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Lucretius on the Nature of Things

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Lucretius on the Nature of Things LUCRETIUS_ ON THE NATURE OF THINGS TRANSLATED BY CYRIL BAILEY FaLLOW 0' BALLIOL COLUGI OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS P4 G1-J7S · E5 /33 ('.1 Oxford University Press, Amtn House, London E.C.4 G1.A5GOW NEW YORIt TORONTO II~L80VRNt WIltLLIKGTOM BOMBAY CALCUTTA )lADRAS £Arlt TOWN Gtoffrty Cumberleg«,Publislur to tnt Univtrsity INDIANA UNIVERSITY LIBRAR'Y SOUTH BEND FIRST PUBLISHED 1910 REPRIIITED 1920, 1921, 1923 1924, 1928, 1936, 1946, 1948 PRIIITItD III GREAT BRITAIN PREFACE No one can set about tnnslating Lucretius into English without finding his head full of the great work of H. A. J. Munro. It ia not only that certain striking phrases ring in one's ears-·dtai claustra, • the Iastnesses of life,' olu UrminuJ baerms, • the deepset boundary-mark,' &c.- but one is possessed with a atrong feeling that he has finally set the tone or colour which Lucretius iu English must assume. It might indeed be thought that with so fine a model in existence it is unnecessary and unprofitable to undertake the task again. But there are, I think, good reason. to justify the attempt. In the first place, the study of Lucretius has made considerable advances since Munro's edition: thanks largely to Dr. Brieger and still more to the late Professor Giussani,l the philo- sophy of Epicurus is far better understood than it was, and, as a consequence, much light has been thrown on many dark places in the poem, and its general grouping and connexion can be far more clearly grasped. Secondly, though Munro set the tone, he did not always keep it: in the more technical parts of the poem he i. apt to drop almost into the language of a scientific textbook, and phrases and even passages of sheer prose give the • In eer own country Or. 101..."", (Lucretiu.: Epicur~.n .nd Poet) hu recentl,. .ritten • yery ,uggestiYe, though not .I .... y. accur.te, sketch or LUCre11UI'. relations to hit predeceuou .nd to modern edenh6c ideal, aDd hu mOlt succeufulJy reprueotecl Ih•• pirit oi the poem. ,.1 PrtJatt reader the idea that Lucretius'. muse allowed him only a fitful inspiration. While acknowledging then my debt to Munro for the main .pirit of the translation and often for words and phuses which seemed to me inevit- able, I have tried at once to embody the resulu of more recent Lucretian scholarship, and to preserve a more equable level of atyle, which will, I hope, leave the impres- sion that the De Rerum Natura, even in iu most scientific discussions, is Itill poetry. I have translated from my own text published in the Bibliotheca Oxoniensi. in 1898, but in the-I fear- numerous places, where I have since altered my opinion, I have taken what I now believeto be the right reading or the belt suggestion and added the warning of a foot- note. I have appended lome notes for the general reader, which are intended either to explain allusions or to elucidate what seemed to me difficult or obscure passages in the light of the general Epicurean theory. I wlsh to thank the Rector of Lincoln for several valuable .uggestions, and Professor H. H. Turner for much help ill the elucidation of the astronomical problem. raised in Book V. C. B. 1<)10. In the present reprint the translation has been adapted to the second edition of the text in the Bibliotheca Oxoniensis (19z I). C. B. March, 19Z1. INTRODUCTION 0, the three great Latin poeu Lucretius aeems to make the most peculiar appeal to our own ase. Catullua and Virgil are for all time; the passionate love-history of a genuine soul and a poet of marvellously wide range, the all-embracing yet findy pessimistic .ympathy of a mind which could focus past and future in the con- sciousness of present crisis, will find their response in all generations. Dut Lucretius-possibly because from the point of view of universality he ltanda a little below the other two=-seems to demand for full appreciation a rather special temper. Hi. are not the interests of every man, nor il his a common attitude to life. A fierce hatred of conventional superstitions and a yearning for intellec- tualliberty coupled with a sense of awe-<ic:eply religious in reality-in the presence of nature, a strong desire for scientific method and accuracy of observation com- bined with a profound feeling of the beauty of tile world and ita works, an unswerving consciousness of natural law and the .equence of cause and effect counter- acted by an equal stubbornness in defence of man'l moral freedom-these are qualities which may engage attention, but cannot at all time. awaken a vital Iympathy Yet these are antitheses familiar enough to our generation, and this i. an attitude of mind which we are peculiarly qualified to undentand. The antagonism of Religion and Science, the relation of the investigation to the 6 Introduc tion love of Nature, the opposition of Natural Law and Freewill are themes which seem very near to us. Only we must be careful not to interpret the past by the present. To each generation its problems present themselves in their own peculiar manner, and we must endeavour to understand Lucretius not as a contempo- rary, but as an Epicurean of the last century B. c. It was eminently a period of disturbance and dissolution, intellectually as well as socially and politically. The Republican regime was breaking down, and with it the system of morals and beliefs on which it rested. The genuine Roman religion-the belief in the numina, the countless little impersonal 'spirits', always' about man's path and about his bed', mostly hostile by instinct, but capable of pacification by simple gifts and easy acts of worship-had long ago lost its hold on the life of the city, or at the most lingered on here and there in the old-fashioned piety of a household cult. The imposing structure of the State-worship, raised as the primitive agricultural community developed into a commercial city, and consolidated when the great wave of Greek culture anthropomorphized numina into dei, gave them temples and statues, and organized ceremonials and priesthoods, remained still untouched in form, but the form was empty. Magistrates and priests duly sacrificed the appropriate victims, augurs watched for . omens and blessed or stayed proceedings, the populace kept holiday on the festivals, but little real religious feeling remained, except a vague sense of the insecurity of life owing to the malevolent interference of divine beings, and an abiding fear of death and the punishments of a life to come. The more recent introduction of Introduction 7 Oriental cults, which had obtained a great influence over the popular mind, had but heightened these terrors, by. adding an ecstatic and orgiastic form of worship, which through excitement and reaction gave an unnatural and intermittent character to religion, essentiallyforeign to the sober and straightforward temperament of the Roman. Among the educated classesin consequence a profound scepticism prevailed. When Q. Mucius Scaevola1 advo- cated the maintenance of religion among the populace as a political asset, he was but voicing what had for a generation been the practice of the ruling classes. Cicero, the Augur, could discuss2 the fundamental assumptions of his art and arrive at a very unfavourable conclusion; Caesar, the acknowledged sceptic, was selected to direct the whole system of religious worship as Pontifez Maximus, But a pure scepticism cannot satisfy any type of mind, least of all the Reman, and Greek culture, which had introduced the diseuse,brought also the antidote in philosophy. Philosophy professed to place men above the conflict of religions and to give them what religion did not claim to offer, a guide to moral conduct. It seems strange at first sight that the two greatest philosophies of Greece-those of Plato and Aristotle- should have made so little impression on the Roman mind, attracting only a few strong intellects like Cicero's, and even then only to a very eclectic and almost dilettante study, But the reason is not really far to seek: not only were the idealism of Plato and the intellectualism of Aristotle alien to the plain Roman mind, but morally both syatema rested essentially on the conception of the State, on the identification of the good man and the good I St. Augustine, de Civ. Del, iv. 27. t Dc Divinatlone, 8 Introduction Citizen. It was just this conception which with the fall of the Republic was' breaking down, and philosophy, if it was to help the sceptical Roman, must be individual- istic: he wanted to know about himself and his conduct as a single human being. In the corresponding period of the history of Athens, when the city-state had given place to the monarchy of Macedon, and that again had fallen into the disruption of the rule of the • Successors" two creeds had arisen to supply the need. Stoicism with its assertion of the divine element in the world and the mind of man had appealed to the more directly religious natures; the doctrine of Epicurus, founded on the atomic materialism of Democritus, made its waywith those more inclined to a matter-of-fact scientific outlook on life. And so now in Rome these two philosophies answered the demand, and as men drifted away from religion, they divided themselves almost unconsciously into the rival camps of the Stoics and Epicureans. Into this atmosphere Lucretius grew up. Of his personal history we are singularly ignorant. By a comparison of an entry in Jerome's FastP and a casual note in Donatus's Life of Virgil,2 and an attempt to reconcile their dis- agreement by considerations of probability, we can arrive at the conclusion that he was born in 94 B.
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