Lucretius Poet and Philosopher

Background and Fortunes of ›De Rerum Natura‹

Philip R. Hardie, Valentina Prosperi, Diego Zucca, Philip R. Hardie, Valentina Prosperi, Diego Zucca

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110673517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Six hundred years after Poggio's retrieval of the De rerum natura, and with the recent surge of interest in Lucretius and his influence, there has never been a better time to fully assess and recognize the shaping force of his thought and poetry over European culture from antiquity to modern times. This volume offers a multidisciplinary and updated overview of Lucretius as philosopher and as poet, with special attention to how these two aspects interact. The volume includes 18 contributions by established as well as early career scholars working on Lucretius' philosophical and poetic work, and his reception both in ancient and early modern times. All the chapters present new and original research. Section I explores core issues of Epicurean-Lucretian epistemology and ethics. Section II expounds much new material on ancient response to and reception of Lucretius. Section III presents new material and analysis on the immediate, fraught early modern reception of the poem. Section IV offers a wide collection of new and original papers on Lucretius' fortunes in the period from Machiavelli up to Victorian times. Section V explores little known aspects of the iconographical and biographical motifs related to the De rerum natura.

Part I: Lucretius and the Traditions of Ancient Philosophy

Lucretian Pleasures

David Sedley

Abstract

This chapter’s main aim is to bring into focus Lucretius’ celebration of his own Epicurean pleasures. The DRN refers in its very first line to divine as well as human pleasures. It closes with the most frightful scene of bodily and mental pain, one that owing to the poem’s evident incompletion still lacks its Epicurean moral lesson about why even the most intense bodily pain need not be feared. In between those two extremities Lucretius offers a uniquely sensitive, and rarely appreciated, commentary on the meaning, boundaries and divine nature of true Epicurean pleasures, and on their intimate relationship to the study of physics, by one who can claim direct experience of their transformative effects.

Keywords: Pleasure, Epicureanism, Lucretius, hedonism, gods,

With its opening words the De Rerum Natura celebrates Venus as hominum divomque voluptas, “pleasure of humans and gods” (1.1). And a recurrent theme of the poem that follows will be the divine nature of true pleasures, presented as a paradigm to which humans too may nevertheless aspire if they follow Lucretius’ Epicurean path. Alongside this upward-looking aspiration, just a few lines further into book 1 pleasure, now in her very different guise as nature’s procreative force, will be seen pervading the entire animal kingdom. In his opening then Lucretius provides, virtually in the same breath, two utterly different introductions to the Epicurean summum bonum. At one extreme, pleasure is the great leveller, an innate motivator common to all animate beings;¹ at the other, it is a godlike reward attainable, even among the human race, only by converts to Epicurean philosophy.

My primary focus in this paper will be on the latter kind, the godlike pleasures specific to Epicurean living, to which Lucretius is himself our most eloquent witness. The lower, animal pleasures may in the book 1 proem appear also to be divinized, in so far as they are the work of Venus, but in the proem to book 2 Lucretius carefully corrects any such impression. There he does again refer to the reproductive drive as “divine pleasure” (2.172 dia voluptas), referring to Venus’ divinely bestowed perpetuation of the human race. But, importantly, this time he rejects it out of hand as theologically mistaken.²

In Epicurean doctrine pleasures are divided into two kinds, the bodily and the mental; and within each of those two domains there are short-term “kinetic” pleasures, which lie primarily in hedonic processes such as eating or learning, and static (or “katastematic”) pleasures, which consist in the longer-term state of painlessness. Counter-intuitively, and notoriously, Epicureans insist that when all pain has gone and static pleasure has replaced it, the height of pleasure has already been reached. The added kinetic pleasures typically associated with luxurious living can, as they put it, ‘vary’ the static pleasure, but cannot increase it. As Lucretius says in his second proem (2.16–19), “there is nothing else that nature barks out for than that pain should be absent from the body, and that the mind should enjoy pleasurable sensation while insulated from anxiety and fear.”³ And as we learn from him in the same proem and elsewhere, those who make the mistake of thinking that the pleasures of simple long-term painlessness can be further increased by heaping luxury upon luxury find that the reverse is true: not only do the luxuries fail to increase the sum total of pleasure, they actually detract from it by generating or intensifying desires that threaten to enslave us.

Take the body first. How do you keep it free of pain? Lucretius dwells on the ease with which this goal can be achieved: not, that is, by luxurious living, but by the satisfaction of basic needs. In the proem to book 2 this ideal is encapsulated for us with the model of a simple pastoral existence consisting in relaxation on shady grass beside a stream.⁴ Later, book 5’s reconstruction of human history (5.1390–1411) will teach us that the idyllic life portrayed in this tableau was once upon a time the reality of the human condition – before, that is, we threw it away by developing extravagant desires, deprived as we were at that time of the insight that the limit of bodily pleasure had already been reached. In the sixth and final proem we learn that only the intervention of Epicurus, when it finally came, was able to halt and reverse this downward spiral of the human condition.

But the recommendation of pastoral simplicity is only half of the story. Epicureanism does not pretend that anyone, however frugally they live, can be sure that illness or injury will not sooner or later make intense bodily pain inescapable – other, that is, than by death. That pain can be tolerated on certain conditions is an important Epicurean lesson, and one that Lucretius in the book 6 proem encourages us to expect,⁵ but nowhere delivers, even in that same book’s concluding account of frightful sufferings in the great Athenian plague. Yet without confident security from the threat of intolerable bodily pain we would also lack the required mental pleasure, that of freedom from anxiety. It is this gap in Lucretius’ otherwise immaculate presentation of Epicurean ethics that convinces me that at the time of his death the end of book 6 still awaited revision.⁶ For although the DRN is a poem devoted to the physical universe, Lucretius’ mastery of Epicurean ethics is if anything even more remarkable than his expertise in physics. His ethical commentary has not featured as much as it deserves in modern reconstructions of Epicurean ethics.

Let me give one example. Scholars of Epicureanism have detected and debated a crucial unclarity in the surviving evidence for Epicurean ethics. Was Epicurus a psychological hedonist – that is, did he claim the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain to be an innate and ineradicable feature of human and animal psychology?⁷ If so, adults who profess to pursue honour or virtue and to shun pleasure are simply mistaken: whether consciously or unconsciously, they want the honour or the virtue not for its own sake but for the sake of pleasure they expect to result. Alternatively was Epicurus, as others have maintained, an evaluative hedonist?⁸ On this latter hypothesis, he regarded pleasure as the only genuine and natural good capable of making a life a happy one, but allowed that many, perhaps most, human beings have been diverted into pursuing an alternative goal that society imposes, such as wealth, power or the possession of virtue for its own sake. Merely saying, as Epicurus is regularly reported as saying, that pleasure is our innate goal and summum bonum does not in itself help decide between the competing psychological and evaluative options.

But Lucretius, curiously overlooked in the modern interpretative debate, has a very clear answer. In the book 6 proem his praise of Epicurus includes the following (26-8):⁹ “[H]e explained what was the highest good (summum bonum) for which we are all aiming,¹⁰ and showed the way by which we could strive straight towards it, along a narrow track.” Uniquely among our Epicurean informants, Lucretius has recognized and eliminated the ambiguity, pronouncing in favour of psychological hedonism: we are already – all of us (omnes) – aiming for pleasure as our highest good; hence Epicurus’ contribution was to teach us, by the arts of hedonic calculation and desire-management, the precise means (the “narrow t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Lucretius and the Traditions of Ancient Philosophy
• Part II: Ancient Receptions
• Part III: Recovery: Early Modern Scholars, Readers, and Translators
• Part IV: Modern Receptions of Lucretius and his Thought
• Section V: Images of Lucretius
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Index Nominum