On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics) Read online

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  LUCRETIUS

  On the Nature of the Universe

  Translated by

  RONALD MELVILLE

  With an Introduction and Notes by

  DON AND PETA FOWLER

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Select Bibliography

  Synopsis of the Poem

  ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE

  Explanatory Notes

  ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE

  LUCRETIUS (T. LUCRETIUS CARUS) lived in the terrible times of the collapse of the Roman republic into chaos and civil war, and this is reflected in his writing. Nothing is known for certain about his life, but scholars agree that he was born shortly after 100 BC and died between 55 and 50 BC. The gens Lucretia was aristocratic, and he was probably a member of it. His poem shows familiarity with the luxurious life-style of great houses in Rome, and his deep feeling for the countryside and its people and animals invites one to imagine that his family owned country estates. Certainly he was expensively educated, and apart from being a master of Latin he acquired a deep knowledge of the Greek language, its literature and philosophy.

  There is a famous story told by St Jerome that he died of madness caused by a love-philtre, and composed his poem during lucid intervals. This is unlikely.

  RONALD MELVILLE studied Classics at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was a civil servant until his retirement in 1973. He was brother to the late A. D. Melville, who initiated this translation and who translated Ovid and Statius for Oxford World’s Classics. Ronald Melville died in 2001.

  DON FOWLER was Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford.

  PETA FOWLER is Lecturer in Classics at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

  IN MEMORIAM

  A.D.M.

  FRATRIS DILECTISSIMI

  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

  I made this translation between May 1994 and November 1995, working for a couple of hours in the evening after dinner, with a glass of port at hand in case I got stuck. My brother Alan had completed a first draft of Book 1 and most of Book 2 when he died, and I started on it to help him. It is to him that I owe the joy and privilege of living for eighteen months in mind and spirit in the company of one of the world’s greatest poets.

  There are some admirable prose translations of Lucretius, by Munro, Bailey, Rouse, and Latham. I have been particularly helped by the last two in the elucidation of difficult passages, and I owe to them numerous happy turns of phrase. I am especially indebted to Professor E. J. Kenney of Cambridge University for his criticism and encouragement.

  Above all I am indebted to Charterhouse, to those great teachers Frank Fletcher and A. L. Irvine, who laid in me the enduring foundations of classical scholarship and of a love of English poetry.

  R.H.M.

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘All nature, as it is in itself, consists of two things: there are bodies and there is void in which these bodies are and through which they move.’ This statement could have come from the opening of any textbook of natural science before the modern elaboration of subatomic physics: in fact it is a translation of two lines by a Latin poet writing over 2,000 years ago, who based his account of the world on the theories of a Greek philosopher living over 200 years earlier still. Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe, as its title suggests, gives an account of the world, the universe, and everything in terms of atomic physics. (The Latin title Dererum natura is even more general: it means literally ‘On the Nature of Things’.) As the only detailed account of ancient atomism to come down to us more or less intact, it has been enormously influential on the development of both science and philosophy: and the account of the development of human civilization in Book 5 of the work has been of similar importance, through Rousseau and others, in the development of modern social science. In the light of this, it is easy simply to marvel at the poem’s anticipations of modern ideas. But the work invites many other readings: as the product of first-century BC Rome and a key text in our constructions of the end of the Roman Republic, as a philosophical meditation on human happiness, and as perhaps the greatest didactic poem ever written in any language. The power of the work resides above all in the intersection of the reading practices which these different classifications invite.

  We know less about the life of T. Lucretius Carus, the author of On the Nature of the Universe, than about almost any other Latin poet. His full name is given only in the manuscripts of his work, and nothi
ng is known of his place of birth or social status, though both have been the subject of much speculation. The only secure date is a reference in a letter of Cicero (To his Brother Quintus 2. 10(9) 3) written in February 54 BC. In this Cicero praises Lucretius’ poemata as possessing both flashes of genius (ingenium) and great artistry (ars)—that is, as combining the qualities of an inspired and a craftsmanlike poet. This is certainly a reference to On the Nature of the Universe, and, although poemata could refer to just selections, the easiest hypothesis is that Lucretius’ poem was published by this time. The poem has often been thought to be unfinished: if so, Lucretius may have been dead by the time of the letter. But textual corruption rather than incompleteness may be responsible for the problems in the text. St Jerome (fourth–fifth century AD, but basing himself on the first–second-century AD writer Suetonius) reports the story (later made famous by Tennyson and others) that Lucretius wrote the poem in brief intervals of sanity after having been driven mad by a love-potion given him by his wife, and eventually committed suicide. If this story were true, it would be surprising that it was not used by Ovid half a century later in defending his Art of Love or by the fathers of the church attacking paganism and Epicureanism: it may be the result of a biographical reading of parts of Books 3 and 4, or of confusion with Lucretius’ contemporary the politician C. Licinius Lucullus, of whom a similar story is told. Nor is there any reason to believe Jerome’s statement that Cicero edited On the Nature of the Universe after its author’s death. The tale to tell of Lucretius’ life may be one of madness and premature death: equally, it may well be that the author was perfectly sane, and gave his poem to the world well before he died in his bed.

  The addressee of the poem is one Memmius, who must be C. Memmius, a prominent politician associated also with Lucretius’ poetic contemporary Catullus. Memmius was praetor in 58, and a candidate in 54 for the consulship of 53: but, after a complicated electoral pact that went wrong, he was found guilty of corruption in 52 and went into exile in Athens. In the summer of 51, Cicero wrote to him on behalf of the Epicurean group in Athens, asking him not to demolish what was left of Epicurus’ house (Letters to Friends 13. 1. 3–4), and suggesting that Memmius was not on good terms with the Epicureans. It is not impossible that he had been annoyed by the dedication of On the Nature of the Universe: despite its warm praise of him in the prologue, the poem is orthodox in its Epicurean condemnation of political life (3. 59–84, 995–1002, 5. 117–35: see below). But in any case, the poem does not imply that Memmius was a convinced Epicurean (cf. 1. 102–3). There can be no clear distinction between Memmius as the didactic addressee and the more generalized second person of the reader, but Memmius’ public persona will not have been irrelevant: On the Nature of the Universe is not unpolitical.

  The times of its production were difficult ones for the Roman Republic. How difficult can be seen from a remark of the historian Michael Crawford, justifying the tone of his book The Roman Republic:

  Some parts of this story may perhaps seem unduly dramatic; I can only say that a century like that between 133 BC and 31 BC, which killed perhaps 200,000 men in 91–82 and perhaps 100,000 men in 49–42, in both cases out of a free population of Rome and Italy of 4,500,000 and which destroyed a system of government after 450 years was a cataclysm.1

  The events he singles out are the terrible ‘Social War’ between Rome and the other Italian cities, with the civil war between Marius and Sulla which took place more or less simultaneously, and the civil wars between Pompey and Caesar and in the aftermath of Caesar’s death. But to the people living through them, the events between the death of Sulla in 78 BC and Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon in 49 would hardly have seemed like the eye of the storm. The 60s and 50s BC saw increasing political violence at Rome, but the gangs on the streets were only a secondary weapon in the political struggle of the élite: the main battleground was the law courts. The easiest way to rid oneself of an opponent was to prosecute him on some charge, genuine or trumped-up: so Lucretius’ addressee Memmius began his career as a Tribune of the People in 66 by unsuccessfully prosecuting Lucullus’ brother Marcus, and as praetor in 58 he joined forces with the orator and poet Gaius Licinius Calvus in an attack on Caesar’s tool Publius Vatinius. The trials which called forth Cicero’s great speeches (and many lost ones) were mostly political; he himself had not bothered with a trial when he executed the leaders of the so-called ‘Catilinarian Conspiracy’ in 63, but it was the threat of prosecution by Clodius for that in 58 which forced him into exile for a year. And behind the street-fighting and the political trials was the real contest between the dynasts Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus; temporarily united in 60 by the pact we know as the ‘First Triumvirate’ (renewed in 56 at Lucca), each was in reality waiting for the chance to achieve domination. Men such as Clodius and Memmius were their tools, as they themselves arguably were in turn of the social and economic forces beginning to concentrate on the omega point that was to be the establishment of autocratic rule at Rome.

  We know that within a decade of the publication of On the Nature of the Universe the Republic would be at an end: in the 50s, in this ‘time of trouble’ (1. 41) the disorder and corruption doubtless looked more like the normal state of political life at Rome. The perspective of On the Nature of the Universe is exactly that, a ‘seeing through’ and a ‘looking down’, as Lucretius makes plain at the beginning of Book 2, where he contrasts the serene security of the wise with what has been called ‘a picture of the typical life-style of a Roman aristocrat’:2

  O wretched minds of men! O hearts so blind!

  How dark the life, how great the perils are

  In which whatever time is given is passed!

  (2. 14–16)

  The condemnation at the beginning of Book 3 is even more trenchant (59 ff.), while later in the same book Lucretius offers a famous version of the myth of Sisyphus as an allegory for the political life that was the almost inevitable destiny of each and every member of the Roman élite:

  Sisyphus also in this life appears

  Before our eyes. He seeks the people’s votes

  Athirst to get the Lictor’s rods and axes,

  And always loses and retires defeated.

  For to seek power that’s empty and never got

  And always vainly toil and sweat for it

  This is to strain to push up the steep hill

  The rock that always from the very top

  Rolls headlong down again to the plain below.

  (3. 995–1002)

  The solution that Lucretius offers to this human misery is a simple one: conversion to the doctrines of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who over 200 years earlier had seen

  that deep in every home

  Were aching hearts and torments of the mind

  All hapless, self-inflicted without pause,

  And sorrows breeding furious laments.

  (6. 14–16)

  The Master himself was born in 341 BC, six years after Plato’s death in 347 and six years before Aristotle, at the height of his powers, was to set up his school in the Lyceum. He was born on Samos, but he was an Athenian citizen, his father having gone to the island as a colonist in 352; accordingly, when Epicurus was 18 he went to Athens as an ‘ephebe’—that is, to undergo the newly reorganized two-year period of ‘national service’ which was the prerequisite to becoming a full citizen. The years of his ephebate saw the death of Alexander the Great and Athens’s brief revolt against Macedonian power; one consequence of its defeat was the loss of Samos. Epicurus joined his parents at Colophon in Asia Minor. His movements for the next fifteen years are not completely certain, but he was at some stage active as a philosopher and teacher at Mytilene on Lesbos and at Lampsacus on the Hellespont. By the time he returned to Athens in 306 he already had a reputation and devoted disciples; he bought the ‘Garden’ which was to remain the headquarters of the school until its disappearance in late antiquity and established a small philosophical community. He presided over this com
munity until his death in 270 BC, by which time it was the centre of a philosophical network expanding beyond its original bases in Asia Minor and Athens to the whole of the Greek world. From his last days, we have a will leaving the Garden to his successors, and a letter of farewell to a young Epicurean, Idomeneus:

  On this truly happy day of my life, as I am at the point of death, I write this to you. The disease in my bladder and stomach are pursuing their course, lacking nothing of their natural severity: but against all this is the joy in my heart at the recollection of my conversations with you. Do you, as I might expect from your devotion from boyhood to me and to philosophy, take good care of the children of Metrodorus. (Diogenes Laertius 10. 22, trans. C. Bailey)

  It was this inner calm that attracted men to Epicurus and what he offered to give them with his philosophy. It was a calm which was achieved in spite of the events of history which were taking place outside the Garden. Like Lucretius, Epicurus lived in ‘interesting times’: the half-century between his ephebate and death saw the bitter aftermath of Macedonian hegemony as the successors of Alexander fought to divide the Greek world between them. The warlords battled over Athens, perhaps less for military than for prestige reasons: in defending Epicurus’ character against ancient criticisms, one of the points Diogenes Laertius makes is that ‘although Greece was at that time in great straits he continued to live there, and only once or twice made a voyage to Ionia and the neighbourhood to see his friends’ (10. 10, trans. C. Bailey). The worst moment of all came in 294, when the city was attacked by Demetrius Poliorcetes: in describing the horrors of that siege, Plutarch tells us that starvation was so acute that a father and a son fought over a dead mouse, but ‘Epicurus kept his companions alive by counting out and distributing beans amongst them’ (Life of Demetrius 34. 2). It was spiritual rather than material sustenance, however, which Epicurus offered to the inhabitants of the Garden in those troubled times. The atmosphere in the community must have been a little like that in the ashram of a modern-day guru. The disciples—who included both men and women—were united not only by strong communal affection and a shared philosophy but also by devotion to their master. This devotion to the person of Epicurus was a striking feature of the school, as it still is centuries later for Lucretius, who praises his master in the prologues to Books, 1, 3, 5, and 6. The praise may seem at times excessive, and unpleasantly redolent of that offered to modern-day charlatans (Plutarch is scandalized at an account by Epicurus of how his young disciple Colotes embraced his knees: Against Colotes 1117b). But in a turbulent world Epicurus gave men the peace they wanted and could not find outside the Garden.