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

  Disquiets the life of man, suffusing all

  With the blackness of death, and leaving no delights

  Pure and unsullied.

  (3. 37–40)

  But nor can a man possess ataraxia if he is continually worried that he will lose all that is worth living for. By reminding him how small his needs really are, and how easily satisfied, that anxiety is removed. In fact the fear of deprivation, whether of things the person really needs, like food, or of things which he only thinks he needs, things like wealth and power which are the object of desires neither necessary nor natural: this fear participates in a complex syndrome with the fears of the gods and of death. We fear the gods partly because of what they may take from us; we fear death similarly as a deprivation of the things we think we need. But because we are so terrified of the gods and death, we cling to the objects of our desire as if to life itself. As Lucretius remarks in the prologue to Book 3, ‘Greed and blind lust for fame… These wounds of life in no small part are fed | By fear of death’ (3. 59–64). There is thus a syndrome of fears and desires which intensify each other in turn and which constitute for the Epicurean the normal state of humanity before the saving message of Epicurus.

  To deal with this syndrome, Epicurus must attack on a broad front; he must not only oppose directly the erroneous ideas about the world which lead to a belief in interfering gods and an irrational terror of death; he must also, with his philosophy of pleasure, remove that fear of want and pain which is increased by those fears and in turn increases them. Lucretius’ poem concentrates on the direct attack on the fears of the gods and of death, but we are not allowed to forget the message about pleasure and pain. It is most obviously present in the prologue to Book 2, which refers to the third and fourth of the Master Sayings as the prologue to Book 1 referred to the first pair, but it is alluded to throughout the poem, in the anthropology of Book 5 as much as the physiology of Book 4, and the final test of our understanding of the doctrine, as of the rest of Lucretius’ message, is the plague which closes the whole poem. There are many details about Epicureanism about which Lucretius is silent; as a rounded picture of the philosophy in all its aspects it cannot compete even with an epitome like the Letter to Herodotus, which itself omits much. But in its relentless reason assault on men’s fears, of the gods, of death, of want, of pain, it gives the true essence of Epicureanism.

  On the Nature of the Universe is an exposition of Epicureanism: it is also a poem, in the original some 7,400 lines of Latin hexameters. Whether or not it failed to receive the final corrections of its author, it is substantially complete: it opens with an elaborate prologue, and the prologue to Book 6 states explicitly that this is the final book (6. 92–5). The ending is abrupt, and textually corrupt, though we may well have the final lines displaced (see note on 6. 1247–51). There are a number of closural features at the end, most notably a recall of the funeral of Hector at the end of Homer’s Iliad, and, although the ending on the plague at Athens and the many deaths it caused is in stark contrast to the opening description of the first day of spring and the appeal for help to Venus, the polarity can be made to have point. By the end of the poem the reader will have passed from birth to death, and in the process come to see like Lucretius that the angst-ridden activity of everyday life is pointless, and that true happiness must be sought elsewhere.

  As well as the great initial prologue to Book 1, each of the other books also has a prologue, and the concluding section of each book in some way stands apart from the rest of the book: striking examples are the attack on love in Book 4, and the final plague. Each book is a unity in terms both of structure and of subject matter. Book 1 deals with the basic metaphysical and physical premisses of Epicureanism, beginning with the proposition that nothing comes to be out of nothing, and concluding with a description of the collapse of our world which is presented as a counterfactual consequence of the belief that all elements tend towards the centre of the earth but which anticipates the Epicurean accounts of the death of our world at the end of Book 2 and in Book 5. Book 2 deals with the motion and shape of the atoms, and how these are relevant to the relationship between primary and secondary qualities: it concludes with the important Epicurean doctrine of the infinite number of worlds in the universe, and the connected proposition that our world has both a birth and a death (recalling the end of Book 1). Book 3 gives an account of the nature of the human soul, and argues both that it is mortal and that, because of this, death is not to be feared. Book 4 discusses a variety of psychological and physiological phenomena, especially perception, and argues against scepticism: as remarked above, it concludes with an attack on love, seen as a mental delusion. Book 5 argues for the mortality of our world, and then gives a rationalist and anti-providentialist account of its creation and early history, concluding with the section on the development of human civilization which is perhaps the most famous part of the poem. Book 6 then proceeds to account for those phenomena of our world which are most likely to lead to false belief in the gods—thunder and lightning, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.—and ends with the aetiology of disease and the plague at Athens.

  This clearly defined book structure is more typical of prose philosophical treatises than of hexameter poetry, and it is replicated at levels both above and below that of the individual book. The books form three pairs, in which Books 1 and 2 deal with atomic phenomena up to the level of the compound, Books 3 and 4 deal with human beings, and Books 5 and 6 deal with the world: there is thus a clear sense of expanding horizons, as we move from the atomic to the macroscopic level. The twin targets of the work as a whole are fear of the gods and of death: the first and last pairs deal more with the former fear, by explaining phenomena that would otherwise be felt to require divine intervention in the world, while the central books, and especially Book 3, tackle the fear of death head on. But the two motives are intermingled throughout the work. The six books may also be organized into two halves, with Books 1–3 dealing with basic premisses, Books 4–6 with what follows from those basic premisses: the problematic prologue to Book 4 (repeated almost verbatim from 1. 921–50: see notes), with its stress on Lucretius’ twin roles as poet and philosopher, thus functions as a ‘proem in the middle’ for the second half. The existence of more than one possible structural analysis in this way is typical of On the Nature of the Universe as a whole (contrast 3. 31–40 with 5. 55–63).

  Below the level of the book, the subject matter is carefully delineated and individual propositions within sections signposted with markers such as ‘First’, ‘Next’, and ‘Finally’: the verse is similarly often articulated into blocks of two or more verses, with careful arrangement of words within the block. This division of the text corresponds to the Epicurean stress on the intelligibility of phenomena: everything has a ratio or systematic explanation, the world can be analysed and understood. If we are to believe Cicero, however, this is in marked contrast to the formlessness of earlier Epicurean writing in Latin (Amafinius and Rabirius: cf. Cic. Academica 1. 5, On Ends 1. 22, 29, 2. 30, 3. 40, and see notes on 5. 337).

  Every major proposition in On the Nature of the Universe can be paralleled in other Epicurean sources, and it is likely that the majority at least of the arguments for these propositions also existed in the Epicurean tradition. We do not know, however, to what extent the poem had a single main source, and if so, what that source was. The title (cf. 1. 25) recalls that of Epicurus’ major treatise ‘On Nature’ mentioned above, but the structure of that work as we know it from papyrus fragments differs in significant respects from that of On the Nature of the Universe and that presumably also goes for any (lost) epitome. There is a much closer correspondence, however, with the extant Letter to Herodotus of Epicurus, passages of which are closely translated (see notes on 1. 159 etc.), although On the Nature of the Universe is longer and the order of topics is sometimes changed. One plausible hypothesis is that the Letter to Herodotus provided the basic core of the poem, but this was expanded from a variety of other
sources. Other prose philosophical and scientific sources are also drawn on, including Plato and the medical writing ascribed to Hippocrates (see notes to 3. 526, 3. 487, etc.), though we can never be certain that some of this had not already been assimilated into the atomist tradition. The final part of Book 3 in particular (with the prologues to Books 2 and 3 and the end of Book 4) contains material from the so called ‘diatribe’ tradition of practical philosophical rhetoric, in which a direct assault is made on the false beliefs of common humanity. The poem also draws on a wide range of literary texts in both Greek and Latin, from Homer to Ennius and Latin drama (see notes). Particularly important is the lost philosophical didactic poetry of Empedocles (fifth century BC), which is known only in fragments whose reconstruction is controversial, but which, like On the Nature of the Universe, set out in verse an account of the workings of the universe. Empedocles’ use of a theory of four elements is criticized (1. 705–829), and the religious content of his verses often perverted to Lucretius’ own ends (see notes to 1. 1116, 5. 100, 5. 226) but his two opposed principles of ‘Love’ and ‘Strife’ influence the prologue and elsewhere (see note to 1. 33), and his stance as a ‘master of truth’ offering an important secret to his audience is one that is enthusiastically taken up by Lucretius.

  In its dense negotiation with a wide variety of texts in different genres, On the Nature of the Universe is typical of Latin poetry: an obvious comparison is with Virgil’s Aeneid, written some thirty years after Lucretius’ poem (and engaged in a constant dialogue with it). Philosophical themes are common in Latin poetry—the Odes of Horace, for instance, often deal with ethical topics—but what distinguishes On the Nature of the Universe is the centrality of its engagement with science and philosophy. Similarly, modern readers are likely to approach the text with a variety of interests, as simultaneously a first-century BC philosophical treatise, an account of ancient science, and one of the greatest of all Latin poems. Traditionally, the differing reading practices of the text’s critics have been polarized around an opposition between ‘philosophy’—perhaps more properly science—and poetry. The ‘problem’ of the text has been seen as that of reconciling these two opposed ways of reading, and the ‘solution’ of much modern criticism has been to show how much, in fact, the poetics of the poem are in harmony with its philosophical and scientific concerns. The text gives a central role, for instance, to a rich and dense use of the pre-eminent poetic trope of metaphor: it is no coincidence that the article which is credited with first stressing this in modern times (by H. Sykes Davies) was published in T. S. Eliot’s journal Criterion.3 Lucretius’ revaluation this century parallels that of Donne and the Metaphysicals as recuperated by Pound and Eliot. Lucretius’ metaphors, as David West showed in his brilliant little study The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius,4 are sharp and complex, though they have not always been well dealt with by his translators and commentators. But metaphors and models such as the atoms as ‘seeds’ have become in recent years a central concern of scientists and philosophers as well, and there are obvious parallels between a poet’s concern with the concrete specifics of language and the Epicurean call to pay attention to the ‘first image’ associated with each word. This is one aspect of a general call to look at the world ‘before our eyes’ which again can be seen as simultaneously a poet’s interest in evocative description and a scientist’s concern with the empirical basis of hypotheses about the unseen. ‘Look and think’ is an injunction both can share. Another aspect of this is the extensive use, especially in the first part of the poem, of the argument-form known as modus tollendo tollens or ‘denying the consequent’, whose form is:

  If P, then Q (e.g. ‘If there is no void, there is no motion’)

  But not Q (‘But (we can see that) it is not the case that there is no motion’);

  Therefore not P (‘Therefore it is not the case that there is no void’).

  The process of refuting hypotheses about the unknown by reference to observed reality was known to the Epicureans as ‘witnessing against’: it is the basic argument form of science, which formulates hypotheses and attempts to refute them with empirical data. But the appeal to empirical reality often contained in the second premiss—‘but you can see that this consequence cannot be true’—is also a key poetic feature of On the Nature of the Universe. On the one hand, the descriptions of the world as it is serve constantly to ground readers in lived reality, bring them back to the way things are, the ordinary and comprehensible life that we live before we begin to be assailed by philosophical doubts. On the other, the descriptions of the world as it is figured by the opponents play a major part in what has always been seen as a strong satirical element in the poem, mocking the delusions of the unphilosophic, as in the very first argument:

  For if things came out of nothing, all kinds of things

  Could be produced from all things. Nothing would need a seed.

  Men could arise from the sea, and scaly fish

  From earth, and birds hatch in the sky.

  Cattle and farm animals and wild beasts of every kind

  Would fill alike farmlands and wilderness,

  Breed all mixed up, all origins confused.

  Nor could the fruits stay constant on the trees,

  But all would change, all would bear everything.

  (1. 159–66)

  The satirical edge to the poem goes deeper than this, however. Epicureanism is in one sense a negative philosophy, in that the emphasis falls on removing the confusions and delusions of unphilosophic humanity, all the false opinions that prevent human beings from being happy. Its central metaphors are of purging and liberating, freeing people from complex accretions of popular belief: its positive content is much simpler, to live a natural life listening to the voice of the body, ‘not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold…’. It shares this stance of heroic removal of superstition and nonsense with much of the rhetoric of modern science, with its implicit or explicit role of sweeping away humbug and recalling us to the plain and simple facts. This Baconian project was famously celebrated in the poem Abraham Cowley wrote ‘To the Royal Society’ on its foundation:

  Some few exalted Spirits this latter age has shown,

  That labour’d to assert the Liberty

  (From Guardians who were now Usurpers grown)

  Of this old Minor still, Captiv’d Philosophy;

  But ’twas rebellion call’d to fight

  For such a long-oppressed Right.

  Bacon at last, a mighty Man arose

  Whom a wise King and Nature chose

  Lord Chancellor of both their Lawes,

  And boldly undertook the injur’d pupils cause.

  Authority, which did a Body boast,

  Though ’twas but air condens’d and stalk’d about,

  Like some old Giant’s more Gigantic Ghost,

  To terrifie the Learned Rout

  With the plain Magick of true Reason’s Light,

  He chac’d out of our sight,

  Nor suffer’d Living men to be misled

  By the vain shadows of the Dead:

  To graves, from whence it rose, the conquer’d Phantome fled;

  He broke that Monstrous God which stood

  In midst of th’Orchard, and the whole did claim,

  Which with a useless Sith of Wood,

  And something else not worth a name,

  (Both vast for shew, yet neither fit

  Or to defend or to Beget;

  Ridiculous and Senceless Terrors!) made

  Children and superstitious Men afraid.

  The Orchard’s open now, and free;

  Bacon has broke that Scar-crow Deitie.

  Cowley’s praise of Bacon is based on Lucretius’ praise of Epicurus in 1. 62–79:

  When human life lay foul for all to see

  Upon the earth, crushed by the burden of religion,

  Religion which from heaven’s firmament

  Displayed its face, its ghastly countenance,


  Lowering above mankind, the first who dared

  Raise mortal eyes against it, first to take

  His stand against it, was a man of Greece.

  He was not cowed by fables of the gods

  Or thunderbolts or heaven’s threatening roar,

  But they the more spurred on his ardent soul

  Yearning to be the first to break apart

  The bolts of nature’s gates and throw them open.

  The heroism of this revolt in the name of earth and humanity against the empty tyranny of the gods goes closely in On the Nature of the Universe with Lucretius’ poetic empiricism, which constantly recalls us from the mists and darkness of false belief to the plain light of scientific reasoning. Poet and philosopher/scientist unite in inviting us simply to use our eyes and see the world for what it is, to see through the ‘words | Of terror from the priests’ (1. 103). It is the enlightenment rhetoric of a Voltaire, echoed in modern times by scientists like Richard Dawkins: a recall from flights of fancy to what Epicurus called ‘sober reckoning’, to the nature of things.

  And yet the very terms in which this revolt is celebrated so powerfully must give us pause for thought. What attracts us to the assault on myth in On the Nature of the Universe, the great Enlightenment project of freeing humanity from delusion, attracts because of its own mythical form: at its heart are those images of Nature unchained, of the hero Epicurus challenging heaven and bringing back victory over it.

  The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains

  Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man

  Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,

  Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king

  Over himself…

  as the Platonist Shelley put it in a passage of Prometheus Unbound full of Lucretian echoes. This sort of rhetoric is not sober reckoning, but an inspiring call to liberation whose efficacy depends on means denied by the scientism it champions. Epicurus said that the only virtue of style was clarity, and the rhetoric of On the Nature of the Universe endorses this view of language as ideally a transparent window onto reality. If we can but drain language of its false accretions and get back to the plain sense of words, then we can have access to the way things are. But the poem does not just tell it as it is, but constructs a complex world of images and metaphors which refutes this naïve view of language as merely a window on truth. What we buy into when we endorse this grand vision of the triumph of reason is a construction in language whose appeal is entirely due to its linguistic richness—the linguistic richness that ironically the underlying theory cannot accommodate. On the Nature of the Universe is a complex statement of the simplicity of things, and the tension between those two drives is not—and cannot be—resolved within the poem.