more evocative of a beautiful garment that has been dyed or ‘stained’, contacta, or of a Homeric sunrise, two ideas encapsulated at once in the epithet κροκόπεπλος (‘saffron-robed’) Homer uses to describe the goddess Dawn.Footnote ¹⁶ While the word contingere can have a negative aspect (cf.: religione animum turpi contingere parcat, ‘let him refrain from staining the mind with foul religion’, 2.660), it also evokes Lucretius’ own practice of ‘smearing’ or even ‘coloring’ (contingere) his bitter philosophy with another sticky substance that is orangish-yellow in color, the sweet honey of poetry (1.934, 938, 947—a passage discussed below).Footnote ¹⁷ Because all material is made of atoms and senses are the result of atomic interactions, the processes of seeing diseased phlegm and tasting honeyed wormwood is analogous. Just as our tongues can taste the ‘contact’ between the sweet atoms of honey and the bitter ones of wormwood, so too can we see and (through poetry) hear the disgusting-yet-beautiful ‘contagion’ of diseased phlegm. If this poem is analogous to an atomic compound, then it too can strike our senses in a similarly ambivalent way by mingling our sensory experiences of pleasure and disgust.

Lucretius’ poetic effects heighten our repugnance even as they elicit aesthetic pleasure. The saffron yellow compels us to visualize the phlegm's diseased discoloration, while its saltiness summons its taste to our mouths. The alliteration of ‘c’ falls harshly upon the ear as it replicates the victim's hacking cough, further evoked through the multiple spondees of line 1189. As we read the lines aloud we almost feel the raspy sensation within our own throats, as if the jagged atoms moving through us were themselves diseased—and of course to the Epicurean sound itself is made up of atoms.Footnote ¹⁸ The very word sputum—from spuo, ‘to spit’—compels us to make a sputtering sound, a sound further mimicked by the alliteration of ‘t’. We see at work in this passage what one might term an ‘onomatopoetics of disgust’, a phenomenon that recurs across the epic. For instance, when we say Tartara taetra (5.1126), as Friedländer has observed, we produce a ‘terrible sound’ that illustrates the terribleness of the disgust we feel.Footnote ¹⁹

By vividly stirring his reader's senses of hearing, touch, sight, and taste, Lucretius compels us to imagine the plague's symptoms at work in ourselves and to be disgusted by them. Lucretius’ detail about the phlegm's taste might even make us wonder from whose perspective the phlegm is salty—whether it is that of the plague victim or perhaps that of an attending physician. As Kazantzidis has shown, ‘there are numerous instances in the [Hippocratic] Corpus… where bodily humors are designated through taste following subtle distinctions, such as salty, sweet, bitter, or acrid, which are clearly made by the physician’.Footnote ²⁰ This detail, found nowhere in the Thucydidean passage on which Lucretius’ plague is based, may well be indebted to these Hippocratic texts.Footnote ²¹ The idea that the saltiness of the phlegm may have been experienced by someone other than the victim (whose sense of taste may at any rate be dulled by disease) only intensifies the feeling of disgust it elicits. That the phlegm comes from a body whose parameters are being disintegrated by disease and death means that Lucretius hits multiple disgust domains at once.Footnote ²²

The poetic pleasure and sensory disgust activated by this passage cannot easily be disentangled from one another as mutually exclusive emotional responses. In fact, it is the very experience of being disgusted that lends the passage some of its aesthetic pleasure.Footnote ²³ Overduin has described the aesthetic of disgust as a strange ‘mix of recoil and attraction, of repugnance and curiosity’—or, as Kolnai puts it, the ‘starting point of disgust’ is its ‘curious enticement’.Footnote ²⁴ In an epic that so often gives us a glimpse of the sublime,Footnote ²⁵ Lucretius’ beautiful, disgusting phlegm instead offers an inverse experience of the sublime, an experience that Korsmeyer has termed the ‘sublate’—a moment of disgust that ‘delivers a compressed insight’. The particular insight we gain from the sublate is a distinct recognition of our own frail corporeality and mortality:

The sublate differs from the sublime especially in its refusal ‘to permit the subject to feel removed from and superior to the intentional object’.Footnote ²⁷ The plague in this regard runs exactly counter to the sublime, which provides us the ability to gaze from a safe distance. Lucretius’ plague—this paradoxically beautiful and disgusting phlegm—makes us face a hard truth that he has to a degree been protecting us from since the epic's earliest books even as he has told it to us repeatedly: our bodies (and souls), constituted as they are of fragile atomic compounds, will break apart and die, most likely wretchedly.Footnote ²⁸ In order for Lucretius to make us truly and viscerally aware of this, he must disgust us.Footnote ²⁹ What the Epicurean can do is arrive at this realization without losing entirely the ἡδονή (‘pleasure’) and ἀταραξία (‘freedom from mental turmoil’) that form the philosophy's highest goals and without faltering in the sublime perspective of the universe gained over the course of six books.

Having shown how Lucretius carefully manipulates and commingles his readers’ experiences of pleasure and disgust, I now want to zoom out from this passage to trace Lucretius’ larger handling of these emotions across the epic before I return again to their role in the plague. Whereas much has been written about the honeyed sweetness that Lucretius employs as a charm to hold his reluctant reader's attention, his use of disgust has been insufficiently considered.Footnote ³⁰ Lucretius first promises that his epic will try to shield us from disgust as much as possible, then he gradually gives us fuller and fuller doses as we become more able to face and know our own fragility and mortality.

Furthermore, the examination of disgust—focused as this emotion is on the body—sheds important light on how Lucretius and other Epicureans understood the inescapable reality of physical suffering.Footnote ³¹ If sublate disgust compels us to know that we are mortal, Lucretius’ use of such disgust in the plague further compels us similarly to know that we too could suffer in this way. Yet Lucretius’ yoking of pleasure and disgust suggests that one can still maintain ἀταραξία even amid severe agony. Epicurean mental tranquility need not collapse when ἀπονία (the ‘freedom from bodily suffering’ that is another Epicurean aim) becomes impossible, and both poetry and philosophy can provide pleasures that stand alongside and mitigate such turmoil. Finally, even as Lucretius evokes sensory disgust to make his readers aware of their mortality and potential to suffer, he carefully directs his reader's sense of moral disgust so that, rather than instinctively dismiss Epicureanism as impious, his readers’ outrage will be directed instead toward those who cannot accept death with equanimity.

Bitter Medicine

As early as the opening hymn to Venus, Lucretius aims to harness the persuasive powers of uoluptas (‘pleasure’), suauitas (‘sweetness’), and lepos (‘charm’) as a means to prevent his reader from rejecting the potentially repellent messages of his epic.Footnote ³² He makes this explicit at the end of Book 1 in his famous simile of the honey smeared around the cup of wormwood, where it is to poetry that he attributes these pleasant qualities. Here, the philosophical content is beneficial medicine that tastes ‘sour/bitter’ (amarus, tristis) or—significantly—‘disgusting’ (taeter). Lucretius piles on keywords evoking disgust:

Much of the attention paid to these lines has concentrated on Lucretius’ controversial use of poetic honey, which goes against the orthodox Epicurean stricture that a wise man will not employ poetry to teach.Footnote ³³ But just as important here is the bitter wormwood, which represents Epicureanism itself, whose unconventional teachings about religion and the mortality of the soul would no doubt have seemed anathema and morally ‘disgusting’ (taeter) to traditionally minded Romans of Lucretius’ day. Again, Lucretius employs poetics to evoke these seemingly contradictory flavors. absinthia taetra (1.936 = 4.11), is—to quote Friedländer—a phrase that ‘not only means ugly but has that sound’. We must wince when we say these words, just as we wince when we drink the substance they describe. On the other hand, the act of sweetening, uolui..suauiloquenti, described with repeated ‘w’ sounds, lets us roll the liquid across our tongue to savor it, as if the smoothness of the letters imitated the ‘pleasantness’ (uoluptas; cf. uolui) of honey's smooth atoms.Footnote ³⁴ Yet this sweet poetry itself holds no curative value in this formulation—this belongs only to the bitter medicine. In other words, we can be healed only if we drink in what disgusts us.

It is helpful to compare Lucretius’ metaphor with Hippocratic writings dealing with disgust that have been examined by Kazantzidis.Footnote ³⁵ Lucretius’ prescription looks a lot like that found, as Kazantzidis points out, at Hippocrates On the Regimen in Acute Diseases 23, where the writer suggests mixing bitter black hellebore with sweeter or more aromatic substances (such as daucus, seseli, cumin, and anise) to offset the drug's bitterness. In both texts, these mask medicine's bitter flavor so that the patient will drink it. But germane here too are those passages in which it is the sickness itself that causes the patient to perceive foods and liquids as ἀηδής, ‘unpleasant’ or ‘disgusting’—literally ‘without ἡδονή’. As Kazantzidis states, ‘Disgust, indicated as ἀηδίη, is located by the Hippocratics in the area of the στόμα [‘mouth’] and is described, in terms that link it primarily with the sense of taste, as a strong physical aversion to food and drink when a patient is still ill.’Footnote ³⁶ At Hippocrates Epidemics 7.43, the writer explains how a sick man named Andreas could not drink anything with pleasure because his sense of taste had been affected by disease: μάλιστα δὲ τὸ στόμα ἀπεξηραίνετο, καὶ πόμα οὐδὲν ἡδέως προσεδέχετο, ἀηδίης πολλῆς ἐούσης περὶ τὸ στόμα (‘And his mouth was parched, and he took no drink with pleasure since much ἀηδία was lining his mouth’). Perhaps, then, in Lucretius’ honey/wormwood simile it is not the flavor of Epicurean philosophy per se that is disgusting as much as it is the reader's ‘sickness’ that keeps her from tasting it properly. If so, her sense of taste should improve as she imbibes the bitter medicine. When the course of treatment takes effect, the bitter flavor will become mollified, even transformed to sweetness.

Lucretius himself is keenly aware that disease can alter the perception of bitter and sweet flavors, a phenomenon he describes in Book 4. Here, taste is a product not only of the shape of the atoms that make up the food we eat but also of the shape of the atoms located in the inside of the mouth and throat.Footnote ³⁷ When these latter are jagged and hooked we taste bitter flavors: ‘What tastes sweet to some, therefore, can taste bitter to others’ (hoc…quod suaue est aliis aliis fit amarum, 4.658). When one becomes ill, the interior atomic structure of an individual is especially likely to change:

Not only does taste depend upon the atomic makeup of the individual taster, but some substances, such as honey, are here more likely to produce different flavors at different times and in different people insofar as they contain both types of atoms, i.e. ones that produce bitterness and sweetness. This line seems to undercut Lucretius’ earlier descriptions of honey as purely sweet (i.e. 2.398–401, discussed above), but we could also read it as purposefully adding a new layer to Lucretius’ use of honeyed sweetness across the epic. Nethercut uses this change to the atomic structure of honey as a key piece of evidence for his idea of ‘provisional argumentation’, Lucretius’ ‘technique of gradually redefining initial propositions’. He writes:

How we perceive pleasure and disgust therefore depends not so much on the inherent atomic structure of what we imbibe as on our own bodily health, just as how we perceive Epicurean doctrine depends not on its intrinsic bitterness but the wellbeing of our soul. Once we have imbibed the bitter medicine and are well, we will taste it for what it really is: Epicurean ἡδονή.Footnote ³⁹

A Life Without Pain?

One challenge for Lucretius, however, is to keep the attention of his reader (nominally the addressee Memmius) long enough for the medicine to take effect. He must therefore again and again allay Memmius’ disgust, and this simply cannot be achieved through poetry alone. The tenets themselves require a degree of sugarcoating that initially masks the reality that nothing, in the end, can change our mortal condition. Lucretius, in other words, does not offer us a full dose of sublate disgust until the time is right, instead offering up images of sublime (almost divine) wellbeing for those willing to convert, and promises of mental and physical despair for those who are not.

To keep Memmius engaged, Lucretius repeatedly exhorts him to keep his ears open and receptive.Footnote ⁴⁰ For example, at 4.912 he writes tu mihi da tenuis auris animumque sagacem (‘Give me discerning ears and a keen mind’), and at 6.921, quo magis attentas auris animumque reposco (‘All the more I ask for ears and a mind that are alert’).Footnote ⁴¹ Lucretius above all fears that Memmius will close his ears out of a sense of moral outrage:

Lucretius keeps Memmius’ ears ‘open’ by ensuring his words are sufficiently sweetened, an idea we see made explicit later in Book 1 even before we get to the honey/wormwood simile:

Lucretius carefully counters the possible disgust Memmius may feel by promising him endless quaffs of liquid from his sweet tongue. The Latin word pigror (to be piger, ‘sluggish’ or ‘unwilling’) is related to the impersonal verb piget, a difficult word to translate that is most often rendered as ‘to cause annoyance’ or ‘to cause disgust’. Kaster has described the pig- stem as conveying ‘an unpleasant state of diminished energy in which lassitude and aversion are combined—a weary sigh blended with “ugh”—as a result of performing, or at the prospect of performing, some action you regard as both taxing and repugnant’.Footnote ⁴² Lucretius fears that Memmius’ response to his bitter message will be simply to back away from it in disgust, and he promises his addressee instead a flow of sweetness that will never stop.

Lucretius’ tongue is sweet in line 413, on the one hand, because it delivers argumenta that have been sweetened by poetry, as in the honey/wormwood simile.Footnote ⁴³ On the other hand, Lucretius does not here explicitly disentangle the poetic and philosophical content of his verse. The liquid his sweet tongue will pour forth consists of Epicurean argumenta, philosophical ‘arguments’ or ‘proofs’. There are not two separate substances here, one bitter and one sweet, but one single liquid whose chief trait is suauitas. Lucretius thus counters Memmius’ possible disgust by making Epicurean tenets themselves, at least at this early stage in his didactic project, appear to be as sweet as possible as they flow from his mouth. His strategy is thus literally ‘persuasive’ (i.e. rendering something suauis, ‘sweet’), on two levels: a) poetry sweetens what may be disgusting and b) the potentially disgusting tenets are likewise sugarcoated.

We find a full dose of sweetness on offer at the opening of Book 2, one of Lucretius’ most ‘purple’ passages. Here, Lucretius paints an idealized vision of Epicurean ἀταραξία that lets us imagine ourselves occupying heights from which we observe the suffering of others without suffering ourselves. Everything is suauis or dulcis:

The Epicurean has here been transformed into a kind of god inhabiting tranquil temples removed from the suffering of mankind.Footnote ⁴⁴ This is a process of deification that happens elsewhere in the poem as the traditional gods of myth get replaced by Epicurus and the heavenly bliss he has made possible for his followers on earth.Footnote ⁴⁵ Lucretius again dials up the sweetness through poetic style, particularly repeated ‘s’ and ‘w’ sounds that suggest sweetness: suaue, uentis, uoluptas, suaue, suaue, sapientum, serena, uidere, uiam, uitae.

The problem with this portrait of unadulterated ἡδονή, however, is that it is far too sugarcoated—it does not account for the reality that human beings, even those who follow Epicurus, must often suffer physical pain. Just a few breaths later Lucretius even holds out the enticing vision of a life lived without bodily or mental anguish: nonne uidere / nil aliud sibi naturam latrare, nisi utqui / corpore seiunctus dolor absit, mente fruatur / iucundo sensu cura semota metuque? (‘Don't you see that nature demands for herself nothing except that pain be gone, removed from the body, that, separated from anxiety and dread, she enjoy pleasant sensation in the mind?’, 2.16–19). These lines translate into Latin the two Epicurean ideals of ἀπονία and ἀταραξία, both of which enable one's attainment of ἡδονή, an idea encapsulated in the Latin iucundo sensu, ‘pleasant sensation’.

The problem is that, whereas ἀταραξία, as a mental response, is largely subject to our control, ἀπονία is often simply unattainable for a human being. As Penwill points out regarding the proem of Book 2, the sage there has simply ‘avoid[ed] humanity's self-inflicted wounds’, such as the ‘desire for wealth and power’. He continues: ‘We may be able to congratulate ourselves on escaping from error; from natura there can be no escape.’Footnote ⁴⁶ While the human mind can inhabit divine realms, the human body remains subject to suffering, pain, illness, disease, and excruciating death. But in the opening of Book 2, the possibility of bodily agony has been withheld. Can the Epicurean sustain such tranquility when she herself is in the thick of a storm, a battle—or a plague? What does Epicureanism offer when the body must suffer, when we cannot simply remove ourselves from what is disgustingly painful? One may be tempted to see in the proem of Book 2 a model for reading the plague: as we encounter agonizing sufferings from which we are free, we should experience a kind of Epicurean detached pleasure.Footnote ⁴⁷ But in the plague Lucretius does not let us get away with this—his repeated arousal of sensory disgust places us not upon celestial heights but among the suffering hordes.Footnote ⁴⁸ We are reminded of our mortality and potential to suffer bodily distress in every line.

No matter how sweetly Lucretius may package his philosophical ratio, there is still the possibility that, given a tenet strange enough, Memmius will be disgusted and spit it out, as we see later in Book 2 when Lucretius cautiously presents to Memmius the idea that ours is not the only mundus (‘universe’) in existence:

Lucretius here tests the waters by introducing Memmius to an idea that may seem preposterous—but which will seem less so if Memmius has been making progress and imbibing plenty of his Epicurean medicine. If he is not ready to accept this teaching, he will, Lucretius fears, ‘spit it out’ (expuere, from the root spuere) as though disgusting liquid—such as, perhaps, diseased sputum. But if Memmius can stomach this strange, new idea, then perhaps he is ready to proceed to the harsher truths to come: the mortality of the soul in Book 3, the diatribe against erotic love in Book 4, the creation and eventual destruction of the world in Book 5, and the plague in Book 6.

Golden Words

Implicit in Lucretius’ request that Memmius not ‘spit out’ this strange doctrine is the suggestion that, as one does attain ‘true reason’ (uera ratio), one will be less inclined to reject it with disgust. For the Epicurean sage, nothing in this system will seem disgusting and the prospect of reframing the structure of the cosmos will in fact be nothing short of immensely pleasurable. At the opening of Book 3, this transformation of Epicurean doctrine itself from bitter to sweet is evident—just as Lucretius gradually corrects honey's atomic structure from sweet to bittersweet, now the bitter wormwood in the cup starts to take on the qualities of sweet honey. This book takes as its topic the mortality of the body and soul, perhaps the most loathsome medicine of all for the Epicurean novice.

Here Lucretius figures himself as a bee, a traditional symbol for poets, flittering around and sipping nectar from flowers in a garden—not now the poetic flowers of 1.928 (iuuatque nouos decerpere flores, ‘it is pleasant to pluck new flowers’) but those of Epicurus’ ‘Garden’ (κῆπος), the name by which his community of followers became known:Footnote ⁴⁹

The source of Lucretius’ honeyed sweetness is no longer poetry but the philosophical writings, praecepta, of Epicurus himself that inspire—and thus work in tandem with—the verse. These tenets are now golden (aurea) like honey rather than disgusting (taeter) like wormwood.Footnote ⁵⁰ Lucretius may in fact have in mind here the ancient belief that it was honey itself that bees plucked from flowers rather than just the sweet nectar used to make it.Footnote ⁵¹ Epicurean teachings do not now need to be sweetened to make them more palatable because they themselves are honey, at least for Lucretius the bee-poet, for whom inspiration and pleasure arise from tasting (libant) and consuming (depascimur) what for others is foul. Lucretius thereby offers himself up as a model for what Epicureanism can become if we just keep drinking its disgusting flavor down: honey-sweet ἡδονή.

We are not, however, as far advanced as Lucretius himself is and will have to receive a top-up of poetic honey at the start of Book 4, where he repeats the honey/wormwood simile almost verbatim. Though traditionally taken as evidence for the incomplete state of the poem, the reinsertion of the simile at this point is a significant admission that even here at the poem's turning post his reader may not be quite ready for a full dose of unmitigated bitterness.Footnote ⁵² The final line of the simile has received a significant change in this second iteration. Whereas in Book 1 Lucretius says his method of honeying what is taeter is required in order to hold Memmius’ attention: dum perspicis omnem / naturam rerum, qua constet compta figura (‘while you examine the whole nature of things, by what structure it is arranged’, 949f.), in Book 4 he ends with dum percipis omnem / naturam rerum ac persentis utilitatem (‘while you examine the whole nature of things and become fully aware of its usefulness’, 24f.). There is a critical development in the reader/Memmius from one passage to the next. In Book 1 we are merely to be tricked long enough for Lucretius to lay out this new vision of nature, while in Book 4 he expects us to undergo a change of perception (persentis) and experience it not as foul but as useful. A transformation has taken place at the level of our senses. If Lucretius is successful, we will no longer taste things as we did before.

Cleansing the Jar

In order to correct our sense perceptions, Lucretius must first heal the sickness that has caused them to go awry. Looking back to 1.410–17, discussed above, it is significantly Memmius’ ears (rather than his mouth) into which Lucretius promises to pour his sweetened argumenta. With this a new metaphor takes shape that Lucretius gradually develops in full: Memmius is a jar with ‘ears’ for handles, and this is the receptacle into which Lucretius pours his Epicurean medicine.Footnote ⁵³ Lucretius has drunk abundantly from Epicurean fonts and now lets these teachings flow from himself into Memmius, as though from one jar into another.Footnote ⁵⁴

The metaphor returns at the start of Book 6 in the lead-up to the plague, and here the notion of ‘disgust’ (taeter) is front and center. Lucretius tells us how Epicurus healed his followers of their faults like someone removing impurities from a dirty jar that gives everything poured into it a disgusting flavor:

This passage returns us once again to the cup of Epicurean wormwood and suggests that the source of disgust there was not the bitterness of Epicureanism itself but the faulty—or sick—heart of the new initiate. No matter how agreeable the philosophy is as it is poured in, sickness will spoil it and make it taste taeter, like something one would spit out, a sputtering suggested by the ‘s’ and ‘p’ alliteration of conspurcare sapore.Footnote ⁵⁵ And yet as the medicine penetrates the heart and steeps the mind it heals us of our uitia so that the true taste of Epicurean ἡδονή can become apparent.

It is with this newly corrected perception that we must read the plague and the horrific suffering it contains. If we are successful Epicureans (i.e. the cleansed jar), as we imbibe truths that seem disgusting to others, our primary response will instead be one of delight. We can accept, even with pleasure, the finality of death and the possibility of pain that are so viscerally described in the plague because Epicurus has cleansed us of fear and provided us with a system of belief that aims always toward pleasure and delight.

Mitigating Pleasures

Once this transformation has taken place and our hearts are cleansed, Lucretius can reveal harsh truths as they really are, and we will neither spit them out nor turn away in disgust. The plague illustrates, once and for all, that death is not a horror to be feared but a blessing that frees us from suffering. Even for the most fervent Epicurean, a mortal life lived without bodily pain or disease cannot be guaranteed. In reality there are no heights on which we can escape our fundamental condition, yet the Epicurean is better equipped to face their mortality because they do not fear dying and in fact knows that death is a welcome release when physical pain becomes unbearable, as it is in the plague. The most distilled forms of ἀπονία and ἀταραξία are not in fact to be found in life at all, but in death, which releases us from all sensation.Footnote ⁵⁶ This is an insinuation made by Natura already at 3.943 when she refers to death as the finem…laboris, ‘end of labor’, and similarly at 3.1020f. Lucretius himself calls death a terminus malorum (‘termination of evils’) and poenarum finis (‘end of punishments’). Even as early as 1.107f. he suggests that there is a certam finem…aerumnarum, ‘a fixed end to troubles’, implicitly death.Footnote ⁵⁷

Amid terrible events such as the plague, the Epicurean's suffering will be mitigated by the tranquility produced by knowing that death will end it. Offsetting physical pain through philosophical enjoyment is a skill that Epicurus himself practiced, according to a letter he wrote to Idomeneus, recorded at Diogenes Laertius 10.22, during his own agonizing death (of kidney failure). Here Epicurus describes his final ‘day’ as ‘blessed’ (μακαρίαν…ἡμέραν) because he was able to alleviate his extreme bodily ‘pains’ (πάθη) by opposing them with ‘the joy felt in his soul’ (τὸ κατὰ ψυχὴν χαῖρον) at ‘the memory of past philosophical conversations’ with his friend (τῇ τῶν γεγονότων ἡμῖν διαλογισμῶν μνήμῃ). In other words, philosophical pleasures (or even the memory of them) can offset physical suffering, though by no means can they cancel it out entirely. Kazantzidis, however, rightly warns us not to take Epicurus’ ability to remember pleasure as too close a parallel for those suffering in the plague, many of whom are in such agony that they cannot even remember who they are (DRN 6.1213f.).Footnote ⁵⁸ In Lucretius, pleasure comes not from the memory of past pleasures but from the gained awareness that death is an end, not a beginning, of agony (a point he develops also in the Underworld section of 3.978–1023, where afterlife tortures are the fictions of poets).

The poetic pleasure we derive from reading the plague, I submit, symbolizes such philosophical knowledge. As we saw in the description of diseased phlegm, even as Lucretius disgusts his reader's senses, he offers her numerous poetic delights and even imbues the phlegm with metapoetic qualities of refined Callimacheanism. Lucretius’ attribution of sweetness and pleasure to poetry goes beyond just the honeyed-cup passage. At 1.924f., for instance, he describes his ‘sweet love for the Muses’ (suauem…amorem / Musarum) and twice reiterates how pleasant it is (iuuat…iuuat, 927f.) to produce original, Epicurean poetry. Poetic pleasure seems uniquely able to mitigate bitter or loathsome experiences. But the particular experiences it can mitigate, as well as its own symbolic associations, change as the epic proceeds. Whereas in the honey/wormwood simile poetic sweetness counteracts the bitter experience of Epicurean philosophy for the new initiate, in the plague it is visceral disgust to which poetic enjoyment offers a release. Most significantly, poetry here works not so much at odds as in concert with philosophical pleasure.

The antithesis between honeyed poetry and bitter philosophy is in fact rarely as sustained in the epic as the honey/wormwood simile would have us believe.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the opening hymn to Venus, for example, the goddess's uoluptas (1.1) and lepos (1.15 and 28) align her not just with Epicurean ἡδονή but also with the charm of poetry and the pleasure of poetic composition.Footnote ⁶⁰ In other words, already at the epic's start poetry and philosophy delight us similarly, and we have seen poetry and philosophy further aligned at the opening of Book 3 when Lucretius the bee-poet gathers honeyed verse from Epicurus’ philosophical garden. Poetic and philosophical pleasure, provided it is the right type of poetry and the right type of philosophy, in reality are one and the same.Footnote ⁶¹ By rousing our sense of poetic pleasure amid the suffering and disgust of the plague, Lucretius reminds us that even amid extreme bodily pain the Epicurean can still retain a sense of ἡδονή. Poetic delight now equates philosophical delight, which is always available to us, just as it was to Epicurus upon his deathbed.

The plague therefore tests how we view death, whether we are finally able to consider the mortality of the soul not as something bitter but as something sweet.Footnote ⁶² To do this, Lucretius has to expose human suffering in its most loathsome, disgusting extreme, has to make us feel and fully understand viscerally that we will end, as will anything made of fragile atomic compounds. This is an awareness that cannot be affected by promises of celestial wisdom and unmitigated pleasure. Nor is it an awareness we can attain by thinking of the plague as primarily a symbol for mental suffering, as many scholars have suggested.Footnote ⁶³ The plague is a physical experience both for the actual sufferers Lucretius describes and for his readers, whose sense of disgust he stirs again and again in order to make us confront the mortality of our body in our body. Even while drinking in this bitter fact, the Epicurean will taste only sweetness, not because she has become anesthetized to pain but because she derives pleasure from knowing the true nature of death. That is why we find no vision of divine Epicurean bliss inserted as a conclusion to balance the plague, an unfulfilled intention that some scholars have attributed to Lucretius.Footnote ⁶⁴ For a true Epicurean, no such vision is needed.

Conclusion: Redirecting Disgust

Lucretius does not, however, want to eradicate our sense of disgust entirely. Rather, he redirects it away from Epicureanism toward those who cling to false and destructive beliefs in harrowing moments. What ultimately is disgusting in the plague is not our own mortality or the breakdown of human bodies but the lack of equanimity with which people cling to life in their incorrect conviction that death is an evil. Perhaps the climax of disgust comes not with the phlegm in lines 1188f. but with the self-mutilations of genitals, hands, feet, and eyes humans undertake in the hope of avoiding death:

Lucretius elicits moral disgust in his reader, again, through alliteration, particularly of ‘p’, a sound often associated with scorn and curses: partim, priuati, parte, pedibusque, perdebant, partim.Footnote ⁶⁵ Repeatedly during the plague men succumb to this utter fear of death. One lies on the ground maesto cum corde (‘with a wretched heart’, 1233), others neglect the sick because they are uitai nimium cupidos mortisque timentis (‘excessively greedy for life and fearful of death’, 1239), and the ‘entire [city] grows disturbed and full of anxiety’ (perturbatus enim totus trepidabat, 1280). Such behavior will seem morally reprehensible to the Epicurean and will trigger her sense of secondary disgust. Lucretius does in fact want to leave a bad flavor in our mouth—yet it should come not from Epicureanism but from those who refuse to convert to it.Footnote ⁶⁶

From the beginning to the end of his epic, Lucretius carefully guides us through experiences of pleasure and pain, sweetness and disgust in the hope of turning us from false to true beliefs. Part of his persuasive strategy is to carefully regulate how, when, and by what these sensations are stirred. Disgust helps Lucretius fulfill a number of his philosophical goals, from making us confront viscerally our own mortality to opening our eyes to the folly of our fear of death. Just as sweetness and pleasure work in tandem with rational argumentation to entice us into new beliefs, so too does disgust offer Lucretius a strategy of opening our eyes through appealing to our emotions. Yet disgust is also a danger that he has to overcome, and he does so by carefully sweetening our palate until we can taste the true delight of the philosophy dripping from his honeyed tongue. The final vision he leaves us with is not of a world in which pleasure constantly has the upper hand and pain and disgust are avoidable—a world that belongs to the gods alone—but one in which for all mortals life is a bittersweet blend, just like the poem itself. What Lucretius empowers us to do is taste life—and death—as they truly are. Good ‘taste’ (sapor) is, after all, at the very heart of ‘wisdom’ (sapientia).