His ibi me rebus quaedam divina voluptas
percipit atque horror.
It amazed him to find himself so carried away that he could not sleep, that he must sit the whole night through satisfying his soul with the vision he had caught. Materialism has been called an unpoetic theme. To us it may be, but to a Roman brought up in the dull mazes of polytheism and the ludicrous nursery-tales that masqueraded as cosmology, it was a sudden liberation. He had found a theme of the highest poetic worth, the epic story of the origins of life; and Vergil who half rejected his arguments still was poet enough to see that Lucretius had discovered the sublimest of all poetic themes—Felix qui potuit.
The young men who were growing up when Lucretius’ poem was published turned quickly to his faith, despite the fact that the Athenian garden had till then been unpopular. It could hardly have been the doctrine of hedonism—which Lucretius almost disregards—that enticed the youth. After all the hedonistic calculus was as exacting in its morality as was the stoic argument of obedience to nature. More probably it was the appeal to the imagination and the aesthetic vision disclosed by Lucretius that swept the younger generation of that time off its feet.
There is another fruitful idea, the idea of progress, which first entered Roman consciousness through the work of Lucretius. Our modern belief in mechanistic progress, made into a fetish as it was after the acceptance of Darwinism, at times obstructs self-criticism and encourages fatalism to such an extent that its value as a stimulant may be almost completely negatived. A generation that could rush thoughtlessly into the most stupidly criminal war of all ages—and still blandly insist that it was the supreme fruit of civilization—has surely been gulled by a fallacious evolutionary post hoc ergo. It is a wholesome reminder to us post-Darwinists that the Athenians of Pericles’ day had in many respects attained to a creative culture which no nation has since succeeded in reaching. Yet read with a careful attention to all its implications, the evolutionary doctrine of progress is productive of envigorating optimism. Before Lucretius wrote—and the poet himself had not entirely shaken himself free from old beliefs—the Romans looked upon the golden age as past, and they were therefore too much reconciled with the fatalism inherent in the conviction that further deterioration was only to be expected.
The belief in a golden age of the past had come from several sources: from Hesiodic genealogies of gods and “heroes,” from an early naïve faith in the actuality of Homeric descriptions, from the tendency of parents to contrast the morals of a new generation with the refurbished and selected memories of their youth, and from the utopian pictures of romances conveniently placed in the far away and long-ago. All these things and others begot the “golden age” of Chronos’ day. The Romans had found such tales plausible. They too had a splendid tradition of ancestral heroes who had undoubtedly possessed the sterling qualities of a simple puritan-agrarian primitivism—capacity to endure hardship and pain, family devotion, loyalty, and abstinence—that later Romans admired but too often missed in contemporary life. In their conquests of the world they had come into contact with many uncivilized peoples and had had occasion to note these very qualities in all unadvanced peoples.[7] They had evidence in the ruins of the decayed villages of Latium that the soil no longer bore the population it once had, and the conclusion was ready at hand, as Lucretius himself points out, that mother earth was not so fruitful as she had been in her youth. Furthermore, when they happened upon the tombs of the prehistoric age,[8] especially the vaults of Etruscan princes, they found in many of them the lavish furniture of gold and silver and bronze-ware that led them to accept the Hesiodic chronology—doubtless based in part on similar observations in Boeotia—of a seeming succession of gold, silver, bronze, and iron periods.
Accordingly, there were reasons enough for accepting the well-known utopian fancies of the Greek poets. Lucretius himself did not wholly free himself of these beliefs. The Ennian portraits of the ancient heroes, and the description of primitive simplicity appealed strongly to him. He did not think that the Romans he had seen in the days of the Sullan massacres and the Catilinarian conspiracy were the moral equals of those of an earlier day. In point of fact they were not. There had been a noticeable decline.
Nevertheless, as we have seen, the theory of evolution which he adopted made it possible for him to observe that in some respects civilization had actually meant progress, that in the arts, in the domain of thought, in the institutions of government and law there had been a real advance. In his fifth book[9] he remarks in an intimate note that betrays his own personal observations:
Wherefore even now some arts are receiving their last polish, some are even in course of growth: just now many improvements have been made in ships; only yesterday musicians have given birth to tuneful melodies; then too this nature or system of things has been discovered lately, and I the very first of all have only now been found able to transfer it into native words.