Mike Pope describes his encounter with the de rerum natura.
I came to Lucretius in roundabout ways. I work on the poet now, but I did not focus on him in any of my formal schooling. My first serious exposure to Epicurean thinking was from a visiting lecturer who spoke on the topic of friendship. I was an undergraduate and found the topic moving on an emotional level. Probably he discussed Lucretius, but my memory from that was more about the various collected sayings of Epicurus. Still, the talk left a mark on me. A few years later I was in the coursework stage of a PhD program in Early Christian Literature at the University of Chicago and, rather on a whim, took a Latin course on De Rerum Natura. My initial impressions of the poem were that 1) it was really, really difficult for me and 2) I could not stop thinking about the opening 43 verses. Both sentiments were partly due to a course requirement to memorize those lines and recite them in meter. While preparing for my shaky and stilted recitation, I found myself rolling a few lines and phrases over and over in my head and mouth. The first line: Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas (“Mother of the Aenean nation, pleasure of gods and humans”; most of verse 34 about Mars: aeterno devictus vulnere amoris (“utterly conquered by an eternal wound of love”); and this phrase from line 39: suaves…loquellas (“sweet little sayings”). Pleasure, wounding, an unexpected erotic embrace, and that final pairing—suaves loquellas—formed the core of a term paper for the course and then, more than a decade later, after a dissertation on an unrelated set of texts and some early articles on DRN, the seed of a much larger project, Lucretius and the End of Masculinity (Cambridge UP, 2023). I had a lot of fun writing that book, but by the end of the process I was only beginning to come to grips with how I was learning to read and hear the poem, and an inkling of what was escaping my notice. This short essay concerns two aspects of Lucretius’ poetics that have demanded increasing attention in my mind over for the past few years: the poet’s incessant playfulness with sounds and the ubiquity of his literary allusions. There are loads of scholarship on these topics, past and present, so nothing I say here is groundbreaking. But here are my thoughts currently.
How to do things with words
I do not think it is exaggeration to say that Lucretius adores wordplay and verbal jingles of almost unending variety—rhymes, repetition, homophones, etymologies both real and imaginative, alliteration, etc. As I have worked on DRN I have come to regard every consonant cluster, every lexeme or phoneme, every collocation of tones as a potential juncture for further investigation. As an example from the lines mentioned above that just occurred to me a few days ago, when we first learn that Mars is aeterno devictus vulnere amoris (“totally defeated by an eternal wound of love”) and lying recumbent on the lap of Venus, we might hear with devictus that Mars is devinctus, or “enchained” by a wound of love. The propinquity of the terms, both visually and tonally, as well as their shared lexical ancestry, blurs semantic boundaries, especially since the scene is one of surrender and captivation. And we are not alone if our senses pick up on this. Vergil almost certainly repurposes Lucretius’ phrasing and imagery when depicting Vulcan being manipulated by the binding power of his love for Venus (aeterno…devinctus amore Verg. Aen. 8.394). Lambinus, the towering 16th cent. editor of classical Latin texts, probably under the influence of this line from Vergil and the myth of Ares and Aphrodite caught in Hephaestus’ trap, boldly emended the received reading to devinctus. But if we put aside the task of the text critic and allow both terms to linger in our minds, what further connections might reveal themselves? Given the erotic scenario with Mars and Venus, we might wonder whether similar language of defeat and binding show up in the verses on love and sex in Book 4. As it turns out, in tandem with two occurrences of the love goddess’ name, we find mating dogs locked (vinctos) in the chains of copulation (in vinclis), caught as they are in mutual pleasure (mutua…voluptas) by the strong bindings of Venus (validis Veneris compagibus 4.1200–7). But then, several lines later, with Venus appearing yet again, the vinc sound recurs in the sense of victory in the context of the love (amorem) that can develop between a man and woman through prolonged exposure to each other in which one party is conquered (vincitur) by the metaphorically repeated wounding (crebro tunditur ictu) of the other’s presence (4.1278–85). An argument could be made, I think, that Lucretius employs the term devictus in the first proem specifically to conjure devinctus as well and to seed the ground for these later iterations of wordplay and imagery. And if we are thinking about bindings and blows, should we also consider the long section on magnets from Book 6? When wounded Mars lies enthralled by Venus, gazing up at her (suspiciens), his mouth an open loop (inhians), his breath hanging (pendet…spiritus) from her, well, that sounds—both phonically and thematically—a little like the magnets from Book 6. Their force dominates (vis pervalet) iron chains of “little hanging rings” (anellis…pendentibus), each ring clinging from beneath (subter adhaerens), stuck together in bonds (vincla), the iron’s internal air (aer) assaulting (verberat) the ring and driving it toward the magnet (6.910–16). Following these various cues, is Lucretius playing with a notion that there is a kind of magnetism in sexual attraction, something atomic that overwhelms and binds one person to another? Maybe. My eyes, ears, and tongue sense something is afoot and I am still working this out in my mind. I must have read devictus in 1.34 hundreds of times, but I am only now perceiving the term and ripples from it in this fresh way. That gives me pause.
Doctus Lucretius
As for echoes and connections to Lucretius’ inherited literary tradition, they continue to be uncovered apace. As one example, even though one might think that all Homeric allusions have been exhaustively noted over the last seven centuries or so, the Iliad and Odyssey remain a goldmine for scholars of Lucretius (such as the editor of this webpage, John Godwin, who recently published a convincing study in Classical Quarterly about Lucretius’ appropriation of Circe’s warnings about the Sirens’ songs (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838824000284)). Indeed, as I have gained familiarity with the Homeric epics, my own sensitivity to Lucretius’ conversation with those poems has grown. Quite by accident, I just barely came upon a possible allusion to the Doloneia (Il. 10) while flipping back and forth through DRN Book 4 in an attempt to track down one thing or another. The phrase quasi si iugulentur (“just as though their throats were cut” 4.1014) initially caught my eye since iugulare is such a graphic word. Lucretius is not averse to using extremely violent expressions, but I had never noticed this one. Some quick checking told me that this was the only instance of the term in the poem. That sparked additional curiosity. The context for the phrase is a discussion on dreams. Lucretius states that peoples’ minds are occupied with the same things in sleep as they are while awake (4.1011–12). Thus, some people while dreaming “assault kings, are captured, engage in combat, and suddenly raise a clamor, just as though their throats were being cut” (reges expugnant, capiuntur, proelia miscent / tollunt clamorem, quasi si iugulentur ibidem 4.1013–14). Kings, war, dreams, and jugulation sound to me like Il. 10.494–7 where Diomedes, like an evil dream in the night (κακὸν γὰρ ὄναρ… / τὴν νύκτ’), kills sleeping King Rhesus (βασιλῆα) and leaves him gasping (ἀσθμαίνοντα). If this is an allusion, why might Lucretius employ it at this juncture? I am not yet sure, but perhaps a tacit comparison to the night raid scene reiterates the poet’s atomistic and non-providential cosmos: while Diomedes is inspired by the wiles of Athena (διὰ μῆτιν Ἀθήνης) to kill slumbering Rhesus, the kings in DRN only experience dream-combat and dream-jugulation on account of their material minds’ sleep-state focus on their waking material obsessions. There are no meddling, death-dealing gods in Lucretius’ understanding of the world, only nightmares engendered by humans’ proclivity to fixate on self-destructive ends. As I said above: maybe. The point I am trying to make is that even a random encounter with a word turned up a potential allusion. And this allusion, if established, would be to a notorious scene in the most famous of all classical texts. In other words, I am certainly missing far, far more than I am detecting. So, my current hermeneutic for Lucretius’ intertextual habits is one of humility and extreme suspicion: I suspect that every verse that comes under my notice is probably reverberating something from prior tradition and that there is an exceedingly high chance that I am missing it. This also gives me pause.
I suppose that what I am trying to say is that after several years spent rushing through the text hither and yon, trying to write cogent arguments and gain a toehold in the field, I am learning to slow down and let the poem go to work on my senses and my sensibilities. It feels like being a beginner and DRN is suddenly strange and foreign again. My hunch is that if I could somehow recreate that memorization and recitation assignment from my first encounter with the poem, but on a book- or poem-wide scale, so many more wordplays and verbal tricks and allusions would present themselves. Some might even prove glaringly obvious. This is not realistic, of course, but a guy can dream.
Mike Pope is an Associate Professor in Classical Studies at Brigham Young University. His Book Lucretius and the End of Roman Masculinity was published by Cambridge in 2023 (reviewed at: Lucretius and the end of masculinity – Bryn Mawr Classical Review). He has also published a wide range of articles on the New Testament
DISCLAIMER: the views expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Classics for All.