[The text is corrupt here]
… one upon another, fighting
To bury the vast numbers of their dead.
Wearied with tears and sorrow they returned;
And many then took to their beds in grief.
Nor could a man be found at such a time
1250
Whom neither plague nor death nor grief had touched.
Moreover now the shepherd and the herdsman
And the strong steersman of the curving plough,
All, all were fainting. Deep within their huts
Their bodies huddled lay, consigned to death
By poverty and by the foul disease.
1255
And sometimes you might see the lifeless bodies
Of parents lying upon their lifeless children,
Or see in turn the children breathe their last
Upon the bodies of their mothers and fathers.
And this affliction to no small extent
Flowed to the city from the countryside;
For crowds of country-folk struck by the plague
1260
Thronging every quarter brought it in.
They filled the lanes and lodgings everywhere,
And crammed together within stifling walls
Death the destroyer piled them up in heaps.
And overcome by thirst bodies lay strewn
Along the roadsides by the drinking fountains
1265
Of multitudes from whom the breath of life
Had been cut off by water all too welcome.
And everywhere in streets and public places
You could see half-dead bodies, fainting limbs
Covered with rags and caked with filth and squalor,
Dying, with naught but skin upon their bones,
1270
Skin almost buried in foul sores and dirt.
And all the holy temples of the gods
Death filled with lifeless bodies, and everywhere
The shrines of the celestials, which the priests
Had filled with guests, stood loaded high with corpses.
1275
For reverence now and worship of the gods
Counted for little, present grief was all.
No longer too the ancient customs stood
Of burial, which the city was wont to use.
Confusion and fear were everywhere, and in sorrow
1280
Each buried his own as circumstance allowed.
And sudden need and poverty inspired them
To many actions horrible and shameful.
They placed their own kin on the funeral pyres
Of others, and with frenzied cries set light to them,
And often in the fighting that ensued
1285
They shed much blood rather than leave the bodies.
EXPLANATORY NOTES
Book One
1 mother of the Roman race: in mythology, Venus was the mother of Aeneas, the traditional ancestor of the Romans: the story of her encounter with his father Anchises on Mt Ida is told in the Hymn to Aphrodite ascribed to Homer, and the introduction to that hymn is recalled in the prologue at several points.
delight: pleasure was the central good of the Epicurean system: see Introduction.
2 Venus: the Roman equivalent of the Greek Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex. Her name in Latin means something like ‘attractiveness’, and her principal festival was on 1 April, the beginning of spring (cf. the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). The poem begins at dawn on the first day of spring (10 ff.), when navigation resumes again after the winter (3 ff.).
26 Memmius: C. Memmius, praetor in 58 BC and consular candidate in 54: see Introduction. Venus was used as an emblem on the coinage of the family of the Memmii.
33 Mars’ dominion: Venus restraining the warlike impulse of her husband Mars was a frequent subject of ancient as of modern painting (see especially Botticelli’s Venus and Mars). Their union was sometimes allegorized as bringing about harmony: they also look back to the two cosmic principles of ‘Love’ and ‘Strife’ of the fifth-century BC Greek poet Empedocles, who was one of Lucretius’ major models (see Introduction).
44–8 for perfect peace… : these lines translate the first of Epicurus’ ‘Master Sayings’: ‘The blessed and deathless [i.e. the divine] is neither itself troubled nor provides trouble to others, and so it is not compassed either by gratitude or by anger; for all such is weakness.’ Some scholars excise these lines (which are repeated at 2. 646 ff.) as at odds with the terms of the invocation to Venus and the run of thought: the lines are certainly shockingly abrupt about the real nature of divinity, but this is not necessarily without point.
56 Nature creates, increases, nourishes: Nature begins to take over the functions of ‘Venus most bountiful’ (2 ff.).
66 a man of Greece: Epicurus. The oblique reference is in oracular style: Empedocles so refers to Pythagoras (fr. B 129), and later Virgil will refer to Lucretius with similar anonymity (Georgics knows the causes of things… ’). Epicurus is depicted as a giant in revolt against heaven (cf. 5. 117 ff.), a hero defeating the monster religion as Apollo defeated Python. This passage was widely imitated in later poetry: see the introduction for Abraham Cowley’s celebration of Francis Bacon’s victory over ‘Authority’ in his Ode ‘To the Royal Society’.
77 deep-set boundary stone: 76–7 are repeated at 1. 595–6, 5. 89–90, and 6. 65–6. It was a sacrilege to move a boundary stone (Latin terminus): there was even a deity ‘Terminus’ who oversaw them (cf. Livy 1. 55. 3). Epicurus’ journey through the infinite universe ends in an expression of human finitude (for the image cf. also 2. 1087, 3. 1020).
84–101 as once at Aulis… : Iphigenia (here called Iphianassa as in Homer, though the latter does not have the story of her sacrifice) was sacrificed by her father Agamemnon at the instigation of the priest Calchas in order to appease Diana (Artemis) and provide a following wind for the expedition against Troy. There were several versions of the story: Lucretius uses those details which reflect worse on religion, especially those found in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon (228 ff.) and Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis.
117 Our own Ennius: Q. Ennius (239–169 BC), the ‘father’ of Roman poetry. In the opening of his great historical epic the Annales he described a meeting with the shade of Homer in Pythagorean terms (frr. 3–11): the work survives only in fragments, but was clearly extensively used in the prologue to On the Nature of the Universe.
141 sweet friendship: friendship played an important role in Epicurean communities, but the term was also used for the relationship between clients and patrons in Rome.
148 the face of nature and her laws: lines 146–8 also conclude the opening sections of Books 2, 3, and 6. The dual reference to the outward appearance of the world and its inner workings reflects the Epicurean insistence on empiricism and reason (physiologia: see Introduction).
159 if things came out of nothing: see Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus 38, ‘nothing comes to be out of what is not, for everything would then come to be out of everything, without needing a seed’, a view described by Aristotle (Metaphysics 1. 983b) as the common belief of ancient natural philosophers. On the argument form used here, see Introduction.
174 why do roses flourish in the spring: the opening address to Venus is recalled, but now science replaces myth. The ‘argument from design’ based on the orderly procession of the seasons is here turned against belief in providence: similarly in 208–14 myths of a Golden Age when human beings did not need to work are debunked.
215 The next great principle: cf. Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 38, ‘and if what disappears was destroyed into what does not exist, all things would have perished, since that into which they were dissolved would not exist’.
250–61 father ether… : the ‘hieros gamos’ or wedding of earth and sky was a common literary and religious motif from the time of Homer’s account of the union of Zeus and Hera (Iliad
14. 346–51): Lucretius’ account here is close to that in Aeschylus’ Danaids (fr. 44), just as his later version in Book 2 (991 ff.) is based on Euripides’ Chrysippus (fr. 839). Lucretius sails close to the wind in perverting the commonplace to his own ends, and this is one of the passages that have led critics to see an underlying religious feeling belying Epicurean orthodoxy; the concluding lines, however, remind us that these are all natural processes.
280–9 just as water… : the behaviour of wind is compared to that of water in an extended comparison which is at once an Epicurean scientific analogy and an epic simile with multiple correspondences between tenor and vehicle.
330 There is void in things: cf. Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 37. The Epicureans were one of the few philosophical schools to accept the notion of empty space within the universe.
402 these small traces: the hunting simile here develops a central metaphorical complex of On the Nature of the Universe, the pursuit of the truth by following up the ‘traces’ (the Latin word also means footprints) visible in the phenomenal world. The metaphors go back to Epicurus (e.g. Letter to Pythocles96) and continue to underlie much scientific and other thinking.
419–20 All nature… consists | Of two things: cf. Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 40.
445–8 no third substance… : cf. Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 40, ‘besides these nothing can even be thought of either by conception or on analogy with things that can be conceived, if considered as an independent entity rather than the accidents or properties of such an entity’.
449–50 properties… | Or… accidents: for the transition here see the passage from the Letter to Herodotus quoted in the previous note: Epicurus discusses the distinction in more detail later in the Letter, at 68–71.
459–63 Time… does not exist by itself… : cf. Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 72–3.
464–82 Helen’s rape | And Troy’s defeat… : Lucretius simultaneously attacks rival semantic theories (the target is disputed, but it may be in part Stoic) and the epic tradition going back to Homer’s Iliad: in contrast Epicurean semantics retain a firm grip on reality.
483–4 Material objects are of two kinds: cf. Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 40 (immediately after the passage quoted on 445–8), ‘among bodies, some are compounds, others those of which compounds are formed’.
485–6 no force can ever quench: cf. Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 41, ‘and these latter [i.e. atoms] are indivisible and unchangeable… being completely solid in nature’.
499 In a few verses: in fact, we get a series of eleven arguments, most of which are not found in the Letter to Herodotus. The plethora of proofs has an epic amplitude, and demonstrates how Lucretius has drawn ‘bounteous draughts from springs o’erflowing’ (412).
521 The universe: the first explicit mention of the universe as a whole since the prologue (74), preparing for the arguments in 951 ff. In contrast, the Letter to Herodotus mentions ‘the all’ from the beginning.
567 air, water, earth, and fire: the Epicureans accepted the notion of four elements, but denied that they were primary: see below 705 ff. attacking Empedocles.
596 deep-set boundary stone: these important lines (594–6) recur at 76 ff., 5. 89 ff., and 6. 65 ff. Epicureanism laid great stress on the fact that the clear boundaries between what is possible and what is not bring certainty to human life.
601–2 the smallest | Thing that can possibly exist: the Epicureans believed in a universe where there were minimal units of space and time. The smallest possible atom would be one minimal space unit in each dimension, but the dimensions of most atoms would be greater than this, since atoms varied in shape. Cf. Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 56–9, in a discussion of primary qualities (treated by Lucretius in 2. 80 ff.).
635–920 Lucretius refutes in turn the views of three ‘pre-Socratic’ physical philosophers: Heraclitus (c.500 BC), who made fire the principle of his cosmology, Empedocles (c.492–392 BC), who had a system of four elements, and Anaxagoras (c.500–428 BC), who believed that there was an unlimited number of different stuffs. They represent three rival approaches to the substance of the physical world: monism, limited pluralism, and unlimited pluralism. Lists of the opinions of the various philosophers (‘Doxography’) existed in various forms in antiquity, and establishing one’s own views through argument with rival approaches was a standard device of ancient as of modern philosophy: see especially Aristotle, Metaphysics 1. 983a. Epicurus’ discussion of the pre-Socratics came in Books 14 and 15 of On Nature (see Introduction): the later Epicurean Diogenes of Oenoanda (fr. 6) tackles a superset of Lucretius’ list. In each case the favoured approach is seen as the culmination of earlier efforts: similarly Lucretius (following in the footsteps of his master) comes immediately after the trio of earlier philosophers.
638 Heraclitus, famed for his dark sayings: Heraclitus of Ephesus expounded in riddling aphorisms a system in which fire was the underlying substance of the universe, constantly changing into other forms. He was later popular 222 Notes to pp. 22–6 with the Stoics, who also made a form of fire their primary substance, and hence a good initial target (as in Diogenes of Oenoanda). Lucretius puns on the second element of his name, which means ‘renowned’ in Greek, and also attacks Heraclitus’ obscurity of language (in contrast to what he will claim for himself in 921 ff.) and military metaphors.
670 things have limits fixed: the principle that change is a form of death is used on several occasions in On the Nature of the Universe (cf. 1. 792–3, 2. 753–4, 3. 519–20): ironically it goes back to Heraclitus (fr. B6: cf. also Melissus (fifth century BC) fr. B7).
707 air is the principle: this was the view of Anaximenes (sixth century BC) and Diogenes of Apollonia (fifth century BC), while Thales (sixth century BC) was said to have made water his single principle: there was no major thinker who upheld the claims of earth.
716–17 Empedocles | Of Acragas: see Introduction. The description of Sicily (Acragas, modern Agrigento, is in the south of the island) suggests a possible genesis for the four elements of his theory in his native land, and demythologizes the stories associated with it.
722 Charybdis: a mythical whirlpool situated opposite Scylla (cf. Odyssey 12. 101 ff.) and later located in the Straits of Messina, which separate Sicily from Reggio di Calabria.
738–9 more holy… | Than those the Delphic prophetess pronounced: repeated in Book 5 (111 ff.) of Lucretius himself. The priestess of Apollo at Delphi still in Lucretius’ day gave notoriously ambiguous verse oracles, sitting on the tripod of the god and crowned with laurel, but the imagery of oracular inspiration was often appropriated by philosophers, including Epicureans. Cf. Epicurus, Vatican Sayings 29, Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 10. 12, Philodemus, On Piety 71. 2044–5, Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 1. 66, On Divination 1. 23.
782 these men: Aristotle and the Peripatetics, and later the Stoics, believed in the interchangeability of the four elements.
824 letters common to many words: a famous comparison of the composition of the world to the composition of the text (cf. 1. 196 ff., 912 ff., 2. 688 ff., 1013 ff.). The analogy of atoms and letters goes back to the early atomists (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1. 4. 985b, On Generation and Corruption 315b), but Lucretius considerably extends the scope of the comparison.
830–920 Anaxagoras’ | Homoeomeria… : Anaxagoras believed the basic stuffs of the world were infinitely divisible, and that the things we see around us were mixtures of all these stuffs. Modern scholars doubt that the word homoeomeria (Greek for ‘similar-partedness’) was used by him, but it was widely seen as his term in antiquity: it probably derives from Aristotle’s discussion (Metaphysics 1. 984a11 ff.). As with the other pre-Socratic philosophers in this section, Anaxagoras’ linguistics come under scrutiny as well as his physics. Anaxagoras was said to be the pre-Socratic philosopher most admired by Epicurus (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 10. 12), perhaps because of his scientific explanations for natural phenomena (he was exiled from Athens for denying
the divinity of the sun: cf. 5. 114 ff.): Democritus praised his formulation of the empiricist principle that visible phenomena can be evidence for the unseen (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 7. 140).
919–20 shake their sides and rock with laughter: the argument is repeated at 2. 976 ff.
923 holy wand: the ‘thyrsus’ carried by Bacchants in their worship of Dionysus. The Bacchic trance was a symbol for inspiration from the time of Plato on (cf. Ion 553e ff.); Lucretius again flirts with religious language in turning to his own rationalist account of the world.
926 A pathless country of the Pierides: after describing and criticizing rival views, Lucretius uses the language of poetic initiation to describe his own mission. The details of the scene are common in poetry from the time of Hesiod (seventh century BC), who described in his Theogony a meeting with the Muses on Mt Helicon (in his home region of Boeotia) but who says that they were born further north in Pieria (near Mt Olympus: cf. Theogony 53, Works and Days 1). Lucretius perhaps pointedly dissociates his ‘Pierian’ inspiration (cf. 1. 946) from the commoner setting on Mt Helicon (cf. 1. 118, 3. 1037). The Hellenistic poet Callimachus (third century BC) dreamt of a meeting with the Muses on Helicon at the opening of his influential poem the Aetia and images such as those of the untrodden path and the untouched spring go back to his poetry and are associated with his aesthetic of small-scale precision. Lucretius appropriates this imagery (as had Ennius in the opening of his Annals, cf. 1. 117 ff.) but stresses that his revelation is ‘of matters high’ (931: cf. 5. 1 ff.): ‘the pathless country’ of poetic exclusivity is also the sublimely infinite universe of the Epicureans (cf. 1. 958 ff.).
933 of things so dark in verse so clear: clarity was the sole virtue of style for Epicurus (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 10. 13), and Lucretius sets himself against the obscurities of philosophers such as Heraclitus (cf. 1. 639 ff.) as well as against poetical fancy. Language is, however, not simply transparent: it is also itself a source of illumination (cf. 941 ff., 1114 ff.).
938 Sweet yellow honey on the goblet’s rim: the celebrated image of the ‘honey round the cup’: poetry sweetens the philosophical message. This does not tell the whole story of the role of poetry in On the Nature of the Universe, but it stresses how the verse both brings the reader to drink and holds the reader in its grip while the ‘medicine’ of philosophy does its work. The image goes back to Plato (Laws 2. 659e).
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