9303 "At any rate," said Deinomachus, "you know so much,- how to make a man out of a pestle." "Will you never stop spinning your marvelous yarns?" I said. "You are old enough to know better. But at least respect these boys, and postpone your terrific stories to some other time. Before you know it they will be full of nervous terrors. You ought to consider them, and not accustom them to hear things that will haunt them all their lives, and make them afraid of a noise because they are full of superstition." "I am glad you used that word," said Eucrates. "It reminds me to ask you what you think about another class of phenomena, -I mean oracles and prophecies. Probably you have no faith in them either?" "I am off," said I. "You are not satisfied with the field of human experience, but must needs call in the gods themselves to take a hand in your myth-making." And so saying I took my leave; but they, I daresay, freed of my presence, drew in their chairs to the banquet and supped full with lies. Translated by Emily James Smith. 9304 TITUS LUCRETIUS CARUS (98 ?-55? B. C.) BY PAUL SHOREY ITUS LUCRETIUS CARUS, the most vigorous and original, though. not the most beautiful and artistic of Latin poets, was a contemporary of the youth and middle age of Cæsar and Cicero. Of his brief life virtually nothing is known. He belonged to a noble family, but seems to have held aloof from the political conflicts which during that Inferno of a half-century made a steaming slaughter-house of Rome. Yet he writes of the great world, and of the vanity of its ambitions, its loves, and its insensate luxury, with a poignant intensity which suggests experience or intimate observation. The legend that his premature death was caused by the administration of a maddening love-philtre by a jealous wife, is familiar to English readers in Tennyson's exquisite and scholarly poem. His life work, the 'De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), is a didactic exposition, in six books and some 7415 hexameter lines, of the doctrines of Epicurus, at that time the most widely diffused among the Roman nobility, of the systems which their ingenious Greek lecturers and literary companions were importing into Italy. LUCRETIUS That philosophy, a product of the frivolous and disillusionized Athens of the third century B. C., taught in physics that all phenomena are explicable, without the intervention of gods, by the fortuitous concurrence of material atoms and the "various entanglements, weights, blows, clashings, motions, by which things severally go on"; and in morals that man's true happiness consists in freedom from superstitious terror, in renunciation of the sterile agitations of ambition and the pursuit of wealth, and in tranquil enjoyment of the simpler and soberer forms of pleasure. Not a very noble or elevating doctrine for a poet, it would seem; yet perhaps hardly more repugnant to the Muse than the Puritan theology of 'Paradise Lost,' or the scholasticism, fantastic allegory, and petty municipal politics of the 'Divine Comedy.' Genius and passion will pour the molten ore of life into any mold; and the genius of Lucretius passionately embraced the cold mechanism and the unheroic quietism of the Epicurean philosophy, as a protest against the degrading superstitions of Rome and as a refuge from her tumultuous politics. The first book opens with a magnificent invocation of Venus, and a dedication of the work to the poet's patron, or rather friend, the great Roman noble Memmius. This is followed by a thrilling picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia,—a typical crime of superstition,— and a brief résumé of the chief topics to be treated, into which is deftly intercalated an enthusiastic panegyric upon Ennius, the father of Roman song. Then comes an exposition of the fundamental principles of the atomic philosophy, accompanied by a refutation of those who deny a vacuum or the indivisibility of the atoms; as well as of those who assume other elements,-earth, water, air, fire. Two eloquent digressions chant the praise of the Sicilian pre-Socratic poetphilosopher Empedocles and the delights of poesy. The last two hundred lines demonstrate, by arguments which Bruno, Locke, Voltaire, Pasteur, and Renan have copied, the infinity of the universe in space and time, and the infinity of matter. The exordium of the second book contrasts the Epicurean tranquillity of students in their pensive citadels with the vain agitations of men. Then follows a more technical exposition of the nature and movements of the atoms. The sensible qualities of things are due only to the shapes and combinations of these colorless material particles. They do not reside in the things nor in the atoms themselves. Life and sensation also are transient phenomena,-bubbles on the ocean of being, froth on the surface,- and not ultimate realities. And being atomic, all things are dissoluble. The earth itself grows old, and no longer bears the teeming harvests of her lusty youth. The third book opens with the praise of Epicurus and a description of the peace of mind which philosophy brings. To attain this peace we must eradicate the fear of death and hell. In seven hundred lines of close reasoning, some twenty-seven formal arguments are adduced to prove the mortality of the soul and its entire dependence on bodily conditions. This long arid tract is followed by two hundred and sixty lines of the most glorious poetry in the Latin language: an impassioned expostulation with the puny souls who rebel against nature's beneficent law of change, who are fain to tarry past their hour at the banquet of existence, and idly repine that they, whose very life is a sleep and a folding of the hands for slumber, must lie down to their everlasting rest with Homer and Scipio, Democritus and Epicurus, and all the wise and brave who have gone before. The fourth book is mainly occupied by an account of the processes of perception, which are explained by the hypothesis that delicate films and emanations, thrown off from bodies, penetrate the channels of sensation. A digression vigorously argues against the skeptical doctrine of the untrustworthiness of the senses. In optical and other illusions, it is not the senses but the hasty inferences of the mind that are at fault. The poet's polemic against the argument from design in the structure of the body is famous. As Prior in his 'Alma' puts it: "Note here Lucretius dares to teach, As all our youth may learn from Creech, The members first and then the use." The book closes with a realistic treatment of sleep, dreams, and the sexual life. The fifth book deals with astronomy, the history of the globe, and the origins of life and civilization. The poet undertakes to prove that the triple frame of the world had a beginning and will some day be dissolved, a doctrine that strongly impressed the imaginations of his successors. "Then shall Lucretius's lofty numbers die, When earth and sea in fire and flames shall fry," says Ovid-in Ben Jonson's free imitation. There is no impiety in this teaching, says Lucretius; for the world is not a perfect divine creation, as the Stoic optimists affirm, but it is a flawed and faulty product of accidental adaptations. The puerile astronomical hypotheses that follow are in startling contrast with the brilliant, vividly imaginative, and essentially correct sketch of prehistoric anthropology and the evolution of civilization that occupies the last six hundred lines. The sixth book is a sort of appendix, devoted to the explanation of alarming or mysterious phenomena which might prove a last refuge of superstition. The most noted passage is the description of the plague at Athens, after Thucydides (1137–1286). Lucretius by the very didactic severity of his theme is shut out from the wide-spread popularity of the great dramatists and epic poets. But in every age a select company of readers is found to respond to at least one of the three mighty chords with which his lyre is strung; and to cherish him either as the poet of the emancipating power of human science, as the poet of nature, or as the sublime and melancholy satirist of naked and essential man. He is the poet of the pride of science, as it appeals to youthful souls in their first intoxication with the idea of infinite impersonal nature liberated from her anthropomorphic lords, and in their first passionate revolt against the infamies of popular superstition and the smug decencies of its official interpreters. This influence no erudite exposure of his errors in detail can destroy, no progress of modern knowledge supersede. It is true that he has no conception of strict scientific method, or of the progressive conquest of nature by man. He affirms that the real and apparent magnitudes of the sun are nearly the same. He denies the possibility of the antipodes, suggests that the stars may move in quest of fresh pastures in the flowerless fields of heaven, believes in the spontaneous generation of worms from manure, and has a theory to account for the fact that the lion cannot abide the crowing of the cock. But he maintains in sonorous and vigorously argumentative verse the infinity of the universe in space and time, the indestructibility of matter, the plurality of worlds, the reign of law, the possibility of a mechanical explanation of all phenomena, and the ceaseless operation of the silent invisible processes whereby the transformations of nature are wrought. He has the fundamental conception of evolution as the "rational sequence of the unintended," and he approaches very closely the formula of the "survival of the fittest." He has the rudiments of the most modern psychological notions as to the threshold of sensation and the measurement of local discrimination. He illustrates the origin of language from the barking of dogs almost in the words of Darwin, and describes the stages of the prehistoric life of man in phrases which Tylor quotes with approval. Above all, he attacks with eloquent scorn the "carpenter theory of creation," and the insipidities of optimistic. teleologies and theodicies; and he magnificently celebrates as the chief heroes of humanity the scientific thinkers who have revealed the eternal laws of nature, and have liberated the human spirit from the bondage of superstition and the chimæras of metaphysics. These things, if they do not justify Huxley's statement that "Lucretius has drunk deeper of the scientific spirit than any other poet of ancient or modern times except Goethe," do at least explain why he has always been honored as the poetic incarnation of that spirit by the church militant of science. But he is more than the rhetorician of science. He has all Dryden's skill in marshaling arguments in verse; and he manifests in addition a peculiar blending of the poetical and scientific imagination, which causes the vivid felicity of his illustrations of the unfamiliar by the familiar, the unseen by the seen, to be felt by the reader as proofs rather than as mere decorative imagery. And whether in argument or description, his language throughout conveys a more |