Of the life of Lucretius very little is known: He lived at a period abounding with great political actors, and full of portentous events—a period when every bosom was agitated with terror or hope, and when it must have been the chief study of a prudent man, especially if a votary of philosophy and the Muses, to hide himself as much as possible amid the shades. The year of his birth is uncertain. According to the chronicle of Eusebius, he was born in 658, being thus nine years younger than Cicero, and two or three younger than Cæsar. To judge from his style, he might be supposed older than either: but this, as appears from the example of Sallust, is no certain test, as his archaisms may have arisen from the imitation of ancient writers; and we know that he was a fond admirer of Ennius.
A taste for Greek philosophy had been excited at Rome for a considerable time before this era, and Lucretius was sent, with other young Romans of rank, to study at Athens. The different schools of philosophy in that city seem, about this period, to have been frequented according as they received a temporary fashion from the comparative abilities of the professors who presided in them. Cicero, for example, who had attended the Epicurean school at Athens, and became himself an Academic, intrusted his son to the care of Cratippus, a peripatetic philosopher. After the death of its great founder, the school of Epicurus had for some time declined in Greece: but at the period when Lucretius was sent to Athens, it had again revived under the patronage of L. Memmius, whose son was a fellow-student of Lucretius; as were also Cicero, his brother Quintus, Cassius, and Pomponius Atticus. At the time when frequented by these illustrious youths, the Gardens of Epicurus were superintended by Zeno and Phædrus, both of whom, but particularly the latter, have been honoured with the panegyric of Cicero. “We formerly, when we were boys,” says he, in a letter to Caius Memmius, “knew him as a profound philosopher, and we still recollect him as a kind and worthy man, ever solicitous for our improvement[430].”
One of the dearest, perhaps the dearest friend of Lucretius, was this Memmius, who had been his school-fellow, and whom, it is supposed, he accompanied to Bithynia, when appointed to the government of that province[431]. The poem De Rerum Natura, if not undertaken at the request of Memmius, was doubtless much encouraged by him; and Lucretius, in a dedication [pg 252]expressed in terms of manly and elegant courtesy, very different from the servile adulation of some of his great successors, tells him, that the much desired pleasure of his friendship, was what enabled him to endure any toil or vigils—
“Sed tua me virtus tamen, et sperata voluptas
Suavis amicitiæ, quemvis ecferre laborem
Suadet, et inducit nocteis vigilare serenas.”
The life of the poet was short, but happily was sufficiently prolonged to enable him to complete his poem, though, perhaps, not to give some portions of it their last polish. According to Eusebius, he died in the 44th year of his age, by his own hands, in a paroxysm of insanity, produced by a philtre, which Lucilia, his wife or mistress, had given him, with no design of depriving him of life or reason, but to renew or increase his passion. Others suppose that his mental alienation proceeded from melancholy, on account of the calamities of his country, and the exile of Memmius,—circumstances which were calculated deeply to affect his mind[432]. There seems no reason to doubt the melancholy fact, that he perished by his own hand.
The poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, which he composed during the lucid intervals of his malady, is, as the name imports, philosophic and didactic, in the strictest acceptation of these terms. Poetry, I think, may chiefly be considered as occupied in three ways.—1. As describing the passions of men, with the circumstances which give birth to them.—2. As painting images or scenery.—3. As communicating truth. Of these classes of poetry, the most interesting is the first, in which we follow the hero placed at short intervals in different situations, calculated to excite various sympathies in our heart, while our imagination is at the same time amused or astonished by the singularity of the incidents which such situations produce. Those poems, therefore, are the most attractive, in which, as in the Odyssey and Orlando, knights or warriors plough unknown seas, and wander in strange lands—where, at every new horizon which opens, we look for countries inhabited by giants, or monsters, or wizards of supernatural powers—where, whether sailing on the deep, or anchoring on the shore, the hero dreads—
“Lest Gorgons, rising from infernal lakes,
With horrors armed, and curls of hissing snakes,