Life and literature in the Roman republic

by Tenney Frank

The poem of Lucretius may be classed with Milton’s Paradise Lost as a purposive work of art. Milton set out to “justify the ways of God to man” in verses that should carry the reader by their sheer emotional beauty; Lucretius, while equally aware of the demands of art, proclaimed his chief purpose to be to remove fear of the gods by describing creation as natural and independent of divine intervention. Milton is one of the last of the didactic poets; Lucretius wrote while the didactic tradition was still generally accepted. He wrote in verse because his predecessors, the earlier philosophers had done so, had indeed composed wholly in verse at a time when reading and writing were not general, when teaching was by word of mouth, and rhythm seemed a legitimate aid to memory. Didactic verse, at first a necessity, had established itself by its very bulk, and was accepted as a customary form by Ennius and Vergil as well as by Lucretius. The effort that the modern reader finds in adapting himself to imaginative and highly colored phraseology employed in scientific arguments need not be strenuous if one accepts the tradition as then vital and unquestioned.

Lucretius’ argument in briefest form is this: Crimes that disturb society are due to fear—fear of death. This fear grows out of an apprehension of what the gods may do to one’s erring soul. The desire to avoid death and the dreaded hereafter drives men to accumulate wealth and power by evil means. Obviously the way to reach a life of peace, is to believe that death is simple dissolution and that the gods are not concerned in the least about human behavior. The proof that this belief is well founded lies in the atomistic philosophy of Epicurus, which explains the creation of the universe from a concourse of atoms, without divine activity, and considers living things, including man, as atomic, and which interprets human progress not in terms of divine interference but in terms of a theory of the “survival of the fittest.” Such is Lucretius’ argument. It is full of fallacies, as science has always been. Our generation was brought up on Dalton’s solid, immaterial molecule which now seems as antiquated as the Lucretian atom. The Curies shattered that, and we accepted in its place the electron of Rutherford; then five years ago the Quantum theory led to Bohr’s kaleidoscopic atom which has since given way to the new theories of Schrödinger and those who vigorously question the material atom. In 1907 Ostwald called the law of conservation the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century, but by 1924 scientists doubted whether it was a law at all. That has happened in one brief lifetime. We do not ask for finality in science, though like Lucretius the young scientist of each new generation seizes upon the latest hypothesis and assumes it to be true. The theory of electrons, whether right or wrong, seems to some of us to have justified itself not only because of its power to awaken the imagination, but in its capacity as a solvent that could disintegrate preceding dogmatism by seeming to prove itself more efficacious. Such was the beauty which Lucretius discovered in his new-found science. To him personally it meant release, romance, and poetry, and he spent all his energy trying to give to others what he had found. He assures us that his whole being is pierced with a thrill when he lets his mental eye see the vision of creation.

Moenia mundi

discedunt, totum video per inane geri res.

He becomes so absorbed in his work that he sits the night out phrasing what he has beheld, and finally when he drops to sleep his dreams are still of the vision of creation.

At the very outset however, we stumble upon a deep puzzle in attempting to picture the man in his setting. How could he suppose that fear of punishment after death was the determining factor in social ethics, when the Romans of this period had not yet developed any clear eschatological system, and when only the learned had begun to read the Platonic myths and Stoic fancies regarding a possible future life? Cicero in his old age, when after utter defeat and a very deep personal grief he needed faith in a doctrine of compensation, tried to find arguments for a theory of the soul’s survival. But the Tusculans do not represent Cicero in the heyday of his powers when, like other cultured Romans, he thought of immortality only in terms of surviving fame. Caesar assumed when he spoke in the senate that his audience accepted death as final, and Catullus gave the common view in his Nox est perpetua una dormienda. The tombstone inscriptions of the Republican period are quite reticent on the point, whereas the more garrulous ones of the Empire that teem with mystical phraseology belong largely to slaves from Asia. The epitaphs of genuine Romans are silent about future punishments and rewards.

It does not suffice to say that the central argument of the De Rerum Natura comes from Epicurus. The language of Lucretius is so vigorous and goes so much farther than Epicurus that we may be sure that some personal experience inspired it. Now the Etruscans, north of the Tiber, had long ago developed a very definite picture of what life after death was like. The wall-paintings on Etruscan tombs give delightful pictures of the banquets of the blest—but also gruesome portraits of Charon and of Tuchulcha scourging the souls of the damned. Giotto’s frescoes and Dante’s pictures of the lost souls in hell give almost as true an interpretation of Etruscan as of Christian conceptions. If we had a biography of Lucretius we might perhaps find that he had spent some years of his boyhood among the Etruscans or that he had had an Etruscan nurse who filled him with un-Roman superstitions which only a carefully considered philosophy could dispel. To a poetic imagination as sensitive as his, such childish beliefs might have occasioned moments of excruciating pain. We do not know the explanation. All that I would suggest at this point is that the poet may well have had some experience in his youth which gave a color to the poem that surprises us in a contemporary of Cicero and which made the new Epicurean faith of special value to him.

It is just possible that an incorrect analysis of instincts led him to stress this point. Taking a suggestion of Epicurus that fear is the cause of abnormal behavior, he drove it hard. He seems not to have surmised that fear of death was readily to be explained as an inheritance from those who had most successfully shunned death; instead he sought to explain the instinct for self-preservation by superstition and to blame that superstition for the acts that are in fact induced by a powerful instinct. How he asks, could a man let greed so dominate him that he would steal, deceive, and even murder, unless he were driven by an inordinate desire to escape the want which might bring death and suffering after death? Such is the argument which seems to be largely his own.

In his purpose then, he is wholly sincere, whatever we may think of the logic of his argument. However, he betrays in his enthusiasms the fact that what inspires him is not a negative missionary spirit, but the desire to let every man know the beauty of science. Plato spoke of the hypnotic vision of “ideas”—the ecstatic thrill that came to the philosopher who penetrated into divine knowledge. We know with what enthusiasm Sir Isaac Newton’s announcement of the laws of gravitation was greeted, with what joy scientists in our own day heard of the breaking-up of the atom and of the cosmic rays that penetrate our atmosphere. Similar must have been the exaltation of this Roman when he felt that he could lay aside childish superstitions, suddenly pierce the confines of the universe and behold the nebulae shaping into planets, when he realized, as he thought, that energy lived forever, that matter was eternal, that the universe was infinite, that in the survival of the fit there were promises of eternal progress, that law and order ruled the universe.