Part 30 (2/2)

Et cycnea mele Phoebeaque daedala chordis Carmina consimili ratione oppressa silerent.

These lines point to the union of music and lyrical poetry.]

[Footnote 4: Cp. the pa.s.sages quoted from Quintilian, Lactantius, etc. by W.S. Teuffel, Wagner's Translation, p.

239.]

[Footnote 5: Annals, iv. 34.]

[Footnote 6: Ta.n.u.sius Geminus, who has generally been identified with Volusius from the pa.s.sage in Seneca, Ep. 93. 11, 'Annales Ta.n.u.sii scis quam ponderosi sint et quid vocentur,'

is supposed, on the evidence of Suetonius, to have been the author of a prose history, which he, Plutarch, and Strabo used as an authority for the times. Seneca certainly must have identified them.

He may have written both in prose and verse, or perhaps the Annals in verse may have been the historical authority appealed to.

There is, however, this further difficulty in identifying them, that there is no apparent reason why Catullus should in his case have deviated from his invariable practice of speaking of the objects of his satire by their own names. Cf. Schmidt, Catullus, Prolegomena, p. xlvi.]

CHAPTER XI.

LUCRETIUS.--PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS.

It is in keeping with the isolated and independent position which Lucretius occupies in literature, that so little is known of his life.

The two kinds of information available for literary biography,--that afforded by the author himself, and that derived from contemporaries, or from later writers who had access to contemporary testimony,--almost entirely fail us in his case. The form of poetry adopted by him prevented his speaking of himself and telling his own history, as Catullus, Horace, Ovid, etc., have done in their lyrical, elegiac, and familiar writings. His work appears to have been first published after his death: nor is there any reason to believe that he attracted the attention of the world in his lifetime. To judge from the silence of his contemporaries, and from the att.i.tude of mind indicated in his poem, the words 'moriens natusque fefellit' might almost be written as his epitaph. Had he been prominent in the social or literary circles of Rome during the years in which he was engaged on the composition of his poem, some traces of him must have been found in the correspondence of Cicero or in the poems of Catullus, which bring the personal life of those years so close to modern readers. It is thus impossible to ascertain on what original authority the sole traditional account of him preserved in the Chronicle of Jerome was based. That account, like similar notices of other Roman writers, came to Jerome in all probability from the lost work of Suetonius, 'de viris ill.u.s.tribus.'

But as to the channels through which it pa.s.sed to Suetonius, we have no information.

The well-known statement of Jerome is to this effect,--'The poet Lucretius was born in the year 94 B.C. He became mad from the administration of a love-philtre, and after composing, in his lucid intervals, several books which were afterwards corrected by Cicero, he died by his own hand in his forty-fourth year.' The date of his death would thus be 50 B.C. But this date is contradicted by the statement of Donatus in his life of Virgil, that Lucretius died (he says nothing of his supposed suicide) on the day on which Virgil a.s.sumed the 'toga virilis,' viz. October 15, 55 B.C. And this date derives confirmation from the fact that the first notice of the poem appears in a letter of Cicero to his brother, written in the beginning of 54 B.C. As the condition in which the poem has reached us confirms the statement that it was left by the author in an unfinished state, it must have been given to the world by some other hand after the poet's death; and, as Mr. Munro observes, we should expect to find that it first attracted notice some three or four months after that event. We must accordingly conclude that here, as in many other cases, Jerome has been careless in his dates, and that Lucretius was either born some years before 94 B.C., or that he died before his forty-fourth year. His most recent Editors, accordingly, a.s.sign his birth to the end of the year 99 B.C.

or the beginning of 98 B.C. He would thus be some seven or eight years younger than Cicero, three or four years younger than Julius Caesar[1], about the same age as Memmius to whom the poem is dedicated, and from about twelve to fifteen years older than Catullus and the younger poets of that generation[2].

But is this story of the poet's liability to fits of derangement, of the cause a.s.signed for these, of his suicide, and of the correction of his poem by Cicero, to be accepted as a meagre and, perhaps, distorted account of certain facts in his history transmitted through some trustworthy channels, or is it to be rejected as an idle fiction which may have a.s.sumed shape before the time of Suetonius, and been accepted by him on no other evidence than that of a vague tradition? Though no certain answer can be given to this question, yet some reasons may be a.s.signed for according a hesitating acceptance to the main outlines of the story, or at least for not rejecting it as a transparent fiction.

It may indeed be urged that if this strange and tragical history had been known to the Augustan poets, who, in greater or less degree, acknowledge the spell exercised upon them by the genius of Lucretius, some sympathetic allusion to it would probably have been found in their writings, such as that in Ovid to the early death of Catullus and Calvus. It would seem remarkable that in the only personal reference which Virgil, who had studied his poem profoundly, seems to make to his predecessor, he characterises him merely as 'fortunate in his triumph over supernatural terrors.' But, not to press an argument based on the silence of those who lived near the poet's time, and who, from their recognition of his genius might have been expected to be interested in his fate, the sensational character of the story justifies some suspicion of its authenticity. The mysterious efficacy attributed to a love-philtre is more in accordance with vulgar credulity than with experience. The supposition that the poem, or any considerable portion of it, was written in the lucid intervals of derangement seems hardly consistent with the evidence of the supreme control of reason through all its processes of thought. The impression both of impiety and melancholy which the poem was likely to produce on ordinary minds, especially after the religious reaction of the Augustan age, might easily have suggested this tale of madness and suicide as a natural consequence of, or fitting retribution for, such absolute separation from the common hopes and fears of mankind[3].

Yet indications in the poem itself have been pointed out which might incline us to accept the story rather as a meagre tradition of some tragic circ.u.mstances in the poet's history, than as the idle invention of an uncritical age. The unrelieved intensity of thought and feeling, by which more almost than any other work of literature it is characterised, seems indicative of an overstrain of power, which may well have caused the loss or eclipse of what to the poet was the sustaining light and joy of his life[4]. Under such a calamity it would have been quite in accordance with the principles of his philosophy to seek refuge in self-destruction, and to imitate an example which he notes in the case of another speculative thinker, on becoming conscious of failing intellectual power[5]. But this general sense of overstrained tension of thought and feeling is, as was first pointed out by his English Editor, much intensified by references in the poem (as at i. 32; iv. 33, etc.), to the horror produced on the mind by apparitions seen in dreams and waking visions[6]. 'The emphatic repet.i.tion,' says Mr. Munro, 'of these horrid visions seen in sickness might seem to confirm what is related of the poet being subject to fits of delirium or disordering sickness of some sort.' He further shows by quotation from Suetonius' 'Life of Caligula,' that such mental conditions were attributed to the administration of a love-philtre. The coincidence in these recorded cases may imply nothing more than the credulity of Suetonius, or of the authorities whom he followed: but it is conceivable that Lucretius may have himself attributed what was either a disorder of his own const.i.tution, or the result of a prolonged overstrain of mind, to the effects of some powerful drug taken by him in ignorance[7].

Thus, while the statement of Jerome admits neither of verification nor refutation, it may be admitted that there are indications in the poem of a great tension of mind, of an extreme vividness of sensibility, of an indifference to life, and, in the later books, of some failure in the power of organising his materials, which incline us rather to accept the story as a meagre and distorted record of tragical events in the poet's life, than as a literary myth which took shape out of the feelings excited by the poem in a later age. Yet this qualified acquiescence in the tradition does not involve the belief that any considerable portion of the poem was written 'per intervalla insaniae,' or that the disorder from which the poet suffered was actually the effect of a love-philtre.

The statement involved in the words 'quos Cicero emendavit,' has also been the subject of much criticism. No one can read the poem without recognising the truth of the conclusion established by Lachmann, and accepted by the most competent Editors of the poem since his time, that the work must have been left by the author in an unfinished state and given to the world by some friend or some person to whom the task of editing it had been entrusted. But there is some difficulty in accepting the statement that this editor was Cicero. His silence on the subject of his editorial labours, when contrasted with the frank communicativeness of his Epistles in regard to anything which for the time interested him, and the slight esteem with which he regarded the philosophy which is embodied in the poem, justify some hesitation in accepting the authority of Jerome on this point also. He only once mentions the poem in a letter to his brother Quintus[8], and in pa.s.sages of his philosophical works in which he seems to allude to it he expresses himself slightingly and somewhat contemptuously[9]. In the disparaging references to the Latin writers on Greek philosophy before the appearance of his own Tusculan Questions and Academics, he makes no exception in favour of Lucretius. The words in his letter to his brother Quintus are these, 'Lucretii poemata, ut scribis, ita sunt, multis luminibus ingenii, multae tamen artis: sed c.u.m veneris, virum te putabo, si Sall.u.s.tii Empedoclea legeris, hominem non putabo.'

Professor Tyrrell in his 'Correspondence of Cicero,' remarks on this pa.s.sage (vol. II. page 106): 'The criticism of Quintus, with which Cicero expresses his accord, was that Lucretius had not only much of the _genius_ of Ennius and Attius, but also much of the _art_ of the poets of the new school, among them even Catullus, who are fas.h.i.+oning themselves on the model of the Alexandrine poets, especially Callimachus and Euphorion of Chalcis. This new school Cicero refers to as the [Greek: neoteroi] (Att. VII. 2. 1) and as _hi cantores Euphorionis_ (Tusc. III. 45). Their _ars_ seemed to Cicero almost incompatible with the _ingenium_ of the old school. This criticism on Lucretius is not only quite just from Cicero's point of view, but it is most pointed. Yet the editors from Victorius to Klotz will not let Cicero say what he thought. They insert a _non_ either before _multis_ or before _multae_, and thus deny him either _ingenium_ or _ars_. The point of the judgment is that Lucretius shows the genius of the old school and (what might seem to be incompatible with it) the art of the new[10].' Thus if his notice of the poem is slight, it is not deficient in appreciation. Mr. Munro succeeds in explaining Cicero's silence on the subject in his other correspondence. It is in his Letters to his oldest and most intimate correspondent, the Epicurean Atticus, that we should expect to find notices of his editorial labours. It was a task on which Atticus might have given most valuable help from his large employment of educated slaves in the copying of ma.n.u.scripts. Cicero's silence on the subject in the Letters to Atticus is fully explained by the fact that they were both in Rome during the greater part of the time between the death of Lucretius and the publication of his poem. Again, Cicero's strong opposition to the Epicurean doctrines was not incompatible with the closest friends.h.i.+p with many who professed them; and this opposition was not conspicuously declared till some years after this time. Lucretius would have sympathised with Cicero's political att.i.tude, as he appears to commend Memmius for adopting a similar att.i.tude in his Praetors.h.i.+p, and he must have known that Cicero was the man of widest literary culture then living. There is thus no great difficulty in supposing that the work of even so uncompromising a partisan as Lucretius should have been placed, either by his own request or by the wish of his friends, in the hands of one who was not attracted to it either by strong poetical or philosophical sympathy. The energetic kindliness of Cicero's nature, and his active interest in literature, would have prompted him not to decline the service if he were asked to render it.

Thus, although on this point too our judgment may well be suspended, we may think with pleasure of the good-will and kindly offices of the most humane and energetic among Roman writers, as exercised in behalf of Lucretius after his untimely death.

This is all the direct external evidence available for the personal history of Lucretius. It is remarkable, when compared with the information given in his other notices, that the record of Jerome does not even mention the poet's birth-place. This may be explained on the supposition either that the authorities followed by Jerome knew very little about him, or that, if he were born at Rome, there would not be the same motive for giving prominence to the place of his birth, as in the case of poets and men of letters who brought honour to the less famous districts of Italy. While Lucretius applies the word _patria_ to the Roman State ('patriai tempore iniquo'), and the adjective _patrius_ to the Latin language, these words are used by other Roman poets,--Ennius and Virgil for instance,--in reference to their own provincial homes. The Gentile name Lucretius was one eminently Roman, nor is there ground for believing that, like the equally ancient and n.o.ble name borne by the other great poet of the age, it had become common in other parts of Italy. The name suggests the inference that Lucretius was descended from one of the most ancient patrician houses of Rome, but one, as is pointed out by Mr. Munro, more famous in the legendary than in the later annals of the Republic. Some members of the same house are mentioned in the letters of Cicero among the partisans of Pompey: and possibly the Lucretius Ofella, who was one of the victims of Sulla's tyranny, may have been connected with the poet.

As the position indicated by the whole tone of the poem is that of a man living in easy circ.u.mstances, and of one, who, though repelled by it, was yet familiar with the life of pleasure and luxury, he must have belonged either to a senatorian family, or to one of the richer equestrian families, the members of which, if not engaged in financial and commercial affairs, often lived the life of country gentlemen on their estates and employed their leisure in the cultivation of literature. The tone of the dedication to Memmius, a member of a n.o.ble plebeian house, and of the occasional addresses to him in the body of the poem, is not that of a client to a patron, but of an equal to an equal:--

Sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas Suavis amicitiae--.

While Lucretius pays the tribute of admiration to the literary accomplishment of his friend, and to the active part which he played in politics, he yet addresses him with the authority of a master. In a society const.i.tuted as that of Rome was in the last age of the Republic this tone could only be a.s.sumed to a member of the governing cla.s.s by a social equal. Memmius combined the pursuits of a politician, a man of letters, and a man of pleasure; and in none of these capacities does he seem to have been worthy of the affection and admiration of Lucretius. But as he filled the office of Praetor in the year 58 B.C.[11] it may be inferred that he and the poet were about the same age, and thus the original bond between them may probably have been that of early education and literary sympathies. That Memmius retained a taste for poetry amid the pursuits and pleasures of his profligate career is shown by the fact that he was the author of a volume of amatory poems, and also by his taking with him, in the year 57 B.C., the poets Helvius Cinna and Catullus, on his staff to Bithynia. The keen discernment of the younger poet, sharpened by personal animosity, formed a truer estimate of his chief, than that expressed by the philosophic enthusiast. But at the time in which the words--

Nec Memmi clara propago Talibus in rebus communi deesse saluti--

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