Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) (ca. 99– ca. 55 B.C.) poet. Encyclopedia of World Writers, Beginnings To 20th Century

Biographical information about Lucretius is scant,
untrustworthy, and inconsistent. The translator
and essayist St. JEROME wrote in the fourth century
that a love potion drove Lucretius mad, that he
composed his poetry in moments of clarity between
bouts of insanity, that his works were improved
on by CICERO, and that he committed
suicide. Jerome’s reportage should be approached
with some skepticism, however: As a doctor of the
Christian Church and the translator of the Old
Testament from Hebrew to Latin and the New Testament
into modern Latin, Jerome may have been
motivated to discredit a man who rebelled against
conventional religion.
It is known that Lucretius lived during the years
that saw the demise of the great Roman republic
at the hands of Julius CAESAR, accompanied by
rampant decadence, corruption, and conspiracy.
It is also known that he died when he was in his
40s, at the height of his poetic powers.
Further details of Lucretius’s life can be assumed
from fashions of the day or from details in
his writings. He was very well educated and well
read, with a fluency in both Greek and Latin. He
may have been well traveled, too; it is suggested he
had journeyed throughout Italy and to Greece,
Sicily, and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean
and southwest Asia. Although it is not
known whether Lucretius was of noble birth, he
was almost certainly integrated into aristocratic
society, as was the tendency for writers of note
during that era. Lucretius was familiar with the
pageantry, hustle, and glamour of city living, as
well as its well-designed public spaces and architectural
constructions.He also knew and loved the
recreational and sensuous pleasures the countryside
had to offer.
Critical Analysis
Scholar Olivia Coolidge states that De Rerum
Natura, Lucretius’s only known work, is “one of the
world’s great poems, magnificent in its courage,
and glorious in its feeling for nature.”Translated as
“On the Nature of Things,” or sometimes as “The
Way Things Are,” the poem is based on the beliefs
of the Greek philosopher EPICURUS and his followers.
The Epicureans believed that the world’s matter
is made up of atoms, that all knowledge is
derived from the senses, which “we trust, first, last,
and always” (De Rerum Natura, I.423), and that
pleasure is the supreme good.
Lucretius’s work, which he left unfinished, is
written in hexameter verse in six segments, or
books. As was the custom among the poets of his
day, Lucretius begins by invoking a goddess. This is
curious, however, given Lucretius’s (and the Epicureans’)
hostility toward religious tradition. Indeed,
we soon find him asserting, “religion has
prompted vile and vicious acts” (I.83), giving as
an example the commander in chief of the Greek
army who, according to legend, sacrificed his
daughter on the altar of the goddess Diana on the
eve of the Trojan War. (This tale is dramatized in
EURIPIDES’ tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis.)
Most of Book I of De Rerum Natura concerns
the theories of atoms, which Lucretius precedes
with an entreaty to his readers to keep an open
mind:
Now turn attentive ears and thoughtful
mind,
by trouble undistraught, to truth and
reason;
my gifts displayed for you in loyal love
you must not scorn before you grasp their
meaning.
For I shall tell you of the highest law
of heaven and god, and show you basic
substance,
whence nature creates all things and gives
them growth,
and whither again dissolves them at their
death.
“Matter,” I call it, and “creative bodies,”
and “seeds of things” . . . for with them
everything
begins.
(I.50–61)
Being is created out of matter, Lucretius states,
as a consequence of natural law, not by miracles
or divine intervention. The atoms that constitute
everything cannot be destroyed, only changed. Although
objects seem solid to us, they are actually
made up of widely dispersed, always moving
atoms. Differences in atomic density account for
differences in weight.Wherever atoms are absent,
there is void; these are the only two forms of matter.
Book II explains that not only is pleasure, or
mind-body harmony, the only true criterion of the
good, but also that nature wants it for us:
“[N]ature demands no favor but that pain / be
sundered from the flesh, that in the mind be a
sense of joy, unmixed with care and fear!”
(II.17–19) Wealth, status, and power cannot benefit
the soul unless they eliminate the fear of death,
and they do not; only human reason can do that.
Book II also discusses at greater length the ways in
which atoms travel and mutate and how different
shapes produce different physical sensations when
we perceive them through our senses.
The fear of death is the source of almost all
human ills, according to Book III, which undertakes
to dispel this fear. The soul is corporeal, made
of atoms like any limb or organ. The idea that the
immortal (soul) and mortal (physical body) can
coexist is nonsense. When the soul’s vessel, the
human body, dies, the soul ceases to exist. If the
soul dies, it cannot possibly suffer; so fear of death
is foolish. There is no afterlife, according to Lucretius,
and “Hell is right here [on earth], the work
of foolish men!” (III.1023) Therefore, superstitions
are a waste of time and prayers are a waste of
breath.
In Book IV, Lucretius explores the mechanics
of the senses and thought vis-à-vis atomic theory.
For instance, we are able to see because the images
release atoms that strike our eyes; sounds and
speech are matter and also cause hearing via physical
impact. Sounds must be matter, Lucretius argues,
because it is well known that “he who speaks
at length loses some weight”! (IV.541) Contrary to
popular belief, echoes are not caused by supernatural
beings, but rather occur when sound-matter
strikes a surface and is thrown back to the speaker.
The atoms that cause odors are languid—they do
not travel as far as sound and sight—and large, as
they do not readily penetrate walls. Lucretius goes
on to say that mistakes in sense perception occur
because the mind has reached an erroneous conclusion,
not because the organs of sense perception
are faulty.
Lucretius discusses astronomical and cosmological
matters in Book V. Earth came about due to
the forces inherent in natural law and had nothing
to do with the activities of any deities or divine beings.
The celestial bodies, the sea, and the land are
not made of godlike stuff, eternal and fixed; rather,
the earth as we know it is a combination of atoms
and void. In other words, matter cannot exist indefinitely
and will one day perish.
Lucretius then provides an anthropological account
of the increasing refinement of the human
race, concluding:
Navigation, agriculture, cities, laws
war, travel, clothing, and all such things else,
money, and life’s delights, from top to bottom,
poetry, painting, the cunning sculptor’s art,
the search, the trial and error of nimble minds
have taught us, inching forward, step by step.
Thus, step by step, time lays each fact before us,
and reason lifts it to the coasts of light;
for men saw one thing clarify another
till civilization reached its highest peak.
(VI.1448–1457)
Book VI acts as a summary of sorts in which
Lucretius recounts some of his previous insights.
His lyricism in this book is characteristic of the
work as a whole.
In the introduction to Lucretius (Basic Books,
1965), Donald R. Dudley states that Lucretius “is,
pre-eminently, the poet of the intelligible world,
of the processes which govern it, and of the intellect
by which these processes are revealed.” And,
according to translator Frank O.Copley,“Lucretius
saw into the hearts of individual men as they faced
the immediacies of their lives. But his sympathy
and understanding not of man, but of this man
and that man, not of mankind, but of people, was
hardly surpassed in antiquity, and perhaps has
never been equaled.”
English Versions of a Work by Lucretius
De Rerum Natura: The Poem on Nature. Translated by
C. H. Sisson. London: Routledge, 2003.
On the Nature of Things. Translated by W. E. Leonard.
Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2004.
Works about Lucretius
Campbell, Gordon. Lucretius on Creation and Evolution:
A Commentary on de Rerum Natura
5.772–1104. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003.
Kennedy,Duncan F. Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and
the Textualization of Nature. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2002.

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