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ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE |
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APPENDIX A The Prelude to the Poem The opening of any long work of literature is bound to be important in our interpretation of the whole. The openings of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, for instance, in their different ways set the tone and the themes for all that is to come. When we look at the opening to this poem, however, we immediately encounter problems that concern the entire work. The problems are basically twofold. In the first place, how can Lucretius dare to pray to the goddess Venus to become his ally in composing verse when the whole thrust of his anti-theological arguments later on will deny any possibility of the gods intervening in human life? Second, what is Lucretius doing writing verse at all, when Epicurus seems to have advised against poetry? Above all, why is Lucretius composing this sort of poetry - full of myth, hymn-formulas and richly ornamented language? I will examine the two problems in reverse order, beginning with Epicurus' antipathy to poetry. 'Sail past it with stopped ears, as from the Sirens' song' (Plutarch, de poetis audiendis15d) he is said to have said. He insisted on the use of simple and appropriate language: The terms he used for things were the ordinary terms, and Aristophanes the grammarian credits him with a very characteristic style. He was so lucid a writer that in the work On Rhetoric he makes clearness the sole requisite (Diogenes Laertius 10.13). The two faults with conventional poetry were its form and its content: the luxuriously unnecessary ornamentation of its language and the mythological lies it told about the world and the gods. We see a glimpse of the first point in 3.131-4: drop this name 'harmony' that was passed down to the musicians from the heights of Helicon - or else perhaps they fetched it themselves from some other source and applied it to the matter of their art, which had then no name of its own. The word for 'applied' (transferre) almost certainly translates the Greek ____, from which our word 'metaphor' derives, and suggests that Lucretius is consciously rejecting what Kenney (in his note on 3.133-4) calls 'second-hand metaphor'. Epicurus seems to reject poetry because it sets up words that deliberately confuse the reader with metaphorical imagery that is patently untrue. It cannot be accidental that when Lucretius is describing the origins and growth of music and poetry he places it in a solidly simple rustic context: 5.1379-1411explicitly draws the comparison between the artistic pleasure of primitive man and the more 'cultivated' accomplishments of today - in good Epicurean terms, the pleasure can only be varied, not increased, and there is distinct disapproval emerging of the 'new' as unnecessary and decadent (1412-35). This would suggest that, just as bread is easier to obtain and therefore preferable to caviare, so also whistling on a reed is preferable to getting hold of an epic poem on Epicureanism. Poetry is perhaps not always anathema to the Epicurean in all circumstances - it may after all contribute to our serenity and it would fall under the class of pleasures that are natural but not necessary, like sex but we have still not begun to answer the two main criticisms of poetry advanced by Epicurus, namely its deliberately obfuscating use of metaphor (instead of clear speech) and its encouraging of beliefs in the silly stories of the gods. The prelude to this poem seems to break both rules. One answer given to this problem is that of Waszink ('Lucretius and Poetry' Mededelingen der koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen 17 (1954) 243-57), who urges that Lucretius was heavily influenced by Empedocles -whom it was customary for Epicureans to despise - and Parmenides, seeing their choice of poetry and in particular their equation of poetry with light and light with truth as inspiration for his own efforts. At all events, says Waszink, the 'mission' to convert is central, the poetry being very much the means to that end and not the end in itself. Following a similar line, Classen ('Poetry and Rhetoric in Lucretius' T.A.P.A. 99 (1968) 110--18) urges that Lucretius' first duty was to the 'mission' to convert us from fear of the gods and fear of death, and that he was prepared to use all possible means to achieve this, even ones of which Epicurus might not have approved. In other words, Lucretius was far too original and talented a writer to have been tied slavishly to every letter of what Epicurus had said. Epicurus is praised lavishly in the prologues to books 3, 5 and 6: but so is Empedocles (1.716-33), who wrote his philosophy in didactic verse and gave it the same title as this poem: so also is Ennius ( 1.117-26), whose ideas on our survival of death may have been wrong but whose verse was 'everlasting'. So also is Homer (3.1037-8). Lucretius used the ideas of Epicurus as scientific justification for his ethical precepts, but his beliefs transcended and developed those of the master, not least in this matter of their exposition. We are still left with the 'mythology' of the prelude - especially when we are presented with an anthropomorphic picture of Venus and Mars reclining together and thus bringing about the peace that the poet prays for. The abrupt insertion of the 'correct' view of Epicurus' gods (2.646-51) after 1.43 -- if not an interpolation by a waggish scribe or a puzzled reader - was done by the poet to disabuse us of the philosophical errors while leaving the power of the poetry undiminished. One thing is of course clear. Whatever interpretation we arrive at, we cannot sensibly ignore the contradiction and see this presentation of the gods as simply theology. There must be more to it than that. One obvious line of inquiry is to see Venus as a symbolic figure representing the 'force of nature', which by its reproductive delight brings into being all the myriad life-forms we see around us. Lucretius several times uses a personification of Nature (e.g., 3.931-51, with Brown, Lucretius on Love and Sex 229) just as elsewhere he plays on the mythical figure of Mother Earth (e.g. 5.795-836): it may be that Venus is at one level a personified force in the same way. A further look at her character makes this more compelling. Venus is at once glossed as 'delight/pleasure of men and gods, life-giving' (1.1-2). It is not coincidental that the highest good in Epicurus' moral system is pleasure, and that the poet is thus fixing his moral colors to the mast right away The passage goes on to describe Venus' activities in terms of sunlight, life, warmth, spring, and Venus is seen as the force behind all of this - Venus physica to the Romans - in a way calculated to dispel at once any suggestion that this Epicurean atomism is a gloomy picture of the world in which cold dark atoms collide in a futile random manner and we might as well--- and could as well - be dead. The rest of the poem will demonstrate that there is no theological purpose to the collisions of atoms, and that the source of everything we know is simply atomic movement, which in turn is blindly caused by weight: but in this burst of poetry we see the poet rejoicing in the free gift that is life and joy, recognizing that within the breasts of living things there is undeniably a force, an instinct towards warmth and reproduction which is the source of our creative joy and survival. This force may be atomically determined and blind -- but the opening paean of the poem is a celebration of it. This sort of allegorical address to Venus (Aphrodite in Greek) had already been done in, for example, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 1-5, Euripides, Hippolytus 447-50, 1272-81, Parmenides B12.3-6 (D-K) and Empedocles B17, 22, 35, 71 (D-K), Lucretius himself addresses Nature as 'creatress of the universe' at 1.629, 2.1117, 5.1362. What is more, Venus is exactly what the poet calls the sexual urge in Book Four. This sort of allegory is mentioned at 2.655-6o as being allowable, provided that the reader 'genuinely refrains from polluting his mind with the foul taint of superstition.' This line of argument becomes more difficult to sustain when the allegory becomes too specific and mythological - in particular when Mars enters and reclines with the goddess, and the poet then prays for peace to be granted (31-2): 'for you alone have power to bestow on mortals the blessing of quiet peace'. It is all very well to see Venus as symbolizing pleasure, peace and life, but now we have to see Mars as the contrary force of death, pain and war and pray the one to beguile the other into submission. The two forces of Empedocles spring to mind, where Love and Strife fight it out for supremacy of the universe and we have seen how great an admiration Lucretius has for Empedocles - but the identification is left to be inferred with no help from the poet. If pressed, Lucretius would perhaps have defended his 'hymn' as follows: prayer is a perfectly proper activity in which to engage, so long as it is recognized that it will not produce reactions from the gods. We contemplate the divine images (simulacra) of gods (6.58-79) and are ourselves shaped <by the impact of the images> to resemble those perfect paragons of serenity. The poet thus transforms the images being contemplated from a rampant god of War to a pacified god of War being embraced by Venus, thus inculcating the sort of contemplation which will bring us peace if we allow it to shape our minds. Bignone (Storia della letterature latina vol. 2. 134-342) has further argued ingeniously that, as Venus is pleasure, she is first of all (1-20) the kinetic sexual pleasure which reproduces ourselves, but then switches to the katastematic pleasure of serenity, peace, friendship. It is as the embodiment of the latter sort of pleasure that she is in a position to represent the peace and serenity that Lucretius needs to write the poem and Memmius needs to read it. The incongruous lines 44-9 would then find a place as explaining how the gods practice this serenity which Venus has by now come to represent. This is surely going too far. We must not forget that this is a prelude to a poem, not an epilogue, and that the first-time reader cannot be expected to pick up detailed points about the nature of Epicurean pleasure in cryptic form without any explanation. A simpler form of allegory is produced if we examine the polarity in lines 21-43 between peace and creativity on the one hand and war and death on the other. Lucretius elsewhere (2.569-72) speaks of the opposing forces of 'destructive motions' and 'generative and augmentative motions', and points to the equilibrium between the two, the cry of infants mingling with the wailing of those mourning the dead. Here in this passage he assumes that life has the upper hand (temporarily?) over death, Venus over Mars, creation over destruction, peace over war: such is the interpretation of Giancotti. There are, however, still other factors to be introduced. Venus is amongst other things the patron goddess of at least one branch of the Memmii family (see Appendix B) and appeared on coins of the family. More important, Venus is addressed at once as Aeneadum genetrix (Mother of the sons of Aeneas) before she is given her proper name, an epic title referring back to Ennius Annales 52 and the whole mythology that saw the Roman race as descended from the Trojan prince Aeneas, himself the son of Venus. Any doubt that this is going to be an epic poem is dispelled before it can arise and - more important still - it is going to be a quintessentially Roman poem. No mere copy or translation of a Greek original but a new creation for Roman readers, referring to Roman figures and Roman life: see, for example, the references to 'this evil hour of my country's history' (41), the named references to Roman people such as Scipio (3.1034) and Ennius (1.117-26) } and the frequent allusions to features of Roman life from Etruscan scrolls (6.381) to hunting-dogs (4.991-7) to the locked-out lover pining on the doorstep (4.1177-84). The hymn-formula of the prelude may be Greek and traditional, but the contents are pure Roman. There is one final point to be made here. Some commentators have spoken of the prelude - as they have of the epilogue - as 'l'anti-Lucrece chez Lucrece', as showing the poet's 'real' religious feelings emerging through the clenched teeth of his affected atomism, and have pointed to the prayer to justify that allegation. I hope to have shown that it is at least arguable that Lucretius intends us to see Venus in symbolic terms as the source of vitality in the world, as the representative in particular of the Roman race and its burgeoning growth and expansion - at which point the 'evil hour of my country's history'(41) takes on a sharper focus - and as the sign that the poem which is about to unfold will be epic in the grand style. It remains however to be explained why he did not address the Muse(s) as was customary in the epic tradition, and as he himself does at 6.92-5. After all, Homer and Hesiod address the Muses and such an invocation would have occasioned none of this agonizing about the 'sincerity' of the poet's beliefs but would simply have been seen as a trademark of the genre. What did Venus have to offer which made her preferable to the ancient Muses? One possible answer, I think, lies in the resonance of the word Venus and its derivatives venustas/venustus. The word means 'charm', especially charm in appearance and style, and used to describe people and writing displaying the key facets of elegance, style, even sex-appeal. The link between Venus and venustus is made explicitly in Catullus (e.g., 3.1-2.; 86) and the qualities implicit in the word venustas - along with words such as lepidus (cf. lepore in line 15 and asked for explicitly at 28) are precisely those espoused by the so-called 'New Poets' of Catullus and his generation. Catullus. for example, uses lepidus at 1.1and 6.17, where he applies the term to his poetry; the word may be derived from the Greek leptos used in important Hellenistic programmatic texts such as the preface to Callimachus' Aitia 24 - the etymology is not watertight but at least the similarity of sound is there. It may be far-fetched to suggest that Lucretius is here making a claim to the same aspirations as those of the New Poets - he would not, for instance, agree to their aim of 'art for art's sake' but sees art as ancillary to philosophy (4.18- 25) - but the correspondence between Venus and Venustas and the typically neoteric appeal for leporem cannot be overlooked and cast doubt on the traditional picture of Lucretius as a literary loner. To open a poem in the late republic - the age of the New Poets - addressing Venus and asking for 'her' to grant leporem (grace) to the poetry - rather than the traditional address to the Muses followed by a 'syllabus' of content - is arguably a sign that this poet was heavily influenced by the notions of poetic technique and refinement so typical of the Hellenistic poets such as Callimachus and by the movement of young poets centered around Catullus whom we call the New Poets.
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