Life and literature in the Roman republic

by Tenney Frank

Lucretius’ whole sketch of social evolution (V, 1011, ff.), though replete with regret at the errors committed, reveals a strong conviction that on the whole the trend had been toward betterment, and this view is clearly stated at the end (Munro’s translation):

Ships and tillage, walls, laws, roads, arms, dress and all such like things, all the prizes, all the elegancies too of life without exception, poems, pictures, and the chiselling of fine-wrought statues, all these things practice, together with the acquired knowledge of the untiring mind, taught men by slow degrees as they advanced on the way step by step. Thus time by degrees brings each several thing forth before men’s eyes, and reason raises it up into the borders of light; for things must be brought to light one after the other and in due order in the different arts, until these have reached their highest point of development.

It is sometimes said that Lucretius did not make the final fruitful deduction that progress might continue in the future—which is the dominant note in modern evolutionary literature. It is true that the poet, whose task was to describe rather than to prophesy, does not emphasize the note of optimism, but when he says explicitly that some of the arts “are even now in the process of growth” he has committed himself to the full theory. And if one is convinced that the creative process has on the whole been one of progress, the rest follows, and the theory of the Social Contract to which Lucretius so fully commits himself rests in a deep faith that the best men have aided and will continue to aid progress by their efforts. Vergil, a close reader of Lucretius, was able in the fourth Eclogue to shift the golden age into the future, and in the Georgics he reveals the conviction that men have themselves, aware of their needs, improved the arts and crafts. Here we see immediately the consequences of the new evolutionary idea. Cicero also exhibits a practical optimism that is ready to undertake the labor of bettering conditions. While he never explicitly discusses the question he traces in his Brutus the evolution of Roman oratory showing its successive improvement, and in the De Republica and the De Legibus, where he accepts the evolutionary theory of social progress, he asserts again and again that it is the duty of statesmen to contribute their efforts to aid this advance. Finally, Seneca has also caught the full import of the gospel of progress. As a Stoic he should have consistently held to the discouraging theory of cycles. That he did not is doubtless due to his great fondness for Epicurean science.[10]

I respect the discoveries of wise men and do reverence to the inventors ... but let us also act the part of good parents: let us increase the inheritance of these things; let the property go to our successors with some increment. Much still remains to be done and will remain; nor will the man born a thousand years hence lack the opportunity to add to what he has received.

Surely Bury has quite missed the point when he holds that the ancient idea of progress failed to look to the future.

Lucretius also responded to Roman temperamental inclinations when he stressed the importance of observation and inductive logic in philosophy. The Romans of the Republic disliked mysticism and were ripe for a cosmology that substituted sense perception for vague mystery. They were also impatient of abstractions, and made little progress with such deductive sciences as mathematics. Their immense experiences in practical affairs of government had accustomed them to the habit of organizing committees to gather data on which to base charters for cities, treaties with neighbors, and forms of government for provinces. Formal plans shaped on a priori ratiocination they had learned to distrust. They always felt their way slowly through experiments to generalizations. It is characteristic of them that without formulating a general principle of equity they shaped a court of equity for the cases of foreigners a hundred years before they found that they were putting into practice the principles that Greek theory had deduced from philosophy without the ability to realize them in actuality.

Democritus had long ago proposed the hypothesis of natural creation, and Lucretius accepted the theory from Epicurus. What Lucretius himself saw was the need of emphasizing to the Romans the approach by induction from observable data to the theories, and the need of presenting these data in a succession of arresting pictures. In his first book, when arguing that there is no creation by miracle, he leads up to the generalization by a series of carefully established facts that give a sound basis for the final induction:

Plants germinate from seeds, they always require time for growth, they require plant-food and the cultivation of the soil that makes that food available, and they invariably grow into the same species as that of the parent plant.

Beneath every statement of this series there lies a mass of careful observation, tested by what John Stuart Mill calls the method of “agreement and difference,” and these valid conclusions are in turn used for the final induction that creation by miracle is unknown. Similarly, in the third book, he demonstrates by use of the same logical process that, since sickness, coma, age, poison, and whatever affects the body, also affect the mind, the mind has actual contact with the body. The standard method of “concomitant variations” is also used frequently as, in the second book, where the argument runs thus: since heavy and light bodies fall more nearly uniformly in thin air than in heavy water they would fall at the same rate of speed in a vacuum. Except in the sixth book, which follows sources closely, Lucretius’ wealth of examples seems to come largely from his own store.