This article is about the Roman poet and philosopher. For other people named Lucretius, seeLucretia gens. For the impact crater on the far side of the Moon, seeLucretius (crater).
Titus Lucretius Carus
Lucretius pointing to the casus, the downward movement of the atoms. From the frontispiece toOf the Nature of Things, 1682
And now, good Memmius, receptive ears And keen intelligence detached from cares I pray you bring to true philosophy
De rerum natura (tr. Melville) 1.50
If I must speak, my noble Memmius, As nature's majesty now known demands
De rerum natura (tr. Melville) 5.6
Virtually nothing is known about the life of Lucretius, and there is insufficient basis for a confident assertion of the dates of Lucretius's birth or death in other sources. Another, yet briefer, note is found in theChronicon of Donatus's pupil,Jerome. Writing four centuries after Lucretius's death, he enters under the 171stOlympiad: "Titus Lucretius the poet is born."[7] If Jerome is accurate about Lucretius's age (43) when Lucretius died (discussed below), then it may be concluded he was born in 99 or 98 BC.[8][9] Less specific estimates place the birth of Lucretius in the 90s BC and his death in the 50s BC,[10][11] in agreement with the poem's manyallusions to the tumultuous state of political affairs inRome and itscivil strife.
Start of late 15th-century illuminated manuscript ofDe rerum natura
Lucretius probably was a member of thearistocraticgens Lucretia, and his work shows an intimate knowledge of the luxurious lifestyle in Rome.[12] Lucretius's love of the countryside invites speculation that he inhabited family-owned rural estates, as did many wealthy Roman families, and he certainly was expensively educated with a mastery of Latin, Greek, literature, and philosophy.[12]
A brief biographical note is found inAelius Donatus'sLife ofVirgil, which seems to be derived from an earlier work bySuetonius.[13] The note reads: "The first years of his life Virgil spent in Cremona until the assumption of histoga virilis on his 17th birthday (when the same two men held theconsulate as when he was born), and it so happened that on the very same day Lucretius the poet passed away." However, although Lucretius certainly lived and died around the time that Virgil and Ciceroflourished, the information in this particular testimony is internally inconsistent: if Virgil was born in 70 BC, his 17th birthday would be in 53. The two consuls of 70 BC,Pompey andCrassus, stood together as consuls again in 55, not 53.
Another note regarding Lucretius's biography is found in Jerome'sChronicon, where he contends that Lucretius "was driven mad by a lovepotion, and when, during the intervals of his insanity, he had written a number of books, which were later emended by Cicero, he killed himself by his own hand in the 44th year of his life."[7] The claim that he was driven mad by a love potion, although defended by such scholars as Reale and Catan,[14] is often dismissed as the result of historical confusion,[3] or anti-Epicurean bias.[15] In some accounts the administration of the toxic aphrodisiac is attributed to his wifeLucilia. Regardless, Jerome's image of Lucretius as a lovesick, mad poet continued to have significant influence on modern scholarship until quite recently, although it now is accepted that such a report is inaccurate.[16]
His poemDe rerum natura (usually translated as "On the Nature of Things" or "On the Nature of the Universe") transmits the ideas ofEpicureanism, which includesatomism andcosmology. Lucretius was the first writer known to introduce Roman readers to Epicurean philosophy.[17] The poem, written in some 7,400dactylic hexameters, is divided into six untitled books, and explores Epicurean physics through richly poetic language andmetaphors. Lucretius presents the principles ofatomism, the nature of the mind andsoul, explanations of sensation and thought, the development of the world and itsphenomena, and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrialphenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided byfortuna, "chance", and not thedivine intervention of thetraditional Roman deities[18] and the religious explanations of the natural world.
Within this work, Lucretius makes reference to the cultural andtechnological development of humans in his use of available materials, tools, and weapons through prehistory to Lucretius's own time. He specifies theearliest weapons as hands, nails, and teeth. These were followed by stones, branches, and fire (once humans could kindle and control it). He then refers to "tough iron" and copper in that order, but goes on to say that copper was the primary means of tilling the soil and the basis of weaponry until, "by slow degrees", the iron sword became predominant (it still was in his day) and "the bronze sickle fell into disrepute" as iron ploughs were introduced.[1] He had earlier envisaged a pre-technological, pre-literary kind of human whose life was lived "in the fashion of wild beasts roaming at large".[19] From this beginning, he theorised, there followed the development in turn of crude huts, use and kindling of fire, clothing, language, family, andcity-states. He believed that smelting of metal, and perhaps too, the firing of pottery, was discovered by accident: for example, the result of a forest fire. He does specify, however, that the use of copper followed the use of stones and branches and preceded the use of iron.[19]
Lucretius seems to equate copper withbronze, an alloy of copper and tin that has much greater resilience than copper; both copper and bronze were superseded by iron during his millennium (1000 BC to 1 BC). He may have considered bronze to be a stronger variety of copper and not necessarily a wholly individual material. Lucretius is believed to be the first to put forward a theory of the successive uses of first wood and stone, then copper and bronze, and finally iron. Although his theory lay dormant for many centuries, it was revived in the nineteenth century and he has been credited with originating the concept of thethree-age system that was formalised from 1834 byC. J. Thomsen.[20]
De rerum natura (1570)
1754 copy ofDe rerum natura
Frontispiece of a 1754 copy ofDe rerum natura
1683 English translation ofDe rerum natura
Title page of a 1683 English translation ofDe rerum natura
In a letter byCicero to his brotherQuintus in February 54 BC, Cicero said: "The poems of Lucretius are as you write: they exhibit many flashes ofgenius, and yet show great mastership."[21] In the work of another author in late Republican Rome,Virgil writes in the second book of hisGeorgics, apparently referring to Lucretius,[22] "Happy is he who has discovered the causes of things and has cast beneath his feet[a] all fears, unavoidable fate, and the din of the devouring Underworld."[23]
Lucretius was an early thinker in what grew to become the study ofevolution. He believed that nature experiments endlessly across the eons, and the organisms that adapt best to their environment have the best chance of surviving. Living organisms survived because of the commensurate relationship between their strength, speed, or intellect and the external dynamics of their environment. Prior toCharles Darwin's 1859 publication ofOn the Origin of Species, the natural philosophy of Lucretius typified one of the foremost non-teleological and mechanistic accounts of the creation and evolution of life.[24] In contrast to modern thought on the subject, he did not believe that new species evolved from previously existing ones. Lucretius challenged the assumption that humans are necessarily superior to animals, noting that mammalian mothers in the wild recognize and nurture their offspring as do human mothers.[25]
^In particular,De rerum natura 5.107 (fortuna gubernans, "guiding chance" or "fortune at the helm"): see Monica R. Gale,Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (Cambridge University Press, 1994, 1996 reprint), pp. 213, 223–224online andLucretius (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 238online.
^abLucretius.De rerum natura, Book V, around line 940 ff.
^Campbell, Gordon (2003).Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Commentary on De rerum natura 5.772-1104. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–6.ISBN0199263965.
Kenney, E. J. (1971). "Introduction".Lucretius: De rerum natura. Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-0-521-29177-4.
Melville, Ronald; Fowler, Don and Peta, eds. (2008) [1999].Lucretius: On the Nature of the Universe. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-162327-1.
Reale, G.; Catan, J. (1980).A History of Ancient Philosophy: The Systems of the Hellenistic Age. SUNY Press.
