CHAPTER VIII
LUCRETIUS AND HIS READERS

In the third century B.C. we find evidence that some of the Romans had begun to doubt the current religious beliefs. During the Second Punic War, the exaggerated superstition among the lower classes, induced apparently by a series of military disasters, led to a pronounced revolt against religion among the more enlightened element.[1] Ennius, though he reveals a strain of Pythagorean mysticism, natural enough in one educated at Tarentum, aided this movement by translating Euhemerus, whose work seems to have been a utopian romance that incidentally interpreted the gods of Greek myths as human beings honored after death. If we may judge from later quotations from this work it was the incidental element which especially attracted the attention of the Romans. Of course, the Euripidean plays presented by Ennius and Pacuvius familiarized the audiences with the phrases of skepticism, and some of the later Greek comedies, written when faith in the Olympians had virtually gone, were shockingly disrespectful of religion. The Amphitruo of Plautus is a case in point. It could hardly have been produced except in Greek dress, but for all that such plays tended to undermine respect for the state cults. The actor’s garb was, to be sure, Greek, but the deity ridiculed was called by his Latin name, Jupiter, not Zeus.

Unfortunately a satisfying philosophy did not emerge to take the place of the departing devotion—which though of no great moral worth had possessed a certain constraining influence. The soundest Greek philosophy was itself out of date at home and was nowhere taught abroad. Plato’s great faith in ratiocination had created a highly imaged idealism of exceedingly great beauty—moral as well as aesthetic. But it had not withstood the prying curiosity of his sophisticated Greek pupils. Aristotle, afraid of the imagination, had set out almost at once to build science upon a foundation of careful and minute observation before trusting to imagination again. Epicurus, without sufficient equipment in science but stirred by a healthy respect for nature, had evolved a materialistic system on the theories of Democritus and Leucippus, which assumed an evolutionary process of creation without divine intervention. The system was attractive, but so full of inconsistencies and untested hypotheses that it led the shrewder young men of Athens into complete agnosticism. Those who were inclined to mysticism took refuge in Zeno’s equally facile pantheism. By the time the Romans were ready to delve into metaphysics, the logical flaws in all systems had been pointed out by the Greeks themselves. The world of thought was in confusion. Men had lost faith in their power to solve the riddle of the universe. Professional philosophers were quarrelling, and the rest were turning away in dismay to nearer tasks.

Rome’s introduction to Greek philosophy came at this unhappy moment, and through the tutelage of the most pitiful representatives of Greek metaphysical eristic, which had nothing of value to offer to Rome. In the year 155 Carneades, while serving on an Athenian embassy at Rome, gave a demonstration of his dialectic ability by lauding justice one day and the next proving with equal facility the futility of the preceding speech. The third book of Cicero’s De Republica, has preserved the gist of his argument. Young men were delighted with the show, but the aged shook their heads. The pragmatist argument seemed to them a dangerous introduction to ethics. Carneades, being a state envoy, must be respected, but Cato insisted that the senate finish its business with him speedily so that he might the sooner be sent home; and when during the next year two Epicurean teachers came to Rome to display their doctrines, the authorities ordered them to leave.[2] Roman cultural history might have been very different if the first philosophers had come with a positive message, if the Platonic dialogues had still been in vogue, or if the minds of the slow-moving Romans had been gradually prepared for the incoming skepticism by proofs that this new philosophy was itself but a transient phase. As it was, the leap from old-time orthodoxy to untrammeled agnosticism was too great. The danger to political and civic stability was fully sensed by the cautious senators. The demonstration of the ridiculous futility of the new learning, if culture produced men like these prattling Greeks, was all too patent. Rome was projected into a fear and hatred of metaphysical dialectic that a century of similar experiences hardly removed. Only Panaetius, the Stoic, had better success, for, concerning himself less with metaphysics, giving more attention to ethics of a type that justified Roman ideas of jurisprudence and political activity, he was welcomed by the small circle of men who acknowledged the leadership of the younger Scipio. Stoicism thus gained respectability, but it was Stoicism prudently narrowed to ethical dogmatism.

After a generation or two of hesitation young men of family began to attend lectures in Athens. They were almost all sons of senators who were themselves preparing for public life, and they chose their teachers and courses accordingly. They needed familiarity with Greek not only because of its great literature but because Greek was the language of a very important part of the now expanding empire. They sought tuition especially with the rhetoricians who taught the art of Demosthenes, the art of public address and debate—all-important in the senate and the courts. What system of philosophy students happened to imbibe was determined by this fact, since the professors of philosophy were the heads of the scholastic hierarchies and each style of speech had a direct connection with an appropriate school of philosophy. It was not accidental that the young man who preferred a matter-of-fact style found himself also imbibing stoic philosophy, and that the one who desired a more florid manner got his philosophic needs satisfied in the circles of the New Academy. This union of rhetoric and philosophy will in part explain why Epicurean materialism was somewhat slow to reach the attention of the Romans, since the school of Epicurus gave little time to rhetoric and therefore caught few of the young men who were training for statesmanship. Furthermore, it is not difficult to comprehend why in these circumstances and in view of the fact that philosophy was no longer progressive or fruitful it continued to remain a matter of minor importance at Rome. Rome’s young nobles were going to Athens for political training, not for a general education, and their teachers accordingly gave out their philosophical lectures as ancillary to rhetorical studies.

So much must be kept in mind by way of an introduction to the work of Lucretius, the friend of Cicero, who was the first of the Romans to present a philosophic theme in an attractive literary garb. In speaking of him here we shall not be primarily concerned with Lucretius as a poet, for the art of Lucretius springs out of an inspiration not to be explained by sources or environment, nor shall we speak primarily of the philosophical system of the De Rerum Natura—for he invents his philosophy as little or as much as did Milton or Tennyson or Browning their theology or their social philosophy. We wish rather to dwell upon Lucretius in his Roman setting, his response to it, and its effects upon him.

Of Lucretius himself we know very little, and that we owe chiefly to a few strange remarks of St. Jerome, who disliked materialism as did all the fathers of the church. The dates are probably 99-55 B.C. If so Lucretius was slightly younger than Caesar and died eleven years before Caesar’s assassination. He was old enough to have observed with full comprehension all the wretched cruelty of the civil wars between the Marian and Sullan factions, and that would have been enough to turn a sensitive man away from political life. Lucretius speaks repeatedly of Latin as patria lingua which implies that Rome was the native city of his family, and he also reveals a certain Roman pride in his reference to foreigners as well as a sympathy with the aristocracy in his slighting references to the crowd.[3] The life of Rome was familiar to him. His name was well known from the day of Lucretia, the insult to whose honor had stirred the riots which led to the expulsion of the tyrant Tarquin. At least thirty-six men bore the name with sufficient distinction to earn space in the modern classical encyclopedia. But whether the poet belonged to one of the nobler branches of the family we do not know. If, as is quite possible, he was a son of the general who was murdered by Sulla because of his independence we would comprehend his horror of warfare. His cognomen, Carus, is somewhat less usual in early records than his nomen, but it was in good standing from its first occurrence some two centuries before the poet’s time till late in the Empire.[4] From the manner in which Lucretius addresses Memmius, a man of some family and distinction, Munro reasonably assumed that the poet was on a footing of equality with this member of the minor nobility.

Lucretius’ great poem, On Nature, was apparently being written during the middle decade of the last pre-Christian century. It was not quite complete when the poet died; the preface addresses Memmius as one who is in the midst of danger and apparently in arms,[5] a reference perhaps to Memmius’ governorship of Bithynia in 57. But the preface assumes the present arrangement of books, which was not established till books 1, 2 and 4 had been written. Perhaps this foreword was thrown in for an incomplete presentation copy to accompany Memmius when he sailed to Bithynia in the spring of 57. Of the legend that the poet experienced intervals of insanity I need only repeat the judgment of the noted physician Dr. Osler:[6] “Of love-philtres that produce insanity we may read the truth in a chapter of that most pleasant manual of erotology, the Anatomy of Melancholy. Of insanity of any type that leaves a mind capable in lucid intervals of writing such verses as De Rerum Natura we know nothing. The sole value of the myth is its casual association with the poem of Tennyson.” This of course does not preclude the possibility that Lucretius committed suicide in a fit of madness, though what a father of the church reports about a member of the Epicurean sect must not be taken too seriously. Wishful thinking often ends in the misjudging of sources.