On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics)

by Ronald Melville

  Book Five

  4 the man who left us such great treasures: Epicurus. He is named only at 3. 1042. Cf. 6. 5 ff.

  8 He was a god, a god indeed: the Epicureans liked to shock by playing with the exaggerated language of praise used for rulers and other supposed benefactors (which sometimes passed over into real cult); so, for instance, the young Epicurean Colotes is said to have prostrated himself before Epicurus (Plutarch, Against Colotes 1117b–c). This was justified for them by the magnitude of Epicurus’ blessings for mankind, but it was also true that the Epicurean wise person was literally as happy as the gods (see above on 3. 322). Virgil imitates the line in Eclogue 1. 6 referring to the young Octavian (the future Augustus).

  13 and earned the name divine: an influential ‘euhemerist’ theory, put forward first by Prodicus (fifth century BC) and later by Hecataeus of Abdera and most famously Euhemerus of Messene (both fourth–third century BC), held that the gods were originally human beings deified for their achievements. Prodicus used the examples of Dionysus (Bacchus) and Demeter (Ceres) as here (fr. B5, cf. Euripides, Bacchants 274 ff.): Euhemerus was translated into Latin by Ennius (third–second century BC).

  20 through mighty nations spread: gods, culture heroes, and great conquerors like Alexander all spread their gifts by global travel (cf. Diodorus Siculus (first century BC), Library of History 6. 1 ff.), but they must yield place to the spread of Epicureanism through the master’s words.

  22 Hercules: ‘paradoxical’ criticism of generally accepted heroes or praise of bad things or people was an established rhetorical exercise, and Lucretius’ assault on Hercules is paralleled in a speech of Euripides, Heracles (c.414 BC, 148 ff.) which shares some details. Hercules was allegorized as an ideal model by Stoics and Cynics (cf. e.g. Heraclitus ‘the Allegorizer’ (perhaps first century AD) 33, Cicero, On Ends 2. 118). And he is a particularly pointed target here as a man who became a god through his labours (cf. Theocritus (third century BC), Idylls 17, 13 ff., Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1. 28). In general, cf. G. K. Galinsky, The Hercules Theme (Oxford, 1972).

  24–7 Nemean lion… Arcadian boar |… Cretan bull… Lerna’s pest | The Hydra: Lucretius mentions eight of the canonical twelve labours of Hercules (first attested in the sculptures of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, c.460 BC), concentrating on those that involve the slaying or capture of wild beasts (and stressing their geographic remoteness). The killing of the lion that terrorized Nemea (mainland Greece) regularly came first: it provided him with his lion skin. Nemea and Lerna are in central Greece (Argolid).

  28 Geryon: a monstrous three-bodied herdsman killed by Hercules in Spain.

  29 Stymphalus’ horrid birds: man-eating birds that infested Lake Stymphalus (Arcadia) and were shot by Hercules with his arrows.

  30 Diomed’s Thracian horses: man-eating mares owned by Diomedes of Thrace (north Greece), to which his guests were fed. Bistony and Ismara are in eastern Thrace.

  32 The golden apples of the Hesperides: in the far west (the ‘wild Atlantic shore’), taken by Hercules after killing their guardian snake.

  64 the order of my theme: in 64–75 Lucretius outlines the subject matter of 91–109 and 235–415 (65–6), 416–508 (67–8), 771–924 (69–70), 1028–90 (71–2), and 1161–1240 (73–5). He then returns to the subject matter of 509–770, the workings of the heavenly bodies (76–81). In the order of the book, this comes as a digression after the account of the creation of the earth, since the workings of the system are bound up with its origins, but Lucretius singles it out here to provide a firmly anti-theological conclusion to his summary.

  82–90 For men who have been well taught about the gods… : repeated at 6. 58–66.

  83 may wonder still: a primary aim of Lucretius in both Book 5 and Book 6 is to remove any sense of wonder at phenomena of the world which might lead to religious belief. Such attacks on wonder go back to Democritus (fr. A169, B4).

  87 cruel masters: contrast 2. 1091.

  90 deep-set boundary stone: see above on 1. 77.

  95 One day will give to destruction: Aristotle had held that the world was uncreated and everlasting, but both Stoics and Epicureans believed in its destruction, though for the Stoics it was then reborn to repeat the same cycle of events. Cf. 2. 1105 ff.

  100 some unaccustomed thing: Lucretius once more perverts to his own ends a religious statement: these lines translate a fragment of Empedocles (B133) dealing with the difficulty of apprehending god.

  110 oracles: cf. 1. 738 ff. (of Empedocles).

  117 Men should, like giants, suffer punishment: see above on 1. 67 for the imagery of the battle of gods and giants: after their defeat, the giants were imprisoned in various ways by Zeus. Both Plato (Sophist 246a) and Aristotle (On Philosophy fr. 18) had cast the early atomists as giants, because they were materialists grasping things with their hands and threatening with their reason the stability of the world.

  128–41 There can be no trees in the sky: 128–41 repeat 3. 784–97, with small changes. There the lines were part of the argument against the survival of the soul outside the body: throughout this passage the similarities and differences between the world-system and the human body play an important role.

  148 the nature of the gods: the exact nature of the Epicurean gods is controversial amongst scholars, but what Lucretius says here about their ‘dwelling places’ (cf. 3. 18 ff.) fits what we are told elsewhere about their living in the so-called metakosmia or intermundia, Tennyson’s ‘lucid interspace of world and world’ (Lucretius: cf. Epicurus, Letter to Pythocles 89, fr. 359, Cicero, On Ends 1. 75, On the Nature of the Gods 1. 18). Philodemus’ fragmentary treatise On the Gods goes into more detail about their lives. At any rate it is clear that the gods are far from being able to be concerned with our world.

  155 later at some length: not in the extant On the Nature of the Universe, but vague forward references like this are not uncommon as devices for bringing a subject to a close: cf. e.g. Plato, Timaeus 50c6–7, Velleius Paterculus (first century AD), Roman History 2. 96. 3, Seneca, Natural Questions 2. 7. 2.

  156 for the sake of men: see above on 2. 174 ff., and especially Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 20.

  168 what new thing: if the gods are perfectly happy, there is no reason for them to want to change their previous life by creating the world. The problems for the divine decision to create the world generated by the principle of sufficient reason (why at one time rather than another if there was no change) were well known to Christian theologians, who faced them by moving their god outside time: cf. Augustine, Confessions 11. 13.

  182 concept of mankind: to be able to speak or act, we need a concept (Greek prolepsis, Latin notities) of what we intend to say or do, but there is nowhere where the gods could have obtained such a concept (cf. 5. 1046 ff., arguing against human invention of language).

  195–9 But even if I had no knowledge of atoms… : 195–9 repeat 2. 177–81 and then develop the argument with further examples.

  204 Nearly two thirds: on the commonest version of the theory of the ‘zones’ of the world (zone in Greek means ‘belt’: see especially Aristotle, Meteorologica362b5 ff., Eratosthenes (third–second century BC), Hermes fr. 15, Virgil, Georgics 1. 231–9), there were two temperate zones surrounding an uninhabitable equatorial torrid zone and surrounded by two frozen zones at the extremes. Cf. Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 21.

  218 the wild beasts’ fearsome breed: cf. Cicero, Academica 2. 120.

  222–34 the child, like sailor cast ashore… : famously translated by Dryden and imitated by Wordsworth, To ——, Upon the Birth of her First-Born Child. Cf. e.g. the Axiochus attributed to Plato 366d, Cicero, On the Republic 3. 1, Seneca, Letters 102. 26.

  226 fills the place with cries: Epicurus used the crying of babies at birth as part of the ‘cradle’ argument that humans naturally flee pain, explaining it as a reaction to cold air (cf. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 11. 96, Epicurus fr. 398). Other philosophers offered different explanations: the issue was connected wi
th that of when the baby became alive (cf. e.g. Plutarch, On Stoic Contradictions 1052, Tertullian (second–third century AD), On the Soul25. 2). Epicurus perverts to his own purpose Empedocles fr. B118, ‘I wept and wailed on seeing an unfamiliar place’: Lucretius restores the tone of the original, adding the image of the shore of life (from Empedocles fr. B20. 5).

  259 The mother of all: see above on 2. 598 ff.

  308 the shrines and images | Of gods: as usual, Lucretius insinuates an explicit point against religion.

  318–19 that which… | Holds the whole earth in its embrace: i.e. the sky. Lucretius imitates a philosophical fragment (86 ff.) of the tragedy Chryses by Pacuvius (first century BC: see above on 3. 881 ff.).

  326 Before the Theban war and doom of Troy: cf. Horace, Odes 4. 9. 25, ‘many brave men lived before Agamemnon… ’. The Theban story of the Seven against Thebes was first told in a lost epic Thebais (perhaps seventh century BC): for the Trojan war as the limit of human knowledge, see e.g. Diodorus Siculus 1. 5. 1 ff.

  330 the world is young and new: contrast 2. 1150 ff.

  337 the very first: not strictly true—Cicero refers to two Latin (prose?) Epicurean writers, C. Amafinius (Tusculan Disputations 4. 6–7) and T. Catius (Letters to his Friends 15. 16), who were probably earlier than Lucretius.

  339 perished in burning fire: theories of periodic cataclysmic destruction were used by Plato (Timaeus 22c—with the same three types of catastrophe, Statesman 269c) and Aristotle (Meteorologica 352a, Politics 1269a5) to explain the apparent youth of human culture despite the eternity of the world, while the Stoics believed in a deterministic cycle of destruction and rebirth.

  351–63 Few things there are that last eternally… : see above on 3.806–10.

  381 In most unrighteous war: the metaphorical complex of the war of the elements is an old one (cf. e.g. Heraclitus fr. B80, Empedocles fr. B115) but was particularly congenial to the Epicureans, since it reinforced their view of the instability of the world. Lucretius uses it frequently of the atoms.

  397 Phaethon: the story of Phaethon disastrously attempting to drive the chariot of his father the sun, already allegorized by Plato (Timaeus 22c), was later interpreted in terms of the Stoic periodic destruction by fire (in Greek ekpyrosis), although not certainly before Lucretius: cf. Manilius, Astronomica (first century BC–first century AD) 1. 735 ff., 4. 831 ff., Dio Chrysostom (first century AD), Speeches 36. 48.

  412 so legend tells: the story of the flood, from which only Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha survived to begin again the human race.

  419 not by design or intelligence: 5. 419–23 are repeated from 1. 1021–5.

  436 strange storm and surging mighty mass: for the creation of the world from the atomic storm or whirl, cf. Epicurus, Letter to Pythocles 88 ff., ‘Aetius’ 1. 4. 1 ff., Epicurus fr. 308.

  487 salt sweat: the sea as the ‘sweat’ of the earth is Empedoclean (fr. B. 55, cf. Aristotle, Meteorologica 353b).

  507 Pontus: the Black Sea (Pontus) was believed to flow in one direction only, into the sea of Marmara (Propontis), which joined it to the Aegean: cf. e.g. Seneca, Natural Questions 4. 2. 29.

  509 The causes of the motions of the stars: Lucretius deals with the motions of the heavenly bodies in the context of their first emergence, because the nature of the explanations offered for these motions is connected with how they first came about.

  528 In various worlds created in various ways: while for the basic principles of Epicureanism only one account is possible, for many of the phenomena described in Books 5 and 6 the Epicureans accepted the possibility of alternative explanations (the so-called pleonachos tropos, ‘mode of multiple explanations’: cf. 6. 703 ff., Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 79–80, Epistle to Pythocles86–7, Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 13). Since everything possible was held to be substantiated somewhere in the infinite universe, although only one explanation of a phenomenon might be true for our world, the other explanations would be valid for other worlds. Cf. 2. 1023 ff.

  554 By common roots united: cf. 3. 325 ff. of the union of soul and body.

  564 The sun’s heat and its size: the Epicureans notoriously held that the sun was no larger than it appeared: cf. e.g. Epicurus, Letter to Pythocles 91 (and cf. Cicero, On Ends 1. 20 etc.).

  575 whether it shines with borrowed light: see below on 705.

  616 Sinks down to Capricorn in winter: the arc that the sun appears to describe through the sky is nearest the horizon in winter and furthest from it in summer. Its highest points each day are all situated on a great circle through the celestial sphere known as the ecliptic. The belt of the sky 8 degrees either side of the ecliptic was divided into twelve regions (the zodiac), named from the principal constellations visible in them at night. The zodiac belt rotates around the earth, and within one year the sun appears to move at its highest point through all the constellations in turn. At the winter solstice, when the sun is moving nearest to the horizon, it moves through Capricorn, at the summer solstice it moves through Cancer. Lucretius attempts to offer possible explanations for the complexities caused by the fact that the sun and the zodiacal belt (and the moon) are moving at different rates. Cf. Epicurus, Letter to Pythocles 93.

  622 Democritus: cf. fr. A39.

  656 Matuta: a Roman dawn goddess, linked to the Greek Leucothea (cf. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1. 28, On the Nature of the Gods 3. 48). She had a temple in the Forum Boarium at Rome.

  663 from Ida’s mountain peaks: for the story that the apparent creation of a new sun each day can be observed from Mt Ida in Phrygia (Turkey), see Diodorus Siculus, Library of History (first century BC) 17. 7. 5 ff., Pomponius Mela (first century AD) 1. 18. 94 ff., Euripides, Troades (415 BC) 1066 ff.

  669 At a fixed time: the stress on the regularity and certainty of natural phenomena also has an anti-theological and ethical point. Far from being an argument for divine intervention in the world (the argument from design), it removes any necessity for divine action.

  687–8 the two knotted circles of the year: the ‘knot of the year’ is the point at which the sun’s daily course when it intersects the ecliptic is in line with the celestial equator (cf. Aratus (third century BC), Phainomena 245, Manilius 3. 622). The sun passes through this knot twice a year, at the spring and autumn equinoxes.

  705 the moon: that the moon reflected light from the sun was an early discovery of Greek philosophy (cf. especially Plato, Cratylus 409a, Anaxagoras fr. B 18, etc.), but the Epicureans again preferred to suspend judgement (cf. Epicurus, Letter to Pythocles 94 ff.). For the various theories, see ‘Aetius’ 2. 28.

  727 the Babylonian Chaldees: the doctrine is ascribed to the Babylonian priest Berosus, who wrote a Babylonian History dedicated to Antiochus I (ruled 281–261): cf. ‘Aetius’ 2. 28, Vitruvius (first century BC) 9. 2. It is unlikely that Epicurus himself mentioned Berosus’ doctrines.

  737 Spring comes: Lucretius’ picture here is one of the sources for Botticelli’s Allegoria della Primavera.

  739 Zephyrs steps: the divinity of the West Wind.

  Flora: an Italian goddess with temples on the Quirinal hill and near the Circus Maximus: cf. Ovid, Fasti 5. 159 ff.

  742 Aquilo: the North Wind.

  745 Volturnus: the East-South-East Wind.

  Auster: the South Wind.

  751 The sun’s eclipses and the moon’s retreats: a much discussed topic in ancient astronomy: cf. Epicurus, Letter to Pythocles 96 and in general ‘Aetius’ 2. 24, 2. 29.

  783 In the beginning: Lucretius’ account of the development of life and civilization on earth occupies the rest of the book. Its most important characteristic is its resolute materialism and avoidance of any suggestion of divine providence: and to explain the various phenomena, he uses extensively what has been termed ‘diachronic analogy’, that is, conjecture about early developments through analogy with phenomena that can be observed today. The many different accounts of the beginning of life and emergence of human civilization current in antiquity are conveniently collected in A. O. Lov
ejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Concepts in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935): Democritus was an important early source.

  793 fallen from the sky: see above on 2. 1153 ff.

  795 The name of mother: see above on 2. 598 ff.

  797 come up from earth: see above on 2. 871 ff.

  808 Wombs would grow: cf. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 1. 7. 3–4 (possibly from Democritus), Epicurus fr. 333, Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 11.

  827 like a woman worn out by old age: cf. 2. 1150, and contrast 5. 330.

  837 many monsters in those days: Lucretius has the notion of random mutation and survival of the fittest, but only in extreme terms: organisms either die or live within one generation, rather than mutations having a small cumulative effect on genetic success over many generations. Cf. Empedocles fr. B61 (though Lucretius rejects some of the mutant forms there as impossible), Aristotle, Physics 198b24 ff., and for the hermaphrodites Plato, Symposium 189d ff.

  862–3 Courage has kept the savage lion safe: cf. Plato, Protagoras 230e, Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 2. 127, in contexts of divine providence.

  878 Centaurs never existed: cf. 4. 732 ff.

  893 Scyllas: figures like the mythical monster of the Odyssey (12. 85 ff., 245 ff.), later in art, as here, girded with dogs who were kennelled in her womb.

  905 Chimaera: cf. Homer, Iliad 6. 179–82 (905 translates 181–2), Plato, Phaedrus 229d, Republic 588c.

  911 rivers ran with gold: Lucretius constantly sets his own realistic ‘hard primitivism’ against notions of early life as a ‘Golden Age’, though it was rivers of milk, honey, wine, etc. that were normal features of such descriptions (cf. e.g. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1. 111), and the discovery of gold typically marked the end of any Golden Age (cf. 1113 ff. below). There is also an allusion to the legends associated with the gold-bearing rivers Pactolus in Lydia (Turkey: cf. Strabo (first century BC–first century AD), Geography 13. 4. 5) and Tagus in Spain (cf. Lucan (first century AD), Civil War 7. 755).