Chapter XI

Lucretius.—Personal Characteristics.

It is in keeping with the isolated and independent position which Lucretius occupies in literature, that so little is known of his life. The two kinds of information available for literary biography,—that afforded by the author himself, and that derived from contemporaries, or from later writers who had access to contemporary testimony,—almost entirely fail us in his case. The form of poetry adopted by him prevented his speaking of himself and telling his own history, as Catullus, Horace, Ovid, etc., have done in their lyrical, elegiac, and familiar writings. His work appears to have been first published after his death: nor is there any reason to believe that he attracted the attention of the world in his lifetime. To judge from the silence of his contemporaries, and from the attitude of mind indicated in his poem, the words 'moriens natusque fefellit' might almost be written as his epitaph. Had he been prominent in the social or literary circles of Rome during the years in which he was engaged on the composition of his poem, some traces of him must have been found in the correspondence of Cicero or in the poems of Catullus, which bring the personal life of those years so close to modern readers. It is thus impossible to ascertain on what original authority the sole traditional account of him preserved in the Chronicle of Jerome was based. That account, like similar notices of other Roman writers, came to Jerome in all probability from the lost work of Suetonius, 'de viris illustribus.' But as to the channels through which it passed to Suetonius, we have no information.

But is this story of the poet's liability to fits of derangement, of the cause assigned for these, of his suicide, and of the correction of his poem by Cicero, to be accepted as a meagre and, perhaps, distorted account of certain facts in his history transmitted through some trustworthy channels, or is it to be rejected as an idle fiction which may have assumed shape before the time of Suetonius, and been accepted by him on no other evidence than that of a vague tradition? Though no certain answer can be given to this question, yet some reasons may be assigned for according a hesitating acceptance to the main outlines of the story, or at least for not rejecting it as a transparent fiction.

Thus, while the statement of Jerome admits neither of verification nor refutation, it may be admitted that there are indications in the poem of a great tension of mind, of an extreme vividness of sensibility, of an indifference to life, and, in the later books, of some failure in the power of organising his materials, which incline us rather to accept the story as a meagre and distorted record of tragical events in the poet's life, than as a literary myth which took shape out of the feelings excited by the poem in a later age. Yet this qualified acquiescence in the tradition does not involve the belief that any considerable portion of the poem was written 'per intervalla insaniae,' or that the disorder from which the poet suffered was actually the effect of a love-philtre.

This is all the direct external evidence available for the personal history of Lucretius. It is remarkable, when compared with the information given in his other notices, that the record of Jerome does not even mention the poet's birth-place. This may be explained on the supposition either that the authorities followed by Jerome knew very little about him, or that, if he were born at Rome, there would not be the same motive for giving prominence to the place of his birth, as in the case of poets and men of letters who brought honour to the less famous districts of Italy. While Lucretius applies the word patria to the Roman State ('patriai tempore iniquo'), and the adjective patrius to the Latin language, these words are used by other Roman poets,—Ennius and Virgil for instance,—in reference to their own provincial homes. The Gentile name Lucretius was one eminently Roman, nor is there ground for believing that, like the equally ancient and noble name borne by the other great poet of the age, it had become common in other parts of Italy. The name suggests the inference that Lucretius was descended from one of the most ancient patrician houses of Rome, but one, as is pointed out by Mr. Munro, more famous in the legendary than in the later annals of the Republic. Some members of the same house are mentioned in the letters of Cicero among the partisans of Pompey: and possibly the Lucretius Ofella, who was one of the victims of Sulla's tyranny, may have been connected with the poet. As the position indicated by the whole tone of the poem is that of a man living in easy circumstances, and of one, who, though repelled by it, was yet familiar with the life of pleasure and luxury, he must have belonged either to a senatorian family, or to one of the richer equestrian families, the members of which, if not engaged in financial and commercial affairs, often lived the life of country gentlemen on their estates and employed their leisure in the cultivation of literature. The tone of the dedication to Memmius, a member of a noble plebeian house, and of the occasional addresses to him in the body of the poem, is not that of a client to a patron, but of an equal to an equal:—

were written, even Cicero regarded him as one of the bulwarks of the senatorian cause against Clodius and his influential supporters. And neither the scandal of his private nor of his public life prevented his being in later years among the orator's correspondents.

This relation to Memmius is the only additional fact which an examination of the poem brings into light. Nothing is learned from it of the poet's parentage, his education, his favourite places of residence, of his career, of his good or evil fortune. There were eminent Epicurean teachers at Athens and Rome (Patro, Phaedrus, Philodemus, etc.) during his youth and manhood, but it is useless to ask what influence of teachers or personal experience induced him to become so passionate a devotee of the doctrines of Epicurus. Yet though no direct reference to his circumstances is found in his writings, we may yet mark indirect traces of the impression produced upon him by the age in which his youth and manhood were passed; we seem to catch some glimpses of his habitual pursuits and tastes, to gain some real insight into his being, to apprehend the attitude in which he stood to the great teachers of the past, and to know the man by knowing the objects in life which most deeply interested him. Nothing, we may well believe, was further from his wish or intention than to leave behind him any record of himself. No Roman poet has so entirely sunk himself and the remembrance of his own fortunes in absorption in his subject. But his strong personal force and individuality have penetrated deeply into all his representation, his reasoning, and his exhortation. From the beginning to the end of the poem we feel that we are listening to a living voice speaking to us with the direct impressiveness of personal experience and conviction. No writer ever used words more clearly or more sincerely: no one shows a greater scorn for the rhetorical artifices which disguise the lack of meaning or insinuate a false conclusion by fine-sounding phrases:—

Quae belle tangere possunt

The union of an original and independent personality with the utmost sincerity of thought and speech is a characteristic in which Lucretius resembles Thucydides. It is this which gives to the works of both, notwithstanding their studied self-suppression, the vivid interest of a direct personal revelation.

The tone of many passages in the poem clearly indicates that Lucretius, though taking no personal part in the active politics of his age, was profoundly moved by the effects which they produced on human happiness and character. Thus the lines at iii. 70-74—

and (at vi. 469) where he notices the more powerful action of the wind on the movements of the clouds at high altitudes—

enables us to think of him as, although isolated in his thoughts from other men, yet not separated from them in the daily intercourse of life by any unsocial austerity. Such separation would have been quite opposed both to the teaching and the example of his master. Some remembrance of active adventure is suggested by illustrations of his philosophy drawn from the experience of a sea-voyage (iv. 387, etc., 432), of riding through a rapid stream (iv. 420), of watching the action of dogs tracking their game through woods and over mountains (i. 404), or renewing the memories of the chase in their dreams (v. 991, etc.). The lines (at ii. 40, etc., and 323, etc.) show that his imagination had been moved by witnessing the evolutions of armies, not indeed in actual warfare, but in the pomp and pageantry of martial spectacles,—'belli simulacra cientes.' These and many other indirect indications afford some glimpses of his habitual manner of life and of the pursuits that gave him most lively pleasure: but they do not give us any special knowledge of the particular districts of Italy in which he lived, or of the scenes in foreign lands which he may have visited. The poem tells us nothing immediately of the trials or passions of his life, though of both he seems to bear the scars. But as passages in which he reveals the deep secrets of human passion and suffering prove him to have been a man of strong, ardent, and vividly susceptible temperament, so the numerous illustrations drawn from the repertory of his personal observation tell of an eye trained to take delight in the outward face of Nature as well as of a mind unwearied in its search into her hidden laws. One great charm of his work is that it breathes of the open air more than of the library. If, in dealing with the problems of human life, his strain—

yet to him too might be applied the lines written of one who, though not comparable to him in intellectual and imaginative power, yet, in his spiritual isolation from the world, seems almost like his modern counterpart—

'And thou hast pleasures too to share

With those who come to thee,

Balms floating on thy mountain air

Among his personal characteristics none is more prominent than his consciousness both of the greatness of the work on which he was engaged, and of his own power to cope with it. The passage in which his high self-confidence is most powerfully proclaimed (i. 920, etc.) has been imitated both by Virgil and Milton. The sense of novelty, adventure, and high aspiration expressed in the lines—

moved Virgil less powerfully in speaking of his humbler theme—

and inspired the English poet in his great invocation:—

The sense of difficulty and the joy of overcoming it meet us with a keen bracing effect in many passages of the poem. He speaks disdainfully of those enquirers who fall into error by shrinking from the more adventurous paths that lead to truth—

Without disowning the passion for fame,—'laudis spes magna,' so powerful an incentive to the Roman temperament,—he is more inspired and supported in his arduous task by 'the sweet love of the Muses.' The delight in the exercise of his art and the joyful energy sustained through the long processes of gathering and arranging his materials appear in such passages as iii. 419-20:—

and again at ii. 730—

The thoroughness and devotion of a student tell their own tale in such expressions as the 'studio disposta fideli,' and the 'noctes vigilare serenas' in the dedication to Memmius, and in the more enthusiastic acknowledgment of the source from which he drew his philosophy at iii. 29, etc.—

The absorbing interest with which he carried on the work of enquiry and of composition appears in illustrations of his argument drawn from his own pursuits; as where (ii. 979) in arguing that, if the atoms have the properties of sense, those of which man is compounded must have the intellectual attributes of man, he says,—

Multaque de rerum mixtura dicere callent

and, again (at iv. 969), in explaining how men in their dreams seem to carry on the pursuits to which they are most devoted, how lawyers seem to plead their causes, generals to fight their battles over again, sailors to contend with the elements, he adds these lines:—

Nos agere hoc autem et naturam quaerere rerum

His frequent use of the sacrificial phrase 'Hoc age,' affords evidence of the religious earnestness with which he had devoted himself to his task.

The feeling animating him through all his great adventure,—through the wastest flats as well as the most commanding heights over which it leads him,—is something different from the delight of a poet in his art, of a scholar in his books, of a philosopher in his thought, of a naturalist in his observation. All of these modes of feeling are combined with the passion of his whole moral and intellectual being, aroused by the contemplation of the greatest of all themes—'maiestas cognita rerum'—and concentrated on the greatest of practical ends, the emancipation and elevation of human life. The life of contemplation which he alone among the Romans deliberately chose and realised he carried out with Roman energy and fortitude. It was with him no life of indolent musing, but one of thought and study, varied and braced by original observation. It was a life, also, of strenuous literary effort employed in giving clearness to obscure materials, and in eliciting poetical charm from a language to which the musical cadences of verse had been hitherto almost unknown. Above all, it was the life of one who, while feeling the spell of Nature more profoundly than any poet who had gone before him, did not in that new rapture forget

The traditional opposition between Democritus and Heraclitus lived after them. Adherence to the doctrine of 'atoms and the void,' and to that of 'the pure fiery element,' became the symbol of a radical divergence in the whole view of human life.

There was a truer affinity of nature between Lucretius and another philosopher whom he names with the warmest feelings of love and veneration—Empedocles of Agrigentum—the most famous of the early physiological poets of Greece. He flourished during the fifth century b.c., and was the author of a didactic poem on Nature, of which some fragments still remain, sufficient to indicate the nature of the work and the character of the man. These fragments prove that Lucretius had carefully studied the older poem, and adopted it as his model in using a poetical form and diction to expound his philosophical system. He declares, indeed, his opposition to the doctrine of Empedocles, which traced the origin of all things to four original elements; but he adopted into his own system many both of his expressions and of his philosophical ideas. The line in which the Roman poet enunciates his first principle,—

was obviously taken from the lines of the old poem περὶ φύσεως—

Speaking of Sicily as a rich and wonderful land, Lucretius pays his tribute of love and admiration to his illustrious predecessor in these lines,—

Nil tamen hoc habuisse viro praeclarius in se

Nec sanctum magis et mirum carumque videtur.

Carmina quin etiam divini pectoris eius

Vociferantur et exponunt praeclara reperta,

There is a close agreement between the two poetical philosophers in their imaginative mode of conceiving Nature. They both represented the principle of beauty and life in the universe under the symbol of the Goddess of Love—'Κύπρι βασίλεια'; 'alma Venus, genetrix.' They both explain the unceasing process of decay and renovation in the world by an image drawn from the most impressive spectacle of human life—a mighty battle, waged through all time between opposing forces. The burden and the mystery of life seem to weigh heavily on both, and to mould their very language to a deep, monotonous solemnity of tone. But along with this affinity of temperament there is also a marked difference in their modes of thought and feeling. The view of Nature in the philosophy of Empedocles appears to be just emerging out of the anthropomorphic fancies of an earlier time: the first rays of knowledge are seen trying to pierce through the clouds of the dawn of enquiry: the dreams and sorrows of religious mysticism accompany the awakened energies of the reason. His mournful tone is the voice of the intellectual spirit lamenting its former home, and baffled in its eager desire to comprehend 'the whole.' Lucretius, on the other hand, saw the outward world as it looks in the light of day, neither glorified by the mystic colours of religion, nor concealed by the shadows of mythology. He was moved neither by the passionate longing of the soul, nor by the 'divine despair' of the intellect: but he felt profoundly the sorrows of the heart, and was weighed down by the ever-present consciousness of the misery and wretchedness in the world. The complaint of the first is one which has been uttered from time to time by some solitary thinker in modern as in ancient days:—

παῦρον δὲ ζωῆς ἀβίου μέρος ἀθρήσαντες

ὡκύμοροι, καπνοῖο δίκην ἀρθέντες ἀπέπταν,

αὐτὸ μόνον πεισθέντες, ὅτῳ προσέκυρσεν ἕκαστος,

πάντοσ' ἐλαυνόμενοι· τὸ δ' οὖλον ἐπεύχεται εὑρεῖν

αὔτως. οὔτ' ἐπιδερκτὰ τάδ' ἀνδράσιν οὔτ' ἐπάκουστα

The other gives a real and expressive utterance to that 'thought of inexhaustible melancholy,' which has weighed on every human heart:—

Miscetur funere vagor

Quem pueri tollunt visentis luminis oras:

Nec nox ulla diem neque noctem aurora secutast

Quae non audierit mixtos vagitibus aegris

Of other Greek authors, Homer and Euripides are those of whom we find most traces in the poem. To the first he awards a high pre-eminence above all other poets,—

Adde repertores doctrinarum atque leporum,

Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus

multa munita virum vi; caerula caeli Templa; Acherusia templa; luminis oras; famul infimus; induperator; Graius homo, etc.—

have a clear ring of the old poet. The few allusions to Roman history in the poem, as, for instance, the line—

the specification at iii. 833 of the second Punic War as a momentous crisis in human affairs,—the description at v. 1226 of a great naval disaster, such as happened in the first Punic War—the introduction there of elephants into the picture of the pomp and circumstance of war,—suggest the inference that, just as events and personages of the earlier history of England live in the imaginations of many English readers from their representation in the historical plays of Shakspeare, so the past history of his country lived for Lucretius in the representation of Ennius. But of the national pride by which the older poet was animated, the work of Lucretius bears only scanty traces. The feeling which moved him to identify the puissant energy pervading the universe with 'the mother of the Aeneadae,' and the motive of his prayer for peace addressed to that Power,—

seem indeed to spring from sources of patriotic affection, perhaps all the deeper because not too loudly proclaimed. But in the body of the poem his illustrations are taken as frequently from Greek as from Roman story, from the strangeness of foreign lands as from the beauty of Italian scenes. The Georgics of Virgil, in the whole conception of Nature as a living power, and in many special features, owe much to the imaginative thought of Lucretius; but nothing can be more unlike the spirit of the older poet than the episodes in which Virgil pours forth all his Roman feeling and his love of Italy. The height from which Lucretius contemplates all human history, as 'a procession of the nations handing on the torch of life from one to another,' is wide apart from that from which Virgil beholds all the nations of the world doing homage to the majesty of Rome. The poem of Lucretius breathes the spirit of a man, apparently indifferent to the ordinary sources of pleasure and of pride among his countrymen. Living in an era, the most momentous in its action on the future history of the world, he was only repelled by its turbulent activity. The contemplation of the infinite and eternal mass and order of Nature made the issues of that age and the imperial greatness of his country appear to him as transient as the events of the old Trojan and Theban wars. To him, as to the modern poet, whose imagination most nearly resembles his, the thought of more enduring things had