On Lucretius
The Second Best Epicurean of All Time
After Epicurus himself, the most significant Epicurean scholar has to be Lucretius.
After Epicurus died, the movement that he began was carried on and spread across the Greek-speaking world. The school that he founded was passed down in an unbroken succession for more than two-hundred years. Lucretius wasn’t one of these leaders. He wasn’t a student either. He never studied at the Garden, probably never visited Athens and was not even part of an Epicurean community, according to Epicurean scholar Diskin Clay in his book Lucretius and Epicurus.
We know almost nothing about him except that he was a Roman poet named Titus Lucretius Carus who was thought to have been born in 94 BC, several centuries after Epicurus. The Lucretii were wealthy Roman patricians, but it was also common for slaves to take the name of the noble house that they served, and we don’t have any biographical details to go on besides the name.
Lucretius reportedly went insane and took his own life tragically, although as Stephen Greenblatt points out the account that claims this came from Saint Jerome who not only was in no position to know the details of Epicurus’s life since they lived hundreds of years apart and had ample to reason to lie since Jerome was a Christian aesthetic who would have despised everything Lucretius and Epicurus stood for.
So, what made Lucretius so special? Why was he the one to make his mark on Epicurean scholarship in a way that no one else has before or since? Well, being a poet, Lucretius wrote. De Rerum Natura encapsulated the Epicurean worldview in one of the first and arguably greatest ever works of Latin literature.
By the time of Lucretius’s birth, the Greeks were no longer the pre-eminent civilization in the Mediterranean. The Romans dominated the Macedonians, who had been hegemons of the Greek-speaking world. Over time, the rough Romans began to imitate cultural forms of which the Greeks were the originators and clear masters. Many educated Romans spoke Greek in order to read the works of the great poets and philosophers. But the Latin language had a conspicuous absence of great artistic achievements. That is, until De Rerum Natura.
While there was no such thing as “publishing” in the sense that we know it, the six volume poem was an immediate sensation among Romans who immediately hailed it as a work of unparalleled aesthetic quality. Even Cicero, the Roman senator and statesman, praised it as a genius artistic achievement. This really was significant because Cicero was no fan of Epicurus or his philosophy. What struck Cicero was the fact that a poem which was meant to transmit weighty ideas could also have such beauty and richness. It’s essentially a science textbook, but it features odes to Venus and
It was the beauty of Lucretius’s words that allowed him to transmit Epicurus’s ideas into a new form. Epicurus was already widely known in the world that Lucretius grew up in and he had tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers across the Mediterranean. But De Rerum Natura allowed Romans and other Latin speakers who couldn’t speak Greek access to Epicurus’s ideas about natural philosophy.
The true significance of the work, though, and the reason why Lucretius enjoys a status second only to Epicurus among Epicureans is the fact that his great masterwork survived. Unlike the works of Epicurus, of which only a few fragments survive, De Rerum Natura was recovered completely. Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of how this happened in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.
If you missed it, The Swerve won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and it’s absolutely worth the read even for someone without much interest in Epicurus. To make a long story short, the recovery of De Rerum Natura helped to reintroduce Europe to Epicurean ideas after centuries of suppression by the Catholic Church. The great Enlightenment figures who would come to admire Epicurus, like Hobbes, Jefferson and Darwin did so by way of Lucretius’s poem.
De Rerum Natura was republished by Penguin under the title On the Nature of Things and is available to read in English. Probably, though, you won’t find it worth reading from cover to cover. I haven’t, and I write a blog on Epicurus.
The reason is that the poem is devoted to Epicurus’s natural philosophy, rather than his ethics. And the ideas that Lucretius presents about the origins and structure of the natural world are wrong. Completely wrong. Laughable, actually, considering what we now know. Lucretius apparently didn’t innovate at all on the ideas of Epicurus, which for him must have been sacrosanct. So when Lucretius writes about animals emerging out of great wombs inside the earth and speculating that the sun is roughly the size we perceive it to be in the sky, we can conclude that these were Epicurus’s ideas too. And these ideas are outdated and so not all that interesting.
De Rerum Natura is interesting as a historical relic, but the ethical theories are only broadly sketched out and it’s not going to be edifying to anyone who is hungry for advice on how to live.
In spite of this, Lucretius still matters. He serves as a bridge between the world that Epicurus lived in and our own. He helped to keep the candle of Epicurean thought flickering through a time when it could have easily been extinguished. He put his heart and soul into a work that he hoped would be eternal and, happily, became so. All done for the sake of a man who Lucretius held as his personal savior.
As Lucretius wrote–
“When human life lay foul before our eyes, crushed to the dust beneath religion’s weight, who showed men first the way to rise above, if not the man of Greece? He was a god, a god indeed, who crushed beneath his feet all the vain fears of superstition and heaven’s threat, and showed us the path of true happiness."
Ειρήνη και Ασφάλεια
Peace and Safety