On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics) (2 page)

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

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:

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

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 community 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.

The original context of Epicurus’ teaching was in the communities he established, and he lays great stress on the practice of philosophical discussion and on the oral apprehension and memorization of his doctrines. This stance puts Epicurus in the line of moral educators whose archetype was Socrates and whose most conspicuous representatives in the generation before Epicurus had been Diogenes and Pyrrho, the effective founders of Cynicism and Scepticism respectively. Unlike these men, however, Epicurus wrote books, and a large number of them, on a variety of topics in physics and ethics (over forty titles are known). The most important work was the immensely long
On Nature
in thirty-seven books, whose title is recalled in Lucretius’ own title. This somewhat discursive work was written over a period of years, and because of its very length it must have been used mostly as a reference work by later Epicureans; luckily there were epitomes which gave the essentials of the philosophy in a shorter compass. Epicurus seems to have regarded it as highly important that such summaries should be available, and the only works of his that have come down to us whole rather than in fragmentary quotations or papyrus remains belong to this class. These works, preserved in the
Lives of the Philosophers
of Diogenes Laertius (?third century
AD
), are the
Letter to Herodotus
(a general epitome of the philosophy), the
Letter to Pythocles
(on the ‘phenomena of the sky’), the
Letter to Menoeceus
(on ethics), and the
Master Sayings
(a collection of forty maxims for living). Another collection of maxims, put together by a later Epicurean, was discovered in the nineteenth century, the so-called
Vatican Sayings
.

Later Epicureans also wrote extensively, from the time of the Master himself to the later Roman Empire, though in most cases we only have fragments. Lucretius’ contemporary Philodemus, active at Rome from the 80s
BC
, wrote a large number of works, extensive fragments of which
were found in the so-called ‘Villa of the Papyri’ in Herculaneum (Ercolano), near Naples, at the end of the eighteenth century (a fragment of Lucretius has recently been identified amongst the same collection). The most eloquent memorial of all, however, is perhaps a huge inscription put up in the second century
AD
in the centre of Oenoanda (in Lycia, now southern Turkey) by one Diogenes. One of the largest Greek inscriptions known, it gives a full exposition of Epicureanism in several separate treatises. A passage near its beginning eloquently attests to the continuing attraction of the Epicurean way, and why figures such as Diogenes and Lucretius felt it important to try to save their fellow human beings:

Having already reached the sunset of my life (being almost on the verge of departure from the world on account of old age), I wanted, before being overtaken by death, to compose a [fine] anthem [to celebrate the] fullness [of pleasure] and to help those who are well-constituted. Now if only one person or two or three or four or five or six or any larger number you choose, sir, provided that it is not very large, were in a bad predicament, I should address them individually and do all in my power to give them the best advice. But, as I have said before, the majority of people suffer from a common disease, as in a plague, with their false notions about things, and their number is increasing (for in mutual emulation they catch the disease from one another, like sheep); moreover, [it is] right to help [also] generations to come (for they belong to us, though they are still unborn); and, besides, love of humanity prompts us to aid also the foreigners who come here. Now, since the remedies of the inscription reach a larger number of people, I wished to use this stoa to advertise publicly the [medicines] that bring salvation. These medicines we have put [fully] to the test; for we have dispelled the fears [that grip] us without justification, and, as for pains, those that are groundless we have completely excised, while those that are natural we have reduced to an absolute minimum, making their magnitude minute. (fr. 3, trans. M. F. Smith)

In setting out the Master’s philosophy, then, Lucretius places himself in a long line of Epicureans, though he is unique in doing so extensively in verse. Much of the poem is concerned with what we would call physical science, but the reason for this focus is that the Epicureans believed that it was vital to understand the basic principles of the universe if one was not to have ‘false opinions’ about the world which would wreck one’s happiness. Epicurus aimed to give men peace of mind, what he called
ataraxia
, ‘being undisturbed’; the metaphysics, the physics, the epistemology, the psychology, the theology were all designed to provide this peace. There was no room for the high Platonic or Stoic ideal of Tennyson’s
Ulysses
, ‘to follow knowledge like a sinking star | beyond the
utmost reach of human thought’; for Epicurus, we need knowledge only because without it we are unhappy: