REDUX EDITION* LUCRETIUS The Nature of Things Translated and with Notes by A. E. STALLINGS Introduction by RICHARD JENKYNS PENGUIN BOOKS * See the release notes for details LINE NUMBERING: The lines of the poem are numbered by tens, with the exception of line II.1021 which was marked instead of line II.1020 (unclear whether intended or by error) and the lines I.690 and I.1100 which were skipped altogether. The line numbering follows the 1947 Latin edition of Cyril Bailey and not this English translation (confusing but helpful when referencing other translations/commentaries). As stated in the "Note on the Text and Translation", the author joined together and restructured lines for the needs of this translation. Consequently, the number of actual lines between adjacent multiples of ten (or "decades") are often a couple of lines less or more than the ten of the referenced Latin edition. As far as line references in the notes are concerned, they are with maybe a few exceptions in alignment with the numbering of their closest multiple of ten. MISSING SECTIONS: As mentioned in the "Note on the Text and Translation", missing sections (or "lacunae") of which there are a few, are denoted with three dots and/or an explanation enclosed in square brackets. LINE STRUCTURE: The structure of the translation is rhymed couplets, meaning that you'll mostly (though not exclusively) have consecutive pairs of rhymed lines throughout the entire poem. The poem itself is broken up with occasional standard line breaks, as one would expect, but also with a more peculiar feature that might best be described as indented line breaks. The standard line breaks are used where there is a change of subject or focus, as would be the case in any text, while the indented line breaks break up one and the same line into two separate pieces (sometimes even in the middle of an ongoing sentence) and align the two parts with indentation as a kind of visual jigsaw puzzle which could easily be refitted. The included page numbering is custom-made for this REDUX edition and does not correspond to the page numbering of any printed edition of this book. The page numbers were simply added in order to ease navigation through the book. However, because of this reason I've had to edit four page references in the Notes section in order to align them with this custom page numbering: PAGE NUMBERING Note I.4: p. xii -> p. vi Note I.12: p. xi -> p. v Note V.18: p. xii -> p. vi Note VI.38: p. viii -> p. iii CONTENTS Introduction THE NATURE OF THINGS Book I: Matter and Void Book II: The Dance of Atoms Book III: Mortality and the Soul Book IV: The Senses Book V: Cosmos and Civilization Book VI: Weather and the Earth Further Reading A Note on the Text and Translation Notes Glossary of Proper Names Acknowledgements THE NATURE OF THINGS TITUS LUCRETIUS CARUS must have been born soon after 100 BC and is likely to have died before his poem was given to the world, probably in the 50s BC. Almost nothing is known about his life. He was a Roman citizen and a friend of Gaius Memmius, a Roman politician, and his poem was read and admired by Cicero. It is doubtful if there is any truth in the story preserved by St Jerome and immortalized by Tennyson that he died at his own hand after being driven mad by a love philtre. A. E. STALLINGS was born in 1968. She studied Latin at the University of Georgia, and Latin and Greek at Oxford University. She has published two collections of poetry, Archaic Smile, which won the Richard Wilbur Award, and Hapax. Her work has twice been included in the Best American Poetry series, and has received a Pushcart Prize among other awards. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos, and their son, Jason. RICHARD JENKYNS was born in 1949 and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. He was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, from 1972 to 1981, and a lecturer at the University of Bristol between 1978 and 1981. He has been a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, since 1981, and Professor of the Classical Tradition since 1999. INTRODUCTION Of all the great poems of Europe – and it is indeed among the greatest – Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) is perhaps the most improbable. Here is a poem without people in it, without any story; instead, it offers a treatise on science and philosophy. The philosophy, moreover, is a strict materialism, which denies the existence of anything magical, mysterious or transcendent. It does not sound like promising matter for poetry at all, let alone for a work of more than 7,000 lines. Yet the result is a masterpiece. A key to appreciating this most unlikely success is to understand the nature of Lucretius’ beliefs and the circumstances in which he decided to expound them. About Titus Lucretius Carus himself we know almost nothing. A very few supposed facts about his life come down to us from antiquity, but they appear in sources many centuries later than his time, and they seem to be at best guesswork, at worst pure fabrication. Only one firm date can be attached to him: in 54 BC Cicero slipped a sentence into a letter to his brother praising ‘the poems of Lucretius’ – presumably the poem that we have or some version of it – for their combination of imagination and skill. Some verbal echoes indicate that Catullus was reading Lucretius while he was writing his own longest poem – Poem 64, commonly known as Peleus and Thetis – datable to somewhere in the fifties BC. Though The Nature of Things is usually supposed to have been written in the fifties, it has been dated to the sixties, and even to the forties. While it is possible that Lucretius was still tinkering with it at the start of the forties, the bulk of it must be earlier. Since there is no trace of him having written anything else, it may have been a lifetime’s work, composed over a decade or more, with portions of it circulating while it was still incomplete. The poem is indeed unfinished. For example, a passage from the first book reappears at the beginning of the fourth, evidence that Lucretius had not finally decided where to place it. And the last book breaks off abruptly in the middle of an account of the plague which swept through Athens in 430 BC. The fact which we can most confidently assert about Lucretius is one drawn from his poem itself: that he had been converted to the philosophy of Epicurus (341–270 BC) and was possessed with the desire to persuade others of its truth. To understand Lucretius we need to consider what Epicurus taught, and to understand Epicurus we need to set him in his context within the development of Greek thought. One of the achievements of the Greek mind between the eighth and the fifth centuries was a process which might be called separation or differentiation. They discovered that fact is different from fiction and that history is different from myth, that theology and philosophy are different ways of talking about the world, and that each of these is different from natural science. These distinctions may iii seem very obvious to us, but they were not then. Take Homer’s Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony, poems datable probably to the later eighth century. Homer was both poet and historian, and Hesiod saw no firm distinction between story-telling about the origin of the gods and explaining how the world came into being in physical terms. Similarly, we may find it hard to decide whether the Greek intellectuals of the seventh and sixth centuries are best described (in our terms) as philosophical or as scientific thinkers. But gradually the discovery that science and philosophy are different modes of enquiry was made, and in the later fifth century Socrates made the distinction absolute. This distinction has prevailed in our thought ever since. To put the matter in very simplified terms: the dominant tradition of Western philosophy descending from Socrates’ pupil Plato and Plato’s pupil Aristotle tells us to look inwards and work out the nature of reality within our own minds by a process of abstract reasoning. By contrast, Epicurus held that natural science is the route to philosophical understanding, and his system, from one point of view, can be seen as the revival, in a transformed shape, of an older tradition of Greek thought. He begins not with abstract cogitation but with the external world. On his account we can deduce from the physical phenomena around us that all matter is made up of small indivisible particles – atoms – and that nothing exists except atoms and empty space. No atom can be created and none can be destroyed; space is infinite, as is the number of atoms that move within it. All events and processes are merely the effects of the movement of atoms. All existence is material; everything that exists is part of nature, and therefore there can be no supernatural realm. It is disputed in what sense Epicurus believed in the existence of the gods: the usual view is that he believed the gods to exist as independent entities, but some think that he believed them to exist merely as concepts. This much is sure: insofar as the gods exist, they must be made of atoms, like everything else; they did not create the world, they play no part in its governance and they take no interest in us.