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The long silence from the death of Ennius to the birth of LUCRETIUS (Titus Lucretius Carus) was broken by no great poetic voice. Slowly and quietly the principles which took form in the Annales of Ennius permeated the leading classes at Rome till the genius of Lucretius awoke to a new intellectual world. Of his personal history the main facts are doubtful and the details quite unknown. From his name he is argued to have come of an old Roman family; from his poem to have felt true friendship for the unworthy Memmius, and to have lived the life of a recluse.
Around him raged the revolution of the third aristocratic stage: Greek culture had done its work, and the world was ready for an emperor. By the best minds the old religious forms were cherished only for literary and artistic adornment; the real political power was the price of arms; the social bonds of class to class were loosed, and the spiritual government of the seething State was committed to a crude literature of which the chief virtue was its frank unoriginality.
The one work of Lucretius is a philosophical poem in hexameters, which, in development of form, lies half-way between Ennius and Virgil. His subject is an atomic theory of the universe, drawn from Democritus and Epicuras, and presented, like the philosophies of the older Greeks, in didactic verse, diversified by passages of extreme beauty and pervaded by a spirit of magnificent earnestness and prophetic zeal.
The atomic theory which he expounded was of course as precocious as it was brilliant. Physical science was not yet sufficiently advanced to furnish an adequate basis of accurate observation and mathematical form. In the hands of Lucretius it was primarily a weapon for attacking the old superstitions which in his view were responsible for most of the misery and backwardness of the world. Religion, as he saw it, was the parent of evil. But he gives us, side by side with this, the first sketch in literature of the great stages in human progress, from the earliest animal men who helped themselves with tooth and nail, to the civilized beings who had tamed the lower beasts and founded cities and cultivated the arts. He has too a large measure of the civic spirit which spoke in Ennius, and he carried into his own realm of nature the orderliness and energy of Rome which had knit together the Western world.
But he loved Nature best, and more perhaps than any other poet before Wordsworth. "Earth," he says, "is rightly called Mother, seeing that she brought forth the race of men and every beast and bird in its due season. . . . In the beginning Earth hath in herself the elements whence watersprings pouring forth their coolness perpetually renew the boundless Sea, and whence fires arise, making the ground in many places hot, and belching forth the surpassing flames of Ætna. Then she bears shining corn and glad woodlands for the support of men, and rivers and leaves and shining pastures for the beasts that haunt the hills."
If his view of nature seems sometimes terrible in its mechanical emptiness, he adds to it a human sympathy which inspired him to search for truth and to help the poor sufferers from superstition, and a conception, dim indeed, but no less real when it appears, of a great power of Love by which all things are drawn together and by which mankind is led on from savage beginnings to a gentler and a nobler order. He is in this way not only one of the greatest inconoclasts of religion founded on fear, but a precurser of the religions of hope and love.
In the force and vividness of his language he is often Homeric. He profoundly influenced Virgil and has been frequently drawn on by later writers. But it has been left to our own days to appreciate him fully.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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