[6] Tanusius Geminus, who has generally been identified with Volusius from the passage in Seneca, Ep. 93. 11, 'Annales Tanusii scis quam ponderosi sint et quid vocentur,' is supposed, on the evidence of Suetonius, to have been the author of a prose history, which he, Plutarch, and Strabo used as an authority for the times. Seneca certainly must have identified them. He may have written both in prose and verse, or perhaps the Annals in verse may have been the historical authority appealed to. There is, however, this further difficulty in identifying them, that there is no apparent reason why Catullus should in his case have deviated from his invariable practice of speaking of the objects of his satire by their own names. Cf. Schmidt, Catullus, Prolegomena, p. xlvi.]
CHAPTER XI.
Lucretius.—Personal Characteristics.
It is in keeping with the isolated and independent position which Lucretius occupies in literature, that so little is known of his life. The two kinds of information available for literary biography,—that afforded by the author himself, and that derived from contemporaries, or from later writers who had access to contemporary testimony,—almost entirely fail us in his case. The form of poetry adopted by him prevented his speaking of himself and telling his own history, as Catullus, Horace, Ovid, etc., have done in their lyrical, elegiac, and familiar writings. His work appears to have been first published after his death: nor is there any reason to believe that he attracted the attention of the world in his lifetime. To judge from the silence of his contemporaries, and from the attitude of mind indicated in his poem, the words 'moriens natusque fefellit' might almost be written as his epitaph. Had he been prominent in the social or literary circles of Rome during the years in which he was engaged on the composition of his poem, some traces of him must have been found in the correspondence of Cicero or in the poems of Catullus, which bring the personal life of those years so close to modern readers. It is thus impossible to ascertain on what original authority the sole traditional account of him preserved in the Chronicle of Jerome was based. That account, like similar notices of other Roman writers, came to Jerome in all probability from the lost work of Suetonius, 'de viris illustribus.' But as to the channels through which it passed to Suetonius, we have no information.
The well-known statement of Jerome is to this effect,—'The poet Lucretius was born in the year 94 b.c. He became mad from the administration of a love-philtre, and after composing, in his lucid intervals, several books which were afterwards corrected by Cicero, he died by his own hand in his forty-fourth year.' The date of his death would thus be 50 b.c. But this date is contradicted by the statement of Donatus in his life of Virgil, that Lucretius died (he says nothing of his supposed suicide) on the day on which Virgil assumed the 'toga virilis,' viz. October 15, 55 b.c. And this date derives confirmation from the fact that the first notice of the poem appears in a letter of Cicero to his brother, written in the beginning of 54 b.c. As the condition in which the poem has reached us confirms the statement that it was left by the author in an unfinished state, it must have been given to the world by some other hand after the poet's death; and, as Mr. Munro observes, we should expect to find that it first attracted notice some three or four months after that event. We must accordingly conclude that here, as in many other cases, Jerome has been careless in his dates, and that Lucretius was either born some years before 94 b.c., or that he died before his forty-fourth year. His most recent Editors, accordingly, assign his birth to the end of the year 99 b.c. or the beginning of 98 b.c. He would thus be some seven or eight years younger than Cicero, three or four years younger than Julius Caesar[1], about the same age as Memmius to whom the poem is dedicated, and from about twelve to fifteen years older than Catullus and the younger poets of that generation[2].
But is this story of the poet's liability to fits of derangement, of the cause assigned for these, of his suicide, and of the correction of his poem by Cicero, to be accepted as a meagre and, perhaps, distorted account of certain facts in his history transmitted through some trustworthy channels, or is it to be rejected as an idle fiction which may have assumed shape before the time of Suetonius, and been accepted by him on no other evidence than that of a vague tradition? Though no certain answer can be given to this question, yet some reasons may be assigned for according a hesitating acceptance to the main outlines of the story, or at least for not rejecting it as a transparent fiction.
It may indeed be urged that if this strange and tragical history had been known to the Augustan poets, who, in greater or less degree, acknowledge the spell exercised upon them by the genius of Lucretius, some sympathetic allusion to it would probably have been found in their writings, such as that in Ovid to the early death of Catullus and Calvus. It would seem remarkable that in the only personal reference which Virgil, who had studied his poem profoundly, seems to make to his predecessor, he characterises him merely as 'fortunate in his triumph over supernatural terrors.' But, not to press an argument based on the silence of those who lived near the poet's time, and who, from their recognition of his genius might have been expected to be interested in his fate, the sensational character of the story justifies some suspicion of its authenticity. The mysterious efficacy attributed to a love-philtre is more in accordance with vulgar credulity than with experience. The supposition that the poem, or any considerable portion of it, was written in the lucid intervals of derangement seems hardly consistent with the evidence of the supreme control of reason through all its processes of thought. The impression both of impiety and melancholy which the poem was likely to produce on ordinary minds, especially after the religious reaction of the Augustan age, might easily have suggested this tale of madness and suicide as a natural consequence of, or fitting retribution for, such absolute separation from the common hopes and fears of mankind[3].
Yet indications in the poem itself have been pointed out which might incline us to accept the story rather as a meagre tradition of some tragic circumstances in the poet's history, than as the idle invention of an uncritical age. The unrelieved intensity of thought and feeling, by which more almost than any other work of literature it is characterised, seems indicative of an overstrain of power, which may well have caused the loss or eclipse of what to the poet was the sustaining light and joy of his life[4]. Under such a calamity it would have been quite in accordance with the principles of his philosophy to seek refuge in self-destruction, and to imitate an example which he notes in the case of another speculative thinker, on becoming conscious of failing intellectual power[5]. But this general sense of overstrained tension of thought and feeling is, as was first pointed out by his English Editor, much intensified by references in the poem (as at i. 32; iv. 33, etc.), to the horror produced on the mind by apparitions seen in dreams and waking visions[6]. 'The emphatic repetition,' says Mr. Munro, 'of these horrid visions seen in sickness might seem to confirm what is related of the poet being subject to fits of delirium or disordering sickness of some sort.' He further shows by quotation from Suetonius' 'Life of Caligula,' that such mental conditions were attributed to the administration of a love-philtre. The coincidence in these recorded cases may imply nothing more than the credulity of Suetonius, or of the authorities whom he followed: but it is conceivable that Lucretius may have himself attributed what was either a disorder of his own constitution, or the result of a prolonged overstrain of mind, to the effects of some powerful drug taken by him in ignorance[7].