On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics) (70 page)

1139
Laid waste the fields
: the plague is figured as an invading army (like that of the Spartans), pillaging the countryside, cutting communications with the city, and then besieging and sacking it. By contrast, in Thucydides the epidemic begins in the harbour of the Piraeus (2. 48. 2).

1142
traversing a wide expanse of air
: while Thucydides also has an Egyptian origin for the epidemic, he lays stress on its transmission by human beings (2. 47. 1, 58. 2), whereas Lucretius emphasizes an airborne miasma.

1143
all the people of Pandion
: Pandion was another early king of Athens: there is a play on the first part of his name, which means ‘all’.

1154
a noisome stench
: the human body has become a place of evil-smelling exhalations, as earlier the earth had been (810 ff.).

1166
as if burnt into it
: an allusion to the torture of slaves, cf. 3. 1017.

1167
The accursed fire
:
sacer ignis
, or erysipelas, a streptococcal skin infection: cf. 660.

1169
as in a furnace
: a recurring image in
Book 6
: cf. 146 ff., 199 ff., 278, 281.

1174
hurled themselves headlong into wells
: cf. Daniel Defoe,
Journal of the Plague Year
: ‘some broke out into the streets, perhaps naked, and would run directly down to the river if they were not stopped by the watchman or other officers, and plunge themselves into the water wherever they found it’ (Penguin edn., p. 99).

1182–98
many signs of death
: this section has no counterpart in Thucydides, but recalls lists of symptoms enumerated in short phrases without syntactical
connection found in the Hippocratic corpus (especially Hippocrates’
Prognostica
, a work on which the Epicurean Demetrius Lacon is said to have written a commentary).

1186
either panting fast or deep and laboured
: similar alternatives are mentioned in Hippocrates,
Prognostica
5.

1193
Nostrils were pinched
: the following lines are based on a famous description of the human face at the time of death in Hippocrates,
Prognostica
2.

1222
man’s faithful friends the dogs
: in Thucydides, dogs are seen as carrion-eating animals, whereas in Lucretius they die at their posts as faithful servants of the house.

1233
Losing all heart
: cf. Defoe,
Journal of the Plague Year
, 183–4: ‘in the plague, it came at last to such violence that the people sat still looking at one another, and seemed quite abandoned to despair.’

1236
contagion
: the word
contagium
(literally ‘contact’) developed the sense ‘contagion’ from its use of the sheep disease scabies.

1239
Men shunned the sick-beds
: the added twist that even those who tried to avoid nursing their relatives and friends died is Lucretian: Thucydides (2. 51. 5) mentions only the patients dying for lack of care.

1247–51
one upon another…
: these lines are clearly out of place in the manuscripts: the parallel account in Thucydides (2. 52. 4) suggests that they come after 1286, and they are probably the original concluding lines to the whole poem, with 1251–2 ‘Nor could a man be found at such a time | Whom neither plague nor death nor grief had touched’, a generalizing epigrammatic conclusion. Like the
Iliad
,
On the Nature of the Universe
ends with a funeral, but with one which lacks all sense of resolution and reintegration of the mourners.

1252–8
Moreover now the shepherd…
: these lines have no counterpart in Thucydides, and the stress on the pathetic deaths of the rural poor is perhaps a Roman element (later accentuated in Virgil’s plague episode at the end of
Georgics
Book 3
). Cf. 2. 1164 ff., 5. 1386 ff.

1274
The shrines of the celestials
: the uselessness of religion is emphasized by the contrast between the ‘celestial’ nature of the gods and the corpses of the men they could not help.

1277
present grief was all
: the epiphany of pain has ironically routed the gods of religion: instead of the presence of the god, we have only grief.

1278
the ancient customs… | Of burial
: Athens was renowned for its public funerals of the dead killed in war, such as inspired Pericles’ ‘Funeral Speech’ in Thucydides.

1284
with frenzied cries
: the shouts of the brawling mourners are a parody of the normal
conclamatio
or ‘calling’ to the dead man: see above on 3. 468.