On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics) (65 page)

82–90
For men who have been well taught about the gods…
: repeated at 6. 58–66.

83
may wonder still
: a primary aim of Lucretius in both
Book 5
and
Book 6
is to remove any sense of wonder at phenomena of the world which might lead to religious belief. Such attacks on wonder go back to Democritus (fr. A169, B4).

87
cruel masters
: contrast 2. 1091.

90
deep-set boundary stone
: see above on 1. 77.

95
One day will give to destruction
: Aristotle had held that the world was uncreated and everlasting, but both Stoics and Epicureans believed in its destruction, though for the Stoics it was then reborn to repeat the same cycle of events. Cf. 2. 1105 ff.

100
some unaccustomed thing
: Lucretius once more perverts to his own ends a religious statement: these lines translate a fragment of Empedocles (B133) dealing with the difficulty of apprehending god.

110
oracles
: cf. 1. 738 ff. (of Empedocles).

117
Men should, like giants, suffer punishment
: see above on 1. 67 for the imagery of the battle of gods and giants: after their defeat, the giants were imprisoned in various ways by Zeus. Both Plato (
Sophist
246a) and Aristotle (
On Philosophy
fr. 18) had cast the early atomists as giants, because they were materialists grasping things with their hands and threatening with their reason the stability of the world.

128–41
There can be no trees in the sky
: 128–41 repeat 3. 784–97, with small changes. There the lines were part of the argument against the survival of the soul outside the body: throughout this passage the similarities and differences between the world-system and the human body play an important role.

148
the nature of the gods
: the exact nature of the Epicurean gods is controversial amongst scholars, but what Lucretius says here about their ‘dwelling places’ (cf. 3. 18 ff.) fits what we are told elsewhere about their living in the so-called
metakosmia
or
intermundia
, Tennyson’s ‘lucid interspace of world and world’ (
Lucretius
: cf. Epicurus,
Letter to Pythocles
89, fr. 359, Cicero,
On Ends
1. 75,
On the Nature of the Gods
1. 18). Philodemus’ fragmentary treatise
On the Gods
goes into more detail about their lives. At any rate it is clear that the gods are far from being able to be concerned with our world.

155
later at some length
: not in the extant
On the Nature of the Universe
, but vague forward references like this are not uncommon as devices for bringing a subject to a close: cf. e.g. Plato,
Timaeus
50c6–7, Velleius Paterculus (first century
AD
),
Roman History
2. 96. 3, Seneca,
Natural Questions
2. 7. 2.

156
for the sake of men
: see above on 2. 174 ff., and especially Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 20.

168
what new thing
: if the gods are perfectly happy, there is no reason for them to want to change their previous life by creating the world. The problems for the divine decision to create the world generated by the principle of sufficient reason (why at one time rather than another if there was no change) were well known to Christian theologians, who faced them by moving their god outside time: cf. Augustine,
Confessions
11. 13.

182
concept of mankind
: to be able to speak or act, we need a concept (Greek
prolepsis
, Latin
notities
) of what we intend to say or do, but there is nowhere where the gods could have obtained such a concept (cf. 5. 1046 ff., arguing against human invention of language).

195–9
But even if I had no knowledge of atoms…
: 195–9 repeat 2. 177–81 and then develop the argument with further examples.

204
Nearly two thirds
: on the commonest version of the theory of the ‘zones’ of the world (
zone
in Greek means ‘belt’: see especially Aristotle,
Meteorologica
362
^b
5 ff., Eratosthenes (third–second century
BC
),
Hermes
fr. 15, Virgil,
Georgics
1. 231–9), there were two temperate zones surrounding an uninhabitable equatorial torrid zone and surrounded by two frozen zones at the extremes. Cf. Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 21.

218
the wild beasts’ fearsome breed
: cf. Cicero,
Academica
2. 120.

222–34
the child, like sailor cast ashore…
: famously translated by Dryden and imitated by Wordsworth,
To ——, Upon the Birth of her First-Born Child
. Cf. e.g. the
Axiochus
attributed to Plato 366d, Cicero,
On the Republic
3. 1, Seneca,
Letters
102. 26.

226
fills the place with cries
: Epicurus used the crying of babies at birth as part of the ‘cradle’ argument that humans naturally flee pain, explaining it as a reaction to cold air (cf. Sextus Empiricus,
Against the Professors
11. 96, Epicurus fr. 398). Other philosophers offered different explanations: the issue was connected with that of when the baby became alive (cf. e.g. Plutarch,
On Stoic Contradictions
1052, Tertullian (second–third century
AD
),
On the Soul
25. 2). Epicurus perverts to his own purpose Empedocles fr. B118, ‘I wept and wailed on seeing an unfamiliar place’: Lucretius restores the tone of the original, adding the image of the shore of life (from Empedocles fr. B20. 5).

259
The mother of all
: see above on 2. 598 ff.

308
the shrines and images | Of gods
: as usual, Lucretius insinuates an explicit point against religion.

318–19
that which… | Holds the whole earth in its embrace
: i.e. the sky. Lucretius imitates a philosophical fragment (86 ff.) of the tragedy
Chryses
by Pacuvius (first century
BC
: see above on 3. 881 ff.).

326
Before the Theban war and doom of Troy
: cf. Horace,
Odes
4. 9. 25, ‘many brave men lived before Agamemnon… ’. The Theban story of the Seven against Thebes was first told in a lost epic
Thebais
(perhaps seventh century
BC
): for the Trojan war as the limit of human knowledge, see e.g. Diodorus Siculus 1. 5. 1 ff.

330
the world is young and new
: contrast 2. 1150 ff.

337
the very first
: not strictly true—Cicero refers to two Latin (prose?) Epicurean writers, C. Amafinius (
Tusculan Disputations
4. 6–7) and T. Catius (
Letters to his Friends
15. 16), who were probably earlier than Lucretius.

339
perished in burning fire
: theories of periodic cataclysmic destruction were used by Plato (
Timaeus
22c—with the same three types of catastrophe,
Statesman
269c) and Aristotle (
Meteorologica
352
^a
,
Politics
1269
^a
5) to explain the apparent youth of human culture despite the eternity of the world, while the Stoics believed in a deterministic cycle of destruction and rebirth.

351–63
Few things there are that last eternally…
: see above on 3.806–10.

381
In most unrighteous war
: the metaphorical complex of the war of the elements is an old one (cf. e.g. Heraclitus fr. B80, Empedocles fr. B115) but was particularly congenial to the Epicureans, since it reinforced their view of the instability of the world. Lucretius uses it frequently of the atoms.

397
Phaethon
: the story of Phaethon disastrously attempting to drive the chariot of his father the sun, already allegorized by Plato (
Timaeus
22c), was later interpreted in terms of the Stoic periodic destruction by fire (in Greek
ekpyrosis
), although not certainly before Lucretius: cf. Manilius,
Astronomica
(first century
BC
–first century
AD
) 1. 735 ff., 4. 831 ff., Dio Chrysostom (first century
AD
),
Speeches
36. 48.

412
so legend tells
: the story of the flood, from which only Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha survived to begin again the human race.

419
not by design or intelligence
: 5. 419–23 are repeated from 1. 1021–5.

436
strange storm and surging mighty mass
: for the creation of the world from the atomic storm or whirl, cf. Epicurus,
Letter to Pythocles
88 ff., ‘Aetius’ 1. 4. 1 ff., Epicurus fr. 308.

487
salt sweat
: the sea as the ‘sweat’ of the earth is Empedoclean (fr. B. 55, cf. Aristotle,
Meteorologica
353
^b
).

507
Pontus
: the Black Sea (Pontus) was believed to flow in one direction only, into the sea of Marmara (Propontis), which joined it to the Aegean: cf. e.g. Seneca,
Natural Questions
4. 2. 29.

509
The causes of the motions of the stars
: Lucretius deals with the motions of the heavenly bodies in the context of their first emergence, because the nature of the explanations offered for these motions is connected with how they first came about.

528
In various worlds created in various ways
: while for the basic principles of Epicureanism only one account is possible, for many of the phenomena described in
Books 5
and
6
the Epicureans accepted the possibility of alternative explanations (the so-called
pleonachos tropos
, ‘mode of multiple explanations’: cf. 6. 703 ff., Epicurus,
Letter to Herodotus
79–80,
Epistle to Pythocles
86–7, Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 13). Since everything possible was held to be substantiated somewhere in the infinite universe, although only one explanation of a phenomenon might be true for our world, the other explanations would be valid for other worlds. Cf. 2. 1023 ff.

554
By common roots united
: cf. 3. 325 ff. of the union of soul and body.

564
The sun’s heat and its size
: the Epicureans notoriously held that the sun was no larger than it appeared: cf. e.g. Epicurus,
Letter to Pythocles
91 (and cf. Cicero,
On Ends
1. 20 etc.).

575
whether it shines with borrowed light
: see below on 705.

616
Sinks down to Capricorn in winter
: the arc that the sun appears to describe through the sky is nearest the horizon in winter and furthest from it in summer. Its highest points each day are all situated on a great circle through the celestial sphere known as the ecliptic. The belt of the sky 8 degrees either side of the ecliptic was divided into twelve regions (the zodiac), named from the principal constellations visible in them at night. The zodiac belt rotates around the earth, and within one year the sun appears to move at its highest point through all the constellations in turn. At the winter solstice, when the sun is moving nearest to the horizon, it moves through Capricorn, at the summer solstice it moves through Cancer. Lucretius attempts to offer possible explanations for the complexities caused by the fact that the sun and the zodiacal belt (and the moon) are moving at different rates. Cf. Epicurus,
Letter to Pythocles
93.

622
Democritus
: cf. fr. A39.

656
Matuta
: a Roman dawn goddess, linked to the Greek Leucothea (cf. Cicero,
Tusculan Disputations
1. 28,
On the Nature of the Gods
3. 48). She had a temple in the Forum Boarium at Rome.

663
from Ida’s mountain peaks
: for the story that the apparent creation of a new sun each day can be observed from Mt Ida in Phrygia (Turkey), see Diodorus Siculus,
Library of History
(first century
BC
) 17. 7. 5 ff., Pomponius Mela (first century
AD
) 1. 18. 94 ff., Euripides,
Troades
(415
BC
) 1066 ff.

669
At a fixed time
: the stress on the regularity and certainty of natural phenomena also has an anti-theological and ethical point. Far from being an argument for divine intervention in the world (the argument from design), it removes any necessity for divine action.

687–8
the two knotted circles of the year
: the ‘knot of the year’ is the point at which the sun’s daily course when it intersects the ecliptic is in line with the
celestial equator (cf. Aratus (third century
BC
),
Phainomena
245, Manilius 3. 622). The sun passes through this knot twice a year, at the spring and autumn equinoxes.

705
the moon
: that the moon reflected light from the sun was an early discovery of Greek philosophy (cf. especially Plato,
Cratylus
409a, Anaxagoras fr. B 18, etc.), but the Epicureans again preferred to suspend judgement (cf. Epicurus,
Letter to Pythocles
94 ff.). For the various theories, see ‘Aetius’ 2. 28.

727
the Babylonian Chaldees
: the doctrine is ascribed to the Babylonian priest Berosus, who wrote a
Babylonian History
dedicated to Antiochus I (ruled 281–261): cf. ‘Aetius’ 2. 28, Vitruvius (first century
BC
) 9. 2. It is unlikely that Epicurus himself mentioned Berosus’ doctrines.

737
Spring comes
: Lucretius’ picture here is one of the sources for Botticelli’s
Allegoria della Primavera
.

739
Zephyrs steps
: the divinity of the West Wind.

Flora
: an Italian goddess with temples on the Quirinal hill and near the Circus Maximus: cf. Ovid,
Fasti
5. 159 ff.

742
Aquilo
: the North Wind.

745
Volturnus
: the East-South-East Wind.

Auster
: the South Wind.