71 BC: Spartacus' massive slave revolt (involving an army
of 90,000 former slaves and outlaws) is finally put down by
Cassius and Pompey. More than 6000 of the captured rebels are
crucified and their bodies left for display along the Appian
Way.
62 BC: Defeat and death of Catiline. By this point in his
career this former lieutenant of Sulla had become a living
plague upon Roman politics and a virtual byword for scandal,
intrigue, conspiracy, demagoguery, and vain ambition.
Such was Rome from the rise of Sulla to the fall of
Catiline, a period of seemingly endless bloodshed and civil
unrest. With such a background, it is little wonder that the
precepts of Epicurus - with their emphasis on contemplative
pursuits and quiet pleasures and severe strictures against
ambition, fame, and the world of politics - struck a
responsive chord in the heart of a young Roman poet. To a
sensitive intellectual like Lucretius, the teachings of
Epicurus must have had the force of a philosophical
revelation. In this respect, it is noteworthy (and ironic)
that throughout De Rerum Natura whenever the poet
writes about Epicurus he praises him not simply as a great
teacher and brilliant philosopher, but virtually as a kind of
oracle and even a god. Meanwhile, he seems to have viewed his
own role as that of an Epicurean evangelist: he is a poetic
apostle dedicated to spreading the master's gospel of
liberation from the bondage of superstition and error, of
inner peace attained through the study of philosophy and the
enjoyment of modest pleasures.
b. Lucretius' Personality and
Outlook
Unlike his hero Epicurus, who had a reputation for being
gentle and self-effacing, Lucretius' excitable personality
springs vividly from his pages. Though naturally passionate
and intellectually contentious, he also reveals himself as
reflective and prone to melancholy. Like his master, he
detests war, strife, and social tumult and favors a life
quietly devoted to sweet friendship (suavis amicitia)
and intellectual pleasures.
At the beginning of Book 2 of his poem, the poet
compares the prospect of a person armed with the insights of
Epicurus to that of a secure spectator looking down upon a
scene of strife:
Pleasant it is, when over the great sea the winds shake
the waters,
To gaze down from shore on the trials of
others;
Not because seeing other people struggle is sweet
to us,
But because the fact that we ourselves are free
from such ills strikes us as pleasant.
Pleasant it is also
to behold great armies battling on a plain,
When we
ourselves have no part in their peril.
But nothing is
sweeter than to occupy a lofty sanctuary of the mind,
Well
fortified with the teachings of the wise,
Where we may
look down on others as they stumble along,
Vainly
searching for the true path of life. . . . (2. 1-10)
This idea of philosophy as a private citadel or quiet
refuge in a world of anxiety and turmoil, or of some form of
contemplation as the true path to enlightenment, has been a
recurrent theme in world literature from the Buddha to
Boethius, from Socrates to Schopenhauer. The idea is a central
component of Epicurean doctrine and a favorite theme and image
of Lucretius, whose characteristic vantage point throughout
the poem is that of a critical observer above the fray. As
narrator, he stands aloof, a scornful yet at the same time
sympathetic witness to mankind's dark strivings and
tribulations:
Lo, see them: contending with their wits, fighting for
precedence,
Struggling night and day with unending
effort,<
Climbing, clawing their way up the pinnacles
of wealth and power.
O miserable minds of men! O blind
hearts!
In what darkness, among how many perils,
You
pass your short lives! Do you not see
That our nature
requires only this:
A body free from pain, and a mind,
released from worry and fear,
Free to enjoy feelings of
delight? (2. 11-19.)
Like his master, Lucretius obviously feels that the true
purpose of moral philosophy is not merely to diagnose human
miseries; but to heal them.
2. Philosophy
a. Epicurus
From the very start of the poem, and especially in the
opening lines of Book 3 (a ringing tribute to Epicurus),
Lucretius makes it clear that his main purpose is not so much
to display his own talents as to render accurately in a
suitably sublime style the glorious philosophy of his
master:
O you who out of the vast darkness were the first to
raise
A shining light, illuminating the blessings of life,
O glory of the Grecian race, it is you I follow,
Tracing in your clearly marked footprints my own firm
steps,
Not as a contending rival, but out of love, for I
yearn to imitate you.
For why should the swallow vie with
the swan?
Why should a young kid on spindly limbs
Dare
to match strides with a mighty steed? (3. 1-8.)
The poetry, Lucretius keeps reminding his readers, is
secondary, a sugar coating to sweeten Epicurus' healing
medicine. The Epicurean system is what is important, and the
poet pledges all his skill to presenting it as clearly, as
faithfully, and as persuasively as possible. In his view
nothing less than universal enlightenment and the liberation
of mankind is at stake.
Epicurus
was born at Samos, an Athenian colony, in 341 BC. Reduced to
its simplest level, the goal of his teaching was to free
humanity from needless cares and anxieties (especially the
fear of death) . By furnishing a complete explanation of the
origin and structure of the universe, he sought to open men's
eyes to a true understanding of their condition and liberate
them from ignorant fears and superstitions. Though by all
accounts he was a voluminous writer, only a tiny fraction of
his original output has survived, with the result that
Lucretius' poem has served as one of the primary vehicles for
conveying his thought.
b. Epicureanism
The Epicurean system consists of three linked components:
Physics, Ethics, and Canonic. These three elements are
designed to be interdependent, each one supposedly uniting
with and reinforcing the other two. (To cite just one example,
Epicurus' physics supposedly validates both the existence of
free will and the fact that the soul disintegrates with the
body, ideas that are crucial to Epicurean ethics. The canonic
claims to validate the authority and reliability of sensation,
which in turn serves as a basis for Epicurean physical
theories and ethical views relating to pleasure and pain.) In
actual fact, however, the three components are quite
separable, and it is certainly possible, for example, to
accept Epicurus' ethical doctrines while entirely denying his
canonic teachings and physics.
i.
Physics
One of the great achievements of the scientific
imagination, the Epicurean cosmos is based on three
fundamental principles: materialism, mechanism, and atomism.
According to Epicurus the universe covers an infinitude of
space and consists entirely of matter and void. For the most
part the philosopher upholds Democritus'
theory that all matter is composed of imperishable atoms, tiny
indivisible particles that can neither be created or
destroyed. He also shares Democritus' view that the atoms are
infinite in number and homogenous in substance, while
differing in shape and size. However, whereas Democritus held
that the number of atomic sizes and shapes is infinite,
Epicurus argued that their number, while large, is
nevertheless finite. (As Lucretius notes, if atoms could be
any size, some would be visible, and possibly even immense.)
As for atomic motion, Democritus had claimed that the atoms
move in straight lines in all directions and always in
accordance with the iron laws of "necessity" (anangke).
Epicurus, on the other hand, contends that their natural
motion is to travel straight downwards at a uniform high
velocity. At random and unpredictable moments, moreover, they
deviate ever so slightly from their regular course, their
resulting collisions thus occurring not by strict necessity
but always with some element of chance. This theory of atomic
"swerve" or clinamen is a crucial feature of the
Epicurean world-view, providing (so Lucretius and other
adherents believed) a firm physical foundation supporting the
existence of free will.
Armed with these basic principles, Epicurus is able to
explain the universe as an ongoing cosmic event - a
never-ending binding and unbinding of atoms resulting in the
gradual emergence of entire new worlds and the gradual
disintegration of old ones. Our world, our bodies, our minds
are but atoms in motion. They did not occur because of some
purpose or final cause. Nor were they created by some god for
our special use and benefit. They simply happened, more or
less randomly and entirely naturally, through the effective
operation of immutable and eternal physical laws.
Here it should be noted that Epicurus is a materialist, not
an atheist. Although he argues that not only our earth and all
its life forms, but also all human civilizations and arts came
into being and evolved without any aid or sponsorship from the
gods, he does not deny their existence. He merely denies that
they have any knowledge of or interest in human affairs. They
live on immune to destruction in their perfectly compounded
material bodies in the serene and cloudless spaces between the
worlds (intermundia), perfectly oblivious of human
anxieties and cares. Lucretius imagines that Epicurus rivaled
them in their divine tranquility.
ii.
Canonic
The so-called canonic teachings of Epicurus (from the Greek
kanon, "rule") include his epistemological theories and
especially his theories of sensation and perception. In
certain respects, these theories represent Epicurus' thought
at its most original and prescient - and in one or two
instances at its most fanciful and absurd.
The central principle of the canonic is that our sense data
provide a true and accurate picture of external reality.
Sensation is the ultimate source and criterion of truth, and
its testimony is incontrovertible. Epicurus considered the
reliability of the senses a bulwark of his philosophy, and
Lucretius refers to trust in sensation as a "holdfast,"
describing it as the only thing preventing our slide into the
abyss of skepticism (4. 502-512).
But if our sensory input is always true and dependable, how
are we to account for hallucinations, fantasies, dreams,
delusions, and other forms of perceptual error? According to
Epicurus, such errors are always due to some higher mental
process. They arise, for example, when we apply judgment or
reasoning or some confused product of memory to the actual
data presented to us by sensation. As Lucretius remarks, we
deceive ourselves because we tend to "see some things with our
mind that have not been seen by the senses":
For nothing is harder than to distinguish the real things
of sense
From those doubtful versions of them that the
mind readily supplies. (4. 466-468.)
Epicurus' theory of sensory perception is consistent with
and follows from his materialism and atomism. Like Democritus,
he postulates that external objects send off emanations or
"idols" (eidola) of themselves that travel through the
air and impinge upon our senses. In effect, these subtle
atomic images or films imprint themselves on the senses,
leaving behind trace versions of the external world (auditory
and olfactory as well as visual) that can be apprehended and
stored in memory. Once again, perceptual errors can occur in
this process, but not because of any inherent problem with
sensation itself. Instead, mistakes arise due either to the
contamination of the "idols" by other atoms or because of the
"false opinions" that we ourselves, through defects in our
higher mental operations, introduce.
In short, unless it is distorted by some form of external
"noise" or by some processing error attributable to reason,
all information conveyed through the senses is true. This is
Epicurus' core canonic teaching. Unfortunately, this belief in
the infallibility of sense perception and the unreliability of
logic and reason led him and his followers (including
Lucretius) into a number of strange conclusions - such as the
absurd claim that the sun, moon, and stars are exactly
the size and shape that they appear to be to our naked eye.
Thus (as strict Epicurean doctrine would have it) the moon
truly is a small, silver disc, the sun is a slightly
larger golden fire, and the stars are but tiny points of
light.
iii.
Ethics
Epicurus' ethics represents the true goal and raison
d’etre of his philosophical mission, the capstone atop the
impressive (though hardly flawless) pillars of his physics and
epistemology. Like Socrates, he considered moral questions
(What is virtue? What is happiness?) rather than cosmological
speculations to be the ultimate concerns of philosophical
inquiry.
As mentioned earlier, it is possible to accept one
component of the Epicurean system without necessarily
subscribing to the others. But from Epicurus' (and Lucretius’)
point of view, it is the ethical component that is of vital
importance.
As many commentators have noted, the term "Epicure" (in the
sense of a self-indulgent bon vivant or luxurious
pleasure-seeker) is entirely out of place when applied to
Epicureanism in general and to its founder in particular. By
all accounts, Epicurus' own living habits were virtually
Spartan, and it is said that he attracted many of his
disciples more by his solid character and agreeable temper
than by his philosophical arguments. His moral philosophy is a
form of hedonism, meaning that it is a system based on
the pursuit of pleasure (Gr. 'ēdonewhich
it identifies as the greatest good. But Epicurean hedonism is
hardly synonymous with sensual extravagance; nor is it a
matter (in St. Paul's disparaging terms) of "let us eat and
drink; for tomorrow we die." It is instead a system that
requires severe self-denial and moral discipline. For Epicurus
places a much greater emphasis on the avoidance of pain than
on the pursuit of pleasure, and he favors intellectual
pleasures (which are long-lasting and never cloying) over
physical ones (which are short-lived and lead to excess). As
for self-indulgence, he argued that it is better to abstain
from coarse or trivial pleasures if they prevent our enjoyment
of richer, more satisfying ones.
In Epicurean ethics physical pain is the great enemy of
happiness and is to be avoided in almost all cases. Mental
anguish is even more threatening and potentially debilitating.
It follows that the fear of death - and especially the
superstitious belief in an after-life of eternal torment - can
be particularly devastating source of anxiety and take a
terrible toll on humanity, which is why Epicurus sets out so
determinedly to crush it.
c. The Design of the Poem
De Rerum Natura is an epic in six books and is expertly
organized to provide both expository clarity as well as
powerful narrative and lyric effects. In one respect, the poem
represents the unfolding of a complex philosophical argument,
and in many places the poet is challenged to explain abstract
and often extremely prosaic technical material in a lucid and
lively way. (At times during the poem he complains about the
relative poverty of Latin as a philosophical medium compared
to the technical richness of Greek.) At the same time, he must
be careful not to overwhelm or upstage his philosophical
presentation with a surplus of brilliant literary devices and
gaudy stylistic displays. The basic organization is as
follows:
Book 1: The poem begins with a justly famous invocation to
Venus (the poet's symbol for the forces of cohesion,
integration, and creative energy in the universe). Presented
as a kind of life principle, the Lucretian Venus is associated
with the figure of Love (Gr. philia, the unifying or
binding force in the philosophy of Empedocles,
and also identified with her mythical role as Venus Genetrix,
the patron goddess and mother of the Roman people. In the
remainder of the book the poet begins the work of explaining
the Epicurean system and refuting the systems of other
philosophers. He starts by setting forth the major principles
of Epicurean physics and cosmology, including atomism, the
infinity of the universe, and the existence of matter and
void.
Book 2. This book begins with a lyric passage celebrating
the "serene sanctuaries" of philosophy and lamenting the
condition of those poor human beings who struggle vainly
outside its protective walls. The poet explains atomic motion
and shapes and argues that the atoms do not have secondary
qualities (color, smell, heat, moisture, etc.).
Book 3. After a glowing opening apostrophe to Epicurus ("O
glory of the Greeks!"), the poet proceeds with an extended
explanation and proof of the materiality - and mortality – of
the mind and soul. This explanation culminates in the
climactic declaration, "Nil igitur mors est ad nos. .
." ("Therefore death is nothing to us."), a stark, simple
statement which effectively epitomizes the main message and
central doctrine of Epicureanism.
Book 4. Following introductory verses on the art of
didactic poetry, this book begins with a full account of
Epicurus' theory of vision and sensation. It concludes with
one of Lucretius' greatest passages of verse, his famous (and
caustic) analysis of the biology and psychology of sexual
love.
Book 5. Lucretius begins this book with another tribute to
the genius of Epicurus, whose heroic intellectual
achievements, it is argued, exceed even the twelve labors of
Hercules. The remainder of the book is devoted to a full
account of Epicurean cosmology and sociology, with the poet
explaining the stages of life on earth and the origin and
development of civilization. This book includes the remarkable
passage (837-886) in which the poet offers his own
evolutionary hypothesis on the proliferation and extinction of
life forms.
Book 6. Though partly unfinished, this book contains some
of Lucretius' greatest poetry, with effective technical
explanations of meteorological and geologic phenomena and
vivid descriptions of thunderstorms, lightning, and volcanic
eruptions. The poem closes with a horrifying account of the
great plague of Athens (430 BC), a grim reminder of universal
mortality.
d. Lucretius as a Philosopher
Critics universally recognize Lucretius as a major poet and
the author of one of the great classics of world literature.
But in part because of his accepted role as a spokesperson for
Epicureanism rather than an originator, it has been more
difficult to assess his merit as a philosopher.
In this respect, it is noteworthy that at least two
important philosophers have voiced strong support for
Lucretius' status as a philosophical innovator and original
thinker. In 1884, while still a young faculty member at the
Blaise Pascal Lycee in Paris, the French philosopher Henri
Bergson (1859-1941) published an edition of De Rerum
Natura with notes, commentary, and an accompanying
critical essay. Throughout this work, Bergson commends
Lucretius not only as a poet of genius, but also as an
inspired and "singularly original" thinker. In particular, he
points out that in his view the poet's instinctive grasp of
the physical operations of nature and his comprehensive, truly
scientific world-view exceed anything found in the theories of
Democritus and Epicurus.
The Spanish poet and Harvard philosopher George Santayana
(1863-1952) held a similarly high opinion of Lucretius' power
as a scientific thinker. Democritus and Epicurus, he argues,
are mere sketch artists who offer no more than bare hints and
vague outlines of a thoroughly imagined and truly
scientifically conceived universe. It thus remained for the
deeper, more visionary poet not just to flesh out their rough
drafts in fine words, but in essence to actually create and
give body to the entire Epicurean system. In Santayana's view,
Epicurus was but a supplier of half-baked ideas; it was
Lucretius who was the true creator of scientific materialism
and the real founder of Epicureanism.
Hyperbole aside, what both Bergson and Santayana are
pointing to is the frequently underrated and misunderstood
role of imagination in the production of almost all major
systems of philosophy. Great philosophers from Plato and
Aristotle to Kant and Nietzsche (and Bergson himself) have
never been simply logic mills or thinking machines, but bold
thinkers with an imaginative "feel" for abstract reality. In
this respect, even if we dismiss the assessments of Bergson
and Santayana as extravagant, we can still accept Lucretius as
a bona fide philosopher and not just as a poetical embellisher
and interpreter.
Every philosopher has strengths and weaknesses; those of
Lucretius are conspicuous. In addition to his powerful
imagination, his main strength (not surprisingly) is his
verbal skill and force of expression. He is one of the most
quotable of philosophers, with a flair for striking images and
tightly packed statements. A few samples:
On superstition:
"So powerful is religion at
persuading to evil." 1. 101.
On luxuries:
"Hot fevers do not depart your body more
quickly
If you toss about on pictured tapestries or rich
purple coverlets
Than if you lie sick under a poor man's
blanket." 2. 34-36.
On life without philosophy:
"All life is a struggle in
the dark." 2. 54.
"After a while the life of a fool is
hell on earth." 3. 1023.
On new truths:
"No fact is so obvious that it does not
at first produce wonder,
Nor so wonderful that it does not
eventually yield to belief." 2. 1026-27.
On reason:
"Such is the power of reason to overcome
inborn vices
That nothing prevents our living a life
worthy of gods." 3. 321-22.
On the language of love:
"We say a foul, dirty woman is
'sweetly disordered,'
If she is green-eyed, we call her
'my little Pallas';
If she's flighty and tightly strung,
she’s 'a gazelle’;
A squat, dumpy dwarf is 'a little
sprite,'
While a hulking giantess is 'divinely
statuesque.'
If she stutters or lisps, she speaks
'musically.'
If she's dumb, she’s 'modest’; and if she’s
hot-tempered
And a chatterbox, she's 'a ball of fire.’
When she's too skinny to live, she’s 'svelte,’
And
she's 'delicate’ when she’s dying of consumption. . .
It
would be wearisome to run through the whole list." 4.
1159-1171.
Of all Lucretius' intellectual strengths, perhaps none is
more characteristic or stands out more impressively than his
hard, clear commitment to naturalism. Throughout the poem he
consistently attacks supernatural explanations of phenomena
and resists the temptation to give in to some form of natural
religion or "scientific" supernaturalism. The world, he
argues, was not created by divine intelligence, nor is
it imbued with any form of mind or purpose. Instead, it must
be understood as an entirely natural phenomenon, the outcome
of a random (though statistically inevitable and lawful)
process. In short, whatever happens in the universe is not the
product of design, but part of an ongoing sequence of purely
physical events.
Lucretius' principal philosophical shortcoming is that not
only will he occasionally follow Epicurean doctrine to the
point of absurdity (e.g., the supposedly tiny size of the sun
and moon) but he will also introduce logical fallacies or
scientific errors of his own (such as his claim that the atoms
travel faster than light - 2. 144ff.). As Bergson points out,
these howlers can usually be attributed to the defective
method of ancient science, which, because it did not require
that hypotheses be confirmed by experimentation, allowed even
the wildest conjectures to pass as plausible truths. One
further problem is that, for all his reliance on naturalistic
explanations and his attempted reduction of metaphysics to
physics, Lucretius at times seems to back away, if only ever
so slightly, from a purely materialist world view. Indeed in
his effusive descriptions of the creative power of nature,
effectively symbolized by the figure of Venus, he seems almost
(like Bergson) to postulate an immaterial life-force surging
through the universe and operating above or beyond raw nature.
To read this romantic streak into him is clearly a mistake.
Lucretius remains a thorough-going naturalist. Yet when his
verse is in high gear, one almost gets the impression
that somewhere inside this staunchly scientific, fiercely
anti-religious poet there is a romantic nature-worshipper
screaming to get out.
e. Influence and Legacy
Lucretius' literary influence has been long-lasting and
widespread, especially among poets with epic ambitions or
cosmological interests, from Virgil and Milton to Whitman and
Wordsworth. Not surprisingly, as one of the main proponents
and principal sources of Epicurean thought, his philosophical
influence has also been considerable. The extent of his
communication with and influence on his contemporaries,
including other Epicurean writers, is not known. What is known
is that by the end of the first century A.D. De Rerum
Natura was hardly read and its author had already begun a
long, slow descent into philosophical oblivion. It was not
until the Renaissance, with the recovery of lost Lucretian
manuscripts, that a true revival of the poet became possible.
It is probably an exaggeration to say that the restoration
and study of Lucretius' poem was crucial to the rise of
Renaissance "new philosophy" and the birth of modern science.
On the other hand, one must not ignore its importance as a
spur to innovative sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
scientific thought and cosmological speculation. Greek atomism
and Lucretius' account of the universe as an infinite,
lawfully integrated whole provided an important background
stimulus not only for Newtonian science, but also (if only in
a negative or contrary way) for Spinoza's pantheism and
Leibniz’s monadology.
Lucretius' influence on early modern thought is most
directly visible in the work of the French scientist and
neo-Epicurean philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655). In 1649
Gassendi published his Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri, a
theoretical refinement and elaboration of Epicurean science. A
Catholic priest with a remarkably independent mind, Gassendi
seemingly had no problem reconciling his personal
philosophical commitment to atomism and materialism with his
Christian beliefs in the immortality of the soul and the
doctrine of divine providence.
Every modern reader of De Rerum Natura has been
struck by the extent to which Lucretius seems to have
anticipated modern evolutionary theories in the fields of
geology, biology, and sociology. However, to acknowledge this
connection is not to say that the poet deserves accredited
status as some kind of scientific "evolutionist" or
pre-Darwinian precursor. It is merely to point out that,
however we choose to define and evaluate its influence, De
Rerum Natura was from the 17th century onward a
massive cultural presence and hence a ready source of
evolutionary ideas. The poem formed part of the cultural
heritage and intellectual background of virtually every
evolutionary theorist in Europe from Lamarck to Herbert
Spencer (whose hedonistic ethics also owed a debt to the
poet) - including (though he claimed never to have read
Lucretius' epic) Darwin himself.
Bergson's early study of Lucretius obviously played an
important role in the foundation and development of his own
philosophy. In 1907 Bergson published Creative
Evolution, outlining his bold, new vitalistic theory of
evolution, in opposition to both the earlier vitalism of
Lamarck and the naturalism of Darwin, and Spencer. It is hard
not to see in the French philosophers' concept of the élan
vital a powerful life force akin to and strongly
influenced by the immortal Venus of his great Latin
predecessor. Bergson's evolutionary philosophy influenced the
later "process" philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead
(1861-1947) and the teleological scientific theories of Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), with the interesting result
that it is possible to trace out a fairly direct, if unlikely,
line of descent from Greek atomism through the pagan
anti-spiritualist Lucretius to the Catholic naturalist
Gassendi and then on, via the Jewish-Catholic Bergson, to the
highly abstract theism of Whitehead and the "spiritualized"
evolutionism of Father Teilhard. That Lucretius' ideas wound
up two thousand years after his death influencing those of a
godly British mathematical theorist and a highly original and
even eccentric French scientist-priest is remarkable testimony
to their durability, adaptability, and persuasive power.
f. Conclusion
In conclusion, it seems fair to say that, far from being a
mere conduit for earlier Greek thought, the poet Titus
Lucretius Carus was a bold innovator and original thinker who
fully deserves the appellation of philosopher. While his
literary fame clearly (and properly) comes first, and although
his philosophical reputation is based largely (and again
properly) on his role as one of the principle sources and
prime exponents of Epicureanism, his own ideas, especially his
evolutionary theories and his entirely naturalistic
explanation of all universal phenomena, have exerted a long
and important influence on western science and philosophy and
should not be underestimated.
3. Bibliography
The most authoritative manuscripts of De Rerum
Natura are the so-called O and Q codices in Leiden. Both
date from the 9th century. Recently, however, scholars have
deciphered a much older and previously illegible manuscript,
consisting of papyri discovered in Herculaneum and possibly
dating from as early as the first century AD. All other
Lucretian manuscripts date from the 15th and 16th century and
are based on the one (no longer extant) discovered in a
monastery by the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini in
1417.
Texts:
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things. W.H.D. Rouse,
trans. Revised and edited by Martin F. Smith. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992.
Bailey, C. ed. De Rerum Natura. 3 volumes with
commentary. Oxford, 1947.
English translations:
Munro, H.A.J. (prose). Cambridge, 1864.
Latham, R.E. (prose). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1951.
Humphries, Rolphe. (verse). Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1968.
Copley, Frank O. (verse). New York: Norton, 1977.
Critical and scholarly studies:
Bergson, Henri. Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of
Lucretius. Wade Baskin, trans. New York: Philosophical
Library, 1959.
Clay, D. Lucretius and Epicurus. Ithaca, NY,
1983.
Jones, H. The Epicurean Tradition. London: 1989.
Kenney, E. J. Lucretius. Oxford, 1977.
Santayana, George. Three Philosophical Poets.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sikes, E.E. Lucretius: Poet and Philosopher.
Cambridge, 1936.
