The Roman Poets of the Republic Part 33

[Footnote 14: Cp. Munro, Note II, p. 413. Third Edition.]

[Footnote 15: 'Si jam violentior aliqua in re C. Caesar fuisset, si eum magnitudo contentionis, studium gloriae, praestans animus, excellens n.o.bilitas aliquo impulisset.'--In Vatinium 6.]

[Footnote 16: iv. 973, etc.]

[Footnote 17: iv. 75, etc.]

[Footnote 18: ii. 24, etc.]

[Footnote 19: In places where he is not drawing from his own observation, he uses such expressions as _memorant_; e.g. iii. 642.]

[Footnote 20: E.g. iv. 353, etc.]

[Footnote 21: E.g.

Ardua dum metuunt amittunt vera viai,

and

Avia Pieridum peragro loca.]

[Footnote 22: Obermann, by M. Arnold.]

[Footnote 23: i. 935-50.]

[Footnote 24: 'And can discourse much on the combination of things, and enquire moreover, what are their own first elements.']

[Footnote 25: 'While I seem ever to be plying this task earnestly, to be enquiring into Nature, and explaining my discoveries in writings in my native tongue.' This is one of those pa.s.sages which seem to indicate an unhealthy overstrain which may have been the precursor of the final disturbance of 'his power to shape.']

[Footnote 26: Cp. Munro's notes on the pa.s.sages where these expressions occur.]

[Footnote 27: E.g. ii. 77, etc. Augesc.u.n.t aliae gentes, etc., suggested by a pa.s.sage in the Laws:--[Greek: gennontas te kai ektrephontas paidas, kathaper lampada ton bion paradidontas allois ex allon]--and the lines which recur several times, etc. 'Nam veluti pueri trepidant,' which Mr. Munro aptly compares with the words in the Phaedo (77), [Greek: isos eni tis kai en hemin pais, hostis ta toiauta phobeitai.]]

[Footnote 28: v. 8.]

[Footnote 29: Cf.

His ibi me rebus quaedam divina voluptas Percipit adque horror.]

[Footnote 30: 'But nought greater than this man does it seem to have possessed, nor aught more holy, more wonderful, or more beloved. Yea, too, strains of divine genius proclaim aloud and make known his great discoveries, so that he seems scarcely to be of mortal race.'--i. 729-33.]

[Footnote 31: 'When they have gazed for a few years of a life that is indeed no life, speedily fulfilling their doom, they vanish away like a smoke, convinced of that only which each hath met in his own experience, as they were buffeted about to and fro. Vainly doth each boast to have discovered the whole.

The eye cannot behold it, nor the ear hear it, nor the mind of man comprehend it.']

[Footnote 32: 'With death there is ever blending the wail of infants newly born into the light. And no night hath ever followed day, no morning dawned on night, but hath heard the mingled sounds of feeble infant wailings and of lamentations that follow the dead and black funeral train.'--ii. 576-80.]

[Footnote 33: i. 943-50.]

[Footnote 34: iii. 1036-38.]

[Footnote 35: Cf. notes ii. of Mr. Munro's edition.]

[Footnote 36: i. 117, etc.]

[Footnote 37: Mr. Froude, in his 'Julius Caesar,' says, 'The age was saturated with cant.' Perhaps, to that condition of the age we, in part, owe one of the sincerest protests against cant, and unreality of every kind, ever written.

Both speculatively and practically Cicero appears at a great disadvantage when compared with Lucretius in these respects.]

CHAPTER XII.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LUCRETIUS.

The peculiarity of the poem of Lucretius, that which makes it unique in literature, is the fact that it is a long sustained argument in verse. The prosaic t.i.tle of the poem, 'De rerum natura,'--a translation of the Greek [Greek: peri physeos],--indicates that the method of exposition was adopted, not primarily with the view of affecting the imagination, but with that of communicating truth in a reasoned system. In the lines, in which the poet most confidently a.s.serts his genius, he professes to fulfil the three distinct offices of a philosophical teacher, a moral reformer, and a poet,--

Primum quod magnis doceo de rebus et artis Religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo, Deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango Carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore[1].

We have, accordingly, to examine the poem in three different aspects:--

I. as the exposition of a system of speculative philosophy.

II. as an attempt to emanc.i.p.ate and reform human life.

III. as a work of poetical art and genius.

But these three aspects, though they may be considered separately, are not really independent of one another. The speculative ideas on which the system of philosophy is ultimately based impart confidence and elevation to the moral teaching, and new meaning and imaginative grandeur to the interpretation of Nature and of human life, on which the permanent value of the poem depends. Thus, although the philosophical argument, which forms as it were the skeleton of the work, is in many places barren and uninteresting, yet it is necessary to master it before we can form a true estimate of the personality of the poet, of the main pa.s.sion and labour of his life, of the full meaning of his thought, and the full compa.s.s of his poetic genius.

Moreover, the study of the argument is interesting on its own account.

In no other work are the strength and the weakness of ancient physical philosophy so apparent. If the poem of Lucretius adds nothing to the knowledge of scientific facts, it throws a powerful light on one phase of the ancient mind. It is a witness of the eager imagination and of the searching thought of that early time, which endeavoured, by the force of individual thinkers and the intuitions of genius, to solve a problem which is perhaps beyond the reach of the human faculties, and to explain, at a single glance, secrets of Nature which have only slowly been revealed to the patient labours and combined investigations of many generations of enquirers.

I.--EXAMINATION OF THE ARGUMENT.

I. The philosophical system expounded in the poem is the atomic theory of Democritus[2], in the form in which it was accepted by Epicurus, and made the basis of his moral and religious doctrines. Lucretius lays no claim to original discovery as a philosopher: he professes only to explain, in his native language, 'Graiorum obscura reperta.'

His originality consists, not in any expansion or modification of the Epicurean doctrine, but in the new life which he has imparted to its exposition, and in the poetical power with which he has applied it to reveal the secret of the life of Nature and of man's true position in the world. After enunciating the first principles of the atomic philosophy, he discusses in the last four books of the poem some special applications of that doctrine, which formed part of the physical system of Epicurus. But the extent to which he carries these discussions is limited by the practical purpose which he has in view.

The impelling motive of all his labour is the impulse to purify human life, and, especially, to emanc.i.p.ate it from the terrors of superst.i.tion. The source of these terrors is traced to the general ignorance of certain facts in Nature,--ignorance, namely, of the const.i.tution and condition of our souls and bodies, of the means by which the world came into existence and is still maintained, and lastly, of the causes of many natural phenomena, which are attributed to the direct agency of the G.o.ds. With the view of establishing knowledge in the room of ignorance on these questions, it is necessary, in the first place, to give a full account of the original principles of being: and to this enquiry the two first books of the poem are devoted. Had his purpose been merely speculative, the subject of the fifth book,--viz. the origin of the world, of life, and of human society,--would naturally have been treated immediately after the exposition of these first principles. But the order of treatment is determined by the immediate object of attacking the chief stronghold of superst.i.tion: and, accordingly, the third and fourth books contain an examination of the nature of the soul, a proof of its non-existence after death, and an explanation of the origin of the belief in a future state. In the fifth and sixth books an attempt is made to show that the creation and preservation of the world, the origin and progress of human society, and the phenomena of thunder, tempests, volcanoes, and the like, are the results of natural laws, without Divine intervention. Although he sometimes carries his argument into greater detail than is necessary for his purpose, and addresses himself to the reform of other evils to which the human heart is liable, yet his whole treatment of his subject is determined by the thought of the irreconcilable opposition between the truths of Nature and the falsehood of the ancient religions. The key-note to the argument is contained in the lines, which recur as a kind of prelude to the successive stages on which it enters, in the first, second, third, and sixth books:--

Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei Discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque[3].

The action of the poem might be described as the gradual defeat of the ancient dominion of superst.i.tion by the new knowledge of Nature. This meaning seems to be symbolised in its magnificent introduction, where the genial, all-pervading Power--the source of order, beauty, and delight in the world and in the heart of man,--and the grim phantom of superst.i.tion--

Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans,--

the cause of ignorance, degradation, and misery,--are vividly personified and presented in close contrast with one another. The thought, thus symbolised, pervades the poem. The processes of Nature are explained not chiefly for the purpose of satisfying the love of knowledge (although this end is incidentally attained), but as the means of establishing light in the room of darkness, peace in the room of terror, faith in the laws and the facts of the universe in the room of a base dependence on capricious and tyrannical Powers.

What then was this philosophy which supplied to Lucretius an answer to the perplexities of existence? The object contemplated by all the early systems of ontology was the discovery of the original substance or substances out of which all existing things were created, and which alone remained permanent amid the changing aspects of the visible world. Various systems, of a semi-physical, semi-metaphysical character, were founded on the answers given by the earliest enquirers to this question. In the first book of the poem several of these theories are discussed. Lucretius, following Epicurus, adopts the answer given by Democritus to this question, that the original substances were the 'atoms and the void'--[Greek: atoma kai kenon]. After the invocation and the address to Memmius, and the representation of the universal tyranny exercised by superst.i.tion until its power was overcome by Epicurus, and after a summary of the various topics to be treated in order to banish this influence from the world, he lays down this principle as the starting-point of his argument,--that no existing thing is formed out of nothing by divine agency--

Nullam rem e nilo gigni divinitus unquam.