The Roman Poets of the Republic Part 32

The traditional opposition between Democritus and Herac.l.i.tus lived after them. Adherence to the doctrine of 'atoms and the void,' and to that of 'the pure fiery element,' became the symbol of a radical divergence in the whole view of human life.

While there is frequent allusion to the Stoics in the poem, there is no direct mention either of them or of their chief teachers, Zeno, Chrysippus, or Cleanthes. Neither do the greater names of Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle appear in it, though one or two pa.s.sages clearly imply some familiarity with the writings of Plato[27]. But among the moral teachers of antiquity he acknowledges Epicurus only. The whole enthusiasm of his temperament breaks out in admiration of him. He alone is the true interpreter of Nature and conqueror of superst.i.tion (i. 75); the reformer 'who has made pure the human heart' (vi. 24); the 'guide out of the storms and darkness of life into calm and light'

(iii. 1; v. 11, 12); the 'sun who at his rising extinguished all the lesser stars' (iii. 1044). He is to be ranked even as a G.o.d on account of his great services to man, in teaching him the mastery over his fears and pa.s.sions:--

Deus ille fuit, deus, inclute Memmi[28].

He speaks of his master throughout not only with the affection of a disciple, but with an emotion akin to religious ecstasy[29]. His admiration for him springs from a deeper source of spiritual sentiment than that of Ennius for Scipio, or of Virgil for Augustus. Though Epicurus inspired much affection in his lifetime, and though other great writers after Lucretius,--such as Seneca, Juvenal, and Lucian,--vindicate his name from the dishonour which the perversion of his doctrines brought upon it, yet even the most favourable criticism of his life and teaching must find it difficult to sympathise with the idolatry of Lucretius. Yet his error, if it be one, springs from a generous source. He attributes his own imaginative interest in Nature to a philosopher who examined the phenomena of the outward world merely to find a basis for the destruction of all religious belief.

He saturates with his own deep human feeling a moral system which professes to secure human happiness by emptying life of its most sacred a.s.sociations, most pa.s.sionate longings, and profoundest affections.

There was a truer affinity of nature between Lucretius and another philosopher whom he names with the warmest feelings of love and veneration--Empedocles of Agrigentum--the most famous of the early physiological poets of Greece. He flourished during the fifth century B.C., and was the author of a didactic poem on Nature, of which some fragments still remain, sufficient to indicate the nature of the work and the character of the man. These fragments prove that Lucretius had carefully studied the older poem, and adopted it as his model in using a poetical form and diction to expound his philosophical system. He declares, indeed, his opposition to the doctrine of Empedocles, which traced the origin of all things to four original elements; but he adopted into his own system many both of his expressions and of his philosophical ideas. The line in which the Roman poet enunciates his first principle,--

Nullam rem e nilo gigni divinitus unquam,

was obviously taken from the lines of the old poem [Greek: peri physeos]--

[Greek: ek tou gar me eontos amechanon esti genesthai to t' eon exollysthai anenyston kai aprekton.]

Speaking of Sicily as a rich and wonderful land, Lucretius pays his tribute of love and admiration to his ill.u.s.trious predecessor in these lines,--

Nil tamen hoc habuisse viro praeclarius in se Nec sanctum magis et mirum carumque videtur.

Carmina quin etiam divini pectoris eius Vociferantur et exponunt praeclara reperta, Ut vix humana videatur stirpe creatus[30].

There is a close agreement between the two poetical philosophers in their imaginative mode of conceiving Nature. They both represented the principle of beauty and life in the universe under the symbol of the G.o.ddess of Love--'[Greek: Kypri basileia]'; 'alma Venus, genetrix.'

They both explain the unceasing process of decay and renovation in the world by an image drawn from the most impressive spectacle of human life--a mighty battle, waged through all time between opposing forces.

The burden and the mystery of life seem to weigh heavily on both, and to mould their very language to a deep, monotonous solemnity of tone.

But along with this affinity of temperament there is also a marked difference in their modes of thought and feeling. The view of Nature in the philosophy of Empedocles appears to be just emerging out of the anthropomorphic fancies of an earlier time: the first rays of knowledge are seen trying to pierce through the clouds of the dawn of enquiry: the dreams and sorrows of religious mysticism accompany the awakened energies of the reason. His mournful tone is the voice of the intellectual spirit lamenting its former home, and baffled in its eager desire to comprehend 'the whole.' Lucretius, on the other hand, saw the outward world as it looks in the light of day, neither glorified by the mystic colours of religion, nor concealed by the shadows of mythology.

He was moved neither by the pa.s.sionate longing of the soul, nor by the 'divine despair' of the intellect: but he felt profoundly the sorrows of the heart, and was weighed down by the ever-present consciousness of the misery and wretchedness in the world. The complaint of the first is one which has been uttered from time to time by some solitary thinker in modern as in ancient days:--

[Greek: pauron de zoes abiou meros athresantes hokymoroi, kapnoio diken arthentes apeptan, auto monon peisthentes, hoto prosekursen hekastos, pantos' elaunomenoi; to d' oulon epeuchetai heurein autos. out' epiderkta tad' andrasin out' epakousta oute noo perilepta[31].]

The other gives a real and expressive utterance to that 'thought of inexhaustible melancholy,' which has weighed on every human heart:--

Miscetur funere vagor Quem pueri tollunt visentis luminis oras: Nec nox ulla diem neque noctem aurora secutast Quae non audierit mixtos vagitibus aegris Ploratus mortis comites et funeris atri[32].

Besides Epicurus and Empedocles Lucretius mentions Democritus and Anaxagoras, and speaks even of those whom he confutes as 'making many happy discoveries by divine inspiration,' and as 'uttering their responses from the shrine of their own hearts with more holiness and truth than the Pythia from the tripod and laurel of Apollo.'

The reverence which other men felt in presence of the ceremonies of religion he feels in presence of the majesty of Nature; and to the interpreters of her meaning he ascribes the holiness claimed by the ministers of religion. Thus, to a doctrine of Democritus he applies the words 'sancta viri sententia.' The divinest faculty in man is that by which truth is discovered. The highest office of poetry is to clothe the discoveries of thought with the charm of graceful expression and musical verse[33].

Of other Greek authors, Homer and Euripides are those of whom we find most traces in the poem. To the first he awards a high pre-eminence above all other poets,--

Adde repertores doctrinarum atque leporum, Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus Sceptra pot.i.tus eadem aliis sopitu' quietest[34].

The pa.s.sages in which Lucretius imitates him show how clearly he recognised his exact vision of outward things, and his true appreciation of the moral strength and dignity of man. The frequent imitations of Euripides[35] show that while he felt the spell of his pathos, he was also attracted by the poetic mould into which the tragic poet has cast the physical speculations of Anaxagoras. Allusion is made in tones of indifference or disparagement to other poets of Greece, as having, in common with the painters of former times, given shape and substance to the superst.i.tious fancies of mankind. It is characteristic of his powerful and independent genius, that, unlike the younger poets of his generation, he adheres to the older writers of the great days of Greece, and acknowledges no debt to the Alexandrine School. Although amply furnished with the knowledge necessary for the performance of his task, he is a poet of original genius much more than of learning and culture: and he is thus more drawn to those who acted on him by a kindred power, than to those who might have served him as models of poetic form or repertories of poetic ill.u.s.tration. The strength of his understanding attracted him to some of the great prose-writers of Greece, by whom that quality is most conspicuously displayed; notably to Thucydides, whom he has closely followed in his account of the 'Plague at Athens,' and, as has been shown by Mr. Munro, to Hippocrates. The kind of attraction which the last of these has for him confirms the criticism of Goethe, that Lucretius shows the observing faculty of a physician, as well as of a poet.

The diction and rhythm of the poem, as well as the more direct tribute of personal acknowledgment[36], prove that he was an admiring student of his own countryman Ennius, to whom in some qualities of his temperament and genius he bore a certain resemblance. Many lines, phrases, and archaic words in Lucretius, such as--

Per gentis Italas hominum quae clara clueret,-- Lumina sis oculis etiam bonus Ancu' reliquit,-- inde super terras fluit agmine dulci,--

multa munita virum vi; caerula caeli Templa; Acherusia templa; luminis oras; famul infimus; induperator; Graius h.o.m.o, etc.--

have a clear ring of the old poet. The few allusions to Roman history in the poem, as, for instance, the line--

Scipiadas, belli fulmen, Carthaginis horror,--

the specification at iii. 833 of the second Punic War as a momentous crisis in human affairs,--the description at v. 1226 of a great naval disaster, such as happened in the first Punic War--the introduction there of elephants into the picture of the pomp and circ.u.mstance of war,--suggest the inference that, just as events and personages of the earlier history of England live in the imaginations of many English readers from their representation in the historical plays of Shakspeare, so the past history of his country lived for Lucretius in the representation of Ennius. But of the national pride by which the older poet was animated, the work of Lucretius bears only scanty traces. The feeling which moved him to identify the puissant energy pervading the universe with 'the mother of the Aeneadae,' and the motive of his prayer for peace addressed to that Power,--

Nam neque nos agere hoc patriai tempore iniquo,--

seem indeed to spring from sources of patriotic affection, perhaps all the deeper because not too loudly proclaimed. But in the body of the poem his ill.u.s.trations are taken as frequently from Greek as from Roman story, from the strangeness of foreign lands as from the beauty of Italian scenes. The Georgics of Virgil, in the whole conception of Nature as a living power, and in many special features, owe much to the imaginative thought of Lucretius; but nothing can be more unlike the spirit of the older poet than the episodes in which Virgil pours forth all his Roman feeling and his love of Italy. The height from which Lucretius contemplates all human history, as 'a procession of the nations handing on the torch of life from one to another,' is wide apart from that from which Virgil beholds all the nations of the world doing homage to the majesty of Rome. The poem of Lucretius breathes the spirit of a man, apparently indifferent to the ordinary sources of pleasure and of pride among his countrymen. Living in an era, the most momentous in its action on the future history of the world, he was only repelled by its turbulent activity. The contemplation of the infinite and eternal ma.s.s and order of Nature made the issues of that age and the imperial greatness of his country appear to him as transient as the events of the old Trojan and Theban wars. To him, as to the modern poet, whose imagination most nearly resembles his, the thought of more enduring things had

'Power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal silence.'

But while by his silence on the subject of national glory and his ardent speculative enthusiasm Lucretius seems to be more of a Greek than of a Roman, yet no Roman writer possessed in larger measure the moral temper of the great Republic. He is a truer type of the strong character and commanding genius of his country than Virgil or Horace.

He has the Roman conquering energy, the Roman reverence for the majesty of law, the Roman gift for introducing order into a confused world, the Roman power of impressing his authority on the minds of men. In his fort.i.tude, his superiority to human weakness, his seriousness of spirit, his dignity of bearing, he seems to embody the great Roman qualities 'constantia' and 'gravitas.' If in the force and sincerity of his own nature he reminds us of the earliest Roman writer of genius, in these last qualities, the acquired and inherited virtues of his race, he reminds us of the last representative writer, whose tone is worthy of the 'Senatus populusque Roma.n.u.s.' But Lucretius is much more than a type of the strong Roman qualities. He combines a poetic freshness of feeling, a love of simple living, an independence of the world, with a tenderness and breadth of sympathy, and a power of sounding into the depths of human sorrow, such as only a very few among the ancients--Homer, Sophocles, Virgil,--and not many among the poets or thinkers of the modern world have displayed. In no quality does he rise further above the standard of his age than in his absolute sincerity and his unswerving devotion to truth[37]. He combines in himself some of the rarest elements in the Greek and the Roman temperament,--the Greek ardour of speculation, the Roman's firm hold on reality. A poet of the age of Julius Caesar, he is animated by the spirit of an early Greek enquirer. He unites the speculative pa.s.sion of the dawn of ancient science with the minute observation of its meridian; and he applies the imaginative conceptions formed in the first application of abstract thought to the universe to interpret the living beauty of the world.

[Footnote 1: According to Mommsen's opinion that Julius Caesar was born in 102 B.C.]

[Footnote 2: Woltier in Phil. Jahrb. cxxix, referred to in Schmidt's Catullus, attempts to show by an examination of the dates a.s.signed for the birth of Lucretius, that he was born in 97 B.C. and died in 53 B.C. But the most definite statement we have is that he died on the day in which Virgil a.s.sumed the _toga virilis_, and that was in the second consulship of Pompey and Cra.s.sus, i.e. 55 B.C. Besides both tradition and internal evidence lead to the conclusion that his poem was not given to the world till after his death, and it certainly had been read by both the Ciceros early in 54 B.C. F. Marx in the Rheinisches Museum, 'de aetate Lucretii,' holds that he was born in 97 B.C., and died in his 42nd year, B.C. 55. He makes a more important contribution to the controversy in the remark 'acceptissima vero Enniana Lucretii poesis fuisse putanda est Ciceroni.' Whether Lucretius died in his 44th or 42nd year cannot be of much consequence to anybody; and, in the general uncertainty of Jerome's dates, it seems impossible to determine it one way or other.]

[Footnote 3: Professor Wallace in his interesting account of 'Epicureanism' writes, in reference to the way in which Epicurus himself was regarded in a later age, 'And the maladies of Epicurus are treated as an antic.i.p.atory judgment of Heaven upon him for his alleged impieties.'--Epicureanism, p. 46.]

[Footnote 4: This consideration is urged by De Quincey in one of his essays.]

[Footnote 5: iii. 1039, etc.]

[Footnote 6: iv. 33-38:--

Atque eadem n.o.bis vigilantibus obvia mentes Terrificant atque in somnis, c.u.m saepe figuras Contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum, Quae nos horrifice languentis saepe sopore Excierunt, ne forte animas Acherunte reamur Effugere aut umbras inter vivos volitare.]

[Footnote 7: An article in the Fortnightly Review of September, 1878, on 'Hallucination of the Senses,' suggests a possible explanation of the mental condition of Lucretius, during the composition of some part of his work. The writer speaks of the power of calling these hallucinations up as being quite consistent with perfect sanity of mind, but as sometimes inducing madness. He goes on, 'Or, if the person does not go out of his mind, he may be so distressed by the persistence of the apparition which he has created, as to fall into melancholy and despair, and even to commit suicide.']

[Footnote 8: The theory of Lachmann and others that Q. Cicero was the editor may possibly be true. He dabbled in poetry himself, and he was more nearly of the same age as Lucretius, and thus perhaps more likely to have been a friend of his.

The fact that Cicero's remark is in answer to one of his might suggest the opinion that the poem had been read by him before it became known to the older brother, and perhaps been sent by him to Cicero. But if Q. Cicero was the editor, Jerome must here also have copied his authorities carelessly. In the time of Jerome the familiar name of Cicero must have been understood as applying to the great orator and philosophic writer, not to his comparatively obscure brother. The only certain inference which can be drawn from this mention of the poem is that it had been read, shortly after its appearance, in the beginning of the year 54 B.C., by both brothers. Yet the consideration of the whole case does not lead to the rejection of the statement that M. Cicero was the editor as incredible, or even as highly improbable. If it was he, he must have performed his task very perfunctorily. Possibly, as Mr. Munro suggests, all that he may have been asked to do was to introduce the work to the public by the use of his name.

The actual revision and arrangement of the poem may have been made by one of the 'librarii' of Atticus.]

[Footnote 9: E.g. Tusc. Disp. i. 21, especially the sentence--'Quae quidem cogitans soleo saepe admirari non nullorum insolentiam philosophorum qui naturae cognitionem admirantur, eiusque inventori et principi gratias exultantes agunt eumque venerantur ut deum.']

[Footnote 10: The use of _tamen_ in the sense of 'all the same' is not uncommon in the colloquial language of Terence, which the language of Cicero's familiar letters closely resembles.]

[Footnote 11: At that time he would be about forty-one years of age--the same age as Lucretius, if, as is most probable, he was born in 99 B.C.]

[Footnote 12: i. 643-4; cf. [Greek: oute hos logographoi xunethesan epi to prosagogoteron te akroasei e alethesteron].--Thuc. i. 21.]

[Footnote 13: The lines (v. 999)--

At non multa virum sub signis milia ducta Una dies dabat exitio, etc.--

might well be a reminiscence of the great ma.s.sacre at the Colline gate.]