On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics) (4 page)

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 counter-factual 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:

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: