Lucretius and the Early Modern (Classical Presences) [Illustrated] 9780198713845, 0198713843

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter

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C L A SS I C A L PR E S E NC E S Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

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Lucretius and the Early Modern Edited by

DAVID NORBROOK, STEPHEN HARRISON, AND PHILIP HARDIE

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2016 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959897 ISBN 978–0–19–871384–5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements This book originated in a conference on ‘Lucretius and the Early Modern’, 16 May 2012, one of a series of conferences held by Oxford’s Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS). Funded mainly by the English Faculty with contributions from other Humanities faculties, the Centre aims to encourage interdisciplinary research across many different areas, and as Director it has been my privilege to learn from Oxford’s community of scholars in the field and to benefit from their spirit of academic cooperation. The conference was co-sponsored by the Corpus Christi Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity. Stephen Greenblatt’s visit to Oxford was funded by an Astor Visiting Fellowship of the University of Oxford. I warmly thank Professor Greenblatt for his contributions to a series of events including the Lucretius conference, and Sharon Achinstein, Rhodri Lewis, Ian Maclean, and Richard Scholar for their participation. My co-editors, Philip Hardie and Stephen Harrison, have been stalwart long-term collaborators on neo-Latin literature. CEMS events have always highlighted Oxford’s extraordinary scholarly resources, and for the Lucretius conference I am grateful to the Bodleian Libraries and in particular to Alan Coates, Alexandra Franklin, and Martin Kauffmann, who made possible David Butterfield’s presentation on Bodleian books and manuscripts. The Oxford English Faculty provided generous support for research assistance, and Peter Auger was an acute reader in preparing the essays for publication. As always Oxford University Press provided outstanding editorial advice and I thank Jane Robson and Timothy Beck for careful copy-editing. David Norbrook

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Contents List of Figures Contributors Note on Editions Introduction David Norbrook 1. Epicurean Subversion? Lucretius’s First Proem and Contemporary Roman Culture Stephen Harrison 2. Lucretius in the Early Modern Period: Texts and Contexts David Butterfield

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3. Lucretian Naturalism and the Evolution of Machiavelli’s Ethics Alison Brown

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4. Poetic Flights or Retreats? Latin Lucretian Poems in Sixteenth-Century Italy Yasmin Haskell

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5. Lucretius, Atheism, and Irreligion in Renaissance and Early Modern Venice N. S. Davidson

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6. ‘Well said/well thought’: How Montaigne Read his Lucretius Wes Williams

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7. Michel de Marolles’s 1650 French Translation of Lucretius and its Reception in England Line Cottegnies

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8. Lucretianism and Some Seventeenth-Century Theories of Human Origin William Poole

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9. Is the De rerum natura a Work of Natural Theology? Some Ancient, Modern, and Early Modern Perspectives Nicholas Hardy 10. Atheists and Republicans: Interpreting Lucretius in Revolutionary England David Norbrook

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11. Political Philosophy in a Lucretian Mode Catherine Wilson

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Bibliography of Printed Sources Index

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List of Figures Fig. 0.1. Thomas Creech, T. Lucretius Carus The Epicurean Philosopher, His Six Books De Natura Rerum, Done into English Verse (Oxford, 1683), title-page. With permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford (8 W 38 Art.).

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Fig. 2.1. Stemma of Lucretius MSS.

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Figs. 6.1, 6.2. Montaigne, Essais (Paris: A L’Angelier, 1588), fols. 382r–v; Reproduction en quadrichromie de l’Exemplaire de Bordeaux des Essais de Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan (Fasano-Chicago: Schena Editore, Montaigne Studies, 2002), reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

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Figs. 6.3, 6.4. ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’, fols. 33v–34r, reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

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Fig. 6.5. Lambinus’s first edition (Paris, 1563/4) 5, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

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Fig. 6.6. ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’, fol. 382 , reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

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Fig. 6.7. ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’, fol. 382 (detail), reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

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Fig. 6.8. ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’, fol. 382v (detail), reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

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r

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Figs. 7.1, 7.2. Jansson’s edition (Amsterdam, 1620), Marolles’s translation (Paris, 1650). © Line Cottegnies.

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Fig. 7.3. John Evelyn, An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De rerum natura (London, 1656), title-page. With permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford (8 L 17(1) Art.BS).

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Fig. 10.1. T[homas]. H[obbes], Elementorum philosophiæ sectio tertia, de cive (Paris, 1642), title-page. With permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford (4 H 14 Art.Seld.).

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Fig. 10.2. Titi Lucretii Cari de rerum natura libri sex, ed. Jacob Tonson (London, 1712), plate facing p. 240. With permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford (AA 6 Jur.).

256

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Contributors Alison Brown is Emerita Professor of Italian Renaissance History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her forthcoming work includes articles on ‘Defining the Place of Academies in Florentine Politics and Culture’ and ‘Leonardo, Lucretius and their Views of Nature’. David Butterfield is a University Lecturer in Latin Literature and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Queens’ College, Cambridge. His interests include ancient literature, textual criticism, and the history of classical scholarship. Line Cottegnies is professor of early modern English literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris 3. She has worked on Caroline poetry and early modern women writers including Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn. She has also edited several plays by Shakespeare. Her current work includes editions of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2 (Norton, forthcoming), and Mary Sidney’s ‘Antonius’ (MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translation Series, forthcoming). N. S. Davidson is Associate Professor of the History of the Renaissance and Reformation, University of Oxford. He has published on the social, cultural, and religious history of Renaissance and early modern Italy. He is currently completing a study of the inquisition in Venice, and preparing a general history of Italy from 1500 to 1800. Philip Hardie is a senior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the co-editor (with Stuart Gillespie) of The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (2007), and co-editor (with Patrick Cheney) of The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, ii. 1558–1660 (forthcoming). Nicholas Hardy is a member of the English Faculty and Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. His principal interest is in the history of criticism, and especially in what late Renaissance and early Enlightenment scholars described as the ars critica. He is currently preparing his doctoral thesis (‘The ars critica in Early

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Modern England’, University of Oxford, 2012) for publication as a monograph. Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature in the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College. He has published many books and articles on Latin literature and its reception, edited Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English (OUP, 2009) and Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays (jointly with Amanda Wrigley; OUP, 2013), and is a contributor to both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century volumes of the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (forthcoming). Yasmin Haskell, FAHA, is Cassamarca Foundation Chair in Latin Humanism at the University of Western Australia. Her books include Prescribing Ovid: The Latin Works and Networks of the Enlightened Dr Heerkens (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Loyola’s Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (OUP, 2003). She is a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: Europe 1100–1800, in which she leads projects on ‘Jesuit Emotions’ and ‘Passions for Learning’. David Norbrook is Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford. His publications include Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (1984; OUP, 2002) and Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1629–1660 (CUP, 1999). He is General Editor of a complete edition of The Works of Lucy Hutchinson for OUP. William Poole is Galsworthy Fellow and Tutor in English, and Fellow Librarian, of New College, Oxford. He has published widely in the areas of early modern literary, intellectual, and scientific history. He also co-edits the journal The Library. Wes Williams is a Professor of French Literature, and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. His most recent book, Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic (OUP, 2011), investigates the meanings of monsters from, roughly, Rabelais to Racine, by way of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and a few others. He is currently preparing a new study of early modern ‘Servitude’. Alongside academic work, he writes and directs for the theatre. Catherine Wilson is Anniversary Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and holds a joint appointment with the Graduate

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Center of the City University of New York. She specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy. Her most recent book is Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (OUP, 2008), and she is currently working on A Very Short Introduction to Epicureanism for OUP’s Very Short Introduction series.

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Note on Editions Except where otherwise specified, text and translation of the De rerum natura (DRN) are from De rerum natura, second edition, ed. and tr. W. D. H. Rouse. Revised by M. F. Smith. (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1992), cited as Lucretius (1992). As will become clear from the chapters in this book, early modern editions of Lucretius often varied significantly in wording and punctuation from today’s editions, and serious exploration of the reception history needs to pay attention to possible textual problems. More and more early modern editions are becoming available in digitized form, and there is a modern edition of Pareus’s 1631 text in The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, i. The Translation of Lucretius, ed. R. Barbour and D. Norbrook, Latin text by M. C. Zerbino (2 vols. Oxford, 2012).

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Introduction David Norbrook

In 1417, Poggio Bracciolini discovered a complete manuscript of the De rerum natura on the shelves of a monastery. The incident corresponds to the hoariest stereotypes of Renaissance history: a text recovered to the light after years of monkish darkness.1 Still more, that text itself celebrates the triumph of the light of reason, ratio, over the darkness and fear of superstition, terrorem animi tenebrasque (1.146–8). Lucretius has been viewed as the herald of modernity, a zealous opponent of the enslavement to tradition in science and religion. Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx in different ways viewed him as a harbinger of the Enlightenment. In some more recent interpretations, Lucretius gains a Nietzschean inflection and becomes a prophet not so much of modernity as of postmodernity, or of a revisionist ‘aleatory’ materialism, with attention focused on the play of contingencies introduced by Lucretius’s swerve or clinamen.2 That swerve, as Harold Bloom long ago noted, offers a suggestive model for literary influence.3 Lucretius also poses contemporary questions that go beyond those interpretative frames, adumbrating contemporary ecological concerns.4 Poggio had certainly had a busy day.

1 The locality of the monastery remains uncertain; Greenblatt (2011) 272 states that there is a scholarly consensus for Fulda, though Murbach is preferred by Gambino Longo (2004) 20; Butterfield (2013) 30. 2 See Serres (1977); Lezra (1997); Althusser (2006); Morfino (2011); and W. H. Shearin and Brooke Holmes, ‘Introduction’, in Holmes and Shearin (2012) 14–20. 3 See most recently Bloom (2011) 133–71. 4 Still relatively unexplored, these connections are discussed most fully by Foster (2006).

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That narrative of a sudden break in the Renaissance, presented most vividly in Stephen Greenblatt’s immensely influential The Swerve, has generated some sharp reactions. Lucretius, it is argued, was not really ‘discovered’ in 1417; nor did his natural philosophy adumbrate modern science; nor did it precipitate a wave of atheism; nor is there good evidence that his poem did sweep Europe. Even today, outside specialists in the classics, Lucretius remains little known—hence the element of astonishment with which Greenblatt’s book was greeted by general readers. And specialists in early modern literature and history have paid far less attention to Lucretius than to figures like Virgil and Ovid. In recent years there has been a major revival of scholarly interest, but much remains to be explored.5 The present collection aims to refine our understanding and to open up new directions. The chapters do not draw uniform conclusions about the cultural impact of the DRN: the poem may have been received as subversive and disturbing in some circles while causing no ripples whatever elsewhere. Recognizing such diversity is more fruitful than seeking a bland middle way: the poem’s reception was and remains volatile. A common factor in many of these chapters is a close attention to the poem’s language and material circulation, as a means of refining generalizations about Epicurean philosophy. While insisting on the need to understand early modern readers without anachronism, they also recognize the ways in which Lucretius was from the start a figure at odds with his time, and calling forth special imaginative leaps in his most original readers. That the reception of the De rerum natura was not simply a matter of darkness followed by instant illumination can perhaps be predicted from the poem itself. Despite his general assertiveness of tone, Lucretius several times voices his fear that his shadowy interlocutor Memmius may relapse into old superstitions. If he coats his Epicurean medicine with honey, it is because he is aware that his doctrine will be felt repellent by many or most of his readers; he can prevail only by a kind of well-meaning deceit (deceptaque non capiatur, 1.941). The potential resistance could be ideological: Stephen Harrison

5 These include, in chronological order, Fraisse (1962); Fleischmann (1964); Gambino Longo (2004); Prosperi (2004); Gillespie and Hardie (2007), with many essays covering the early modern period; Palmer (2009); Greenblatt (2011); Paladini (2011); Passannante (2011); Lestringant and Naya (2010); Del Lucchese et al. (2011); Holmes and Shearin (2012); Palmer (2014).

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(Chapter 1), makes clear why the poem’s subversiveness will indeed have made it bitter medicine for defenders of traditional values. But the difficulties were also aesthetic: few readers have complained that he ladled out too much honey, for large tracts of the poem are harsh in texture—‘crabbed’ was the standard early modern English description—and uncompromisingly technical. Lucretius reveals an ambivalence about the status of poetry, even strongly didactic poetry, within the Epicurean system: his passion for his craft is evident, he even tells us that he dreams about writing his own poem (4.969–70), but he also again and again draws attention to ways in which poetic images can be misleading. The record of his reception amongst his contemporaries bears out the problems: though allusions indicate that his greatness as a poet was early recognized, esteem for his poetry rather than his didactic mission was not what he himself had aimed for.6 By the fourth century, when polarizations between Christians and the neo-paganism of Julian the Apostate intensified, Lucretius’s philosophy became more sensitive and liable to cause offence on both sides; many manuscripts may have been destroyed as part of Julian’s campaign to defend traditional pagan worship. To some extent, Lucretius became a tactical ally of Christian assaults on paganism, and we owe the survival of the poem at all to monastic copyists. The interpretation of the next phase of the poem’s fortunes has been swayed by the development of different disciplines. Textual criticism in the field of classical literature has long taken Karl Lachmann’s edition of Lucretius as a foundational work, with Lachmann himself presented as a Lucretian figure bringing light out of darkness.7 More recent scholarship, by Sebastiano Timpanaro and others, has highlighted the continuities between Lachmann’s method and the best scholarship of Renaissance humanists; the current Loeb edition frequently notes readings which we owe to early modern scholars.8 All these scholars showed a sensitivity to the material characteristics of manuscripts—Lachmann was able to infer the pagination of a lost original. At the same time, they tended to see themselves as 6 On the engagement of later Roman poets with Lucretius, see Hardie (2007; 2009), who explores the philosophical and political issues behind the process of poetic allusion and emulation; for a full list and discussion of quotations from Lucretius down to late antiquity and beyond, see Butterfield (2013) 46–101. 7 This perspective underlies Munro’s acute and magisterial study of the editorial history, Lucretius (1920–9) i. 1–38. 8 Timpanaro (2005); Lucretius (1992).

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bringing light out of an often confused and ignorant process of textual transmission. This has meant that the material witnesses of texts have been treated as raw materials without being a primary focus of interest in their own right. It is symptomatic that at the time of writing we lack an edition of the earliest manuscripts, for which scholars must still rely on expensive and rare photofacsimiles produced more than a century ago.9 Recent scholarship on medieval and early modern manuscripts has urged a renewed attention to their material properties, a movement often linked with a postmodern celebration of plurality rather than a search for a fixed authorial original.10 These editors would be inclined to ask whether Lucretius arrived at or intended a fixed and final version of his text. Work on the material circulation of texts also highlights the precariousness of the survival of so many classical writings, so that the De rerum natura was far from unique in the paucity of copies. After all, we owe the survival of the poem at all to the cultural renaissance of the ninth and tenth centuries, which saw the transcription of the two earliest complete surviving manuscripts, another one now surviving in fragments and a further manuscript, now lost, which was the one Poggio recovered in 1417. Some commentators have found echoes of Lucretius in later medieval verse and prose and posited connections with monastic libraries. The myth of the dark ages is displaced by claims that the period was ‘a world full of light and learning’.11 The further that line of argument is pushed, the less of a case there is for a ‘discovery’ in 1417.12 And yet the steady proliferation of manuscripts in Italy once Poggio’s copy had been circulated does indicate a demand that had not previously been satisfied. Gerard Passannante has shown that a reader with Petrarch’s expertise could infer something of what the DRN must have been like from surviving extracts and allusions in Virgil.13 Poggio knew the importance of his discovery because he was already primed as to what to look for. The fact remains that he had to look. No new evidence has been produced to counter the view of late-medieval decline which Greenblatt summarized from earlier authorities. R. W. Hunt, hardly a foe of medieval manuscript culture, wrote that by the twelfth century Lucretius ‘has vanished’; L. D. Reynolds agreed that, ‘despite this promising start, Lucretius 9 11 13

Lucretius (1908, 1913). Treharne (2013) 320. Passannante (2011) 18–37.

10 12

See e.g. Marotti (1995). See Treharne (2013); Woods (2013).

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went underground for the rest of the Middle Ages, an eclipse which may be partly explained by the passionately anti-religious nature of his message’.14 Susanna Gambino Longo, while arguing that a small monastic elite may have continued to read and study Lucretius, acknowledges that the manuscripts would have been confined to an enfer or restricted category.15 We now at long last have a study based on a very detailed scrutiny of the early manuscripts, and David Butterfield’s conclusion is that the annotations in later hands either date from the first two centuries after their transcription or from a much later period: his conclusion, made in his essay (Chapter 2) and argued at greater length in his monograph, is that there is no evidence that anyone read Lucretius in the later Middle Ages. He offers detailed counter-arguments to various claims for direct echoes of the DRN in medieval texts. The evidence does not point to any deliberate programme of suppression; one may also suspect, though, that the more obscure the poem had become, the more attention would be drawn to anyone who sought to revive it, and given its content this could have been an inhibiting factor. Butterfield points out that the title of the oldest surviving manuscript was erased and replaced, which only makes sense if the writer believed an association with Lucretius would be undesirable—the marks of an enfer. Even if no more was at issue than that the poem came to seem obscure and irrelevant, that in itself points to a gap in comprehension of a kind that humanists became anxious to fill. From within the carefully codified paradigms of scholastic philosophy, Lucretius’s arguments might well have seemed eccentric and amateurish; and before that, Cicero, Plutarch, and Lactantius had developed strategies for dismissing Epicureanism through ridicule and rhetorical question. The longstanding quarrel between scholasticism and humanism seems still to come into play in contemporary debates: one may gain the impression from Greenblatt’s critics that the DRN was merely one of several alternative expositions of atomist natural philosophy, and a poorly argued one at that, lacking the rigour of serious scholastic philosophers.16 But the poem also offers a passionate Hunt (1971) 51–2; Reynolds, ‘Lucretius’, in Reynolds (1983) 218–22 (220). Gambino Longo (2004) 24–5; cf. Reeve (2007). 16 Shank (2013) appositely warns against conflating Lucretian atoms with those of modern science but seems to regard the basis of the former, in an ancient tradition, as dismissable simply by rhetorical question: ‘the primordial indivisible “seeds” (atoms, to us) are all “carried downward by their own weight in a straight line” (De rerum 14 15

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frontal assault on the idea that our world shows signs of divine design; outlines a history of this world from creation to a powerfully imagined destruction, as part of an infinite universe; narrates a radically materialist vision of the development of human society and a horrific vision of social disintegration; presents a part-satirical, part-sympathetic portrait of human erotic passion; urges a radical reform in attitudes to death; outlines a coherent and entirely secular system of ethics; and throughout it offers a powerful appeal to the imagination and the emotions, in poetry that is utterly distinctive and matches the greatest in world literature. Perhaps monastic readers found little to interest them in this text, and exaggerated as Greenblatt’s negative portrayal of medieval culture may be, contemporary medievalists do not seem very interested either.17 Early modern humanists, however, were excited to recover a poem which Virgil had valued so highly, and indeed against which he had been prompted to react in such complex ways: to that extent, Lucretius had helped to set the Virgilian agenda, and given the massive prestige of the Aeneid across medieval and early modern periods, this was immensely important. The arguments of authorities like Lactantius, ridiculing Lucretius as a puerile malcontent, could now be seen to have been highly prejudiced. Something new came into the world in 1417. But its reception was fascinatingly and unusually problematic—as Lucretius himself might have expected. The present collection shows how difficult it is to generalize about the mixture of enthusiasm and revulsion with which the DRN was greeted, but that volatility is in itself worthy of note. Scholars may write of ‘Epicureanism’ as if it formed a unified body of thought to be accepted or rejected en bloc, but we need first of all to recall that relevant texts bore complex interrelations. Epicurus had fared less well than Lucretius in the preservation of his manuscripts: his major work On Nature and many other writings have not survived, and while fragments of papyri have been recovered from Herculaneum, all that was known in the early modern period was a handful of letters and some maxims. Most of these survive because natura, 2.216–18; down? by weight? in parallel? in an infinite universe? Ponder that)’ (315). For early annotations on the absurdity of the swerve, and Machiavelli’s unwillingness to find it absurd, see Palmer (2014) 85–8. 17 Most of the responses to Greenblatt’s book in Pugh (2013) are strikingly lacking in any specific reference to Lucretius. Robertson (2010) surveys the historiography.

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they were collected in the sympathetic life of Epicurus in the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, compiled from sources still available in the third century CE. This work was widely printed in Western Europe in Latin and subsequently Italian and French translations, though a Greek editio princeps was not available until 1533. While Stoicism was more immediately attractive than Epicureanism as a parallel to Christian philosophy, it was widely known to scholars that the ethically rigorous Seneca had himself greatly esteemed Epicurus and cited Lucretius with approval.18 In a kind of dialectical relation with this growing body of scholarly knowledge, however, there emerged the polemical stereotype of the ‘epicure’ and ‘atheist’, figures who, lacking the restraint imposed by religious belief, reduced life to nothing but an endless pursuit of debauched pleasure. The two terms are paired in the first appearance of ‘atheist’ in the sense of ‘one who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God’ in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘eate we and drink we lustely, to morow we shal dy. which al [th]e Epicures protest ope[n]ly, & the Italia[n] atheoi in lyfe practyse’.19 It is notable that the word is not actually ‘atheist’ but its Greek equivalent, associated with Italians: the Bible translator Miles Coverdale, writing c.1555, represents the very idea of not believing in God as alien to his native language.20 There was a gulf between this hedonistic notion of Epicureanism and the writings of Epicurus; but it was bridged to some extent by the wide availability of the highly negative views of Epicureanism found in Cicero’s De natura deorum and Plutarch’s In Colotem—texts which were polemically reductive, and engaged less with Epicurus’s own writings than with later followers. Seneca’s more favourable view of Epicurus was widely known, but it was not until Pierre Gassendi’s massive edition of Diogenes Laertius’s Life, with much commentary on Lucretius, in 1649 that Epicurus was really purged of his earlier notoriety. Even after that, and indeed down to the present day, confusion between the real philosopher and the caricatures remained commonplace. It can also be difficult to distinguish between Epicurus and Lucretius, who presents himself as following in his master’s footsteps. We 18

Seneca (1925) iii. 269 (Epistulae Morales 90.6–7), citing DRN 2.55–6. OED3 ‘atheist’ A n. 1; Werdmueller (1555) preface, sig.iiiv. The entry needs revision in the light of more recent scholarship. 20 On Greek and Latin terms for ‘atheist’, cf. Robichaud (2014) 190. 19

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still cannot be sure how far Lucretius was drawing on Epicurus’s nowlost On Nature; certainly his poem, while having much in common with the letters that may have derived from that work, has a significant amount of material not to be found in any surviving writings.21 We are dependent on Lucretius alone for the famous swerve and the lengthy discussion of the origins of civilization in the fifth book. Just as significantly, though the point sometimes seems so obvious as to be ignored, Lucretius was a poet, and his discourse was very different in tone. Epicurus advocated a state of detachment from the unnecessary desires that are aroused by deceitful images and he seems to have found this state fairly easy to achieve: a figure of low affect, he wrote in a suitably economical prose. Insofar as religions distorted the true images of the gods, as themselves affectless and remote figures, he criticized conventional religion, but he also disliked public opposition, advocating instead a calm acceptance with inner reservation. How far he was an ‘atheist’ in the sense of denying that there was a reality behind human perceptions of the gods remains debated.22 With Lucretius that point is likewise open to debate, but his sensibility was very different. He was a poet of extraordinary skill and capable of great intensity, and a scorching wit of a kind that was popular in the seventeenth century; whatever his final beliefs about the gods (cf. Norbrook’s Chapter 10, 239–41), he passionately inveighed against superstition. Insofar as his poem could be classified as a literary text and hence liable to different standards of truth, his early modern defenders could use this fictional quality to outflank criticism: if any blame attached to the poem’s doctrines, it should be directed at Epicurus, not Lucretius. Insofar as he heightened the affective qualities of Epicureanism, however, disguising with poetic honey some doctrines which Christians considered poisonous rather than medicinal, his poetic skill could be seen as all the more subversive. One further difference between the two writers was that Lucretius had to strain at the limits of the Latin language to accommodate Epicurus’s technical Greek vocabulary within the acceptable diction and metrical patterns of a Latin hexameter. He aimed to naturalize Epicurean terms by finding Latin equivalents with deep roots in the language, in the process often adopting an archaic idiom; but he also liked to show his virtuosity in the most sophisticated contemporary 21 22

See Sedley (1998). See the opposed views of Sedley (2011) and Konstan (2011).

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poetic techniques. His language can quickly jump from the prosaic to the elevated; he can ram points home with heavy repetition, but also slip them by the reader with compressed aphorisms. These characteristics were to present problems for translators. The Swerve, aiming to introduce Lucretius to new readers, has remarkably little to say about the poem itself, with a summary in bullet points and a few excerpts from the translation by John Dryden, which is indeed fluent and energetic but gains this effect by expanding considerably on the original.23 These difficulties of language posed problems for editors and commentators. The fact that a word in the poem is to be found nowhere else in Latin may mean that it requires emendation or that it was a unique Lucretian usage; repeated lines may reflect scribal inattention or a deliberate authorial strategy; obscurities may need editorial tidying or may be intended as a stimulus to the reader. All these linguistic devices were deployed to convey philosophical doctrines which are in their barest prose expression extremely complex and often counter-intuitive. The editorial problems are acute, and early modern readers lacked the generations of textual scholarship on which today’s editions rely. Even today, editors offer solutions to one passage as radically different as et ecum vi, ‘and the force of horses’, que elephantis, ‘and by elephants’, and hastatis, ‘armed with spears’.24 Many passages had baffled the scribes of the oldest surviving manuscripts, and as derivatives of Poggio’s manuscript began to circulate in fifteenth-century Italy, humanist readers turned to their favoured practice of philological analysis and comparison. So acute was humanist interest in language that it often overshadowed questions of content, another reason why the reception of Lucretius might not immediately raise religious concerns. Fifteenthcentury manuscripts circulated partly as prestige items with elaborate ornamentation, reflecting the social capital given by classical interests, and partly amongst the scholarly community, whose interests might be more literary than philosophical. One fifteenth-century scholar who was to become a bishop transcribed the whole poem as an exercise in the praise of God and added a note apologizing not for any subversive content but for errors of sense or metre.25 Marginalia in early modern manuscripts pay far less attention to thorny issues like atomism and 23 24 25

Greenblatt (2011) 182–202. Lucretius (1947) i. 238, apparatus to 2.43[42]. Reeve (2007) 210.

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the fate of the soul than to textual emendations, vocabulary, including the Greek origins of Lucretius’s Latin terms, and passages echoed by later Roman poets. Lucretius’s challenges to an Aristotelian cosmology, including the idea of an infinite universe, might be simply ignored: one manuscript blandly provides illustrations that go against his own words.26 These emphases continued as manuscript transmission gave way to print. Just what Lucretius had actually written remained a problem. While Dionysius Lambinus’s (Denys Lambin’s) conjectural emendations in his great editions of the mid-sixteenth century are today considered to have been the greatest advance in improving the text before Lachmann, there was sufficient uncertainty for many editions to continue reproducing older manuscript readings. Much annotation in printed editions focused on basic elucidation rather than more controversial issues. With printing the opportunities for widespread diffusion of Epicurean ideas did greatly increase, but this did not necessarily mean an immediate wave of subversion. Printing, in the form of popular pamphlets and sermons, could bring the onslaught against the ‘epicure’ to socially diverse audiences. Editions of the DRN tended defensively to displace ideological concerns on to Epicurus and to absolve Lucretius of personal responsibility for the ideas that he adorned poetically. And neo-Latin poets began to write imitations of the DRN which took pride in an ability to imitate the nuances of Lucretian language while specifically refuting his arguments. The honey and the doctrine could apparently be kept completely separate. One may then imagine Lucretius as concluding that he had written in vain, that his early modern readers were as vulnerable as Memmius to lapsing back into superstition. Drawing on a meticulous survey of early manuscripts and printed books, Ada Palmer shows that the majority of readers for whom evidence survives skirted round atomism and mortalism while finding ways of assimilating Lucretius’s ethics to Christianity. But she also highlights striking exceptions such as Machiavelli, who copied out and annotated the entire poem, with acute attention and a deep interest in the atomist core of his philosophy.27 And yet Machiavelli never mentioned Lucretius in any of his writings: had the manuscript not happened to survive, scholars 26

Palmer (2014) 63. Palmer (2014) 81–8, 92–6; large as her coverage is, work remains to be done in this field. 27

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would have been able to pour scorn on any Machiavellian debt to Epicureanism. This silence, from a writer not reluctant to take risks, forms part of a more general pattern of ambivalent allegiance and semi-disavowal that runs across early modern writers from Montaigne to Hobbes and Hutchinson. Bland sensibilities could remain effectively untroubled by Lucretius; more probing minds could be both stimulated and disturbed by the encounter. One of the period’s greatest readers, Erasmus, risked presenting Epicureanism as very close to Christianity in his dialogue Epicureus (1533), and certainly knew Lucretius, but he never mentions him, perhaps because he considered the DRN more dangerous than Epicurus’s less easily accessible writings.28 Such ambivalence underlay even the much-quoted praise of Lucretius by a later scholar, Isaac Casaubon, who hailed him as Latinitatis auctor optimus, thus placing him above even Virgil.29 He passed on this admiration to his son Meric, who wrote that he loved to recite the opening of Lucretius’s second book to himself when he was out riding, and that it would be better not to translate such a great poem at all than to ruin it by a bad translation. John Evelyn, then engaged on a translation, declared himself disheartened by this; but when Casaubon wrote to him about that translation some years later, it was to censure him for misdirecting his talents on unworthy subject-matter. This ambivalence was a matter of family tradition. In 1668 Meric Casaubon denounced contemporary Epicureans and branded Lucretius as their inspiration, recalling that in a copy of the DRN that had come down to him, his father had attacked him as a minister of the devil.30 Isaac Casaubon’s marginalia testify to his deep interest in Lucretius’s philosophy and language—he had published a commentary on Diogenes Laertius and was well versed in Epicureanism—but also reveal several flashes of deep hostility: he was moved to address Lucretius as very stupid, stultissime, when denouncing his claim that the spontaneous generation of worms disproved the immortality of the soul.31 For him Lucretius’s greatness and his 28

Paladini (2011) 38; see also Bietenholz (2009) 109–40. Casaubon (1587) 417. 30 Epicurus Deus, iudicio Lucretii; meo, Diaboli
çÅ nequissimus, glossing deus ille fuit, deus, 5.8, Lucretius (1576) 168, Leiden University Library 755 H 9; M. Paladini, ‘Isaac Casaubon e Kaspar Scoppe’, in Paladini (2011) 191–219; cf. Hutchinson (2012) p. cx. 31 DRN 3.719–21, Lucretius (1576) 110, Leiden University Library 755 H 9; for more examples of his criticisms of Lucretius, see Paladini 199–200. Notes on Diogenes 29

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stupidity were hard to separate. Neither father nor son could sustain a stable and unproblematic distinction between the poem’s form and its content, and Casaubon’s rebuke to Evelyn implies that he had become tainted by the very act of translation. Lucy Hutchinson certainly considered herself so tainted; as David Butterfield’s essay shows (Chapter 2, 66–7), Thomas Creech acquired notoriety from his translation. Those translations were very belated. Translating great writers, both to broaden their audience and to provide a prop for those who read partly in the original, was a central humanist project. But nearly a century and a half elapsed between Poggio’s discovery and the first translation into any vernacular. One reason for this delay could have been the formidable linguistic difficulties already discussed; both the poem’s philosophical obscurity and its poetic quality were daunting. Nor is there any evidence of direct attempts to discourage translation. Nevertheless, when vernacular translations did emerge they had to apologize for themselves in very particular ways, magnifying the ambivalence already evident in the publication of Latin texts. The chapters in this volume try to register these complexities. They do not propose an immediate reception of subversive Lucretian ideas, checked by or hidden from official censorship. They do not claim Lucretius’s unique responsibility for modern atomism, secularism, or atheism, let alone modernity in general: all of these have a range of sources.32 But in focusing on the specific material and cultural contexts in which the DRN was interpreted, they do bring out ways in which Lucretian themes and imagery percolated early modern culture, in the face of often subtle resistances. They highlight the agency of authors and readers, as opposed to contingencies and swerves, but pay attention to the constraints as well as the possibilities offered by early modern conditions of textual production and circulation. They explore aspects of the reception which have not received so much attention as atomism and natural philosophy, notably Lucretian ethics and politics; and they move from Renaissance Italy to Enlightenment Northern Europe.

Laertius by Isaac and Meric Casaubon appeared in John Pearson’s 1664 edition (Diogenes Laertius 1664). 32 Kors (1990) argues that scholastic philosophy invented atheism as a heuristic device to strengthen its own positions, and writes that he has omitted discussion of Epicurus and Lucretius to highlight the many alternative routes to atheism (109, 203). For a similar argument, see Gregory (2012).

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Stephen Harrison begins the collection by pointing out that the question of Lucretius’s subversiveness was not confined to medieval and early modern readers: the DRN frontally challenged its first readers, affirming peaceful friendship amongst equals against Roman militarism and civic religion. Harrison demonstrates Lucretius’s deployment of specifically poetic means of subversion, in echoing the archaic language of Ennius to give a lustre of patriotic tradition to his scandalously unpatriotic views. Lucretius thus emerges as a figure who, while urging his patron Memmius to disengage himself from public life, was himself intensely engaged with the problems of his times. His poem does not fit easily into received political moulds. Benjamin Farrington’s Marxist interpretation saw Roman Epicureanism as a movement of plebeian resistance; Momigliano replied by insisting on its elite character, sometimes with a republican inflection; Duncan Kennedy finds in his admiration for Epicurus’s transgressive boldness a covert sympathy for Julius Caesar.33 Lucretius’s subversiveness arguably consisted in urging his readers to think outside the existing Roman paradigms altogether—a goal that could resonate with early modern readers as politically divergent as the absolutist Hobbes and the republican Lucy Hutchinson. David Butterfield, drawing on and developing the research for his book, takes the story of Lucretius’s textual transmission from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. Paying close attention to paratexts and particular copies, he opens up different areas of reception which are explored in more detail by other contributors. The next three chapters discuss reception in Italy. Alison Brown has already given us a study of the Epicurean revival in fifteenth-century Florence, and here she gives a fuller account of Machiavelli’s response to Lucretius. He did not simply copy out an existing edition of the DRN but showed a humanist interest in weighing up a range of texts and deciding on the best edition: his own manuscript of the poem may even represent a planned new edition. In his case, she argues, this work of close reading was not simply a satisfaction of literary curiosity but a foundation for a profoundly new vision of politics. Brown notes that his radical break with Christian providentialism and Aristotelian teleology has close structural parallels with 33 Farrington (1965); Momigliano (1941); Kennedy (2013) (a reading depending on a Foucauldian assimilation of knowledge and power); on Lucretius’s politics, see Benferhat (2005) 57–97.

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Epicureanism: the tripartite structure of necessity, freedom, and chance; the firmly secular and utilitarian account of the origins of the state and the nature of laws; the anthropological analysis of religion’s origins in the human psychology, notably in the powerful emotion of fear. Brown considers one further distinctive aspect of Machiavelli’s thought with clear Epicurean parallels. The denial of a split between immortal soul and mortal body had further profound implications for the distinctions between humans and other living creatures. Once humanity’s God-given authority over the animal kingdom was denied, ethical and political questions might be grounded in a common materialist analysis of animal and human behaviour rather than in divinely based laws—an issue that was to surface in the following century, as Poole’s Chapter 8 shows. It is worth pausing on Brown’s adumbration of two areas in which the early modern reception of Lucretius provides an important corrective to or qualification of some current historiography. In the sphere of politics, J. G. A. Pocock’s magisterial The Machiavellian Moment established an influential reading of Machiavelli as a civic humanist. The Florentine differed radically from many humanists, however, in his scepticism about the links between moral virtue, religious piety, eloquent speech, and political activism, all points on which he shares ground with Epicureanism, and which were to be taken up by Thomas Hobbes.34 As will emerge in later chapters in this volume, however, early modern humanism and republicanism was often surprisingly open to some aspects of Epicureanism. This applied even to the sensitive question of religion. As recent scholarship on early modern ‘political theology’ emphasizes, many humanists shared Livy’s interest in the way Rome’s ‘civic religion’ fostered her political institutions and military discipline, and Machiavelli’s enthusiasm for Livy was part of a broader movement. The current interest in political theology stems in part from a critique of simplistic accounts of secularization, sometimes pushed to the point of arguing that modern political theory is simply a secularization of Christianity. Epicureanism would clearly present a limiting case for such an argument, however; Lucretius shows no sign of approving the state religion of Rome. As Victoria Kahn has argued, Machiavelli often adopts a critical view of religious ideology that is closer to Lucretius than to Livy.35 34 35

Pocock (1975), strongly critiqued by Rahe (2008) 24–100. Kahn (2014) 95–102; Brown (2010b). Cf. Rundle (2013) on Poggio’s politics.

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If Epicurean influence was so powerful, why then did Machiavelli not acknowledge it? Up to a point, he did. In the preface to one of his most ambitious works, the Discourses on Livy, he declared that ho deliberato entrare per una via, la quale, non essendo suta ancora da alcuno trita, ‘I have resolved to enter upon a path still untrodden’.36 As Paul Rahe has pointed out, when early modern writers declared that they were doing something completely new, they generally acknowledged that they were simultaneously following someone else’s tracks; Lucretius was well enough known in Machiavelli’s Florence for his trita to be seen as a specific echo of Lucretius’s avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante / trita solo, ‘I traverse pathless tracts of the Pierides never trodden by any foot’ (1.926–7).37 But this subtle acknowledgement was very different from Machiavelli’s open following of Livy. One reason for his silence, which Brown has argued elsewhere, would be that the Lateran Council’s ban on teaching the mortality of the soul in 1513, and the controversy caused by Pietro Pomponazzi’s Trattato sull’immortalità dell’anima (1516), made him cautious about the association. This ban was not directly concerned with Epicurean texts: it emerged from a long debate about the central figure in the medieval academic canon, Aristotle, whose De anima was held by Averroes to show that the soul was mortal. But Lucretius’s barrage of arguments against the soul’s immortality in his third book, a tour de force of savage irreverence, had given a much stronger affective dimension to the debates, and had certainly been a provocation to Ficino in his defences of the soul’s immortality. Concern about the DRN was further indicated by a decree in Florence in 1517 against its being taught in schools. A tradition of scholarship on early modern Epicureanism and free-thinking, from Leo Strauss to Paul A. Rahe, has argued that figures from Machiavelli to Hobbes and Spinoza deliberately concealed their debts, adopting what Valentina Prosperi has termed a ‘dissimulatory code’. Machiavelli’s writings were after all found dangerous enough to be put on the Index of Prohibited Books as they stood. But was dissimulation really needed? Yasmin Haskell’s Chapter 4 on sixteenth-century neo-Latin poetry in Italy shows the intensity with which readers and writers engaged with Lucretius. Neo-Latin writing remains a neglected area in cultural history, but scholars like

36

Machiavelli (1971).

37

Rahe (2008) 40.

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Haskell have been showing how vital and various these writings were. From the building-blocks of which we find evidence in annotations and commentaries, poets could construct new works which were deeply informed by classical texts but engaged with the discourses and debates of the contemporary Latinate republic of letters. Two of the poets she discusses, Aonio Paleario and the virtually unknown Lodovico Parisetti Junior, in different ways tried to separate the honey of Lucretian verse from the poison of its content: they addressed the Lateran Council’s call for writers to refute mortalism, drawing ammunition from Ficino. Even within this shared agenda, Haskell is able to demonstrate significant variations in tone: Paleario urbanely showing off his responsiveness to Lucretius’s poetic qualities; Parisetti downplaying specific allusions to the DRN in his concern for a clear articulation of Christian orthodoxy. Another Lucretian imitator, Scipione Capece, had belonged to a group of Neapolitan writers who were exploring modern forms of scientific poetry and was able to deploy Lucretian language without raising any suspicions of religious unorthodoxy—his poem indeed gained warm support from successive Catholic editors. Capece and still more Paleario showed sympathies for religious reform, but these views did not surface in their Lucretian poetry. And yet the other poets she discusses, Palingenio and Bruno, were inspired by Lucretius into boldly unconventional views. Neither was by any means a programmatic Epicurean: Palingenio was warmly received in Protestant England, and Davidson and Haskell both make the point that Bruno’s condemnation by the Inquisition was not for his atomism. Haskell’s close readings, however, show how the influence of Lucretius’s poetry might work at a more subliminal level: ‘the free spirit of Lucretius breathes through Palingenius’s poem at a sub-literary, almost autonomic, level’ (p. 99); both poets take inspiration from the transgressive images of flight above traditional limits. If one simply provides a checklist of Bruno’s ideas against Epicureanism in general, the Lucretian influence may seem negligible; but, as Haskell has argued at greater length elsewhere, Bruno, as ‘perhaps the first and last didactic poet since Empedocles to really do philosophy in verse’, is inspired by Lucretius at the most profound levels of texture and tone.38 Sometimes callowly imitative, neo-Latin poetry could also be

38

Haskell (1998a) 138.

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surprisingly innovative, though recognizing the difference poses real challenges for most readers today. Haskell presents us once again with the difficulty of generalizing about the ideological constraints posed on the reading and imitation of Lucretius. Of her six writers, two were put to death on the Church’s orders and a third had his body posthumously burned: a rather high attrition rate. It can be pointed out, however, that Palingenio and Paleario were suspect for Protestant rather than Epicurean heresy and that Bruno’s philosophy, however deeply he was attracted to Lucretius, was not Epicurean. There was no point in writing allusive neo-Latin poetry unless one took for granted a readership that would respond favourably to works demonstrating a deep knowledge of Lucretius. Not only was Lucretius not placed on the Index, but the Jesuits developed strategies for teaching parts of the DRN, recognizing its importance for any understanding of classical poetry and thought.39 N. S. Davidson’s Chapter 5 offers another perspective on the Italian reception. Davidson has studied religious heterodoxy in early modern Italy, and the Venetian Republic, as a celebrated centre for independence of thought and a relatively free press, might have been expected to be a focus of radical speculation with a Lucretian tendency. Four early editions of the DRN were printed in Venice, and enthusiastic readers of the poem in manuscript and print form can be found in Venice. But many of these held ecclesiastical offices, and none of them seems to have felt a religious problem in admiring Lucretius. Davidson is able to demonstrate much evidence for official concerns about challenges to the immortality of the soul or the existence or creating role of God, but he has not found any case where these were blamed on Lucretius: these views could have originated in the Aristotelian/Averroesian tradition, or, in less educated circles, from other sources of popular free-thinking. Padua, which was under Venetian control, became a major centre for scientific interest in Lucretius. The humanist Gian Vincenzo Pinelli drafted an extensive commentary which may have been intended as the basis for a new edition; Tito Giovanni Scandianese seems to have composed an Italian translation; and Girolamo Frachetta published in Venice a detailed paraphrase of the DRN.40

39 40

Paladini (2011) 177–90. Ceccarelli (2013) 51, 165, 169–219; Frachetta (1589). Cf. Gambino Longo (2011) 25.

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Such a readership, however, was necessarily limited to those who had a good Latin education, and who were to some degree invested in structures of secular and clerical power and patronage. The first vernacular translation of Lucretius did not appear until nearly a century and a half after Poggio’s discovery—a very pronounced time-lag. This can perhaps be explained in part by the sheer difficulty of translating Lucretius; yet an Italian translation was made as early as 1530 but never published (Chapter 2, p. 55), nor was the later one by Scandianese. Frachetta thought it necessary to protect his paraphrase from potential censorship by a lengthy commentary explaining how Epicureanism deviated from the truth and from Aristotle.41 Writers do seem to have felt hesitant about coming forward as pioneers in this field, even if there is no evidence of direct censorship. Davidson points out that one official of the Inquisition argued that it would be absurd to ban pagan fables by Lucian, Lucretius, and the like—another example of the form/content split—but some writings by Lucian were in fact banned. Such instability, even if not openly repressive, could be disquieting.42 By the later seventeenth century there is clear evidence that the Inquisition could not tolerate an Italian translation that would be accessible to the plebs infima, the common people, and was trying to suppress circulation of Marolles’s French version.43 The lack of vernacular versions in turn helps to explain why we do not find free-thinkers from lower down the social scale appealing to the DRN— they simply were not able to read it. In Italy there even seems to have been some hesitancy about publishing the DRN in Latin. The 1515 edition, which appeared between the Lateran Council decree of 1513 and Pomponazzi’s work on the mortality of the soul in 1516, was the last to be printed there until 1647. The banner of publication and scholarship passed to France, where a new generation of scholars was developing bolder methods of textual emendation, and Denys Lambin produced an edition of Lucretius that marked a high point of scholarship before Lachmann.44 In his preface, which was to be much reprinted in later editions and translations, Denys Lambin made a familiar split between Lucretius’s offensive, Epicurean content and his mastery as a 41 42 43 44

Ceccarelli (2013) 174. Davidson’s Chapter 5; Frajese (2006) 77–8; Grendler (1977) 96, 99, 107, 118–20. Costa (2012) 58–65, 83–8. Grafton (1989–93) i. 71–100; Palmer (2014) 176–87; Butterfield’s Chapter 2.

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poet. It has been argued that this was a defensive strategy, protecting the editor against his direct and sympathetic exposition of challenging views, but it raises once again the question of the relations between ideology and poetic form. In Chapter 6, Wes Williams suggests that Montaigne goes beyond Lambin in searching for a deeper engagement with the language of the poem, insisting that what is well thought will in itself produce the most powerful expression. For Montaigne, boldness of thought involves upsetting conventional literary hierarchies. The recovery of the full text of the DRN had made it clear just how deeply Virgil had engaged with Lucretius, elevating the latter to the point of potentially displacing Virgil from his traditional supremacy in the poetic canon—a move which Casaubon in fact made. Montaigne picks up a debt which Lambin had missed, identifying Lucretius’s circumfusa (DRN 1.39) in a striking phase, as the ‘mother’ of Virgil’s infusus (Aeneid 8.406), and edges himself towards saying that the parent surpasses the child. This is indeed a passage where bold thought inspires bold language. Literally (Fig. 6.1) it means something like ‘you, goddess, with your sacred body poured-round from above on him as he reclines, pour out sweet words from your mouth’; but the Latin syntax intermingles the words referring to Venus and to Mars until it remains unclear whether the body referred to is that of Venus or of Mars. Circumfusa, literally ‘poured round’, can mean ‘surrounding’, and hence is often rendered as ‘embracing’; but the funde in the next line brings back the association with liquids, and the phrase has an erotic energy that precludes any precise visualization. This is the woman on top, using her sexually charged eloquence to challenge Roman military values. Of early modern translators, only Dryden fully catches the mobility of this passage, precisely by not giving a single equivalent for circumfusa: There while thy curling limbs about him move, Involv’d and fetter’d in the links of Love, When wishing all, he nothing can deny, Thy Charms in that auspicious moment try[.]

The second line, with an appropriate ambiguity, might refer to Venus as well as Mars; but the third loses Lucretius’s concision, bringing home just how hard the translator’s task is.45 It is notable that Virgil’s 45 ‘Sylvae’, Dryden (1956–90) iii. 45. On Dryden’s translation, see further Norbrook’s Chapter 10 (253–5); Hammond (1999). As often in Lucretius, the

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infusus refers to the post-coital male, not the female, in a conjugal relationship that is more conventional, if in Montaigne’s somewhat Epicurean view too passionate for a successful marriage. Without spelling out such implications, Montaigne exemplifies a mode of intensely engaged reading that will bring readers beyond scholastic and humanist commonplaces. Williams writes that this quotation from Lucretius, out of many in the Essays, is both ‘untypical and exemplary’, and these terms are useful for some more general questions. Montaigne, like Machiavelli, is an untypical reader of Lucretius in the intensity and intelligence of his engagement: as Williams puts it, he refuses to erect a cordon sanitaire between fine thoughts and dangerous ideas. It is significant that he quotes from the DRN most frequently in discussing the sensitive topics of sexuality, religion, the soul, and social inequality. The history of his reading of Lucretius, like Machiavelli’s, is shadowed by the particularly problematic nature of the DRN. His heavily annotated copy came to light only recently, because his name had been overwritten by a later owner who was fearful of being compromised by his liberal views on witch-hunting. Montaigne’s generous quotations made a substantial portion of Lucretius’s poem available; but these were still in Latin, without translation. When John Florio published his English version, directed specifically at a female audience, he did translate the quotations, and a further step towards vernacular diffusion was taken. It was not until 1650, however, that the poem broke through the cordon sanitaire of Latin, with the translation by Michel de Marolles, which heralded a series of versions in English. As we shall see in several chapters, this move towards the vernacular involved a complex dance of forward and backward steps, with greater openness towards Lucretius countered by protestations of distance and disengagement. Marolles’s task had been made easier by the appearance in 1649 of Pierre Gassendi’s influential Animadversiones on Diogenes Laertius’s life of Epicurus. Thanks to the inclusion of later Epicurean texts, including very large portions of the DRN, and his own lengthy and discursive commentaries, Gassendi managed to swell the few surviving texts by Epicurus into a three-volume compendium which movement of concrete bodies becomes linked with abstract cosmic processes: we are later told that the spirit cannot be separated from the body but is interfused, fusa, with it (3.701).

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claimed for itself the dignity of an august philosophical system. Yet though Gassendi claimed to have removed the thorns from the rose of the Epicurean system, Marolles’s translation, as Cottegnies shows in Chapter 7, reveals continuing uncertainties. On one level, this was a clear and direct version, not shunning erotic matter that troubled many contemporary translators. As was so often the fate of translations, however, the paratextual materials underwent revisions as the translator engaged with the contradictory impulses to gain the maximum publicity for a controversial work and to distance himself from allegations of subversion. The process is illustrated by the continuation of the form/content split in Marolles’s pointed title Le Poëte Lucrèce; by his quotations from Lambinus’s preface; by the dedication to Queen Christina, apparently included in some but not all copies and either failing to reach her or meeting her disapproval; and by Marolles’s appeal to Gassendi in his second edition, further to remove the thorn from the rose. Cottegnies finds a comparable ambivalence, indeed something close to schizophrenia, in the public presentation of the first English translation, by John Evelyn. The intellectual links between Paris and London were especially close with so many royalists in French exile, but these links could be problematic. The piety of Gassendi and Evelyn was not in question, and if Montaigne had proclaimed no less than ten times in his annotations that Lucretius was writing ‘contre la religion’, the purified Epicureanism now on offer made it easier to translate his religio as merely ‘superstition’. There remained, however, a lurking embarrassment in the figure of Thomas Hobbes, who, like Machiavelli and Montaigne, engaged intensely if obliquely with Lucretius, and whose notoriety as an ‘atheist’, however defined, led to anxious distancing. One might also mention Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, whose heterodoxy on religious matters combined with her gender made an explosive combination. Translation from the Latin, Cottegnies reminds us, made previously restricted texts available to women, and if Christina seems to have held back from proclaiming public interest in Marolles’s version, Evelyn’s wife Mary carefully studied his title-page when preparing a design for the English translation. Disavowal very often accompanied influence, however: John Evelyn never mentions Marolles, he left the remaining books of his translation unpublished, and when many years later he published a commendatory poem to Creech’s translation, he gave the misleading impression that he had got no further than the first book. Another

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woman writer, Lucy Hutchinson, expressed scorn for John and Mary Evelyn for having published at all, and kept her version in manuscript; there was a kind of schizophrenia in her own fierce rejection of Lucretius himself as well as her own translation in her dedicatory letter of 1675. When Aphra Behn, another figure vulnerable to charges of atheism, celebrated Thomas Creech as a bold emancipator who had helped women become equal to men through his translation, she seems to have been quite unaware of earlier women’s interest in Lucretius.46 William Poole’s Chapter 8 explores a further controversial aspect of the DRN. As Brown’s Chapter 3 showed, Machiavelli had been struck by Lucretius’s challenge to early modern hierarchies in one particularly fundamental way, in undercutting the biblical maxim that God had given humans dominion over animals. On the titlepage of his edition, Creech shockingly portrayed the birth of animals and human beings from the Earth (Fig. 0.1). As Poole shows, generation of animals from the earth might in some cases seem compatible with Christian belief, but the authoritative Genesis narrative seemed to leave no doubt of God’s direct creation of Adam and Eve. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, Hobbes and others were popularizing radically heterodox interpretations of scripture, and Isaac de la Peyrère had produced a reading of Genesis that squared with Lucretius; Marolles, Poole points out, was interested in this convergence. We need not, however, place such readings on any direct high road to modern atheism: Lucretius’s semina might be read as vital spirits rather than lifeless atoms, and attempts were being made to synthesize seemingly incompatible scientific models. Milton felt confident enough to play with Lucretian analogies in Paradise Lost.47 Creech’s title-page also displays the inscription CASUS, ‘chance’. He thus heightens what for some contemporaries seemed the most absurd element of the whole Epicurean system: that the universe could have come together through a random play of atoms. A long chain of classical and Christian polemicists had ridiculed the idea of a universe without intelligent design. As Nicholas Hardy shows in 46

But for overlapping circles, see Hutchinson (2012) p. cxii; cf. Tomlinson (2012). Hardie (2009) 264–79; Norbrook (2010); on Lucretius and early modern vegetarianism, see Stuart (2006); and on the Genesis paradigm in early modern science, P. Harrison (2007). 47

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Fig. 0.1. Thomas Creech, T. Lucretius Carus The Epicurean Philosopher, His Six Books De Natura Rerum, Done into English Verse (Oxford, 1683), titlepage. With permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford (8 W 38 Art.).

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Chapter 9, however, Creech’s translation in fact acknowledges that there is an order in Lucretius’s system, and this recognition was widespread amongst seventeenth-century readers. Indeed, translators like Evelyn, Hutchinson, and Creech sometimes exaggerated the nonaleatory elements in Lucretius. Hardy shows, however, that even more recent translators have often simplified ambivalences in Lucretius’s provisional, metaphorical language in their concern to make his poem fit a general philosophical paradigm. As Gassendi had proposed, early modern natural theologians, keen to reconcile Christianity with the most advanced forms of contemporary science, but no longer accepting the traditional teleological language of Aristotelian natural philosophy, could find an ally in Lucretius. Political theorists also turned to Epicureanism as older discourses seemed inadequate to modernity. The mid-seventeenth-century English revolution was an important part of Pocock’s ‘Machiavellian Moment’, but as we can now see, Machiavellianism could come with a strong Lucretian inflection.48 As in the sphere of natural theology, Lucretius could, however, be open to strongly divergent interpretations. Norbrook’s Chapter 10 on readers of the fifth book of the DRN shows that it could appeal across the political spectrum. Polemicists often made a direct link between Lucretius and Hobbes, and indeed some modern commentators would agree that Epicureanism provided Hobbes with a crucial stepping-stone towards his self-consciously ‘modern’ political philosophy. There were, nonetheless, crucial differences, notably in Hobbes’s denial of the realm of freedom permitted by Lucretius’s swerve. One parallel that struck contemporaries was a common atheism and irreligion—though both writers have found interpreters who point to evidence for their belief in gods or the Christian God. Norbrook argues that a close reading of the DRN leaves the status of Lucretius’s gods highly problematic, and this makes it all the more remarkable that he should have been translated by the fiercely puritan Lucy Hutchinson. However, his boldly secular narrative of the emergence of a state without any divine intervention or priestly aid could appeal to the broad alliance of anticlerical Erastians, keen to claw back state authority from the presumptions of the clergy, that fuelled the English Revolution. 48 Rahe (2008), passim: to the implausible extent of analysing Milton’s Christian Doctrine as a ‘reshaping in a politic fashion the superstition dominant in his own time’ (174).

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Norbrook argues, however, that the heightened attention to the DRN produced by Gassendi’s commentaries and new vernacular translations also allowed contemporaries to understand significant differences between Hobbes and Lucretius. Hutchinson had a clear understanding of Epicurus’s ethical and political severity, as opposed to the caricature of the licentious ‘Epicure’. The later translator Thomas Creech, borrowing from contemporary poets, was ready to play up the caricature. He also slanted the political emphasis in a Hobbesian direction, downplaying ethical freedom, in a way Machiavelli had not done, and heightening the fear of anarchy that drives the people into submission to their sovereign. Ambivalence is again apparent. Hutchinson by 1675 was sharply condemning her own translation, in the face of a new wave of libertine Restoration ‘Epicureans’, and of a renewed Anglican political theology; yet she took enough pride in her version to have a new copy made. Conversely, Creech may have been closer to his Hobbesian Lucretius than he was willing to acknowledge, and certainly knew that he would draw in readers—his edition sold very well; but he offered them safety by presenting himself as the shocked critic of these outrageous doctrines. Unlike Marolles’s Le Poëte Lucrèce, however, his title of The Epicurean Philosopher did not encourage readers to distance themselves from Lucretius’s doctrines. Catherine Wilson’s Chapter 11 traces the continuing influence of the DRN on political theory from the mid-seventeenth century through to the Enlightenment—an influence, she argues, which has still not been fully recognized. (There is very little about Epicureanism, for example, in Jonathan Israel’s Spinoza-centred studies of the Enlightenment and its origins.49) While acknowledging crucial differences between Hobbes and Lucretius on the state of nature, she finds in Hobbes and his slightly later contemporary Samuel Pufendorf a radical nominalism or ‘fictionalism’ that deviates from the traditions of political theory and has a clear Epicurean basis. Wilson shows that these philosophers’ foundation of ethics in some form of self-interest rather than in religion or in civic virtue generated an intense debate 49 Cf. Israel (2001). Spinoza’s relationship to Lucretius has provoked extensive debate in the face of limited direct evidence. Akkerman (2009) 214 argues that ‘Spinoza is conducting a polemic, albeit covertly, against Lucretius’; for readings linking Spinoza with a current of subterranean materialism, see Morfino (2011) and essays by Bove, Illuminati, and Montag (in Del Lucchese et al. 2011). Strauss began his early study of Spinoza with an account of Epicureanism; but he came to see Hobbes as the central mediator of Epicureanism (Wurgaft (2012) 267–84).

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about benevolence and the social order, and the precise extent to which Epicureanism itself legitimized mere self-interest. Turning to the fifth book, she traces the resonance of Lucretius’s unusual vision of the development of civilization down to Rousseau and Enlightenment debates about inequality. In certain inflections, the Epicurean legacy can legitimize a dark and competitive vision of human nature; in others, it reveals a utopian, pacifist, and egalitarian strand. This is a story that can indeed be traced down to the materialism of Karl Marx. The young Marx wrote a doctoral thesis on atomism and took many notes on the DRN. He responded to the opening lines as intensely as Montaigne, identifying Lucretius, the ‘fresh, keen, poetic master of the world’, with the Venus of his opening passage, melting pious conventions away—as opposed to the frigid commentators like Plutarch and Gassendi who rebuked or reformed him.50 He read the fifth book carefully early in his career and it returned to his attention in his last years when studying the ethnography of Lewis Henry Morgan.51 When he wrote that the ‘new forces of production and relations of production do not develop out of nothing, nor drop from the sky’, he was alluding to, and presumably expecting his readers to recognize, two different passages in Lucretius: the claim that nothing can originate from nothing (1.150) and the satirical jab at those who believe animals could have fallen from the sky (5.793).52 Though this form of words long became a cliché, in the claim that ideas do not fall from the sky, it is probable that few of its later users knew the Lucretian origin. That fact perhaps indicates that Marx stands at the end of a particular tradition of Lucretian reception: this materialism may seem too crude, too deterministic, for those more interested in swerves and indeterminacy.53 But swerves were never the whole story.54

50

Marx (1975) 468; for his notes on Lucretius, see 466–78, 489–90. Stanley (1995) questions some current interpretations of Marx on the swerve; on his continuing interest in Lucretius and Epicurus, see Foster (2006) 217–18. 52 Marx (1975) 278; the allusion is not specifically recognized in Prawer’s wonderfully erudite study (Prawer 1976). For another Lucretius reference in the Grundrisse, to 5.287, see Marx (1973) 282. 53 On this current of aleatory materialism, see Althusser (2006); Goldberg (2009); Morfino (2011); it is worth noting that Epicurus and Lucretius were hardly unknown to exponents of a more traditional ‘dialectical materialism’, as witness Congiot’s selection of readings (Lucretius 1954) based on a Soviet edition. Greenblatt’s The Swerve never mentions aleatory materialism, though the title seems to evoke it. 54 Representing a different current of materialism, Timpanaro (1975) 50 sees Marx’s political voluntarism as failing to acknowledge the limits imposed on humanity by the natural world. 51

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As Strauss and his followers always insisted, nineteenth-century historical materialism is a long way from ancient Epicureanism, with its modest goals for human change and prudential acceptance of a state religion.55 And yet Lucretius’s visionary imagination and irreverent wit could form a bridge between them; and one of the fascinating aspects of the early modern reception of Lucretius is its pivotal position. We should not expect early modern readers to have responded exactly as we do, but nor should we restrict the range of possible responses; some found the poem troubling, some exhilarating, some merely an enrichment of poetic diction. The best readers looked back, and imagined alternative futures, with a passion and eloquence that resonate today.

55

Cf. Colman (2012) 131–45, ‘Conclusion: The Modern Reversal’.

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1 Epicurean Subversion? Lucretius’s First Proem and Contemporary Roman Culture Stephen Harrison

1. INTRODU C T ION This chapter uses a close reading of parts of the first proem of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (1.1–148) to show how the poem, setting out to present the doctrines of Epicureanism for Romans in the first century BCE, negotiates some fundamental tensions between that radical Greek philosophy and traditional Roman culture.1 It looks at the DRN ’s appropriation and undermining of key Roman concepts and institutions such as war, imperialism, and certain kinds of religious practice. Through a variety of poetic strategies, involving the application and redirecting of key Roman ideas, the proem (I suggest) argues that a turn to Epicureanism can offer Rome a model of peace which is both a specific antidote to the violence of the poem’s own times and a countercultural notion for late Republican Rome.

2. LUCRETIUS’S CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT Lucretius’s DRN is to be dated to the middle of the first century BCE: our first reference to it is a notice by Cicero in a letter to his brother in February 54 BCE (Ad Quintum fratrem 2.9.3): Lucreti poemata ut 1 I dedicate this chapter to the memory of David West (died 13 May 2013), viro Lucretiano humanissimoque.

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scribis ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis, ‘the poetry of Lucretius is just as you write, with many brilliancies of talent, yet many of technique too’; though the plural poemata here has been treated as problematic, there seems no great difficulty in referring it to a single poem.2 The addressee of the DRN is generally thought to be C. Memmius L. f., praetor in 58 BCE and Catullus’s commander in Bithynia (cf. Catullus 28.9), who stood unsuccessfully for the consulship in 54, though C. Memmius C. f., tribune in 54, has been proposed as an alternative.3 In either case, we have a dedicatee placed at the heart of politics in a momentous period in the break-up of the Roman Republic, moving via elements of anarchy to monarchy in the next generation. In 60 BCE the three most powerful men in the Roman state (Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus) had formed what is commonly known as the ‘First Triumvirate’, creating an irresistible power-base which was renewed in 55 BCE, leading to the extension of Caesar’s crucial command in Gaul and further elections to consulships for Pompey and Crassus in that same year. In 54 BCE Crassus was given the proconsular command in Syria to campaign against the Parthians, hoping to match in the East Caesar’s considerable conquests in the West, while Pompey governed Spain through legates and stayed at home in Rome to dominate domestic politics. Thus major military campaigns were afoot at both ends of the Roman dominions, as noted for example by Catullus in poem 11, which alludes to the campaigns of both Caesar and Crassus; Caesar successfully conquered Gaul, but Crassus’s enterprise ended in the disaster of the battle of Carrhae (53 BCE), where he and his son were killed by the Parthians and their army destroyed or captured. Violence was also prominent at home: the 50s BC at Rome were much troubled by gang warfare in the streets and suburbs of the city, involving the lawless

2 Cf. Ennius, Ann. 12 Skutsch res atque poemata nostra, apparently referring to the Annales (Ennius (1985) 168); for a different account of poemata see Hutchinson (2001), who argues that it refers to other Epicurean poems written by Lucretius before the DRN (but what then of his apparent claims to priority in this respect at DRN 1.926–50 and 4.1–25?). Hutchinson’s further suggestion that the picture of Venus and Mars and the notion of national emergency at 1.41 hoc patriae tempore iniquo could fit a reference to the civil war between Caesar and Pompey and therefore a date for the first proem of post-49 BCE otherwise has some attractions (though for some objections see Volk (2010)). 3 See n. 10.

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opposing gangs of Clodius and Milo; this had already begun in 59–57 (see e.g. Cicero, Pro Sestio 14–92) and culminated in the killing of Clodius by Milo in 52, memorably (if tendentiously) described by Cicero in his defence of Milo (Pro Milone). As we shall see, Lucretius’s first proem provides potential allusions to all these instantiations of war and disorder.

3. LUCRETIAN PACIFISM This contemporary context of violence at home and abroad gives particular force to Lucretius’s opening hymn to the creator goddess Venus in the first half of the proem to book 1 of the DRN (1.1–43). Towards its end, the poet turns to the goddess in a prayer for peace (1.29–43; text from Lucretius (1922)): effice ut interea fera moenera militiai per maria ac terras omnis sopita quiescant; nam tu sola potes tranquilla pace iuvare mortalis, quoniam belli fera moenera Mavors armipotens regit, in gremium qui saepe tuum se reiicit aeterno devictus vulnere amoris, atque ita suspiciens tereti cervice reposta pascit amore avidos inhians in te, dea, visus eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore. hunc tu, diva, tuo recubantem corpore sancto circum fusa super, suavis ex ore loquelas funde petens placidam Romanis, incluta, pacem; nam neque nos agere hoc patriai tempore iniquo possumus aequo animo nec Memmi clara propago talibus in rebus communi desse saluti. Make sure that meanwhile the savage services of warfare May be lulled in rest through the seas and all the lands: For you alone can aid mortal men with tranquil peace, Since war’s savage services are ruled by Mars, mighty in arms, Who so often throws himself to lie back in your lap Overcome by the eternal wound of love And so, gazing up with his smooth neck thrown back, Feeds his gaze greedy with love in gaping at you, goddess, While his breath as he reclines hangs from your lips.

30

35

40

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On him, goddess, as he lies on your sacred body and you surround him above, Pour sweet-speaking utterances from your mouth Seeking the calm of peace for the people of Rome, lady renowned. For neither can we act with even mind at this dire time for our country, Nor can the famed stock of Memmius be lacking to the common good in such straits.

Commentators have long noted the rich texture of this image of Venus/Aphrodite and Mars/Ares as lovers, relating it to possible representations in art4 and to the allegory deployed by Empedocles, an important Greek predecessor of Lucretius, or his poetic cosmology in epicizing hexameters, which represents Aphrodite and Ares as the cosmic forces of Love and Strife, harmony and disharmony (fr. 259 D/K).5 But the passage surely also alludes to the most famous literary picture of Venus/Aphrodite and Mars/Ares embracing, when they are caught in adulterous post-coital rest by Venus’s husband Vulcan/ Hephaistos in the song of the bard Demodocus in the eighth book of the Odyssey (8.266–366)—I cite lines 266–98 in the lively translation by Samuel Butler (1900): Meanwhile the bard began to sing the loves of Mars and Venus, and how they first began their intrigue in the house of Vulcan. Mars made Venus many presents, and defiled King Vulcan’s marriage bed, so the sun, who saw what they were about, told Vulcan. Vulcan was very angry when he heard such dreadful news, so he went to his smithy brooding mischief, got his great anvil into its place, and began to forge some chains which none could either unloose or break, so that they might stay there in that place. When he had finished his snare he went into his bedroom and festooned (å) the bed-posts all over with chains like cobwebs; he also let many hang down (KŒåı) from the great beam of the ceiling. Not even a god could see them, so fine and subtle were they. As soon as he had spread (åF) the chains all over the bed, he made as though he were setting out for the fair state of Lemnos, which of all places in the world was the one he was most fond of. But Mars kept no blind look out, and as soon as he saw him start, hurried off to his house, burning with love for Venus. Now Venus was just come in from a visit to her father Jove, and was about sitting down when Mars came inside the house, and said as he took her hand in his own, ‘Let us go to the couch of Vulcan: he is not at 4

Cf. e.g. Edmunds (2001–2).

5

Cf. Furley (1970); Sedley (1998) 15–27.

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home, but is gone off to Lemnos among the Sintians, whose speech is barbarous’. She was nothing loth, so they went to the couch to take their rest, whereon they were caught in the toils which cunning Vulcan had spread (åı) for them, and could neither get up nor stir hand or foot, but found too late that they were in a trap.

This episode seems to be alluded to in some of Lucretius’s language about the pair of lovers,6 and was already linked allegorically with the Empedoclean doctrine of Love and Strife by ancient interpreters of Homer.7 Homer, soon to be named at 1.124, is an important genre model for Lucretius as a writer of ambitious epic, and this allusion ought to be added to the other Homeric echoes generally discussed8 (note that the poet Lucretius here takes up the song of the poet Demodocus), but I want to argue for a more specific contemporary allusion in this passage which purveys a clear message of pacifism. Apart from their Homeric and Empedoclean resonances, Venus and Mars of course represent the twin origins of the Roman nation and the city of Rome. Venus is the mother of Aeneas, ancestor of the Roman race, as Lucretius notes in his opening words (1.1 Aeneadum genetrix), while Mars is father of Romulus, founder of Rome, by the Alban princess Ilia, whose seduction was famously narrated in the lost Annales of Ennius (second century BCE), the great national epic of early Rome, to the opening of which Lucretius alludes later in the proem at 1.117–25. But (as has often been noted) Venus also represents the origin of the gens Iulia, the family of Julius Caesar, as the dictator himself proclaimed in his youth (Suetonius, Div.Iul. 6.1): the idea that Venus should bring peace not war to Rome could be a neat argument from his ancestors against Caesar’s current overseas campaigning in Gaul. It has been recently argued (see n. 2) that this plea for peace has a contemporary resonance in referring to the civil war of 49 BCE, but that later date is hard to reconcile with the likely appearance of at least some of Lucretius in the mid-50s as witnessed by Cicero (previously quoted); the strong emphasis on the prevention of worldwide campaigning by warlike Rome (1.30 per maria ac terras) might 6 In particular, Lucretius’s metaphor of pouring in connection with Venus’s embrace of Mars (1.39 circumfusa, 1.40 fundens) nicely inverts the trap ‘poured’ by Hephaistos in his entrapment of the couple (8.279 KŒåı, 282 åF, 288 å, 297 åı). 7 See e.g. Heraclitus, Homeric Problems 69 (from the first or second cent. CE). 8 See e.g. Gale (1994) 106–7.

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also point more naturally to the ambitious foreign wars of the mid-50s BCE, and if a reference to internal violence is needed, the years 59–52 had plenty of that in the gang warfare of Clodius and Milo (also see n. 2). Such objection to foreign warfare was distinctly unusual at Rome, since the Romans in general were self-consciously imperialistic and conceived of themselves as the master race of their time, to whom world dominion was due through divine favour; to present the gods as intervening to prevent overseas campaigns rather than backing the Romans was distinctly countercultural and subversive.9 The poet clearly associates Memmius with himself in this opposition to war overseas. This might indicate that the Memmius of the DRN is indeed not the Memmius who served as praetor in 58 and military governor of Bithynia in 57 but rather someone whose concerns were more domestic at the time: the Memmius who was tribune in 54,10 whose father was a distinguished soldier but whose election as tribune for 54 provided a more city-bound arena of action. The suggestion of lines 41–3 would then be that Lucretius and Memmius are to combine to bring peace to Rome on the home front, the poet by the means of Epicurean doctrine, the tribune by peaceful use of laws and magistracy, unlike (for example) the violent tribunate of Clodius in 59–58 BCE. Similar objections to foreign warfare can be seen in the famous story of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia (Iphianassa) narrated at 1.80–101: Illud in his rebus vereor, ne forte rearis impia te rationis inire elementa viamque indugredi sceleris. quod contra saepius illa religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta. Aulide quo pacto Triviai virginis aram Iphianassai turparunt sanguine foede ductores Danaum delecti, prima virorum. cui simul infula virgineos circum data comptus ex utraque pari malarum parte profusast, et maestum simul ante aras adstare parentem sensit et hunc propter ferrum celare ministros aspectuque suo lacrimas effundere civis, muta metu terram genibus summissa petebat. nec miserae prodesse in tali tempore quibat, quod patrio princeps donarat nomine regem; 9 10

Cf. e.g. Hopkins (1978); Harris (1979); Brunt (1990). Here I follow Hutchinson (2001), approved by Schiesaro (2007) 54.

80

85

90

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Epicurean Subversion? nam sublata virum manibus tremibundaque ad aras deductast, non ut sollemni more sacrorum perfecto posset claro comitari Hymenaeo, sed casta inceste nubendi tempore in ipso hostia concideret mactatu maesta parentis, exitus ut classi felix faustusque daretur. tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

35 95

100

This is my fear in these matters, that you may chance to think That you are entering on impious rudiments of thought And stepping in the way of wickedness: but contrariwise, That kind of superstition has all too often borne wicked and impious deeds. In this very way at Aulis the altar of the virgin goddess Diana Was foully stained by the blood of Iphigeneia By the chosen leaders of the Greeks, those first amongst men. She, as soon as the woollen headdress was put around her virgin’s dressed tresses, And hung down equally divided on either cheek, Realised that her father was at the same time standing by the altar, And that for his sake the attendants were hiding the knife And that her fellow-citizens were shedding tears at her sight, Submitted dumb with fear and sought the ground with her knees. Nor could it be to the poor girl’s gain in such a dreadful time That she had been the first to grace the king with the name of father. For, raised up by men’s hands, she was escorted trembling to the altar, Not so that she could, with the established manner of ritual completed, Be accompanied by the loud wedding song, But that, pure amid impurity, at the very season of marriage, She could fall slaughtered as a sad victim by her father’s sacrificial act, That a fortunate and prosperous departure might be granted to the fleet. Such is the level of evils that superstition could urge.

This celebrated Greek literary episode, like that of Venus and Mars, can be argued to allude to a famous poetic model for the poem soon to be mentioned by name, the great Ennius, who had written an influential version of Euripides’ tragedy Iphigeneia in Aulis: though the story is found in several previous sources, Lucretius’s hyperarchaic diction sends the Roman reader back to that early Latin poet, the school reading of Cicero and Lucretius’s contemporaries.11 We should note 11 e.g. 82 indugredi for ingredi (cf. Ennius, Ann. 79 Skutsch induperator), 84 Triviai and 85 Iphianassai (Ennian-style archaic genitives), 84–5 aram . . . /turparunt

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that the Iphigeneia story deals specifically with an overseas military expedition, such as those being undertaken by both Caesar and Crassus in the mid-50s: we could parallel the gods’ withholding of the right winds for Troy with the weather difficulties experienced by Caesar in waiting twenty-five days for his second expedition to Britain in the summer of 54 (Caesar, Gall. 5.7), or compare Agamemnon’s expedition to the East with that of Crassus to Parthia, which similarly headed eastwards on a grand mission in later 54 and likewise experienced difficulties in sailing, losing a number of ships in an overhasty departure from Brundisium (Plutarch, Crassus 17.1). We might even want to compare the doomed Crassus with the similarly doomed Agamemnon, whose later tragic fate was of course a staple theme of Greek drama; it is interesting that Plutarch explicitly compares the tragic death of Crassus to that of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae (Plutarch, Crassus 33.1–5).12 Whatever contemporary resonance may have been intended, it seems clear that the allusion to the Trojan War here is in active tension with the general positive view at Rome of wars of conquest or retribution against ‘inferior’ races.

4. RELIGION AND WAR Lucretius attacks the mythological sacrifice of Iphigeneia primarily as an extreme instance of religio, religious observance devoid of ethical or humane considerations, often translated as ‘superstition’. This episode has been rightly seen as an indirect assault on Roman Republican religious practice: though human sacrifice if ever practised at Rome was long in the past, animal sacrifice in general was still a central form of religious ceremonial.13 In Epicurean terms, such ritual could only be meaningless: sacrifice constituted attempted intercourse with and placation of the gods, but the latter were held in Epicurean doctrine to have no communication or practical relation with the human world,14 as Lucretius firmly stressed in 1.44–9, lines sanguine foede (cf. Ennius, Trag. 93 J. Iovis aram sanguine turpari), 86 ductores Danaum delecti (cf. Ennius, Ann. 331 duxit delectos, Trag. 212 J delecti viri), 87 prima virorum (cf. Ennius, Ann. 84 infera noctis). For further details see Harrison (2002). 12 13 Cf. e.g. Zadorojnyi (1997). e.g. Scheid (2012). 14 See e.g. Long and Sedley (1987) 143–54.

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repeated at 2.646–51 and sometimes omitted by editors of book 1, who think that they are inconsistent with the symbolic invocation of Venus in 1.1–40.15 The story of Iphigeneia also clearly alludes to Empedocles’ objections to animal sacrifice, made on the very unEpicurean grounds that any animal sacrifice might involve sacrificing a creature that had once been a human through transmigration of souls (fr. 137 D/K).16 The connection between religion and war has not been stressed in this context, but it is clearly important in Roman tradition. In the second book of Cicero’s De natura deorum, the Stoic advocate Balbus stresses the importance of religious observances in the context of the wars of the Republic, giving examples of commanders who had come to grief through failing in this department (2.7–9), and much the same attitude is shown two generations later by Valerius Maximus’s collection of Roman anecdotes and exempla in his section de neglecta religione (1.1.16–21), which adds non-Roman instances to further Roman ones. A key element in all this is the Roman taking of auspices before battle, the divinatory observation of birds’ behaviour in order to determine whether or when to attack; though Cicero’s Balbus admits that the taking of auspices was less important in his own time (2.9), something confirmed by the commentarii of Caesar from the 50s, which omit any such religious observance, the situation of Agamemnon at Aulis is clearly parallel to that of traditional Roman military commanders consulting the gods before naval expeditions or battles. This is confirmed by a linguistic link: the conjunction felix faustusque, ‘fortunate and prosperous’ (1.100), echoes a traditional Roman religious formula for an auspicious outcome to prayers and

15 A complex and long-standing issue which I can only touch on here (for the earlier history of the question see e.g. Bailey’s 1947 edition, ii. 601–3, and on early modern editions Hutchinson (2012) 472–3). In general I favour the retention of 1.44–9. Gale (1994) 226–8 argues for exclusion of 1.44–9 on the ground that we need an adversative particle rather than enim as a connective at 1.44, but enim surely points to the picking up of pacem (40) by pace (45): what Rome needs is the peace which the gods possess. Sedley (1998) 26–7 argues for retention on the grounds of typical Lucretian inversion, followed by Farrell (2007) 87. I would add that the lines need to be retained in order to show that the conventional and unEpicurean presentation of Venus in 1.1–40 as an intervening deity, naturally attractive to the conventional Roman reader, can only be figuratively true in her symbolic role as creative source for the literary charms of Lucretius’s poem (cf. 1.21–8). 16 Cf. e.g. Furley (1970), approved by Sedley (1998) 30.

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the like.17 Agamemnon’s choice to trust the words of the priests and to sacrifice his daughter as a prelude to a successful expedition can easily be taken as a criticism of the traditional Roman approach to the role of religion in war, which can be questioned by the intellectuals in Cicero’s philosophical dialogue, but which remains valid in Roman culture for Valerius Maximus under the early Empire. The reader should not (like Agamemnon) take heed of the terrifying words of traditional prophet/priests (1.102–3 vatum/terriloquis . . . dictis), but rather of the DRN, the dicta (1.28) of another kind of vates, the poet Lucretius.18

5. ALTERNATIVE MODELS OF CONQUEST Lucretian opposition to the traditional Roman ideology of war-making and its concomitant religious apparatus in the presentation of the Iphigeneia story thus seems clear. But the Roman cultural model of invasion, conquest, and imperial incorporation is not absent from Lucretius’s Epicurean project, and it has been rightly argued that he appropriates the traditional Roman admiration of war in his presentation of Epicurus’s victory over superstition at 1.62–79: Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret in terris oppressa gravi sub religione, quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans, primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra; quem neque fama deum nec fulmina nec minitanti murmure compressit caelum, sed eo magis acrem inritat animi virtutem, effringere ut arta naturae primus portarum claustra cupiret. ergo vivida vis animi pervicit et extra processit longe flammantia moenia mundi atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque,

17

65

70

Cf. TLL 6.1.389.13–25; Schiesaro (2007) 52 n. 54. Though Lucretius never names himself a vates, it is clearly used of poets by his time; on the semantic range of vates in late Republican and Augustan literature, see Newman (1967). 18

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Epicurean Subversion? unde refert nobis victor quid possit oriri, quid nequeat, finita potestas denique cuique qua nam sit ratione atque alte terminus haerens. quare religio pedibus subiecta vicissim obteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo.

39 75

When human life lay before all eyes foully oppressed Through all the earth under the mass of superstition, Which showed its head from the regions of the sky, Standing over mortals with dread aspect, It was first a man of Greece who dared to raise mortal eyes Against it, and to make first resistance, who could not be suppressed By fables about the gods or the heaven with its threatening roar, But whose mind’s sharp courage was stirred all the more, to long To be the first to break open the tight-shut bolts of nature’s gates. So the fierce force of his mind prevailed, and advanced Far outside the firmament’s flaming ramparts, And traversed all the immense space in soul and spirit, From where as victor he brings us back knowledge of what can arise, What cannot, in sum, the limits of every object’s force, And the deep-set end of things. Accordingly Superstition is in turn set under our feet and crushed, While our victory makes us equal with the heavens.

Literary analyses of this passage have stressed its use of Roman military imagery:19 obsistere suggests military resistance, virtus points to military courage, effringere . . . arta/ . . . portarum claustra to the storming of a city’s gates, while pervicit, processit, and peragravit suggest the successful progress of a general,20 and refert, victor, and victoria the triumphal return of an army to Rome laden with spoils. As has been noted,21 the stress on covering territory here could evoke the vast Eastern conquests of Pompey in the 60s BCE, in which he created three new Roman provinces in Asia (Bithynia/Pontus, Cilicia, and Syria). But all this is accomplished not by a Roman but by a Greek (Graius homo); the main reference here must be to Epicurus,22 but once again a literary allusion adds interesting ideological depth, 19

West (1969) 57–63; Buchheit (1971) = Gale (2007a); Kenney (1974). 21 OLD s.v. 1, 1b, and 1 respectively. Buchheit (1971) = Gale (2007a). 22 Furley (1970) sees Empedocles as equally possible here, but Epicurus must be the primary reference given the content of 1.62–79, which suits him much better (the defeat of religio); Empedocles could be a secondary trace alongside Pyrrhus, Alexander, and Pompey. 20

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for this phrase, complete with the archaic long scansion of its final syllable, picks up Ennius’s phrase for Pyrrhus of Epirus (Annales 165 Sk. Graius homo), the famous invader of Italy and opponent of Rome from the third century BCE.23 The parallel which this allusion suggests merits further consideration. The two are in fact contemporaries: Epicurus lived in 341–270 BCE, Pyrrhus in 319–272. Both can be represented as Greek invaders of Italy. This is literally true of Pyrrhus, who spent long periods occupying parts of the Italian peninsula in the 270s BCE; a decade after the DRN, it was said metaphorically of the Epicureans by Cicero, who claimed that they had ‘seized the whole of Italy’ (Italiam totam occupaverunt, Tusc. 4.7). The idea of a general cultural invasion of military Italy by unmilitary Greece was of course common in Roman thought (cf. e.g. Horace, Ep. 2.1.156: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, ‘Greece once captured in turn captured the fierce victor’). There is no doubt that the two invasions are to be regarded very differently: that of Pyrrhus constituted one of the greatest risks to the Roman Republic, while that of Epicurus paradoxically brought true peace and enlightenment. The likely allusion to Pyrrhus is reinforced by the further likely allusion to his second cousin Alexander the Great in 1.73–4: the Graius homo is said to exceed the very bounds of the universe, precisely the kind of language used about Alexander by his encomiasts.24 Thus the language of Roman militarism is paradoxically turned to characterize the triumph of a non-Roman and his untraditional peaceful message for Roman culture; in this case a foreign invasion of Italy, a dire military prospect for Rome, turns out to be its cultural salvation. The true victories are not Agamemnon’s sack of Troy, the invasions of Pyrrhus, or the vast conquests of an Alexander or Pompey, but the greater triumph over the fear of death and the consequent attainment of mental peace represented in the philosophical achievements of Epicurus. As in the use of the figures of militia amoris (love’s warfare) and servitium amoris (love’s slavery) in Roman love-elegy in the generation after Lucretius,25 key Roman ideas and practices are appropriated and inverted in a new countercultural literary world which argues for a different set of values. 23

Here I expand a paragraph from Harrison (2002). See Buchheit (1971) = Gale (2007a). 25 For these values in elegy, see the latest accounts in Fulkerson (2013) and Drinkwater (2013). 24

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6. ALTERNATIVE VALUES OF VIRTUE AND FRIENDSHIP Towards the end of Lucretius’s first proem we find the poet’s reflections on the difficulty of his task in a further address to Memmius (1.136–45): Nec me animi fallit Graiorum obscura reperta difficile inlustrare Latinis versibus esse, multa novis verbis praesertim cum sit agendum propter egestatem linguae et rerum novitatem; sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas suavis amicitiae quemvis efferre laborem suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti, res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis.

140

145

Nor does it escape my mind that the dark discoveries of the Greeks Are hard to illumine in lines of Latin Especially since there must be much dealing with new words On account of the poverty of language and the novelty of matter: But yet your virtue and the hoped-for pleasure Of your sweet friendship urges me to bear any labour, And persuades me to watch through the clear nights, Seeking in what words and then with what line I can spread out my clear lights of revelation to your mind, By which you will able to see right through to hidden matter.

The transfer from Greek to Roman in lines 136–7 is not just linguistic: Lucretius here seems to be referring to the ideological transformation for the average Roman that Epicurean doctrine entails, which has been laid out above: the ‘dark discoveries of the Greeks’ both focalizes traditional Roman prejudice about Greek intellectualism26 and suggests a cultural revelation. But it is by communicating with Memmius in particular (and with the Roman readers that Memmius more generally represents) that the poem’s mission will be accomplished. The qualities ascribed to Memmius here look both ways culturally: virtus, as in 1.70, can mean both the manly courage traditionally inherent in Roman militarism (OLD s.v. 1a and b) and the philosophical 26

Cf. e.g. Balsdon (1979) 30–58.

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and ethical virtue of the Greeks (OLD s.v. 3), while amicitia both uses the traditional term for the Roman relation between patron and client, whether poetic or otherwise27 (Memmius is likely to be of higher social status than Lucretius), and evokes the high value assigned in Epicureanism to conventional personal friendship (e.g. Cicero, De finibus 1.66–70); the voluptas to be gained from this is not simple pleasure but , the chief good as defined by Epicurus. Once again, we can see the modulation of Roman cultural values into Epicurean qualities.

7. CONCLUSION The DRN is a poem which uses superficially conventional Roman elements to argue for an Epicurean philosophy which is fundamentally subversive in Roman terms, and which presents contemporary Roman readers with deeply countercultural ideas. On the poetic level, the poem makes a conscious choice to deploy a strikingly archaic Ennian style and metre, at least partly to conceal with a traditional form the countercultural content of the poem.28 This is clear if we compare with it the sophisticated neotericism of Catullus’s contemporary hexameter epyllion 64, showcasing a much more modern poetic style. But this does not mean that we should underestimate either the density and ambition of Lucretius’s poetic texture29 or his interest in neoteric/Callimachean aesthetics;30 the poet is choosing a more traditional and (hence in highly conservative Rome) more persuasive vehicle for material which otherwise might be regarded as dangerously radical. On the ideological level, the poem begins with an invocation of one of Rome’s chief gods, but immediately it is clear that Venus is a symbolic instantiation of the poem’s capacity to deliver Epicurean voluptas/  (pleasure) in both form and content (cf. 1.1 hominum divumque voluptas), and that her allegorical function goes back to

27

See White (1978). See the bibliography gathered by Harrison (2002); Kenney (2007) for me underestimates how archaic and Ennian Lucretius would have appeared to his contemporaries (though see his p. 96 on Lucretius’s Ennian metrics). 29 30 Kenney (1970) = Gale (2007a). Brown (1982) = Gale (2007a). 28

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Empedocles’ use of the goddess Aphrodite to represent the principle of cosmic harmony. The key Roman values of war, overseas conquest, and religious observation are methodically appropriated for more enlightened Epicurean purposes, redefining traditional values for a new philosophical context, and reacting in detail to a very specific set of cultural and political contexts in 50 BCE. On the literary level, Homeric and Ennian episodes are likewise redirected to Epicurean purposes, whether reinterpreted in terms of allegory or criticized for outdated attitudes to which Epicureanism provides more modern alternatives. On the social level, the notion of amicitia, which provided the cement of Roman society through unequal relationships between patron and client, is redefined in terms of the equal relationship of fellow Epicureans. Thus the subversive aspect of Lucretius’s poem, often perceived by early modern readers in respect of Christianity and other contemporary ideologies, would have been already apparent to an original Roman reader of conventional views, both in the poet’s ability to challenge some of the leading cultural values of his own time and in his sophisticated manipulation of prestigious literary antecedents, all for the promotion of his own Epicurean project.

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2 Lucretius in the Early Modern Period Texts and Contexts David Butterfield

The purpose of this survey is to provide some broader context about how Lucretius was rediscovered, revised, and read in the early modern period, with a particular—but by no means exclusive—focus upon Britain.1 It is hoped that the more general range of this review will provide a useful backdrop against which the other chapters in this volume on specific figures and particular periods can stand. Since the development of Lucretian scholarship was largely narrow and linear throughout the early modern period, with newer works unapologetically appropriating and building upon material drawn from their recent predecessors, this account will also proceed on a primarily chronological basis. It will be useful for us first to survey in brief the Nachleben of Lucretius’s poem. Although he would only rejoice that even now, over two millennia on, there is intense interest in the fate of his great compendium of Epicurean physics and ethics, that same fate is one unavoidably fraught with disappointment. The text of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (DRN) has undergone a most tumultuous journey in its transmission. In Roman antiquity there is little evidence that the poem achieved philosophical success; instead, its main influence, evidenced most notably by the Augustan poets Virgil and Horace, 1 This survey emerges from a seminar in which the history of Lucretius’s reception from the Middle Ages to the early eighteenth century was tracked on the basis of a selection of items from the collection of the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

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was literary. Indeed, to judge from the comparatively scant evidence that survives, it was primarily an aesthetic appreciation of Lucretius’s poetic vision and expression that commended him to his Roman audience, and it was such literary charm, rather than philosophical rigour, that turned the initial cogs in the transmission of his didactic epic. No surviving author from the first hundred years after Lucretius’s death directly quoted his poem’s text, and no Roman testimony survives praising the DRN as an intellectual or academic venture. On the contrary, the Church Fathers, most prominently Lactantius, dismissed the work as the dangerously misconceived undertaking of a delirious author, and malicious tales of his suicide—driven to madness by a love potion—took a firm and lasting hold in his biography.2 As a result, Lucretius’s work was mostly cited for purely educative (but non-philosophical) purposes in late antiquity, especially to elucidate linguistic matters and to demonstrate Virgil’s copious debts to his remarkable predecessor.3 Given the controversial Epicurean doctrines that Lucretius keenly advanced regarding the mortality of the soul, the disinterested nature of the pagan gods, and the futility of religious worship (not to mention his impassioned and colourful account of sexual intercourse at the close of book 4), it is little surprise that the thread by which his work lived on after the final collapse of Rome—a process guaranteed only by the transcription of manuscripts of his works in Christian monasteries—was tenuous in the extreme. It seems quite probable that only one manuscript of DRN survived beyond the seventh century, and certainly only one had any textual influence beyond the dark ages: a copy of this fortunate codex (termed the ‘archetype’), made perhaps in Northern Italy but now lost, found its way to the court of Charlemagne and was itself copied at least twice in the first half of the ninth century for one or more monasteries newly enthused by the Carolingian revival of learning. Recharged by this sudden and fecund period of transcription of the pagan classics, three ninthcentury manuscripts of Lucretius’s work now survive, two of which are still complete. 2 The strange amalgam of anecdotal material recorded in the late fourth cent. by Jerome (Chron. s.a. 95 BCE (Ol. 171.3 an. Abr. 1922)), although it probably drew in part upon Suetonius’s lost tract De poetis, is predominantly fabricated from half-truths and confusions. 3 For further information on Lucretius’s reception in antiquity, see Hadzsits (1935); Butterfield (2013) ch. 2, 46–101; Gatzemeier (2013).

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It will be instructive at this point to take a closer look at the oldest and most famous of these extant manuscripts, the so-called Codex Oblongus, the manuscript on which the text of Lucretius now relies most principally. The Oblongus is undoubtedly among the most remarkable medieval Latin manuscripts in existence: the book is an exceptionally luxurious production, lavish to an extent very rarely seen outside Christian works, save for the poetry of the golden boy of the Middle Ages, Virgil. Since this is a copy of not only an exceptionally rare and recondite text but also an exceptionally controversial one, this immense level of expenditure is all the more astounding. The codex comprises towards two hundred single-column folia, each averaging twenty verses per page. It is the product of an early Carolingian scriptorium, showing in its hand the initial signs of that school’s famous scribal reforms, and is to be dated to the first quarter of the ninth century. It was probably copied in a monastery closely linked with Charlemagne’s court—then vagrant—either in north-west Germany or north-east France. Whatever its origin, throughout its history O—the conventional abbreviation for the Oblongus— never left northern mainland Europe, other than for its brief sojourn in Britain from 1670 to 1689 when it travelled as part of the celebrated library of Isaac Vossius. Although we cannot know who commissioned O, nor who wrote it, we may still profitably enquire what befell it after its creation. However, answering this question proves more difficult than might perhaps be supposed, for there is no convincing evidence that anyone in Europe between the tenth century and the second decade of the fifteenth century read Lucretius directly, whether from the Oblongus or from any other codex at all.4 As a result, there is little scope for tracing the fate of this or any other Lucretian manuscript in this opaque half-millennium. However, fortunately for us, we can in the case of O say a little more about the earliest phases of its colourful history, since the manuscript was corrected soon after its creation by the Irish scholar-monk Dungal, who, having left the British Isles for France, was based at St Denis near Paris for much of the first quarter of the ninth century. The hundreds of corrections made by Dungal, inserted in his characteristic Irish hand throughout the manuscript, are of major importance for the editing of the poem, for not only did

4

For treatment of the evidence, see Butterfield (2013) 286–8 n. 1.

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Dungal possess sufficient critical acumen to make several inspired corrections to some of the hundreds of corrupt elements that already blighted the poem’s text but he also enjoyed direct access to the exemplar, i.e. the archetype from which O was originally copied. Dungal ended his days in Bobbio in northern Italy, although it appears that he left the text of Lucretius behind him in northern France, for no copy of DRN is found among the list of codices he donated to that monastery. Over the following two centuries at least three other (necessarily anonymous) hands corrected and annotated the Oblongus, demonstrating that this most august manuscript enjoyed a small but diligent private readership: among these the most obvious is the figure who (before or around 1000 CE) made several crude alterations to the first book of the poem and added over seventy elementary glosses upon the text. At some unknowable stage in the subsequent centuries, perhaps even as early as the mid-ninth century, this manuscript had moved to Mainz in western Germany, where it remained until at least the late fifteenth century.5 A little over two hundred years later, the codex was finally acquired by the University of Leiden, in whose library it still resides.6 Since O is the most important of all extant Lucretian manuscripts, we may leave to one side the two other ninth-century manuscripts, the so-called Quadratus (Q), also held at Leiden, and the Schedae (S) 5

In 1479 Macarius von Busek, the Canon and Syndic of St Martin’s in Mainz, added his uniform ex libris to its first leaf: iste liber pertinet ad librariam Sancti Martini ecclesie Maguntine. M. Sindicus subscripsit anno 1479, ‘this book belongs to the library of St Martin’s Church, Mainz. Signed M(acarius) the Syndic in the year 1479’. In addition, the references ‘O II XI’ at the top and ‘·LV· I·’ at the bottom of the opening recto are very probably library marks of the fourteenth or fifteenth cents. characteristic of Mainz MSS. 6 Although the Oblongus, along with the other major Lucretian MS, the Codex Quadratus, has been housed in the Library of the University of Leiden since the late seventeenth cent., had Richard Bentley—the British classicist who towards the end of that same century was informally linked with Wadham College—been more successful in persuading the powers that be in Oxford to loosen their purse strings further than they actually did, these two medieval Lucretian manuscripts would, in all likelihood, now be jewels in the collection of the Bodleian Library. Interest was undoubtedly present elsewhere in Britain. For instance, the sometime Lucretian John Evelyn wrote to his fellow diarist Samuel Pepys on 12 Aug. 1689: ‘I wished with all my heart some brave and noble Maecenas would have made a present of them to Trinity College in Cambridge’ (Evelyn (1859) iii. 306). The Bibliotheca Vossiana had in fact been offered to the Universities of Cambridge and Amsterdam, as well as those of Oxford and Leiden.

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or ‘fragmentary leaves’ that contain some 45 per cent of the poem, which are divided between Copenhagen and Vienna. I have already mentioned the curious fact that, after the close of the ninth century, no compelling evidence survives among extant authors for the direct knowledge of Lucretius until the second decade of the Quattrocento.7 Despite the noble efforts of Carolingian scribes, the number of copies of this rare poem across Europe probably never entered double figures throughout the following half millennium: at any rate, most of these copies are now lost, although the poem’s title occasionally crops up in the inventories of various European monasteries.8 The few copies of DRN that did exist were doubtless kept out of the open by their anxious owners. In the case of Q (mid-ninth century), we actually find the earliest signs of active censorship of Lucretius’s work: on the recto of its first leaf the original title of the work (T. Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura) was erased and replaced by a later hand—of the tenth or eleventh centuries—with a deliberately unspecific, and ultimately misleading, summary: ‘De phisica rerum origine uel effectu’ (‘On the physical origin or outcome of things’), a heading that gives no indication of the poem’s author and avoids the particular wording of the infamous title. Since Lucretius’s text was almost unknown in the Middle Ages, such removal of his name from the manuscript effectively rendered the work anonymous. It is probable therefore that an individual, or a monastery (St Bertin?) as a collective, wished thus to disguise the fact that so notorious a poem was in their possession. Given this necessarily unfavourable environment towards Lucretius and Epicureanism through the Middle Ages, it is surprising that the DRN avoided irrevocable loss and joining the miserable catalogue of classical works known only by their titles and the occasional quotation. Yet fortune took a different course, and in 1417, whilst acting as papal secretary for the Council of Konstanz (1414–18), the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini succeeded in unearthing what proved to be a complete manuscript of Lucretius. Although he did not

7 For a survey of the evidence, see Jessen (1860); Bignone (1913); Solaro (2000) Appendix 2 n. 1. 8 The evidence of medieval monastic catalogues attests to the presence of Lucretius’s work in Murbach (ninth cent.), Bobbio (ninth/tenth cent.), Corbie (twelfth cent.), and Lobbes (twelfth cent.), all of which have been lost (unless one was S); by the fifteenth cent., O and Q resided in Mainz and St Bertin respectively, perhaps for many centuries in each case.

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disclose where exactly he found it,9 it is now certain that he stumbled across a lost medieval copy (å) of the most important extant Lucretian manuscript, the Oblongus, as depicted in the stemma codicum (Fig. 2.1). Poggio’s major discovery of this exciting and inspiring new text, previously known only in tantalizing glimpses via the citations interspersed throughout other ancient authors, soon sent ripples throughout the intellectual circles of Italy, emanating first from Florence, the home of his literary patron Niccolò Niccoli, who held Poggio’s own copy () of å until at least 1430. By the end of the fifteenth century, the text of Lucretius was comparatively well known to Italian scholars, as the survival to the modern day of fifty-four manuscripts of De rerum natura produced in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries evinces, all of which trace back to Poggio’s favourable windfall.10 Ω 800

O

Ω: lost archetype (s.VIII?): Ω⬘ is the same after damage O: Codex Oblongus (Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Voss. Lat. F. 30) s.IX¼

Ω⬘

Q: Codex Quadratus (Leiden Universiteitsbibliotheek, Voss. Lat. Q 94) s.IX med.

ψ 850

S: Schedae (Copenhagen Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. Kgl. S. 211 2°; Vienna Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Lat. 107, ff.9-18) s.IX ¾ (45% of DRN)

Q S

χ: 10th cent. copy of O (now lost) π: Codex Poggianus (now lost), copied from χ when discovered by Poggio in 1417

900 χ 1000 1500

π

15th cent. Italian mss

Fig. 2.1. Stemma of Lucretius MSS.

9 Poggio told his friend Francesco Barbaro in early 1418 that he found the work in a locus satis longinquus (‘a sufficiently distance place [i.e. from Konstanz]’). The most plausible candidate is perhaps Murbach. 10 For further context, see Lehnerdt (1904); Hadzsits (1935); ch. 11, 248–83; Goddard (1991a); Prosperi (2004); Brown (2010a); a broader-brush survey is provided by Greenblatt (2011).

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From this efflorescence of Renaissance manuscripts of DRN, seven codices have reached Britain, of which two are housed in Oxford, both in the Bodleian.11 Although one of these, Canon. Class. Lat. 32 (third quarter of fifteenth century), has little of independent interest to offer, the other, Auct. F 1 13 (c.1460), reflects the early phases of Renaissance learning in England. This attractive codex is a product of mid-fifteenth-century Padua, written in an elegant formal bookhand (lettera formata) with some sporadic persistence of Gothic elements. Despite the anonymity of its scribe, there can be no doubt that the book was commissioned by John Tiptoft, the first Earl of Worcester (1427–70), who, after passing through University College, Oxford, toured much of Europe and the Holy Land, before two years’ study in Padua, for the Tiptoft arms proudly, albeit with an unfortunate scribal error in the Latin motto (tendmus for tendimus), adorn folio 2r. It has been suggested that both the vellum and the scribe are English, although the latter was evidently trained in Italy; the elegant illumination and white vine decoration, by contrast, must have been added in Padua itself. This book attains additional significance through its being the first text of Lucretius ever known to enter the British Isles: for, in 1461, Tiptoft brought his De rerum natura home. We know from a letter preserved in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (MS 423 item 42, f.65), that Tiptoft was explicitly having Latin texts copied in Italy so as to improve the Latinity of his former university.12 Yet, however noble Tiptoft’s intentions, his own Lucretius did not reach the University’s hands: rather, its fate throughout the sixteenth century is unknown, but by the early seventeenth century it had found its way haply but happily into both learned and Latinate hands. For on 3v of Auct. F 1 13 there stands the unambiguous dedication D. D. Jana Ouena ad usum Bibliothecae Publicae Oxon. 1610, ‘Jane Owen gave [this manuscript] as a gift for the use of the Public Library in Oxford’, i.e. the Bodleian.13 Jana Ouena, Jane Owen, is very probably the niece of the famous Welsh Latin poet John Owen (c.1564–1622), 11 Four of the remaining five are held in the British Library, the last in Cambridge University Library. 12 For the text of this letter, dated to 25 Jan. 1460 [correcting 1468], see Tait (1920) 571–2. 13 A similar inscription occurs on 2r, for good measure. Jane’s devotion to making classical manuscripts more widely available can be seen elsewhere, such as in her donative inscription prefixing MS Bodl. 210, a twelfth-cent. compendium of various

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an ardent Protestant who was a student and later Fellow of New College in the 1580s, before he entered the life of a schoolmaster in Monmouth and Warwick. In this post he published his famous Epigrammata, which duly earned him the nickname of ‘the British Martial’ across Europe. Although there is no explicit evidence that John Owen himself owned this manuscript, it is by no means impossible. At any rate, Jane Owen, an indisputable owner, is known to have been something of a Latin poet in her own right. In John Owen’s published collection of epigrams, we find not only a poem addressed to Jane, but also in due course one written by Jane to John in praise of his anthology, both of which compliment the learning and intellect of the other.14 Given the mutual admiration (note especially doctissima of Jana) and the educated Latin badinage between the two, it is rather ironic that a few decades later, in 1628, when an edition of John Owen’s epigrams translated into English appeared, its purpose was explicitly stated as being for the sake of ‘beauties’ (i.e. women) because (he tells his doubtless appreciative audience) the poems were previously ‘Lock’d in a tongue you did not understand’.15 Although Auct. F 1 13 bears no extant traces of having been read by either Owen (nor Tiptoft himself), its existence and bequest cannot but mark the genuine rise of classical aspirations among educated British circles, male and female. To return to the fifteenth century, as demand to read Lucretius’s poem increased, and the fresh technology of movable type emanated religious tracts, primarily of St Cyprian. Again on 3r there stands the proud assertion: D. D. Jana Owena Bibliothecae Publicae Oxoniensi, Amoris ergo 1610 28 April. This time that the book is said to have been given Amoris ergo, ‘out of love’. Although we know very little of this learned woman of early seventeenth-cent. Oxford, her love and generosity towards the Bodleian is as intriguing as it is inspiring. For further discussion of Owen and her bequest, see Hutchinson (2012) xx–xxi. 14 Ad Janam Audoenam doctissimam foeminam (To Jane Owen, A Most Learned Woman): Nulla tuarum audita mihi, neque visa sororum, | Longaevus genuit quas tibi quinque pater. | Quot sint ergo scio: quales tibi, Iana, sorores | Nescio; si similes sunt tibi, Iana, scio. (None of your sisters, whom your aged father bore to the tune of five, has been heard or seen by me. Therefore, although I know how many there are, I do not know, Jane, what your sisters are like. But if they are similar to you, Jane, I do know.) (Owen (1604) poem II.68). STC gives first edition as 1606. In Laudem Autoris (In Praise of the Author): Quod fuit, est, et semper erit solemne Poetis, | Carpimur in libris foemina virque tuis: | Iudice me, tamen haec Epigrammata salsa merentur, | Laudet ut ingenium vir mulierque tuum. (As was, is, and always will be customary for poets, we, both man and woman, are attacked in your books. By my judgement, however, these witty epigrams merit that both man and woman praise your intellect.) Prefaced to several editions of the Epigrammata from 1612 onwards. 15 Owen (1628) A2r.

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from Mainz (albeit leaving the Oblongus undisturbed in St Martin’s), the DRN found its way at last into printed form and thus secured its survival in perpetuity. It is not known how many copies of the editio princeps of Lucretius were printed in or around 1473 by the enterprising Thomas Ferandus of Brescia. However, only four extant copies have been traced, spread between the fortunate foursome of Manchester, Florence, Chantilly, and Prague. The colophon (106r) of this scarce edition reveals Ferandus’s struggles in pioneering the editorial process: LUCRECII Unicum meas in manus cum pervenisset exemplar de eo imprimendo hesitavi: quod erat difficile unico de exemplo quae librarii essent praeterita negligentia illa corrigere: Verum ubi alterum perquisitum exemplar adinvenire non potui—Hac ipsa motus difficultate unico etiam de exemplari volui librum quam maxime rarum communem multis facere. Studiosis siquidem facilius erit pauca loca vel al[i]cunde altero exemplari extricato vel suo studio castigare & diligentia: quam integro carere volumine. Since a single copy of Lucretius came into my hands I hesitated about printing it, as it was difficult to correct from a single copy the things that had been passed over by the negligence of a scribe. But I was not able to find out from where I could acquire a second copy. Moved by this very difficulty, I wanted, on the basis even of one copy, to make a book that was extremely rare common to all. Indeed, it will be easier for the diligent to correct a few passages either by another copy procured from somewhere else or by their own effort and diligence than to go without the book entirely.

Despite this nobly conscientious apologia from Ferandus, this first edition was little more than the hasty printing of a manuscript already heavily corrupted by both scribal transmission and misguided Renaissance conjectures. To answer increasing demand, a better text was provided for the second edition of 1486, overseen in Verona by Paulus Fridenperger. This elegant folio is a much commoner book in Europe and America;16 in fact, owing to the rarity of the princeps, the editio Veronensis was long thought to be the first edition of the poem.17 This

16

Lucretius (1473). A copy survives in the Bodleian as Auct l 2 17. Towards the very end of the book (m7r) we find a curious anonymous cento of twenty-six hexametric lines either reworked from lines of Lucretius’s poem or composed afresh: see Palmer (2014), 196–9; Davidson’s Chapter 4, 125. 17

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edition and the two that followed18 were mere reproductions of lowquality Italian manuscripts or their printed predecessors, reflecting almost no attempt to purify the work of textual corruption. Far more important were two editions of the next couple of decades, which both merit the name of ‘critical’. The first, issued by Aldus at Venice in 1500, profited greatly from the editorship of Avancius (Girolamo Avanzio), who carefully purified the text of the poem via emendation as well as citations of Lucretius in other ancient authors.19 The other important text-only edition of the early sixteenth century is represented by the Giuntine edition of 1512, issued in Florence. The book, edited by the eminent scholar Candidus (Pietro Candido), benefited in particular from the posthumous notes of the solider, poet, and soldier Marullus (Michele Marullo Tarcaniota), whose Lucretian emendations were in circulation from around the time of his death.20 This greatly improved Lucretian text was further polished in the second Aldine edition, edited by Naugerius (Andrea Navagero) three 18 Published by T. de Ragazonibus (Venice, 1495); B. Misinta (Brescia, 1496). For the latter, see Ferguson Smith and Butterfield (2010); for further details about these and all other Lucretian printed editions, see Gordon (1985). 19 A copy preserved in the Bodleian (Auct 2 R 4 50) of this early Aldine quarto provides valuable evidence of the close and keen engagement with it by an appreciate early readership: it bears the frequent notes, particularly in its earlier stages, of the sixteenth-cent. Florentine scholar and republican political theorist Donato Giannotti, who could count Machiavelli among his associates. Although these notes are often textual—suggesting alternative readings known to Giannotti from other editions and manuscripts, as well the occasional conjecture apparently of his own—they spread into broader territories, touching upon the physical theories of the early atomists, primarily Democritus, as well as Aristotle. A cursory inspection of these annotations suggests that much of Giannotti’s language may be drawn from the sixteenth-cent. Aristotelian commentaries of Agostino Nifo, who, although based primarily at Padua, toured the lecture circuit of Italy throughout his career. 20 Candidus’ devotion to Marullus is stated clearly enough in the introduction (Aiiv): Marullus sane amicus olim noster iucundissimus, cuius in hoc opere censuram potissimum secuti sumus, lucretianae adeo ueneris per omnem aetatem studiosus fuit, ut nuspiam fere non eo comite itaret, nunquam cubitum (quod de Archesilao, Homerique rhapsodia traditur) nisi perlectis aliquot, exploratisque Cari carminibus sese reciperet. Quin etiam ex miseranda illa in mediis Cecinae undis latinarum musarum iactura, cladeque insigni, unus est Lucretius receptus. (Marullus was indeed once a very close friend of mine, and I followed his judgement in particular when correcting the work. For his whole life he was devoted to such a Lucretian passion that he went almost nowhere without him as a companion, and never slept—as the story goes about Archesilaus, the Homeric rhapsode—unless he had read and explored some of Lucretius’s poetry. And even out of that terrible loss to the Latin Muses amidst the waves of the Cecina, a major disaster, his Lucretius alone was recovered.)

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years later, in 1515. Although Aldus himself openly acknowledged in his preface that Lucretius’s teachings were manifestly full of lies (plenus mendaciorum), he advanced that they should be read nonetheless, since veritas, quanto magis inquiritur, tanto apparet illustrior, & venerabilior (‘the more truth is investigated, the more splendid and venerable it appears’). Despite this enlightened pledge, Naugerius’s edition, the most legible and intelligible to date, marked the end of close contact with Lucretius in his home country: for it proved to be the last Italian edition of the poet published for almost 150 years, as Lucretius’s doctrines, amidst the strife of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, proved to be too potent and provocative for publication. Nevertheless, it is surprising to note that, despite the anti-classical attitude that pervaded the Italian ecclesiastical community following the Council of Trent (1545), Lucretius’s poem was at no stage entered into the Index Prohibitorum Librorum (circulated from c.1515 to 1966). This same freedom was not granted to Italian translations of the poem: Gianfrancesco Muscettola completed his prose rendering in 1530—very probably the first made into any other language—but chose not to publish it, a decision that effectively guaranteed its destruction not long afterwards. It was not until more than two centuries later that Italy could stomach, from the hands of the deceased Alessandro Marchetti, a vernacular rendering of the poem.21 But before we let the curtain fall on Italy, a brief word should be said of three early attempts to expound and explicate the poem’s contents. The earliest effort known to us was undertaken by Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) of Florence, a city that was of course a hotbed of Epicurean interest. The youthful and ambitious Ficino, apparently on the prompting of Poggio, turned his interests to Lucretius and Epicureanism in the 1450s, before, in 1473, he converted to Platonism and entered life as a priest. Most intriguingly, in his final years, Ficino revealed (in a letter to Martinus Uranus of 1492)22 that he had himself censored what would surely have been a ground-breaking contribution, whatever its scale and quality, namely some commentariol[i] in Lucretium written when a puer, choosing to burn rather than publish it. The translation was first published in ‘Londra’ (1717) under the name of Antinoo Rullo, the pseudonym for Paolo Rolli, then based in the city; he had failed to publish the work in Italy. For further context, see Saccenti (1966) 104. 22 This epistle was published in Ficino (1576) i. 963. 21

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A similar but shorter work of exposition that did survive was the 1504 Paraphrasis in Lucretium of Francus (Raffaele Franceschi) of Bologna.23 It will suffice to observe here that Francus limited himself to general remarks on only the first three books of the poem, to which account he felt compelled to add an appendix that argued—against Epicurean doctrine—for the immortality of the soul. The third and final case is of a much grander scale: for the first complete commentary on Lucretius’s poem published in the modern era was the dense and untidy folio of Giovanni Battista Pio (J. B. Pius), likewise issued in Bologna in 1511 (and soon reprinted at Paris in 1514). The work, if not replete with great intellectual insights, does at least attest to Pius’ significant labours upon the poem. For the one, or perhaps two, ancient commentaries on Lucretius’s work about whose existence we know did not survive the end of the Roman Empire;24 as a result, Pius had to collect materials afresh without the benefit of any predecessors’ work, an overwhelming and impressive achievement, even if much of the poem was not understood and much of his work betrays obvious haste. Instead, for the first truly significant advance in the elucidation of Lucretius’s text and its meaning, we must march forward fifty years and enter Paris. From that city in 1563–4 emerged the revolutionary commentary of Dionysius Lambinus (Denys Lambin), which enjoyed a large print run both in quarto and as a simple pocket edition (1565), before reaching its most polished form in a third edition in 1570, all of which are common books throughout European libraries. In the introduction to his commentary, we find, for the first time, a robust understanding of Lucretius’s Latinity and metre, of his logical manner of argument, and of Epicurean philosophy, although much was naturally lacking in his knowledge of the last. This dense, detailed, and provocative commentary on the DRN would prove to be the most important contribution to the study of the poem from its rediscovery to the mid-nineteenth century. Lambinus’s text was the first to be edited on scientific principles, with the careful collation and inspection of 23 No copies of this rare thirty-two-page pamphlet—supposedly produced at the prompting of friends—survive in Britain. 24 Evidence of such ancient works survives in Jerome’s allusion to a commentary that he had read as a younger man (Adu. Ruf. 1.16) and the assertion, perhaps first made by Suetonius himself (Frag. Paris. De notis (GLK 7.534) = Suet. De uir. illustr. p.138 R.), that the grammarian M. Valerius Probus (first cent. CE) made use of critical editorial notes in (and therefore perhaps also commented upon) the text of Lucretius.

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several manuscripts, including one of the two medieval manuscripts, Q (which in fact he unwittingly made use of in two forms).25 Whereas Pius’s earlier commentary retained many features of the scholastic tradition, largely expounding difficult words, phrases, and points of historical interest, with very little broader exegesis of argument and structure, Lambinus applied his energies almost entirely to improving and clarifying the text and, where necessary, expounding its philosophy. The poetic text was divided up into sections according to the development of its arguments and then carefully explained in the intervening notes, such that the work could now scarcely be read without the tutor having a regular, and often virulent, word in the reader’s ear. Lest such keen engagement with the poem’s content cause contemporary alarm, in his lengthy prefatory address to Charles IX Lambinus vigorously refuted the claim that the undoubtedly impious writings of Epicurus and Lucretius could actually render their readers impious too; rather, he asserted that one should focus on the many positive aspects of the poem. In the case of its undeniable faults, by contrast, the reader should be aware that Lucretius’s own role was simply to follow the mistakes that had already been committed by Epicurus. Furthermore, the Church Fathers themselves evidently read such pagan poetry without any spiritual or moral detriment, which suggests that the modern reader should not be unduly troubled in exposing themselves to Lucretius’s poetry. The alternative was that, if pagan authors are to be rejected wholesale because of their manifestly non-Christian content, then Plato and Aristotle also, not to mention Homer, the Greek tragedians, and Virgil, would have to be left unread, which very few among the learned circles of Europe would have commended.26 25

He had been provided with a collation made by Turnebus (Adrien de Tournebou) from the ‘Bertinianus’ (= Q) in the possession of his friend Gallandus (Pierre Galland), who had obtained it from the monks of St Bertin in 1544. 26 Other dedications prefixed to each of the six books—to the likes of Ronsard, Muretus, and Turnebus—flag up Lambinus’s further qualms about the text he has done so much to unravel. We hear that Epicurean philosophy is delira, et in multis impia (‘delirious and in many respects impious’) and that Lucretius’s inept atomic philosophy is unappealing, although its failings are to be attributed to Epicurus alone (rideamus licet Epicuri deliria, ‘though we may mock Epicurus’ bouts of delirium’). Given such an unpromising context, in order to avoid his overall scholarly project being called into question, Lambinus avers at one point non omnia sunt in Lucretio respuenda ac rejicienda (‘not everything in Lucretius should be eschewed

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Although Catholicism, and in due course Protestantism, were necessarily staunch enemies of Epicureanism, the editing of DRN thrived in mid-sixteenth-century France and Holland. Spurred on by Lambinus’s clear critical and commercial success, the Dutch lawyer Hubertus Gifanius (Obert van Giffen) attempted to capitalize on the work’s new-found interest. With a remarkably swift turnaround, he produced a compact and savvy edition of the poem in Antwerp in 1565/6 which, at least to the untrained eye, showed much acuity and ingenuity. Under closer inspection, however, this edition emerges as a very clever repackaging of the poem in octavo, with brief marginal notes and a detailed index, almost entirely on the basis of Lambinus’s immense labours. As a result, by the time of Lambinus’s third and expanded edition (1570), the wily Gifanius had been cast as his major adversary, attacked with a myriad terms of vitriolic abuse—but always avoiding the name Gifanius itself—and convicted of the credible charge of plagiarism. Indeed, almost every page of Lambinus’s final edition is aflame with bitter indignation that Gifanius had stolen his emendations and scholarly advances without any scruple or acknowledgement. Gifanius issued no apology in print and his edition (still a common book) continued to sell well;27 even when his second edition (Leiden, 1595) emerged three decades later, and after Lambinus’s death, no acknowledgement was made of the controversy. Intriguingly, however, there exists previously overlooked evidence that Gifanius did privately seek to do something to repair his reputation by striving to augment and improve his second edition. For one of the two copies of the first Gifanius edition in the Bodleian’s Bywater collection, Byw. P 6 14, is in fact Gifanius’s own. The book, one of the most heavily annotated editions of a sixteenth-century Latin classic I have encountered, is plastered on all pages—whether the endpapers, the index, the introduction, or the poetic text itself—with the editor’s manuscript notes, which inspection reveals to have been added over a period of and rejected’). For further context regarding Lambinus’s Lucretius edition, consult Tsakiropoulou-Summers (2001); O’Brien (2010); and Butterfield (forthcoming). 27 A copy of this edition in the Bodleian’s Bywater collection, Byw. P 6 13, attests to the esteem in which Gifanius was held. On one of the rear endpapers there stands an inscription to the owner, John Ladislaw of Misena, by Gifanius, which was added explicitly as a celebrity autograph when he passed through that town in 1587. Clearly the Lucretius of Gifanius gave him a fame which the lamentations and lampoons of Lambinus could not destroy.

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many years. These annotations are mostly textual, but they not only record with care what Lambinus printed and argued in his vituperative third edition (which appeared five years later) but they also attest to Gifanius’s own personal collation of Italian manuscripts in 1569 and his further work on text-critical matters. ‘L.’ or ‘Lamb.’ appears on almost every page as a point of contrast, and Gifanius often spells out his various arguments against his rival’s decisions, unless he records with satisfaction ‘L. edidit ut ego’ (‘L(ambinus) edited the text as I did’). At times he is prepared to reveal his own newly found scepticism: e.g. on 2.469–75 he confesses hic locus mihi totus satis videtur perplexus (‘this whole passage seems sufficiently perplexing to me’), and on 6.113 hic totus [versus] mihi valde est suspectus (‘this whole verse is very suspicious to me’). Many of his arguments are more discursive: for instance, regarding the poem’s problematic proem, he offers four reasons as to why Lucretius chose Venus as the addressee of his plea: she was goddess of the rerum natura; she was the goddess to bring peace to Romans; she was the goddess of pleasure, as is appropriate for Epicureans; she was the foundress of the Roman race.28 We may now briefly return to southern Europe and move into the mid-seventeenth century (the next fifty years from 1595 to 1645 being devoid of substantial contributions). For at this point the near-complete silence that had fallen over Italy for 150 years was to be broken, if only temporarily, by the bizarre edition of Giovanni Nardi, published in Florence in 1647. The work, which is of negligible academic interest, followed Lambinus’s practice in dividing the Latin text of the poem with brief summaries of its meaning, although these prudently passed over several more controversial aspects of the poem in silence. The sensitivity felt in publishing DRN in Florence at this time is evidenced by the extraordinary protection given to the book through ecclesiastical licences. The final page (680) offers several sombre defences of the edition, in Latin and Italian, from a broad range of influential men. One such example of the five, written by Antonius Mucinus, pronotary apostolic, states that, having read through the work carefully, he can find ‘nothing in it that is contrary

28 I plan to conduct a detailed investigation of this remarkable volume, which has scarcely ever been studied, and to trace and clarify its relationship to Gifanius’s second edition.

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to the doctrines of Christian faith or good morals’.29 In order to keep his commentary palpably above board, Nardi scatters fifty ‘excursuses’ throughout the work, which cover topics of varying degrees of relevance to DRN. Strangely, the author’s own fetishes shine increasingly through as the book progresses, and, on the dubious ground that the Athenian plague which ends book 6 arose in Egypt, the edition ends with an extremely lengthy discussion (and nine engraved plates) concerning the minutiae of Egyptian burial practices—of which Lucretius himself has not one word to say.30 Since the edition of Nardi made no impact upon the understanding of Lucretius, and the benefits of the 1662 Saumur edition of Tanaquil Faber (Tanneguy Le Fevre) were primarily textual, one may assert that, in the wake of Lambinus’s commentary, Europe lacked what could be called a truly new Lucretian edition for almost 150 years. Yet genuine light began to dawn again as the latter half of the seventeenth century arrived, a period in which Western Europe saw an indubitable revival of interest in Epicureanism and its exponents. Although Lucretius’s controversial poem still found itself in the difficult position of being heralded for its poetic beauty but treated with caution for its subversive content, as perhaps evidenced by its never appearing through the elegant presses of Stephanus and Elzevir (although both Gryphius and Jansson issued multiple editions), fresh attention was turned to the work in France, an attitude that duly spread north-west to England. Works indicative of this neo-Epicurean surge include Jean-François Sarasin’s Discours de Morale sur Épicure (written in 1645/6), an important account that was however soon eclipsed by the detailed work of the French Catholic priest Pierre Gassendi, whose De vita et moribus Epicuri of 1647 (‘Eight Books on the Life and Morals of Epicurus’) and Philosophiae Epicuri syntagma (‘Compendium of Epicurus’ Philosophy’) appended to his 1649 commentary upon Diogenes Laertius’s biography of the school’s founder made Epicureanism more generally available throughout learned Europe. Alongside these significant advances in understanding Epicurean philosophy from the 1640s onwards, an increased popular demand 29 Ego Antonius Mucinus Protonot. Apost. hanc in Lucretium Paraphrasim, & Animadversiones D. Ioannis Nardii varia eruditione refertas accurate perlegi, nihilque in eis reperi [sic], quod Christianae Fidei dogmatibus, vel bonis moribus adversetur. In quorum fidem, &c. Die 18, Maii 1645. 30 For some interesting remarks on the edition’s engagement with contemporary science, see Beretta (2008b).

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during this period meant that an intimate knowledge of the Latin and Greek languages ceased to be a necessary criterion for accessing ancient Epicurean texts and its most important vehicle. For the first published translation of Lucretius into a vernacular language, that of Michel de Marolles, commendatory abbot of Villeloin, appeared in Paris in 1650. Meanwhile, across the English Channel, the various Epicurean(ist) writings of Walter Charleton and Thomas Stanley inspired a fresh and keen interest in translating DRN into English. (See Cottegnies’s Chapter 7 for more on Marolles and Charleton.) The first such translation to be published was that of the English diarist John Evelyn, begun in the 1650s, whose first book appeared in 1656. Evelyn himself would perhaps take a grave view of the fact that this work remains the subject of scholarly enquiry, since he was convinced that it was utterly ruined by the incompetence of its supervisor through the press, a Dr Triplet. In his own copy, now in the British Library (Eve.a.168), he wrote, ‘Never was book so abominably misused by printer, never copy so negligently surveid’. To illustrate this incompetence, three pieces of evidence will suffice: first, all copies have no pp. 81–96; second, the ‘Animadversions’ or exegetical and anti-Epicurean notes, which form over half of the book, were explicitly not meant to be included (at p. 80, however, the stationer states his belief that it was better to print them anyway); and third, as a small but indicative example, the heading opening the ‘Animadversions’ on p. 97 announces that they concern the ‘fisrt’ (sic) book. In truth, Evelyn only published this first book of his complete verse translation of Lucretius so as to test the murky waters of his audience by its reception. Although the rest of the work had probably been completed by 1657, he later wrote to Meric Casaubon (in 1674) that he ‘repented of his folly’ and declared that ‘to commute for this’ the manuscript of the remaining books ‘lies in the dust of my study, where ’tis like to be forever buried’.31 The translation of the second book has indeed been lost to the dust for eternity, but—some 350 years later, the manuscript of books 3 to 6—also preserved at the British Library (Evelyn MSS 33–4)—was at last published in the year 2000.32 Similar reticence about publication surrounded one of the most well-known English translations of this period, the verse rendering of the complete poem by the puritan Lucy Hutchinson. Although

31

Evelyn (1859) ii. 210.

32

Repetzki (2000).

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written probably in the 1650s, and perhaps at the provocation of Evelyn’s aborted publication, Hutchinson chose not to put her translation in print, and instead had a doctored (and slightly bowdlerized) manuscript fair copy of it sent to Arthur Annesley, first Earl of Anglesey in 1675, which now is housed in the British Library (Add. MSS 19333). The manuscript is prefaced by a famous dedicatory address in which she repents of the work as one of ‘youthful curiositie’ that expounded ‘such vaine Philosophy’ of ‘this dog’. This lively text has recently been immaculately edited and provided with a rich and rewarding commentary by David Norbrook and Reid Barbour.33 The Bodleian Library preserves a no less curious item within Lucretius’s reception in seventeenth-century England: Rawl. Ms D 314 is an anonymous prose translation of the complete DRN. Rather paradoxically, one of the most interesting aspects of this little book is the very absence of information about its context: not only is the author unknown but he—or she—provides absolutely no indicative material in the course of its 167 leaves about the who, the when, and the wherefore of its production. Instead, it is a relatively unmarked fair copy bearing occasional scribal corrections throughout. Alongside the anonymity of the translator, and of the scribe— although the two are very probably one and the same—stands the opacity of this book’s history: somehow it entered the collection of the voracious magpie of manuscripts Richard Rawlinson, as part of whose library it reached the Bodleian in 1756. There is no evidence about how or why Rawlinson obtained it, nor that he did anything with it once he had. Indeed, save for the Rawlinson bookplate placed upside down on the rear board, only the classmark bears witness to his former ownership. Some help regarding the book’s date can be given by its primary hand (for a second individual has repeated the chapter headings at the close of the manuscript, on pp. 325–33). The confident combination of secretary and italic elements suggests an approximate date of the mid-seventeenth century. Yet further progress has been made in recent years by Reid Barbour, who has not only demonstrated to a high degree of probability the influence of the French translation of Marolles on the work but has also shown that it is the revised edition of 1659, emended on the basis of Gifanius’s contribution to the poem,

33

Hutchinson (2012).

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that is reflected in the anonymous author’s work. Simply put, Barbour demonstrates that the poem’s marginal headings, which are not the translator’s own creations, stem specifically from Marolles’s own reworking of Gifanius’s reworking of what were once the capitula added into Lucretius’s manuscript in late antiquity.34 Hopefully, the new and probable terminus post quem of 1659 that has emerged from this research will encourage further investigation into the source of this translation. To date, many interesting hats have been thrown into the ring: the work has been attributed to Isaac Barrow, Robert Boyle, Alexander Brome, Meric Casaubon, Charles Cavendish, Walter Charleton, Ralph Cudworth, Kenelm Digby, John Greaves, Matthew Hale, Robert Hooke, Richard Lower, Jasper Mayne, Henry More, Walter Needham, Peter Pett, William Petty, Henry Pierrepont, Alexander Ross, Thomas Sprat, Henry Stubbe, Thomas Vaughan, Obadiah Walker, Seth Ward, and Thomas Willis. If the translation was indeed made in the 1660s, this bewildering field can be narrowed with gratitude.35 We come now to the final phase of this survey. Given the more positive reception of Epicureanism in England following the Civil War, the wider market was ready for a Latin text of Lucretius to be printed for the first time on English soil. This came in London in 1675, more than two centuries after the princeps, in the form of a scaleddown reprint of Faber’s 1662 edition, with some material recycled from Gifanius. Unfortunately, this work lacks any prefatory matter in which to explain or defend itself, but its reprinting in 1686 attests to its success. On the back of this new expansion in Lucretius’s circulation there emerged one of the most important English Lucretians. Thomas Creech, born in 1659, matriculated at Wadham College before winning, in 1683, a prize fellowship at All Souls, an institution at which he stayed 34

Barbour (2010). For discussion of the capitula that intersperse DRN, see Butterfield (2013) ch. 3, 136–202. 35 As a specimen of the calibre of this unpublished translation, we may cite the opening to book 2: ‘It is a pleasant thing when the winds have raised a storm and disturbed the sea, to behold from the land the great calamity of another. Not as if the pleasure lay in seeing him troubled, but only in seeing ones self to be safe. It is also a pleasant thing to see greate pitched battolls, without having a share in the damage. But nothing is more pleasant than to possess the high temples of the wise and learned, from which you may look down upon others, and see them wander up and down, and grope after the way of life, contending in wit and nobility, and night and day endeavouring to come to great riches and rule all things. O wretched minds of man, o blind hearts. In what darkness and dangers of life, is this age of others spent!’ (p. 52).

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until his suicide at the age of 40. Creech first obtained the notice of the learned public by his youthful translation of DRN into rhyming heroic couplets, which appeared in Oxford in 1682 as the first complete English translation of the poem to be published, and indeed the first full poetic translation issued in any language. Creech seems to have been aware that he needed support for an endeavour such as this from the outset, as suggested by the epigram he chose to stand on his title-page: I, fuge, sed poteras tutior esse Domi, a pentameter taken from Martial and addressed to his book, translating as ‘Go then, flee! but you could have been safer at home!’ In order to parry in advance any charges of impiety in translating Lucretius, Creech proceeded to make clear in his preface that the work was ‘written for the satisfaction of a Private Gentleman’ (to this date unidentified), before stating: ‘I have heard that the best Method to overthrow the Epicurean Hypothesis (I mean as it stands opposite to Religion) is to expose a full system of it to publick view’. The prima facie literary venture of this translation is therefore explicitly rebranded as an educative and apotropaic tool to aid the Christian scholar via careful and controlled exposure to the enemy. To bolster his task, Creech added at the rear of this translation an appendix of ‘Notes’, beginning after p. 223, and over fifty pages in length, whose primary aim was to refute, rather than explicate, Lucretius’s doctrines. In these we often find rather fervent rhetoric, and his debts to the writings of Gassendi and Stanley et al. are evident. From the first edition onwards, Creech’s work proudly opens with epigrams of recommendation and commendation (from the likes of John Evelyn, Edward Bernard, Nahum Tate, Aphra Behn, and Thomas Otway), which well attest that English men of letters lauded his literary contribution, even if his thunder was soon to be stolen by Dryden in his Sylvae of 1685. This clever and popular translation won Creech great fame, although his interests apparently turned away from Lucretius for some years. Meanwhile, however, a broader spectrum of learned society in England had come to acknowledge the intellectual importance of Lucretius’s work: Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle were keenly advancing the cause of atomism, and the literary merits of the poem became more highly esteemed than ever.36 This positive energy 36 The influential William Temple, in his 1685 work Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or, of Gardening in the Year (first publ. London, 1692), praised Lucretius as one of the

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perhaps provided some of the spur for Creech to publish, at Oxford in 1695, a Latin edition of the entire poem, together with a lucid prose explanation and laconic scholarly annotation (also in Latin). This celebrated edition led the anonymous editor of the first Bipontine (i.e. Zweibrücken) text of DRN in 1782 to mark this date as the beginning of a new dynasty—the Aetas Creechiana, ‘the age of Creech’—in the poem’s history, thus ending the Aetas Lambiniana, ‘the age of Lambinus’—which had stretched from 1563 until the Englishman’s work. Interestingly, Creech’s tone as editor in the obscurity of a learned tongue changed significantly from his obstreperous objections as an English translator: the prefatory matter makes no direct apology for his choice to explicate Lucretius, rather we find the beauty of DRN praised and the failings of former editors chastised. Amidst his impassioned language, we find Creech say of Giovanni Nardi that he was a sexagenarius Interpres de ponte dejiciendus (‘a sixty-something commentator who should be hurled off a bridge’, Ad Lectorem, 18). By contrast, the best Lucretian interpreter, Creech tells the reader with a hint of reflexivity, should embody the fusion of Lambinus’s textual and Gassendi’s exegetical virtues. Although Creech’s library sale on his death contained no edition of the former, his explicit praise of the latter is extreme. At one point in his commentary (ad 3.171) Creech declares that he ‘willingly prefers the opinion of Gassendi to a thousand Gifaniuses and Paraeuses’.37 The commentary itself continues along a similarly scholarly tack, since Creech typically refrains from attacking directly the theory under discussion, choosing instead to explicate the text and its philosophical content. The reader can consequently work through a given Lucretian book using the commentary below almost without any anti-Epicurean sentiment interrupting that purely intellectual experience. With Creech’s anxieties apparently set aside, the least combative annotated edition of DRN to date was now in print. However, Creech could not entirely silence his objections of old: to appease either his own conscience or that of his audience, we find at the close of each book his own post-factum apologia for the doctrines that have appeared in the preceding text and commentary. These appendices seem to have been placed with some cunning, since their positioning leaves a potent anti-Epicurean salvo as a Parthian best philosophers and the supreme poets of Rome, which further stirred English interest in the poem. 37 cujus [= Gassendi] sententiam mille Gifaniis et Paraeis libenter praefero.

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shot to save the reader. Although each coda generally admires the rigour and arrangement of Lucretius’s foregoing argumentation, they constantly assert that his impious slurs against the doctrine of providence are without the force to shake this key tenet of the Christian faith. For instance, at the end of book 5, on p. 310: Lege quae sequuntur, & admirabilis ingenii tam vehementer delirantis miserere; Ea autem est omnium, qui negant Providentiam, sors; ut in Ethicis vana doceant, in Physicis absurda. (p. 310) Read what follows [i.e. 5.771ff., Lucretius’s discussion of the development of the earth and mankind] and take pity on an admirable intelligence that is so wildly delirious; this, however, is the fate of everyone who denies providence, that they teach vanities in Ethics and absurdities in Physics.

For all of these brief bouts of complaint in his two Lucretian works, it remains unclear to what extent Creech himself privately sympathized with Epicurean doctrines towards the end of his life. Certainly his death—hanging himself in 1700 for an unknown reason—was not without supposed ‘Lucretian’ parallels: in this connection, the curious reader of Creech’s note upon 3.171 will see that—in the context of a discussion of suicide—Creech admits (appropriating the words of Faber) that he is, by nature, et a natura et ab aerumnis paulo tristior, ‘a little sadder both because of his nature and because of hardships’. This confession seems supported by the harsh judgement of Thomas Hearne, who called Creech ‘a very proud, morose, sower Man, and no Good Company’. With his scandalous and indeed anti-Christian death, stories abounded that Creech had committed suicide because of love—as was already claimed of Lucretius himself by St Jerome. The tale went that he fell in love with a woman of Oxford named Philadelphia Playdell, who refused his requests for marriage despite being favourable to other men’s advances. This story—true or untrue—was given further life by a bizarre salvo against Creech and his character. This pamphlet (a copy of which survives in the Bodleian as Bliss B 366) was published anonymously in 1700, and bears the direct title of A Step to Oxford: or, a mad essay on the reverend Mr. Thomas Creech’s hanging himself, as it is said, for love: with the character of his mistress. In a letter to a person of quality. The unknown author—perhaps John Oldmixon38—holds 38 The author often cites a pastoral elegy probably by Oldmixon, see Anderson (1932); its double-edged praise may suggest that he wrote the pamphlet too.

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no punches in slandering the late Creech: we find in this colourful account a terrible picture painted of a lecherous man forever ogling women from the pulpit with ‘goatish lust’. The author’s shock and disgust is given full vent: ‘Tis ‘Tis true, Lalage [i.e. the pastoral name given by the author to Dr Creech’s Mistress] is a vertuous Woman, but still she is but a Woman.—Methinks, had the Doctor hang’d himself for the Loss of his Fellowship, or to shew his Aversion to Sensual Love, there might be something said in his Vindication, but for a Rhiming Clergy-man to hang himself for a Woman (a Thing in Petty-Coats) is such a ridiculous Murther as scarce warrants our Pitty.

Later on we read the mocking claim that Creech ‘lov’d Women better than Wives, and was so expert in the Art of Love, that he would praise a Lady’s Vertue till he got to Bed to her’; further, he was ‘prouder of holding Lalage’s Busk or Fan, than a School-Boy with a Scepter in his Hand playing the Emperor’s part in the School’. All of this meanspirited muck-slinging (which nevertheless does not bring Lucretius explicitly into the picture) is interspersed with Oldmixon’s pastoral poetry, the genre in which Creech himself wished to flourish. No doubt literary envy has some part to play in this rather unfortunate episode. The alternative theory—one said to be attested in a letter of Arthur Charlett preserved in the Bodleian, but which I have not succeeded in tracing—is that adverse finances brought about Creech’s sorry end.39 Whatever the truth, despite the new injection of life that his translation and edition gave to Lucretian studies in the dawning eighteenth century, Creech himself pointedly chose not to live into it. As the final item to close this survey, we may turn to the prolific London bookseller, Jacob Tonson the Elder, a former associate of Creech who produced a lavish quarto edition of DRN (London, 1712). The work was intended to make a substantial impression: not only does it include large and attractive engravings before each book but twenty-five copies of this costly production were published in a very large elephant folio format (Lucretius 1712b); among the privileged owners of that lavish batch was the poet and diplomat Matthew Prior, whose immense copy is now in the library of St John’s College, Cambridge (B.1.1). Although aesthetically very attractive, the real 39 For further context see the ODNB entry for Creech (contributed by Hermann Real) and Hopkins (2012).

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weight of this edition comes from a hard-won appendix of variae lectiones given at the book’s rear (pp. 379ff.). These variant readings, each heralded by a brief siglum, are drawn from a wide range of manuscript sources, ancient and modern, as well as a number of printed editions, both the distinguished and the despicable. As a result, it is here that we find published for the first time a partial collation of the three ninth-century manuscripts, O, Q, and part of S (the first gathering, G), although the major importance of these manuscripts was not understood.40 This, then, is the first arrival of the apparatus criticus to Lucretius. We should note, however, that Tonson did not seek to edit the text himself. Instead, he followed a conservative compromise between the texts of Lambinus and Faber. But, rather progressively for its time, he offered his readers this smorgasbord of variant readings in order that ‘whilst reading they could exercise and sharpen the subtlety and acumen of their intellect to select the true readings’.41 This admirable labour of collation and painstaking typography shows a genuine interest in purifying the poem’s text, albeit leaving the actual task of judgement in the reader’s hands, competent or otherwise. Thus did Lucretius enter the eighteenth century and the age of Enlightenment, supported by two worthy commentaries (Lambinus and Creech) and with a corpus of variant readings to aid the requisite emendation of the best texts available. Although battered and bruised from his turbulent transmission, Lucretius was at last ready to be read more carefully and more attentively than at any point since antiquity itself—even if Europe did not turn to that task with zeal until the great contributions of Bernays, Lachmann, and Munro in the middle of the nineteenth century.

40 These collations were transmitted to Tonson by Robert Cannon, Canon of Ely, who presumably had obtained them indirectly from the material that is preserved in the margins of two Lucretian editions owned by the Vossii (now Trinity College, Cambridge, Adv. b 13 3, and Leiden UB, 757 G 25) which was distributed during Isaac Vossius’s lifetime and after his death by Adrian Beverland, his executor. 41 ‘Hic enim habes, quod subtilitatem & acumen ingenii Tui exerceat & acuat; ut ex variantibus veras tandem possis lectiones eruere’ (Bibliopola Lectori Candido S.P.D. (379)); cf. also Bibliopolae Admonitio ad Lectorem (p2r).

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3 Lucretian Naturalism and the Evolution of Machiavelli’s Ethics Alison Brown

1. INTRODUCTION The influence of the Epicurean revival was not fully felt until the seventeenth century, but within Italy, and especially in Florence, it contributed to a much earlier shift in thinking.1 By the middle of the fifteenth century, Lucretius’s De rerum natura and Diogenes Laertius’s newly translated Life of Epicurus were circulating in Florence and they both encouraged new, transgressive thinking there, especially by Machiavelli.2 Although Machiavelli never cited Lucretius openly, his transcription of De rerum natura, now in the Vatican Library, clearly left an indelible impression on him, which is reflected not only in his early political and philosophical writings but also in his poetry and in the canzoni he wrote almost at the end of his life.3 In what follows, I shall argue that the close parallels between the writings of these two men demonstrate the extent of Machiavelli’s debt to Lucretius and his naturalistic ethics. According to the marginalia in book 2 of his transcription, his interest was initially aroused by the revolutionary implications of Lucretius’s swerve of atoms, which then influenced his thinking on a series of interrelated topics that betray his radicalism. I shall centre my argument on the influence of Lucretius and Epicurus’s 1

See Wilson (2009); Johnson and Wilson (2007); Palmer (2012). Brown (2010a), esp. 1–2, 68–97. On transgressivism in Florence and its influence on Machiavelli, see Fubini (2009), esp. 282–3. 3 Brown (2010a) 68–87 and 113–22; cf. Brown (2010b) and (2013). 2

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‘hard primitivism’, since it helps to explain Machiavelli’s morality and its relationship to later social contract theories.4 But in order to understand its place in Machiavelli’s wider outlook, I begin by examining Lucretius’s atomism and his psychological interpretation of the role of human passions, which also influenced Machiavelli in important ways—especially his emphasis on free will as the mental freedom to act as autonomous agents, and on the influence of fear and desire as motivating forces in our lives. Because they help to explain Machiavelli’s apparent inconsistencies, they also help to demonstrate the coherence of his political and ethical thinking as a whole. The puzzle about Machiavelli is where he stands in the debate about the cosmos, since he apparently believes both in free will and in astrological fatalism, in the same way in which he apparently advocates both republicanism and princely rule.5 Here Lucretius may offer a solution, for as an Epicurean he combined the elements of freedom and determinism in the world differently from other ancient philosophers and from Christian scholastics. In contrast to the providential creationism of the Platonists and the Christians and the teleology of Aristotle, the Epicureans believed the world was neither divine nor purposeful: ‘in no way has the nature of the world been made for us by divine power’, Lucretius wrote in the second book of De rerum natura. Instead, the Epicurean world was one of many mortal worlds which were created in an eternal universe by the random collision of swerving atoms in space and would die, ‘worn out by old age’, with no prospect of immortality for its inhabitants nor a final end beyond this life. Despite the philosophy’s materialism and absence of an after-life, however, it offered freedom of a different sort. Thanks to the swerve, it escaped rigid determinism (‘the decrees of fate’) and allowed us freedom to follow our desires and go ‘wherever our mind has taken us’. Because our world eventually developed regular cycles of development according to necessitating laws of cause and effect (foedera naturae), it was possible for Epicurus to explain that some things happened of necessity, others by chance, and others ‘through our own agency’, for whereas ‘necessity destroys responsibility and . . . chance or fortune is inconstant’, ‘our own actions are free’. This tripartite balance of forces has interesting

4 5

See Lovejoy and Boas (1935), esp. 222–42. See Parel (1992); on contrasting ancient views, see Sedley (2007).

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resonance in Machiavelli in balancing chance and necessary laws with freedom, perhaps—I have suggested elsewhere—representing the early modern outlook better than traditional creationism or Aristotelian teleology.6 For although, according to Lucretius, ‘nature is always free’, ‘it has no proud masters and does everything freely (sponte) by itself without the help of gods’, atoms nevertheless ‘fell into their present arrangement’ after their initial buffeting about by establishing regular cycles of development that preserved the species after the early fearful struggle for survival in primitive nature. So lions and foxes survived through their ferocity and guile that over time became inherited traits, and although humans acquired additional polish through education (doctrina politos constituat), they too retained in their genes the original traces of these animal passions that had been responsible for their survival.7 Underlying these motive forces was the emotion of fear, the dominant theme of De rerum natura, which Lucretius wrote in order to dispel superstitious fears of death and the unknown with true scientific understanding, believing as he did—in contrast to Plato and Aristotle—that emotions and desires were intermingled with reason in the psyche and could be changed by beliefs and reasoning.8 In Machiavelli’s world, too, the passions form an integral part of the psyche, and animals like lions and foxes explain human traits. More than that, his world is also governed by the same mixture of continuity (necessity), flux (change), and individual freedom (selfagency) as for the Epicureans. First of the building blocks is a universe that is unchanging. Closely following Lucretius, who believed that ‘everything is always the same’ and that ‘atoms will behave now as they did in the past, and will do in the future’, Machiavelli too believed that ‘the world has always been in the same condition’, and ‘in all cities and in all peoples there are always the same desires and

6 Diogenes Laertius (1972) ii. 659 (bk 10, §133), (1475), fol. 179r (citing Traversari’s translation that Machiavelli would have used, ink foliation (1480) in BL 167.d.6): partim vero a fortuna partim a nobis quod necessitas obnoxia non sit instabilisque fortuna. Quod autem a nobis est, dominatu caret. On necessity describing the mechanical sequence of cause and effect rather than a world made by intelligent design, see Sedley (2007) 181–6. For an important discussion of necessity, fortune, and freedom in Machiavelli, see also Del Lucchese (2002), esp. 45, 57; Brown (2015). 7 DRN 2.1090–2; 1.1021–7, 2.300–2; 3.307–9 (cf. n. 18 in this chapter), 741–53; 5.855–77. 8 On the Epicurean psyche, see Gill (2009), esp. 126–8, 129, 140–1.

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the same humours as there always were’, so (following Lucretius’s rhythm) ‘it is, and always has been, and always will be, that evil follows after good, good after evil’.9 Within this unchanging universe of space and atoms, there is nevertheless constant movement, the second building block. ‘Things go on with incessant motion in every part’, causing species to increase and diminish in repetitive cycles of change as atoms come and go, according to Lucretius. Machiavelli agrees that ‘human affairs are always in a state of flux, they move either upwards or downwards’, and since ‘worldly things are not allowed by nature to stand still’, provinces go from order to disorder and back again, with varying degrees of success, ‘men’s deeds’ being ‘sometimes more effective in this country or that according to the type of education from which their inhabitants have derived their way of life’.10 And the third building block is freedom, which for Lucretius was provided by the swerve, enabling ‘living creatures all over the earth to go freely where pleasure leads us, swerving our motions just where our mind has taken us’. This is the most controversial element in Machiavelli’s tripartite world, in view of his reputation as a fatalist who believed—according to Anthony Parel—in astral determinism. However, Machiavelli’s marginal comment on Lucretius’s passage on freedom that I have already quoted—that thanks to the swerve, ‘we have a free mind’ (motum varium esse & ex eo nos liberam habere mentem)—shows the importance he attributed to it.11 Read in conjunction with Machiavelli’s two references to free will in the early 1500s (one misinterpreted, the other omitted by Parel), it seems clear that he was rethinking the problem of free will at this time and now agreed with Lucretius that men and animals did enjoy free volition. In the first of these, the Florentine astrologer Bartolomeo Vespucci’s reply in 1504 to Machiavelli’s no longer extant letter, Vespucci agrees with him that, although the stars are unchanging, the wise man can adapt himself to changing circumstances ‘and change himself ’. And in the second, Machiavelli’s ghiribizzi or musings to Gian Battista 9 Brown (2010a) 76, citing DRN 2.294–303; Machiavelli, Discourses, 2, pref.; 1.39; 3.43 (‘di necessità’) (1971), 145, 122, 250; (1989 = Chief Works, cited here and subsequently for its page references, not usually following its translation), i. 322, 278, 521. 10 DRN 1.995; 2.71–9; Machiavelli, Discourses, 2, pref.; 3.43; Istorie fiorentine, 5.1 (1971) 145, 250, 738; (1989) i. 322, 521; iii. 1232. 11 DRN 2.250–5, in MS Vat. Rossi 884 fol. 25r, discussed by Brown (2010a) 74 and n. 16. See Parel (1992), esp. 75–7.

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Soderini in 1506, Machiavelli adds, in a contrapuntal marginal comment, that ‘each man must do what his mind prompts him and try his luck with daring, regaining the initiative when fortune slackens off by behaving differently from usual’. This in turn is entirely consistent with what he says about free will in The Prince, chapter 25, where he replaces the traditional view of a world governed ‘by fortune and by God’, with a world in which power is shared between fortune and men, ‘in order to keep our free will alive’, thereby effectively excluding the providential role of God, who he tells us in the following chapter, ‘doesn’t want to do everything in order not to deprive us of free will’.12 Reading Machiavelli through the lens of Lucretius, it seems clear that freedom meant for him free volition, suggesting that in practice he believed a wise and energetic man could ‘change step’ and think outside the box (as we might put it today). It had little or nothing to do with the moral freedom of Christians to choose between good and evil, as scholars like Cary Nederman suggest. Machiavelli apparently rejected the idea of individual souls, translating anima as imagination rather than as soul or spirit, and he was considered by his friends not to be an orthodox Christian.13 Moreover, he evidently shared Lucretius’s belief that this mental freedom was a natural attribute of ‘all living creatures’, animals as well as men. Lucretius illustrates this with two examples, by a horse’s moment of delay in moving after the gates are raised and by man’s ability to resist pressure to move. For Machiavelli, man’s freedom consists in his ability to change step, and animals’ freedom is represented by the upstanding boar’s refusal to return to being a human in his poem, the Golden Ass—as well as by the advice Machiavelli gave to his son Guido in 1527, to let their mad mule go free so it could ‘regain its own way of life’.14 This suggests that Epicurean naturalism exercised a powerful influence 12 On Vespucci’s letter and the Ghiribizzi, see Sasso (1988) 2, 42–56, esp. 43, 52–3; Brown (2010a), 73–4 (the former mistranslated by Parel (1992) 76, and the marginal addition to the Ghiribizzi not mentioned). The Ghiribizzi (13–21 Sept. 1506: ‘che ognun facci quello che li detta l’animo et con audacia’) are in Machiavelli (1984) 242â, (2004) 134; Prince, ch. 25 (‘perché el nostro libero arbitrio non si spento’) and ch. 26 (‘Dio non vuole fare ogni cosa, per non ci torre el libero arbitrio’, in Machiavelli (1971) 295, 297, (1989) i. 90, 94. On Machiavelli’s free will and the hendiadys ‘fortune and God’, see De Caro (2013), esp. 122–3. 13 Brown (2010a) 71 n. 11 (on Nederman) and 80–3 (on Machiavelli’s religion). 14 DRN 2.263–71, 272–83, discussed by O’Keefe (2009) 144; Machiavelli (1971) 973, 1248–9, (1989) ii. 770; (2004) 413; cf. Brown (2010a) 84.

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on Machiavelli’s outlook, replacing Graeco-Arabic fatalism and Christian providentialism with a balance of the same three forces, free will, necessity, and chance, that Epicurus had described.15 It provides the context for understanding the coherence of the political and ethical ideas that developed from these early building blocks.

2. HARD PRIMITIVISM AND THE GROWTH OF EXPEDIENT J USTICE AND RELIGION Machiavelli’s account of man’s early development is restricted to a few lines in his Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, book 1, chapter 2, where he describes how, ‘at the beginning of the world, when there were few inhabitants, men lived for a time scattered like animals’—or, as Lucretius put it, ‘in the roving manner of wild beasts’.16 He refers implicitly to this early stage of life in chapter 16, in which he compared people restored to freedom after living under a prince to ‘a brutish animal . . . by nature fierce and silvan but brought up entirely in prison and in servitude’; both, he said, would fall prey to the first person who tried to recapture them if released into freedom because they would have lost their primitive survival skills.17 This ‘natural instinct’ for self-survival would direct our ‘movements and passions’ if not restrained by law or force, Machiavelli wrote in his poem On Ambition, where (like Lucretius) he also referred to education polishing or ‘supplementing’ nature.18 Florentines were already familiar with Lucretius’s ‘hard primitivist’ account of early man, which contrasted with what Lovejoy and Boas call the ‘soft primitivism’ of Ovid’s ‘golden first age’ in his popular

15 See n. 6. Although Lucretius is the most obvious source of Machiavelli’s Epicureanism, he used Diogenes Laertius’s Lives for his Life of Castruccio Castracani and is likely to have known it earlier; see Garin (1970) 55–6; Sasso (1987–8) i. 202–3; Rahe (2008) 34–5. 16 Machiavelli (1971) 79; (1989) i. 197; cf. DRN 5.932. 17 Discourses, 1.16: ‘un animale bruto . . . di natura feroce e silvestre . . . nutrito sempre in carcere ed in servitù’, Machiavelli (1971) 99, (1989) i. 235. 18 Dell ambizione, 79–81: ‘istinto natural, per proprio moto e propria passione’, 113–14, ‘perché può supplire l’educazion dove natura manca’, Machiavelli (1971) 985, (1989) ii. 737; cf. Discourses, 3.43; DRN 3.307–9: quamvis doctrina politos constituat . . . tamen illa relinquit naturae cuiusque animi vestigia prima.

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Metamorphoses.19 Bartolomeo Scala was one of the first Florentines to use Lucretius when describing to Cosimo de’ Medici in 1463 (probably using Cosimo’s own early copy of Lucretius) how primitive men were: at first rough and uncouth, scattered about in woods, without culture, without shrines, without a settled home. They used tree trunks to shelter from the force and turbulence of winds, and they came forth as naked and shaggy creatures.

Although Scala professed this was no more than a myth, Lucretius’s primitivism was picked up by other early readers of De rerum natura— such as Bartolomeo Fonzio, who wrote in the margin of Francesco Sassetti’s copy, ‘on the first kind of man and how wild and uncultivated he was’. In November 1495, a year after the French invasion of Italy and the downfall of the Medici regime, four lines of Lucretius’s account of life ante legem were quoted openly in Marcello Adriani’s public inaugural university lecture of the year to describe the state Florence then found itself in, where, he said, quoting De rerum natura 5.958–61, men ‘couldn’t look to the common good, knew no customs and used no laws; each man carried off the booty that fortune gave him, learning to survive and live off his own bat’—a state of primitivism confirmed two years later by one of Adriani’s students when he told his former teacher that ‘we live as we please’.20 Lucretian primitivism would have been entirely familiar to Machiavelli as well, since he was also one of Adriani’s students and his father a friend of Scala’s. So despite dealing so briefly with early man in this chapter of the Discourses, his view of man’s nature was consistent with the idea that survival and self-defence, not Ciceronian moral improvement, was early men’s objective in first banding together.21 These were the utilitarian origins of natural justice and religion. According to Machiavelli, justice developed after primitive men had gathered together as their numbers increased, choosing in order to defend themselves the strongest and bravest man as their leader (capo): It was thus that men learnt to distinguish between what is honest and good from what is pernicious and wicked, for the sight of someone

19 Lovejoy and Boas (1935) 10–11, on 43–7 citing Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.76–215 (89: aurea prima sata est aetas). See also Gambino Longo (2011). 20 Scala (1997) 276; (2008) 72–5; Brown (2010a) 26, 30 (on Fonzio), 44 and n. 5. 21 On the contrast between Lucretius’s and Cicero’s primitivism, see Lovejoy and Boas (1935) 243–59; Schiesaro (2007) 46, 51–2.

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injuring his benefactor evoked in them hatred and sympathy . . . well aware that the same injuries might have been done to themselves.

To prevent this happening, they began to make laws and punish those who broke them, ‘and so the notion of justice came into being’.22 This account compresses what is a two-part process in Epicurus and Lucretius, first a covenant or agreement not to harm or be harmed by another, and then the creation of laws which established the concept of justice. The first stage, summarized by Epicurus in maxim 31 (natural justice is a symbol or expression of expediency, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another), was expanded by Lucretius into a description of how men were softened by mating and having children and joined up with neighbours for self-protection; eager ‘not to hurt nor suffer violence’ (nec laedere nec violari), they formed agreements (foedera) that most people observed in order to preserve the human race.23 It was after kings had been appointed and overthrown that ‘statutes and strict rules of law’ (and punishments) were established. This is the second stage: only after this is it possible to talk of justice, according to Epicurus, but even so justice was not based on absolute standards (‘there never was an absolute justice’, ‘injustice in itself is not an evil’), nor was it universal (like Aristotle’s natural law), but instead it was based on what was agreed to be expedient by different communities of men.24 This is its novelty, and although Machiavelli’s account of justice is very summary, it adopts the key features of Epicurean justice that make it distinctive, in being expedient, based on agreement, and defined by laws made effective by punishment. These two stages in the establishment of justice help to explain the apparent contrast between what we might call the ‘soft’ and the ‘hard’ aspects of law in Machiavelli. The first stage, when men agreed ‘it was right for all to pity the weak’, as Lucretius put it, is based on the 22 Machiavelli (1971) 79–80 (‘donde venne la cognizione della giustizia’; (1989) i. 197 (tr. Walker, Machiavelli (1950) i. 212–13). 23 Diogenes Laertius (1972) ii. 673–7 (bk 10, §150–4, maxims 31–40, (1475) fol. 181: natura e ius utilitatis est signum, ut neque se invicem laedant neque laedantur; DRN 5.1011–27 at 1020, 1025. 24 Diogenes Laertius (1972) ii. 675 (bk 10, §152, maxims 33–4), (1475) fol. 181r: Iustitia nihil per se esset, verum in contractibus mutuis quibuslibet locis id foedus initur ut non laedamus neque laedamur. Iniuria per se malum non est; 181v: quod expediat in usu mutuae societatis eorum quae iusta putantur esse, etc. On the distinctivness of Epicurean justice and its two stages, Alberti (1995), esp. 166, 186–7.

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precept of not doing to another what you don’t want done to yourself, or, as Machiavelli puts it, feeling hate and compassion at the sight of someone injuring one’s benefactor, well aware that we might suffer the same injuries. This ‘sign of expediency’ (signum utilitatis), was identical to the Golden Rule preached by Christ in his Sermon of the Mount—as Bartolomeo Scala acknowledged in his 1483 Dialogue on Laws and Legal Judgments, a work that Machiavelli certainly would have known, since his father figured in it. It is also the same precept of reciprocity that Hobbes describes as his second ‘law of nature’ in the Leviathan, which he, too, compares to ‘that Law of the Gospell; whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them’.25 The contrast between this first stage of establishing justice and the second lies in the introduction of harsher—and to us post-Freudians more alarming—laws that relied on the psychology of fear to be effective. The hidden fear of punishment, metus poenarum, stalks Lucretius’s poem, where it is described as ‘tainting the prizes of life’, assailing wrongdoers in their asleep, and, in order to propitiate the wrath of the gods, ‘filling the cities with altars and performances of sacred rites’.26 Fear of punishment as both a political and a religious sanction is also omnipresent in Machiavelli’s writings. As he often told his friend Francesco Vettori, fear is ‘the greatest master there is’, and in the Prince chapter 17 he said it was better to be feared than loved, because ‘fear is sustained by a dread of punishment that never leaves you’.27 Fear became a recurrent word in Machiavelli’s political lexicon and a key concept for his psychological analyses of Roman history, in the way that Gabriele Pedullà has recently described.28 Nor was it only an instrument of control since it also served to undermine contracted obligations, as we can see from Machiavelli’s poem Ingratitude, where the prince’s confidence in his supporters is undermined, because ‘his fear of you is more potent than the obligation incurred’.29

25 Scala (1997) 344; (2008) 174–5, citing Matthew 22:37; cf. Brown (2010a) 29, 85; Hobbes (1996) 92 (Leviathan, ch. 14). 26 DRN 5.1151–68; cf. Alberti (1995) 173, citing the Epicurean Hermarchus on ‘fear of the penalty laid down by the law’ being the only remedy against ‘ignorance of the useful’. 27 Machiavelli (1971) 1238, 282; (2004) 395; (1989) i. 62. 28 Pedullà (2011) ch. 2, esp. 242–6, referring to his special debt to Lucretius on 245. 29 Dell’ingratitudine, 172–6: ‘perché li è più potente la paura ch’egli ha di te, che l’obligo contratto’; cf. Discourses, 1.29; Machiavelli (1971) 983, 110–12; (1989) i. 744; ii. 257–8.

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The use of fear as a religious weapon of control had been expounded by Marcello Adriani, Machiavelli’s teacher, in his Lucretian 1497 inaugural lecture Nil admirari (‘Fear Nothing’), which explained to his students how propitiatory religion exploited their fear of the unknown by holding them in its thrall instead of liberating them—that is, by making them wait until the Last Judgment to settle their debts in order to extort from them more gifts (indulgences), as though God was a pawnbroker, he said, not a healer.30 Adriani’s approach to religion was anthropological in using the example of the ancient Egyptians and the Romans to explain the origins of propitiatory religion, but it was also political in aiming its attack at Savonarola for what Adriani saw as his abuse of power. The same is true of Machiavelli, for whom the anthropological function of religion lay in keeping people happy and united through prayers and ceremonies, whereas its political function was to control them—as Savonarola did, in claiming that he enjoyed Moses’s divine prophetic authority and then using it to frighten the people that they could only be saved by placating God with ‘fasting, alms, and prayers’. As Machiavelli wrote in the Discourses, 1.11: There never was a lawgiver who didn’t seek God’s help when introducing extraordinary laws, for otherwise they would not have been accepted. . . . [Even] the Florentines were persuaded by fra Girolamo Savonarola that he talked with God.31

Although Machiavelli was clearly influenced by his experience of Savonarola, as well as by historians like Polybius, it is his psychological understanding of the role of fear in religion and politics that makes his view distinctively Lucretian. According to Lucretius, it was only in the fourth stage of social evolution, introduced by the discovery of gold, that laws and the fear of punishment began to ‘taint the prizes of life’. This followed the first state of nature, in which men and animals fought each other as equals, then the second stage, when primitive communities agreed, or ‘contracted’, not to hurt each other (since it was not 30

Brown (2010a) 53–5, and (on the title of his lecture, Nil admirari) 51–2. Discourses, 1.11 (cf. Prince, 6), L’asino, 5.106–11 (‘digiuni, limosine, orazione’), Machiavelli (1971) 94–5 (264–5), 967), (1989) i. 225–6 (26–7), ii. 763; Brown (2010a), 78–9, cf. 29 on Scala (how Minos and Moses used fables to make people more obedient ‘by invoking the authority of the gods’; Scala (1997) 357; (2008) 210–11). On the two facets of Machiavelli’s approach to religion, see Najemy (1999), esp. 663. 31

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considered wrong to pity the weak), and the third stage, when an alpha-group of natural leaders emerged to transform primitive life in new ways, headed by kings distinguished by ‘beauty, strength, and genius’, who founded cities protected by citadels.32 Although the order of Machiavelli’s cycle of change is slightly different from Lucretius’s and more influenced by the Greek historians Polybius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus in advocating mixed government as the solution to corruption, he nevertheless adopted key features of Lucretius’s account of social evolution and especially its emphasis on psychological factors.33 The destructive role of ambition is a recurrent theme in both Lucretius and Machiavelli. Lucretius’s attack on the folly of ‘sweating blood in struggling along the narrow path of ambition’ in book 5 is anticipated in earlier books by his description of the pleasure for an Epicurean of gazing from the safety of the shore at others’ tribulations, as they try to ‘climb the pinnacle of riches and lay hold on power’, or as they vainly push rocks up a hill like Sisyphus, ‘to solicit power that is never granted’.34 This desolate image was used by Machiavelli to describe his own situation to Francesco Vettori in December 1513, in vainly offering to roll stones for the Medici in order to get a job that was not granted.35 Less personally, the folly of ambition is not only the theme of his poem to Luigi Guicciardini On Ambition and his autobiographical poem the Golden Ass but it runs throughout the first book of the Discourses as the driving force of political unrest and change.36 In Discourses 1.5 Machiavelli described how the wealthy’s fear of losing their possessions made them acquire more, which stimulated those without possessions or power to emulate them. This in turn led to the degeneration he had described in chapter 2, for once power became hereditary, ‘heirs began to degenerate from their ancestors’, provoking a Buddenbrooks cycle of decline

32

DRN 5.925–1160 (esp. 1111: pro facie cuiusque et viribus ingenioque), this ‘innovative five-stage account’ of evolution is described by Schiesaro (2007) 43–5. 33 On the cycle of change and the ‘gradualist’ or evolutionary approach of Dionysius and Machiavelli, see Pedullà (2011), esp. 437–41. 34 DRN 5.1131–2; 2.12–13; 3.62–3, 995–1002 (998: nam petere imperium quod inanest nec datur unquam). 35 Machiavelli (1971) 1160; (1989) ii. 930; (2004) 265; on Sisyphus, see Raimondi (1998) 37–43. 36 See Najemy (2010b) 102–10, and my n. 38.

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as they spent the money their fathers had created and devoted themselves to lives of luxury.37 The novelty of this psychological explanation of acquisition and degeneration distinguishes Lucretius and Machiavelli from writers like Cicero and Sallust and their humanist followers in Florence, who attacked ambition and the love of riches from a moral stance, for undermining the traditional Roman virtues of piety, nobility, and honour.38 By contrast, instead of attempting to eradicate these passions, Machiavelli, like Lucretius, accepted that they were part of human nature and needed to be controlled, not destroyed, which for Machiavelli meant incorporating conflict and dissent within the political system.39 Novel though this was, it was in fact Machiavelli’s naturalistic ethics that proved more subversive, as we can see from his poem the Golden Ass. Written around 1517, after Machiavelli’s loss of office, the poem’s use of animals to criticize men’s ‘civilized’ behaviour offers another route to understanding the influence of Lucretian primitivism on his expedient morality.

3. MEN AND ANIMALS As Machiavelli spells out in the Golden Ass, animals are not only born stronger and better equipped for life than man, whom he describes, as Lucretius did, as a wailing puer nudus at birth, but they also retained the natural virtues of prudence, temperance, and courage, from which men were diverted by their ambition. The poem describes Machiavelli’s early life of incessant activity—not even Christ could stop him running up the wide Via Larga, where the Medici had their palace—until his loss of office led to a Dantesque mid-life crisis from which a beautiful handmaid of Circe eventually rescued him. As guardian of Circe’s flocks of men transformed into animals, she offered him the 37 Discourses 1.2 (‘subito cominciarono li eredi a degenerare dai loro antichi’) and 1.5; Machiavelli (1971) 84, 80; (1989) ii. 206, 197–8; cf. my n. 49 and Guicciardini (1951) 39–40, no. 33. 38 Schiesaro (2007) 45–51; Pedullà (2011) 325–33: though written without reference to each other, both make the same point about the novelty respectively of Lucretius and Machiavelli in their approach to ambition. 39 Pedullà (2011), esp. 123–33, 196–8, 333–6 (citing Discourses, 1.4, 6–7, 37, 46; Istorie fiorentine, 3.1, 7.1).

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opportunity to talk to one of them, the boar, who after refusing the chance of being changed back into a human, set out to destroy Machiavelli’s ‘self-love’ by demonstrating that animals are much more moral than humans. They are more prudent than men in choosing for themselves the appropriate climate in which to live and the appropriate food to eat, whereas men move restlessly to seek wealth, often to unhealthy climates and polluted atmospheres. Animals are stronger than men and act valorously without the spur of glory. They are also more temperate, spending little time on love-making or on searching for rare foods. And they are ‘closer friends to Nature’, fully clad and sharper in all the senses except for touch, whereas man is born weeping and lives unprotected except by his hands and speech, which he uses only to feed his ambition and avarice and to kill, crucify, and plunder others.40 Since the virtues of prudence, courage, and temperance constitute (with justice) the four cardinal virtues in classical and medieval moral schema—as in the Good Government frescoes in Siena, for example41—Machiavelli is making the point that, far from enjoying an a priori status, these virtues, like justice, all have a natural, utilitarian origin. The Golden Ass can be read as a satire in which Machiavelli lampoons his contemporaries as animals, or as an Aesopic fable that uses animals as moral exempla—like the Prince, which we are told ‘turns Cicero upside down’ in recommending the beastly fox and lion as models for a prince.42 But if we approach both works from the viewpoint of Machiavelli’s primitivism, we read them not as satires but as evidence of his nature-based morality, according to which animals exemplify the necessary self-survival skills that Lucretius had described. Subversive though this morality was in narrowing the gap between humans and animals, it was based on a historical understanding of how animals had survived in primitive nature and which traits had ensured their survival. Since the same traits had left traces in human genes as well, animal behaviour was more relevant to humans than classical moralists like Cicero suggested.

40 L’asino, esp. bk 8, Machiavelli (1971) 973–6 (1989) ii. 750–72; see Sasso (1991–4); Brown (2010a) 83–4. 41 Skinner (1986) 46–55; Donato (2001) at 66. 42 Skinner, intro. to Machiavelli (1988) pp. xix–xx; cf. Cicero, De officiis 1.13.41. On L’asino as satire, see Anselmi and Fazion (1984); Inglese (1985); and my n. 44.

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There is another natural quality shared by men and animals, that is, the free will to go ‘where pleasure leads us’ and ‘where our mind has taken us’, as Lucretius described it in the passage picked out by Machiavelli in his transcription.43 In the Golden Ass free will is exemplified by the boar’s refusal to be turned back into a man after his transformation by Circe, since he believes he is better off as an animal, more independent and more moral than humans. Although Machiavelli borrowed this episode from Plutarch’s Gryllus, the boar’s defiant words, as he rises upright on his feet (‘I don’t want to live with you and I refuse’) are Machiavelli’s own and represent the argument that animals as well as men—‘all living creatures’—have the ability to move independently in response to their own free will.44 In the Prince, this ability enables an exceptional leader to buck the trend and break the downward cycle of political decline in the space left to him by God and fortune. For as we have seen in the passages in chapters 25 and 26 already described, Machiavelli transformed the traditional view that fortune and God were jointly responsible for what happened in the world by suggesting that fortune shares with us, not with God, half of the responsibility for events, in order to prevent our free will from being extinguished.45 In referring to both fortune and God, Machiavelli makes it clear that he is asserting the individual’s freedom of action in the face of traditional theories of Christian providence and Graeco-Arabic astrological fatalism. The extent of his challenge to these traditions is shown by his role in Luigi Guicciardini’s draft dialogue On Man’s Free Will.46 In it, the character ‘Niccolò’ wants to hear from ‘some serious and learned man’ how ‘divine providence, the influx of the heavens, and the free desires of humans’ can be reconciled. Despite the difficulty (we are told) of reconciling the evils in the world with divine providence, and moral responsibility with natural determinism,

43 quo ducit quemque voluptas . . . ubi ipsa tulit mens (DRN 2.258–60). In transcribing Pomponio Leto’s reading of 2.262, Machiavelli wrote that ‘men’ are ‘ruled’ by their will through their limbs, rather than that the will conveys movement through the limbs; see Brown (2010a) 74. 44 ‘Viver con voi io non voglio, e rifiuto’ (8, at 28), Machiavelli (1971) 973; (1989) ii. 769–72 (770); cf. Brown (2010a) 84; Rahe (2008) 35; Plutarch (1957) xii. 492–533 (§985–92, esp. 986 F–988 E); on its ambivalent readings, see Warner (1997). 45 See n. 12. 46 See Guicciardini (Luigi), ‘Del Libero Arbitrio’, partly edited and discussed by Gilbert (1937). For Machiavelli’s poem De ambizione to Luigi, see n. 18.

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the two other disputants, ‘Cesare’ and ‘Girolamo’ both speak as Christians for whom free will can never contradict religion, leaving Machiavelli exposed as a doubter or agnostic, who ‘if I didn’t doubt, wouldn’t have an intellect, nor would I merit more for believing the truth than someone who had never thought about it’. Equally transgressive is his natural morality, which the dialogue goes on to contrast with Girolamo’s conventional morality that draws a clear distinction between men and animals. For whereas the lives of animals are ordered by Nature, Girolamo says, men order their own lives, using legislation to promote virtue (especially poverty, ‘the true mother and origin of all virtuous deeds’) and condemn its enemy, leisure. To this, ‘Niccolò’ immediately objects that, since men strive all their lives to escape poverty and enjoy leisure, ‘Nature would have been too harmful to humans, to have given them appetites so contrary and—according to you—injurious to their health’.47 The dialogue is unfinished and post-dates Machiavelli’s death in 1527. The role it assigns to ‘Niccolò’ nevertheless usefully highlights the novelty of Machiavelli’s naturalistic ethics in suggesting— contrary to what Girolamo had said—that men and animals share the same passions and the same love of freedom. This view is entirely consistent with the real Machiavelli’s emphasis on man’s acquisitive and ambitious nature, which he thought should be acknowledged and controlled rather than eradicated. So in the Prince he warns the prince not to ‘touch the property of citizens and subjects’, for ‘men sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony’, and in later chapters, commenting that ‘most men live happily provided they’re not deprived of their property or their honour’, he anticipates the Discourses in writing that citizens must be encouraged to practise their trades and professions freely without fear of losing their possessions or having them overtaxed.48 As we saw, the fear of

47 ‘Del libero arbitrio’, citing 65v (‘lungo tempo ho bramato udire da qualche grave et doctissimo huomo discorrere . . . come insieme unitamente concorrino . . . la divina providentia, l’influxo celeste, con le libere volontà humane’); 63v (‘Se io non dubitassi, non harei intellecto, né meriterei più nel credere di poi el vero che coloro che non mai ci pensorono’); 67r (‘la vera madre et la propria origine d’ogni virtuosissima opera’); 67v (‘Per certo, la Natura harebbe con troppo danno de’ mortali introducto nel animo di ciascuno appetiti tanto contrarii et tanto inimici seconda la opinione vostra della salute delli homini’). 48 Prince, chs. 17, 19, 21; cf. Discourses, 3.23 and Istorie fiorentine 2.1, Machiavelli (1971) 282, 284, 292–3, 230–1, 658–9, (1989) i. 62–3, 67, 84; iii. 1080.

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losing one’s possessions provides the dynamic that drives those who already own property to want more, in order not to lose what they have, and the have-nots to emulate them, partly for revenge and partly to become rich and powerful themselves.49 But instead of condemning this vicious cycle, Machiavelli suggests that the force of its driving passions should be used to build a prosperous and competitive state, whether it is a princely state or—better—a republic, since: all towns and all countries that are in all respects free profit by this enormously. For populations increase where marriages are made freely, since everyone is happy to have children if he is sure that he can raise them and that his patrimony won’t be taken away, and that not only are they born free and not slaves, but through their ability they can become rulers. Riches multiply . . . for everyone tries to acquire possessions that they think they can enjoy once they’ve acquired them. So it comes about that competing with one another, men look to their own and the public advantage, so that both make wonderful progress.50

The lesson of the Discourses, that laws and institutions are necessary to control men’s ambition and desire for material prosperity, is also the moral lesson of Epicurus. When we have achieved ‘tolerable security against our fellow-men’, he writes in one of his maxims, with enough power to be materially prosperous, then we achieve the genuine freedom from care that is provided by ‘a quiet private life withdrawn from the multitude’.51 Both men believed that material prosperity depended on being safe from assault—the first concern of early societies—and free enough to pursue our desires, which for most people was more important than exercising power. For ‘in all republics . . . there are never more than forty or fifty citizens capable of holding power, all the rest, for whom it’s enough to live in security, can easily be satisfied by laws which provide general security as well as protecting the ruler’.52

49

Discourses, 1.5, Machiavelli (1971) 84, (1989) i. 206. Discourses, 2.2, Machiavelli (1971) 150, (1989) i. 332. 51 Diogenes Laertius (1972) ii. 669 (bk 10, §143, maxim 14), (1475) fol. 180v: cum humana securitas fuerit usque ad aliquid virtusque innixa et purissima fecunditas sit, quae ex quiete et quae a multis recedendo securitas provenit. 52 Discourses, 1.16; cf. Istorie fiorentine, 2.1, on the security provided by new towns in conquered territories; Machiavelli (1971) 100–1, 658–9, (1989) i. 237; iii. 1080–1. 50

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4. CONCLUSION It is possible to trace the influence of Epicurus and Lucretius in other fields that are less directly connected with Machiavelli’s ‘hard primitivism’ but which nevertheless reveal the influence of Epicurean naturalism and expedient ethics on his thinking. For instance, he shared their argument that language—like law and justice—develops naturally from animal-like sounds and not from pre-existing concepts, since like them it systematizes useful practices that are not based on such concepts or norms but develop spontaneously for their practical utility.53 Machiavelli agreed with Lucretius that we need to use ‘new words’ to describe new concepts, and also to incorporate words from other countries and cultures in order to enrich our own expanding culture and record it for posterity, developing this double argument in his Discourse or Dialogue on our Language and in his Florentine Histories.54 But whereas for Lucretius it was the dearth of Latin vocabulary in which to describe ‘the obscure concepts of the Greeks’ that required new words, for Machiavelli new words were required to describe not only new scientific concepts but also his own novel political ideas. The analogy between language and law suggests his political vocabulary may have benefited from his naturalistic theory of justice and morality in enabling him to use new, value-free words that no longer carried traditional moral overtones—in order to achieve what has recently been called the ‘technification of his lexicon’.55 We can also see Lucretius exerting his subtle influence on Machiavelli in the canzone Machiavelli wrote for his beloved mistress, the singer Barbera Salutati Raffacani, towards the end of his life in 1525–6: ‘How sweet is the deception . . . that deprives another of distress and sweetens every bitter taste. O sublime and rare remedy that shows the straight path to wandering souls, you, O Love . . . ’ The song plays on the famous lines Suave, mari magno that open book 2: ‘How sweet it is when the sea is rough to watch another’s distress from the shore’, and then, from book 6, on Lucretius’s equally famous praise of Epicurus, who ‘showed us the straight and narrow path to which 53

This analogy is discussed by Alberti (1995) 170–1. DRN 1.138–9, 831–2; 3.260; 5.1028–32, 1041–3, 1440–57; Machiavelli, Discorso (1982) at 28–33, Istorie fiorentine, 1.5, (1971) 926, 637, (1989) iii. 1040; cf. Brown (2013) 9–10. On the originality of this double Epicurean argument, see Atherton (2009) 208–9. 55 By Pedullà (2011) 148–9. 54

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we should run without turning’.56 Written with other songs as intermezzi for Machiavelli’s plays La Mandragola and La Clizia, it is not surprising that the canzone alludes to their themes of deception and remedy—as well as to the theme of pleasure, the Epicureans’ ‘highest good’ and ‘guide of life’. Satirical though the plays may be, the presence of De rerum natura in the song reminds us once again of the hold that Lucretius still exercised over Machiavelli, who wittily celebrates in his play the animal traits of guile and deception and even the young man’s freedom to ‘change step’ in order to overcome oldfashioned superstition.57 Pulling these threads together, we can see how much Lucretius and the Epicureans contributed to Machiavelli’s transgression and to his morality, which Riccardo Fubini describes as his unique and paradoxical combination of ‘brutal naturalism and passionate moralism’.58 By following only the Epicureans’ influence on Machiavelli and not that of other ancient writers, I have hoped to show how consistently their philosophical outlook influenced Machiavelli’s, imposing coherence on the wide range of topics he wrote about and making him break as openly as they did with the accepted orthodoxies of the day—hence his ‘transgression’. In insisting on the freedom of all living creatures to act independently, despite the constraints of necessity and chance, Machiavelli was adopting the Epicurean balance of forces that ran counter to Christian providentialism and Aristotelian teleology.59 This was also true of his emphasis on the importance of the passions and animal traits in man’s psyche, which similarly contrasted with the views of classical moralists and Christians. This in turn encouraged the importance Machiavelli attributed to psychological explanations of human behaviour, especially the force of fear and ambition on man’s development, which then became the basis of his naturalistic or expedient ethics—do to others what you would like them to do to you, and if they don’t, then punish them.

56

Philip Hardie (personal communication) also suggests the possible influence on this canzone of Lucretius 1.938, 940–1 (on sweetening with mellis dulci flavoque liquore the amarum absinthi laticem). 57 Machiavelli (1971) 882, 909; (1989) ii. 804 and 857; see Brown (2013) 9–10. On Mandragola as a ‘play about Florentine politics’, see Martinez (2010) 212–19; on the intermezzi, see Bruni (2005), esp. 382–4, 390–2. 58 Fubini (2009) 288: ‘paradossale combinazione, che solum è sua, di naturalismo brutale e di appassionato moralismo’. 59 See n. 6.

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Translated into political counsel, as realistic advice to the prince to rule by fear and force, to break his word, and, if necessary for his survival, even adopt the appearance instead of the practice of virtue, Machiavelli’s apparent relativism has encouraged his posthumous reputation for immorality and wickedness.60 Yet if we assess him by looking backwards to his Epicurean roots, which judged good and evil by ‘sober reasoning’, ‘measuring one against the other and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences’, we find this is exactly what Machiavelli does. Unlike Pope Julius II, whom he accused of behaving rashly in having ‘no scales or measuring stick in his house’, Machiavelli evaluates good and bad outcomes and bases his judgement on them, writing famously in the Prince that ‘in the actions of all men, and especially of princes (where there is no appeal to a higher judgement), one looks to the end’—and if the end or outcome is good, the means to it will be judged favourably.61 And if instead of looking backwards we look forward, we find that Thomas Hobbes, too, shares the same Epicurean approach in judging good and evil by measuring their advantages and disadvantages, or what he calls ‘Reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting) of the Consequences’. Accordingly, his first ‘precept or general rule of reason’ is ‘That every man, ought to endeavour Peace’.62 The second precept of his ‘law of nature’—as we have already seen—was identical to Machiavelli’s (and Epicurus’s) natural law of expedient self-interest, ‘Do unto others’, and since he also shared Machiavelli’s view of men’s ambitious and acquisitive nature that created an endless fight for power—what Hobbes calls ‘a state of war’—he too concluded that the most expedient solution was to provide a government whose laws would provide security for its citizens to enjoy their possessions in peace.63 His social contract is also a two-stage process, the second stage imposing laws with punishments after an initial agreement, or ‘contract’, not to do to others what you 60

See Anglo (2005), esp. 17–18, chs. 4, 9, etc.; Kahn (2010) 244–7. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus; Diogenes Laertius (1972) ii. 655 (bk 10, §130), (1475) fol. 178v: ‘Commensione itaque et utilium inutiliumque discretione diligenti haec omnia iudicare convenit’; Ghiribizzi to Soderini: ‘questa papa, che non ha né stadera, né canna in casa’, Prince, ch. 18, Machiavelli (1984) 242–3, (2004) 135, (1971) 1082, 284, (1989) i. 67. 62 Leviathan, chs. 5 and 14, Hobbes (1996), 32, 92 6; De Cive, 2.1–2, Hobbes (1991) 123. On Hobbes’s Epicureanism, see Pacchi (1978); Rahe (2008) 291–320, esp. n. 3, listing at length the works in which it is unmentioned. 63 Leviathan, chs. 14, 13, Hobbes (1996) 91–2, 86–90; cf. De Cive, 1.12; 3.26, (1991) 117–18, 148. 61

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don’t want done to yourself—and since verbal consent to the initial agreement was too weak to be relied on, ‘the Passion to be reckoned upon’, as he puts it, ‘is Fear’.64 So fear was as important a weapon of political control for Hobbes as it was for Machiavelli. The most significant difference between them concerned free will. In Machiavelli’s cosmos, the play of chance and the necessary laws of cause and effect left space for the individual to act ‘through his own agency’ that was lacking in Hobbes.65 Nevertheless, in the context of his discussion with Bramhall about ‘Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance’, Hobbes—as his title suggests—was much closer to Machiavelli and the Epicureans in adopting their tripartite, naturalistic approach to what had previously been defined in terms of theology or fatalistic determinism. Like them, he thought freedom was compatible with necessity and chance—not because he shared their view that free will consists in acting ‘through our own agency’, but because he agreed with them that freedom to pursue our pleasure consisted in evaluating, or weighing-up, outcomes and adopting one’s ‘last opinion of the goodness or evilness’ of the object, ‘be the opinion true or false’, which he, too, believed animals were as capable of doing as men (as a materialist, for whom ‘will is appetite’, Hobbes defined liberty as being able to choose whether to eat or not when hungry, but not whether to be hungry or not, which lay in the realm of necessity).66 Although the Leviathan allowed less political freedom to its citizens than Machiavelli’s free republican state, Hobbes, like Machiavelli, recognized that for most citizens what mattered was the state’s ability to provide security and peace, so they could enjoy ‘the Liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own aboad, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit; & the like’.67 Machiavelli, for his part, pragmatically recommended that, after the death of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici in 1519, the Florentines should adopt a

64 Leviathan ch. 14, Hobbes (1996) 99; cf. De Cive, 1.3, (1991) 113; Pacchi (1978), esp. 68–9. 65 Leviathan ch. 21, Hobbes (1996) 145–54, esp. 145–6, De Cive 10.8 (1991) 228–9. On Hobbes’s progressive distancing himself from the void, simulacra, atoms, and man’s free will, despite his similar approach to language, law, and mortalism, see Pacchi (1978) 62–6, 69; cf. 68, 70–1, and my n. 63. 66 Hobbes (1999) 70, 72, 74, 87; De Caro (2004), esp. 7, 24. 67 Leviathan, ch. 21, Hobbes (1996) 148.

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government that he called ‘a monarchy’ during the lifetimes of the Medici popes before it reverted to being a republic when they died.68 By following the trail of what Gerard Passannante has aptly called the ‘absent presence’ of Lucretius in many early modern writings, we can identify the extent of his cumulative influence on both Machiavelli and Hobbes, and especially on Machiavelli.69 For thirty years, Lucretius provided an explanatory thread that runs through all Machiavelli’s writings, giving them coherence and explaining their novelty. Machiavelli is as transgressive as Lucretius and the Epicureans in breaking taboos by his naturalism, and he is equally forward-looking in grasping man’s psychology and basing his expedient morality and politics on it.

68 Discursus florentinarum rerum, Machiavelli (1971) 24–31 at 30 (‘è una monarchia’), (1989) ii. 101–15 at 113. 69 Passannante (2011), esp. 11–12; cf. Gambino Longo (2011), 25: ‘Lungi dall’essere dimenticato nascosto o censurato, il De rerum natura è una lettura costante lungo tutto il periodo che va dal suo ritrovamento per opera di Poggio Bracciolini alla sua presunta rinascita alla fine del ’500’.

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4 Poetic Flights or Retreats? Latin Lucretian Poems in Sixteenth-Century Italy Yasmin Haskell

The Italian Cinquecento was a period of literary and spiritual ferment, of rules and rule-breaking.1 It was above all a period of vernacularization2 yet it saw the publication in Latin of at least seven more or less Lucretian poems by authors who hovered at or boldly crossed the borders of Catholic orthodoxy: Aonio Paleario (= Antonio della Pagliara),3 De animorum immortalitate (before 1536); ‘Marcello Palingenio Stellato’,4 Zodiacus vitae (Venice: 1 On the stylistic iconoclasm of Giordano Bruno, see Barbèri-Squarotti (1960). I have compared Bruno’s anti-Petrarchan poetics to his no-punch-pulling Lucretian Latin style in Haskell (1998a). See also Paccagnella (1984). 2 Brundin summarizes the findings of scholars who have followed the lead of Carlo Dionisotti, relating the reach and appeal of reformed spirituality to the spread of vernacular literature. She concludes that ‘the movement for reform in Italy can be characterized as a vernacular movement’ (Brundin (2008) 4). 3 For his life, see Caponetto (1979). Dirk Sacré (1992) 31–65 gives the most complete account of the poem’s publication history. The first edition was probably printed in Italy in 1535; the Lyons one in 1536 is the first dated. Cf. Gallina (1989) i. 1–164 for editions of Paleario’s other works and historical bibliography. Unfortunately Sacré’s useful commentary on the poem remains unpublished, in Sacré (1986). 4 Jacopo Facciolati’s longstanding (since 1725) conjecture that ‘Marzello Palingenio’ was an anagram of ‘Pier Angelo Manzolli’, a native of Stellata, near Ferrara, has been debunked by Franco Bacchelli (1985), who concludes that Palingenius was probably born in Campania, was a professor of grammar, and was a friend to physicians if not a physician himself. His Latin, at any rate, was far from humanistic. Jacques Chomarat assumes he had a traditional scholastic education in a monastic school, with the expectation of becoming a priest, but that at some point he changed course and came to his Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, and Persius, relatively late (p. 8). See also Bacchelli (1990a; 1999; 2001); and Palumba (2007). I have not seen Bacchelli

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B. Vitali, 1535–6?); Lodovico Parisetti Junior,5 De immortalitate animae (Reggio Emilia: Antonio Viotti,6 1541); Scipione Capece,7 De principiis rerum (Venice, 1546); and, of course, Giordano Bruno, De triplici minimo et mensura, De monade numero et figura, and De innumerabilibus, immenso, et infigurabili (Frankfurt: Wechel, 1591).8 It should not be assumed, however, that all these poems are vehicles for veiled, let alone open, heresy, nor that they constitute, retrospectively, a de facto tradition. For one thing, they are stylistically quite miscellaneous: Palingenius’s eclectic and eccentric, a mish-mash of earthy moralizing and speculative cosmology;9 Capece’s an accomplished and surprisingly nonchalant imitation of the naturalphilosophical Lucretius;10 Parisetti’s anxiously pious,11 poetically unpretentious; Paleario’s polished, the product of recursive humanistic limae labor; and Bruno’s affectedly anti-humanist, off-the-cuff, difficult, and sometimes sublime. As to their contents, Palingenius (2008). The date of Palingenius’s death is unknown but must have preceded the publication in 1551 of L. G. Giraldi’s Dialogi duo de poetis suorum temporum which reports the posthumous exhumation and burning of the heretic’s corpse, ‘ob impietatis crimen’. His poem enjoyed an extraordinary fortune, mainly in Protestant countries (eighty Latin editions through to 1837: Bacchelli (2001) 153), but no Italian printings since the Venetian first. This is no doubt due to the fact that, as Palumba notes, it remained on the Index of Forbidden Books from 1557 to 1900 and was also censured in lists published by the University of Louvain (1558), and the Portuguese (1581) and Spanish Inquisition (1583). 5 See later in this chapter, 103–13. 6 Publisher of the first edition of Vittoria Colonna’s poetry. 7 For Capece’s life, see Parenti (1975); Bacchelli (1990a); and Nüssel (1999). 8 The De immenso and De minimo have the most evident affinities to Lucretius’s De rerum natura. 9 See Haskell (1999b) 91–9. 10 Pace Capece’s eighteenth-cent. Benedictine translator, Francesco Maria Ricci, who claimed that the poem was ‘indirizzato per qualche sua parte a combattere la perniziosa Poesia Lucreziana’, the De principiis rerum was clearly not conceived as an antiLucretian work, even though the Christian poet does, predictably, reject atomism. 11 In the proem to his first book Parisetti adopts a belt-and-braces approach, undertaking to expound material that is fully in conformity with the Church’s teaching: ‘I prefer to be thought ill-advised than too ingratiating. I promise that I shall say nothing about this subject which does not accord and conform with the sacred authors, from whom I reckon one should not diverge in the slightest degree. If anything falls out that seems at odds with the revealed mysteries [of our faith] I judge that it should be considered as if it were not said’ (Malo inconsultus haberi, / Quam nimis ambitiosus. Ego nil spondeo de re / Hac me asserturum, quod non consentiat, ac non / Conveniat sacris authoribus: a quibus unguem / Vel minimum divertendum non censeo. Siquid / Exciderit forsan: quod dissentire videri / Possit ab arcanis scriptis: id sentio habendum, / Ac si non dictum foret, p. 1).

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was disingenuously apologetic in his dedicatory letter to Ercole II of Ferrara, claiming to be an innocent mouthpiece for the heretical (Platonic) opinions of others.12 But whether and how the poet imagined he could get away with biting Erasmian satire of clerical abuses and casual endorsement of demonology, necromancy, and alchemy is moot, and prompts the question for whose ears can such a work really have been intended?13 Bruno read and acknowledged Palingenius in his De immenso et innumerabilibus, seu de universo et 12 ‘But if, in such a large work, perhaps something is found which appears to disagree somewhat with our religion I don’t think I should be blamed. For on those occasions when I am discussing philosophical matters I relate the opinions of different philosophers, especially the Platonic ones. If these are false and wrapped up in errors which are neither small nor trivial, the blame lies not with me, indeed, but them, since it is my intention never to diverge from the Catholic faith. By no means, therefore, should I be judged as wishing to adhere to the defence or to the earnest and stubborn assertion of these opinions, for I want to profess clearly and put on the record for all those who are about to read these things that in everything I have written in this work I submit myself to the judgement of the Orthodox and Catholic Church, and I freely accept their censure as behoves any Christian’ (Si tamen in tanto opere aliquid forte reperitur quod a nostra religione aliquantum dissentire videatur, mihi minimum imputandum censeo. Nam dum aliquando de rebus Philosophicis loquor, diversorum Philosophorum opiniones refero, praesertim Platonicorum. Quae si falsae sunt et erroribus nec paucis, nec levibus involutae, equidem non ego, sed ipsi reprehendi debent: cum mea sit intentio, a Catholica fide nunquam declinare: Nequaquam igitur existimandum est me harum opinionum defensioni aut seriae assertioni mordicus velle inhaerere: nam clare profiteri et omnibus haec lecturis testatum esse volo, me in omnibus quae hoc in opere scripsi, Orthodoxae et Catholicae Ecclesiae iudicio submittere, eiusque censuram, ut virum Christianum decet, libenter accipere. Chomarat, ed., p. 17; the text emphasized does not appear in the first edition). 13 The question cannot be answered here. Palumba observes that, notwithstanding the fact that ‘il M. abbia cercato di mantenersi distante da Lutero (l. X, Capricornus, vv. 821–8), lo Zodiacus vitae finì per essere considerato opera di un luterano, subendo la stessa damnatio memoriae che aveva colpito le spoglie mortali del suo autore’. In fact, there is no exposition of Christian, let alone Reformation, theology in Palingenius’s poem. The author is an apostate even from the ‘Platonism’ he throws out in the preface, perhaps as a red herring. Thus Stephen Ryle (1996) traces Stoic arguments about fate, free will, and providence in bk 8 to Alexander of Aphrodisias’s (anti-Stoic) On Fate, which Palingenius probably accessed via the 1516 edition of Gerolamo Bagolini, the edition also used by Pietro Pomponazzi for his De Libero Arbitrio et de Praedestinatione (Bologna, 1520). Indeed, Ryle suggests that Palingenius may have known Pomponazzi’s De Fato (1567) in manuscript. In his discussion of the necessity of the passions as a stimulus to reason, however, Palingenius (in the persona of Arete) firmly rejects Stoic apathy (‘Accordingly they err who say that the wise man should never feel these upheavals of the spirit. They wish a man to be no different from a marble statue and in their utter madness spew out futile words’; Proinde errant quidam, dicentes quod sapienti / Haud unquam licet hos animi sentire tumultus. / Hi differre hominem signato a marmore nolunt, / Et delirantes prorsus verba irrita fundunt, bk 3, vv. 489–92).

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mundis (‘On the Infinite and Numberless, or On the Universe and Worlds’)14 an old-world-shattering poem in which he dismantled Aristotelian physics with ad hominem vitriol and recalled his own personal conversion to Copernicus,15 but the mere composition of Lucretian-style natural-philosophical poems, and even the espousal of alternative physical systems, was not necessarily a high road to the stake. In 1530, Copernicus’s sometime tutor, physician, and Latin poet, Girolamo Fracastoro, had published a medical poem, Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus, which drew (constructive) criticism from its dedicatee Pietro Bembo not for evincing pervasive Lucretian influence but for a superfluity of myth which he deemed un-Virgilian.16 And, of course, already in the previous century, Lorenzo Bonincontri, Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, and Michael Marullus had imitated Lucretius in long, Latin astrological and meteorological poems of a more or less pagan complexion.17 In some ways it makes more sense to view Capece’s De principiis rerum as a product of this earlier, less fretful, humanist engagement with Lucretius than as a companion piece to Parisetti’s and Paleario’s passionate vindications of the immortal soul, much less as harbinger of the brazenly mould-breaking cosmological epics of Palingenius or Bruno.18 Bembo’s praise is telling: 14 In De immenso 8.2, Palingenius is said to be ‘almost awake’, but in 8.4 he ‘sleeps more profoundly with Plato’ for positing a realm of incorporeal light beyond the finite corporeal realm and visible stars. Bruno probably first encountered Palingenius’s poem during his London period (1583–5); the Zodiacus vitae was a hit in Elizabethan England, quoted in the original by Thomas Digges and translated by Barnaby Googe. Cf. Bruno’s Oratio valedictoria to the University of Wittenberg (1588), where Palingenius is hailed as one of the latest German incarnations of the prisca theologia, revealed down the centuries in the figures of Orpheus, Thales, Empedocles, and Lucretius (Op. lat. 1.1, pp. 16–17). 15 Aristotle and his tribe are scolded in the figure of the ‘wretched old man’ (miserande senex) of De immenso 3.2 who goes ‘fishing with [his] net for monsters in the Stagirite stream, for the figments of foolishness’ (Stagyreo e flumine monstra,/ Phantasiae nassa, expiscaris stultitiarum, Op. lat. 1.1, p. 321). For Copernicus, see chs. 3, 9, and 10 of the same work (381–98). 16 ‘Avvertimenti di Pietro Bembo’, in Fracastoro (1955) 25ff. See also Goddard (1991b). 17 Goddard (1991a); (1991c); Gambino Longo (2004). Stephan Heilen has edited Lorenzo Bonincontri’s De rebus naturalibus et divinis (1999). The longest, central hymn of Marullus’s Hymni naturales is freighted with Lucretius. See also Haskell (2007) 186–9; Coppini (1995); and for the microcultural context; see Brown (2010a) ch. 5; Palmer (2012). 18 It is worth noting, however, that already at the turn of the fifteenth century some candidly anti-Christian, Lucretian verses were composed by the Ferrarese humanist, Celio Calcagnini (1479–1541). They were entrusted to his friend Sardi and are

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‘Your poem on the origins of things, written in heroic metre, and divided into two books, I read most willingly. For it is of a kind which is greatly redolent both of the style and elegance of Lucretius and of that cultivated and polished age of the ancients.’19 The lawyer Capece had served after the death of Sannazaro as head of the Neapolitan academy, like Pontano and Bonincontri before them. He writes a Lucretian poem on the elements that sets forth a mildly controversial cosmology, to be sure, but one that gives no clear indication of his involvement in the circle of Spanish reformer, Juan de Valdés (1509–41).20 It is true that Bruno’s attraction to atomist ideas was raised at his trial for heresy, but not, so far as we know, his having imitated Lucretius in the Frankfurt poems. Paleario was executed in preserved in the Codex Estense latino 174 (Alpha O 6 15) cc. 117r–129v. Bacchelli (2006) 132 observes: ‘Non conosco in tutto il Quattrocento e primo Cinquecento una così franca dichiarazione di anticristianesimo. In altri testi esso si intuisce, ma nessuno ha il coraggio, come qui Calcagnini, di formulare così chiaramente il suo dissenso ed anzi la sua avversione. Per questo si può star certi che la Secta Coelii . . . era destinata ad essere letta solo dal fidato amico Sardi e che gli era stata mandata coll’impegno che non uscisse dai suoi scrigni’. Twenty-five years later, when he and his friends in Ferrara came under the influence of the Reformers, a reconstructed Calcagnini corresponded with Erasmus about Luther, and with his friend Pellegrino Morato, who was inclining to the Protestant cause, about prudent religious dissimulation (1538). Calcagnini’s extensive private library included nearly all the works of Erasmus and Valla, and writings by free-thinkers and Reformers from Machiavelli to Savonarola, Hutten to Zwingli, Paleario to Palingenius (Bacchelli (2006) 125 n. 16). 19 Poema de principiis rerum tuum, heroicis carminibus conscriptum, in duos divisum libros, legi sane libentissime. Est enim eiusmodi, ut magnopere cum LUCRETII stylum et elegantiam, tum antiquorum hominum aetatem illam cultam & perpolitam redoleat . . . (De principiis rerum, 1531, p. 3). On Bembo’s correspondence with Paleario, see Gallina (1989) ii. 38–41. Bembo also corresponded with Paleario about his poetry, and a handful of Parisetti’s verse letters were addressed to him. 20 As for his cosmology, Bacchelli (1990a) suggests the influence on Capece of a minor, probably Neapolitan, humanist, Basilio Sabazio, who moved in the circle of the poets and brothers Giovanni and Cosimo Anisio, which also included Johannes Widmanstetter (‘Lucretius Oesiander’). It was Oesiander who explained the heliocentric theory of Copernicus to Pope Clement VII in Rome in 1533. In the previous year Sabazio had written a letter to papal physician, Matteo Curzio, remaining within an Aristotelian framework and professing a homocentric cosmos, in which he summarized his evidence for the supralunary nature of the comets and asserted the elemental primacy of air—ideas that found their way, in a somewhat muddled form, into Capece’s De principiis rerum (p. 135). Bacchelli’s evidence shows a mixed and sometimes scandalized contemporary reaction to Sabazio, but the fact that the 1594 reprint of Capece’s De principiis rerum was edited by Ottaviano Capece, Bishop of Nicotera, with notes by a Jesuit, Ignazio Bracci, and that in 1754 it was translated into Italian by the Benedictine, Francesco Maria Ricci, translator of Cardinal Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius, speaks against any taint of heresy attaching to that work.

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1570 for reasons that included his authorship of a vernacular spiritualist tract, Della Pienezza, sufficienza, et satisfazione della passione di Christo,21 for criticizing certain Church rites, cardinals, and popes, but not, it would seem, for composing what was, after all, an anti-Lucretian poem on the immortality of the soul.22 Its theme and contents were in any case determined by a wider Renaissance response to Pietro Pompanazzi’s Tractatus de immortalitate animae, published in Bologna in 1516.23 Pomponazzi’s treatise, which argued that the survival of the individual soul could not be deduced from the philosophy of Aristotle, followed three years after the papal bull Apostolici regiminis had affirmed its immortality in the wake of general clerical enthusiasm for Ficino’s Theologia Platonica.24 Ficino’s was probably the single most significant source for both Paleario’s and Parisetti’s poems.25 Nevertheless, the efflorescence of Lucretian poetry in Italy in the 1530s and 1540s, more than a century after the excitement of the recovery of the De rerum natura by Poggio Bracciolini, invites further inspection if for no other reason than that Lucretius does not appear to have inspired a comparable series of long-form imitations among Latin poets north of the Alps.26 The mainly French ‘poetry of the heavens’ in sixteenth-century France has been surveyed by Isabelle 21 Gallina surveys the recent scholarship and concludes against the identification of this work with the clandestine Italian evangelical blockbuster, Beneficio di Cristo (Gallina (1989) i. 865–76), which is now generally attributed to a certain Benedetto da Mantova. 22 In an article in progress, Claudia Schindler (University of Hamburg) will plot the trajectory of didactic poems on the immortality of the soul from Paleario through Daniel Heinsius to Melchior de Polignac. 23 Blum (2007) 223 sums up the incendiary effect of this treatise: ‘[D]espite the strategies Pomponazzi deployed in his De immortalitate (e.g. declaring his book as non-academic, admitting incompleteness, submitting to the authority of the Roman Church), he was inevitably understood as undermining the immortality of the soul. The damage was done. The book was publicly burned in Venice. The Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo, then secretary to Pope Leo X, barely prevented Pomponazzi from being removed from his professorship at Bologna. And a great number of criticisms and responses were published.’ See also Di Napoli (1963); Pomponazzi (1999); Sgarbi (2010). Sgarbi informs me, per litteras, that he is currently preparing a small book on Italian dialogues about the immortality of the soul. 24 For the text of the bull, see Di Napoli (1963) 220–1. 25 Now available in the I Tatti translation of James Hankins and Michael B. Allen (Ficino (2001–6)). There is unfortunately no space in this chapter to calibrate parallel passages. Parisetti cites the ‘recent Academy’ of Ficino at the beginning of his treatment of the punishments of hell: (1541) 90. 26 There are Lucretian/anti-Lucretian elements in George Buchanan’s Sphaera; see Haskell (1998b) 514–20; and Gee (2008).

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Pantin; the presence of Lucretius, much less of the radical Lucretius, is shadowy.27 To be sure, Stéphane Lamacz exposes aspects of Du Bartas’s emulation of the De rerum natura, but the irenic Huguenot can hardly be described as an out-of-the-closet Lucretian poet.28 Generally speaking, Lutheran and Calvinist authors seem to have shrunk from the mantle of Latin natural-philosophical vates as a persuasion to religion.29 Was the sustained impersonation of Lucretius felt to be dangerous, ridiculous, or his poetico-philosophical programme too hubristic or haughty for the northern Protestant market?30 As for sixteenth-century Italy, Valentina Prosperi has argued persuasively for the mainstream reception of the poem via the expedient of what she calls a ‘dissimulatory code’.31 But if the De rerum natura was added to the Index of Prohibited Books only in 1718, Marco Beretta reminds us that, after the success of the first 27 Pantin ((1995) 50) observes e.g. that ‘[m]oins courageuse que celle de Lucrèce (ou de Giordano Bruno), la poésie française du XVIème siècle a rarement cherché à changer la vision du monde de ses contemporains, ou à lui inculquer une autre philosophie’, and she discusses the role of Ronsard in the ‘caractère inactuel de poésie philosophique du XVIème en France’ (123 n. 54) at 259–70. 28 Lamacz (2002). Cf. Kany-Turpin (1991); Banks (2008) 34 n. 6, and 47–9 (on (fleeting) Lucretian elements in Baïf and Habert, and Du Bartas). It is a nice coincidence that Du Bartas followed the relatively obscure Parisetti both as hexaemeral poet (La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde (1578) ~ Ad Varium Tolomaeum fratrem Theopoeiae libri VI (Venice, 1550)) and as proponent of the supralunary explanation for comets (q.v. Bacchelli (1990a) 149 n. 72). 29 On the evidence, at least, of Paladini (2011). 30 Yet Paleario’s De animorum immortalitate appears in the company of other ‘pious, serious, and elegant poets’ (Pii, graves atque elegantes Poetae), including Jacopo Sannazaro and Marco Girolamo Vida, as well as the Reform-inclined Marcantonio Flaminio and Sebastiano Castellio, already in an anthology printed by Oporinus in Basel c.1551, presumably intended for a mixed confessional market. This collection appears to have been initiated by one Orgetorix Sphinter, who visited Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto in Rome shortly before the latter’s death. Sphinter’s letter to Oporinus reports the ‘good old man’s’ (sc. Sadoleto’s) sadness about religious schism and his hopes for an irenic anthology of ‘most learned and excellent poets, experienced in one and the same sanctity’ (Latin text given in Sacré (1992) 93–4; cf. 32–3 on the identity of Sphinter). Not long after the appearance of the first edition (1535?), Paleario had written to Sadoleto himself suggesting that the Lyons printer, Sebastianus Gryphius, might reprint the DAI together with the works of other Christian poets; he was flattered when Gryphius brought it out in a separate edition (Lyons, 1536) (Sacré (1992) 34). The poem was admired by Conrad Gesner, who devoted generous space to it in his Bibliotheca universalis of 1545 (Sacré (1986) 598). 31 Prosperi (2004), (2007a) 214–16, (2007b), and (2008). Mariantonietta Paladini ((2011) 177–90) has devoted a chapter of her recent book on the reception of Lucretius and Epicurus among writers of the Reformation to the surprisingly relaxed Jesuit attitude to the De rerum natura.

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Aldine edition (1500) and Andrea Navagero’s of 1515, the ecclesiastical authorities successfully prevented its printing on Italian soil until 1647.32 Thus, while Lucretius was not strictly forbidden fruit for learned Italian readers during these turbulent years, and sixteenthcentury physicians, as Prosperi has indicated, regularly exploited him as a scientific source,33 writing philosophical poetry in a Lucretian voice was bound to raise a few eyebrows, if not suspicions. Or was it? *** We bracket and consider first the rather special cases of Palingenius and Bruno, whose philosophical poems undoubtedly verge at times on the hectoring and heresiarchal. A premise of the Zodiacus vitae is the eschewal of frivolous, mythological subjects in favour of truthtelling and moral utility. The rejection of titillating trifles, of mendacia vana, is justified at length in the proem to the sixth book, ‘Virgo’,34 but its specific association with the project of Lucretian poetry is most evident in the metrical letter to the reader which precedes the poem:35 Pauci audent veri caecas aperire latebras: Quisque iocos sequitur, seria quisque fugit. Quam facile est chartas nugis implere canoris, Quam facile in calamum fabula blanda venit! Ausonios inter vates Lucretius unus, Scrutator veri sedulus ipse fuit: Abdita naturae cupiens irrumpere claustra, Et superos acie mentis adire Deos. Saepe tamen recto deflexit tramite, et errat, Deceptus dictis ô Epicure tuis. At nunc Marcellus meliori numine ductus, Vera magis, necnon utiliora canit. Few dare to open up the blind lairs of truth. Everyone chases amusement and flees from the serious. How easy it is to fill pages with finesounding frivolities, how easily seductive fiction comes to the pen! Lucretius alone among the Italian bards was a diligent seeker-out of truth, desiring to break through the hidden barriers of Nature and to approach the Gods above with the keenness of his mind. But often he wanders from the right path and errs, deceived, o Epicurus, by your

32 34 35

33 Beretta (2008b) 181. Prosperi (2007) 217–18. Cf. Haskell (1998a) 120–3. r–v Palingenius (1548) sigs. a3 : Prosperi calls this a ‘super-proemio’ (2007b) 149.

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words. But now Marcello, lead by a better spirit, sings more truthful and also more useful things. (emphasis mine)

These liminary verses are, in fact, as programmatically and loftily Lucretian as it gets. In the poem proper, Palingenius distances himself from the grand style, at least, when in the proem to ‘Virgo’ he writes: ‘Believe me, there are many to whom eloquence is given, few wisdom; many produce sublime songs, and they are learned in the Roman and Greek languages, and although they know many things, they are only moderately wise, or not at all’ (Tradita (crede mihi) est multis facundia, paucis / Consilium; multi sublimia carmina condunt, / Sunt et Romano et Graeco sermone diserti, / Et cum multa sciant, sapiunt tamen aut modice aut nil, vv. 31–4). Nevertheless, the free spirit of Lucretius breathes through Palingenius’s poem at a subliterary, almost autonomic, level. In arguing for the existence of demons, for example, Palingenius adopts the Lucretian example of the visible effects of the unseen wind (‘Libra’, vv. 250ff., cf. DRN 1.271–97)—applied by Parisetti36 and Du Bartas37 to the soul—but without so much as batting an anti-Lucretian eyelid as he concludes against the power of the senses: ‘It is without doubt foolish to refer all judgment to the senses; the eyes very often deceive the viewer’ (Nimirum stultum est committere sensibus omne / Iudicium; fallunt oculi persaepe videntem, vv. 259–60). While Lucretius, of course, is careful not to blame the senses but our reason for any false inferences about the phenomenal world, we could almost be reading the Epicurean poet’s explanation of the paradoxes and problems of physical vision (DRN 4.269–378) in Palingenius’s analogy for the clouding of our spiritual sight: ‘To be sure, as they are sunk in the gross body, and shrouded in gross sense perception, they know nothing apart from bodies. It’s as if you looked through a glass tinted with some colour—you will be deceived into believing that whatever you view through it has the same colour’ (Nempe quia in crasso demersi corpore, crasso / Obducti sensu, nil praeter corpora norunt. / Ut si forte 36 Scitote Deum nonnulla creasse, / Quae vestris oculis non subiicerentur: & esse / Non ignota tamen vobis ostenderet esse: / Quamvis aspectu vestro non perciperetur. / Non aliquis vestrum ignorant vocem esse, & odorem, / Ac ventum: quamvis vobis substantia eorum / Non cernatur . . . (bk 2, p. 48). 37 On the wind analogy, Kathryn Banks ((2008) 48, following Lamarcz) notes that ‘Du Bartas rewrites a Lucretian comparison, demonstrating that it can be marshalled to attest not to an atomic universe with no loving God but, conversely, to a universe in which the marvellous effects of a human soul bear witness to its divine provenance.’

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oculis vitrum quocumque colore / Infectum obicias, quicquid spectabis eundem / Qui vitro credas deceptus habere colorem, vv. 159–63). These are neither strictly literary allusions nor philosophical influences but simulacra, as it were, of Lucretian poetic logic; they are ubiquitous but fleeting in the Zodiacus vitae.38 In his oration to the University of Wittenberg, Bruno described Palingenius’s mind as ‘sublime’, his poem as ‘creeping along the ground’ (repente humo).39 Nevertheless, Bruno seems to have caught directly from Palingenius the association of Lucretius with a plainspeaking poetry of truth, amplifying the Lucretian volume of his didactic poetry and assuming with more vehemence than his precursor a sublime of literary and philosophical defiance.40 In the Frankfurt trilogy Bruno disdains humanist elegance and sometimes even metrical accuracy, identifying personally and viscerally with the gigantomachic Epicurus and the marvellous monster Empedocles of DRN 1, unleashing his new philosophy of nature with a studied, almost proto-Romantic, spontaneity.41 Another feature of Palingenius’s and Bruno’s poems for which Lucretius may well be a common catalyst is the device of the imaginative or speculative flight. The overall structure of the Zodiacus vitae is 38 Constraints of space preclude reconnaissance of all the Lucretian voices and ideas at play in the poem. They are perhaps most concentrated in the third book, ‘Gemini’, where the poet encounters the figure of Epicurus, who delivers a Lucretian lecture on the philosophy of pleasure. Although he is at length overruled, Epicurus/ Lucretius is neither gently parodied as per Ovid’s speech of Pythagoras in Metamorphoses 15, nor rendered ridiculous as he is in a comparable epiphany in the Philosophia novo-antiqua by a Jesuit anti-Lucretian poet, Tommaso Ceva (Haskell 2008). In ‘Virgo’ the poet is possessed, unwillingly, by Calliope (cf. DRN 6.92–5) and compelled to confront the personified figure of Death, whose harangue recalls in parts the finale of DRN 3. Other Lucretian resonances include the indifference of Palingenius’s God to our troubles and sins (e.g. Nimirum Deus offendi laedive nequit . . . , ‘Scorpio’, v. 780) and the condemnation of priests and monks (e.g. ‘Leo’, vv. 586ff., where avarice, mendacity, debauchery, and corruption of boys are added to Lucretius’s charge sheet of rousing superstitious fear). 39 ‘Can you believe what a sublime mind Palingenius set forth in that poem of his that creeps along the ground [sc. prosaic]? How many marvels, how many true things beyond vulgar understanding he revealed about the dimensions of the universe, the substance of the stars, the nature of light, the habitation of the planets, and the soul of the spheres? Are not five hundred of his songs to be preferred, among so many flat wines, to the Romanism and Atticism of all those who march under the Peripatetic standard, who speak more ornately and understand almost nothing?’ (Op. lat. 1.1, p. 17, translation mine). 40 I have described this sublime of defiance or ‘aesthetics of contempt’ in Haskell (1998a). 41 See Haskell (1998a) and, for the Empedoclean element, Haskell (forthcoming).

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that of a journey or ascent from the realm of earthly moral darkness to one of supra-celestial light, and the poem comprehends many internal journeys, revelations, and views from above, most notably the poet’s visit to the moon in the ninth book, ‘Sagittarius’, but also, for example, the return of Timalphes (son of Arete) to the heavens at the end of book 4, ‘Cancer’, from which vantage point he observes the earth hanging like an apple in the middle of the air and describes the features of terrestrial geography. It might seem a stretch to trace these flights and visions back to Lucretius. Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’ is a more obvious model for Timalphes’s ascent, and the Zodiacus vitae has been compared more than once to medieval cosmological epics such as Bernard Sylvestris’s (prosimetric) Cosmographia which also feature allegorical guides and revelatory raptures.42 Nevertheless, the changing elevations and points of view, in combination with the poet’s restless, philosophical audacity, seem to me to be overdetermined by Epicurus’s flight of the mind in DRN 1 (cf. Palingenius’s ‘super-proem’, discussed in the present chapter) and the proems especially of DRN 2 and 3. Palingenius’s book 7, ‘Libra’, represents a turning point from the hellish earth and domain of death, and its opening verses exhort the Muse to ‘rise and use better wings, seek the heights and henceforth look down on humble cares! There is greater beauty and glory in higher things’ (Musa, agedum, surge et melioribus utere pennis: Alta pete atque humiles iamdudum despice curas: / Rebus in excelsis decus est et gloria maior). The lines that follow clearly allude to Lucretius’s intermundial gods (e.g. DRN 3.124), and the analogy of the terrestrial lookout for the view from Jove’s throne may owe something to the proem to DRN 2: Contemplare Deos totumque per aethera curre, Est ubi ver aeternum, ubi pax aeterna, ubi semper Lucidus apparet Titan nullisque tenebris Laeditur alma dies. Non illic nubifer Auster Vesanusve Aquilo, Zephryi sed blandior aura Spirat et ambrosiae laetissima gramina mulcet. Hac spatiare igitur; tamen inde relapsa vicissim A centro ad centrum vario discurre volatu. Ac veluti speculam quaerit quicumque videre Optat multa procul, sic te super astra necesse est Scandere ad usque Iovis solium. 42 In ‘Microcosmos’ 6, Bernard’s Urania escorts Natura to the lower limit of the sphere of the moon whence they view myriad spirits, celestial angels, and sublunary demons, both good and bad.

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Contemplate the gods and course through the whole ether, where there is eternal spring, where there is eternal peace, where bright Titan always shines and the dear day is harmed by no shadows. There no cloudbearing South or raging North Wind blows, but the gentler breeze of the West. Therefore promenade here; but descending again, from centre to centre, run back and forth in turn with varied flight. And just as he who wishes to see many things from afar seeks a vantage point, thus it is necessary for you to mount right up to the throne of Jove. (vv. 4–14)43

In the opening verses of the final book, ‘Pisces’, Palingenius invokes divine intellectual rather than poetic inspiration to imagine the infinite realm of light beyond the firmament, a truly psychopoetic enterprise: ‘My mind, desiring now to ascend to you, needs neither Apollo nor Parnassus nor those fonts which vacuous poets are wont to drain’ (Mens mea, nunc ad te cupiens conscendere, Musis / Non eget aut Phoebo aut Parnaso aut fontibus illis, / Vaniloqui quoscumque solent haurire poëtae). He demands to see first so he may subsequently describe for others, thereby acquiring eternal fame for his song (Spectare et spectata aliis expromere possim, / Carminibusque meis aeternum acquirere honorem, vv. 18–19).44 Bruno is if anything less tentative when he mocks and smashes through the crystalline spheres of the traditional cosmos in the opening chapters of his De immenso

43 Cf. a lyrical, neo-Platonic passage in the third book, ‘Gemini’, where the personified ‘Arete’, explaining why we must sometimes intermit our mental labours, compares our spirit to Jupiter’s eagle which mounts to the top of the heavens and marvels at the brilliant palaces of the gods, exulting as it flies this way and that, and begins to forget the earth and its abandoned nest until hunger compels it to descend again (vv. 529–53). 44 Palingenius undertakes to refute those whose feeble powers of sense cannot bring them to believe that there is anything beyond the heavens: ‘For if there is an end of things there, where the ether ends, why has God not created anything further? Is it because he didn’t know how to create anything further, deserted by his own art? Or is it that he could not? But both are rightly refuted, for the knowledge of God is enclosed by no boundaries and divine power endures no limit’ (Nam si illic finis rerum est, ubi desinit aether, / Cur nil ulterius fecit Deus? An quia scivit / Nil facere ulterius, propria defectus ab arte? / An quia non potuit? Sed iure negatur utrumque / Quippe Dei nullis est clausa scientia metis / Et nullum patitur divina potentia finem . . . , vv. 25–30). Palingenius’s staccato interrogation of the reader who doubts a supra-material infinity is reminiscent of Lucretius pressing his point in the thought experiment of the spear thrown from the limit of the universe (DRN 1.968–83); Lucretius pursues his addressee at every step across this imaginary boundary: ‘in this manner I shall follow you, and wherever you set up your furthest borders I shall ask you what becomes of the spear in the end’ (hoc pacto sequar atque, oras ubicumque locaris / extremas, quaeram quid telo denique fiat, 980–1).

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and De minimo. In De immenso 4.1 he hails the Olympus-storming giant, Enceladus, who realizes, with the dizzying exultation of Lucretius’s third proem, that he is not really oppressed by the weight of Etna, that the earth is a living star of which he is part, and ‘thus, liberated and free, and cheerful, I see no moving [spheres], the empty machine of the revolving heavens has retreated’.45 In De immenso 3.1, Bruno is despatched by his beloved Mount Cicala (near Nola) to Vesuvius, which had appeared barren from a distance but is found to be gloriously fertile; and like Palingenius, Bruno takes us to the moon in De immenso 4.3, but for cosmological rather than moral revelations: ‘Come now, I’ll set you on the body of the moon. Fit out your senses as I shall fit you with the wings of reason. Come on, get going, follow a sure guide: it’s no Daedalean hand that raises you up with waxed feathers, not the trick of stupid Menippus—from which you might well fear the fall of Icarus or the silly pulled faces of Lucian of Samosata—but the image of Truth, and the glorious order of Nature will lead you, faltering, and will bring you back safe and sound.’46 *** In contrast to those of Palingenio and Bruno the drivers of the Lucretian poems of Parisetti and Paleario, arguably even of Capece, are not disruptive, giddying, new cosmo-theologies but rather, it would seem, the desire for certainty, retreat, and spiritual repose in troubled times. The case is made most easily, perhaps, for Parisetti, the Italian Lucretian poet who has attracted the least scholarly interest to date, no doubt because his low civil profile is matched by the physical scarcity of his works.47 Born in Reggio Emilia in 1503 into what must have been a moderately wealthy family, Lodovico studied 45 Pars ego sum stellae atque illustris lampadis, et quem / Aethna premit nullus, siquidem est sine pondere tellus / In membris comperta suis. Sic ergo solutus / Liberque, atque hilaris non ullos cerno moventes, / Vanida gyrantum coelorum techna recessit, Op. lat. 1.2, p. 2. 46 Eia age conscendas, statuam te in corpore Lunae; / Aptato sensus, aptem rationis ut alas: / Pergito, perge, ducem certum securus adusque / Persequitor, te non ceratis Dedala plumis / Ulla manus tollit, vel stulti techna Menippi; / Unde vel Icarium formides optime casum / Insulsas Lucii vel sannas Samosateni: / Sed veri species, naturaeque inclitus ordo / Est tibi dux aegro, incolumem qui deinde reducet, Op. lat. 1.2.15–16. 47 I am grateful to Dirk Sacré for lending me his copy of the Reggio first edition of the De immortalitate animae (I follow his added pagination); Valentina Prosperi cites a second edition, Reggio, 1564, which I cannot trace (Prosperi 2007b). I foreground Parisetti in the discussion that follows and quote more extensively from his works than Paleario’s and Capece’s because they are relatively inaccessible.

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Latin and Greek as a child under Giusto Capriani, and later law, at Pisa and elsewhere, though invita Minerva.48 He came to depend on the financial support of a more successful brother, a physician, and enjoyed a life of semi-retirement at the family estate in Casola Canossa, a small village on the Appennino Reggiano. There he devoted himself to moral and spiritual studies and poetry. In 1529 he attended the meeting in Bologna between Pope Clement VII and Charles V, apparently with hopes of embarking on an ecclesiastical career, but returned to Reggio disillusioned by the behaviour of the senior prelates. In June 1546 Parisetti accompanied his friend, Francesco Martelli, assistant to the Bishop of Reggio Emilia, Girolamo Andreasi, to Trent, and there met papal legates Reginald Pole, Marcello Cervini, and Giovanni Maria Del Monte (whom he also visited after he ascended the papal throne as Julius III).49 His earliest published work was a moral treatise, De perfectiori humanae vitae felicitate (‘On the Blessedness of the More Complete Human Life’, Parma, 1531). His De animae immortalitate (1541) was published in the same year and indeed month as a collection of verse letters to his friends; a second collection appeared in 1553.50 Two hexaemeral poems, in hexameters, Theopoeia (Venice, 1550) and Pausithea (Venice, 1554), mark the summit of his literary aspirations.51 In a passage near the beginning of his final philosophical poem, Pausithea (1554), Parisetti declares that he has been constituted by God for the quiet life, and that he is happily devoid of ambition and overpowering emotions.52 According to Dasso he had taken a 48 In the remainder of this paragraph I summarize the biographical information gleaned by Gabriele Dasso (2008) from Parisetti’s two collections of verse letters, Epistolae (1541) and Epistolae posteriores (1553). See also Ferrari (1921) and D’Ascia (1993). 49 Parisetti was not afraid to address verse epistles to Popes Clement VII, Paul IV, and Pius IV; to the last he also dedicated a final collection of prose letters, urging Church reform (Bologna, 1560). 50 The author is preparing a study of these letters for a special issue of Rivista storica italiana devoted to the history of emotions. 51 To the works recorded in Dasso’s thesis we can now add a collection of ‘three orations on God’s benevolence and beneficence to man, to the men of Reggio’, De divina in hominem benevolentia atque beneficentia orationes tres ad viros Regienses habitae (Venice, 1552). 52 ‘You so fortified me in spirit and constituted me in mind that I should lead a tranquil life in the most perfect peace; and that I should not be carried away and diverted by the frenzy of ambition, nor be agitated whithersoever by a storm of emotions, so that my mind would languish and my spirit labour. And although the place where it is now given to me to live is of the sort that overflows in delights no less than it abounds in ambition, yet you, divine benevolence, through your grace, guard

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comparatively mild view of Epicurean ethics in the De perfectiori humanae vitae felicitate when set against his bitter excoriation of Lucretius in the De animae immortalitate.53 A wistfulness for the carefree Epicurean life also pervades the opening poem, to Celio, of his 1541 letter collection, where, however, the poet warns his friend that we cannot afford to be complacent about the fate of the soul after death. Dasso convincingly situates Parisetti’s philosophical letters in the context of Erasmian ideals of spiritual friendship, correspondence, and political withdrawal. The circles in which our modest poet moved may have been less distinguished than those of Constance Furey’s ‘Religious Republic of Letters’, but there are key points of intersection in the figures of cardinals Pietro Bembo and Jacopo Sadoleto.54 Moreover, several of Parisetti’s verse letters touch on the nature and purpose of philosophical poetry and thus shed light on his ambitions for the De animae immortalitate.55 His commitment to religious/natural-philosophical poetry over frivolous, vernacular verse is defended in two letters to Pietro Bembo. In the first (Ep. 1.3), the poet asks ‘what does it avail us to be Latins’ (quid nos iuvet esse Latinos) if so few read our writings? Better to write for the few who can gain some spiritual benefit than to titillate barbers with erotic tales. In the second (Ep. 6.2), Parisetti exhorts Bembo to write sacred poetry in Latin and to and keep me safe from harm and immune, thus far’; Sic me suffulxisti animo, sic composuisti / Me mente; ut vitam summa cum pace quietam / Traducam; & nullo correptus ducar ab oestro / Ambitionis, & affectus non turbine vexer / Quoquam: quo languescat mens, animusque laboret. / Et quamvis locus, in quo nunc mihi vivitur, is sit, / Ut non delitiis minus affluat, ambitione / Quam se praestet abundantem: tamen incolumem me, / Indemnemque tuo, bonitas divina, favore / Custodis, servas adeo, p. 9v). 53 Unfortunately I have not had access to this text. D’Ascia observes that its 28-year-old author was precociously mature, maintaining through all his production the same paternalistic and parenetic tone; that the work is prosimetric, the prose framing eighteen poetic compositions, evoking Horace, Virgil, Marullus, the Psalms; and that ‘la ricerca di una grandiosa epica cristiana non esclude l’ispirazione lucreziana’ (‘the pursuit of a great Christian epic does not exclude Lucretian inspiration’, D’Ascia (1993) 514). 54 Dasso (2008) 37–8, citing Furey (2006). Dasso describes Parisetti’s epistles as a ‘Christian version of Horace’s Epistolae’, in which he ‘celebrate[s] the modest joys of the country life as opposed to the stressful and potentially immoral way of the city (32). D’Ascia, however, observes that the letters, which are increasingly preoccupied with Church reform, lack the authentic narrative dimension of the Horatian model: (1993) 515. 55 See Dasso, ‘Parisetti and the Importance of Didactic Poetry’: (2008) 39–44. Some of the letters also discuss the soul’s immortality, e.g. Ep. 2.14; Ep. post. 2.19; 3.2.

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renounce his ‘Tuscan vanities’ (Hetruscae nugae). Dasso points to a similar rejection of literary fame and fashion in Palingenius56 but it is less clear that the vulgus which Palingenius (and Bruno, for that matter) holds at bay in his philosophical poetry is primarily defined by its non-Latinity. Palingenius’s and Bruno’s poems are ‘elitist’ insofar as they are directed to those with the superior moral or intellectual capacities to appreciate them. They anticipate, in their ambition and hauteur, an ideal and anonymous public and posterity.57 True, Palingenius aspires to be morally improving and, in the first half of the Zodiacus vitae, relays much simple, Polonius-style advice on how to live in and yet remain immune from the corruption of the world, but Bruno might just as well be pouring his didactic verses into the infinite universe of numberless worlds of his De immenso.58 Unlike Parisetti 56 Citing ‘Virgo’, vv. 42–8: Ergo, Seu vulgus me iudicet esse poëtam, / Seu neget, haud ideo mendacia vana sequemur, / Sed verum, quoniam verum est perfectio mentis. / Quod quicumque magis novit, magis est similis Diis / Atque magis felix, licet hunc inscitia vulgi / Non merito extollat plausu meritoque favore / Excipiat, licet huic non grandia nomina donet; ‘Therefore, whether the mob judges me a poet or denies it we will not on that account pursue empty falsehoods, but the truth, since the truth is the perfection of mind. Because he who knows more is more similar to the gods and more blessed, even if the ignorance of the mob does not extol him with deserved praise and receive him with deserved favour, though it does not confer great titles on him’ (Dasso (2008) 40 n. 56; translation mine). Earlier in this book, Palingenius had exclaimed: ‘It is shameful, ah, shameful to be a poet if one must devote oneself to puerile trifles and pursue pleasing lies, spurning the truth’; Pudet ah, pudet esse poëtam, / Si nugis opus est puerilibus inservire / Et iucunda sequi spreto mendacia vero (vv. 28–30). 57 In the closing lines of the final book, ‘Pisces’, Palingenius exhorts his book to ‘rush through all the various towns, you who will suffer grievous envy; for you will be snapped at and savaged from all sides by many detractors; there will be no shortage of those who, though they are incapable of producing anything worthy of praise, nevertheless enjoy forever speaking ill and hunting for empty fame by criticizing others. You [book], hating and shunning these dogs inclined to envy and evil speech, seek out the learned and good, who are few; but you are able to be happy with a few. To be sure, God has produced few excellent things on our earth! Go respectfully to them and publish our wares; it is enough if they are praised. As to what the other crowd may say, have no care, and laugh at the abuse of the mob’ (Tu liber interea diversa per oppida curre, / Invidiam subiture gravem; nam multus ubique / Oblatrator erit, cuius lacerabere morsu. / Non deerunt certe, qui, cum nil edere possint / Dignum laude, tamen gaudent maledicere semper, / Carpendisque aliis famam venantur inanem. / Hos tu lividulos catulos, orisque maligni, / Exosus refuge, et doctos inquire bonosque, / Qui pauci sunt; sed paucis potes esse beatus. / Nimirum pauca in terris Deus optima gignit. / Hos reverenter adi, et merces his exere nostras; / Quas tibi laudarint, satis est. Quid caetera dicat / Turba, parum cura et vulgi convicia ride, vv. 560–72; translation mine). 58 See e.g. Bruno’s prefatory poem to the De monade, which concludes: ‘let the Sun proceed naked, without clouds; the trappings of horses don’t suit a human back;

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(or indeed Lucretius) neither of these poets co-opts, cajoles, or makes concessions for a historical addressee. Parisetti’s epistles, but also his longer didactic poems, are ‘elitist’ in a more intimate and exclusive sense. They are best understood in the context of a close circle of learned, Latin-reading friends whom the poet seeks to encourage in the Christian life. In the epistles, at least, these friends and their real-life concerns and personal foibles are explicitly identified.59 In Ep. 4.1, to the poet and priest Bartolommeo Crotti, Parisetti inveighs against the lies and obfuscations of the astrologers and then criticizes ‘our poets’ for ‘concealing what they know they do not know and striving to cover it over with an honourable name, declaring that they rave with divine madness’ (Quidquid se dissimulare nequire / Noverunt: operire student velamine honesti / Nominis: & se divino insanire furore / Affirmant). The ironic, self-deprecatory literary manifesto that follows is clearly Horatian. Parisetti dares not call poets those who ‘have enclosed humble speeches with a meagre Muse and sung nothing with great bellowing. The honours of so great a name should not be accorded to one who creeps along the ground and fashions his songs from plain speaking’ (Exili quicumque humiles clausere Camoena / Sermones: magnoque nihil cecinere boatu. / Non ulli, qui serpat humi, sermoneque puro / Carmina contexat: tanti tribuentur honores / Nominis). Nature has blessed him with only ‘meagre talent and feeble powers for poetry, a slender vein, devoid of divinity and Apollonian frenzy’ (Ingenii . . . pusilli / . . . tenues . . . in carmina vires: / Si vena exilis, si numinis, atque furoris / Phoebei est expers). At least he will never be tempted ‘boldly and shamefully’ (tam turpiter audax) to claim for himself the status of poet, and he urges the epigrammatist, Crotti, ‘if you are wise, and determined to live content with appropriate honours, exempt yourself likewise from the henceforth may the appearance of truth, which is sought, found, and revealed convey me, and if no one understands, as long as I am in conformity with God and Nature, that is indeed more than enough’ (Procedat nudus, quem non ornant nebulae, / Sol; non conveniunt quadrupedum phalerae / Humano dorso. Porro veri species / Quaesita, inventa, et patefacta, me efferat / Et si nullus intellegat, / Si cum natura sapio et sub numine, / Id vere plusquam satis est, Op. lat. 1.2, p. 322, emphasis mine). 59 A recurring if not obsessive theme in the letters is sexual purity. For example, a letter to Bembo in the first book of the 1540 letter collection begins: ‘Of all the diseases of the soul, Bembo, we reckon none more pernicious than lust’; Omnibus ex animi morbis nos Bembe putamus / Nullum pestiferum magis esse cupidine. Cf. Pausithea (1554) 24v–5r, where the poet prays to be kept immune from disturbing human affections, including lust.

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number of the bards’ (Si sapis, & propria contentus vivere laude / Constituis, pariter debes excerpere vatum / Te numero). As we shall see, this Horatian ‘humility’ of the letters carries over into the De animae immortalitate. To what extent, then, are we justified in describing the De animae immortalitate as a Lucretian poem? In a letter to Francesco Martelli60 from the 1541 collection (Ep. 5.6), Parisetti had yearned for the wings of Daedalus or the sandals of Hermes, to write the sort of poetry ‘that wraps the marvellous works of nature in an allegorical cloak of words, conceals secret meanings under a veil of speech, and transmits the lessons of human life under a beautiful cover—so that it transpires that divine poems not only delight but also edify’.61 The philosophical poetry envisaged by Parisetti here, without the irony palpable in Ep. 4.1, is not so much anti-Lucretian as a-Lucretian. It is in any case very different from the discursive, not to say, prosaic, philosophical verse he serves up in De animae immortalitate. The author professes diffidence about his poetic powers from the outset. There is, unsurprisingly, no hymn to Venus,62 but neither does Parisetti invoke the aid of the Christian God for his didactic-poetic undertaking: Quem nunc aggressurus sum Martelle laborem, Credo supervacuum nonnullis posse videri: Cum spacium coner pedibus decurrere vinctis: Quod vix scriptores veteres potuere solutis. Forsitan id nostri conaminis, atque laboris, 60 Martelli was a close friend and fellow ‘seeker’, of the same social status as the poet, and thus not, according to Dasso, a likely patron: (2008) 25–6; he is the recipient of many of the letters, esp. of the second collection (which opens with a letter to him), as well as of the De animae immortalitate. Dasso well observes that Francesco is invoked in the opening lines of each of the poem’s three books, recalling not so much Lucretius’s relationship with Memmius as the Horatian philosophical epistle (43 and n. 68). 61 Ne dubites, operae precium est tibi scire, Poesim / Tendere eo: ut ficto verborum syrmate claudat / Naturae admiranda opera, arcanosque loquendi / Involucro sensus abdat: documentaque vitae / Humanae tradat pulchro sub tegmine. Quo fit, / Ut non delectent divina poemata tantum, / Sed prosint etiam. . . . 62 But D’Ascia quotes from De perfectiori humanae vitae felicitate a passage echoing Lucretius’s hymn to Venus (DRN 1.1–20). Quin quoque syderibus varia interstantia motis: / Et coelom inspicimus variis clarescere stellis / Et varios etiam portendere casus / Temporibus variis felix diducitur annus: / Vere novo tellus flores producit herbas / In Venerem ruuntque animi, genus omne volucrum / Omne genus pecudum stimulus demulcent amoris: (1993) 514, n. 13.

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Empedoclis Graeci factum, factumque Latini Lucreti poterit defendere: remque probare, Quam tento, minus absurdam. Nam carmine sunt hi Complexi rerum causas, animaeque latentem Naturam nostrae: quam nunc ego mortis inanem, Expertemque obitus defendere molior. I believe that the work which we are about to attempt, Martelli, may seem superfluous to some, since I am attempting to run through space with bound feet [sc. in verse] which the ancient writers could scarcely do unfettered. Perhaps the fact that this attempt and labour of mine has been made by the Greek Empedocles and the Latin Lucretius may vouch for it, and prove the thing I am attempting less absurd. For they enclosed in song the causes of things and the hidden nature of our soul: which now I strive to prove deathless and eternal. (p. 1)

And pace the author’s promise to set things out in a compendious, clear, and attractive manner,63 much of the first book is dry and technical, and taken up with close exposition and refutation of Aristotelian arguments for the immobility of the soul. Throughout the poem, in fact, Parisetti gives the impression of thinking aloud in verse, or at least of an intimate conversation with spiritually questing friends. We feel his inner struggle in negotiating a theologically correct position on his philosophical heroes Plato, Socrates, and Pythagoras.64 His poetic insecurities re-emerge in the second proem, which begins rather strangely and inauspiciously: ‘I don’t think anyone, Martelli, even a comedian, will say that I am about to 63 Nolim tamen, omnia speres / Me complexurum, quaecumque relata fuerunt / A priscis: quoniam nimium haec provincia haberet / Ponderis: & pateret forsan fastidia. Quare / Quaedam praecerpens, quae non obscura nimis sint, / Nec vulgata nimis: rectum servare tenorem / Conabor: tetricaeque aliquos superaddere flores / Materiae (2). 64 Plato is consistently hailed as ‘divine’ and is the philosopher who most exhaustively treated the subject of the immortality of the soul; Parisetti believes he must have had intimations of Christianity and hopes to return to this topic (1.3–4; cf. 2.79). On the other hand, he won’t follow Plato on the pre-existence of souls as this conflicts with ‘our religion’ (1.29); and while it is Aristotle who is regularly blamed for being tricky and rhetorical, even Plato can be overly wordy and mysterious (1.31). Socrates is also ‘divine’, and Parisetti confesses: ‘Nay—I speak frankly—the works of Plato, which relay the records about this man and his blameless life used to draw me away from human attachments more than the reading of Sacred Scripture’ (Quin immo, ingenue fateor, monumenta Platonis: / Quae documenta viri referunt, vitamque probatam / Huius, ab humanis me plus affectibus olim / Distraxere: sacri quam lectio dogmatis, 2.47).

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pour out trifles. For this farrago contains much within it. The net, which I have freely undertaken to carry, is heavy, and we are going to talk now about a not insubstantial topic.’65 Nevertheless, Parisetti proceeds in this second proem to justify his treatment of a thesis which, in fact, no Christian should have reason to doubt, on the grounds that his contemporaries are behaving in a manner that belies their faith. In short, it is as if they believed—even the clerics, who should know better—that this earthly life is all there is.66 But while, like Lucretius, Parisetti sets out with missionary zeal to tie off each and every philosophical loose end, there is a palpably self-exhortatory and self-soothing quality to his poetic practice.67 It is almost as if, by setting down his doubts and processing them in verse, the author hopes to merit an assured if modest seat in the painstakingly partitioned after-life he constructs in his third book. This hunger for spiritual consolation is both fuelled and satisfied by the whipping up of fear (in others as well as himself) of posthumous punishment. There is, on the face of it, a Lucretian irony to Parisetti’s proof that animals do not have immortal souls because they do not experience regrets or fear of death: ‘No loathing for the past perturbs them, no fear or forethought for the future. They are affected by no dread of impending doom or death, oppressed by no agonies of the spirit or mind. They are content with whatever Nature serves them’ 65 Non aliquem Martelle puto: qui legerit ista, / Vel si comoedus fuerit, me fundere nugas, / Dicturum fore. Nam multum complectitur in se / Ponderis haec farrago; refert, quam sponte gerendam / Suscepi spartam, multum gravitatis. Inani / Haud quamque [sic] de re facimus nunc verba. Cf. Juvenal, Sat. 1. 86 (farrago libelli). 66 [Q]uoniam quamvis tractemus apertam / Rem magis, ac de qua dubitari possit ab ullo, / Qui nostrae sectetur dogmata relligionis: / Non tamen absurdum fuerit, nec inutile prorsus: . . . Praecipue: cum pectoribus frigere futurae / Humanis curam vitae videamus: & illos, / Ad quos summa rei divinae pertinet, esse / Tales, ut vivant, tanquam post fata supersit / Nil hominis: finisque animae cum corpore par sit. / Dumtaxat quaeruntur opes. Solummodo honores / Vani captantur. Curatur sola voluptas. / Sic vivunt, tanquam semper regionibus his sint / Victuri, numquamque alibi, quam hic vita trahenda / Sit sibi. (38–9). 67 The Theopoeia begins with an apology for the poet’s apparent lack of fitness for his task, but he proceeds because it is sometimes necessary to (over)stretch ourselves so that we may become stronger (sane perpendere vires, / Et librare, priusquam quid subeatur, oportet / Prudentem: & quam sufficiat tolerare facultas, / Materiam tractare decet. Sed nulla potestas / Cresceret in maius: nullumque accederet augmen / Viribus humanis, si non graviora subiri / Interdum accideret, maioraque pondera sumi, / Quam ferri ex solito videatur posse. Labore / Difficili vires augentur, p. 3v). Lucretius’s poetic labours are undertaken, with some confidence, for Memmius’s benefit (DRN 1.136–45); Parisetti’s, with considerable trepidation, as a personal spiritual exercise.

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(Nulla ea praeteriti perturbant taedia. Nulla / Formido vexat, vel sollicitudo futuri. / Nullo impendentis casus, lethique pavore / Tanguntur. Nullis animi, mentisve premuntur / Tormentis. Quidquid natura ministrat, eo sunt / Contenta, 1.34). In short, the animals enjoy a life that approximates to that of the ataraxic Epicurean sage or gods. In his third book, Parisetti first respectfully summarizes what ‘divine Plato’ has said ‘albeit in an ambiguous and long-winded fashion’ (ambage licet sit / Usus verborum longa, p. 85), about the abodes allotted to the souls after death; but then ‘certain others have thought these regions where souls are afflicted to be nothing more than our human bodies, which enclose our souls in a sad prison, and wrap them in filth and darkness. They have called the infernal homes of the souls our bodies. Whatever poetic religion once claimed about the underworld they have sought to ascribe to our bodies’ (pp. 87–8). Yet in the survey of psychological rationalizations that follows (of the underworld rivers, Prometheus, Tantalus, etc.) Parisetti, perhaps surprisingly, does not echo even verbally Lucretius’s catalogue of torments at DRN 3.978–1023.68 And far from disproving the afterlife, these poetic allegories only confirm the wretchedness of our lives on earth—to the torments of the mind Parisetti adds the sufferings of the body—so that we are obliged to hope for a reward in the world to come.69 While the Lucretian intertext flickers in the shadows of such 68 For Parisetti Lethe is the error of the soul which has forgotten its true condition; Phlegethon the fires of anger and the passions of those whose souls are on fire because of their depraved bodily habits; the vulture that endlessly consumes the liver represents the pangs of a guilty conscience; the rock about to fall is the fear suffered by tyrants because they have earned the hatred of the people, etc. Parisetti concludes: ‘Thus they have truly painted the unfortunate condition of man, so that no one could not but judge these things to have been ingeniously fashioned and sagely pronounced by them’ (Sic vere pingit mortalis conditionem / Infaustam vitae: ut non possit reputari / Ingeniose conficta, ac dictata sagaci / Ingenio, 90). 69 Moreover, later in the book Parisetti extrapolates a higher intensity of after-life torments from the very survival of our souls. The biblical metaphors of hell (roaring, hissing, burning, etc.) are rationalized, though again, without echoing Lucretius. Thus, ‘I take the gnawing worm to be nothing other than a certain goad/pang about a sin or crime with which the surviving soul, conscious of its guilt, afflicts and is afflicted; and although that goad is also wont to gnaw a man in this life—while he is less conscious of his actions it expects an end and [then] strikes at the mind again—it afflicts and drives the soul which has departed the body all the more, since that soul is more aware of itself ’ (Vermem / Rodentem, nihil esse aliud puto, quam sceleris, seu / Delicti stimulum quendam: quo conscia culpae / Existens anima urgetur, premiturque. Tametsi / Is stimulus quoque sit solitus corrodere in ista / Vita hominem: dum conscius actorum male, finem / Respectat, repetitque animo: tamen hoc magis urget,

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castigations as ‘O blind hearts, and too-mad minds of men, gripped by such desire for and shrewdness in human affairs’ (o pectora caeca, nimisque / Delirae mentes hominum: quos tanta cupido, / Et solertia rerum humanarum tenet . . . , 108; cf. DRN 2.14; 3.1077) it is difficult to say whether these are conscious or deliberate allusions. If anything, Parisetti seems to forestall the suspicion he might be emulating the impious Epicurean poet. In the middle of the second book, when he is done with rebutting those he deems to be serious philosophers, he turns, almost as an afterthought, to Lucretius.70 Parisetti claims to find him rather droll when he claims that everything is constituted from ‘subtle atoms, nay, now hooked onto the body, now spiked, and now round. I have never been able to read his verses, which are elegant enough, without succumbing to a great belly laugh.’71 ‘Elegant enough’ is rather grudging praise for the DRN (especially from one who confessed, in one of his verse letters, to not caring when a teacher judged his own verses ‘harsh’72). Lucretius is then accused of choosing an attractive but ridiculous subject for the sake of amusing his readers; of displaying an un-Roman foolishness in choosing to glorify the mad philosophy of the pleasure-addicted Epicurus, more worthy to be called devius than divinus; and of

/ Exagitatque animam defuncto corpore: quo se / Ipsa anima agnoscit perfectius . . . , 103). In the same way, the posthumous punishments projected for the victims of ambition, avarice, gluttony, and lust, are imaginative extensions of the afflictions of body and mind suffered for these sins in the present life (the lustful person will continue to suffer the pain of venereal disease but also of knowing he will never be able to satisfy his lust again). 70 Superest scrutari, siquid adhuc sit / A quoquam ex illis: qui tentavare probare / Mortem animae: obiectum: quo possit nostra videri / In dubium adduci causa: & discrimen inire. / Illa mihi tantum occurrunt: quae scripta reliquit / Impius, ac demens Lucretius ex Epicuri, / Et Dichaearchi sententia. As Dasso has noted, Parisetti follows Lactantius (De opificio Dei: illius [sc. Epicuri] enim sunt omnia quae delirat Lucretius (see Lactantius (1893) part 1, v. 2, p. 22) in imputing all Lucretius’s errors to Epicurus: (2008) 26). Dicaearchus of Messana (3–4 BCE), a pupil of Aristotle, had attempted to prove the soul mortal (On the Soul criticized by Cicero in Tusculan Disputations 1.24, 1.41, 1.51, 1.77). 71 Is esse videtur / Naturae mihi scurra: suas dum congerit una / Omnibus in rebus gignendis, atque creandis / Subtiles atomos, imo nunc corpore aduncas, / Nunc teretes, nunc despicatas [sic], nuncque rotundas. / Carmina nunquam huius, quae sunt sat compta, leguntur: / Quin risus mihi concipiatur maximus. 72 Ep. 4.2 (1541), ‘Ad Alphonsum’. But in a letter ‘Ad Marcellum’ (Ep. 6.8), Parisetti attempts to entice his lawyer friend back to the countryside, where he can deny the poet his post-prandial siesta with readings from the ‘bright writings of Lucretius’ (candida . . . Lucreti scripta).

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deriving from him, among other nonsense, various opinions about the mortality of the soul—which our poet now undertakes briefly to survey and refute.73 In fact, the notion that Lucretius chose an Epicurean theme for aesthetic reasons rather than out of genuine philosophical conviction is undermined by Parisetti’s subsequent assertion that Lucretius would not have been waylaid by Epicurus’s idiocies (ineptiolas) had he not been driven mad by the notorious love potion (59). In preparing to refute the Epicurean argument that if the soul were immortal it would leave the dying body at one instant, not piecemeal (DRN 3.526–32), Parisetti claims that this thought had already occurred to him as a child, before he had read Lucretius. He has now grown up, whereas Lucretius remains stuck in a state of perennial puerility.74 Perhaps the poet protests too much, and feels the anxiety of an evil Lucretian influence?75 However that may be, the De immortalitate animae is not Parisetti’s party piece, as the De animorum immortalitate was, arguably, for his contemporary, Paleario. Parisetti was just getting started; the more ambitious, and even less Lucretian, philosophical poetry of the Theopoeia and Pausithea beckoned.

73 Is, ni / Materia allectus condendis versibus apta, / Scripsit: & amplecti diffisus carmine posse / Seria naturae, sumpsit sibi ludicra versu / Tractanda: elegitque sciens deliria: quo rem / Ridiculum faceret: delectaret legentes: / Omnem stultitiae humanae mihi pene videtur / Excessisse modum: ut Romanum hominem reperiri / Tam vanum, & stolidum mirer: cui visa Epicuri / Somnia sint imitari digna. Scientia inanis, / Addictusque voluptati Gargetius Horti / Incola, nil scripsit prope, quod mereatur ab ullo / Admitti sano. Quodcumque libidini amicum / Noverat, & ventri: nebulonibus, & parasitis / Persuadere suis studuit. Lucretius ergo / Hunc hominem: qui convenientius, ac melius quit / Devius appellari, quam divinus, inepte / Est imitatus: & inter deliramina dixit / Caetera, mortalem esse animam: cuius breviter nunc / Argumenta recensebo: prorsumque refellam (56–7). 74 Has nugas puero mihi succurrisse recordor / Quondam: cum nondum legissem scripta poetae / Lucreti: & nondum novissem scita Epicuri. . . . Mox tamen excedens aevum puerile, virilem / Sumpsi animum, & sana puerilia somnia mente / Exegi. At noster vates pueriliter errans / Semper: & egregius nimium puerilium amator / Fabellarum, alicuius iudicat esse valoris, / Quae profert, nulli non irridenda, puer ni / Existat, mentisque impos. Dum colligit ergo / Mortalem apparere animam: quae deserit aegrum / Paulatim corpus: nimirum delirat inepte (67). 75 The charge of puerility is of course a Lucretian one (cf. DRN 2.55: nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis / in tenebris metuunt). There is an anti-Lucretian flavour to the simile developed by Parisetti in the opening letter of the sixth book of his 1540 collection, to Jacopo Sadoleto, on the eve of Trent. Parisetti compares corrupt clergy who are breathing easy because of a reprieve from the calling of a Council to naughty boys who behave well in the presence of an adult or teacher but resume their noise and games even more boisterously as soon as the fear of observation has passed (luduntque licentius / omni terrore exuti).

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It is quite likely, as Dasso suggests, that Parisetti will have read Paleario’s poem, although the two diverge not insignificantly in style and structure.76 The De animorum immortalitate was composed after a two-year stint in Padua during which time Paleario will have had ample opportunity to participate in the debates that were raging around Pomponazzi. Dasso suggests a subsidiary motive of angling for humanistic patronage (the poem is dedicated to the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand, and sports a liminal letter to his papal nuncio, the humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio, Jr). The De animorum immortalitate deserves to be recognized as the first of the literary anti-Lucretiuses inasmuch as it is an undisguised emulation of the De rerum natura that simultaneously draws attention to and subverts its model. The second book opens with praise for Plato modelled on Lucretius’s praise for Epicurus in the proem to DRN 3 (Flumina qui, Graiae gentis decus, aurea fundis / ore sacro . . . te duce non verear caecis offusa tenebris / explorare . . . ). But how distant is ‘the glory of the Greek race’ from that ‘Greek man [sc. Epicurus]! For what should one not think a Greek capable of daring?77 Here, here, religion, the whole glory of humankind, of the Gods, descending from the clear ether, seems to be cast down and trampled underfoot: a wicked voice was able to persuade to so much evil’ (Graius homo! Graium quid non audere putandum est? / Hinc, hinc relligio, liquido quae ex aethere lapsa, / relligio, decus omne virum, decus omne deorum, / sub pedibus deiecta hominum externataque visa est: / improba vox tantum potuit suadere malorum!,

76 Paleario had also devoted his third book to the fate of our souls after death, but his broad sweep anti-Lucretian eschatology is a world away from Parisetti’s fastidious inquiry into the particulars of after-life torments. Both poets, however, expatiate on the idea that Nature has implanted in us the desire for posterity and would be cruel to deny us an after-life; and conversely, that our physical monuments and heroic achievements here on earth are transient (Parisetti 2.40–1, 54–5; Paleario 2. 207–307: the latter, with Scipiadas in the first position in line 272, recalls DRN 3.1034). Like Parisetti, Paleario had also contrasted animals’ unawareness of their mortality with human anxiety (2.501–7). 77 In bk 3, vv. 352–5, Paleario chides another ‘little Greek’, presumably Pythagoras, in verses that would not look out of place in DRN 3 (the ultimate allusion is to Odyssey 4.563–8, as Sacré notes ad loc): ‘Why do you blather so much to me about golden Rhadamanthus and the Elysian fields, little Greek, why do you imagine and tell me they are happy and blessed who are obliged to return to evils and tribulations for eternity?’ (Quid tu mihi de flavo Rhadamantho, / quid mihi de Elysiis tot garris, Graecule, campis, / quid mihi felices fingis dicisque beatos / aeternum, in mala quos opus est luctusque redire?).

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vv. 22–7).78 While the allusions to DRN are not always so concentrated—Paleario is just as likely to imitate, for example, Virgil—he is evidently less embarrassed to flourish his Lucretian feathers than was Parisetti. A much more confident poem than Parisetti’s, the De animorum immortalitate is unexceptional in its physics and theology.79 Without engaging systematically with Lucretius’s proofs for the mortality of the soul, Paleario makes some glancing hits. Thus he deflects Lucretius’s implication of the soul’s perishability in its capacity for inebriation (DRN 3. 476–86) by shifting the focus of that argument to the issue of nourishment: if the soul really were part of the body it too should thrive on food and wine, but in fact these impede its functioning.80 Towards the end of the first book, Paleario rises on Lucretian wings beyond the ‘flaming walls of the world’ (cf. Lucretius 1.73) to prove that the human soul’s natural home is in the heavens: Partem aliam nunc specta animi prudentis et altae participem rationis, vis quaenam illa repente tollit se celerem liquidum super aethera et extra procedit longe flammantia moenia mundi? Ecquibus ad caelum toties se sustulit alis invisit divumque domos atque ardua tecta? Cur tantum molitur iter vel quo duce, si non hic suus est olli locus et caelestis origo? Now observe another part of the prudent soul, one which partakes of profound reason, for what power is it that suddenly raises itself up swiftly above the liquid ether and proceeds far beyond the flaming walls of the world? Is it on any wings that it has so many times lifted itself up to the heavens and visited the homes and towering mansions of the

78

Cf. Lucretius 1.78, 101. Sacré points out e.g. that Paleario is here still asserting the existence of purgatory, which he would subsequently reject in his Actio in Pontificos Romanos: (1986) 2.518–19. 80 Parisetti silently appropriates another Lucretian argument, on the helplessness of the human infant, and repurposes it to prove that Nature would indeed be a wicked stepmother if there were no reward beyond the grave (Nascitur infelix homo, ubi fastidia / menses longa tulere decem matri, vagitus et ingens / primum exauditur . . . 2.429 ff.). Parisetti adds some Virgilian pessimism to the mix as he elaborates on the excruciating love pangs of the human adolescent (Uritur infelix iuvenis misere, ossaque et artus / incendunt taedae ardentes urbemque peragrat / vestigatque altas formosae virginis aedes, 483–5). 79

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gods? Why does it undertake such a journey, and with what guide, if not that this is its home and celestial origin?

The lines that follow briefly sketch other natural movements (rivers coming to rest in seas; a projectile hurled upwards returning to earth; precipitation), concluding that the ‘power of the soul, spurning the darkness of its blind prison, flies to the gods and is carried up like the breeze of pure fire; it loves to travel through the golden stars and settle, an exile, in its homeland of heaven’ (At vigor ille animi, tenebris e carcere caeco / contemptis, volat ad superos et simplicis ignis / aurai similis fertur, iuvat ire per astra / aurea et extorrem patrio considere caelo, 534–7).81 Paleario equivocates here as to the literal elemental nature of soul (‘like the breeze of pure fire’) but, like Parisetti and Palingenius in their different ways, he evinces a restive yearning for a purer life of the spirit beyond the imperfections and flux of the present world, and for a paradise firmly located in physical space.82 On the face of it, Scipione Capece’s poem is much less anguished than either Parisetti’s or Paleario’s. The effusiveness with which the Neapolitan poet praises Lucretius’s poetry and distinguishes it from his unfortunate choice of philosophy may be contrasted with the shrill resistance of Parisetti and the subversive appropriation of

81

In the overture to this passage (vv. 479–516) Paleario had elaborated on the theme of DRN 3.288–306, on the elemental basis of the emotions in animals and man. The rational soul, however, is immune from any corporeal contamination. Parisetti makes a similar point, claiming that Nature (rerum natura) comprises just two elements, fire and water, one of which is ascribed to heaven and the other to earth: ‘Only man has the use of fire, which is the sublime and heavenly element; the other animals, according to their species, inasmuch as they are earthly and mortal, use the heavy and earthy element. As the light [element] rises upwards it represents life; as the heavy [element] sinks to the bottom, so does it pertain to death and destruction. As light cannot exist without fire, thus life cannot exist without light. Since fire appears to be the element of light and life, we must believe that the condition of eternity is alotted to man’ (in usu / Solus homo ignem habeat, quod sublime est elementum, / Et coeleste: aliis generatim animantibus: ut quae / Sint terrenae, & mortales: oneroso elemento, / Terrenoque utentibus. Ut sursum leve fertur: / Sic vitam designat. Uti grave tendit ad imum: / Sic mortem, interitumque refert. Velut esse sine igne / Lux nequit: absque nequit sic lumine vita manere. / Cum lucis, vitaeque elementum appareat esse / Ignem: credendum est aeternam conditionem / Sortitum esse hominem, 2.51). 82 Bacchelli has commented on the need of many (literary) humanists of this generation compulsively to restate a vision of the universe contrasting sublunar defectiveness with the incorruptibility of the heavens: ‘È un incessante, quasi ossessionato, ritornare a questo tipo di rappresentazioni, che riflette una crisi generale ed una crisi personale di quei letterati; uno degli aspetti, in fondo, di questa età segnata dal doloroso spettacolo di guerre, pestilenze, desolazioni’ (1990a) 142.

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Paleario. As I have argued elsewhere, Capece, whose second book begins, emblematically, with a painting metaphor for scientific progress, presents us in De principiis rerum with ‘a series of gradually corrected cartoons of the universe, a working from rough drafts which literally prefigure his own master fresco’.83 The atomist worldview is a primitive but not irrational one, and ‘persuaded many Greeks who were concerned with the first elements of the universe and to know the causes of things’, whence: Haec eadem Latio illata est, natisque recepta Roma tuis, studio claris cultoque coruscis Eloquio, ante alios Italum qui primus amoenos Pieridum ingressus lucos e fronde perenni Detulit in Latium Grajo ex Helicone coronam, Naturae arcanas rerum dum pandere causas Nititur, & rarae deflagrat laudis amore, Hanc pater admittens dulci Lucretius ore Exposuit, blandoque tulit super aethera cantu. Felix, si obscuris verum cognoscere lumen In rebus potuisset, mellifluoque lepore Mananti optasset rationem carmine dignam. this same idea was brought to Latium, and received by the brilliant and illustrious sons of Rome through zeal and learned eloquence. He, above all the Italians, who first entered the pleasant groves of the Pierians, conveyed a garland from the Greek Helicon to Latium, as he strives to reveal the hidden causes of things and burns with desire for rare praise. Receiving this [ratio], father Lucretius expounded it with his sweet mouth, and carried it with charming song above the ether. Happy, if he had been able to recognize the true light in obscure things and had he chosen a worthy argument for his song, dripping with honeyed charm! (fols. 6v-7r, 1.231–42)84

Capece speculates de rerum natura in a candid and elegant imitation of his poetic model, impersonating Lucretian condescension about the superstitions of the rudis vulgi (2.449–64, on their dread at the 83

Haskell (1997) 695–6. If Lucretius had only chosen a better argument his name would have lived forever. But when Capece goes on to invoke the aid of the ‘Great Father’ and the illuminating rays of the Sun so that his poem may last forever, ‘with your name’, the addressee of his prayer is perhaps left deliberately ambiguous: Lucretius or the Christian God? 84

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precipitation of red earth, which they assume to be blood).85 And yet it is possible to identify a different kind of anguish, that of the exile, at the heart of this superficially serene natural-philosophical poem: Sed dum signorum incessus motusque vagantum Me iuvat, & miros naturae solvere nodos, Longe alios cursus alios mea perficit orbes Mens agitata malis, acrique exercita cura, Cura, has aeternis quaesitas vatibus olim Quae me tentantem naturae accedere partes Ad tristes vertit gemitus durosque dolores Heu misero nimium at frustra sirenis amatae, Quae nunc de patriis demisso lumine portis Incisum cari nequicquam nomen alumni Desertasque piis spectat cultoribus aedes . . . But while I enjoy the tracks and movements of the wandering stars and unravelling the knots of Nature, my mind is stirred up by woes and completes very different orbits, and is vexed by a biting care, a care which, when I am attempting to understand these parts of Nature into which the eternal bards once inquired, diverts me to the sad sighs and harsh pains—woe is me!—of my Parthenope [nymph of Naples], loved too much but in vain, who now, from my ancestral gates, regards with eyes downcast the house bereft of pious guests, and the name, inscribed to no avail, of its dear alumnus. (fol. 31r, 2.826–35)

These lines introduce a long peroration in which Capece revisits Virgil’s o fortunatos nimium and tribute to Lucretius in Georgics 2.458ff. For Capece, ‘too happy are they’ who have no desire for transient praise but rejoice in the riches of ‘kindly reason’, and ‘resources bestowed, without labour, by Mother Nature’86—that is, presumably, those who can enjoy their Lucretian natural-philosophical labours in peace! But ‘happy above all is he who knows the way of Fortune and has been able to spurn the power of death, and aspires to the substantial honours of that praise which never dies and to the joys 85 As Beretta observes, ‘Pur rifiutando le conseguenze materialistiche del De rerum natura e la dottrina della mortalità dell’anima Capece . . . si era servito di Lucrezio per delineare una filosofia della natura diversa, il cui linguaggio era direttamente riconducibile ai semina, gli exordia e i primordia rerum del suo modello’: (2008) 180. 86 Felices nimium & fatis melioribus orti, / Mens sua quis satis est fluxae non indiga laudis, / Et scelerum immunis nullique obnoxia culpae / Est almae tantum dives rationis, opesque / Quas bona fert nullo genitrix natura labore, / Ingentes credit vitae fugientis ad usum (fol. 31v, 2.850–5).

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of the true life [sc. after-life] which will remain’.87 This masterly recuperation of Virgil’s portrait of Lucretius88 casts the Christian philosopher as the truly blessed man, a philosopher, like Capece, who has known adversity (noscere morem / Fortunae). In the Golden Age fantasy that ensues, Capece imagines a retreat from the world to a wild paradise of woods and caves, where such a man will be strengthened in his resolve to rise above the uncertainties and fruitless exertions of this life by the company and sanctus amor of like-minded friends. Here and only here does Capece seem to hint, with politic vagueness, at his onetime association with the circle of the reformer, Juan de Valdés (d. 1541). There is at any rate no obvious attempt by Capece to relate his religious beliefs to the nonconformist cosmology expounded in the poem. *** Constraints of space have obliged me to take a bird’s-eye view of the Latin Lucretian poems of sixteenth-century Italy. Our Cinquecento Lucretian poets broadly agree on the immortality of the soul, less on the structure of the universe.89 There are, it is true, some intriguing topical correspondences but scant evidence of conscious crossreferencing, let alone of a coherent literary tradition. So why Lucretius? Rather than a fund of (dangerous) ideas either to be refuted or endorsed, the Roman vates seems to represent for these poets, first and foremost, the enabling genius for taking philosophical flight in verse. (Thus if Paleario’s and to a lesser extent Parisetti’s poems are anti-Lucretian, they engage with Lucretian arguments against the immortality of the soul only in passing—as had Ficino, for that matter, in his Theologia Platonica.) The philosophical flights of the Cinquecento Lucretian poets range from cautious Christian raptures (Paleario and Parisetti) through to bold spiritual and cosmological thought experiments (Palingenius and Bruno). But Parisetti in his verse epistles and didactic poetry is simultaneously taking flight from religious turmoil and the temptations of the 87 Ante tamen felix cunctos, qui noscere morem / Fortunae, & vires potuit contemnere leti; / Ac solidos nunquam periturae laudis honores / Et verae aspirat mansura ad gaudia vitae (fol. 31v, 2.858–61). 88 felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas / atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum / subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis auari (490–2). 89 Bacchelli finds an implicit polemic against Palingenius’s (and others’) hypothesis of extra-celestial light in Capece (Bacchelli (1990a) 135 n. 50).

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world. The dual desire to write himself free from/rise above spiritual contamination is precisely expressed in the letter to Martelli (Ep. 5.6), where Parisetti describes the project of philosophical poetry as the attempt to escape from the Cretan labyrinth. This flight is both intellectual and moral (and in the poem’s final’s lines we are told that it will require both Platonic furor and Christian grace): Dedalus ergo Est intellectus noster: qui dum speculator Sublimes rerum causas, divinaque coeli Ornamenta: volatu sese attollere in altum Dicitur: & celeri migrare per aera penna. Hic contemplando sese de carcere Cretae Explicat: Affectus dum corporis exuit; & dum, Fortia tardantis superat retinacula sensus, Evadit volucri Minoia claustra volatu. Therefore Daedalus is our intellect which, while it examines the sublime causes for things and the divine ornaments of heaven, is said to raise itself up high, in flight, and to travel through the air on swift wings. In contemplation it liberates itself from the Cretan prison, as it puts off the affections of the body, and as it overcomes the strong chains of dragging sense it escapes the Minoan cage with winged flight.

Ep. 1.3, to Bembo, had also concluded with a liberating ascent/ascesis via serious poetry about Nature. The Latin poet, ignored by the vulgar crowd, reaps ‘above all [the reward] of making a path for the mind to blessed Olympus and driving the four-horsed chariot, bursting from its cage, to the sublime finishing line, surmounting the earth through the swift soaring of the virtues’.90 That Parisetti explicitly associates this flight with escape from the mythological punishments of the underworld as experienced on earth cannot but put us in mind of DRN 3.978–1023—even if, as in De animae immortalitate, the literary influence of Lucretius is either unconscious or suppressed.91 As for 90 Id sedet imprimis animo foelicis Olympi / Affectare viam, & rupto de carcere currum / Quadriiugum ad spacii sublimem impellere metam, / Virtutumque agili terras superare volatu. 91 ‘[A]nd prevent the vulture from feeding on the beating liver of Earth’s son [Prometheus], or the deceit of Sisyphus’s stone from torturing [him], that is, the rock and its like, about to fall, from looming over him as he descends, and the prepared tables from denying food, and the wheel from casting him down and the molten wave from vexing the one to whom it is given to elude the bitter

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Capece, notwithstanding the fact that, during his exile in Salerno, he was obliged to carry out some minor administrative duties for his protector, Ferrante Sanseverino, he offers in De principiis rerum a model of natural-philosophical poetry as consolation and refuge from political life, and a glimpse, perhaps, of his nostalgia for a lost Valdesian community under the guise of Lucretian primitivism.

windings of Acheron, the sluggish Styx, and the wave of lamentable Cocytus, the burning waters of Phlegethon, the oblivion of Lethe—he, in the end, through his merits will equal the rewards of the Gods’ (Ac prohibere, iecur vivax ne tondeat Ales / Terrigenae, neu Sysiphii fallacia saxi / Torqueat, aut lapsura [sic] silex, similisque cadenti / Immineat, mensaeque negent alimenta paratae: / Neu rota praecipitet, neu fusilis unda fatiget / Cui dabitur vitare sinus Acherontis amaros, / Torpentem styga, cocyti lachrimabilis undam: / Ardentes Phlegetonis aquas, oblivia Lethes, / Is tandem meritis Divorum aequabit honores).

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5 Lucretius, Atheism, and Irreligion in Renaissance and Early Modern Venice N. S. Davidson

Research on Lucretius in Renaissance and early modern Italy is often focused on Florence, and with good reason. The text of the De rerum natura was first brought to light by a Tuscan, Poggio Bracciolini, in 1417; and although Poggio’s copy remained in Niccolò Niccoli’s sole possession at Florence until the 1430s, it subsequently served as the main source for European knowledge of the text. Florence became, as Alison Brown has shown, a key centre for the study and dissemination of Lucretian ideas well into the sixteenth century.1 But Florence was not the only city where Lucretius was read. While many of the earliest manuscript copies of the De rerum natura were produced in Florence, others were owned in Rome and Naples, and interest was evident in north-east Italy as well. Two fifteenth-century manuscripts of the De rerum natura survive in the Biblioteca Capitolare in Padua, for instance, one with the coat of arms of Jacopo Zeno (1418–81), the other copied by Pietro Barozzi (?1441–1507). Both men were Venetian patricians.2 And the earliest four printed editions of the text were produced in the Venetian Republic: the editio princeps by Thomas Ferandus at Brescia in about 1473; the second by Paulus Fridenperger at Verona in 1486; the third in Venice by Theodorus de Ragazonibus in 1495; and the fourth—edited by the Veronese humanist Girolamo Avanzio—by Aldus Manutius in

1 2

See esp. Brown (2010a). A list of Lucretius MSS can be found in Palmer (2009) 354–7.

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Venice in 1500.3 The Venetian humanist Giovanni Battista Cipelli (1478–1553)—more usually known as Battista Egnazio—was reportedly lecturing on Lucretius in Venice in the early years of the sixteenth century.4 And in 1515, the last Italian edition of the De rerum natura for over one hundred years was published, again in Venice and again by Aldus. The text for this edition had been newly edited by the Venetian patrician Andrea Navagero, a prolific editor of the classics who was appointed public historiographer of the Republic in the following year; it became the basis for the later editions of the De rerum natura produced in Basel, Lyons, and Paris.5 Despite these indications of a serious local interest in, and engagement with, the De rerum natura, there has been little modern research on the reception and influence of Lucretius in the Venetian Republic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.6 The Venetian example may nonetheless help us to test and develop some of the arguments and interpretations that have been advanced by scholars who have worked in the records of other Italian cities and states. Venetian readers of Lucretius were undoubtedly aware that elements in the De rerum natura were at odds with contemporary Christian teaching, as they were with the Roman religion of the poem’s own time. Throughout the poem, in fact, religious belief is presented as delusional, and a source of evil and crime (as 1.80–101; 5.1217–39). Among its most obvious challenges to Catholic belief are the materialism of Lucretius’s understanding of atoms (as 5.417–32), his rejection of any notion of divine creation or providence (as 1.149–50; 2.1048–63; 4.833–43; 5.157–70), and his denial of an after-life (as 3.418–25, 799–800). These subversive themes were not lost on Venetian publishers and readers. At the end of the second printing of the poem, for example, after recording publication details (Paulus hunc impressit 3

For a list of Lucretius editions, see Palmer (2009) 363–7; (2014) 258–64; cf. also (2009) 310–19; (2014) 258–64; and Ferguson Smith and Butterfield (2010), for a possible additional printing at Brescia in 1496. Avanzio was born in Verona; he also worked with Aldus on his editions of Pliny and Catullus: Lowry (1979) 245, 257. 4 Fleischmann (1971) 352. 5 Palmer (2009) 244, 327; (2014) 162–3. For Navagero, see Lowry (1979) 204–5, 230–1; Marchesi (2012). Only two other editions of the De rerum natura were produced in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth cents.: one at Bologna in 1511 and the other at Florence in 1512. 6 An important exception is S. Campbell (2003), who suggests that Lucretius’s poem provides ‘an interpretative frame’ (323) for Giorgione’s The Tempest, which is often dated to 1505–6.

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fridenperger in verona . . . ), the publisher inserted an additional little verse of his own, constructed for the most part from largely unaltered lines taken from the De rerum natura itself, in which Fridenperger recognized the importance of atoms (semina rerum) to Lucretius’s thinking, but urged the reader in the publisher’s own words to discard everything in the volume that was false (Si autem sint falsa et ratio quoque falsa et sensus: relinque). The verse ends with a confident statement—including a line reworked from 4.467–8—that truth and falsehood can be distinguished by reason: Nam nihil egregius est: quam res cernere a dubiis apertas. / Ratio enim neminem decipit nec decipitur nunquam.7 Aldus Manutius made a rather different case on the opening page of his first Venetian edition of 1500, in the dedicatory letter to his former pupil, Alberto Pio di Carpi. While acknowledging that much of what Lucretius had written was wrong, Aldus argued that the poem should nonetheless be studied because its account of Epicurean philosophy was written in such elegant and learned Latin.8 In the new dedicatory letter to Alberto Pio—by now imperial ambassador to the papacy—which introduced his second edition of 1515, however, Aldus reverted to the argument that a study of the false beliefs of Lucretius would reveal the truth of Christianity even more clearly. He referred to Lucretius directly as ‘full of lies’, pointing in particular to the very different beliefs about God and the creation that he held as a member of the ‘Epicurean sect’. And he insisted that any reader of Lucretius who was not already aware of the poet’s ‘lunacies’ should learn of them from Aldus’s own words.9 Not all aspects of the De rerum natura were seen as dangerous, of course. Lucretius’s austere approach to physical pleasure and his hostility to self-indulgence (as in 4.1061–1146) could be reconciled quite easily with Christian teaching.10 It is nonetheless sometimes suggested that the distancing tactics adopted by his early Venetian editors—warning readers against his errors while urging them to read his poem, or focusing more on its literary merits than its philosophical 7 Lucretius (1486) m vii. Palmer (2009) 315–16, (2014) 197–9 prints the verse and helpfully identifies the Lucretian origins of each borrowed line. 8 . . . non quod vera scripserit, et credenda nobis, nam ab academicis etiam, et peripateticis, nedum a theologis nostris multum dissentit, sed quia epicureae sectae dogmata eleganter et docte mandavit carminibus: Lucretius (1500) 1v. For the relationship of Aldus and Alberto Pio, see Lowry (1979) 52–9, 75, 111. 9 Lucretius (1515) 1v–2r. 10 Cf. e.g. S. Campbell (2003) 326–7; Palmer (2009) 236–7.

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content—were little more than attempts to protect themselves from the unwelcome attention of the authorities while still ensuring that his ideas were put into wider circulation.11 But it can also be argued that editors, publishers, and readers were in reality quite capable of distinguishing between the different arguments in the text, refuting some and approving others. In order to identify which approach students of Lucretius might have adopted, however, we need to look more closely, where we can, at their other statements and activities. Take those two Venetian patricians who owned—in one case, copied—the manuscripts of the De rerum natura now in the Biblioteca Capitolare at Padua. Jacopo Zeno and Pietro Barozzi were both bishops. Zeno was appointed to Belluno in 1447, and moved in 1460 to Padua, where he remained until his death twenty-one years later; Barozzi followed the same path from Belluno, where he was bishop from 1471 to 1487, to Padua, remaining in post there until his death in 1507. Both men were known as defenders of Catholic teaching, conscientious pastors, and reformers in their dioceses. They also amassed significant private libraries—361 manuscript and printed volumes, in Zeno’s case—and had extensive scholarly interests. Zeno wrote biographies of popes and other men of the Church,12 while Barozzi produced saints’ lives and a verse life of Christ, as well as work on canon law, devotional texts, and a book on the art of dying well, which was published with a selection of his other titles in 1531.13 Barozzi’s exemplary life and career in fact served as a model for Gasparo Contarini’s influential description of the ideal bishop in his De officio episcopi, written in 1517.14 It is not easy to characterize either Zeno or Barozzi as a closet Lucretian. Or consider Battista Egnazio, who lectured on Lucretius in Venice in the early 1500s. He was ordained in 1502, and despite the early success of his career as a secular priest, he seriously considered joining the austere Camaldoli branch of the Benedictine order towards the end of that decade. He remained a good friend of devout 11

12 See e.g. Prosperi (2007a) 214–16. King (1986) 7, 447–9. Barozzi (1531). The Bodleian Library in Oxford owns a decorated MS of Barozzi’s De ratione bene moriendi—probably the dedication copy presented to Cardinal Marco Barbo, patriarch of Aquileia: Bodleian MS Lyell 81. On Barozzi, see also Gaeta (1964); Gasparini (1980); King (1986) 7, 32, 235, 333–5, who emphasizes his piety and theological orthodoxy; Reeve (2007) 210; and Nante et al. (2012). 14 A modern edition and translation of this text appears in Contarini (2002): for Contarini’s praise of Barozzi, see 84, 94, 120–2. 13

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patricians such as Tommaso Giustinian and Vincenzo Quirini (who did both join the Camaldolesi), and Gasparo Contarini (who was made a cardinal in 1535), as well as of Aldus and his son Paolo, with whom he worked closely on many classical editions.15 Quirini too had worked on the text of the De rerum natura, as Avanzio acknowledged in his dedicatory letter in the 1500 Aldine edition of the poem.16 Figures such as Zeno and Barozzi, Egnazio and Quirini, who studied, edited, or published the De rerum natura but retained a strong commitment to the Christian faith, could be found in other Italian cities too. The Aldine press published the De principiis rerum of the Neapolitan humanist Scipione Capece, for instance, in 1546, with a preface by Paolo Manuzio and an endorsement by the Venetian cardinal Pietro Bembo. The poem imitates Lucretius’s original, praises his Latin style, and deals with some similar themes. But Capece used his text to reject Lucretius’s materialism; and he was in fact a deeply religious man, attracted by aspects of the evangelical preaching of the Capuchin Bernardino Ochino and by the teaching of the Spanish theologian Juan de Valdès, who had lived in Naples for the last few years of his life until his death in 1541.17 And while some devout Christians were undoubtedly concerned by the risk posed to orthodox belief by the arguments of pagan classical authors,18 it should be remembered that the Catholic Church did not in the sixteenth century add Lucretius’s name to the Index of Prohibited Books. Indeed, during the preparatory work on the first Roman Index, issued by Pope Paul IV, the fearsomely orthodox Cardinal Michele Ghislieri—who was elected Pope in 1565 and canonized in 1712—argued forcefully that books such as the De rerum natura should not be placed on the Index. Writing to the inquisitor at Genoa on 27 June 1557, he claimed that ‘If we were to prohibit the Orlando innamorato and the Orlando furioso . . . the Decameron and similar books, we would immediately be laughed at; . . .nobody reads such books as texts in which we have to believe, but as stories (fabule), 15 On Egnazio, see Ross (1976); Mioni (1981); on his circle of devout friends, see Bowd (2002); Tabacchi (2002). 16 Lucretius (1500) 2v. 17 Capece (1546): see e.g. i. 238–42. Information from Capece’s 1553 Inquisition trial in Naples was sent to the Venetian Inquisition tribunal in 1555: Venice, Archivio di Stato (hereafter ASVen), Savi all’eresia (Santo Uffizio) (hereafter SU), b. 13, ‘Giulio Basalù’. See further Haskell’s Chapter 4; Parenti (1975); Bacchelli (1990a). 18 See the examples cited by Brown (2010a) pp. x, 3, 5, 12.

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in the same way that we still read many pagan authors such as . . . Lucretius and the like’.19 It is true, of course, that the Florentine provincial council had in 1517 ordered local school teachers not to discuss opera lasciva et impia in their classes, naming Lucretius’s poem as an example. But the decree refers only to the De rerum natura’s teaching on the mortality of the soul; and the prohibition could have had no force outside the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Florence.20 Philosophical debates about the soul had in fact become very heated in the later fifteenth century, not least at the University of Padua—so much so that Bishop Pietro Barozzi had had to intervene in 1489, issuing a decree prohibiting public discussion of the doctrine of the unity of intellect.21 And in December 1513, the Fifth Lateran Council had also condemned ‘all those who assert that the intellective soul is mortal, or only one among all human beings’.22 It is possible that either or both of these decrees might subsequently have been used against anyone seeking to challenge the traditional doctrine of immortality in the Venetian Republic. But it is clear from their wording that they were targeted mainly against existing trends in Aristotelian philosophy, rather than against any new materialist ideas borrowed from Lucretius. It seems, therefore, that it was possible to read and study Lucretius without compromising Christian belief; and that the ecclesiastical authorities—outside the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Florence, at least—were not especially concerned by the circulation of the De rerum natura. But another way to assess the impact of the poem in north-east Italy is to examine the trial records of individuals who were reported or examined for ideas of the kind that Lucretius had hoped to promote.

19 Quoted by Frajese (2006) 77–8. Alessandro Marchetti’s Italian translation of the De rerum natura was placed on the Index, but only in 1718, after its first publication in London and three years after his death. It is interesting to note in this context that, in 1534, the Venetian Council of Ten authorized the publication of the Zodiacus vitae, which was almost certainly influenced by the De rerum natura and is now attributed to the south Italian humanist Marcello Stellato. The author died in Forlì in 1538; his body was subsequently exhumed and burned, along with heretical books found in his house. The Zodiacus was placed on the first papal Index in 1559. But Stellato was no atheist, and the ecclesiastical authorities were probably more concerned by his interest in such un-Lucretian subjects as astrology, alchemy, and magic than his knowledge of Epicureanism: see Vasoli (1996) and Haskell’s Chapter 4. 20 Mansi (1900–27) xxxv, col. 270: De magistris, 2. 21 See Blum (2007); for Barozzi’s decree, 218. 22 Anon. (1521) 107r: Session 8, 19 Dec. 1513.

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In March 1534, for instance, while on visitation in the western part of his diocese, Gian Matteo Giberti, the Bishop of Verona, received reports about Antonio Piviano, a tavern-keeper in Desenzano on the southern shore of Lake Garda. After questioning witnesses, the bishop concluded that Antonio was ‘a blasphemer against God, the Virgin Mary, and the saints’. He had, claimed Giberti, mocked the faith and the sacraments, and denied the immortality of the soul; and ‘as one who does not believe that either Paradise or Hell exist, he says publicly that there is no life after death; and that when he dies, his body can be thrown into the lake to feed the fish’.23 Later in the century, Girolamo di Ferrari was alleged to have held some similar beliefs. Ferrari was a lawyer and poet who lived in Monselice, to the south of Padua. The Venetian Inquisition was told in 1570 that ‘he believed nothing’: in particular, he denied the existence of hell, purgatory, and paradise, he mocked the sacraments and the crucifix, and he rejected the providence of God, holding instead that everything was subject to chance.24 And a few years after that, in 1577, Costantino Tessera, a Venetian gold-beater in his seventies, was interrogated after claims by witnesses that he denied the existence of the after-life, arguing that ‘once the body is dead, the soul dies also’, for according to Tessera, the soul ‘is nothing other than our blood’.25 These are just a few examples from many that could be cited; and it is not of course easy to prove that the suspects in trials such as these did in fact hold the beliefs for which they were investigated. But whether they did or not, the surviving records undoubtedly indicate that beliefs of the kind present in the De rerum natura were by the sixteenth century familiar in north-east Italy: materialism, the rejection of providence, the denial of an after-life.26 But as far as I have been able to discover, the extensive records of ecclesiastical jurisdiction from this period contain no investigations for atomism. Nor did there seem to be any interest at the time on the part of inquisitors and other clerical judges in the influence of Lucretius. None of the suspects I have mentioned, or the others I could discuss in this context, were asked whether they had read the De rerum natura, or even 23 ASVen, SU, b. 160, letter of Gian Mateo Giberti, Bishop of Verona, to the Capi del Consiglio dei Dieci in Venice, 15 Mar. 1534; Prosperi (2010) i. 101. 24 SU, b. 28, ‘C. Girolamo di Ferrari, Dottore’; for Ferrari’s written works, see Vedova (1832) i. 393–4. 25 SU, b. 41, ‘Tessera Costantino’. Tessera was a Greek; he was born in Trebizond. 26 Cf. also Davidson (1992).

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whether they owned a copy. The only reference to Lucretius that I am aware of in the archives of the Venetian Inquisition before 1600 appears in the trial of Giordano Bruno. And in that case, Lucretius’s name was brought up not by the tribunal, but by Bruno himself. On 3 June 1592, during his fifth interrogation, he was asked whether he had ‘ever said, held or believed that men were created in corruption like other animals’, to which Bruno replied ‘I believe that that is Lucretius’s opinion, and I have read it and heard it discussed; but I am not aware that I have ever referred to it as my own, let alone held it or believed it . . . such an opinion is neither consistent with, not derivable from, the principles and conclusions of my philosophy—as anyone who reads [my books] will easily discover’.27 In north-east Italy, therefore, suspects investigated for materialism and those who rejected providence and the after-life were not asked whether they had read the De rerum natura. Nobody was investigated for atomism. And in the Venetian trial of Giordano Bruno, who certainly had read Lucretius and who did adopt an atomist conception of matter, the suspect was the only person to mention the poet’s name.28 These findings suggest that the ecclesiastical authorities within the Venetian Republic were—at least before 1600—untroubled by the circulation of the De rerum natura. There was no local equivalent of the Florentine decree of 1517 against its use in schools, and no campaign against those who owned or read manuscript or printed copies of the text. And the evidence also indicates that, insofar as contemporaries did adopt beliefs that seemed consistent with those proposed by Lucretius, they found them in other sources or developed them independently. In the summer of 1598, for instance, the inquisitor in Venice wrote to the bishop and the inquisitor in Padua asking them to prevent Cesare Cremonini, who had taught philosophy at the University of Padua since 1590, discussing in his lectures the opinion of Alexander of Aphrodisias that the soul is mortal.29 Alexander, an Aristotelian 27 Firpo (1993) 187. It is usually not possible to identify which member of the tribunal asked each question. When recording this question, the scribe initially used the word anime (‘souls’), and only later replaced it with huomini (‘men’). Cf. also p. 285. 28 For Bruno’s understanding of atomism, see Gatti (2011), esp. 70–90. 29 Vatican City, Archivio Segreto Vaticano (hereafter ASVat) Vat. Lat. 10945 fol. 115v; cf. Vatican City, Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede (hereafter ACDF) Decreta, 37 fol. 188r: a reference to Cremonini, ‘qui legit de anima

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philosopher of the late second and early third centuries, had rejected the notion of personal immortality; his views were kept in circulation in early modern Italy in a Latin translation of his work titled Enarratio de anima ex Aristotelis institutione by the Venetian patrician, Girolamo Donato (1457–1511), first published in Brescia in 1495 and republished in at least eight further Venetian editions by 1560.30 There seems little doubt that Cremonini did hold unorthodox views. But Donato was no religious subversive: among his many other publications was a defence of papal primacy, published posthumously in 1525.31 And when the homes of suspects investigated for unorthodox beliefs were searched, the religious authorities invariably focused their interest on books by authors who had been prohibited rather than those who had not. Alvise Capuano was sentenced by the Venetian Inquisition in May 1580 for holding a wide range of errors, including the beliefs that the universe had neither beginning nor end, but was eternal; that God did not exist, nor any spiritual beings; that the only true law was the law of nature; that the world had been created by chance; and that the soul was mortal. Capuano had had an unusually complex religious pilgrimage. He was born on the Venetian island of Lesina in the Adriatic (modern Hvar); he had travelled widely in Italy, Spain, and France, and had also spent time in Geneva, before he settled in Venice. In its sentence, the tribunal labelled him an ‘atheista’. But in the report of the inquisitor’s raid on his house, submitted to the tribunal after his arrest, only his copies of the Colloquies of Erasmus, the Chronica of Carion, and the works of Machiavelli were recorded. The complete works of these three named authors had been included on the Index of 1559.32 ad mentem Alexandri Afrodisei’. For Cremonini, see also Poppi (1993); Nonis (1995); Spruit (2000). 30 On the survival of Alexander’s works to the sixteenth cent., see Kessler (2011). 31 Donato (1525). Donato also had a very successful political career, serving as the Republic’s Ambassador to many rulers between 1483 and 1511, including Popes Alexander VI and Julius II: King (1986) 366–7. For more on Donato and his translation, see Barnes (2009). 32 SU, b. 47, ‘Capuano Alvise’. The inquisitor also found in his house a French book, which was never identified. Johann Carion was a Protestant historian and astrologer; his Chronica had been published in Venice in 1543 in an Italian translation by Pietro Lauro, and then reprinted in 1548. Lauro was a prolific translator, and certainly associated with Reformation sympathizers in the city: see Dini (2005). For a later claim that Erasmus’s Colloquies had prompted atheist beliefs, see ACDF, St st.,

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The Venetian tribunal did not, however, always assume that suspects had acquired their beliefs from books. Among other beliefs alleged against him at his trial in 1512, Guido Donà held that God had not created humankind; that the universe was eternal; that the soul was mortal, and that there were therefore no rewards in the afterlife for the good, nor punishments for the evil; and that all religions were deceptions. By the date of his trial, Donà was in his seventies, and according to his neighbours, his views were longstanding and well known. But it would have served no purpose for the tribunal to ask him which books he had read: Donà was illiterate.33 Between the mid-fifteenth century and 1600, humanists in the Venetian Republic made significant contributions to the study of Lucretius, not least through the publication of five of the earliest seven printed editions of the text. But the scholars and publishers involved were fully aware that the De rerum natura brought together a number of related beliefs that were incompatible with the teaching of the Catholic Church, and either warned their readers that they should separate out and reject the false elements in the text, or urged them to focus on the poem’s literary merits. Such distancing tactics certainly served to enhance their own reputations for orthodoxy. But as far as we can see, these men were and remained devout Christians; many in fact were priests. And the Church authorities never condemned the text in its Latin form, despite their more general hostility—in both the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries—to philosophical discussion about the immortality of the soul. So the Church seemed not to be concerned about the religious implications of the De rerum natura. On the other hand, ecclesiastical tribunals in north-east Italy did prosecute individuals suspected of materialist beliefs about the creation of the world, divine providence, and the after-life. But at no point did clerical judges express any interest in the possible influence of Lucretius on these suspects; and in many cases, their opinions seem to have been prompted by other sources, or developed independently of written texts. Beliefs of the kind expressed by Lucretius had, after all, been available well before 1417 in the works of other ancient authors, such as Aristotle and O 3 L, fol. 296r–v, letter of Giovanni Battista Agucchi, papal nunzio in Venice, 11 Apr. 1626. 33 Venice, Archivio storico del Patriarcato di Venezia, Criminalia Sanctae Inquisitionis, 1461–1558, b. 1, fols. 174r–9v.

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Cicero. The subversive implications of Aristotelianism had been apparent as early as the thirteenth century;34 yet there was a strong Aristotelian tradition at the University of Padua, one that was influenced especially by the thinking of Alexander of Aphrodisias.35 And it is abundantly clear from the trial records that views of this kind were not debated only within educated and scholarly circles. The response to Lucretius within the Venetian Republic therefore raises some important questions about the role of books—in manuscript or in print—in the process of intellectual and cultural change. Do new ideas need to be made available in written form before they can be adopted more widely? Or can individuals and groups generate innovative thinking, or thinking that is in conflict with the dominant culture, without the stimulus of written sources? Indeed, are books likely to have a greater impact if their contents resonate in some way with, or even reinforce, ideas that are already in circulation? The Venetian evidence seems to suggest that thinking that questioned or rejected the core beliefs of Christianity was more widespread in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy than we might expect; and that the written word may have played a smaller part in shaping the beliefs of the majority than we sometimes assume.

34

See e.g. (1979). See e.g. Kessler (1988). Pomponazzi was an influential contributor to this tradition; he left Padua in 1510. 35

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6 ‘Well said/well thought’ How Montaigne Read his Lucretius Wes Williams

1. PROLOGUE ‘Bien dire/bien penser’: these terms can be found expressed as infinitives, rather than past participles, in a passage concerning Lucretius in book III, chapter 5, of Montaigne’s Essais, a chapter titled ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’. It is here that we find Montaigne’s most intense engagement with Lucretius, exemplified by the close reading of the poem’s opening evocation of Venus and Mars (DRN 1.33–40). Of all the classical poets, only Horace is quoted more often in the Essais than Lucretius; there is no single chapter devoted to either writer, but the chapter ‘On some lines in Virgil’ also quotes and comments on these lines from Lucretius, in which Montaigne recognizes Virgil’s source. Earlier in the same chapter, an exploration both of what it means to read the ancient Latin poets on love, sex, and all things between, and of how to write about the experience in French, in prose, and in the present, Montaigne had quoted Virgil in support of the contention that poetry ‘represente je ne sçay quel air plus amoureux que l’amour mesme’ (reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself).1 Expanding on his theme some twenty or so pages later (halfway down 1

Montaigne, Les Essais (1965) III.5, 849, and Complete Works (1957) 645; henceforth all parenthetical text references will be to these editions, and in this order, unless otherwise stated; for a fine account of the early modern ‘je ne sais quoi’, see Scholar (2005).

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Fig. 6.1. Montaigne, Essais (Paris: A L’Angelier, 1588), fol. 382r; Reproduction en quadrichromie de l’Exemplaire de Bordeaux des Essais de Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan (Fasano-Chicago: Schena Editore, Montaigne Studies, 2002), reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

the pages reproduced in Fig. 6.1), Montaigne offers both a comparison and a critique: ‘Ce que Virgile dict de Venus et de Vulcan, Lucrece l’avoit dict plus sortablement d’une jouissance desrobée d’elle et de Mars’ (What Virgil says of Venus and Vulcan, Lucretius had said more appropriately of a stolen enjoyment between her and Mars) (872; 664).

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Fig. 6.2. Montaigne, Essais (Paris: A L’Angelier, 1588), fol. 382v; Reproduction en quadrichromie de l’Exemplaire de Bordeaux des Essais de Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan (Fasano-Chicago: Schena Editore, Montaigne Studies, 2002), reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

The pages reproduced here (Figs. 6.1–6.4, 6.6–6.8) are taken from the ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’, Montaigne’s own marked-up copy of the second, 1588, edition of the Essais, the last version published in Montaigne’s lifetime, on which he made the handwritten notes, additions, and alterations which his literary executor, Marie

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de Gournay, would collate to produce the monumental work of scholarship that is her posthumous edition of the Essais in 1595.2 Lucretian reception history is also a history of annotation and marginalia, and the appearance of Montaigne’s copy of the Lambinus 1563 edition at a book auction in 1989, masked by a subsequent owner’s signature, but positively ‘bescribbled’ with its original reader’s notes, constitutes one of the several ‘moments of discovery’ which punctuate the narrative of Greenblatt’s The Swerve.3 It was long known that Montaigne had read Lucretius; the internal evidence of the Essais suggested as much and the four quotations from the DRN in ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’ are just a few of close to a hundred and fifty such quotations or references to Lucretius in the Essais. Bibliographers, collectors, and booksellers had for many years speculated that the copy proper—were it ever to be found—would prove to be something of a treasure; and so it is. In exploring aspects of this marvellous possession, now held in the Gilbert de Botton collection in Cambridge University Library,4 I shall focus on questions that arise when we try to establish both how Montaigne read ‘his’ Lucretius, and how he made sense of the poem: made Lucretius, in some sense, his own. Montaigne was a voracious reader. From the quotations painted on the beams in the ceiling of his study to the thousand or so books on the shelves on its walls, he surrounded himself with the words of others as he wrote. Among the essays themselves, it is perhaps the theoretical discussion found in the short essay ‘On books’ (II. 10) which offers the most programmatically clear insights into Montaigne’s reading habits. It, like other chapters which set writers alongside each other in a process which Montaigne calls ‘l’art de conferer’, suggests that he read Lucretius in an ancient tradition, which is to say comparatively; more specifically, this sets the context for his reading of the DRN in relation to Virgil’s poetry. But my aim in what follows is not to extend

2 See . I am grateful to Philippe Desan for permission to use this and other images from the EB here. For more on the early editorial history of the Essais, see Desan (2001). 3 Greenblatt (2011) 243–56. 4 See Ford (2008) 32–6; a facsimile of Montaigne’s copy can be found at (search ‘Lucretius’); for more on the history of this particular book and its place in Montaigne’s library, see de Botton and Pottiée-Sperry (1997) and the essays by Boyde, Legros, and Tournon in Ford and Kenny (2012). For a broader sense of Lucretius in early modern France, see Ford’s essay in Gillespie and Hardie (2007) 227–41.

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the logic of comparison by setting the ‘theory’ of the one essay (‘On books’) against the ‘practice’ of the other (‘On some lines in Virgil’). To do so would in any event be foolish, since ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’ is hardly typical. Montaigne’s direct quotation of Lucretius in the Essais is, as others have shown, fairly concentrated: ninety-eight of a total of some one hundred and fifty instances occur in just three chapters.5 By far the majority (seventy-six quotations all told) are in the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’ (II.12), where they inform the argument by way of both contestation and support. After ‘Que philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir’ (I.20), to which we return in a moment, and which includes sixteen quotations from Lucretius, the next most numerically significant chapter is ‘De l’inequalité qui est entre nous’ (I.42); here just six Lucretian references serve to convey the force of argument, with the last of them lending Montaigne his clinching, concluding example. ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’ has, then, just four quotations, the longest, and most distinctive of which is DRN 1.33–40: most distinctive because it is here that we see not only that Montaigne reads Lucretius, but also how he does so. At once untypical and exemplary, this is the passage in which Montaigne accounts, directly (which is to say by way of a comparison with Virgil), for his long and intense readerly relationship with the poet. It is here, above all, that Montaigne bears eloquent witness to the ways in which a persistent commitment to the reading of Lucretius’s poem transforms his own sense of the contested relation between the terms of my title: ‘bien penser’ and ‘bien dire’.

2. HOW DID MONTAIGNE READ? Montaigne’s Essais quote, allude to, and otherwise draw on his reading at every turn. Even when he claims to be setting books to one side, he seems unable to stop himself from quoting the example of others before him who did likewise. In ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’, for instance, following the discussion of Lucretius and the comparison with Virgil already alluded to, he suggests a readerly change of tack: I’m going now, he says, to abandon the theme of literary imitation 5 See, in addition to the texts referred to in the previous note, Screech (1998); Legros (2010a).

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and to speak and write ‘plus materiellement et simplement’. But as Terence Cave has pointed out, the very next sentence refers to Zeno and Cratippus and quotes Claudian; and the one that follows weaves together a quotation from Horace, a reference to Plato, and paraphrases of sayings of Alexander and Aristotle (III.5, 877–8).6 That Montaigne’s own writing voice was so insistently amplified by his prior reading is in large part a function of the humanist practice of imitation: reading the texts of the past in readiness to speak, or write oneself in turn.7 But he does at times make serious efforts to move beyond this habit of mind and to set it, too, to one side, so as to give free rein to what he calls his own, specific forme: ‘Quand j’escris, je me passe bien de la compagnie et souvenance des livres, de peur qu’ils n’interrompent ma forme. Aussi qu’à la verité, les bons autheurs m’abattent par trop et rompent le courage.’ (When I am writing I can do without the company and support of books because I am afraid that they will interfere with my form. Also, to tell the truth, because great authors overwhelm me and destroy my confidence) (874; 989). And yet, of course, even this claim is attenuated by the evidence of the library, the texture of the work as a whole, and (perhaps) its specific context as part of an essay concerned with ‘some lines in Virgil’. In setting poets alongside each other, Montaigne was, as noted, both following and diverging from an ancient tradition. Such comparisons are the effect of a long established practice which has students of literature compare and contrast different writers, as if in perpetual competition, the better both to (re)establish the contours of the canon, and to refine and redescribe the technology of taste. It is a habit Montaigne draws on at several significant points in the Essais. ‘Du jeune Caton’ (I.37), for instance, concludes with what is in effect a competition, as he sets five Latin poets to battle against each other in praise of Cato: ‘et pour l’interest de Caton, et, par incident, pour le leur aussi’ (both in Cato’s interest and, incidentally, in their own also) (228; 171). This extended comparison itself then generates Montaigne’s own, powerfully articulated reflections on the effects of poetry. For in terms which anticipate those which he uses when thinking about Lucretius in the essay on Virgil, Montaigne here 6

Cave (2009) 20. See Jardine and Grafton (1990). My own title is of course a ‘riff ’ on that of this ground-breaking article. 7

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wonders at the power which poetry can have both on individual readers and on groups, gathered together (for instance in theatres) to subject themselves, willingly, to its force: ‘Elle ne pratique point notre jugement; elle le ravit et ravage [ . . . ] Des ma premiere enfance, la poesie a eu cela, de me transpercer et me transporter’ (She/it does not make us apply our judgement; it/she ravishes and overwhelms it . . . From my earliest childhood poetry has had that power to transpierce and transport me) (228; 171, minimally altered). Lucretius (since he has nothing to say about Cato) is not one of the five poets in this particular contest; all are unnamed, but it is the one Montaigne calls ‘the choir master’ (‘le maistre du choeur’) (and whom he seems to expect his readers to recognize as Virgil) who wins, hands down. Lucretius’s voice is, then, not called on to challenge ‘the choir master’; at least not here, not yet. Books are not Montaigne’s only source material and not all of his discussions of the practice of reading are reflexive; not all bear on his own practice as a writer, or on the ways in which he anticipates readerly responses to his own text. But in the context of this discussion it is worth noting that as the Essais proved to be an editorial success, and their author became more conscious of having transformed himself into a book in other readers’ minds, and hands, so his conception of what it means to read attentively, or well, became more acutely defined. Of the three ‘couches’, or compositional layers, of the text—corresponding to the versions published in 1580, 1588, and, posthumously, 1595—it is the last of these that contain the most complex reflections on his own practice both as a writer, and as a reader; both of others’ texts, and of his own. In a rich passage added to the final version of the ‘Consideration sur Ciceron’, we read the following: Je sçay bien, quand j’oy quelqu’un qui s’arreste au langage des Essais, que j’aimeroye mieux qu’il s’en teust. Ce n’est pas tant eslever les mots, comme c’est deprimer le sens, d’autant plus picquamment que plus obliquement. (I.40, 251) I know well that when I hear someone dwell on the language of these Essays, I would rather he said nothing. This is not so much to extol the style as to depreciate the sense: the more galling for being more oblique. (184–5)

Here, even as he recalls the experience of hearing readers talking about his work, Montaigne also fantasizes silencing the stylistically

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savvy among them. The anxiety he articulates is in large part social, since the chattering class of reader indulges, he suggests, an elevated attention to ‘style’, the better to disregard or even disparage the author’s ‘sense’. The point is reiterated in the subsequent paragraph as Montaigne offers a critique of the humanist practice of useful reading, in that it can motivate an unproductive misdirection of readerly attention. Even as he acknowledges that he often quotes the authors he has read, he argues that the references and stories which he ‘spreads around’ in his text should not only be seen as part of a rhetoric of socially sanctioned display, mere evidence of the author’s cultural capital. They serve (at least sometimes) as part of an argument about what it means to read non-instrumentally: Ny elles, ny mes allegations ne servent pas toujours simplement d’exemple, d’authorité ou d’ornement. Je ne les regarde pas seulement par l’usage que j’en tire. Elles portent souvent, hors de mon propos, la semence d’une matiere plus riche et plus hardie, et sonnent à gauche un ton plus delicat, et pour moy qui n’en veux exprimer d’avantage, et pour ceux qui rencontreront mon air. (251) Neither these stories nor my quotations always serve simply for example, authority, or ornament. I do not esteem them solely for the use I derive from them. They often bear, beyond my purpose, the seeds of a richer subject and bolder material, and sound obliquely a subtler note, both for myself, who do not wish to express anything more, and for those who hit upon my tune. (185; minimally altered)

‘Pas toujours; pas seulement; souvent’: the modifiers trace the movement of the argument as it progresses, gently, from claim to invitation. It is a movement given further impetus by the pair of oddly conjoined images: first the ‘seed-bed’ of exempla, quotations, and citations which Montaigne has planted in his text, and then the ‘air’ or ‘tune’ of the writing which future readers may or may not one day ‘hit upon’. It is the interdependence of these elements that matters most to Montaigne as he imagines the thoughts and words working together, both in his own mind, and, ideally, in the mouths of readers, as they attune themselves in turn to the harmonious choir of voices speaking in and through ‘his’ Essais. In some respects, this tunefully dialogic theme simply reworks an established early modern commonplace about the use of commonplaces: the theory of imitation in which the ancients are never quite absent, and yet only fully present when we ourselves call them back to

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life, through the conversation that is reading.8 But the passage also goes further than this. For it characterizes Montaigne’s ideal reader as one who both ‘hits upon [the original] tune’ and extends the particular notes of which it is composed beyond the author’s intended ‘purpose’; in so doing, such a reader recognizes that the substance of the Essais does far more than serve as ‘matter’ to be deployed according to the tripartite humanist technology of ‘example, authority, and ornament’. And in describing the kinds and degrees of intimate reading he would wish to have others experience with the Essais, Montaigne is also, I think, describing his own sense of what it means to read Lucretius: as neither a member of a chattering class, nor a professional scholar, nor yet an altogether ordinary soul, but someone uniquely attuned to the contrapuntal workings of ‘style’ and ‘sense’. For a book is neither a conclusion, nor an end in itself; it is part of a conversation which began before it took on its present shape, and will continue long after. This is as true of Montaigne’s own book as it is of those of the poets, philosophers, and historians he partially incorporates into his text; partially, since when Montaigne quotes directly from others he takes care through italicization (and, in the case of poetry, indentation) to signal the separation of their words from his own. Not to do so would be to reduce conversation to a dull monotone: ‘Est quaedam vox ad auditùm accommodata, non magnitudine, sed proprietate. La parole est moitié à celuy qui parle, moitié à celuy qui l’escoute. Cettuy-cy se doibt preparer à la recevoir selon le branle qu’elle prend.’ (There is a kind of voice adapted to the hearing, not by its volume but by its quality. Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener. The latter must prepare to receive it according to the motion it takes) (III.13, 1088; 834).9 ‘Hearability’ is, it seems, a quality, or more precisely an affordance, of the well-tuned author’s voice. The fact that the Latin phrase which makes this point for Montaigne was itself added to the final edition of this, the final chapter of the Essais, makes of it neither an after-thought, nor a ‘source’ which the essayist only belatedly recognized, through 8 Amongst the best studies here are Cave (1979); Compagnon (1979); McKinley (1981); and Moss (1996). 9 The quotation is from Quintilian; Montaigne tells us in ‘Des livres’ that he deliberately avoids naming his Latin interlocutors, so that we listen more carefully to what they have to say (and not who they are); Marie de Gournay initiated the editorial ‘source-hunt’.

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retrospection and rereading. It is, rather, proof of the argument presented throughout the Essais about what it means for Montaigne to read: to hold oneself ready to accommodate new thoughts and words ‘according to the motion’ the conversation takes. For such a conversation to work, those engaged in the process must be ready both to listen and to speak, both between languages and across time.

3. ‘HIS’ LUCRETIUS: ANNOTATION, TRANSCRIPTION, AND TRANSLATION This collection is, amongst other things, testament to the ‘hearability’ of Lucretius’s voice across the early modern period. The DRN certainly holds a distinctive place in the Essais, with some 150 extracts, totalling 454 lines quoted, and more than a sixth of the poem either directly cited or paraphrased. If Montaigne’s first reading of the poem—initiated in 1564, when he acquired a copy of Lambin’s newly minted edition—seems to have been instrumental in his coming to terms with the premature death of his friend, La Boétie, then the addition of close to a hundred new Lucretian passages in the later editions of the Essais bears witness to new and distinct lines of thinking. For in these later readings Montaigne reconceives not only his understanding of what it means to be an author, but also his own relation to the DRN. He does so both in the light of his own earlier notes on the poem, written in the margins and endpapers of his copy, and in respect of his developing understanding of his own mortality.10 Lucretius’s voice is, in other words, woven into the texture and history of the Essais, through both quotation and commentary, in both Latin and French. The point can be clarified with reference to the powerfully argued essay ‘Que philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir’ (That to philosophize is to learn how to die) (I.20). Moving through a number of distinctive attitudes to death (some self-consciously ‘philosophical’, others markedly less so), the chapter concludes in Lucretian mode, as Nature argues the case for the necessity of death, even as she proves to 10 For Lucretius’s role in Montaigne’s coming to terms with the loss of his friend, see Defaux (2001).

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Fig. 6.3. ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’, fol. 33v, reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

be mother to all materially recurrent, living things. Mother Nature is, then, already present through not only personification but also prosopopoeia in the first edition of the Essais. But her already distinctly Lucretian voice is then (as the pages reproduced here suggest) further amplified by annotation over the next twenty years of the life of

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Fig. 6.4. ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’, fol. 34r, reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

Montaigne’s text. This amplification includes the addition of some sixteen new Latin quotations in this speech alone; almost all are taken from Lucretius (Figs. 6.3, 6.4). These pages further underscore something fundamental about Montaigne’s reading habits. Even as he proves to be singularly alive

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to the new-fangled technology of print, Montaigne, like many readers then and now, allows himself to mark with his own inky hand the pages of his books. If this is famously true of his now celebrated copy of Lucretius, it is no less true of Montaigne’s own copy of the Essais: if he reads pen in hand, then he annotates his text (at least) as much when reading himself as he does when reading the works and words of others. This, like common-placing, is now increasingly recognized as something close to common practice amongst early modern readers, and much interesting work is being down on how, why, and by whom books were annotated across the period.11 But what Montaigne’s case in particular reveals is the extent to which a reader might maintain an at once auditory, tactile, and labile relation to whatever words s/he finds on the printed page: he not only scores the margin at points of particular significance, but also crosses words out, adds others, and changes the punctuation, both on the copy of his own Essais, and on other books which he makes in this way ‘his’. And rather than apologize for this habit, he celebrates it, conceiving of it both as an extension of his humanist training, and a mark of his own, distinctive, essayistic forme. In the short chapter ‘Des livres’ (‘On books’) (II.10), an essay in which he makes much of his poor memory, he recalls the experience of picking up a book he thought he had never read, only to find it (as Montaigne’s early modern translator Florio, puts it) ‘all bescribbled with [his] notes’. The recollection of this—doubtless not altogether uncommon—experience initiates a richly circumstantial discussion of how and why he marks and annotates the books he owns. One movement in this passage is worth quoting at length: Pour subvenir un peu à la trahison de ma memoire et à son defaut, si extreme qu’il m’est advenu plus d’une fois de reprendre en main des livres comme recens et à moy inconnus, que j’avoy leu soigneusement quelques années au paravant et barbouillé de mes notes, j’ay pris en coustume, depuis quelque temps, d’adjouter au bout de chasque livre (je dis de ceux desquels je ne me veux servir qu’une fois) le temps auquel j’ay achevé de le lire et le jugement que j’en ay retiré en gros, afin que cela me represente au moins l’air et Idée generale que j’avois conceu de l’autheur en le lisant. Je veux icy transcrire aucunes de ces annotations. Voicy ce que je mis, il y a environ dix ans, en mon Guicciardin (car, quelque langue que parlent mes livres, je leur parle en la mienne). (418) 11

See for instance Sherman (2007) and Blair (2010).

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To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those that I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it, and the judgement I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense [‘air’] and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it. I want to transcribe here some of these annotations. Here is what I put some ten years ago in my Guicciardini (for whatever language my books speak, I speak to them in my own). (305)

There is much to say about this passage, and what might look like its preternatural anticipation of recent materialist theories of distributed cognition and extended mind as evidenced by the practice of annotation. And in the context of our own earlier discussion, it is striking that Montaigne’s notes to himself seek to capture something of what Florio (through whom many of Lucretius’s ideas first found their way into English print) rightly calls ‘the aire’ he had conceived of the author on a first reading; but I want here to focus on the two parenthetical, bracketed, remarks in the passage quoted. The first is restrictive in scope; the second is at once explanatory and quasiproverbial in intention and form. The parenthesis, in each case, serves to signal the importance of the remark. For in what amounts to a mode of annotation integral to the text, these phrases matter, since they have been effectively already underlined by the author. As if already excerpted for specific attention, they stand out from the rest of the sentence, and (as we shall see) Lucretius proves, over time, to be an exception to the rules which they encode. Initially, Montaigne seems to have read Lucretius according to his customary habits. As Screech has shown in the monumental labour of love that is his transcription and analysis of the pen marks on Montaigne’s copy, and as Legros has more recently shown in turning his forensic critical attention from the beams above Montaigne’s head, to the notes in his books, the young Montaigne may, in 1564, have begun reading and annotating his Lucretius with the thought that he would do so just the once.12 He certainly records the date of his first complete reading of the copy, within months of its printing, hot, in other words, off the press; and he also notes down in the 12

See Screech (1998); Legros (2010a).

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endpapers ‘the judgement [he] derived of it’, in terms that would have enabled him, were he ever to forget having read the book, to recall ‘the aire’ he had conceived of it on that first reading. But the kinds of notes Montaigne then goes on to make on his copy suggest not only that he never quite forgot having read this book, but that it was one with which he was to become engaged, immersed, insistently, repeatedly, over many years of reading, with a range of notational marks, from lists of numbers to an index; from dotted lines and one-word comments, to pages of numbered notes on the endpapers and flyleaves: in a word, entangled. The first parenthetical rule articulated in ‘Des livres’—‘annotate books you are likely to read just the once’—does not, then, apply when Montaigne read his Lucretius. Nor, over time, does the second—‘speak to books in your own language, whatever theirs might be’. As Screech and, following him, Legros have shown, Montaigne’s notes on his copy of the DRN can be classified into distinct kinds of remark—philological, literary critical, thematic, and so on; his extensive cross-referencing and page number notation serves, furthermore, to supplement for the absence of an index in Lambin’s edition. And, once again rules were modified, or even transgressed, as Montaigne’s engagement with Lucretius developed: what look to be the early annotations are indeed all in Latin; only later, it seems, does Montaigne begin to speak to the poet in French; most notably, and repeatedly, in the margins of the text, and most often of all, with the recurrent tag line that seems to mean so much more than it already says: ‘contre la religion’.13 Leaving ‘religion’ to one side and returning to Montaigne’s conversation with Lucretius in respect of sex, love, and the passage from DRN 1.33–40 with which we began this discussion, it becomes clear that he both relishes the taste of the poet’s Latin, and is inspired by his reading to experiment with the expressive possibilities of French. This is evident both from the notes on the copy of Lucretius held in his library, and from his critical commentary on the poem in the Essais: ‘Amours de mars et Venus’ reads the first of Montaigne’s marginal notes (Figs. 6.5, 6.6); ‘Imitè [sic] par Vergile’ reads the second, itself accompanied on the left-hand side of the page by the particular interrupted downward strokes which (here as elsewhere on the copy) seem to signify not only ‘good stuff ’, but also ‘come back to

13

See Legros (2010b).

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Fig. 6.5. Lambinus’s first edition (Paris, 1563/4) 5, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

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Fig. 6.6. ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’, fol. 382r, reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

this later’. Which is (as we see in Fig. 6.6) what Montaigne does, when writing ‘On some lines in Virgil’: belli fera moenera Mavors Armipotens regit, in gremium qui saepe tuum se Rejicit, aeterno devinctus vulnere amoris: Pascit amore avidos inhians in te Dea visus, Eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore:

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Commenting on the passage which he here transcribes into the Essais, Montaigne makes the following observation: Quand je rumine ce rejicit, pascit, inhians, molli, fovet, medullas, labefacta, pendet, percurrit, et cette noble circunfusa, mere du gentil infusus [ . . . ] quand je vois ces braves formes de s’expliquer, si vifves, si profondes, je ne dicts pas que c’est bien dire, je dicts que c’est bien penser. (III.5, 872)

The verbs of action articulating the process of reading which Montaigne singles out for consideration tell their own story: when I taste and chew the poet’s Latin words; when I see for myself the force and beauty of his eloquence; then I do not say what others say—that Lucretius speaks well; what I do say is that Lucretius thinks well. The pairing ‘bien dire/bien penser’ turns out to serve, then, as the conclusion to a dialogue in which Montaigne stages himself talking at once to himself and to his prospective reader. ‘To speak well’ clearly matters to Montaigne, but the formal organization of his phrasing suggests that something else matters more: something which risks going unheard in amidst talk of ‘eloquence’ and ‘bien dire’, namely the second of the verbs in this opposition (or pairing): ‘bien penser’. But why this insistence, and why here? Who is Montaigne speaking against; who needs persuading that Lucretius is best thought of not (just) as a stylist, but (rather) as a philosopher: one who ‘thinks well’ (too)? The negative turn of Montaigne’s phrase underlines a further crucial point about reading in the early modern period: to read is to anticipate and to contest other readers’ accounts of the text or the matter at hand. This is what publication taught the essayist, as we saw in respect of the passage from ‘Consideration sur Ciceron’, and the annotated reception history of the DRN suggests that any early modern conversation about reading Lucretius was also likely to prove contestatory. The argument does not begin with Montaigne, any more than it concludes with his own rereading of himself.14 14

For an early conspectus, see Fraisse (1962); there was also a good deal of philological work done in the 1930s on the French Renaissance reception of Lucretius: see, for instance, Belowski (1934). For three very different recent accounts of the European reception, see Hardie (2009); Passannante (2011); and Palmer (2014).

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Indeed the specific distinction between speaking and thinking well that we have been focusing on here has both a charged history and a continuing present in respect of Lucretius’s poem. As Ada Palmer has shown, early Renaissance readers marked up their copies of the DRN in a range of different ways.15 From the very frequent (philological corrections), through the common (poetic, literary, and otherwise cultural notabilia), to the rarer, more contentious notes concerning natural philosophy, atomism, and theology, copyists and rubricators working in the manuscript tradition permitted themselves only very occasionally to note that the poem contained this or that ‘opinio non christiana’, all the while ensuring what Greenblatt has called ‘the survival of dangerous ideas’. But did humanist editors, such as Lambin, capitalize on this tradition so as to consciously cultivate the impression of Lucretius as, above all, a poet: a man of fine words and phrases, rather than of pernicious thoughts and ideas? The question is a vexed one; it has been evoked a number of times in this collection, and it is central to the paratextual material which stands guard over Lucretius’s poem in his many humanist editions. Some scholars argue that early modern editors most frequently insist on a distinction between the work’s beliefs and what might be termed its ‘artistic merit’, and this division of spoils is central to the account of the reception of Lucretius as narrated in The Swerve. Glossing Lambin, Greenblatt suggests that ‘once the distinction has been drawn . . . the full force of that merit can be acknowledged’; expanding on their common theme, Greenblatt further suggests that over the course of Lambin’s prefaces and editions ‘disavowal shades into a reassurance subtly conjoined with a warning: sing the praises of the poem, but remain silent about the ideas’.16 Exactly what Lambin himself was up to in his prefaces, glosses, and suggestions for further, comparative reading is in truth much contested. I will certainly not have resolved the conflict here.17 But I want to suggest that in drawing his reader’s attention to specific words when explicating the passage he quotes at some length from the DRN, Montaigne is at once imitating Lambin and marking out his own reading of the poem as somehow, crucially, distinctive. Lambin had 15

16 Palmer (2014). Greenblatt (2011) 256. For a brief, productive ‘conférence’ of two opposing views, see O’Brien (2010) and Argaud (2010). 17

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himself already isolated four of the terms Montaigne notes and, true to form, he had glossed this passage by adducing Homer’s fabula in book 8 of the Odyssey, which he read as ‘signifying the tempering of the primary qualities of hot and cold, moist and dry: for Mars is dry and hot, whilst Venus is moist and cold’.18 Wandering off into the adjacent worlds of allegory and humoral theory, Lambin avoids close engagement both with the words in front of him on the page, and with their more materially determined sexual sense. Montaigne, by contrast, sets Lucretius’s terms down in a list intermingled with those of Virgil, the better to evoke, as it were enactively, and by way of ‘rumination’ that rolls each delicious word round in the mouth, an experience: that of reading ‘his’ Lucretius. And it is on the basis of this experience that Montaigne can then move on to argue his case. Lucretius is a poet of real taste: one who not only speaks well, but thinks well, too. Michael Screech (to whom we owe the first sustained study of Montaigne’s reading of Lucretius) draws close attention, in commenting on this passage, to the quality and scope of the essayist’s debt to Lambin. Keen to stress Montaigne’s ‘literary sensibility’, Screech first notes that Montaigne is ‘not the slightest bit interested’ in the allegorical Homeric readings which Lambin proposes by way of gloss to the passage discussed above. He then suggests that what concerns the essayist is, rather, ‘the sensitive evocation in high poetry of the sexual embrace which can bring back thoughts and memories of youthful joys to a lonely and rancid old man’.19 Whilst it is true that Montaigne avoids allegorizing where possible, it is not altogether clear that his reading of Lucretius evokes in him thoughts of old age and loneliness, let alone a sense of being rancid.20 The point bears on the material quality of the experience which reading Lucretius (as opposed to Virgil, for instance) represents for Montaigne: does reading only ever ‘bring back thoughts and memories’ of earlier times? Does a reader’s repeated engagement with a text only ever serve to recall the excitement of the first encounter? Or might the experience of reading be understood, rather, as (at least occasionally) a species of peculiarly attentive conversation, which takes place in something like an eternally recurrent present? The question is best resolved through the distinctive form of reading that is translation. 18 19

See Lucretius (1563) 8; see also Screech (1998) 488. 20 Screech (1998) 486–92. See Compagnon (1993).

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Screech translates the final stage of the sentence in contention here as follows: ‘When I look upon such powerful means of expression, so dense and full of life, I do not conclude that it is said well, but thought well.’21 This is a translation composed in harmony with his understanding of what reading Lucretius meant, or rather did, to Montaigne. But what I think it misconstrues is the embodied, enactive dimension of Montaigne’s account of reading. Screech’s mentalizing ‘look upon’ is already allegorical, and his ‘conclude’ cuts short the conversational conceit in which Montaigne is engaged; his transposition of the concluding infinitives of the phrase into past participles makes a memory of an ongoing experience. This matters because the tense of each of the active, physically charged verbs in this sentence is determinedly present; Montaigne’s ‘looking’, like the ‘speaking’ (and the ‘ruminating’) which is said to accompany it, takes place in the habitual present: all of this is happening now, and might yet happen again. The point can, once again, be clarified by comparison. Frame, for his part, keeps the ‘see’ and the ‘say’ as active, present verbs, and, furthermore, accentuates, sharply, with added quotation marks, the dialogic aspect of Montaigne’s words; but he nonetheless settles on past participles for the conclusion of the thought: ‘When I see these brave forms of expression, so alive, so profound, I do not say “This is well said,” I say “This is well thought”’. Florio’s early modern account, by contrast, captures the several senses of reading as articulated in this passage more fully, and, by adding a ‘nimble’ to stress the point, he keeps the infinitives in the phrase alive: ‘When I behold these gallant forms of expressing, so lively, so nimble, so deepe, I say not this is to speake well, but to think well’.22

4. CONCLUSIONS: ‘MEANING MORE THAN THEY SAY’ Philip Hardie memorably writes the following about Virgil: ‘It is almost as if at the beginning of his career, Virgil intuits that Lucretius’s capacious textual universe will provide space within which to develop 21 22

Montaigne (1991) 987. Montaigne (1957) 665. For Florio’s translation, see Montaigne (1931).

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the projects of all three of his major works.’23 The same could be said of Montaigne’s own relation to Lucretius, and of the three books of essays that make up his major work: the Essais. Montaigne would have enjoyed reading Philip Hardie; perhaps, one day, when the swerving atoms reorganize themselves into another Montaigne, he will have the chance to do so. The enabling fantasy for just such an eventuality— ‘that the atoms might come together in this way again, so as to give birth to another Montaigne’—is itself elaborated in one of the notes made on the flyleaves of Montaigne’s copy of Lucretius. ‘Wildly heterodox’ is how Greenblatt describes this note in The Swerve; ‘non incredibile est’ is how Montaigne himself frames the thought, characteristically careful (or perhaps playful), even when annotating for his own future reading self: Ut sunt diuersi atomorum motus non incredibile est sic conuenisse olim atomos aut conuenturas ut alius nascatur montanus (Since the movements of the atoms are so varied it is not unbelievable that the atoms came together in this way once, or that in future they will come together like this again, so as to give birth to another Montaigne).24 That Montaigne was able to entertain the not incredible possibility of finding himself having already existed in the past, and reconstituted in some future moment is, perhaps, a function of his strong grasp of the imaginative reach afforded by the practice of reading. When reading and annotating his Lucretius, then, Montaigne turned a keen and trained eye to material, commonplaces, and themes that could be reworked in his own writing; he also made a note of matter, words, and thoughts which he believes others to have derived from the poet. Among these, clearly, is Virgil’s reworking of the Lucretian lines relating the ‘Amours de Venus’, and when he reflects on the history of their relationship in the essay ‘On books’, Montaigne calls to mind an ancient complaint, the better to argue a contemporary case: Ceux des temps voisins à Virgile se plaignoient dequoy aucuns luy comparoient Lucrece. Je suis d’opinion que c’est à la verité une comparaison inegale: mais j’ay bien à faire à me r’asseurer en cette creance, quand je me treuve attaché à quelque beau lieu de ceux de Lucrece. (411) 23 24

Hardie (2007) 127. See Screech (1998) 11; Greenblatt (2011) 249–50, 306.

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Those who lived near Virgil’s time used to complain that some compared Lucretius to him. I am of the opinion that it is in truth an unequal comparison; but I have much to do to confirm myself in this belief when I find myself fixed on one of the beautiful passages in Lucretius. (298)

These few words reveal much about what happens to Montaigne when he finds himself reading Lucretius. In particular, they say much about what is and is not (in)credible about this author: both in respect of what he says, and how he says it. There is, Montaigne says, a generally shared ‘opinion’ which, from a distance, he judges to be true: any contest between the two authors is unequal and unjust, since Virgil is clearly the greater poet. And yet—the correctio ‘mais’ signals a shift of perspective in Montaigne’s thoughts—when I get caught up in the text itself, when I become (as Florio has it) ‘entangled in’ Lucretius’s lines, I find that my commitment to the commonly held belief seems somehow less secure . . . The point Montaigne is making here is, initially, specific: it concerns the relative worth of the two poets, in respect of their ‘eloquence’. It is the art of ‘bien dire’ which causes ‘opinion’ to modulate to ‘creance’; it is the specific ‘beau lieu’ which ignites the heterodox thought that Lucretius might in fact be the better poet. And yet. Montaigne’s account of his ‘entanglement’ in Lucretius, articulated as it is first in terms of received opinion being modified by the experience of reading, and then of settled belief being made less secure by the power of the writing itself: all this also seems to mean more than it directly says. Might it show that on reading Lucretius Montaigne finds himself compelled to query certain other, otherwise settled, opinions, and beliefs? Not least among them the received opinion that the poem is best read for the ‘beau lieu’, the mark of style, and that all talk of ‘creance’—belief—is, in respect of this particular poet, left well alone? The question is, as noted above, a vexed one. I have, here, explored it largely by way of the pairing (or opposition) ‘bien dire/bien penser’, derived from Montaigne’s powerful analysis of Lucretius’s opening evocation of the coupling of Venus and Mars. We have found both that the comparative habit of reading Lucretius in relation to Virgil is strongly ingrained in Montaigne, and that the experience of actually engaging in detail with the DRN raises, for Montaigne, questions about common, or received opinions, and settled, or unsettled beliefs. Returning one last time to the passage (and pages) from ‘Sur des vers

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de Virgile’ with which we began, we find these questions already anticipated by the essayist’s considered, reflexive account of what it means to read Lucretius, both by way of the contested comparison with Virgil, and as evidenced in the annotations Montaigne makes to his own text. There is nothing specific in Lambin’s notes in Montaigne’s copy of the DRN to suggest the linking of the passage from the Aeneid with these particular lines in Lucretius; nor, it seems, does Lambin relish, as Montaigne clearly does, the peculiar twists and turns of phrase, across and between the work of the two poets as they evoke the gods themselves engaged in love’s work. The point here is not just to give Montaigne credit for effecting the ‘conference’, or coupling, of these two passages; though of course credit should be given where it is due. The point bears, rather, on conflicting accounts of what good poetry says, is, and does. For Montaigne moves, as noted above, through a series of sexually charged comparisons and distinctions to explore exactly this question in this essay. Chiding the ‘moderns’ (anyone writing since Virgil) with effeminacy, Montaigne praises the ‘virile eloquence’ of the ancients, adducing in the final edition, the man’s man, Seneca, in support: Contextus totus virilis est, non sunt circa flosculos occupati he beams, and Florio, translating for his English readers, follows suit: ‘The whole composition or text is manly, and they are not bebusied about Rhetoricke flowers’. Distinguishing itself, then from all that is ‘molle’ (soft, flabby, or flaccid), true eloquence is ‘nerveuse et solide’—‘sinnowie, materiall, and solid’ suggests Florio, interpolating another crucial adjective of his own; true eloquence is unafraid to risk causing ‘offence’, and as a result is given licence by readers not simply to ‘delight’, but to ‘fill and ravish’. ‘Elle ne plaict pas tant, comme elle remplit et ravit; Et ravit, le plus, les plus forts esprits’. Excitedly mimetic, Montaigne’s own prose tumbles over itself as it presses on beyond ‘remplit’ and ‘ravit’, itself first repeated, and then serving to introduce first one, and then another ‘plus’, as he presses on towards the ‘plus forts esprits’, the finer minds he has in view at the end of the sentence . . . Which is where we find Montaigne imagining that it might be good to add a further, closing point to his phrase. Is this the point, he wonders on rereading his own prose-poem, to add still more, to insert a further, reflexive, ‘plus’, by way of performative explanation of the inexhaustible power of words, hinting at still more significance, as yet unsaid? ‘Qui signifie plus qu’elle ne dict’: the subject of the

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Fig. 6.7. ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’, fol. 382v (detail), reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

phrase in its initial conception and context is poetic eloquence, a feminine noun in French, for all that Montaigne stresses the ‘virility’ of the poetry of the men whose words he has just relished. The import of the additional, marginal claim is that this order of eloquence ‘signifies more than it says’; or, perhaps, ‘means more than it lets on’ (Fig. 6.7). There is, clearly, more to be said about such poetry than that it is ‘well said’. And yet. Montaigne crosses the phrase out; only to move it down half a page, to the point where it is clear that he is talking now exclusively about Lucretius, and explaining exactly why reading Lucretius matters: ‘Icy de mesme, le sens esclaire et produict les parolles: Non plus de vent, ains de chair et d’os’. ‘Here the sense (says Florio) enlighteneth and produceth the words: no longer windy or spongy, but of flesh and bone. They signifie more than they utter’ (Fig. 6.8). With the move from singular to plural, the subject of the meaningful verb has changed: no longer the poetic eloquence of Latinity, but Lucretius’s very particular ‘parolles’. To conceive of the relation between Lucretian ‘sens’ and ‘parolles’ in this way is to make a clear case against those who argue for the erection of a cordon sanitaire, ensuring the hygienic separation of fine words from dangerous ideas, and the security of a ‘literary’ firewall, behind which the thought-police need never peek. Vigorously countering any such understanding

Fig. 6.8. ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’, fol. 382v (detail), reproduced by kind permission of Montaigne Studies.

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of Lucretius’s poem, Montaigne stresses that this is not just ravishing eloquence; it is, of course, that; but it both is, and means, so much more. In the resonant phrase with which I began this exploration, a phrase governed by the first person pronoun, bearing verbal witness to this singular reader’s response, Montaigne testifies to his belief that to write like Lucretius is not simply to speak well: ‘je dicts que c’est bien penser’. On reading Lucretius, Montaigne recognizes the offence to be no less the point and the pleasure than is the eloquence; each is bone to the other’s flesh. Lucretius does more than confirm Montaigne’s belief in the redundancy of the opposition between sense and style; reading, annotating, and rereading this poem alongside the writing of his own Essais alerts him to the embodied force of both conjoined. He read ‘his’ Lucretius comparatively, which is to say in relation both to Virgil and to himself; and he did so in a state of absorption or immersion that was to last an intellectual lifetime. There is, Montaigne tells us, nothing quite like reading Virgil on Venus; not even sex comes close. But even Virgil gets something wrong: his is too licentious an evocation of married love. For passionate, engaged, lifelong commitment (and, so the comparative argument of the essay goes) a ‘more suitable’ instance of the coming together of style and ideas, saying and thinking—for that, you want Lucretius; nobody does it better. Venus ravishes Mars, and the reader’s mind is rapt in contemplation of its own assent to the embodied force of the words, marked, here, ‘icy mesme’ on the page.25

25

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Philip Ford.

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Thanks to the work of a whole generation of scholars we now know how far-reaching the reception of Lucretius was in the early modern period, both in manuscript and print. Particularly well researched has been the so-called ‘Epicurean revival’ of the 1640s and 1650s, which, as Howard Jones, Stephen Clucas, Reid Barbour, and David Norbrook (among others) have shown, saw a crystallization of the interest in Epicurus and Lucretius that led to the publication of a series of important texts.1 In this history, manuscript culture naturally played an important part, as the recent edition of Hutchinson’s version of De rerum natura has usefully reminded us.2 The present chapter focuses on a particular moment in the history of the reception of Lucretius in the 1650s, when the very first French and English translations were published. In 1650, Michel de Marolles, Abbé de Villeloin, published in Paris what constitutes the very first translation in any vernacular language of De rerum natura under the title Le Poëte Lucrèce, Latin et françois. Following suit, John Evelyn published in London in 1656 a translation of book 1 of De rerum natura under the title An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De rerum natura, keeping the rest 1 Jones (1989); Clucas (1994); Barbour (1998); Norbrook (2012), esp. pp. xxviii–xxxiii. See also Gillespie (2007); Cottegnies (2008); and Rzepka (2012). 2 Hutchinson (2012). See Norbrook (2012) for a detailed depiction of the Epicurean ‘ambience’ in the early 1650s and the various attempts at offering partial translations of DRN. See also Barbour (1997).

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of his translation private. Evelyn’s debt to Marolles has often been overlooked by historians.3 This chapter hopes to shed some light on the context of the reception of Lucretius in England, by looking at Marolles’s possible influence on Evelyn and his contemporaries.4 As will be apparent, this reception has much to do with the milieu of English exiles in Paris, which included intellectuals such as Walter Charleton and Kenelm Digby, among others, and points to hitherto overlooked links between France and England. Marolles’s translation can in many respects be considered a bold endeavour, even in the context of Gassendi’s partial rehabilitation of Epicurus in France.5 Pierre Gassendi’s works popularizing Epicurus (and using Lucretius as one of his sources) had only been published in Latin, and any translation of Lucretius in French was bound to attract a wider readership than just the scholarly one, in particular women, with all the dangers that this entailed in the eyes of the learned.6 Michel de Marolles (1600–81), a Jesuit, Abbé de Villeloin from 1626 to 1674, was a great frequenter of salons and a familiar of Madeleine de Scudéry’s. He proved an extraordinarily prolific writer and translator, with about forty published works between 1626 and 1680. He is mostly known today for his career as a translator of classical authors such as Virgil, Plautus, Seneca, Terence, Horace, Ovid, Martial, Juvenal, Propertius, Catullus, and Petronius, and for his fabulous collection of prints which was bought by Colbert in 1668 for the King’s Cabinet, and formed the basis for the soon-to-be

3 When this influence is mentioned at all, it is usually just in passing, without further ado. See for instance Kroll (1991) 169–70. A valuable exception is Norbrook (2012). 4 Evelyn was obviously not the only one to have been influenced by Marolles’s translation, although this goes beyond the scope of this chapter. According to Barbour, the anonymous manuscript translation of Lucretius in the Bodleian Library, probably done in the 1660s, follows Marolles’s 1659 edition. See Barbour (2010). 5 On Gassendi’s ‘Christianization’ of Epicurus, see for instance Bloch (1971); Taussig (2003); Sarasohn (1996); and Norbrook (2012) pp. xxix–xxxiii. As Norbrook notes, ‘Gassendi filled in many of the gaps in Epicurus’ surviving works with long quotations from Lucretius’ (p. xxix). 6 About Thomas Creech’s first complete 1682 translation of Lucretius into English, an anonymous commentator writes: ‘’Twas enough that Mr Hobbs seduced the Men; too much that Mr Creech should debauch the Women with those corrupt Notions of a Deity, & by his soft Translation of a rough Piece melt the Ladies in admiration first of the Poetry & then of the Opinion.’ Cf. Anon. (1937) 20–1. Gassendi’s Animadmaversiones (1649) are interlarded with about two-thirds of Lucretius’s DRN. Cf. Norbrook (2012) p. xxix.

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created Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Royale.7 His French translations, always with parallel Latin text, are all in fairly elegant octavos, with large margins and scholarly apparatus. They were usually published with dedicatory epistles to great personages of the realm, in patronage bids which Marolles did not always win. His 1623 Lucan was dedicated to King Louis XIII, Ovid’s Fasti to the Grande Mademoiselle in 1660, the Heroides to the Duc d’Enghien in 1661, and his translation of Lucretius was inscribed to Christina of Sweden, as if Marolles feared a French patron might have found the association with Lucretius unseemly. Marolles’s indefatigable activity was often mocked by his contemporaries. Jean Chapelain spoke with contempt of his achievements, and if we are to believe Pierre Bayle, his translations apparently acquired the reputation of being plodding and unreliable, and among them most particularly his prose translation of Lucretius.8 Marolles’s Lucrèce, however, seems to have sold well. At least Marolles himself, always a good publicizer of his work, claims so in his second, corrected 1659 edition, pointing out in his preface: ‘of all the translations I have done, this one sold more quickly than all the others’.9 La Mothe Le Vayer allegedly praised it.10 Marolles’s translation of Lucretius went through three editions: Le Poëte Lucrèce, latin et françois, de la traduction de M. de M., in 1650, was reissued in 1659 (‘edited, corrected and with additional tables and necessary remarks’, as specified on the title-page) with a two-fold, more erudite title, in Latin and in French, Titi Lucretii Cari de Rerum natura libri sex . . . Les Six livres de Lucrèce de la nature des choses.11 The new 1659 preface indicates that the updated translation was read and corrected by none other than Gassendi himself. Finally, a verse version of the

7

Surprisingly very little work has been done on Marolles. For an overview of his career, see Bosseboeuf (1971). For a study of his translation of Lucretius, see Ford (2007). 8 Bayle (1720) ii. 1802 ‘Remarque P.’; for Chapelain’s testimony, see n. 17. 9 ‘[D]e toutes les traductions que j’ai faites, le debit de celle-cy a esté plus prompt que de toutes les autres’: Marolles (1659) sig. [aviii]. 10 See Repetzki (2000) p. lxxxv n. 107. 11 The complete title runs on two different title-pages, with the first one bearing the Latin title, the French one only coming next: Titi Lucretii Cari de Rerum natura libri sex, ad postremam Oberti Gifanii . . . emendationem . . . restituti, cum interpretatione gallica M. D. M. A. D. V. / Les Six livres de Lucrèce de la nature des choses, traduits par Michel de Marolles, abbé de Villeloin: Marolles (1659).

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same translation was published almost twenty years later, in 1677.12 The three editions seem to point to different agendas.13 In the first, 1650 edition, Marolles’s strategy is to present the text first and foremost as a beautiful poem, a ploy which Lambinus had already adopted in his 1564 edition, but which Marolles’s choice of title (Le Poëte Lucrèce, ‘The Poet Lucretius’) makes particularly conspicuous. This edition is fascinating first for its elusive dedication to Christina of Sweden. To the best of my knowledge, only two copies of this book with the dedicatory epistle have survived, both held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, out of the nine extant copies that I have been able to locate.14 The collation of the unnumbered liminary texts is irregular, and the signatures non-sequential (a, e, i).15 The four leaves of the dedicatory epistle to Christina have signature marks that double up with the beginning of the preface (signed á, áij, áiii, å), which obviously makes it a non-integral part of the book. Its placement is also odd, as it was inserted after both the preface and the life of Lucretius, instead of being given pride of place, as could have been expected. Is this fact to be attributed to an afterthought on the part of Marolles—as if the dedication to Christina had been intended for another book, since it does not specifically mention the DRN—or is it due to a poor job by the printer? What it seems to indicate, however, is that Marolles had only a few presentation copies bound separately for a selection of ‘important’ readers—one of the two copies with the epistle and kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France belonged to the scholar and bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet, for instance. The dedication was part of a bid for patronage, which was apparently not successful. After praising Christina for her virtues and her piety, Marolles includes a list of names of scholars she patronized, from Grotius, Heinsius, Menage, Salmasius, Vossius, Descartes, to Hérault, 12

Marolles and Anon. (1677). An exhaustive study of the three editions of the Marolles translation, sadly missing, would be required fully to render justice to Marolles’s enterprise. There is in fact very little published on Marolles. 14 The two copies which include the epistle are shelfmarked BnF RES. P. YC.355 and YC.5066. All the others omit it: BnF RES. P. YC.356 (Paris), copies at Museum d’Histoire Naturelle (Paris), Université de Lille 3 (Lille), Complutense Universidad (Madrid), Bibliothèque des Quatre Piliers (Bourges), and two privately owned copies (including my own). 15 The collation is: á8 (-á 1, 2) é8 í3 å A-I8 K-T8 V8 X-Z8 Aa-Ii8 Kk-Pp8. In the copies where the dedication features it is: á8 (-á 1, 2) é8 í3 å á3 å A-I8 K-T8 V8 X-Z8 Aa-Ii8 Kk-Pp8. 13

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perhaps suggesting that he would like to add his own to the list. It was difficult to be clumsier, at a time when Christina might have wanted to dissociate herself from any associations with free thought. Jean Hérault, Christina’s maître d’hôtel (a close equivalent to the title of ‘steward’), was responsible for bringing Christina the translation from France on behalf of his friend, but to Marolles’s surprise, perhaps dismay, Christina failed to respond, for reasons about which we are left to speculate. The new 1659 edition is dedicated instead to the stern Guillaume de Lamoignon, first President of the Parliament of Paris. In the preface Marolles scathingly comments on Christina’s silence, remarking laconically that: ‘to speak truthfully, the books that are offered to the public under such majestical and sublime titles hardly ever receive any advantage by it, because they do not ascend the throne with them’ (áiiiv–áiiii). It is clear that Marolles feels bitter about Christina’s silence. Why did the Queen fail to respond? According to Bayle, although he is not alone in reporting this,16 Marolles’s translation of Lucretius was considered by his contemporaries as insipid—Jean Chapelain even called it ‘infâme’ (‘terrible’, ‘infamous’), but then Chapelain was a personal enemy of Marolles’s. What we can safely say about his translation is that it can be painstakingly flat and literal at times.17 Christina of Sweden, herself an accomplished scholar, had no need for a French translation to understand Lucretius, a poet whom she notoriously acknowledged as a major influence on her religious beliefs a few years later, publicly declaring during a visit in Dijon in 1656 that she was not Catholic but of the ‘religion of philosophers’, that of Lucretius.18 But there might 16

For converging testimonies, see Ladvocat (1760) ii. 124, 193. Jean Chapelain writes: ‘On dit que le comédien Molière, ami de Chapelle, a traduit la meilleure partie de Lucrèce, prose et vers, et que cela est fort bien. La version qu’en a fait [sic] l’abbé de Marolles est infâme et déshonore ce grand Poëte.’ (Letter dated 25 Apr. 1662). Cf. Chapelain (1883) ii. 225. On the hatred between Chapelain and Marolles, see Repetzki (2000) p. lxxxv. 18 About Christina’s visit to Claude-Barthélémy Morisot in Dijon, Fortner writes in a letter to Bouilliau dated 26 Oct. 1656: Christina Alexandra Divioni Moirisotum, Burdelotio suadente, qui Reginae ibi aderat, accersiit. Post varios sermones, Moirisoti religionem inquisivit, qui se Catholicam profiteri asseveravit, simulque adjunxit, si aliâ imbutus esset, se tantae Reginae exemplo illam amplexurum, quam Christina. Ad ista subridens, sciscitata est num sciret que sacra illa coleret. Respondit illet, palam esse accusavit, seque Philosophorum religionem (verba Christinae sunt) omnibus aliis praeferre, testata est. Moirisotus haec sacra late patere innuens, explicationem dicti illius a Regina modeste efflagitavit, quam sic protulit: Philosophorum Religionem Lucretium optime depinxisse in libris de Natura Rerum, hacque se unice probare. 17

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be other reasons for Christina’s silence: in 1651 she was getting closer to the Jesuits, and already thinking about abdicating and converting to Catholicism. Whatever her reasons, the dedication of such an openly heterodox work, even under the falsely reassuring guise of a mundane translation made for polite circles of French society, might have been perceived as associating her too openly with libertinism and impiety.19 This cautious silence of Christina’s might have had something to do with the blithe ignorance of decorum evinced by Marolles and his offhand treatment of highly heterodox ideas in the first edition of his translation, as will be apparent. The 1650 preface presents a detailed defence of Lucretius. Because he was writing as a poet, Marolles argues, he should not be blamed for heterodoxy: Loûons ce qu’il y a de bon, & taschons d’en profiter. Consolons-nous de ce qui n’y est pas et supportons-en les défaux avec patience. C’est à dire, cherissons l’élégance, les graces & la beauté de ce Poëme, & contentonsnous de souhaiter que son Autheur eust fait choix d’un sujet plus heureux.20

This defence, which in fact closely follows Lambinus, appears somewhat paradoxical given the pedestrian nature of Marolles’s translation, which is in prose. Marolles, however, consistently shies away from philosophical ideas to concentrate on aesthetic arguments, repeatedly praising the beauties of the text in this edition. He argues that Lucretius is useful, in fact, because he encourages his readers to the love of beauty and virtue, and the hatred of vice and evil, like all classical writers for that matter. Marolles then moves on to defend the genre of scientific poetry. His argument is straightforward, even candid: it is impossible to blame Lucretius the poet for writing about the causes of things, first because others have done it too, and secondly, because his poem aims at teaching while entertaining.

Post exiguam moram eidem iniunxit, cum spe praemii regii, ut poetam illum commentario illustraret; qua mille, ut pro cero mihi relatum, nunc adornat. Cited by Pintard (1943) 638 and Cavaillé (2010). 19 On Christina of Sweden’s motivations, see Åkerman (1991) and Cavaillé (2010). 20 ‘Let us praise what is good [about the poem], and let us try and enjoy it. Let us not feel sorry for what is not here, and let us bear its faults with patience. Viz., let us admire the elegance, the graces and the beauty of this poem, and let us be content with wishing that its author had made the choice of a better subject-matter.’ (Marolles (1650) sig. Eiiv). All translations of Marolles into English are mine.

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Marolles then moves on to the core of Lucretius’s ideas, asserting that naturally they are not acceptable. The poet denies the immortality of the soul and providence, he rejects all religions, and places the superior good in voluptuousness ([avi]). But this is all Epicurus’s fault, Marolles hastens to add, whose doctrine is pagan and is opposed to Christianity—and how could it be otherwise, since he was writing before Christianity. Meanwhile, Marolles keeps to his line; in spite of all that is objectionable in it, it is a poem, and a very pleasant poem at that—it should therefore be appreciated and read as such. In fact, Marolles’s attitude to Lucretius’s heterodoxy could be described as fairly cavalier, although here again he follows Lambinus.21 There is no need to refute the doctrine of Epicurus, he claims: his conceptions are so far-fetched and fantastical that they are evidently disqualified, and destroy themselves. Particularly absurd are the arguments of the chance encounter and cooperation of atoms and the notion of infinite worlds. Of course, he notes with wry humour, modern readers can only wish that Lucretius had minded his business, but it is too late to want to correct him and readers are not so gullible as to believe anything they read.22 After asserting again that Lucretius is a great poet, he remarks that Epicurus’s philosophy has already been explained away and refuted by Gassendi in three volumes, and that ‘it would be sufficient to translate his treatise’, adding facetiously that ‘since it [Gassendi's treatise] is a little long, it could not be included in this volume’.23 To conclude, to resolve difficulties over issues such as the immortality of the soul and the defence of providence, he refers his reader back to both Pierre Gassendi and Kenelm Digby, mentioned in the same breath: ‘I think it is sufficient to refer the reader back to it [Gassendi’s work], as well as to the book by Sir Kenelm D’Igby, an Englishman, which is of high reputation, and to the other books written on the subject before by several authors.’24

21

Cf. Lambinus (1570) sig. a3, for instance (quoted in Norbrook (2012) p. xxviii). ‘[C]es choses-là se détruisent assez d’elles-mesmes . . . il eust bien mieux fait d’occuper son beau naturel à quelque sujet moins serieux, & plus proportionné aux sentiments de tout le monde. Il le deuoit. Qui le nie? Mais il est permis de s’en plaindre, & n’est plus temps de le corriger’ (Marolles (1650) sig. [avi]). 23 Marolles (1650) sig. [ev]. 24 ‘Mais comme il est un peu long, & que ce volume ne seroit pas capable de le contenir, ie pense qu’il vaut mieux y renuoyer le Lecteur, aussi bien qu’au liure du Cheualier Kenelme d’Igby Anglois, lequel a beaucoup de réputation, & aux autre liures que plusieurs ont écrit deuant luy sur ce mesme sujet . . . ’ (Marolles (1650) sig. [ev]). 22

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This English connection, the first one that we have come across so far, is intriguing. A modern reader would have expected Marolles to mention Descartes here as an authority, but Descartes was under suspicion of heterodoxy in those years—which resulted in his accepting an ill-fated invitation from Christina of Sweden, and he died there that same year. It is very unlikely that Marolles had read Digby’s treatise on the immortality of the soul, which was only published in English (and English was a language that very few French intellectuals could read). Digby was well-known in Paris, where he published several of his works during the Interregnum, before having them reprinted in London. He spoke French and was an avid collector of books and art, to which a man like Marolles, himself a collector of engravings and paintings, would necessarily have warmed, and is often mentioned in memoirs of French contemporaries. Digby frequented the Court, various salons and academies, and attended concerts and public lectures. He was also a friend and correspondent of Mersenne and Descartes, who was a major influence on his philosophy, although he was also interested in Paracelsus.25 He apparently had an affair with Madame de Châtillon, and was involved in several infamous duels.26 His Two Treatises, the works most probably known by Marolles, were written and first published in Paris by Gilles Blaizot.27 The reference to Digby is the first evidence here of the Anglo-French background of the reception of Lucretius—there will be more. In his second, 1659 edition, Marolles’s attitude shows more awareness of the heterodox nature of the Latin poem, and even a wariness not present in the first 1650 edition. The book includes a whole paratextual apparatus which aims at imposing a cordon sanitaire round Lucretius’s philosophy. To begin with, in his 1659 preface, 25

See Mersenne (1965–68) ix. 119–24, 203–7, and xi. 12 for a letter by Descartes to Mersenne which praises Digby. For Digby’s interest in Paracelsus, see his work on the ‘powder of sympathy’, which made him famous in France. He went to the University of Montpellier to present his ideas in the 1650s. Cf. Digby (1658). 26 According to Mlle de Montpensier, Digby had a relationship with Mme de Châtillon around 1656 (Montpensier (1838) iv. 211–12). See Gabrielli (1957) and Peterson (1956). 27 Marolles is most probably referring here to Two treatises. In the one of which, the nature of bodies; in the other, the nature of mans soule; is looked into; in way of discovery, of the immortality of reasonable soules. Cf. Digby (1644). The autograph MS of this text (dated 31 Aug. 1644) is in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (Ms 3392–3393).

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Marolles screens himself squarely behind the posthumous authority of Gassendi, claiming that the latter had actually read and corrected some mistakes or slips of his translation before his death in 1655: Il y a prés de quatre ans qu’ayant eu dessein de reuoir ma Traduction pour la rendre plus iuste & plus correcte qu’elle n’estoit la premiere fois, ie profitay des bons aduis que m’en donna l’vn des plus Sçauants hommes de son Siecle, Pierre Gassendi, peu de iours auant sa mort. Il m’y marque de sa propre main tous les endroits, où il crût qu’il estoit necessaire de retoucher; de sorte qu’en cela mesme, il me donna beaucoup de marques de sa bien-veillance: Et certes ie ne puis nier que ie ne luy sois redeuable de beaucoup de vuës & de corrections importantes que i’ay employées dans cette seconde Edition.28

Even a cursory comparison between the 1650 and the 1659 editions is sufficient to indicate that the text was thoroughly revised.29 This aspect of the translation would deserve a full-length study in itself, and it would very much exceed the scope of this chapter to go into the changes made—particularly as this edition of Marolles’s was not available to John Evelyn when the Englishman was penning his own version of Lucretius. It seems quite likely, however, that Marolles did benefit from the help of Gassendi in revising his translation. Marolles also registered Gassendi’s influence in a different way, by including a French version of Gassendi’s life of Epicurus, followed by a series of remarks on the De rerum natura—placing all the paratextual material after Lucretius’s text this time. The edition as a whole shows a translator obviously much more aware than in 1650 of Lucretius’s materialism and the dangers it posed to orthodoxy. The book now

28 ‘About four years ago, as I set out to revise my translation to make it more faithful and more correct than it was at first, I was able to benefit from the advice of one of the most learned men of his century, Pierre Gassendi, a few days before he died. He marked in his own hand all the passages where he thought it necessary to revise; and he gave me thereby many instances of his kindness. I cannot deny therefore that I am greatly beholden to him for many views and important corrections which I introduced into this second edition.’ Marolles (1659) [avv]. 29 One example: the passage about the nature of the soul (ignoratur enim quae sit natura animai, / nata sit an contra nascentibus insinuetur, / et simul intereat nobiscum morte dirempta, 1.112–14) shows a different emphasis, away from the notion of matter—possibly contentious in the context of contemporary materialism. The 1650 text reads: ‘on ne sçait point si elle a esté creée ou si elle s’insinuë avec la matiere [emphasis Marolles’s] dans ceux qui naissent, ou si elle perit avec nous quand la mort la separe’. In 1659: ‘on ne sçait point si elle a esté creée, ou si elle s’insinüe venant du dehors dans ceux qui naissent, si elle perit avec nous quand la mort la separe’ (7–8).

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includes, for instance, a critical commentary on the text, as well as a discours apologétique, ‘to justify the translation and the reading of Lucretius’, which contains some of the material written in defence of Lucretius as printed in the preface of the first edition, but this time toned down. Finally, this 1659 edition is also simply more scholarly than the 1650 one: in 1650 Marolles had offhandedly claimed in a final avertissement (‘warning’), placed just after the translation, that he had only consulted the fairly rare Lambinus edition, but had used the more common 1620 Janssonius edition. In 1659 the name of Gifanius features on the first title-page, all in Latin, and Marolles includes a preliminary list of all the scholarly editions, still explicitly acknowledging the superiority of the Lambinus text and foregrounding his philological work by advertising it early in the book. The rather decorous 1650 frontispiece (inspired by the frontispiece to the Janssonius edition) (Fig. 7.1) has also disappeared,30 which gives the book a more stern and serious appearance. It is replaced by two successive title-pages, the first one entirely in Latin, the second in French, with a view to turning the book into something that looked like a scholarly edition.31 The book also includes Gifanius’s erudite notes, where there had been none in 1650. The third and last edition of 1677 testifies to the continuing success of Marolles’s translation and its protean endurance. It is a verse version of the Marolles 1659 text, published with a new preface, in which the anonymous versifier, often identified as the printer, Jean Langlois, claims to be following in the footsteps of the playwright Molière (who had died in 1673). Molière allegedly admired Marolles’s translation so much that he started a verse adaptation, early in the 1650s. No such manuscript has emerged, however, but several contemporaries, like Chapelain and Marolles himself,32 refer to this

30 It seems, however, that the frontispiece was still included in some copies (for instance in BnF YC-5066). 31 Cf. the full title of Marolles (1659). 32 For Chapelain’s testimony, see n. 17. See also the posthumous testimony of JeanNicolas de Tralage, nephew of the police lieutenant La Reynie, a close witness of the theatrical life of the mid-seventeenth cent., who worked with the censor. He writes about the edition of Œuvres de Monsieur de Molière published in 1682: ‘Le sieur Thierry a payé cinq cents escus, ou quinze cents livres à la veuve de Molière pour les pièces qui n’avoient pas été imprimées du vivant de l’auteur, comme le sont Le Festin de Pierre, Le Malade imaginaire, Les Amants magnifiques, La Comtesse d’Escarbagnas, etc. Le sieur Thierry n’a pas voulu imprimer ce que Molière avoit traduit de

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version by Molière, and the dramatist does include obvious references to the De rerum natura in Le Misanthrope.33 The 1659 preface mentions a second prestigious supporter, ‘Monsieur D’Avisson, médecin écossois’, who allegedly praised the book several times in public. William Davidson, Davisson, or Davison (c.1593–1669) played an important role for English royalists in Paris. A successful Scottish exile, he gallicized his name as D’Avissone while in Paris. He became physician to the King and obtained the first chair of chemistry to be created in France, which was attached to the Jardin du Roi in the Faubourg St-Victor in 1647, becoming the Keeper (‘Intendant’) of the garden that very year, and leaving France in 1651 to become physician to the King of Poland. While in Paris, he was an important contact for English exiles: his lectures were well attended, both by French and English people, and it seems that he acted as an intermediary between the two communities. The British Library holds a manuscript correspondence between Davisson and William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, for instance.34 Evelyn took a chemistry course from him,35 and Hobbes and William Petty attended some of his lectures and experiments.36 In 1652 Sir Thomas Urquhart wrote of Davisson’s ‘excellency . . . in alchymy above all the men now living in the world, whereof by his wonderful experimentss he giveth daily proof ’.37 If Davisson praised Marolles’s translation in public several times, as the 1659 preface claims, then it is likely that the English exiles in Paris as a whole had a favourable impression of it too. Walter Charleton, Edmund Waller, and Kenelm Digby were all present in Paris in those years—as well as John Evelyn. It is wellknown that several scholars and poets had envisaged translating Lucretius in England, and some had even translated extracts: Lucrèce. Cela estoit trop fort contre l’immortalité de l’âme, à ce qu’il dit.’ (Recueil de Jean-Nicolas de Tralage, MS-6541–6545, quoted in Fournier (1868) xvii). 33 Molière (1667) II.4.701–30, was inspired by DRN 4.1122–70. Marolles himself mentions Molière’s attempt at translating Lucretius first in the 1659 preface, where he writes: ‘On m’a dit qu’vn bel Esprit, en fait une Traduction en Vers, dont j’ai vû deux ou trois Stances, du commencement du second Liure, qui m’ont semblé fort iustes, & fort agreables’ (Marolles (1659) [avv]). And again in the dedicatory epistle to Le Livre d’Ovide contre Ibis in 1661: ‘Un comédien fameux ne réussira peut-être pas moins dans un pareil dessein qu’il a entrepris pour les six livres de Lucrèce, dont j’ai ouï réciter quelques stances pour le commencement du second livre, qui m’ont paru magnifiques’ (Marolles (1661) n.p.). 34 35 BL Harley 6491. See Sarasohn (2003) 57 n. 33. Darley (2006) 100. 36 37 Cf. Malcolm (2002) 12. Urquhart (1652) 213.

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Casaubon, Sherburne, Cockayne, or Alexander Brome, for instance. David Norbrook has retraced this history in his introduction to the edition of Hutchinson’s version of De rerum natura.38 These were the years when Lucy Hutchinson was most probably also working on her own version of Lucretius. In Paris, John Evelyn found himself at the centre of an intense intellectual life. Inspired by the success of Marolles’s translation, Evelyn was encouraged, according to his biographer Gillian Darley, to start translating Lucretius into English by his friends and family—most particularly by his literary mentors Richard Browne, whose daughter he married in 1646, Edmund Waller, Richard Fanshawe, and Christopher Wase.39 That the Marolles translation was known to John Evelyn can be inferred first from the superficial similarities between the frontispieces of the two books (Figs. 7.1, 7.2), but the evidence goes deeper. Yet Evelyn never explicitly mentioned the Frenchman’s influence and a close comparison of the two texts reveals more differences than similarities. Evelyn’s Essay was by no means a very scholarly work— he never specifies, for instance, which Latin edition he consulted. As I have already pointed out, Marolles used the Janssonius Amsterdam pocket edition of 1620, and its frontispiece was a source of inspiration for his own frontispiece (Fig. 7.2). The Janssonius title-page was the earliest printed illustration for the De rerum natura. It represents the sun (personified as a benign face), depicted as made up of atoms in the background, with motes of dust dancing in its beams, an allusion to DRN 2.114–28. Nature as the great Mother, doubling as a version of Venus with multiple breasts—a figure often conflated with Diana—stands on a pedestal above the four Empedoclean elements, feeding the world with milk from her breasts (cf. 5.809–15). These elements are: earth, represented by Demeter, or Ceres, and carrying a basket full of fruit; then fire, embodied by Prometheus, holding a firesteel in his right hand and a flint in his left hand; air, personified as Ganymede straddling an eagle; and finally water as Venus, mother of the Romans, standing on a dolphin and pouring water (a figure which seems again conflated with Diana here).40 Marolles’s frontispiece, which is unsigned, offers a free reinterpretation

38

39 Norbrook (2012) pp. xxiii–xxv. Darley (2006) 103. My interpretation differs slightly from the one given by Philip Ford (Ford (2007) 232). 40

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of the Janssonius frontispiece. The personification of the towering sun in the background of the Janssonius is replaced by a rendering of both the sun and the moon. The mythological figures are altered: Nepture stands for water, Vulcan for fire, Cybele, recognizable through her attributes (the headgear including a model of a city and a lion) for earth. As for the serpent, it is usually associated with Demeter, another earth figure. Marolles has a portrait of the author (Lucretius) added in the middle. Ganymede is simply dispensed with and replaced with the more neutral figure of an angel with no particularly recognizable attributes other than his wings—a version of Cupid, perhaps. It is a fact that Marolles was very interested in iconography, and he collected prints. These iconographical changes can therefore in all likelihood be attributed to the author himself. In fact, the changes tend to exemplify one of the major features of Marolles’s translation, namely his tendency to water down the most contentious aspects of the text. The ‘vagueness’ of this angel, the odd one out in this otherwise fairly coded mythological composition, is representative of this tendency. What seems to have been unacceptable here for Marolles was the implication of having physical love embodied by Ganymede, who personified homoerotic desire. In the fourth book of the DRN, Marolles unsurprisingly damps down the very physical description of homoerotic attraction. The passage in question deals in fact with the physiological manifestations of sexual desire in very explicit terms: So therefore, if one is wounded by the shafts of Venus, whether it be a boy with girlish limbs who launches the shaft at him, or a woman radiating love from her whole body, he tends to the source of the blow, and desires to unite and to cast the fluid from body to body; for his dumb desire presages delight.41

Marolles’s version reflects an interesting moment of reflexive censorship, as he omits the passage which mentions the boy with girlish limbs: Ainsi donc, celuy qui a ressenty quelques atteintes des traits de l’Amour, soit qu’il ait esté blessé ∴ par des membres délicats, soit qu’vne femme l’ait touché par les attraits de sa beauté, il aspire à ce qui l’a blessé. Il s’efforce de s’en approcher & de jetter de son corps en vn autre l’humeur

41

Lucretius (1992) 359, DRN 4.1051–7.

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Fig. 7.1. Jansson’s edition (Amsterdam, 1620). # Line Cottegnies.

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qui s’y est amassée. Vne passion vehemente fait esperer la volupté que l’on souhaite.42

As is obvious here, Marolles tones down what has to do with the physicality of desire, and this he does elsewhere too. We need to qualify somewhat this description of Marolles as a censor, however. In comparison with other translators, his translation tends to be fairly faithful, almost too literal at times, in spite of the deliberate omission already mentioned. Moreover, Marolles shows a form of scrupulousness that is worth emphasizing: here he indicates the presence of a cut with a distinct diacritical mark in his text (∴). John Evelyn, in contrast, simply omits the whole section that deals with the physiology of love in his manuscript version of book 4 of DRN,43 probably because he thought the passage too lewd. Marolles’s deliberate damping down of the crudity of the Latin is nothing in comparison with Thomas Creech’s very approximate gloss over the same passage in 1682—which summarizes a much longer passage in Lucretius (DRN 4.1048–72 roughly): Love rises then, when from a beauteous face Some pleasing forms provoke us to embrace Those Bawds to lust, when with a tickling Art They gather turgent seed from every part, And then provoke it: Then rise fierce desires, The Lover burns with strong, but pleasing fires; Those often are pursu’d by following Care, Distracting thoughts, and often deep despair.44

In this version by Creech, the physiological manifestations of desire are simply left out, which shows an astonishing coyness. It was Mary Evelyn who copied Marolles’s frontispiece for her husband’s 1656 Essay, but the illustration was engraved by Hollar.45 Mary Evelyn signed her name on the overturned urn (Fig. 7.3). The ‘So the man who has felt the shafts of Love, whether he be wounded by delicate limbs, or whether he was touched by the charms of a woman’s beauty, yearns after what has wounded him. He strives to get close to it, and to pour from his body into another the humour that has been building up. A vehement passion makes one hope for the bliss that one desires’ (Marolles (1650) 367). On Marolles’s relative coyness, see Ford (2007) 239. 43 44 BL Additional MS 78354. Creech (1683b) 132. 45 See for instance Harris (1997) 201 and Hunter (1995) 84–92. Richard Kroll discusses the title-page, with slightly odd conclusions, in Kroll (1991) 169–70. 42

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Fig. 7.3. John Evelyn, An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De rerum natura (London, 1656), title-page. With permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford (8 L 17(1) Art.BS).

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changes made to the original frontispiece are striking: all the female characters, even the multiple-breasted figure embodying nature on top, are dressed formally, in clothes in contemporary fashion, including the angel, who is distinctively feminized in this version. The (mostly naked) men in the picture continue meanwhile to be inspired by classical models. This heightened decorum might be a reflection of Mary Evelyn’s influence on the project. However, these details tend to make of the frontispiece a rather baroque affair, where the significance of the classical iconography is somehow blurred. What is most striking, though, is perhaps the replacement of the portrait of the author (Lucretius) by that of the translator (John Evelyn himself), which Lucy Hutchinson famously sneered at: ‘a masculine wit hath thought it worth while printing his head in a laurel crown for the version of one of those books’.46 It seems that Evelyn had finished at least a large section of his translation before he left France in 1652, but he kept working at it until 1656. In July 1651, Alexander Ross thanks him for a draft of the translation that he has received.47 Among the liminary texts included in the published work, the dedicatory epistle by Richard Fanshawe is dated December 1653. But, in his commentary attached to the translation, Evelyn ends with a reference to Gassendi’s recent death (in 1655), and transcribes his epitaph, which gives us the terminus ab quo for the completion of the book. Why did Evelyn wait for three years before publishing only book 1 of DRN, augmented with a very long essay to refute Lucretius in an appendix? Why did he feel he had to publish this odd combination under the beguiling title An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De rerum natura (where ‘essay’ could actually mean commentary, or literally attempt)—a misleading title since it does not publicize the fact that the book includes a translation and a commentary? Part of this story is well documented, especially in Repetzki’s introduction to the old-spelling edition of Evelyn’s work. It is obvious that, by the time he went back to England, Evelyn had got increasingly worried about his enterprise. The 1640s and early 1650s were

46 Quoted by Darley (2006) 141. This portrait was perhaps made after the portrait engraved for Evelyn by Nanteuil in 1650. Robert Nanteuil (1623–78), a famous portraitist and engraver, also made a famous fine portrait of Marolles a few years later. The British Museum possesses a copy of this portrait, traditionally known as ‘Le petit Mylord’. 47 Darley (2006) 103.

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for him a period of bubbling enthusiasm for the philosophy of Epicurus which led him to create gardens with an Epicurean theme, first at Wotton, then at Albury.48 But when he published his partial translation of Lucretius, it attracted the attention of some vocal supporters of Epicurean philosophy, such as William Rand, who insisted in dedicating his translation of Peiresc’s life of Gassendi to him, much to Evelyn’s embarrassment.49 We know from the intense correspondence between Jeremy Taylor and John Evelyn that early in the 1650s Taylor tried to dissuade him from pursuing his translation.50 Evelyn also expressed unease about it in his correspondence with Meric Casaubon. As a devout Christian, he was obviously concerned about disseminating Lucretius’s subversive theses. While the 1656 volume includes very positive dedicatory poems by Sir Richard Browne, Edmund Waller, and Christopher Wase, among others, Evelyn was urged by Taylor, clearly annoyed by the interference of Evelyn’s friends, to at least include in his book ‘a sufficient antidote’ by way of notes or a preface.51 Taylor prevailed: not only did Evelyn suppress the remaining five books, now in the British Library, refraining from circulating them, but he also crammed his partial translation with warnings and commentaries in the hope of compensating for Lucretius’s heterodoxy.52 He thus sandwiched the 67-page-long translation of book 1 (with Latin text) between a long preface and 100-page-long essay titled ‘Animadversions upon the first Book of T. Lucretius Carus’. The latter is in fact presented by the bookseller as published without the author’s consent, but this was most probably an editorial ruse, intended to titillate the reader.53 Evelyn, however, was extremely unhappy about the quality of the publication: there were numerous pagination errors, as if the book had been published in haste (or by an incompetent printer), or the essay had been added at the very last minute as an afterthought. In fact, Evelyn was planning a new edition,

48

On the Epicurean symbolism of Evelyn’s gardens, see Small and Small (1997). 50 Rand (1657) sig. A3. Darley (2006) 138. 51 Letter dated 16 Apr. 1656. Evelyn (1859) iii. 72. 52 BL Evelyn MSS 33–4. Book 2 was lost, however. See the 2000 critical edition by Repetzki. 53 ‘I must acknowledge ingenuously, That these Animadversions following, were some scattered Collections encountred at the end of this Copy, which it was the Authors express desires I should totally suppress . . . But to advance our particular Interest, and gratifie the Printer (who objected the Volume was too smal of it self) I have adventured to publish this Addition.’ (Evelyn (1656) 80). 49

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and his personal copy of the published work, annotated in his hand, can also be consulted in the British Library.54 Evelyn’s commentary on the DRN is a line-by-line explanation and refutation of Lucretius’s book 1 which owes much to Gassendi and Charleton’s adaptation of the latter. In this impressive piece of scholarship, Evelyn compares Lucretius’s positions with those of a whole array of thinkers from the Church Fathers to modern philosophers such as Gassendi and Charleton, but also Descartes and Digby. The result, however, is almost schizophrenic, and Evelyn offers here a vivid testimony of the conflicted reception of Lucretius in those years. The aim was to dissociate himself from ‘the empty and impatient Epicures of our age’,55 all those who read Lucretius indiscriminately. Yet even in this pious, often extremely moralizing, commentary Evelyn’s discomfort surfaces, especially in the instances where he seems, almost in spite of himself, to sympathize with his author on a number of points. Such is the case when he mentions the notion of the infinity of worlds: [T]he plurality of Infinites . . . which convincing instance, I finde also used by the rational Bruno, who hath written an express and curious treatise, not onely to prove the Infinity of Space; but that even of worlds, what concerns our Poet.56

This shows an astonishing audacity on Evelyn’s part, one which contradicted his mostly critical attitude in the rest of the commentary: although several authors in England had toyed with the idea of the plurality of worlds,57 the idea was still considered highly contentious, as Marolles himself had confessed in his 1650 preface. That Evelyn should resort to Giordano Bruno as an authority on the question is also surprising: if Bruno was mentioned appreciatively by Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, it is difficult to forget that he ended up burnt at the stake for heterodoxy in Rome in 1600, precisely for defending such ideas. Even if England in the 1650s was more welcoming to intellectual debate than Rome fifty years earlier, aligning oneself with Bruno and Lucretius on such an issue still meant taking the risk of being accused of atheistic sympathies.

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55 Shelfmark: Eve a 168. Evelyn (1656) 110. Evelyn (1656) 164. 57 William Godwin, John Wilkins, and Margaret Cavendish had all written about the idea of the plurality of worlds. See Cottegnies (2008) 139–40. 56

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A similar ambivalence can be found throughout the Essay. In fact, while the final commentary section is on the whole very critical of Lucretius, the preface entitled ‘The Interpreter to him that reads’ (which seems explicitly to exclude women readers) is much more positive, poles apart from the later section. This is where Evelyn’s debt to Marolles, although never acknowledged, seems most obvious. Evelyn begins by praising the beauties of the poem, a strategy perhaps inspired by Marolles and his source Lambinus: to render a perfect and lively Image of this excellent piece, and speak of its colours in the Original, cannot be better accomplished, then in the resembling it to the surprising artifice of some various Scene, curious Landskip, or delicious prospect; where . . . all . . . conspire to create a new Paradise, and recompense him the pains of so many difficult accesses. For our Poet seems here to have been of counsel with Nature herself, when she disposed the Principles of things . . . and framed that beautiful Machine, which we daily contemplate with so much variety and admiration.58

The praise is hyperbolic, and shows a split perception of Lucretius’s poem. Here it is described as enchanting and uplifting. By comparing De rerum natura with a prospect or a painting, Evelyn incidentally bases his appreciation of the work primarily on aesthetic criteria. Meanwhile, Evelyn’s disregard for the heterodox implications of what he describes here is striking; it leads him to espouse, albeit temporarily in the book, an unmitigated pagan perspective, even if he appears to renege a little further down, when he hastens to answer the possible objection of the ‘scrupulous’ readers, who might find his translation of Lucretius offensive: They are such as seem greatly to declaim against our Author, as altogether Irreligious and Prophane; and therefore not fit (say they) to be so much as read or entertained amongst Christians. But if this be the sole and grand objection, I would likewise enquire, why those nicer and peevish spirits should at all approve, or in the least make use of any other Heathen Writer whatsoever?59

This is a familiar topos, already used by both Lambinus and Marolles: how can one reproach Lucretius, or any ancient author for that matter, with being pagans, since they came before the Christian era?

58

Evelyn (1656) sig. [A6]–[A6v].

59

Evelyn (1656) sig. [A7v].

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As a consequence, if you blame one, you have to reject all of them. Evelyn concludes, with a levity that the Marolles of 1650 would not have disowned, that for all the impious elements in his text, ‘by any whit obnoxious to our faith’, yet Lucretius’s moral principles are excellent: And if our Poet have any one passage (as where he prevaricates on Providence, the Immortality of the Soul, the spontaneous coalition of Principles, and some other sublime points of speculative Theologie) which seems to concern, or be any whit obnoxious to our Faith; he hath a thousand more, where amongst the rest of his most excellent Precepts, and rare discourses, he perswades to a life the most exact and Moral; and no man, I hope, comes hither as a Spider, to swell up his bag with poyson onely, when with half that pains, he may with the industrious Bee, store and furnish his Hive with so much wholesome and delicious Honey.60

It is up to the reader, Evelyn implies, to be discerning enough to draw from Lucretius what is good, and to reject what is not. Did Evelyn use Marolles when he was translating Lucretius? We know that Evelyn mastered French and he was in Paris when he first started his version of Lucretius.61 It is Michael Repetzki’s opinion, however, that Evelyn did not use the French translation, as he chose poetry over prose.62 At first sight, there are no blatant word similarities between the two versions. Both indirectly used Lambinus’s edition of Lucretius as a basis for their edition—Marolles in the Janssonius edition, Evelyn perhaps through Gifanius, since it is his Latin version he reproduces in his printed version of book 1.63 It is my contention, however, that Marolles’s translation was a little more than a stimulus for Evelyn, and that he most probably used Marolles for reference when he came across difficult notions as he was working on his translation. Only a few examples can be treated within the scope of this chapter, and I shall focus on a passage in book 1 (62–111) which offers three intriguing cases, suggesting that Evelyn 60

Evelyn (1656) sig. [A8v]. Entry in Diary, 8 May 1644: ‘I took a master of the language, and studied the tongue very diligently’ (Evelyn (1908) 46). In his State of France, Evelyn urges the English traveller to learn the tongue of the country (Evelyn (1652) sig. [A8v]). 62 Repetzki (2000) p. lxxxiv. 63 Repetzki (2000) p. lxxxii, lxviii. Repetzki seems certain, however, that Evelyn’s authoritative text is Lambinus’s, and his analysis highlights Evelyn’s philological and bibliophilic interests in editions of Lucretius and his eclecticism (p. lxxxvi). 61

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at the very least consulted Marolles.64 The first example concerns the vexed question of the translation of the important word religio, in the passage in which Lucretius denounces religious superstitions (1.62–79). Marolles and Evelyn chose to translate this term in a similar, ambivalent way and avoided the word ‘religion’, perhaps out of a desire to distinguish between good and bad religious belief. What Rouse translates in the modern Loeb edition as ‘the weight of superstition’ is thus rendered as ‘superstitions sway’ in Evelyn,65 and as ‘le fardeau de la superstition’ in Marolles.66 Although slightly different, these two versions similarly mitigate the force of Lucretius’s original. Creech, in contrast, somewhat overstates his case in 1682 with ‘Religion’s Tyranny’, which is perhaps much closer to the spirit of Lucretius’s original, however.67 Evelyn appears less careful to release religion consistently from the stigma of superstition than Marolles, however: he successively uses the word ‘Religion’ (and even ‘foolish Zeal’, on the same page) to translate ‘religio’,68 contrary to Marolles who uses the same word ‘superstition’: Yet fear I least thou think my Arguments Should lead you into impious rudiments, When as Religion it self, oft times Hath perpetrated foul and bloody crimes.69

It seems apparent here that Evelyn was aware that Lucretius’s radical criticism of religion concerned more than just superstition. The second example pleads perhaps more convincingly for Evelyn’s at least consulting Marolles. It concerns the translation of a difficult, polysemous Latin notion in the same passage, the word vates (DRN 1.102), which could mean prophet, priest, or poet according to the context. According to Smith, this could refer to ‘all professional supporters of traditional religion and mythology, both priests and

64 More research is obviously needed to make a really authoritative case, and I can only hope here to suggest a few connections between Marolles and Evelyn. As David Norbrook has pointed out, however, the case is probably more for Evelyn pointedly NOT using Marolles in book 1 at least (I would like to thank him for most helpful comments on an early draft of this essay). It might be safe to say that Evelyn’s eclecticism means that he consulted a wide variety of sources, including Marolles. 65 Lucretius (1992) 8–9, Evelyn (1656) 17. See note in Hutchinson (2012) 475. Hutchinson herself has ‘burth’nsome superstition’ ((2012) 21). 66 67 ‘the burden of superstition’ (Marolles (1650) 11). Creech (1682) 3. 68 69 Evelyn (1656) 19. Evelyn (1656) 19.

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poets’.70 Evelyn seems to have hesitated, and he chose in fact to side with Marolles here, although he does not reference Marolles in the commentary where he justifies his choice: ‘Thy self (so long) with Poets frightful lies / O’rcome, wilt our opinions soon despise’.71 In the context of Lucretius’ attack on religion, it would have been more logical for Evelyn to have chosen ‘prophets’ or ‘priests’, as did Rouse in his modern version which has ‘the terrific utterances of priests’.72 Evelyn’s version, ‘Poets frightful lies’, is close, however, to Marolles’s ‘tragiques discours des Poètes’.73 Creech goes even further than Marolles and Evelyn with: ‘some furious threats / By Poets form’d’.74 Evelyn follows Marolles even down to a wonderful moment of hesitation in which the Frenchman, apparently unable to choose, translates the word vates in l. 109 both by ‘priest’ and ‘poet’ in the same line. The Latin reads: religionibus atque minis obsistere vatum. Rouse translates this line as: ‘the superstitions and threatenings of the priests’.75 Marolles’s version reads: ‘les fantaisies de la religion, et les menaces des Poëtes’,76 while Evelyn has ‘Poetique Threats, and Superstitions fright’—Creech has it right this time with ‘disdain / The Poets tales’.77 This is one instance where the influence of Marolles is direct, and it seems highly likely that Evelyn at least consulted the French translation on this difficult point. Marolles’s version, however, tends on the whole to be more accurate than Evelyn’s when dealing with contentious and subversive passages. It is as if Marolles was less self-conscious about the potentially impious implications of his translation. One example will suffice to prove this point, which comes from the same passage. It concerns this time Lucretius’s discussion of the mortality of the soul (1.107–11), and the translation of certam finem (107). As will be apparent, throughout this passage Evelyn consistently softens the

70

Smith in Lucretius (1992) 11 n. e. DRN 1.102–3; Evelyn (1656) 18–19. For his commentary on those lines, see (1656) 114. 72 Lucretius (1992) 11. Interestingly, Hutchinson chose ‘priests’ (Hutchinson (2012) 25). 73 ‘Tragic discourses of poets’, Marolles (1650) 13. 74 Creech (1683b) 5. 75 DRN 1.109; Lucretius (1992) 13. 76 ‘The absurdities of religion, and the threats of poets’, Marolles (1650) 13. 77 Evelyn (1656) 19. 71

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edges of Lucretius’s crispness. The passage deserves to be quoted in full, to understand the context of the Latin quotation:78 for did men think their woes had end, After a sort perhaps resist they might Poetique Threats, and Superstitions fright. But now in vain alass! no help remains Since after death they dread eternal pains: For in this ignorance men live amus’d, Whether the Soul be born, or else infus’d They know not, or expiring with our breath, Visits those Lakes, and gloomy shades beneath.79

Marolles’s transliteration for line 107 seems fairly faithful: ‘si les hommes voyoient une fin asseurée à toutes leurs miseres’.80 Creech paraphrases the Latin freely: ‘But if it once appear / That after death there’s neither Hope nor Fear’.81 Evelyn’s version, in contrast, tends to blur the notion at stake, i.e. death as the end of everything, suggesting that the end of men’s miseries must be interpreted figuratively rather than literally: it is not the definitive end of life that is envisaged here in his version, but only the end of one’s woes—which softens the Latin. Finally, by linking two arguments that were disconnected in the Latin text, Evelyn completely misses the point about the mortality of the soul a few lines down, which becomes simply implicit in his version: literally it should be ‘whether the soul expires with the breath, / Or visits those lakes’ (my paraphrase). The two points are not logically connected in the Latin: they represent two branches of an alternative. This Marolles translates perfectly, if rather freely, letting poetic amplification take over: ‘si elle [l’âme] périt auec nous quand la mort la separe: si elle void les tenebres de Pluton, & les vastes marais de son triste Empire’.82 78 The text is: certam finem esse viderent (1.107). In Rouse’s paraphrase: ‘if men saw that a limit has been set to tribulation’ (Lucretius (1992) 13). 79 Evelyn (1656) 19. 80 Marolles (1650) 13: ‘if only men saw an assured end to their miseries’. 81 Creech (1683b) 5. 82 Marolles (1650) 15: ‘whether the soul perishes with us when death tears it from us; or whether it sees the dark shades of Pluto and the vast marshes of his gloomy empire’ (my translation). The Latin version is: et simul intereat nobiscum morte dirempta, / an tenebras Orci visat vastasque lacunas’; Rouse paraphrases: ‘whether it perish together with us when broken up by death, or whether it visit the gloom of Orcus and his vasty chasms’ (Lucretius (1992) 13).

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To conclude, it seems that Marolles is perhaps timid where issues of sexuality are explicit, but that he actually never shies away from the literal meaning when philosophical or religious issues are concerned. As for Evelyn, he never mentions Marolles, either in manuscript or print. It is obvious that, by comparison, he seems more anxious than the Frenchman about sexual or impious implications; and it seems clear that this is not a question of linguistic skill. Evelyn obviously did not misunderstand the Latin text, but in many instances he tried to mitigate the forceful explicitness of some of the most heterodox arguments by toning the text down. It should come as no surprise that Evelyn thought he had to add a refutation to the volume as a means of toning down what can be described as his initial enthusiasm for Lucretius. His opening good-humoured, playful justification of Lucretius could be perceived as a provocation in the context of the mid-1650s, especially when it was followed by Waller’s grandiloquent praise of the subversive nature of the DRN, itself a paraphrase of Lucretius’s famous praise of Epicurus of book 1 of DRN: LUCRETIUS with a Stork-like fate, Born and translated in a State, Comes to proclaim in English Verse No Monarch Rules the Universe; But chance and Atomes make this All In Order Democratical . . . And this in such a strain he sings, As if his Muse with Angels wings Had soar’d beyond our utmost Sphere, And other Worlds discover’d there; For his immortal boundless wit To nature does no bounds permit; But boldly has remov’d those bars Of Heaven, and Earth, and Seas and Stars, By which they were before suppos’d By narrow wits to be inclos’d . . . 83

The image of a free spirit removing the bars limiting human knowledge had naturally become a topos, and in the early modern period Bruno had famously applied it to Copernicus (as well as to himself).84 83 84

Evelyn (1656) 3. Cf. the discussion of ‘speculative flight’ in Bruno in Haskell’s Chapter 4.

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Gassendi himself had applied it to Galileo.85 The topos, however, seems to have acquired the status of a sign of recognition among thinkers with affiliations or sympathies with heterodoxy. Waller’s praise might have alarmed Evelyn in the mid-1650s, as one more ostentatious sign of alignment, even if it was playful, with what could clearly be perceived as a free-thinking, libertine discourse. Moreover, Waller’s unsubtle, and paradoxical, praise of the ‘democracy’ of Lucretius’s atoms might also have rankled in the context of the Commonwealth, at a time when many royalists were coming home (including the Evelyns) to make their peace with the regime (see Norbrook’s Chapter 11). Evelyn was not the only one to have become openly worried about the reception of Lucretius (and Epicurus) in the context of the 1650s. So was Walter Charleton, who adapted Gassendi’s Latin works into English in a series of works published from 1652 onwards. Charleton published two of his most important works in 1656: his bulky opus magnum, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, which includes about one-third of Gassendi’s 1648 Animadversiones, interpolations from various authors, including Digby and Descartes, as well as his own thoughts on physiology, and Epicurus’s Morals, a presentation of Epicurean moral philosophy which again owed much to Gassendi. Charleton seems to have had the ambition of becoming the English Gassendi, with a view to purging Epicurus’s philosophy of his most subversive, impious aspects. In 1656, he must have looked on the uncalled-for publication of Evelyn’s Lucretius with some dismay. His election at the College of Physicians had already fallen through twice, and his former friendship with Thomas Hobbes had put him in a difficult position after the 1651 Leviathan was received as a work openly encouraging atheism and increasingly associated with Epicureanism. Charleton had to extricate himself from associations with Hobbes, and this he did by suppressing all references to Hobbes in the works he published in the 1650s. He also published a nasty piece of anti-Hobbesian propaganda, The Ephesian Matron, in 1659. This pamphlet, first published anonymously, and reissued in 1668 under his name, is a grotesque fable caricaturing Hobbes’s doctrine of

85 Gassendi (2004) i. 4, in a letter dated 20 July 1625. See also Gassendi (2001) Introduction, 24–6 and Perfetti (1994–5). Sorbière praises Hobbes in similar terms. See Hobbes (1994) i. 122.

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the passions as encouraging all vices.86 Charleton, the Christianizer of Epicurus for the English, knew his career was potentially in jeopardy. By risking being associated with what he must have seen as Evelyn’s blithely irresponsible translation of Lucretius, he could run into trouble. His response to the publication of Evelyn’s Essay was a philosophical dialogue, The Immortality of the Human Soul, Demonstrated by the Light of Nature. In this ‘à clef ’ dialogue, Charleton-Athanasius confronts Lucretius-Evelyn and Isodicastes—possibly Henry Pierrepoint, Marquis of Dorchester, the dedicatee of the treatise, or perhaps Sir Kenelm Digby himself because he is cited as a reference on the question of the immortality of the soul—in a French garden, in fact specifically referred to as the Luxemburg Garden in Paris. The choice of place is hardly accidental. We have seen how important the French context was for the reception of Lucretius and Epicurus in those years. The point of the whole dialogue is somewhat odd, as the character called Lucretius, although he admits to being a disciple of Epicurus, immediately asserts: ‘I believe the Soul to be immortal, as firmly as you’.87 The whole dialogue is therefore a purely academic exercise, a form of disputatio, meant to comfort Lucretius even more in this belief, by rehearsing the usual critique of the Epicurean doctrine. Lucretius is thus made repeatedly to rehash his credo: ‘Though I am an Epicurean, in many things concerning Bodies; yet, as a Christian, I detest and utterly renounce the doctrine of that Sect, concerning Mens Souls . . . ’ And if Lucretius contradicts and questions Athanasius, his mentor, by presenting some Epicurean tenets, it is only for the sake of argumentation, ‘to this end only, that I might the more fully experiment the strength of your Arguments’.88 This very convoluted piece of propaganda seems to me to reflect Charleton’s uneasy reception of Evelyn’s schizophrenic edition of book 1 of DRN, with its Janus-like paratexts, the epideictic preface and the damning commentary. It would be another twenty-five years before the complete poem finally appeared in English, under the pen of Thomas Creech. And then there would be no praise of Lucretius, no playful excusing of his impiety, and Creech’s preface and notes would be unambiguously critical: his aim, like Lucy Hutchinson’s, is nothing more or less than ‘to overthrow’ Epicurus. In 1678, only four 86 88

On this text, see Cottegnies (2003). Charleton (1657) 186.

87

Charleton (1657) 62.

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years before Creech’s translation was published, with only one, sober dedicatory poem,89 Ralph Cudworth published his True Intellectual System of the Universe in which he described Lucretius as ‘the atheistic poet’, and Epicurus as ‘an absolute Atheist’.90 In his 1682 preface, which was excised from later editions, Thomas Creech thought it fit to add his voice to the anti-Epicurean, anti-Hobbesian chorus which made of Epicurus the emblem of the times: ‘Hence also the admirers of Mr. Hobbes may easily discern that his Politicks are but Lucretius enlarg’d; His state of Nature is sung by our Poet; the rise of Laws; the beginning of Societies; the Criteria of Just and Unjust exactly the same, and natural Consequents of the Epicurean Origine of Man; no new Adventures.’91 If Marolles had blazed a trail, by treating Lucretius as just another classical author worth reading and treating with respect, his influence was, in the end, limited in England by the peculiar antiHobbesian climate of the 1660s. This Epicurean moment was over.

More were to be added from the second edition (1683), with a series of flattering dedicatory poems. 90 Cudworth (1678) 57, 77. 91 Creech (1682) sig. [b3v]. For the change of intellectual climate between the 1650s and 1660s and the growing tendency to ‘brand Hobbes as an atheist’ in the 1660s, see Norbrook (2012) pp. cx–cxi. 89

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8 Lucretianism and Some Seventeenth-Century Theories of Human Origin William Poole

In the fifth book of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), there is a wellknown moment when Raphael, blushing in his lips, explains to Adam how angels make love: being of rarefied material nature, angels can entirely interabsorb. Now this is a fleeting, incongruous inversion of a passage on human sex in book 4 of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, and the reader privy to this implied reference is also therefore privy to something approaching a Miltonic joke. For, as Lucretius writes of human intercourse, man and woman: adfigunt avide corpus iunguntque salivas oris et inspirant pressantes dentibus ora— nequiquam, quoniam nil inde abradere possunt nec penetrare et abire in corpus corpore toto . . . (4.1108–11) They greedily cling bodies together, and join their watering mouths, and pant, pressing teeth on lips; but all in vain, for they can rub nothing off, nor can they penetrate and be absorbed body in body . . .

Note the subtle absurdity of the observation, as if the purpose of sex was in fact mutual abrasion; and just as Lucretius’s humans cannot interpenetrate, so too his word-order presses body against body: ‘in corpus corpore toto’. John Evelyn after some deliberation omitted the passage, as did Lucy Hutchinson, as fit ‘for a midwife to translate’, although she may in fact have composed a version of the passage.1 1 Hutchinson (2012) 281. Norbrook notes in the introduction, however, that the retention of line-numbers in otherwise blank pages of Hutchinson’s translation

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Thomas Creech slightly euphemized the passage, and it was left to John Dryden, whose versions were reprinted in the 1700 edition of Creech’s translation, to make the bolder approach. Note Dryden’s insertion of an extra foot into the final line of the following quotation to underscore the difficulty of fitting two bodies into one: They gripe, they squeeze, their humid Tongues they dart, As each wou’d force their way to t’other’s Heart: In vain; they only cruize about the Coast, For Bodies cannot pierce, nor be in Bodies lost . . . 2

Milton’s angels, as Raphael explains, achieve commixture too, and Milton, with his twinned collocations of ‘Air’, ‘Pure’, ‘Flesh’, and ‘Soul’, moves his versification closer to his angels, who: . . . obstacle find none Of membrane, joynt, or limb, exclusive barrs: Easier then Air with Air, if Spirits embrace, Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure Desiring; nor restrain’d conveyance need As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul. (Paradise Lost, 8.624–89)3

In Miltonic angelology, angels were created before the (visible) universe, an unorthodox move.4 They were nevertheless created by God, and it is a mark of the sin of the fallen angels that they cannot remember this, preferring instead a fantasy of autochthony: as Satan says, We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d By our own quick’ning power . . . (5.859–61)

Now the notion of self-creation, bypassing generation, can sound a rather Lucretian tone, because the major difference between the Lucretian creation and that of the Bible is that in the former, not just the first man but all the first people spring directly from the

suggests that the translation existed, but was deliberately not copied into the surviving manuscript; he also discusses Evelyn’s and Creech’s attitudes (pp. lxii–lxiii). 2 Creech (1700), 23; compare Creech’s rendering on p. 134. 3 I cite Paradise Lost from the second edition (London, 1674). 4 Milton (2012) i. 299, a view endorsed in the first book of Paradise Lost. See Campbell et al. (2007) 109–10.

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ground, separately, and in the Lucretian system this is not a providential act: Satan’s belief that angels are not made from other angels and that providence has no part in their creation is thus parallel to the Epicurean view that the first people were not made from other people—and that, again, providence had no part in this first creation. It is this notion of polygenesis—the idea of plural and parallel creations, as opposed to monogenesis, the creation of all humans through Adam and Eve—that the current chapter addresses. Lucretius treats of creation in the middle of his fifth book. First flora develop, herbae and virgulta. Next come fauna, for, as Lucretius says, as animals cannot have fallen from the sky or land creatures have derived from the ocean, they therefore sprang from the earth. As Thomas Stanley paraphrased in the 1660 instalment of his History of Philosophy, a passage itself redacting the foremost revivalist of atomism, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655): But as concerning Animals themselves, it is likely that the earth, retaining this new genitall seed, brought out of itself some little bubbles, in the likenesse of little wombs, and these when they grew mature, (nature so compelling) broke, and put forth young little Creatures.

Crucially, Epicureanism proposed a like origin for mankind: . . . some little bubbles and wombs, sticking to the roots of the earth, and warmed by the Sun, first grew bigger, and, by the assistance of nature afforded to infants, sprung from it a connaturall moisture called milk, and that those thus brought up, and ripened to perfection, propagated Mankind.

Men of this age were hardy productions, but nature at length tiring, these seeds dried up, and people began to be propagated from people.5 In this early stage of development too many abortive species arose, but because these ‘monsters’ lacked the physiological means for survival, they died out. Such a theory has been heralded as protoevolutionary, but we must be cautious here: Lucretius did not propose variation of species.6 This was of course a section of De rerum natura with which it was almost impossible for early modern commentators to acquiesce entirely, and yet the adaptation of aspects of the Lucretian genesis was to prove fundamental to the rise of experimental philosophy and 5

Stanley (1660) 172–3.

6

Poole (2010) 124–7.

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the new science. The pioneer of English atomism, the physician Walter Charleton (1620–1707), in his Darkness of Atheism Expelled of 1652, endorsed a model of the creation of subhuman biota that was Lucretian in its physics but with a superadded providentialism; indeed, learning from Gassendi (and behind him a famous chapter in the Church Father Lactantius),7 Charleton was growing from a most incongruous soil a genre which he helped to name ‘physicotheology’: atomistic design, in these modern hands, proved divine workmanship. However, in his massive Gassendist syntagma, the Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana (1654), Charleton simply omitted any discussion of this aspect of the Epicurean system at all.8 John Evelyn never published book 5 of his translation of De rerum natura, and John Dryden did not touch the passage. As the French translator Michel de Marolles (1600–81) said in the commentary accompanying his Latin/French edition of Lucretius of 1659, ‘After having spoken of the creation of plants and animals, [Lucretius] speaks of the creation of men, through pure philosophical reasoning, having had no other source of illumination whatsoever to carry him higher.’9 The implication is clear: the polygenesis of the lower fauna is one issue, but the genesis of mankind must on biblical authority be cordoned off from the genesis of the rest of the biota. Marolles, who said of Lucretius that ‘il y a bien de la Philosophie dans ce Poëte, que tout le monde n’entend pas’ (‘there is much philosophy in this poet which everyone does not understand’),10 is in fact a complicated case, as later in life he was said to have been responsible for an abortive translation of the Bible into French, which was accompanied by notes clearly sympathetic to polygenesis, and attributed to Isaac La Peyrère, whom we will encounter again later in this chapter.11 (Marolles, 7 This locus classicus, often cited by editors of Lucretius, is Lactantius, De opificio Dei, ch. 6, frequently headed ‘Of the error of Epicurus’. 8 Charleton (1652) 53–6. 9 Marolles (1659) 493–4: ‘Aprés auoir parlé de la production des Plantes, & des Animaux, il parle de celle des Hommes, par vn pur raisonnement Philosophique, n’ayant point eu d’autre lumiere pour s’éleuer plus haut.’ 10 Marolles (1656) 186. 11 Bible (1671) 2, commentary to Genesis 1: 17, which is, despite the formal submission to the authority of the Church, audibly defiant in context: ‘Cecy sembleroit marquer plusiers personnes d’vne mesme espece cre’ez en mesme jour. Et l’on a voulu induire de là, que Moyse n’a pas voulu parler en cet endroit d’Adam & d’Eue, mais de quelques autres hommes deuant Adam, de qui la formation est marquée ensuite plus particulierement. Toutesfois cette opinion est rejetctée, qouy que ceux qui

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indeed, wrote extensively and tolerantly about the pre-Adamite hypothesis in his memoirs—although, as a good churchman, without final assent, preferring instead to praise the intentions of the author if not finally his arguments.)12 Thomas Creech, the only early modern English translator of Lucretius to publish a complete version, defensively sneered in his notes about ‘men springing out of the Earth, as from the teeth of Cadmus his Dragon’.13 And even if an original polygenesis of the lower fauna is accepted, most implicitly agreed that after the original creation from the earth, all subsequent fauna are generated from parent fauna. Belief in the spontaneous generation of certain insects was still of course common, but few thought any fauna of size might grow directly from the earth. There were however some medieval survivals: witness the longue durée of the ‘Tartar lamb’ (agnus scythicus) or ‘boramets’, a beast supposed to grow from a stalk attaching it to the ground. The boramets was much discussed and even illustrated by contemporary naturalists, as many believed it to be a ‘zoophyte’, a plant-animal living on the boundary between those two kingdoms.14 There was a boramets in Olaus Wormius’s famous museum, and the Elizabethan ambassador Sir Richard Lee obtained from Russia a garment apparently woven from this plant-animal’s skin, later kept as a prized exhibit in the Bodleian Library. John Tradescant’s 1656 catalogue of his rarities, too, the core of the modern Ashmolean Museum, contained ‘a coat lined with Agnus Schythicus’.15 Milton is a good example of a poet who seems genuinely to have adopted several Epicurean doctrines, through Lucretius, as well as rejecting others, often, as we have seen, by the subtle parody of inversion. He stands in a direct line from Gassendi through Charleton in his adoption of the notion of the spontaneous generation of fauna la vouloient establier n’entreprenoient point de le faire contre l’authorité des Saintes Ecritures, à laquelle ils rendoient tout le respect qui lui est deub. Mais l’Eglise en ayant autrement jugé, on s’est soûmis à ses Decrets, & aux sentimens de tous les Saints Peres’. See also the note to Genesis 2:15. The translation extends only as far as Leviticus 23, and was said to have been stopped in the press by the chancellor, Pierre Séguier. There is a copy in the British Library, L.13.c.4. 12 Marolles (1656) 243–7; see further Cottegnies’s Chapter 7. 13 Creech (1682) notes, p. 39. In passing, Creech owned a copy of La Peyrère’s Prae-Adamitae (Bibliotheca selectissima eruditissimi viri Mri Thomae Creech (London, 1700), 25). 14 Duret (1605) ch. 29. 15 Borrichius (1693) ii. 395; Macray (1890) 431–4; Tradescant (1656) 51.

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from Lucretian wombs in the primal earth, and unlike many other Lucretian borrowings in Paradise Lost there is no trace of irony in Milton’s account of the manner of the creation of the lower fauna: The Earth obey’d, and strait Op’ning her fertil Woomb teem’d at a Birth Innumerous living Creatures, perfet formes, Limb’d and full grown . . . The Tawnie Lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts, then springs as broke from Bonds, And Rampant shakes his Brinded main . . . (Paradise Lost, 7.453–6, 464–6)

The difference, of course, is that Milton emphasizes that this was a providential, not a spontaneous process—‘The Earth obey’d’—and he does not suggest that this kind of autochthony might then apply to man too: only Adam will be made from the earth, by God himself, directly; and only thereafter shall the race derive from his copulation with Eve, herself made from his rib. Milton is also careful to say that the first fauna sprang forth as ‘perfet formes’, designedly so: this is a deliberate excision of the unviable, because random, hybrids of a Lucretian genesis. We can see, then, that Lucretian models of the creation of flora and fauna were well-known in the period and partially endorsed by several natural philosophers and even poets. But the sticking-point was the creation of the highest fauna, human beings. Here the biblical bar was too strong to overcome, and it worked hand-in-glove with an Aristotelian anthropology that separated man from the beasts by interposing as a barrier man’s rational soul, and that for Christian commentators was synonymous with the imago Dei in which Adam was created. Lord Rochester in an unaccustomedly serious, properly Epicurean poem, his ‘Satyr on Mankind’, might contend that ‘Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast’, but it was not an anthropology shared by orthodox writers.16 The only English writer of significance I know who supported total polygenesis was Francis Lodwick (1619–94), the merchant, linguist, FRS, and nuclear member of the circle around the prominent experimental philosopher Robert Hooke from the 1670s until Lodwick’s death in 1694. Lodwick’s private theological manuscripts show that he believed in an 16 Wilmot (1680) ‘Satyr’, p. 13. For humans and animals in Lucretianism, see Hutchinson (2012) i, pp. lxxxix–xci.

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initial polygenetic creation of mankind, directly from the earth, followed much later by the special creation, this time directly by God, of Adam and Eve in Eden, this latter creation a specifically and exclusively Jewish creation. In this Lodwick was an obvious disciple of the French heretic Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676), whose work, the Prae-Adamitae of 1655, Lodwick owned and studied carefully. But Lodwick’s complete theologico-physical system does not seem to me consciously Epicurean, and it is significant that Lodwick, whose library catalogues survive, owned only a few minor Charleton publications and Creech’s translation of Lucretius, which appeared rather late in Lodwick’s life.17 Rather, Lodwick’s thought is a fusion of a pre-Adamist anthropology with aspects of Spinozan and Socinian critical theory, underwritten by a corpuscular physics taken directly from Descartes.18 It seems to me however that one of Lodwick’s masters, La Peyrère, did adapt his polygenetic model with a reading of Lucretius in mind, or at least La Peyrère is Lucretian in his phrasing and doctrine. This aspect of the Frenchman’s heresy has not hitherto been noted, commentators preferring to place him within solely biblical and exegetical traditions.19 I conclude, then, on a brief discussion of this neglected source of La Peyrère’s polygenesis. La Peyrère expounds his polygenetic creation thus: According to the . . . Analogy of Creation, we must believe, that men were made by God Male and Female in one day, with an uninterrupted Creation, and upon the whole earth, and that there was no place in the whole earth wch brought forth grass, fostered trees & cattel, which before the sixth and last day of the absolute Creation had not its own men and its own Lords.20

La Peyrère however then theologized his Lucretian anthropology by suggesting that this first creation of mankind underwent its own fall long before that of Adam and Eve in Eden. His argument in origin is Augustinian: man is made from matter, matter is made from nothing, therefore man has an inherent metaphysical tendency to slide away from the good into which he was created, and back to the nothing from which he was created. But La Peyrère, I contend, phrased this doctrine by bifurcating a central Lucretian metaphor: 17 18 19 20

Henderson and Poole (2009) 25. Lodwick (2010) introduction, 39–53. In his standard study, R. H. Popkin (1987) does not mention Lucretius. La Peyrère (1656) ‘Systeme’, 131.

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the flesh and matter of man was reprobate Earth, the Mother of good seed, and the mother of ill weeds. The step-mother of all Vertues which God in his creation had sown in the hearts of men, and the mother of all Vices, which naturally spring in them, as in their native soyl, and, which like watred Herbs, grow most plentifully. The cursed step-mother hates her Sons-in-Law, but like a very loving mother embraces and fosters her Children. Hence it happened, that nature and the flesh of man refused that tried and choyce seed of perfection, with which they were created; and that, by the same nature it returned again into it self, when it found liberty. And that in this regard it was far easier to do evil than good.21

This is somewhat convoluted, but the symbolism of two mothers, one good, one bad, is clear. Now the earth as mother is perhaps the controlling metaphor of Lucretius’s account of creation: Linquitur ut merito maternum nomen adepta terra sit, e terra quoniam sunt cuncta creata. (5.795–6) It remains that the earth is rightly named mother, since all things are produced from the earth.

And then two dozen lines later: Quare etiam atque etiam maternum nomen adepta terra tenet merito, quoniam genus ipsa creavit humanum atque animal . . . (5.821–3) Therefore once again and once again the earth is rightly held to be named the mother, since she herself created the race of humans, and animals . . .

As a mother, the earth then grew old, and became unable to bear more children, to whom was therefore deferred the power of generation. So when we encounter the metaphor of the earth as mother or grandmother in such literary or philosophical contexts, it is usually an allusion to Lucretian models of creation. Thus Charleton, who by no means admitted the autochthonous production of humans, could nevertheless in his Darknes of Atheism slip in his discussion of creation into the metaphor of ‘fetch[ing] Stones and Mineral Concretions’ ‘from the entrals of our Grandmother’.22 La Peyrère, we can now see, adopts the Lucretian metaphor of the mother, but split in two: there is mother earth, now the ‘reprobate’ 21

La Peyrère (1656) ‘Systeme’, 26.

22

Charleton (1652) 60.

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mother of material man; and there is the step-mother, the divine sower of spiritual gifts alien to man’s material origins. La Peyrère treats the gifts bestowed on man as what Thomist and subsequently Tridentine teaching recognized as the donum supernaturale, the supernatural gift of God bestowed upon Adam at Creation and lost at the Fall; and the material nature of man as the principle back to which man always threatens to decline.23 Nor is ‘mother earth’ here to be thought of as a passive force, contributing to the creation of man merely matter but not the active principle of form, as the Aristotelians taught.24 Epicureanism was in this respect sexually egalitarian, semper enim partus duplici de semine constat (‘for parturition always consists in a double seed’), Lucretius writes in book 4 on procreation—and a child may resemble its mother more than its father, and vice versa, signalling which seed dominated in a given act of procreation (4.1228–32). But what comes from the earthy side of man is undoubtedly a negative ethical force or tendency. La Peyrère therefore fitted a Lucretian account of the origins of man to a lapsarian theology by taking the Lucretian ‘mother earth’ and equating it with the material principle identified by some theologians as the material cause of man’s tendency to sin, an interpretation with no place in classical Epicureanism, but which is nevertheless Epicurean in origin and metaphor. It is a creative adaptation, but a deeply unstable one too. For La Peyrère’s two-seed model, in which the ‘seed of perfection’ is opposed to the material seed, runs rather close to metaphysical dualism for theological comfort, and even has gnostic overtones, in which matter is evil, and salvation comes from without and beyond the material realm.25 La Peyrère’s Epicurean polygenesis was simply beyond the pale for almost all his contemporaries; but, as this chapter has suggested, his was nevertheless not quite a lone voice, and the Epicurean creation itself marked some otherwise hostile literary texts of the age, notably Milton’s Paradise Lost.26

23

24 Williams (1927) 400–23. Maclean (1980) 30. A strong two-seed model was also adopted by the English Muggletonians, although quite independently: Poole (2005) 80–1. 26 I am grateful to the editors of this volume for their comments. 25

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9 Is the De rerum natura a Work of Natural Theology? Some Ancient, Modern, and Early Modern Perspectives Nicholas Hardy

‘Those eternal rules / Which from firm Premises true Reason draws, / And a deep insight into Natures laws’.1 This is how one early modern translator of Lucretius, Thomas Creech, rendered naturae species ratioque, a refrain found throughout the De rerum natura.2 At first glance gratuitously expansive, Creech’s translation is simply drawing together two themes that punctuate the entire poem: Lucretius’s insistence on the regularity of the cosmos, and his exaltation of human reason. Lucy Hutchinson and John Evelyn, the other two known translators of the entire poem into English in the seventeenth century, were more restrained at this point. Elsewhere, however, all three translators share an interest in the poem’s vision of nature’s law-like regularity and intelligibility. ‘Order’ and ‘reason’ are not the dominant buzzwords in recent studies of the reception of the De rerum natura.3 Flux, contingency, instability, and materialism tend to have the upper hand. The doctrine of the swerve and the poet’s comparison of atomic configuration 1 Creech (1682) 6. In what follows, I quote Hutchinson (2012) for Hutchinson’s translation, and Evelyn (2000) for Evelyn’s. I do not provide line or page references; all quotations are easily located by comparing with the Loeb line references. For Creech (1682), however, I provide page references, since lines are not numbered. 2 Lucretius, DRN 1.148; 2.61; 3.93; 6.41. 3 For exceptions, see Barbour (1997) 129 and Norbrook (2013): ‘Lucretius’ cosmos does have an underlying order’.

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with human language interested various postmodern philosophers in the latter half of the twentieth century.4 More recently, literary critics have adopted these aspects of Lucretius’s atomism as the organizing conceits for sweeping studies of his influence in the early modern period. In one case, the swerve has been made to function as a figure of the unpredictable but decisive break which the Renaissance made with the Middle Ages.5 In another, the direction of Lucretius’s wellknown analogy between atoms and letters has been reversed, so that texts are made to behave like detached particles of matter: endlessly breaking apart and recombining with each other, their movements random and ungoverned by any guiding intelligence.6 Despite the temptations of these features of his matter theory, there is a strong case to be made for reading Lucretius in the manner suggested by Creech’s translation. It has been made already, by many scholars of ancient philosophy and poetry. And it was made, albeit more obliquely, by many of his readers in the Renaissance.7 Both bodies of work deserve closer reading by early modernists and specialists in classical reception. They reveal important continuities between Lucretius’s poem and non-Epicurean traditions of writing about nature, from antiquity to the end of the Renaissance. Most striking of all are the points of contact between the poem and various forms of natural theology: that is, the belief that the natural world and human reason can cooperate to arrive at truths about the nature of being, and especially the gods or God. Before considering his early modern reception, however, it is necessary to treat Lucretius’s representations of the order of nature and the power of reason in their own right. Ideas of fixity and limit pervade the De rerum natura. Another refrain concerns the boundaries that determine what can and cannot come into being: quid possit oriri, / quid nequeat, finita potestas denique cuique / quanam sit ratione atque alte terminus haerens.8 Lucretius mobilizes Roman military, legal, and indeed religious terminology to show that natural phenomena are restricted by a ratio, an 4 Esp. Serres (1977) and Lezra (1997); see Holmes and Shearin (2012) 11–12 for a favourable overview. 5 6 Greenblatt (2011). Passannante (2011). 7 Palmer (2009) offers a valuable general account: her treatment of the sixteenthcent. reception of Lucretius in natural philosophy and ethics corresponds with many of my claims; esp. 299, 345, 347–8. See also Mandelbrote (2013) 77–8, 92. 8 DRN 1.75–7; for slight variations, see 1.594–6; 5.88–90; and 6.64–6.

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order or arrangement. The adjective certus abounds throughout the poem. No single controlling authority put this ratio in place, but it is not much less orderly for that.9 At times, these metaphors appear to be countered by ideas of chance and spontaneity (e.g. sponte sua, 2.1092); but the purpose of these is not to present nature as unpredictable so much as to deny teleology and intelligent design.10 Even the swerve is simply the minimum movement necessary to set the order of nature in motion. Lucretius emphatically denies that any random deviations are visible in the movement of super-atomic bodies: unlike swerving atoms, the motions of observable objects follow a consistent pattern.11 Even though the swerve has a disruptive effect on volition in humans or other animals, this effect remains heavily determined by the physical constitution of the animal in question.12 Particularly striking, and without many precedents in Greek philosophy, is Lucretius’s preoccupation with the laws or ‘treaties’ of nature (foedera naturai). Both this and the notion of fixity are probably borrowed from Stoic natural philosophy in order to suggest that the Stoic vision of a harmonious, structurally reliable cosmos is possible without any deities.13 In a Roman context, moreover, terms such as terminus and foedus transfer a sense of national self-sufficiency and security from the political realm to the realm of nature.14 The corollary of nature being consistent and explicable is that humans have all the faculties needed to explain it. Species and ratio are Janus-faced, subjective as well as objective. They refer to the active inspection of nature by an observer, as well as its outward appearance; and to the observer’s powers of understanding, as well as nature’s own orderly characteristics.15 This duality is the basis of Epicurean ethics, which demands the cultivation of what has been called an ‘objective self ’: the inquirer into nature gains ‘a perspective in which we treat our personal identity not as a privileged viewpoint but merely as one

9

De Lacy (1969); Long (2006a) 157–77, esp. 167–8; and Jenkyns (1998) 226–7. 11 M. R. Johnson (2013). Lucretius, DRN 2.243–5. 12 Fowler (2002) 417–19. 13 Long (2006a) 171–2 and (2006b) 208–10; Schrijvers (2007) 259–60; Asmis (2008) 153, 156–7. See Garani (2007) 47–61 for a discussion of possible Greek precedents which are neither Epicurean nor Stoic. 14 Asmis (2008); cf. Fowler (1989) 145–8. See Lehoux (2012) 47–76 on the prevalence of legal terminology in Roman natural philosophy. 15 Fowler (2002) 141–3; Clay (1983) 108. 10

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of the things that the world contains along with everything else. We manifest our objective selves in numerous activities involving appeals to evidence and verification.’16 While many readers are captivated by Lucretius’s portrayal of the passions, especially erotic desire, Lucretius himself is no less moved by the power and value of reason.17 The senses cannot err. The faculty of judgement can err, by combining sense-impressions in illogical and illegitimate ways, but it is possible to train it to avoid this. If anything in the Epicurean cosmos transcends atomic determinism, it is human reason.18 Reason is powerful enough to overturn atomic determinism and almost entirely wipe out any biological propensity to behave irrationally or unethically.19 Moreover, reason based on sense-perception is so transcendent as to merit its own quasi-religious faith: we must cling to it as a general principle, even if it occasionally fails to explain a particular phenomenon.20 Above all, we ought to revere the man whose genius uncovered the true ratio of nature: Epicurus.21 In the interpretation of the poem I am outlining, some of its most notorious features carry surprisingly little weight. The operations of nature make very little room for contingency: the same things tend to happen over and over again. This means that the things humans do tend to perceive with their senses can be reliable guides to what is happening under the surface. In this sense, Lucretius is not an especially ‘reductionist’ thinker.22 He places less stress than earlier atomists on the ‘tension between appearance and reality’ implied by atomic models of interaction.23 He concentrates instead on contiguities between visible nature and the invisible reality of atomic interaction, such as his famous analogy comparing the movement of dust motes and atoms.24 Other examples reinforce the value of analogical inferences from what we can see to what we cannot. Lucretius shares this confidence in analogical reasoning about nature with writers as Long (2006b) 218–20; the phrase ‘objective self ’ is Thomas Nagel’s. See also De Lacy (1969) 104–7; Asmis (2008) 141. 17 Fowler (2002) Appendix B, esp. 442. 18 Sedley (1988) 323–6. On sense-perception and judgement in general, see Long (1971) 114–22. 19 20 DRN 3.319–22. DRN 5.500–12. 21 22 DRN 3.1–17. Sedley (1988). 23 In what follows, I draw on Wardy (1988). See esp. 115–16. 24 DRN 2.112–41. On this and analogy in general, see Fowler (2002) 186–206. 16

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diverse as Homer, Anaxagoras, and Empedocles, none of whom was an atomist.25 Lucretius’s account of the relationship between human reason, natural phenomena, and atoms is one of comforting synergy rather than alienating materialism.26 Precise scientific explanation in terms of atoms can sometimes assist the Epicurean ethical project, but so, at other times, can a simple trust in the stability and intelligibility of what we see with our own eyes. When Lucretius does explain phenomena in reductive terms, he does so for tactical and ethical reasons (such as a need to question Roman military chauvinism).27 Reductionism is treated as a tool, rather than a categorical moral or scientific imperative. Often, ratio on its own suffices, without the aid of atomic explanations. As part of his denial of creationism (2.167–83), Lucretius wrote that nature could be seen to operate with ‘exact conformity to the plans of mankind’ (tanto opere humanis rationibus admoderate), but immediately guarded against the intrusion of an intelligent designer by adding that it was far from perfect; and this balance between order and imperfection would be clear enough even if one had no inkling of atomic theory (quamvis rerum ignorem primordia quae sint). Scrutiny of meteorological phenomena (ipsis caeli rationibus) alone would suffice to demonstrate it, and show that the creationists were wrong (a vera lapsi ratione).28 This passage involves intricate repetition of ratio, again blurring the boundaries of objectivity and subjectivity: ratio here is both embedded in nature, and a separate, human faculty of judgement. From this point of view, the De rerum natura is an open-minded, outward-looking work of philosophy and of literature, as opposed to a fundamentalist manifesto for atomism or materialism. Lucretius and his rivals were all operating within a broad tradition of reasoning about nature that did not depend on atomism for its ontological or epistemological foundations. Lucretius was no more fond of the idea

25 Lloyd (1966) remains the best general treatment of analogical reasoning in early Greek literature and philosophy. On Lucretius’s relationship to these earlier writers, see Schrijvers (1999) 183–213. Marković (2008) 90–100 provides a broader account of the literary and rhetorical background, while Garani (2007) concentrates on Empedocles as a poetic and philosophical precursor to Lucretius in his use of analogy. See also Clay (1998) 161–73. 26 27 Fowler (2002) 442. DRN 1.455ff. 28 DRN 2.167–83. See Bailey edition (1947) ad loc.

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of a naturae ratio than anti-Epicurean thinkers like Cicero.29 Some of Lucretius’s rivals are criticized, and their arguments are inverted to demonstrate the opposite of what they were seeking to prove. However, such critiques amount not to a declaration that all non-Epicurean philosophies are fundamentally wrong, but an insistence that we continually calibrate and recalibrate our view of the world according to our common experiences and our reasoning about them. NonEpicurean traditions are scrutinized in order to show that, while the experiences are reliable, the reasoning can sometimes go astray. The poem is not a dogmatic exposition of a closed philosophical system: it is an eclectic, but critical, exploration of many systems, that finds the building blocks of true reasoning wherever it can.30 However, these continuities with other philosophical and literary traditions have been obscured by opponents of atomism from antiquity onwards, who have characterized the Epicurean account of nature as unstable and disruptive.31 Most of them did not regard the De rerum natura as their primary target. Their caricature relies on a dichotomy between an intelligently designed universe and total atomic disintegration which excludes Lucretius’s orderly, but not divinely ordained, middle way. Cicero, perhaps most famously, took the analogy between atoms and letters favoured by Lucretius and other atomists, and used it to argue for the providential regulation of nature: it was as absurd to believe that such an intricately beautiful world could be made from the ‘fortuitous coming together’ (concursione fortuita) of atoms as it was to believe that Ennius’s Annales could be produced by throwing together countless blocks in the shape of letters and hoping that they land in the right order.32 Cicero’s likely target here was Democritus, who had compared the operations of atoms in forming different natural phenomena with the fact that tragedies and comedies are composed using the same letters.33 Lucretius’s analogy was quite different.34 It concentrated on the composition of single words, rather than entire texts. Letters are distinguished from one another by their shapes, and if placed together

29

30 Fowler (2002) 141. Schrijvers (1999) 197–212. As noted in the case of its notion of spontaneity by M. R. Johnson (2013) 100–1. 32 Cicero (1955) ii. 213 (2.93). For Cicero’s providentialist account of the laws of nature and its influence, see Wilson (2008b) 17–19. 33 34 Schrijvers (2007) 262–3. Dalzell (1987) 19–24. 31

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in the correct order, they form a meaningful word. The natural equivalent of a meaningful word is a phenomenon that does tend to occur, as opposed to one that doesn’t, such as a chimera. All this analogy illustrates is the range of forms permitted by a finite number of basic material or linguistic building blocks. It was intended to refute rival explanations of the variety of nature.35 Lucretius probably restricted the scope of Democritus’s analogy in order to avoid suggesting any need for nature to have an ‘author’, and escape the reductio ad absurdum with which Cicero confronted it. To credit it with wider implications is an anti-Lucretian manoeuvre.36 Countless later opponents of atomism echo Cicero’s providentialism.37 A passing reference in Seneca is particularly revealing: those who lack training in philosophy are said to fall downwards endlessly into the boundless ‘chaos’ of Epicurus (in Epicureum illud chaos decidunt, inane sine termino).38 Epicurus is said to have turned to philosophy because he found poetic mythology unsatisfactory: he was not convinced by an early tutor’s attempts to answer where Hesiod’s Chaos came from.39 Seneca’s quip implies that Epicurus’s philosophy of atoms and void was no less chaotic than the one it was intended to replace. Early Christian critics sustained the offensive. Lactantius tried to expose Lucretius’s appeal to ratio without intelligent design as absurd: ‘What are the terms, the plan, on which they [the atoms] meet to create something out of themselves? If they lack sense they cannot come together in any organized fashion: only reason can create something rational.’40 The third-century anti-Epicurean, Dionysius of Alexandria, gave the argument a political colouring, again turning metaphors like foedus against Lucretius: ‘The democracy of atoms is wondrous indeed: they receive and embrace one another as friends, and press together, coming to rest in one community.’41 35

For these explanations, see Lloyd (1966) 248 and Garani (2007) 13–14. As in Passannante (2011). For more sensitive and productive interpretations along similar lines, see Friedländer (2007); Snyder (1980); Dionigi (1988); Schiesaro (1994); Armstrong (1995); and Fowler (1995). 37 For numerous further examples not discussed here, see Pease’s notes, Cicero (1955). 38 Seneca (1917–25) ii. 103 (Epistulae Morales 72.9); cited in Porter (2003) 199. 39 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 10.2. 40 Lactantius (2003) 3.17.24–7. 41 Cited in Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 14.25, and noted by Fowler (2002) 185: ŁÆıÆ ª H Iø ÅŒæÆ Æ,  Øıø  IºººÆ H ç ºø ŒÆd æغŒø, N  Æ  ŒÆÆŒÅF ıØŒ Æ Kتø. 36

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As the cases of Cicero and Seneca demonstrate, this anti-atomistic invective was not exclusively Christian. Indeed, it pervaded the poetry of Rome as much as its philosophy. Nature in Virgil’s poems, especially the Georgics, can produce ‘impossible’ wonders (I ÆÆ) that overturn the Epicurean doctrine of regularity.42 The astronomical poet Manilius provides a further example. Katharina Volk has argued that ‘his presentation in the Astronomica of an orderly cosmos ruled by fate is a direct attack on the random universe depicted by his predecessor’. Like Cicero, Manilius used the analogy between atoms and letters against Lucretius: ‘The Epicurean universe is, after all, a product of mere chance and thus . . . a random jumble of letters.’43 Volk’s language here slides into uncritical acceptance of Cicero and Manilius’s hostile parody of Epicurean or Democritean doctrine, showing how hard it is even for modern scholars to discard the prejudice that atomism entails pure contingency. It should not surprise us, then, that early modern writers were equally susceptible to it. Many of the references to atomism cited as instances of the early modern reception of Lucretius or of Epicurean physics are much closer, both in letter and in spirit, to these Roman and patristic parodies than to the Epicurean sources themselves.44 Robert Burton, for instance, drew on Cicero’s condemnation at the beginning of his Anatomy of Melancholy. He attributes to Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus (no mention of Lucretius) the belief that worlds are created ex fortuitâ atomorum collisione.45 Fortuita and atomorum are both terms used by Cicero, but never by Lucretius in the entire De rerum natura.46 The case of John Donne offers even clearer illustrations of the gap between a genuinely Lucretian understanding of atomic interaction, and its parody. He writes from Paris to a friend that ‘If our letters come not in due order, and so make not a certain and concurrent

42

43 Gale (2000) 84–5, 220, 224. Volk (2009) 192 and 197. For examples, see Clucas (1991) 328–36; Haskell (2008), esp. 510–12; Wilson (2008a) 29–30, 90, 93; and Passannante (2011) 7, 121. 45 Burton (1989–2000) i. 1 (‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’). Clucas (1991) 332 assumes the familiar dichotomy between providence and pure contingency, and quotes Burton as if he were describing Lucretian physics, rather than simplifying it: ‘The replacement of divine Providence by chance in Lucretius’ theology, where the world is created “ex fortuita atomorum collisione”, was one of the principal objections of Christian philosophers to ancient atomism.’ 46 De natura deorum 2.93 and 1.54. 44

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chain, yet if they come as atoms, and so meet at last by any crooked and casual application, they make up and they nourish bodies of friendship.’47 For Lucretius, however, this distinction would make little sense: atoms were predisposed by their shapes, sizes, and weights to observe ‘due order’ and ‘make . . . a certain and concurrent chain’. This is the point of his own analogy with letters and words, as we have seen. Atoms cannot ‘make up and . . . nourish bodies’ which the order of nature has not already predisposed them to make. In fact, Lucretius’s cosmos makes less room for ‘crooked and casual application’ than Virgil’s world of unpredictable natural wonders. Donne’s contrast between order and atomic disorder fails to acknowledge that Lucretius is a poet of the former as well as the latter. The same is true of other passages. Most famous is the complaint in his Anatomie of the World that the world is ‘crumbled out againe to his Atomies. / ’Tis all in pieces, all cohaerance gone’. Donne appears to juxtapose an atomist cosmology and its Aristotelian or biblical rival. From a Lucretian point of view, however, he is simply offering two distinct stages of the former: on the one hand, the separation of atoms from each other that precedes the formation of the world, and follows its destruction; on the other, the ‘cohaerance’ of atoms in larger bodies that comprises the order of nature as humans have always encountered it. Francis Bacon offered a similarly stark choice between atomic chaos and providential design: the ‘order and beauty’ of the natural world could only be explained atomically by positing a divine lawgiver arranging those atoms into place. Indeed, such an explanation was theologically less suspect than a dangerously self-sufficient doctrine of elements and essences: Nay, even that Schoole, which is most accused of Atheisme, doth demonstrate Religion; that is, the Schoole of Leucippus, and Democritus, and Epicurus. For it is a thousand times more Credible, that foure Mutable Elements, and one Immutable Fift Essence, duly and Eternally placed, need no God, then that an Army, of Infinite small Portions, or Seedes unplaced, should have produced this Order, and Beauty, without a Divine Marshall.48

47

Donne (1899) 1.305–6; cited by Passannante (2011) 7. Bacon (1985) 51; cited in Wilson (2008a) 90–1. Bacon did refer directly to Lucretius on other occasions: see Bacon (2000) 52. 48

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Like Burton, Bacon cited the three most prominent Greek atomists, rather than the De rerum natura. Once again, Lucretius is conspicuous by his absence from a theological argument about atomism. These allusions to the atomic theory owe more to the brief discussions—and caricatures—of atomism in Cicero and the Church Fathers than they do to a direct reception of Lucretius.49 There is an interesting variation on this critique, which applies more narrowly to Lucretius’s poem, rather than the whole atomist or Epicurean philosophy. It is the argument that, in spite of the reductionist, materialist philosophy which his atomism allegedly entailed, Lucretius in fact ends up yielding to theism of one kind or another. For Lactantius, he seems to have been led towards a Christian view of the immortality of the soul, perhaps by an innate human propensity to seek the true religion: ‘even Lucretius forgot what he was arguing and what principle he was defending . . . truth prevailed, and the true analysis slipped in unperceived’. Lactantius provided evidence for his claim by quoting passages about birth and death out of their context, omitting crucial statements about atomic dissolution.50 Such arguments had early modern counterparts. Indeed, Lucy Hutchinson took a similar view of another discussion of the passage from life to death. When Lucretius admits that humans seem to have an innate (but nonetheless erroneous) conviction that there is life after death, Hutchinson writes in her margin: ‘How much this poore deluded bewitcht mad wretch striues to put out the dimme light of nature which while he contends against he acknowledges’.51 Similarly, Pierre Bayle detected some hesitation in Lucretius’s denial of providence, although he was less quick to attribute this to the return of a repressed natural religion.52 The two passages targeted in these early modern readings share a feature: they are rooted much more firmly in commonly observed characteristics of nature and of human behaviour than they are in This is a simpler explanation of the patchiness of the early English ‘reception’ of Lucretius than that of Rzepka (2012) 116, that ‘the poem’s dynamic treatment of atomism and mutability seems to generate heterodoxy and turbulence in the history of its own reception’. 50 e.g. DRN 2.999–1001: see Lactantius (2003) 7.12.5. 51 Hutchinson (2012) 205, commenting on Lucretius DRN 2.887ff. 52 Bayle (1697) iii. 422, quoting DRN 5.1233–5. For a more straightforwardly Christian interpretation of the passage, see John Mason Good’s translation of the DRN (1805) i, p. lxix; cited in Hutchinson (2012) comm. ad loc. 49

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deeper atomic explanations. Lucretius does not explain atomically where our misconception about life after death comes from, or what exactly, in physical terms, is the hidden force (vis abdita quaedam) that seems (videtur) to thwart the ambitions of men and lead them to assume that the gods have control over mortal affairs. He is taking more interest than might be expected in the insights of everyday experience, and less in the reductive power of scientific materialism. Translators and commentators have not always recognized Lucretius’s ambivalence here. Although videtur provides a note of scepticism about this hidden power, Hutchinson and Evelyn both neglect to translate it. Creech, on the other hand, is slightly over-emphatic in his dismissal of the superstitious apprehension of fortune: ‘And hence we fancy unseen powers in Things’.53 The balance of experience and explanation is difficult to preserve, and Bailey gets no closer by glossing the indeterminate vis abdita quaedam with a precision unwarranted by the Latin text: ‘the secret workings of the atomic world’.54 There is some continuity between such readings of Lucretius, and the famous argument of Henri Patin that the poet betrays a profound sympathy with the traditional forms of religion and nature-worship which he is ostensibly rejecting: in short, that there is an ‘anti-Lucrèce chez Lucrèce’.55 Many critics since Patin have retained his conviction that Lucretius’s poem is somehow at odds with the philosophy it espouses.56 Having abandoned religious sympathies, however, this conviction proceeds by other means, often seeking to expose the corrosive intertextual residues of other, non-Epicurean texts within the poem: ‘recontextualization of a topos does not cleanse it of all the accretions of meaning it gained from its former context’.57 Other critics have detected internal philosophical or rhetorical contradictions, as well as intertextual ones.58

53

54 Creech (1682) 178. Bailey edition (1947) iii, ad loc. Patin (1883) i. 117–37. Patin actually cites Bayle’s comment approvingly, 122. Another, more overtly theological precursor to Patin was Cardinal Melchior de Polignac, author of a poem titled Anti-Lucretius: see Clay (1983) 234–6. 56 This continuity is posited by Sharrock (2013) 4–6. 57 Campbell (2003), commenting on Lucretius, DRN 5.181–2; quoted by Garani (2007) 17. For a more historically inflected view of Lucretian intertextuality, see Obbink (1995), esp. 206. 58 Fowler (2000); (2002) 442–3; Hardie (2009) 5–7. Schrijvers (2007) 266–7 finds inconsistency in Lucretius’s incorporation of Stoic and Peripatetic natural theology. 55

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The search for contradictions has claimed to uncover them in Lucretius’s laws of nature. This claim involves a combination of the two kinds of criticism of Lucretius surveyed above: the caricature of Lucretian nature as chaotic and the exposure of two Lucretiuses working against one another. The laws of nature are a ‘sustaining myth’ that sit uncomfortably with his alleged commitment to ‘the notion that random chance is the governing principle of the universe’.59 Lucretius does indeed appear to exhibit a strong faith in the existence of laws of nature, without being able to say exactly what they are. They are not linked to explanations of how specific natural processes work, or general mathematical principles that underpin those processes.60 Indeed, Lucretius was unlikely to endow these laws with a clearly defined substance or explanatory power, given his relish for offering multiple explanations of phenomena.61 They operate more like a postulate of the consistency of nature as humans tend to observe it: for nature to be so orderly, there must be guarantees of that order. The content of those guarantees is not especially important, as long as they do not involve recourse to the gods. The point was not so much to explain nature, as to show that it could be explained: explained, that is, rather than feared or worshipped. Lucretius does not, therefore, place undue scientific confidence in those laws. The form of his invocations of them is important: by shifting between lex, foedus, pactum, and a more diffuse vocabulary of limit and certainty (certus, terminus, necesse est, etc.) he warns his reader not to take any one term too literally and allow it to master the entire physical framework. We can think of nature as observing laws, or as forming treaties, or as having a clear ratio. What matters is that we perceive its underlying order and intelligibility, not that we find a single dominant explanation for that order. Above all, we must not confuse metaphorical descriptions with physical truth. We may permit ourselves to refer to the sea as ‘Neptune’, or grain as ‘Ceres’, or wine as ‘Bacchus’, or the world as the ‘Mother of the Gods’, as long as we do not suppose any genuine divine intervention in creation.62 This principle is surely at the heart of Lucretius’s adaptations and inversions of rival philosophers’ accounts of reality: their terminology must continually be judged 59 61 62

60 Gale (2007b) 15–16. Milton (1998), esp. 682–4, 699. Milton (2002) 181–2; West (1994) 136–7; Hankinson (2013). DRN 2.655–60.

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against our experience of nature itself. This is why he is as eager to show how analogies break down as he is to show how they can illuminate things: for example, the separation of spirit from body does not behave like evaporation.63 Lucretius does not ‘absorb’ his intertexts in their entirety, leaving residues of hostile philosophies of nature in his poem. He maintains a respectful distance from them by means of a continual critique of their descriptions of phenomena and processes. Nor does he tend to reify his own descriptions: the formal restlessness of his poem ensures that no single term, whether ‘law’ or any other, is allowed to stand as a straightforward reflection of reality. Moving beyond the De rerum natura itself, the alternative reading I have outlined here also bears on the history of its reception. Critics have already demonstrated the affinities between Lucretius’s representation of nature and those of non-atomist Latin poets.64 But the affinities persisted for much longer than this. Insofar as he emphasized the order and beauty of nature and the ability of humans to comprehend it rationally, Lucretius found admirers throughout the early modern period. As Creech’s version of naturae species ratioque suggests, a lawbound, intelligible cosmos was easy for early modern translators to digest. Their enthusiasm for the language of limit could even lead them to place limits on an entity which Lucretius described as infinite, the cosmos: Hutchinson and Evelyn both took the ‘walls’ (moenia) which Lucretius applied to the world (mundus, 1.71), and mistakenly transferred them to the entire ‘universe’ (omne, 1.72).65 In doing so, they may have had an eye on the lines immediately following these, in which Lucretius sets out for the first time his doctrine of the terminus.66 Lucretius’s mantras of finitude diffuse throughout the poem and ‘contaminate’ the minds of its translators so that they see them wherever they look.67 This happens again when Hutchinson translates 1.1008–9: nature’s refusal to allow atoms and void to place limits on themselves turns into a more vague, all-encompassing statement of finitude within nature: ‘Yet to it selfe, the highest nature gives / A certeine measure, within which it liues’. She inserts ‘certeine’ even when certus does not appear in the Latin text. Her marginalia also draw attention to Lucretius’s insistent repetitions of the word. Next to 63

64 DRN 3.337–43. Hardie (1986); Jenkyns (1998). This and the following example are discussed by Munro (1858) 136; cf. Hutchinson (2012) p. lxxii. 66 67 See n. 8. I borrow the term from Passannante (2011) 31. 65

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the passage arguing that atoms can only combine in certain ways to produce certain natural phenomena, she adds ‘That there is a certeine order in the coniuncture of seed’.68 The same passage continues by asserting that everything in nature is bound by the same laws (legibus) and the same ratio, preventing matter from spontaneously forming unprecedented combinations, such as chimeras.69 Hutchinson collapses ratio into ‘laws’ as if they were the same thing: ‘These laws not only animalls comprehend / But to all other things themselues extend’. Ostensibly a failure of translation, this is not entirely out of tune with Lucretius’s uses of these terms, in which ratio can take on an objective rather than a subjective meaning, and denote the inherent consistency of nature, rather than the faculty by which humans investigate it.70 If Hutchinson, Evelyn, and Creech share one error in their handling of Lucretius’s language, it is in their propensity to transform his variegated language of regularity into a more colourless one, in which ‘laws’ predominate over the other terms. They were not the first to do so: a precedent had been set by the earliest published commentary on Lucretius, that of Giovanni Battista Pio in the early sixteenth century, who glossed the phrase fati foedera (2.254) as leges naturales.71 Evelyn also translated foedus as ‘law’, although he did offer some flexibility by rendering both it and lex as ‘decree’ on other occasions.72 Hutchinson turned the foedera naturai into ‘natures laws’ or the ‘laws of nature’ on at least three occasions.73 Creech, as we have seen, is the most aggressive in this respect, often introducing laws where there are none in the Latin original.74 Natura on one occasion expands into ‘Natures eternal Laws’.75 When lex does actually occur, it becomes ‘Catholick Laws’: that is, general laws that cover everything.76 Dryden, too, introduced the phrase in sections where it had no Latin equivalent.77 68

Hutchinson (2012) 123. The passage is 2.700ff. DRN 2.718–19: Sed ne forte putes animalia sola teneri / legibus hisce, eadem ratio disterminat omnia. 70 71 See n. 15. Hine (1995) 735. 72 See his translations of DRN 6.906, 5.310, and 5.58. 73 DRN 1.586; 5.57, 310. 74 e.g. Creech (1682) 7 (1.159–60): ‘what Law binds / All Beings’; and 147 (5.247–9): ‘that it disagrees with Natures Laws’. 75 Creech (1682) 31 (1.1009): ‘Again, Natures eternal laws provide’. 76 Creech (1682) 55 (2.718–19); see n. 69. 77 e.g. in his translation of 3.1072, naturam primum studeat cognoscere rerum: ‘And study Nature well, and Natures Laws’: Dryden (1956–90) iii. 56. 69

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By amplifying Lucretius’s emphasis on lex, then, the translators drown out the tentative, critical, self-reflexive quality of his attempts to map language onto reality. A similar point can be made about the way they handle the psychology of scientific investigation, in which the poet’s ruminations on nature provoke uncertainty about the power of his mind to comprehend it. Lucretius famously expresses a strong ambivalence about his ability to master mentally the sheer grandeur and sublimity of the vision of nature unfolded in the discoveries of Epicurus: he is seized by divina voluptas atque horror when he contemplates it.78 Things are more straightforward for the translators.79 Hutchinson’s Lucretius experiences ‘sweete delight and wonder’; Evelyn and Creech translate the phrase as ‘divine desire’ and ‘mighty pleasure’ respectively, omitting horror altogether.80 While not always authentically Lucretian, this sense of security and self-satisfaction is part of the translators’ sympathetic response to Lucretius’s vision of the remarkable order produced by atomic interaction. One reason for their sympathy is that they would have recognized these laws as components of a sort of godless natural theology. Theological writers in other philosophical and religious traditions had often sought to present nature as law-bound, from Cicero to Aquinas and beyond. For many of these theologies there was no clear distinction between a purely physical law and a moral one; the two aspects of law were united by a sense of divinely imposed teleology.81 Although it happens to deny divine government of the world, Epicureanism is equally prone to this merging of physics and ethics. One of Lucretius’s favoured terms, finis, translates Epicurus’s º, and the two writers use each term in ethical as well as physical contexts.82 This is probably one reason why the Roman scholar Varro, a contemporary of Lucretius, is said to have placed Epicurean atomism in the category of ‘natural theology’.83 This well-known precedent may have encouraged early modern readers to take a similar perspective on the De rerum natura.

78

DRN 3.28–9. On the Lucretian sublime, see Porter (2007). 80 Norbrook (2013). Creech (1682) 70. 81 Milton (1998) 681–2; see also Kusukawa (2008), esp. 115–16 on Melanchthon’s assimilation of moral and natural law. 82 De Lacy (1969) 105–7; for ethical uses, see Lucretius, DRN 5.1432–3, 6.25; see n. 8 for an important repeated physical use. 83 Augustine, De civitate Dei 6.5. 79

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How did early modern natural theologies discuss the laws of nature? Many of them inferred the existence of laws of nature inductively, from observation of particular natural phenomena. Their approach was flexible: although the best proof of divine government was provided by the apparently perfectly regular, mathematically precise movements of celestial objects, ‘sublunary nature’ could also offer evidence of divine planning, despite exhibiting ‘regularity only for the most part’.84 Once again, Lucretius’s accommodation of variation and atomic flux within a generally consistent universe could seem quite acceptable from an early modern point of view. The same is true of his blend of ontology and epistemology: in other words, his confidence that the nature of things and the nature of human reason automatically cooperate with one another. This, too, was built into the premises of various sixteenth-century disciplines (and their ancient precursors), including natural philosophy.85 Post-Aristotelian natural philosophers often combined a theological argument about the providential ordering of the world with an ‘abhorrence of Epicureanism as the negation of natural and moral orders’, drawing on Cicero and Lactantius’s critiques.86 As in the English literary tradition, however, this hostile treatment of Epicureanism seems not to have involved close engagement with Lucretius’s poem, which might have served as an accomplice for natural theology rather than a foil. From the point of view of natural philosophy and theology, then, there are striking continuities between the De rerum natura and more traditionally theistic accounts of nature. Equally, the imprecise and versatile character of Lucretius’s legal terminology would have been quite acceptable to natural philosophers and theologians throughout the early modern period. Even those philosophers who sought to discover clearly defined universal laws of motion were equally willing to describe mere rules of thumb and ‘generalized observations’ as laws, in line with Lucretius’s usage of the term. This included Walter 84

Maclean (2008) 29, 37. Maclean (2008) 38–41 and 44: ‘the discursive elaborations of “law of nature” evince a blurring of the distinctions between teleological and non-teleological, metaphysical and physical, general and local, ontological and epistemological which, although awkward to the modern eye, suits the purposes of post-Aristotelian students of nature’. 86 For John Evelyn’s acquaintance with this tradition through his reading of Magirus (1597), see Kusukawa (2008) 105–9, esp. 105–6. 85

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Charleton, who translated and expanded Pierre Gassendi’s revival of Epicurean atomism. For Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke, empirical observation of regularity could provide enough evidence to speak of laws.87 So although early modern writers rarely arrived at, let alone agreed on, specific definitions of the laws of nature, they tended to concur that nature operated in a regular, law-like fashion. From Cicero onwards, the vagueness of the natural-theological appeal to laws of nature was part of its utility: it served an apologetic purpose without necessarily committing its proponents to strong, specific, and therefore falsifiable statements about the nature of reality.88 This way of understanding the relationship between God and the world was especially popular in the early modern period, moreover, because the genre of natural theology had entrenched itself in the university arts curriculum as part of students’ preparation for their studies in physics. It was often written in the vernaculars, and required no advanced training in academic theology or philosophy.89 In England, natural theology eventually came to provide an explicit, public justification for the study of nature as an enterprise outside the universities, and Epicureanism played a part in this process.90 When practitioners of natural theology spoke of the laws of nature, what mattered was not so much the content of those laws as the implication that they had a divine author. Nonetheless, content did become important in other scenarios: for instance, when scientifically minded advocates of atomism sought more specific atomic explanations for natural regularities. Many natural philosophers attacked Epicurean physics on this front, and their attacks went beyond the prejudiced dismissals of the Ciceronian–Lactantian tradition. Experimentalists such as Boyle did not just rehearse the argument that the Epicurean universe was random and lawless. Instead, they chose to attack the atomists’ scientific method, on the grounds that it was speculative and reductive: speculative, because it made too many inferences about the existence of indivisible units of matter that, however plausible, could not be confirmed by experiments; reductive,

87

Steinle (2008) 219–23, 227–8. Steinle (2008) 229–30; Milton (1998) 682–4 (see n. 13). 89 Mandelbrote (2013) 85–6. 90 Feingold (2002) 109–13; Mandelbrote (2007) 473. On the role of Epicureanism, see Jones (1989) 206–9; Barbour (1994) 130–1. 88

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because atoms would not serve to explain all the phenomena that their proponents wanted them to explain. Boyle seems to have regarded Gassendi as culpable on both of these fronts.91 Practitioners of ‘chymistry’ such as Boyle and his predecessors found atomic models of causation too simplistic, even when they adopted some form of corpuscularian or indivisibilist theory. Early modern atomisms were as diverse as they were numerous, but none of them was as ontologically spare as that of Epicurus. Most of them drew eclectically on alternative explanations of natural processes drawn from other philosophical traditions, including Aristotelianism.92 In certain natural-philosophical contexts, then, the deficiencies of the atomists’ methods and explanations made it more difficult to speak precisely of laws of nature as part of an atomic matter theory. There was little prospect of using atomism to make vaguely defined laws or regularities more concrete and scientifically useful. This difficulty was exacerbated by another development: the influence on matter theory of voluntarist theology, particularly in the work of Pierre Gassendi.93 Voluntarism pitted itself against any notion that God’s freedom in creating and maintaining the cosmos was restricted. Nothing in nature happens out of necessity, because this would mean that God could not alter it. There was a danger in speaking too literally about ‘laws of nature’, since God is absolutely above any law. Robert Boyle offers a clear example of the problems voluntarism could present for the scientific use of the language of laws of nature. He was comfortable speaking of ‘municipial laws . . . that belong to this or that particular sort of bodies’, as well as ‘fixt laws of nature’, and the fact that he found the term ‘laws’ acceptable in both instances would suggest that he regarded a general experience of order as enough evidence to describe nature as law-governed. However, he warned that when he spoke of laws of nature, he did so only

91 Levitin (2012) 5–6, 22–3, 34; Joy (2006) 79–80. On speculative methods in atomism in general, see Meinel (1988) 76–8, 85; on Gassendi in particular, see Osler (1994) 184–92, 198–9. For the unattractiveness of atomic reductionism for early modern chemists and physicians, see Lüthy (2000), esp. 478–9, and 449–50 on Lucretius. On Charleton’s chemical and medical interests, see Sharp (1973). 92 Meinel (1988), Garber et al. (1998), and Lüthy (2000) are excellent guides to this terrain. 93 Osler (1994) (1991). Wilson (2008a) 94–5 suggests an alternative explanation of Gassendi’s reluctance to invoke laws of nature, although Wilson (2008b) 22 maintains the importance of voluntarism.

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metaphorically. He was worried that, if taken too literally, his readers would see him as arguing that there were real, quasi-Platonic principles between nature and God that played an active role in governing nature.94 This would amount to a claim either that nature did not depend entirely on God’s constant, direct providential government of it, or that God was in some sense bound by external rules—or both. The laws of nature made sense in a quasi-Lucretian naturaltheological context that emphasized nature’s order and intelligibility, but this did not afford them any extra purchase as scientific explanations. If bold new assertions about the law-bound status of the cosmos could represent an affront to voluntarism, so too could older philosophies of nature. As Bacon’s aperçu shows, Aristotelianism was especially difficult to reconcile with this view, because of its tendency to find immutable essences in natural phenomena that made them function in certain ways and not others, regardless of God’s intervention.95 But even some aspects of atomism could suffer under the scrutiny of voluntarism: for instance, the doctrine that weight was an inherent property of atoms.96 In the notes that accompanied his translation, Thomas Creech went out of his way to reject that teaching as anti-providentialist and ‘the Basis of the Epicurean Atheism’. If, contra Lucretius, weight was not an essential characteristic of atoms, then ‘there must be some other Being to bestow it’: namely, a creator. The weight of atoms, and all the types of atomic motion and interaction that followed from their weight, had been willed into existence by God alone.97 Why did Creech take a strong voluntarist position in rejecting some aspects of Lucretius’s doctrine, but go out of his way to amplify his references to laws of nature? As with the case of Boyle, the answer lies in the very different purposes served by Lucretius’s account of weight as opposed to his treatments of the foedera naturai. The former plays a more specific explanatory role in Epicurean physics.

94 Mandelbrote (2007) 465–6; Milton (1998) 694; Joy (2006) 78–9; and Levitin (2012) 30–4 on the affinity between Boyle, Samuel Parker, Locke, and Gassendi’s voluntarism and anti-Aristotelianism. 95 96 See n. 48. Lucretius, DRN 2.85. 97 Creech (1683a) ‘Notes’ 14. This passage is not found in the first edition, suggesting that Creech may have added it in order to quench any suspicions of atheism. However, he had already provided a detailed scientific argument against weight as a property of atoms, citing Boyle: Creech (1682) ‘Notes’ 16–19.

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Since atoms have weight intrinsically, they are guaranteed to move in a certain way, without interference from the gods. Weight is an immutable fact of nature. If motion necessarily follows from it, any critic wishing to emphasize divine governance of the universe must refute that necessity and attribute motion to God instead. The laws of nature, by contrast, are fuzzier. Lucretius does not state that they themselves are inherent properties of matter or void. He often seems to present them as plausible inferences from observed regularities, rather than as necessary causes of those regularities. Although weight itself might be regarded as one of the laws of nature, so might other things, such as atoms’ shapes, or speed, or the existence of the minimae partes that make up atoms.98 Nowhere does Lucretius provide a definitive list, however. This explains why Lucretius’s laws found no real opponents among a diverse range of translators: a puritan Calvinist with no formal scientific training; a virtuoso with interests in avant-garde French and English approaches to natural philosophy; an Oxford academic with connections to London libertinism; and a pious convert to Catholicism.99 They were all capable of treating the De rerum natura as a natural theology manqué, a hymn to the harmonious cooperation of nature and human reason that happened to draw unusually antitheistic conclusions. This consensus does not mean that there were no differences between them: it simply underlines the sheer depth and ubiquity of theological attitudes towards nature from early Greece to the seventeenth century. Despite his denial of intelligent design, Lucretius did not abstain from adopting many of the methods and preoccupations of this tradition. If Lucretius did avert to any divine agent, it was nature herself, but it would not have taken a great leap of the imagination for the translators to substitute a deity in nature’s place, as David Norbrook has suggested.100 Norbrook adds that Creech diverged from Hutchinson in this respect, preferring to draw attention to the ‘absurd’, ‘aleatory’ character of an atomic universe; but his heightened emphasis on

98 For shapes, see Lucretius, DRN 2.333ff.; for speed, 2.142ff.; for the minimae partes, 1.599ff. 99 Dryden’s conversion came in 1685, very soon after his translations from Lucretius were published. 100 Hutchinson (2012) p. lxv.

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nature’s law-like behaviour complicates this argument.101 In fact, all three translators would probably have agreed with Bacon’s view that the atomism of the Greek philosophers demanded a sense of divinely imposed order. In Lucretius, moreover, they may have found an exposition of atomism that went some, if not all, of the way towards fulfilling that demand.

101

Hutchinson (2012) p. lxix.

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10 Atheists and Republicans Interpreting Lucretius in Revolutionary England David Norbrook

1. INTRODUCTION The English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century marked a high point in militant Protestantism as a political force, as exemplified in Lucy Hutchinson’s classic biography of her religiously engaged husband. And yet the same writer had composed the first complete surviving translation of Lucretius during the revolutionary period, which has claims to be seen as an Epicurean as well as a Machiavellian moment. At first Hutchinson’s range of discourses may seem anomalous, but it reflects the enormous complexity of the process of secularization. In its political aspects, Epicureanism provided a bridge between classical and modern philosophies. As Leo Strauss and many of his followers emphasized, the philosophy was rooted in classical models of virtue in its ideal of the freedom gained by limiting desire and its suspicion of political instrumentalism. And yet its utilitarian cast of mind, which distinguished it from Stoicism, offered early modern philosophers from Machiavelli to Hobbes and beyond a means of thinking outside classical models. Its ‘atheism’ seemed to rule it out as a model for religious radicals; but in offering an imaginative vision of the development of human society from which organized religion was completely absent, it could appeal to the strong vein of anticlericalism that fuelled lay participation in the puritan revolution. The reception of Lucretius in the mid-seventeenth century indicates a very complex dialectic in which within a strongly

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religious framework the most radically secular narrative of human history in existence could play a key role in political debates. Scholarship on Epicurean political thought has tended to focus on systematized political theory.1 But it is precisely in the area of politics that Epicurus’s own surviving writings are most lacking; the fifth book of Lucretius’s De rerum natura gives much the fullest surviving exposition of what an Epicurean history of politics might look like. This introduces a further complication. Obvious though the fact may be, it is not always fully recognized that the De rerum natura is a poem, and its effect and meaning cannot be fully conveyed by paraphrase. Even to term it a didactic poem is not quite sufficient: rather than simply turning a set of propositions and examples into verse, the De rerum natura oscillates between bald exposition, angry polemic, soaring visions, and rationalist hostility to myth and imagination, its abrupt shifts often leaving readers perplexed. Lucretius is not just translating Greek into Latin, but prose into poetry. Epicurus was a writer of low affect and little humour, and for him the renunciation of the deceitful images of poetry came easily; Lucretius could be wickedly funny, with a scorching wit of a kind that was popular in the seventeenth century, and was torn between a passion for poetry and suspicion of its deployment in false causes.2 In this chapter I shall focus on the period when translators first faced the challenge of bringing this unstable discourse into vernacular verse. In an exercise in ‘slow reading’, I shall look first at Lucretius’s discussion of the origins of civilization, highlighting points of difficulty and complexity in the poetic language and structure, and the ways in which these opened up divergent readings by Gassendi and Hobbes, with different understandings of religion, law, and the origins of the state. I shall then look more closely at English translators’ engagement with the passage on the fall of monarchies, showing how such divergencies expressed themselves in the fine grain of their language. My chapter complements those of Alison Brown and Catherine Wilson, but with a close focus on a few decades in England from the regicide to the Exclusion Crisis, and on the ways in which political differences emerge in translations of some passages from book 5.

1

For a recent survey, see E. Brown (2009). The materialism, and the wit, tend to be missing from the often illuminating readings of book 5 associated with the school of Leo Strauss: Strauss (1995); Nichols (1976); Colman (2012); for Strauss’s slow movement towards an engagement with Lucretius in particular, see Wurgaft (2012). 2

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2. INTELLECTUAL CONTEXTS The paradigms for the mid-seventeenth-century English reception of Lucretius were established by two very different figures, Pierre Gassendi and Thomas Hobbes. In his Animadversiones on Diogenes Laertius’s life of Epicurus (1649) and in the ensuing Syntagma Philosophicum (1658), Gassendi aimed to detoxify Epicureanism through a very learned exposition and a demonstration of common grounds with more conventionally acceptable philosophies. A genial synthesizer, he claimed to be able to integrate atomism with a providential account of the universe. He challenged stereotypes of the debauched pleasure-seeker with a sustained defence of Epicurean moral philosophy, which he integrated with a Christian pursuit of blessedness and cast into more traditional moulds, the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Besides re-editing Epicurus’s surviving texts, he gave lengthy quotations from large portions of the DRN, and when discussing the origins of the state he called attention to the fifth book and offered detailed commentary. If on the one hand Gassendi’s philosophical approach encouraged a reading of the fifth book as an exposition of political maxims, it also led readers to explore the poem in detail, and Gassendi made appreciative comments about its poetic power. Gassendi was in close contact with the wide circle of English royalists in exile in Paris (see further Cottegnies, Chapter 7), and notably with Thomas Hobbes. Radically different in philosophical temper, Hobbes cast his own work as self-consciously modern and innovative and made it very hard to trace his debts to earlier thinkers. However, there are many signs that the hedonistic and utilitarian sides of Epicureanism were important to him. Hobbes probably borrowed from Gassendi’s work in progress in the 1640s, which had shown knowledge of Hobbes’s De Cive and itself influenced the second edition of 1647; a letter from Gassendi was prefaced to a subsequent edition.3 Samuel Sorbière, who brought this edition to press, praised Hobbes in words directly borrowed from Lucretius’s praise of Epicurus.4 Hobbes departed in many ways from the Epicurean system, notably in eliminating the possibility of Epicurean ataraxia or peace of mind, and thus throwing great weight on human

3

Paganini (1990; 2000; 2001).

4

Hobbes (1994) i. 122–3.

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unhappiness without an artificially imposed state. Contemporaries, however, were often struck by common ground. Lucretian traces can be found not just in Hobbes’s vigorous insistence on the soul’s materiality and mortality but also in the reductive rhetoric with which he destroys rival arguments and effectively courts the charge of irreligiousness. His literary skills as much as his daring philosophical views attracted the attention and friendship of younger poets and wits, themselves often interested in Lucretius.5 Hobbes was himself the author of didactic Latin poetry—a fact which until recently has passed almost entirely unnoticed—and the extent to which his own verse echoed Lucretius remains unexplored.6 His prose style excelled in what Quentin Skinner has identified as the figure of tapinosis, ‘making use of deliberately inappropriate and undignified terminology to belittle what we are talking about’. Though this was a common classical rhetorical strategy, the satirical deployment of material terms in spiritual contexts was especially characteristic of Lucretius (as with the animals falling from the sky: 5.793). One example Skinner gives, Hobbes’s description of faith as being ‘infused’, may derive from Lucretius’s frequent use of insinuare when ridiculing ideas of the soul’s immortality.7 Hobbes and Gassendi offered very different constructions of Lucretius to English readers. Gassendi—much of whose work quickly became available in English translation—encouraged a sympathetic engagement from Christians, and linked Lucretius with ethical and political moderation and a vindication of free will. His own political position is hard to tie down—as indeed are all his positions; but in practice he tended to support checks on absolutism. He favoured the royalist side in England but believed that the King should have negotiated more with Parliament.8 Hobbes offered an appeal to various forms of intellectual radicalism. Traditionally minded royalists like Edward Hyde, attached to the ancient English constitution, were suspicious of his innovative absolutism, and could feel themselves vindicated when he jumped the royalist ship in the most spectacular way and returned to republican England in 1651; his 5

Hillyer (2007). Springborg gives a number of possible echoes, not all of them convincing (Hobbes (2008a) 355, 345, 377, 419, 543); see further Springborg (1994). 7 Skinner (1996) 423; DRN 3.698; Lucy Hutchinson frequently uses ‘infuse’ when translating Lucretius, Hutchinson (2012) 477. 8 Olivier Bloch, ‘Gassendi apolitique?’, in Bloch (1997) 174–95. 6

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Leviathan could be read as justifying support of the republic as the new de facto power. Hobbes, widely accused of being an atheist, was very far from a puritan; but during the 1650s alliances were formed between a range of Independents and Hobbesians, anxious to keep at bay any clerical excesses, whether Anglican or Presbyterian.9 Later in the decade, republicans opposed to Cromwell’s Protectorate found common ground with royalists in supporting a quasi-Epicurean retreat from the public world. Women writers like Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson, excluded from the conventional political and academic worlds, found Epicurean texts engaging. The boundaries between anticlericalism and the loosely applied label of atheism could become blurred.10 The cautiously experimental royalist John Evelyn was rather nervous with the approbation won for his translation of Lucretius by the reformer William Rand, who found common ground between Hobbes, Lucretius, and the struggle against superstition.11 Lucretius opened up a poetics of the sublime, of bold framebreaking.12 English readers had been accustomed to taking Virgil’s praise of Augustus as a model for the writer, but with the fall of the English monarchy the stakes suddenly changed, and as a series of poets followed Hobbes’s lead in publicly accommodating themselves to a post-monarchical order, Lucretius’s own role in the literary hierarchy was transformed.

3. READING BOOK 5 Following the paradigms offered by Gassendi and Hobbes, English readers during the 1650s engaged with a new intensity with Lucretius’s 9

Collins (2005); on conflicting interpretations of Hobbes’s relations to the Commonwealth, see Hillyer (2007) 90–6 and the magisterial account by Noel Malcolm, Hobbes (2012) 1–100; on literary ramifications, see McDowell (2008). 10 Hunter (1985). The poet Jasper Mayne advised the translator of some of Margaret Cavendish’s works into Latin to begin by reading Lucretius; for evidence of Cavendish’s acquaintance with commentators like Charleton and, direct or oblique, with Lucretius, see Semler (2011); Norbrook (2012); on Epicureanism and her political views, see Battigelli (1998) 45–61; Norbrook (2000). Smith (1996) explores Anglo-French connections, though with a blurring of the distinction between different understandings of the ‘Epicurean’. 11 Hutchinson (2012) p. lxxvii; Norbrook (1999) 282–3. 12 Norbrook (2010).

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secular vision of historical development. Part of his sublimity was a bold rejection of traditional narratives of the emergence of civilization through reference to gods or royal heroes. His fifth book is a remarkable achievement, a mini-epic which recounts the origins of life and of the state from a rigorously Epicurean perspective—including the assumption that the basic patterns outlined apply on planets throughout the infinite universe (5.1344–6). Lucretius drew on philosophical works by Epicurus and others which are now lost, but he also made his argument work poetically through engagement with a range of literary tropes and genres. In surveying the book I shall focus on poetic elements which are easily missed if one fillets the poem for its basic philosophical propositions, but which often raised complexities and ambiguities for seventeenth-century readers with their divergent frames of reference. Broadly speaking, ‘Gassendian’ readings were more faithful to the content of Lucretius’s thought, but ‘Hobbesian’ readings might pick up provocations in tone that could go with a harder-edged interpetation.13 It is significant that early illustrations of the poem bypassed book 5, which presented particular challenges to easy representation.14 Lucretius interweaves his narrative of human development with a close attention to the lives of animals. He thus greatly reinforces the sense of the polity as a natural development rather than an arbitrary imposition, while undermining the conventional theological supports for human superiority over animals (see Poole’s essay, Chapter 8). Humans are amongst the animals that did not fall from the sky, their name linking them with humus, the earth (5.793, 821–5). Lucretius places his first discussion of human–animal relations immediately after the creation of the world: he explains that some species quickly died out, some perpetuated themselves by strength or intelligence, while some fled fiercer creatures and sought out the protection of mankind. There is already here some sense of an implicit contract: the animals gain protection but in exchange offer products like wool, showing their utilitas (5.870). As Gassendi reminded his readers, Hermarchus had found it necessary to justify human killing of animals by explaining that they were unable to enter a contract: if they

13

For a fuller discussion of Gassendi’s reading of book 5, see Mormino (2011). Piero di Cosimo’s paintings The Hunt and The Forest Fire, widely reproduced in recent studies of the Renaissance Lucretius, may reflect genuine interest in book 5 (Brown (2010a) 105–7), but they will not have been widely known. For a significant exception, see Fig. 10.2. 14

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had been, the social contract would presumably have extended to animals too.15 As things were, animals did constitute a threat to human society, and indeed the fear of animals was a major motivation for coming together in a community. But an underlying sense of kinship with all creatures was a feature of Epicurean thought, and became one influence on a growing interest in the case for vegetarianism from the mid-seventeenth century.16 Lucretius returns to animals after he has discussed the first adoption by humans of the Epicurean principle nec laedere nec violari (5.1020; cf. Epicurus’s Principal Doctrines, no. 31), and proceeds to discuss the natural origins of language amongst animals and humans. Later in the book, he imagines a period when humans tried to enlist unsuitable animals such as the lion and the boar in the art of war: the passage highlights the ways in which human desire for military glory may ruin animals (5.1305–49). We are repeatedly reminded both of the underlying affinities between humans and animals and of the mingled cruelty and precariousness of human control over them. This aspect of Epicureanism attracted considerable curiosity at the time, though it does not belong to traditional narratives of political thought and has only recently started to attract renewed attention in the wake of the ecological movement. Lucretius’s account of human development again emphasizes precariousness. He does not offer the simple analytic structures to be found in political philosophy. There is no clear-cut break between the state of nature and political society. Broadly speaking, three early phases of sociability can be traced, starting with closer familial bonds, then the emergence of monarchy, and finally the formation of new constitutions after a period of anarchy, but his treatment is very elliptical.17 Nor does his iconoclastic temper allow the patterned mythologizing tales of Hesiod or Ovid. He does not fit clearly into later analytic models of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ primitivism. Gordon Campbell writes that the honeyed cup/sugared pill technique [cf. DRN 1.936–50], in this case getting the reader to swallow the bitter pill that human society, culture,

15 Gassendi (1649) 1538–43; cf. Hobbes (1983) i. 133, ii. 87 (De Cive, 5.5); and G. Campbell (2003) 228–9. 16 Hutchinson (2012) p. xc. 17 Sarasohn (1996) 155 finds two stages in Lucretius, developed into two or three stages in Gassendi; Mormino (2011) finds three stages of the social contract in both; for differing discussions see Chapter 3 by Brown and Chapter 11 by Wilson.

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and justice are not gifts of the gods, works best with a good admixture of honey, and this is supplied by readily available Golden Age topoi, which originally argued just the opposite.18

Lucretius has no time for euhemeristic narratives of great men who originate breakthroughs, perhaps with divine aid. The abrupt transitions and irregularly spaced events of his narrative have a particular effect when placed in a poem where readers would expect clear patterns of divine or human agency and causation; readers’ desire for clear formal patterns is frustrated. All the same, the poem’s reflexive discussion of its own processes of composition does point to cumulative gains in the process of civilization, while the sense of repeated activity over great spans of time works against anticipated objections that contingency could not produce human development. As he summarizes at the end of the book, humanity usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis paulatim docuit pedetemptim progredientis . . . artibus ad summum donec venere cacumen. (5.1451–2, 1457) learnt gradually through experience and the inventiveness of the quick mind, as they advanced step by step . . . until they reached the highest pinnacle of the arts.19

The alliterative paulatim . . . pedetemptim progredientis conveys a sense of gradual, uncertain, experience-based development. Here, unusually, the last word echoes the last word of the previous line (the figure of homoioteleuton), giving a sense of closure as the arts near perfection that differs from his normal expansive syntax and frequent enjambements—and would have struck seventeenth-century English readers as a parallel to the closed heroic couplet. The way in which a contingency of language can generate an intellectual connection illustrates Lucretius’s larger point that combinations of atoms and combinations of letters can come together by chance and generate larger structures (1.823–9). The pedetemptim particularly suggests the experimental nature of his own metrical feet, in a passage which is

18 Lovejoy and Boas (1935) 222–42 summarize book 5 and conclude that Lucretius does not fully accord with ‘cultural primitivism’; G. Campbell (2003) 11; the allusions are catalogued at his 336–53. For book 5 as a broadly positive view of human development see Beretta (2008a). 19 Lucretius (2009) 107.

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very self-consciously concerned with progress in poetry and other arts—he has indeed earlier used pedetemptim to describe the progress of his own inquiry (5.533). Lucretius had called attention to the difficulty of finding equivalents for Greek philosophical terms in the Latin language (1.136–9). In fact his style varies from the rather crude and metrically obvious effects of his Roman predecessor Ennius (cf. Harrison’s Chapter 1, 35–6) to the refinements and subtleties of Alexandrian verse, and his sublimity often derives from sudden shifts from one to the other. Virgil would aim at a more consistently polished effect, as a mark of Rome’s growing fulfilment of its imperial destiny, but Lucretius tries to register a complex balance of gains and losses in the poetic medium and the content of the book. The first men may have come to blows over their animal skins, but unlike us they had the excuse of necessity, while clothes of imperial purple are no more necessary than plebeian garments (5.1418–29). Though the book ends and its successor begins with pride in the achievements of all the arts, culminating in Epicurus’s philosophy, the graphic description of panic and chaos in the face of the plague at the conclusion of book 6 and of the whole poem gives a reminder of the precariousness of human society. Its early stages are not presented in a conventionally idealized way. Mankind is at first a hard race in a hard environment (5.925), wandering in the same manner as animals (5.932) and lacking arts. At this stage, they have no laws and do not look to the common good, and each man lives and is strong for himself, carrying off prizes from his foes (5.958–9). The recurrent negatives of this part of the poem (5.933, 934, 935, 953, 958, 959, 973, 988) imply a strong contrast with the present, and early modern readers would have read these lines in the light of what Mary Nyquist calls ‘the topos of civil privation’, where the negatives would be clinched by a strongly positive or pejorative view of modern civilization. Hobbes offered the most devastating summation of this topos in Leviathan: ‘no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.20 This portrayal had been anticipated in visual 20

Hobbes (1996) 9 (Leviathan, ch. 13); G. Campbell (2003) 189–90 compares the topos classicists term the priamel; Nyquist (2013) 257–92 (261). On the use of this passage as a parallel with the emergence of the Florentine republic, see Brown’s Chapter 8.

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terms in the title-page to successive editions of the De Cive, which depicts the state of nature through what is presented as an image of contemporary America (Fig. 10.1).21 The engraving is based on but darkens earlier images of North Americans: a severed arm indicates cannibalism, and men armed with clubs and bows and arrows pursue not beasts but other men. Revising republican comparisons of tyrants to beasts, Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature man is a wolf to man.22 Gassendi cited the maxim when discussing Epicurus’s dictum (Principal Doctrines, no. 33) that ‘There never was an absolute justice, but only an agreement made in reciprocal intercourse in whatever localities now and again from time to time, providing against the infliction or suffering of harm’.23 Gassendi recognized, however, that Hobbes took a far more negative view of early humanity than Lucretius. Lucretius’s negatives are spaced in a characteristically irregular way, retaining a golden age lustre but sometimes implying that progress has genuinely been made. After citing the vulnerability of early men to animal attacks (DRN 5.990–1, 999–1000), Gassendi goes on to argue that men had always been capable of transcending animal passions through reason, attaining to a natural justice; later he distinguishes between primary and secondary laws of nature. At another point, when he is discussing justice as one of the four cardinal virtues, Gassendi quotes at length from book 5 and again mitigates a sharp opposition between the state of nature and human laws.24 While contrasting the hardships of Lucretius’s early men (citing DRN 5.925–47) with Ovid’s golden age (Metamorphoses 1.101–6), Gassendi insisted that nonetheless they could lead a happy life; with his attentiveness to the texture of Lucretius’s verse, he noted the beautiful antithesis with which Lucretius contrasted primitive disquiets with their more intense modern versions, when abundance overwhelms us (5.1007–10).25 While Lucretius’s savages are not exactly noble, and there are clear signs

21

On changes in successive editions, see Nyquist (2013) 285–92. Hobbes (1983) i, plate III, 73, ii. 24 (De Cive dedication). 23 Diogenes Laertius (1972) ii. 675; Gassendi (1649) 1748; however, he also declared that the tyrant is Populi non pastor, sed lupus (1498)—a more conventional image of the tyrant as wolf; Mormino (2011) 162 compares the radical humanist discourse of Étienne de la Boétie. 24 For the larger pattern of interpretations of Lucretius in the light of natural law theory, see Chapter 9 by Hardy. 25 Paganini (2001) 15–17; Gassendi (1649) 1754–5, 1543–6. 22

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Fig. 10.1. T[homas]. H[obbes], Elementorum philosophiæ sectio tertia, de cive (Paris, 1642), title-page. With permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford (4 H 14 Art.Seld.).

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of violent conduct (5.960–1), this is not imaginatively rendered into anything like Hobbes’s state of perpetual war.26 Even male sexual violence is subordinate to mutua cupido, the mutual desire of women and men—a point reinforced by the echoing libido (5.963–4). Humans’ main fear is of death from animals—it is wolves who are wolves to men, not men. Close focalization makes us share these early humans’ capacity for attaining the tranquillity of mind and freedom from fear which for Hobbes required the formation of a strong state (5.945–51). As for religious fear, which for Lucretius is the true blight of human life, he withholds the topic for a later place (5.1161–1240). He goes out of his way to counter the myth that early men feared that the sun, once set, would never rise. Rather than making a Hobbesian opposition between a natural, fearful life and a secure life under a sovereign, Lucretius proceeds in a characteristically oblique way. After outlining the new softening attendant on closer social relations, he shifts first to the origins of language and then to the origins of fire. In each case, the key point is that these origins were in no sense divine but emerged from a combination of natural processes and contingency. It would seem that the discovery of fire was as important a feature in the development of society as the fear of fellow-creatures or of animals, since gathering round a hearth led to closer social bonds and the softening of the race’s earlier hardness as bodies grew less accustomed to cold. The institution of marriage (according to a line printed in early modern editions between lines 1012 and 1013, Castaque privatae Veneris connubia laeta) is followed by bonds between families, as neighbours join in friendship and pledge nec laedere nec violari (5.1020), which as Gassendi noted was a direct reference to Epicurus’s maxim no. 33. But there is no trace in Epicurus of Lucretius’s argument that the crucial factor in this move towards cooperation was the affective softening that came with more intimate familial bonds.27 He writes that children broke their parents’ proud spirit by their coaxing, blanditiis (5.1018). The idea that children might instruct their parents was so alien to seventeenth-century norms that Hutchinson and her contemporaries John Evelyn and Thomas 26

Hobbes (1983) i. 96, ii. 49 (De Cive, 1.12). On the possibility that Lucretius was drawing on lost Epicurean writings, see G. Campbell (2003) 273. On the role of marriage in early modern translations, cf. Miller (2012) 671 and Lucretius (2012) 721. 27

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Creech simply rewrote the line to have their parents instructing their children; but it is indeed characteristic of Epicureanism’s readiness to invert top-down models of social development.28 Neighbours pass on this example, urging their friends with stammering tongues that all should pity the weak, and foedera are formed. Lucretius’s emphasis on language at this point is significant, for a key point of difference between the Epicureans and theorists of divine or natural law such as the Stoics was the Epicurean insistence that justice had a contingent and local basis, the product of decisions made for overall utility. While Lucretius’s position may be characterized, in Wilson’s term, as ‘fictionalism’ (Chapter 11), he does not see such fictions as entirely arbitrary. For he goes on in another apparent digression to ridicule those who believe that names could ever have been invented by a single individual. His immediate target may have been Plato’s Cratylus, but early modern readers would have found resonances in contemporary debates over natural law. Lucretius insists that language emerged gradually as a social product which sprang from entirely natural impulses to communication, and here he draws a parallel with animals. The whole passage could have been read as an anticipatory refutation of Hobbes’s paradigm of the sovereign who effectively invents justice and law, and is more in line with Gassendi’s tracing of an evolution from nature to contract than with Hobbes’s paradigm of a sharp break between beast-like ‘societies’ and human.29 Only now does Lucretius turn to the formation of the state, to what can be considered as the second stage in Epicurean thought, when the initial covenant of mutual non-harm develops into laws, from which principles of justice followed. Lucretius’s narrative, however, as always contains elements that go well beyond Epicurus. In his narrative, kingdoms are initially founded by outstanding individuals who divide up cattle and lands on the basis of beauty and strength. As these more aristocratic values are displaced, lands are instead allotted according to wealth. This prompts moralization on the evils of the pursuit of wealth, which offers a false contentment whose attainment

28 Hutchinson (2012) 720. Mormino (2011) 151 suggests that the increase in familial identification, the sense of children as parents’ property, also signals the potential for quarrels over property: the move from a more ‘natural’ state heightens the potential for discord rather than necessarily controlling it. 29 Hobbes (1996) 119 (Leviathan, II.xvii).

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is always insecure. One critic has argued that there are two stages here, one in which monarchs at the head of a natural meritocracy establish an Epicurean golden age, the second in which the pursuit of wealth leads to ambition and a collapse of social order.30 Lucretius’s language in these lines, however (5.1105–35), is elliptical and seventeenth-century readers do not seem to have read the passage in this way. Bailey writes of 5.1108 that the ‘transition is very abrupt, for he should have explained how these talented men became kings’; the fall of monarchies is described with equal abruptness, but seems to frame the whole passage as centrally concerned with monarchical rule.31 Gassendi writes critically of the monarchical phase that there were no laws, but kings’ judgements stood for laws (nullae erant leges, sed Regum arbitria pro legibus erant).32 Political and ethical concerns are closely interrelated in this passage, and given a distinctive poetic inflection. Bailey writes that this is ‘one of the comparatively few places . . . where the moral theory of Epicurus comes close to the surface’; but Lucretius draws the maxims together in distinctive ways.33 He creates difficulties for translators by a language that highlights economical paradox and slips between the abstract and the concrete. Epicurus’s Vatican Sayings, no. 25, ‘Poverty, if measured according to the natural goal of life, is great wealth; but unlimited wealth is great poverty’,34 becomes the even more compressed neque enim est umquam penuria parvi, ‘for there is never a shortage of a little’. The ideal of living aequo animo is highlighted by a series of variations on summus, ‘highest’: summum (1123), e summo (1125), summa (1127), summi (1138), summam (1142), a sequence that culminates in Lucretius’s coinage summatum. Against aspiration to power and wealth there is set the maxim of living quietly: ut satius multo iam sit parere quietum, quam regere imperio res velle, et regna tenere. (5.1129–30)

This is, Monica Gale writes, an ‘astonishingly bold reversal of conventional Roman values’, in renouncing the ideal of serving the state: so bold that Virgil rewrote it at a central moment of the Aeneid (tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, 6.851); but it will lead in to 30 31 32 34

Schiesaro (2007) 44–6. Lucretius (1947) 1501; cf. Benferhat (2005) 94–5. 33 Gassendi (1649) 1535. Lucretius (1947) 1501. Lucretius (2009) 194.

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defending the formation of well-ordered states, which are needed precisely because the growth in wealth after the early state of nature makes the good life harder rather than easier to pursue.35 Here again, the language is slippery. Throughout the DRN, the word res runs through permutations of meaning, from the matter of nature to the subject-matter of art; it has been used at 1106 to refer to ways of life, at 1113 to refer to wealth, and here is extended to the state or res publica. A few lines later, a less determinate res will refer to the things (or information?) power-seekers have to gain through the mouths of others, highlighting the contradiction between hierarchy in the state and the good life that is open to all. Lucretius highlights the tension between the general and the particular by declaring that the phenomena he is describing have been the same at all times (1135), then continuing with the laconic regibus occisis—a sharpening of the Roman formula regibus exactis, ‘when the kings were driven out’. Lucretius’s sceptra superba may glance at the fall of Rome’s last king, Tarquinius Superbus, but Lucretius continues to pitch the national against the universal: the sequence of events is different, and there is no sign of a Roman republican’s pride in the downfall of tyranny.36 There is indeed a somewhat elegiac note: et capitis summi praeclarum insigne cruentum sub pedibus vulgi magnum lugebat honorem; nam cupide conculcatur nimis ante metutum. res itaque ad summam faecem turbasque redibat, imperium sibi cum ac summatum quisque petebat. (5.1137–42) Therefore the kings were killed and the former majesty of their thrones and proud sceptres lay overthrown, and the glorious emblem of the highest head mourned for its great honour, trampled in blood beneath the feet of the mob; for that which was formerly too greatly feared is eagerly trodden down. And so the situation declined to the uttermost dregs of disorder, as each person sought power and supremacy for himself.37

Once again abstract and concrete are blurred: the laments for the fall of monarchy come from the abstract insignia of power, not from the supreme head, itself a generalized way of referring to the monarch which ties in with the recurrence of the word summus. The line res 35 37

Lucretius (2009) 194. Lucretius (2009) 89.

36

Cf. Fowler (1989) 144–5.

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itaque ad summam faecem, turbasque redibat has been interpreted with various degrees of abstraction: the ground-bass words res and summus here come together, and summam faecem can be taken as a generalized metaphor for confusion or a more specific and derogatory reference to the plebeians. At all events, Lucretius complicates any simple progressive narration from early anarchy to a secure state, offering a more dialectical process in which stable polities emerge from the failure of an earlier process of state formation.38 We return to a situation not unlike that of the early state of nature, when everyone seeks his own advantage (5.1142); but now it is recognized that even self-interest is best served by collective rather than individual action, an act of common creation (magistratum . . . creare, 5.1143). Gassendi described this process as the return of the people to supreme power, redeunte summa potestate imperiove ad populum.39 In this narrative of the creation of states there are points in common with Hobbes: the entirely utilitarian perspective, the need to avoid disorder. People are weary (pertaesum, 5.1150) of living in violence. But this is not quite the same as Hobbes’s analysis of the state as a means of avoiding ‘that miserable condition of Warre, which is necessarily consequent . . . to the naturall Passions of men, when there is no visible Power to keep them in awe, and tye them by feare of punishment to the performance of their Covenants’.40 Dubious about the possibility of gaining an Epicurean control over unruly desires, Hobbes places a much greater emphasis on fear.41 Though Lucretius concludes his political narrative with a focus on criminals’ fear of punishment, this is in a contrast with those who follow the bonds of the common peace. Gassendi glossed the passage with a long quotation from Porphyry’s summary of Hermarchus, who argued that the rational would obey the law and those incapable of reasoning properly would have to be deterred by fear. In fact, a little earlier Lucretius had specifically criticized fear as a means of sustaining political stability, writing that the kings had been nimis . . . metutum (5.1140). In his great edition, the normally circumspect French

38 For arguments against a straightforwardly pro-monarchical reading of this passage, cf. Benferhat (2005) 91. 39 Gassendi (1649) 1535. 40 Hobbes (1996) 117 (Leviathan, ch. 17). 41 In this respect he parallels Machiavelli (cf. Brown’s Chapter 3).

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scholar Denys Lambin had glossed these words with a rousing attack on political fear from Cicero’s De officiis: qui uero in libera ciuitate ita se instruunt, ut metuantur, iis nihil potest esse dementius. Quamuis enim sint demersae leges alicuius opibus, quamuis timefacta libertas, emergunt tamen haec aliquando aut iudiciis tacitis aut occultis de honore suffragiis. Acriores autem morsus sunt intermissae libertatis quam retentae. But those who in a free state deliberately put themselves in a position to be feared are the maddest of the mad. For let the laws be never so much overborne by some one individual’s power, let the spirit of freedom be never so intimidated, still sooner or later they assert themselves either through unvoiced public sentiment, or through secret ballots disposing of some high office of state. Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.42

Cicero had been writing after the assassination of Julius Caesar, to make the point that ruling by fear alone would never succeed in a republic. Lambin seems here to assume a point that Gassendi was to make more explicit, that Epicureanism tended towards republican sympathies. Countering Plutarch’s complaint that Epicureanism implied selfish withdrawal, Gassendi noted that Cassius, one of the agents of the noble act of tyrannicide against Caesar, had been an Epicurean, as had other republicans.43 In a characteristically elliptical way, Lucretius follows his discussion of the fear of punishment by turning to the origins of fear of the gods. This raises the issue of his passionate denunciations of religio, which led to his being frequently attacked, and associated with Hobbes, as an ‘atheist’. Epicureans, it can be countered, insisted that their notions of the sublimely transcendent gods were more elevated than vulgar superstitions. As ever, what Lucretius says in his poem is not quite a straightforward exposition and is open to divergent readings. At the beginning of the fifth book he attacks people who, bridled by religio, wish to punish anyone who exercises reason, ratione, to show that the world is not eternal (5.86, 114, 119). They should understand that mortal speech cannot render the immortal, that the gods cannot possibly reside anywhere in our world. He will, he says, go on to describe their abodes; but he never in fact does this 42 43

Lucretius (1570) 499, citing Cicero, De officiis 2.7.24; Cicero (1961) 191–2. Gassendi (1649) 1480; cf. Momigliano (1941); Schiesaro (2007).

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save in the most abstract terms. When he returns to the gods after his account of the foundation of the state, it is to explain why humans came to believe in their existence and to worship them. In these eighty lines (5.1181–1240), the longest discussion in the whole poem, Lucretius avoids any clear statement about the gods themselves as opposed to human perceptions: we are told not that the gods are eternal but that mankind gave them eternal life (5.1175).44 The true piety is placata posse omnia mente tueri, ‘to behold all things with a tranquil mind’. This hardly raises the bar high for specific belief, and forms a striking contrast with the Epicurean speaker in Cicero’s De natura deorum, who confidently distinguishes his religion from popular superstition and is ridiculed by an antagonist precisely for the material specificity of his school’s statements about the gods.45 Lucretius’s poetry, however, leaves a very slender margin indeed for a non-superstitious religion. With his eye for the weak points of conventional views, Hobbes presented the opposition in provocative terms: Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publiquely allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION. And when the power imagined, is truly such as we imagine, TRUE RELIGION.46

This passage scandalized contemporaries: the starkness of Hobbes’s alignment of true religion with state control risked making a confident distinction between religion and superstition sound smugly or menacingly conformist.47 Hobbes does go beyond Lucretius, however, in proposing so baldly that authorized religion is an instrument of state power. Such a claim could be made as a cynical attack on organized religion or, on the contrary, as showing the need for a strong religious apparatus to buttress the state. In his discourses on Livy, Machiavelli had provocatively celebrated the political efficacy of the Roman religion in a manner that seemed disconcertingly to oscillate between these positions.48 Hobbes and his disciples were often accused of a similar cynicism in their own defence of the Church. Lucretius does not 44 This would be consistent with the ‘theological idealism’ attributed to Epicurus by Sedley (2011) 52; Sedley compares the ambiguity of Epicurus’s formulations to those of Hobbes (51). 45 Cicero, De natura deorum 1.68–123. 46 Hobbes (1996) 42 (Leviathan, ch. 6). 47 Skinner (1996) 424, contra Martinich (1992) 51–3. 48 Kahn (2014) 90–109; cf. Brown’s Chapter 3.

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allow such a clear-cut conclusion. He blurs the tenses in his description of the origins of religion so that it is unclear when in his narrative of civilization it started to appear. His reference to early humans’ invoking Orcus (5.996) may point to an original religious system— the name derived from Roman mythology; but seventeenth-century translators took ‘Orcus’ simply to be a term for ‘death’ and do not seem to have considered religious belief to have been involved.49 In a later stage of civilization, false beliefs about the gods are seen to motivate everyone from kings to people, rather than being feigned by priests and rulers to sustain their power, as in seventeenth-century attacks on ‘priestcraft’. There was still enough to provoke seventeenth-century readers in his complete bracketing of his account of the state from religion, which does seem to make it clear that a good society can be constructed without any divine aid.

4. TRANSLATING REGICIDE 1: THE 1650 S I shall now look at the way three contemporary verse translators rendered Lucretius’s description of the fall of monarchy.50 This was a passage that had especial resonance after the regicide had shattered the traditional political world, sending some royalists into the despair of sheer incomprehension: this disaster seemed to resist representation, to break all the frames, and to raise questions about God’s purposes in permitting it. Lucretius’s narrative positioned the fall of monarchy in a long time-frame and combined an element of nostalgia with a conviction that human versatility could always find new solutions; it could thus speak both to royalists and to republicans. Just as the regicide rudely challenged an Augustan teleology according to which states grew to perfection under monarchy, so it challenged an Augustan poetics, which in England had come to mean a growing 49 Marolles (1650) 469; Evelyn (2000) 160; Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 314, 249. Hutchinson comes closest to suggesting a religious element (Hutchinson (2012) 356, 720). Orcus appears as a name for the underworld at 1.115 (see Cottegnies, Chapter 7, n. 82). G. L. Campbell (2003) 247–8 suggests that the name may be intended as onomatopoeic, naming a god after a death-cry. 50 For reasons of space and generic parallel I leave aside the interesting prose translation, Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 314, which deserves a full study (see Butterfield’s Chapter 2, 62–3).

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courtly harmony of the balanced couplet, and reopened interest in Lucretius’s more sublime and uneven model of poetic progress. The earliest English version of book 5, completed by 1657 at the latest, was by John Evelyn, a committed royalist whose sympathies emerge in his translation and commentary. His addition of ‘barbarously’ to Lucretius’s bald regibus occisis at 5.1136 evokes royalist outrage at the regicide of 1649. He intensifies the anti-democratic interpretation of 5.1141: ‘the Government at length return’d / To th’dreggs o’th’people & rude multitude’. In his commentary he implies Lucretius’s underlying democratic sympathies, insisting ‘against our poet, that the first Legislatiue power was not in the people’. He also finds a contemporary application: ‘It is euident that . . . the Tyrants succeeded the ourthrow of Monarchy but I leaue it to or politicians’. Cromwell is equated with those who sought their own power after the fall of monarchies, presumably leaving the process of creating a just magistracy to a future Restoration.51 Evelyn was in fact uneasy about his involvement with such a heterodox writer, and never published the later books of his translation. His friend Edmund Waller teased him in his commendatory poem to the publication of the first book in 1656, alluding to the democratic implications of a world without a single author, and pointing out that the poem was ‘Born and translated in a State’.52 ‘State’ here long stood as the first Oxford English Dictionary example for ‘state’ in the sense of ‘republic, non-monarchical commonwealth’, though the dictionary has now added an antecedent from Hobbes’s Leviathan: ‘when Augustus Caesar changed the State into a Monarchy’.53 Here we may have an example of the way in which Lucretian language encouraged a detached and impersonal view of political institutions: ‘state’ is an easy translation of the recurrent res. Waller would have known that Evelyn in fact translated the first book in the period of the Commonwealth, mirroring the origins of the DRN under the Roman republic. In this context, the fable of King Log and King Stork suggests that precipitately fleeing tyranny may lead to the worse danger of anarchy, as witnessed in the narrative of book 5. Waller had offered his own

51 Evelyn’s Lucretius translation is cited from Repetzki’s edition (Evelyn 2000), 164–5; Hutchinson (2012) 725. On Civil War contexts, see also Barbour (1997) 158–61. 52 Evelyn (1656) sig. E2r (discussed in Cottegnies’s Chapter 7, 186–7). 53 OED3 ‘state’ n. 27 {b. ‘A republic, a non-monarchical commonwealth. Chiefly with reference to ancient Rome’; Hobbes (1996) 456 (Leviathan, ch. 45).

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way out which was very different from his friend’s, for he had endorsed the very Cromwellian monarchy whose tyrannical outlines Evelyn had found foreshadowed in book 5, on Machiavellian and Hobbesian grounds. He had planned to translate Hobbes’s De Cive into English, with the author’s approval. Long celebrated along with Denham as a refiner of the English couplet and a defender of the monarchy, he had made a dramatic accommodation to the new order with his Panegyrick to my Lord Protector (1655). There he had offered an account of the transition from monarchy to anarchy to secure government which parallelled Lucretius’s, but inserted the Protectorate into the position of lawful magistracy: That Sun [i.e. Charles I] once set, a thousand meaner Stars, Gave a dim light to Violence and Wars, To such a Tempest, as now threatens all, Did not your mighty Arm prevent the fall.

Waller was here attacking royalist conspirators against the Protectorate. Detaching support for a strong state from loyalty to the Stuarts, he urges a kind of Epicurean turn to privacy, a utilitarian renunciation of civic virtue: So England now does with like toyle opprest, Her weary Head upon your Bosom rest . . . 54

But if England is here a recumbent Mars, the poem ends with a call to arms: the Protectorate will emulate the martial glories of Rome. Another Protectoral poet, Andrew Marvell, revised monarchical imagery in defence of Cromwell’s innovative Protectoral role, comparing popular alarm at rumours of Cromwell’s death to the fear of early men that the setting sun would never reappear. Though the allusion may be to Manilius, the popularity of the fifth book in the 1650s suggests that Marvell would have expected readers to recall the Lucretius passage, which he deliberately countered in his defence of the Protector.55 Lucy Hutchinson may have undertaken her own translation in the late 1650s in the knowledge that Evelyn had recently finished his one, 54

Waller (1655) 7. Marvell (2003) 296. The passage is normally referred to Statius, Thebaid 4.182–4 and Manilius, Astronomica 1.66–70, both passages which revise Lucretius—a fact of which readers in the 1650s are likely to have been aware. 55

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and she wrote in conscious engagement with the contemporary political climate. Phrases like ‘Com[m]onwealths’ for commune bonum (5.958), ‘Soveraigne powers’ for imperium . . . ac summatum (5.1142), and ‘States rose, & states invented Pollicies’ in her verse summary of this passage, catching the impersonality of res, give a topical flavour. Her husband had withdrawn from public affairs in his resistance to the Protectorate and the couple were in contact with royalists who could share a common quest for retirement from a corrupt public world. She later wrote that he believ’d himselfe wholly disengag’d from all ties but those which God and nature, or rather God by nature, oblieges every man of honor and honesty in to his countrie, which is to defend or relieue it from invading tirants as farre as he may by a lawfull call and meanes, and to suffer patiently that yoake which God submitts him to till the Lord shall take it off.56

Hutchinson adopts from Lucretius a language different from the traditional Roman idiom of republican virtue, but where royalist poetry of retirement often evoked the pleasures of the gentry’s leisure in a lightly hedonistic way, she responds to the genuine note of severe austerity and simple sociability that underlies Lucretius’s portrayal of early humanity. For women writers like Hutchinson, the devaluation of the public world also opened up a revaluation of intellectual pursuits by women in the household and in friendship.57 Hutchinson presents a significantly non-Hobbesian state of nature, considerably more in Gassendi’s spirit of Christianizing ataraxia: the good life can be found through encouraging natural instincts towards cooperation. The odd phrase ‘god and nature or rather god by nature’ seems to hesitate before revising an Epicurean separation between the gods and nature into a more orthodox Christian position. Like several other writers of the time, she responded powerfully to Lucretius’s sense of parallels between animal and human worlds.58 She seems to have been confident that Lucretius’s religio, however minimal, could be an ally against superstition: ‘superstition’ is her choice for religio at 1.101 and 5.86 and 114, and at Lucretius’s 5.1207 she renders a general malis, ‘woes’, as ‘superstition’. She renders Lucretius’s placata posse omnia mente tueri (5.1203) with ‘to receiue all chance with 56 58

57 Hutchinson (1973) 208, 216. Anderson (2012) 114–49. A topic which needs much fuller treatment: see Hutchinson (2012) pp. lxxxix–xci.

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calmed brests’, a phrase which says even less about the supernatural than Lucretius and adds an Epicurean insistence on contingency. Much later, in 1675, she complained that her contemporaries were using Lucretius to support their belief that ‘religion is nothing at all but an invention to reduce the ignorant vulgar into order and Government’.59 Interestingly, however, she did not impute this view to Lucretius himself; indeed, she declared that in political terms he taught good lessons: he ‘defind vertue to be all those things that are iust equall & profitable to humane Society, wherein this Poet makes true religion to consist, & not in superstitious cerimonies’.60 Hutchinson was attentive to the austerity of Epicurean ethics and its possible political colouring. Her ‘In a meane state’ for aequo animo leaves open a reading of poverty as well as a middle state, just as she is the only contemporary translator, French or English, to risk rendering Lucretius’s plebeia for simple clothing as ‘plebeian’ (2.36; 5.1429/1481). Her ‘Little is still supplied’ is an effective rendition of neque enim est umquam penuria parvi and brings in the appropriately Lucretian register of supplying. She motivates Lucretius’s maxim about obedience, whose position in early modern text was syntactically awkward, to make it the self-realization of those who fall from power: they There learnt, that tis much better to obey And in a subiects humble state to stand Then to enioy a crowne and vast command.

Hutchinson’s ‘humble’ adds a Christian note to Lucretius’s renunciation of the public world, just as in her husband’s resolution ‘to suffer patiently that yoake which God submitts him’; her ‘crowne’ gives negative monarchical associations to Lucretius’s more general imperio. So congenial did Hutchinson find this part of the poem, and a corresponding passage on Epicurean friendship in book 2, that she echoed them in an anti-courtly poem of her own: Ambition doth incessantly aspire, And each advance leads on to new desire; Nor yet can riches av’rice satisfie, For want and wealth together multiplie: Nor can voluptuous men more fullnesse find, 59

Hutchinson (2012) 13.

60

Hutchinson (2012) 11.

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David Norbrook For enjoy’d pleasures leave their stings behind . . . One village feast shall gaine a greater name Then his who weares th’imperiall diadem, Whom the rude multitude doe still condemne.61

Hutchinson makes the Epicurean link between infinite desire and unhappiness; ‘want and wealth together multiplie’ inverts neque est umquam peniuria parvi, and the sixth line echoes DRN 4.1128–9. As in the fifth book, and contra Hobbes, it is made clear that those who govern their lives can escape the grip of fear and infinite desire; if, as seems likely, she is writing in the retirement of the 1650s, she is able to contrast her own good life with the ‘imperiall diadem’ of the usurper Cromwell, who, like the kings of book 5, is condemned for ambition by the ‘multitude’. There is in fact evidence that Hutchinson was thinking specifically of Cromwell, Hobbes, and Waller’s Panegyrick. In the absence of Waller’s version of De Cive, the first English translation was by a young poet named Charles Cotton, a royalist who had local and family connections with Hutchinson, and who married her half-sister.62 Cotton and Hutchinson both composed replies to the Panegyrick, with Hutchinson contesting Waller’s solar imagery: on Charles’s death the ‘Senators’ of Parliament shone forth in the darke night like the radient stars Shin’d forth after the Tempest of our Warrs Till this new Mist [Cromwell] did from this Earth arise Blacking againe the Lustre of our Skyes[.]63

The collective leadership of a republican constellation is superior to a regal sun. Hutchinson presented Waller’s ‘refinement’ of the couplet as a mark of courtly degeneracy, indicating that the more open couplets of her translation can be seen as a conscious alignment with Lucretius’s pre-Augustan poetics.64 Hutchinson’s own narrative of the state avoids both Evelyn’s nostalgia and Hobbes’s hard primitivism. Revealingly, she inserted in her own hand the line, missed by the scribe, which insisted on the mutual

61

62 Hutchinson (1806) 446. Hutchinson (2012) p. xxiii. Norbrook (1996) 83 (lines 153–6). 64 On her metre, see Hutchinson (2012) pp. xcvi–ciii; and on the development of the couplet in translations, see Sowerby (2010) 23–31, 118–30. 63

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love of men and women even at an early stage; she in fact added an element of female agency, however compromised, in insisting that other women ‘themselues . . . sold’.65 When narrating the origins of monarchy she draws a distinction between the inventive men who found cities and the ambitious, security-seeking kings who retreat to citadels: Iudgement and witt abounding in those dayes, Men founded cities, kings did strong towers rayse That they therein securely might reside. (5.1148–50, translating 5.1108–10)

This is a possible though far from inevitable interpretation of the lines as punctuated in early modern editions, which do not make the break found in modern editions after 5.1107. She gives a specifically antimonarchical cast to lines that in Lucretius are more general: For kings persue what others say is good, More, by report, then true sence vnderstood. (Hutchinson, 5.1176–7, translating 5.1133–4)

When it comes to the way out of anarchy after the fall of monarchies, Hutchinson places the agency more firmly with the people than contemporary translators or indeed Lucretius himself, who has partim, ‘some people’, teach them to create magistrates, whereas Hutchinson has the people learn themselves of the need for magistracy from the dangers of anarchy. Her language, ‘Bound vp themselues, of their owne free accord / Within strict laws’, is more emphatic than Lucretius’s cecidit, ‘fell’ under laws, and contrasts with Waller’s England laying her weary head on Cromwell’s breast.

5. TRANSLATING REGICIDE 2: THE 1680s AND BEYOND The politics of the mid-century still haunted the first complete English translation to be printed, that of the Oxford scholar Thomas Creech in 1682. Though he was later to publish a scholarly edition of

65 Hutchinson (2012) p. cxxxiii. 355: 5.1005–7, translating 5.963–5 (I owe the last point to Claire Landis).

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the Latin text (cf. Butterfield, Chapter 2), this translation was primed to arouse controversy. The emergent Whig party feared a movement towards absolutism, the Tories a return to the politics of the 1640s. Charles had dissolved the Parliament that excluded his Catholic brother, the Duke of York, from the succession and called a new one to meet in the more royalist atmosphere of Oxford, but this too was soon dissolved. Creech was strongly royalist and in 1683 composed a poem to honour a visit by the Duke of York, a public testimony of loyalty to the Stuart succession. In the wake of the Rye House Plot to assassinate the King, the University had responded by publicly burning politically offensive books, yoking together Protestant millennialists, Milton’s defences of the regicide, and Hobbes’s De Cive and Leviathan, with condemnation of the claim—which could be considered Epicurean as well as Hobbesian—that ‘Self preservation is the fundamental law of nature, and supersedes the obligation of all others, when ever they stand in competition with it’.66 Hobbes continued to be associated with revolutionary dissent even though he himself had no wish to be aligned with radical Protestantism or republicanism, whose acolytes he had condemned in his treatise on the Civil War, Behemoth. When first printed, apparently without the author’s consent, in 1679, this bore on its title-page two lines from Lucretius’s attack on religio (1.83, 101), giving a whiff of atheism to the text’s fierce anticlericalism.67 Neither Lucretius nor Hobbes could be easily assimilated into available frameworks for the discussion of church and state, and their ‘atheism’ might seem equally redolent of anticlerical republicanism and of absolutism. Creech’s translation brought Lucretius’s politics more fully into the vernacular public gaze; through repeated borrowings from contemporaries like Abraham Cowley and John Dryden he also set up a dialogue with the latest fashions in literary culture. These were effective strategies for gaining public attention, resulting in a series of editions in Oxford and London within two years, and the edition’s fluctuating paratextual materials are an index of the intense but politically ambiguous responses the translation aroused. Though he declared that his aim was to expose the absurdity of Epicureanism, he also titillatingly attracted purchasers by highlighting the text’s subversiveness. The engraved title-page presented the creation narrative from book 5,

66

University of Oxford (1683) 2.

67

Hobbes (2010) 53, 84–5.

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with animals springing from the earth in direct contradiction of the Bible; though the legend CASUS, ‘chance’—a word that does not occur frequently in the DRN—highlighted what for many opponents of Epicureanism was the implausibility of creation without design.68 There was, then, something a little disingenuous in Creech’s complaint in the dedication to his second edition that some readers had attacked him for sowing atheism. He dropped the offensive preface but marshalled an array of contemporary writers to defend his translation. Creech’s defenders included his predecessor Evelyn and three dramatists, Nahum Tate, Thomas Otway, and Aphra Behn, all of whom had supported the government during the Exclusion Crisis. Behn praised an earlier adapter of Lucretius, Thomas Sprat, for his loyalty to the King during the Commonwealth, his disdain for ‘the mad Senate-House’. To this extent, then, Creech presented himself as a bold defender of Church and State; but Behn was hardly herself an orthodox figure. She celebrated reason as the equal of faith, ‘the secure Retreat of Routed Argument’—this phrase was itself a retreat from her initial ‘Faith the Last Shift of Routed Argument’—and praised the Earl of Rochester, recently reclaimed by the Whigs for his pious death, instead as a bold Lucretian champion of reason.69 The third edition added further verse tributes, one of which praised Creech for being From all that’s weak, or mean, or trivial, free; As Whigs from Sense, or Faith, or Loyalty[.]

A readiness to engage with Lucretius’s boldest speculations was thus becoming identified as a mark of Tory loyalty.70 Creech distanced his own views from Lucretius’s in a long note to the lines on the initial establishment of a social compact: Those that endeavour to disgrace Religion, usually represent it as a trick of State, and a Politick invention to keep the credulous in Awe; which however absurd and frivolous, yet is a strong argument against the Atheist, who cannot declare his Opinions, unless he be a Rebel, and a disturber of the Commonwealth: The Cause of God, and his Caesar are the same, and no affront can be offered to one, but it reflects on both;

68 69 70

Cf. Fig. 0.1 and Chapters 8 (by Poole) and 9 (by Hardy). Creech (1683a) sigs. c2r–v, c4v–5r, C5r–d2v, d3r–e2r (d4r). Creech (1683b) sig. ¶2r.

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and that the Epicurean Principles are pernicious to Societies, is evident from the account they give of the rise of them.71

The first part of this sentence is in line with the recently deceased Lucy Hutchinson’s dedication to her translation, but its second part would surely have had her turning in her grave. Creech proceeds to distinguish between Epicurean accounts of the state as originating in self-interest and democratic ones which present the people as the foundation of all power—effectively between the Hobbesian and republican wings of the Commonwealth and Protectoral regimes— and, in the spirit of Oxford University’s 1683 declaration, to oppose to both an uncompromising claim that monarchical power comes from God alone. For his second edition, Creech heightened the absolutist tone, raising the spectre of 1649: if it were not acknowledged that God alone gave kings their power, the people could ‘make what Conditions they pleased, subject them to an High Court of Justice’. And with a direct glance at the Exclusion Crisis, he insisted that nobody could tell kings who their successor might be. He seems to have feared, however, that the tone of this high-flying defence of Church and State would alienate some readers, and he added two paragraphs conceding that kings should in practice try to follow existing political traditions.72 Creech gave some distinctly Hobbesian touches to his translation. He did not, it is true, try to imitate Hobbes’s own style in epic poetry. Hobbes had published translations of Homer in 1675–7, with a strongly monarchist cast, but adopting the quatrains of his friend Sir William Davenant rather than heroic couplets—perhaps to signify his and his friend’s literary independence.73 Creech chose couplets, and in general these are more closed and balanced than Hutchinson’s, though he still emulated Lucretius’s stylistic variety in sometimes rugged and percussive verse paragraphs and a scattering of triplets and half-lines. In content, his version offers a number of Hobbesian touches. To Lucretius’s description of early humanity, by whom ‘No publick good

71

Creech (1683b) sig. (g)1v. Creech (1683a) sigs. (g)1v–3v. The change is noted, though somewhat exaggerated, by Mayo (1934) 74. The many changes in texts and paratexts of successive editions are not fully covered by Gordon (1985) and current bibliographical databases, and a full critical edition of Creech’s translation is needed. 73 On the politics of these translations, see Hobbes (2008b) i, pp. xxxiii–lv; Nelson (pp. xxxi–xxxii) does not distinguish between couplets and quatrains. 72

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was sought, no common Cause’ he added: ‘But all at War’.74 He differs from Hutchinson in his translation of the passage on the origins of monarchy, identifying wit with a naturally endowed kingship: The wiser and the wittier left the field, And Towns for safety did begin to build; By Nature, Kings.—

In narrating the fall of monarchies, he omits the anti-hierarchical comment that the powerful get their wisdom from others, and brings contemporary fears of a return to 1649 to the surface: Those former Kings now murther’d, they o’rethrown, The glory of the Scepter, and the Crown Decreas’d: The Diadem, that sign of State, Now wept in drops of Blood, the Wearer’s fate, Spurn’d by the common feet, who fear’d no more: Tis sweet to spurn the things we fear’d before. Thus Monarchy was lost.—

Creech intensifies the impact of the regicide by elaborating Lucretius’s insigne into sceptre, crown, and diadem, and associating ‘State’ firmly with regal pomp rather than the republican sense glanced at in Waller’s ‘Born and translated in a State’. The identification of regicide with murder comes directly from polemics about the execution of Charles I. Creech dispels the critical force of Lucretius’s nimis, ‘too much’, as qualifying ‘the things we fear’d’: there is a Hobbesian inflection of fear as a necessary component for government. He then adds a Virgilian half-line of his own to emphasize the momentous nature of the loss, balancing it against the half-line with which he had introduced the emergence of monarchy, ‘By Nature, Kings’. There follows a remarkable transition: That Sun once set, a thousand little Stars Gave a dim light to Jealousies and Wars, Whilst each among the many sought the Throne, And thought no Head like his deserv’d the Crown.75

74

Creech (1683b) 169, noted by Tilmouth (2007) 279. On the tendency of Restoration ‘Hobbists’ to simplify Hobbes’s conception of the state of nature, cf. Hillyer (2007) 117–23. 75 Creech (1683b) 174–5.

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Reviving the intense engagement with this passage by Waller and Hutchinson in the 1650s, Creech inserts near-verbatim a couplet from Waller’s A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector; since it is in no sense a translation of the original, he must have expected readers to recognize the allusion, which was pointed by the marginal note ‘Common wealths’ at this point. In fact the Interregnum verse of Waller and others was attracting renewed public attention—Waller’s elegy for Cromwell had been reprinted in 1682, not long after Marvell’s poems to Cromwell had been cut from the 1681 edition of his works. The addition of the couplet was in line with Creech’s editorial interpretation of Lucretius as a Hobbesian: first Cromwell and then Charles had become king after a period of anarchy, and on Lucretian or Hobbesian principles each would have gained legitimacy on grounds of utility. In his Latin edition, Creech summarizes the episode: ‘Reges constituuntur, at brevi orta Seditione Respublica emersit . . . Deturbatis Regibus . . . ad pristinam feritatem rediit Hominum vita’ (‘kings were established, but a republic emerged from a brief period of sedition . . . when kings were overthrown, men’s life returned to its first savagery’76). Creech borrows further from the idiom of Waller’s Panegyrick by making subjects submit to an elected authority (here a singular ‘Lord’, unlike in Lucretius) because they want ‘an easie life’, as Waller’s people ‘finde repose at last’ by resting their ‘weary head’ on Cromwell’s bosom. ‘Ease’ is a term often favoured by Creech to illustrate Epicurean ideals, but otia occurs only once in Lucretius (5.385), Epicurean ataraxia being a more strenuous concept. Earlier, in contrast with Hutchinson’s austere moralism, he turned ataraxia into a form of desire by rendering neque enim est umquam peniuria parvi as And bounteous Fortune still affords supply Sufficient for a thrifty Luxury.

If Hutchinson slightly exaggerates popular agency in her version, Creech exaggerates the element of weary submission. He adds to the Hobbesian note in the lines Hence men grew weary of continual wars, Which sowr’d the sweet of life with constant fears[.]77

76

Lucretius (1695) 250, 296.

77

Creech (1683b) 174, 175.

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Creech’s couplet links lines which modern editions mark as separate, with a break after 5.1150; the ensuing adverb Inde is translated by Monica Gale as ‘From then on’ (89), signalling that Lucretius is moving on to the fears of punishment which keep irrational people subdued once states are formed. As has been seen, Gassendi believes that such fears are not felt by those who judge things properly. Instead, Creech has Lucretius mark a sharp break between the prior realm of war and fear and the establishment of the state; once again, the Hobbesian emphasis is clear. The acute sensitivity of Lucretius translation at this time is further illustrated by Creech’s edgy relations with the Poet Laureate, John Dryden. Dryden was himself intensely interested both in Lucretius and in Hobbes. He had been contemplating a translation of Lucretius for many years, and his plays presented, while not necessarily endorsing, Epicurean and Hobbesian positions. Creech had contributed verses to his Religio Laici (1682), which engaged with contemporary religious scepticism in a way one reader found ‘Atheisticall’.78 In Absalom and Achitophel (1681), however, Dryden had joined the Tory wits who tried to smear the Whigs as republicans and atheists, and had evoked Lucretius’s fifth book to do so. The rebels are said to have ‘led their wild desires to Woods and Caves’, alluding to DRN 5.955, and he has his villain Achitophel—the Whig leader Shaftesbury—proclaim that ‘Self-defence is Natures Eldest Law’.79 Creech had reason to believe that Dryden shared his ambivalent admiration for Lucretius, and in his first edition he declared: ‘look upon our Laureat’s Maximin, and Nourmahal, could Epicurus speak more contemptible of the Gods, or Lucretius be more loose in his Expressions?’ This passage came just before Creech’s comparison of Lucretius to Hobbes (cited in Wilson’s Chapter 11), and aligned the three writers as voicing subversive views. Though in Dryden’s case this was only through characters in heroic plays, Creech was persuaded by a colleague that the association of the laureateship with atheism was too provocative, and he had the passage cut halfway through printing. He continued to seek an alliance with Dryden, however, and persuaded the publisher Jacob Tonson—himself a student of Lucretius—to ask Dryden, and that veteran of Lucretian 78

Dryden (1956–90) ii. 340. Absalom and Achitophel, lines 55, 458, Dryden (1956–90) i. 7, 19; the Lucretian allusion at line 55 is noted by Paul Hammond, Dryden (1995) 460. 79

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debates Edmund Waller, for commentary verses to the second edition. Both poets refused, evidently worried about compromising their reputations; but Tonson wrote verses himself and they were duly published, one as by ‘E. W.’, one anonymously but in what might be taken to be Dryden’s voice. Creech himself seems to have been deceived, for in the preface to his second edition he cited Waller as one of those who had vindicated his reputation, and as has been seen he had enlisted Waller’s verse for his own translation. But he was apparently chastened by his experience with the first edition, for he refrained from naming Dryden.80 The laureate’s response came in 1685, when he included some translations from the De rerum natura in a miscellany. In his preface he praised Creech, but his own translations were so much superior— they remain arguably the best English versions of Lucretius—that one must wonder whether he regretted a lost opportunity: the market would probably not bear two translations close together. While his frequent additions generally amplified the original text, when it came to politics he continued to give Lucretius an anti-Whig perspective. He did not translate the political passages from book 5, but he made pointed additions to Lucretius’s allegorization of the Sisyphus story 3.995–1002): The Sisiphus is he, whom noise and strife Seduce from all the soft retreats of life, To vex the Government, disturb the Laws; Drunk with the Fumes of popular applause, He courts the giddy Crowd to make him great, And sweats & toils in vain, to mount the sovereign Seat.81

Even as he tried to invoke Lucretius for his own political cause, however, Dryden was concerned to distance himself: If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing Character of Lucretius; (I mean of his Soul and Genius) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his Opinions. He is every where confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command not only over his vulgar

80 The reference to Dryden survives in some copies of the first, 1682 edition but was replaced in others: see Hopkins (2012). Winn (1992 ) 56–7 suggests that Dryden may in fact have added some lines to the poem. 81 Dryden (1956–90) iii. 53. On Machiavelli’s use of the Sisyphus passage, cf. Brown’s Chapter 3, 79.

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Reader, but even his Patron Memmius. For he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the Rod over him; and using a Magisterial authority, while he instructs him. From his time to ours, I know none so like him, as our Poet and Philosopher of Malmsbury [i. e. Hobbes].82

Dryden wrote that Lucretius’s dogmatism was at odds with his own ‘natural Diffidence and Scepticism’. As so often in the early modern period, the task of making clear that the translator’s voice was different from the author’s was made all the more sensitive by the fear that the differences might not be so easily apparent. Soon after publishing these words, Dryden sought a new stability in conversion to Catholicism. In his later years Dryden turned to Virgil, not Lucretius. For his part, his publisher Tonson turned increasingly to Whiggish politics. Whig literary circles included Paolo Rolli, the publisher of Marchetti’s Lucretius and also the first Italian translator of Paradise Lost— another leading feature of Tonson’s list.83 It is perhaps indicative of the softening of old fears about Lucretius that when Tonson came to issue a Latin edition of Lucretius in 1712, he included the first-ever illustration of book 5 (Fig. 10.2). The illustration focuses on the scene of Epicurean pleasure outlined at the end of the book (5.1390–1404, partly repeating 2.29–33). Grapes, not wine, are consumed; the presentation of garlands highlights social mutuality; children are conspicuously present, highlighting their role in strengthening social bonds, while priests are conspicuously absent. The absence of clothes indicates that this is still an early stage of human development, though in the background we see picks and spades being used. Further back, there is what amounts to a direct revision of the title-page of De Cive, a return to a softer primitivism: these humans, most of them again unclothed to indicate an early stage, are using clubs and spears against animals, not men. Where Hobbes’s title-page makes a sharp distinction between civility and the state of nature, in Tonson’s edition there can be security and peace in the early stages.84 The shadow of Leviathan no longer falls over the Epicurean landscape. It is a vision that might have appealed to Lucy Hutchinson. 82

83 Dryden (1956–90) iii. 10. Wright (2003) 3–5; Norbrook (2010). The engraving is by Gilliam van Goewen after Ottmar Elliger. One illustration was copied from the 1701 Amsterdam edition but the rest appear to have been commissioned for this edition. On illustrated editions generally, still an underexplored subject, see Fusil (1930); Gordon (1985) 233–55. 84

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Fig. 10.2. Titi Lucretii Cari de rerum natura libri sex, ed. Jacob Tonson (London, 1712), plate facing p. 240. With permission of the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford (AA 6 Jur.).

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6. CONCLUSION Lucretius’s fifth book, then, was pivotal for many English discussions of early and also of recent history, and he was able to speak to readers of widely divergent political views. The appearance of four translations over a period of thirty years indicates the particular intensity of interest the poem aroused in a period of radical ideological instability: there was to be no further complete verse translation until John Mason Good’s in 1805. I have tried to show that, through these translations, the DRN became for the first time a powerful presence in English literary as well as philosophical culture. This new level of close attention to the text worked against simple appropriations of the poem within contemporary political ideologies. Hutchinson and Creech produced very different readings of the fifth book which could both claim strong elements of support in the original. Their versions do not fit any simple narrative of secularization. In her later years, as Hutchinson moved towards a much more dogmatic Calvinism, she reacted sharply against what she saw as absolutist appropriations of Lucretius, in which a subterranean atheism could paradoxically be used to strengthen the established church. Dryden’s conversion to Catholicism came shortly after his most intense period of engagement with Lucretius. The concept of secularization implies a change from a default mode of universal religious belief and observance; the particular challenge of Lucretius lay in offering a plausible narrative that reversed the process.

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11 Political Philosophy in a Lucretian Mode Catherine Wilson

The classical legacy in early modern political philosophy has long been identified with Roman law and the philosophy of the Stoics. The robust persistence of the natural law paradigm and the assumption of human sociability have been expertly traced from the ancients, through the medievals, and down into modern theory. More recently, attention has turned to the traditional targets of Stoic criticism, the Epicureans, and to the importance for political as well as natural philosophy of the recovery of Lucretius’s great Epicurean poem, De rerum natura. Despite the paucity of new editions and translations of the DRN before the 1680s, the Latin text had circulated for much longer, stimulating and encouraging natural philosophers and prompting the abandonment of the scholastic philosophy of matter, form, the four causes, and real qualities (Wilson 2008a), and it enjoyed wide distribution in England and on the Continent in the eighteenth century as a standard in Latin pedagogy and in translation.1 The present chapter explores three elements of the Epicurean heritage that are central to post-Machiavellian political theory: first, the thesis of the mind-dependence or ‘conventional’ nature of values and political status; second, the thesis that the justice of a law depends on its utility in the circumstances of its application and that laws are legitimized by agreement or contract; and finally, the notion that the history of humanity consists of a succession of stages, driven by technological and social innovation, that implies either continuing progress or degeneration, or both. 1

For details, see Gordon (1985).

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There are several reasons why Epicurean themes have been largely invisible in political philosophy from Grotius to Rousseau, presenting a challenge for evidence-based reception-studies, especially where Lucretius’s version of Epicureanism is concerned.2 First, while Lucretius’s hostility to religion is patent, no early modern political theorist was motivated to present himself as a militant atheist. Hugo Grotius composed a defence of Christianity targeting ‘such persons whose interest it is that there should be no God’ and who advance the ‘hypothesis’ of the ‘fortuitous concourse of atoms’ ((1627) I.iii). Thomas Hobbes wrote as if laying down a plan for a ‘Christian commonwealth’ in Leviathan, and Samuel Pufendorf invoked God repeatedly as providing the foundations of the law (Pufendorf (2006) 7–8). Opinions contrary to the Christian truth, he maintained, ‘including Atheistical and Epicurean Principles’, are ‘most carefully to be barr’d off and excluded’. In no case, however, was a defence of the theocratic state implied, and the modern reader is encouraged to consider the content of their doctrines above and beyond their programmatic statements. Grotius was a key figure in the ‘Leiden circle’ that aimed with considerable success to banish theology from political discourse (Somos 2011). Hobbes ridiculed religion in chapter 12 of his 1651 Leviathan ((1996) 75–86) and attacked the priesthood and its practices of incantation and conjuring in part IV of the book. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of 1670 explicitly removed God and scripture from political theory. Despite Pufendorf ’s claim that it is ‘black malignity and . . . pure malice’ to see any contradiction between scripture and the necessary postulates of philosophy, his political theory as well is an exercise in secularization. Despite his barring of Epicurean policy, he made excellent use of book 5 of the DRN with its account of human cultural evolution. His ‘moral theology’ is as functionally irrelevant to his system as Descartes’s appeals to God as responsible for all ongoing causal activity in the universe are functionally irrelevant to his mechanistic philosophy of nature, and as God’s role as guarantor of clear and distinct ideas is to his methodology of scientific discovery. The devastation of the Thirty Years War, the Civil War in England, and other conflicts, massacres, and threats of the early and midseventeenth century impressed on philosophers the need for a 2 See however Haas (1896); Guyau (1927); Palladini (1981; 2008); Rosen (2002); Barbour (2007); Ahnert (2009); Brooke (2012); Wilson (2013).

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political doctrine sufficiently general to embrace Protestants and Catholics alike or else frankly ‘desacralized’ in the interests of peace.3 This necessity is signalled in the Prolegomena to his 1625 treatise, the Laws of War and Peace, in which Grotius famously declared ‘What I have said would be relevant even if we were to suppose (what we cannot suppose without the greatest wickedness) that there is no God, or that human affairs are of no concern to him’ (Grotius (2005) iii. 1747–8). It was an effortful undertaking in light of the longstanding assumptions that, on the contrary, the duty of obedience to God grounded the duty of obedience to the sovereign and the magistrate; the key to civic peace was universal agreement on points of doctrine; and atheists were dangerous people, who, foreseeing no punishment in the hereafter, were capable, as Leibniz put it, of ‘setting fire to the four corners of the earth, for their pleasure or advancement’ (Leibniz (1981) 462–4). Such people were, in his view, to be found amongst the ‘disciples of Epicurus’, and, conversely, philosophers who rejected the theocratic state as a dangerous and internally unstable institution could count Lucretius on their side whilst prudently disavowing any influence or affiliation. A second important reason why the significance of the DRN remains somewhat understudied is the perceived problem of relevance. Hobbes, an excellent classicist, was scornful of the contributions of the ancients to morals and politics, as was Pufendorf, who was criticized as an ignoramus where the history of philosophy was concerned.4 The issues that preoccupy the moderns are the problems of authority and obedience, the legitimacy of sovereign power and the right of resistance to tyrants, the ontological status of the law, equality, and the moral acceptability of warfare and slavery. These subjects are treated only tangentially if at all in Epicurean philosophy. Further, as James H. Nichols has emphasized, the political realm for Lucretius is one of ‘compulsion, vain desires, false opinions, competition and warfare’ (Nichols (1976) 166). Public service is deprecated by implication, and the remodelling of institutions in accord with political

3

See esp. Ian Hunter (2003) on Leibniz and Pufendorf, referencing Pocock (1988). His contemporary Hermann Conring said, ‘As regards the history of ancient philosophy, I always did realize that Pufendorf knows practically nothing.’ Quoted in Chroust (1979) 78. The Law of Nature and Nations was thereafter peppered with quotations from the ancients. 4

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ideals was not a philosophical priority for either Epicurus or Lucretius (Nichols (1976) 145–7). Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Rousseau, by contrast, anticipated—and were rewarded with—celebrity, notoriety, and genuine political influence. Nevertheless, Lucretius’s poem was understood as having political import in its own time.5 Civil war, assassinations, and the tyrant Sulla’s rise to power, as well as the mass executions following the slave revolt by Spartacus, shadowed Lucretius’s youth; he refers in book 1 to ‘this tempestuous time in my country’s history’ (1.41). By contrast, Cicero’s De re publica presents a picture of a stable, mature, potentially immortal, non-violent Roman republic that mirrors, as the ‘Dream of Scipio’ suggests, the stability, order, and calm that are to be found in the heavens. For Lucretius, as Alessandro Schiesaro argues, the metaphysical structure of the Stoic cosmos under the supervision of Providence and the imperial ambition to bring an ever-widening circle of strangers under the pax Romana are ‘an insurmountable obstacle to personal and social fulfillment’ (Schiesaro (2007) 54). Epicurean metaphysics and ethics counsel withdrawal; in a temporary world, only the enjoyment of simple pleasures and private friendships, not the acquisition of riches and imperial glory, can secure personal happiness within a functioning state. This aspect of the DRN was also apparent to early modern readers in the turmoils of the Civil War in England.6 It could be read and studied as literature in a Christian culture with less guilt than a close study of Epicurus as philosopher and anti-theologian might imply; at the same time, readers affected by the Lucretian interpretation of human life could return to the sayings of Epicurus on morality, social life, and politics with an enhanced and perhaps sympathetic understanding of the Epicurean position. As Lucretius himself remarked, the ‘sweet honey of the Muses’ might render his somewhat bitter medicine more palatable (1.931–50).

5 According to Schiesaro (2007) 48, the DRN was ‘disruptive’ politics, seen by Lucretius’s contemporaries as a direct criticism of his contemporary Cicero’s faith in the permanence of the Roman Empire and the inherent dignity of the political life as well as an attack on the Stoic conception of natural law. 6 See Barbour (2007) 158–60 on royalist withdrawal in the Interregnum and Norbrook (Chapter 10) on anti-democratic interpretations of Lucretius’s account of regicide in book 5.

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1. MORAL ENTITIES AND LUCRETIAN FICTIONALISM Epicurean ontology lends itself to a theory of ‘social fictions’, according to which certain entities and qualities—notably God, sin, nobility, worth, and virtue—exist only insofar as humans believe them to exist, construct practices and institutions around them, and feel themselves to experience their force. The status qualities of human beings are seen as ‘imposed’ on them, and ‘value’ and ‘price’—or even ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’—are understood as attributions that are ‘superadded’ onto objects of experience in a manner that reflects human interests. This early version of ‘error theory’—people are mistaken if they suppose persons and things actually to possess such properties independently of how they are perceived—is central to the emerging critique of arbitrary power of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In book 1, in the course of laying out the ontology of atoms and void, Lucretius informs the reader that ‘slavery, poverty and wealth, freedom, war, concord and all other things whose coming and going does not impair the essential nature of a thing’ are accidental (1.455–9). Insofar as such categories organize and guide much of anyone’s everyday experience, this claim is seriously revisionary. It is at odds with the Aristotelian political ontology of natural hierarchies and ‘individual natures’ that equip and qualify persons for their social roles,7 a superficially ‘empirical’ theory that infers from observed effects—including subordination—to putative causes—such as innate inferiority. Atomistic ontology correspondingly demanded a deeper analysis of political personhood and agency. In Leviathan (1651) in accord with his doctrine that all is body, Hobbes argues that values are mutable and dependent on interests, which in turn are dependent on the appetites and desires of the human corporeal machine. The ‘honourable’ is not what corresponds to the Stoic honestum as an absolute standard, rather it is ‘whatsoever possession, action, or quality, is an argument and sign of power’ ((1996) 65, ch. 10). Titles and scutcheons are ‘honourable’ only where they are regarded as such, and even ‘merit’ and ‘desert’ are notions implying a particular context of expectation and agreement as to what fulfilment implies ((1996) 68–9, Leviathan, ch. 11). In 7

See Beer (1986) for a lucid exposition.

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Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), the difference between the concepts of natural substances and moral concepts is made explicit. Unlike the concepts of gold and lead, which correspond to ‘real essences’ as determined by their corpuscular substructure, concepts such as ‘murder’ are notions ‘made by the mind’ and/or fiat conditions created by an authorizing power, ‘institutional facts’ in modern parlance (III.v.3–6). Three features of Samuel Pufendorf ’s influential moral and political philosophy were strongly inflected by his acquaintance with Epicurean sources: his assertion of primitive social equality; his denial of natural property rights; and his conventionalist account of what he calls ‘moral entities’. In his De jure naturae et gentium of 1672, which went through a number of English editions, Pufendorf defined ‘moral entities’ as ‘Certain Modes superadded to Natural Things and Motions, by Understanding Beings; chiefly for the guiding and tempering the freedom of Voluntary Actions, and for the procuring of a decent Regularity in the Method of Life’ ((1710) I.1.iii).8 The original moral entities, he supposes (without however identifying this set), were superadded by God; but most were ‘afterwards added at the pleasure of Men, as they found it expedient to bring them in, for the polishing and the methodising of Common Life’. Their purpose is not the perfection of the universe, ‘but the particular Perfection of Human Conduct: as Superior to Brutal, in being capable of regular Beauty and Grace: that thus in so inconstant a Subject as the Motions of Mens Minds, an agreeable Elegance and Harmony might be produc’d’ ((1710) I.1.iii). They cannot produce ‘any natural Motion or Change in Things’ by their own efficacy, but they endow persons with entitlements and deservingness and show them how to direct their actions ((1710) I.1.iv). Property and dominion are accordingly ‘impositions’. ‘Dominion necessarily presupposeth some Human Act, and some Covenant either Tacit or Express’ (IV.iv.iv). ‘Being owned by X’ is not a property of a thing, the causal effect of which is to confer the right to its use and disposition by X; rather, the power on the part of the human agent X to use and dispose of it constitutes the ownership Pufendorf ’s conception of ‘moral qualities’ is often said to be derived from his teacher Erhard Weigel’s tripartite scheme of ‘natural’, ‘moral’, and ‘notional’ entities. These appear in Weigel’s 1674 Arithmetische Beschreibung der Moral-Weißheit von Personen und Sachen, but I have not had a chance to examine them. 8

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relation for ‘[t]he Natural Substance of things suffers no Alteration, whether Property be added to them, or taken from them’ (IV.iv.i). Pufendorf ’s target is the view that God gave human beings as a species ‘positive’ dominion over the earth, with personal property constituting a subspecies of the general endowment. ‘Thou shalt not steal’ was not a primitive commandment but a social rule deriving its ‘Rise and Original from Humane Covenant’ (IV.iv.iv). Ignoring Genesis and following the pagans, from whom he quotes extensively in connection with original human equality (II.ii.ii) and the later stratification of the social order, Pufendorf envisions an original condition of ‘negative communion’, or general absence of property, which, by degrees, became inconvenient for developing populations. Thereafter property was to be ‘adjusted by the Disposal of Men, according as the peace of Humane Society seemed to require’ (IV.iv. iv). It is worthy of note that Locke, despite his quasi-Epicurean natural philosophy and his belief that concepts are man-made, departs significantly from this understanding, rejecting Pufendorf ’s radical conventionalism. He regards God as having given the earth to human beings in common (positive communion), and even in hunter-gatherer society, he maintains, the ‘law of reason makes the Deer, that Indian’s who hath killed it’ ((1998) §30). No agreement is required for ownership, only (provided the resource is not too scarce) the agent’s own act of appropriation, namely the action of mixing his labour with the natural resource. By contrast, all rights, for Pufendorf, ‘arise from the Concurrence of Men’s minds in mutual Compacts’ (VII.iii.iv). Slavery as well was neither established by Nature nor ordained by God; it arose from human agreement between differently situated persons, whereby ‘the Wiser and richer sort, invited those of less parts, and less Wealth, to assist them in their Business, for hire’ to the benefit of both parties (VI.iii.ii–iii). But it should not be forgotten that the relationship is meant to imply mutual benefit. ‘The Law of Humanity doth by no means allow us to extinguish all Marks of primitive Equality in a Slave . . . so as to use him in the same manner as a Beast or Inanimate Creature, towards which we cannot stand under any Engagement’ (VI.iii.iii). A moral entity, Pufendorf says, can never ‘grow up to the Strength and Force of a Natural Quality’. Things have prices and persons have ‘esteem’ by imposition. When we change the status of a man, we extinguish all his moral qualities, but not his natural ones. ‘When a

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Commoner is created a Nobleman, he only acquires new Right, but does not at all change his Substance, or the Qualities founded in it’ (I.i.xxiii). Although he states that God imposed the institution of sovereignty for ‘Honour, Peace and Safety’ (VII.iii.ii), Pufendorf ridicules the notion that persons who ascend to the throne ‘have suddenly been surrounded with an unusual Glory or Splendor, which could not shine from any other place than heaven’ (VII. iii. iii).9

2. UTILITY, JUSTI CE, AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT Discussions of the legitimation of political authority in Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf revolve around four major themes: (1) the characteristics of human beings—principally their viciousness—that make the law necessary; (2) the characteristics of human beings— whether it is only their equal power and fearfulness, or their comparable rationality and sociability—that make obedience to the law possible; (3) the historical origins of law and law-enforcement; and (4) the current requisites of an orderly society—whether this necessitates a central power or a more distributed form of government. While it is sometimes difficult to determine exactly how selection amongst these various alternatives is being argued for and how the selections are fashioned into a coherent and consistent whole,10 the novelty, force, and relevance of their presentations were undoubtedly clear to the theorists themselves: The cohesion of the state does not

9 ‘Men such as Hornius have conceived majesty to be a physical entity, which, upon being created by God, wanders about over the world with no home or restingplace, until it lights upon a king, who has been selected by a people, and invests him with this august splendor . . . [but] when was it created, at the beginning of then world or later? Is there also but one majesty in the entire world, bits of which are distributed to individual kinds? Do kings have their own special and entire majesty? When a king dies does his majesty perish with him? Or does it survive him . . . ?’ (1710, VII.iii.iv), quoted by Hunter (2001) 89. 10 Thus Pufendorf, despite his constant references to human needs and interests, denies that ‘utility’ is ‘the mother of justice and equity’. Rather, even in the absence of scarcity, when people do not depend on one another, human nature drives us to ‘seek a common society’. This Stoic move is undercut in turn by a quite different ressentiment-based account of law a page later in his text, declaring (following Grotius, who follows Plato) that it is the invention of the multitude for their own advantage.

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require a high level of civic virtue on the part of subjects; it succeeds despite their vices. Metaphysics does not belong in the theory of government; apart from certain general references to God, there should be no appeal to transcendental entities, or to the attainment of perfection.11 Flawed but intelligent human beings, driven by necessity, invented the civic unit, as they invented other technologies. Hobbes and Pufendorf betray their Epicurean heritage in their deployment of robustly material and empirical concepts—needs, emotions, perceptions, agreements, and worldly power.12 The two philosophers proceed to reinterpret the laws of nature; they are not the principles of orderly behaviour exemplified by inanimate objects and demanded of animate ones in a providential universe but either the necessary motions of parcels of matter, or else, in a political context, restrictions on human agency necessitated in light of the fact that association with others is obligatory yet perilous. They are the conditions of pacific and enduring civil society, of ‘commodious living’ (Hobbes (1996) 90, Leviathan, ch. 13) or of the capacity for ‘Order’, ‘Decorum’, and ‘Beauty’ that elevates human beings above the animals (Pufendorf (1710) II.1.v). (Pufendorf does not neglect to mention in this connection the glorious nature of the immortal soul.) Observation reveals what troubles and offends persons, and what vexatious actions they in turn are inclined to perform. (Hobbes (1996) 105–9, Leviathan, ch. 15). The Lucretian text lacks the frank normative assertions of the Epicurean texts on justice. The DRN does not provide the forceful philosophical account presented by Epicurus, according to which ‘Natural justice is a symbol or expression of expediency, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another’ and according to which there is no ‘absolute justice’ but only agreements adapted to particular circumstances that may cease to be expedient when circumstances change (Diogenes Laertius (1972) ii. 673–5, 677). Rather, the topic of justice as expediency is treated descriptively in the DRN in the narration of the emergence of civilization from the savage state, to which Hobbes’s account of the exit from the state of nature has certain parallels (5.1019–20).

11

See Hunter (2003). Cf. Hont (1987), who regards Pufendorf as pulling away from Hobbes and accordingly from Epicureanism. 12

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Where Lucretius claims of early humans merely that ‘They were unable to look to the common interest, and had no knowledge of the mutual benefits of any customs or laws’ and that ‘Individuals instinctively seized whatever prize fortune had offered to them, trained as they were to live and use their strength for themselves alone’ (5.957–61), Hobbes presents them as driven by active malice. ‘In the state of nature there is in all men a desire to do harm’ ((1998) 26). Further, Lucretius describes in effect two successive social contracts. First there is a process of informal pacification as individuals settled down into families and tribes and ‘neighbours, in their eagerness neither to harm nor be harmed, began to form mutual pacts of friendship’ (5.1019–20). If humans—however the traits of mildness, malice, moral vigilance, treachery, conscience, and self-seeking were distributed amongst them—had been incapable of sustaining these considerate relations the species would not have survived (5.1025–8). This agreeable existence is ruined by ambition fuelled by ‘new practices’ and the accumulation of wealth, which brings about a period of competitive, retaliatory, anarchic monarchic claims, followed by a later period of formal pacification that occurred after when ‘people were sick and tired of a life of violence’ in which ‘each individual was prompted by anger to exact vengeance more cruelly than is now allowed by equitable laws’ (5.1145–50). Hobbes collapsed the Lucretian account into a simple exit from the state of nature for which he claimed no anthropological validity. He did not wish his argument to stand or fall on its consistency with scripture or indeed with historical fact; indeed his purpose was not to give a historically plausible account of the exit from the state of nature and the formation of the social contract but rather to persuade his readers to accept the centralization of uncontested and uncontestable power in order to secure and maintain the benefits of civilization, lest the country descend again into the anarchy of Civil War. Following Thucydides and Grotius, he considered warfare to be the default state for human groups.13 Even private friendships according to Hobbes in De Cive are sustained by malice. ‘All society . . . exists for the sake 13 According to Grotius (2005, I.2.iv), citing a number of ancient authors in his favour, ‘In the first principles of nature there is nothing which is opposed to war; rather all points are in its favour’. Nature has given all animals strength for selfdefence and self-assistance. All animals understand some mode of fighting, learned from nature ((2005) 53).

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either of advantage or glory, i.e. it is a product of love of self, not of friends’ ((1998) 24). These overly dramatic claims were sensibly dropped in Leviathan, where the message was nevertheless clear: society ought to exist for the sake of advantage, with glory a disruptive motive ((1996) 88, I.xiii). To argue his case, Hobbes transformed the benign axiom of self-preservation of natural law theory into an original ‘right’ of predation, retaliation, and self-defence that, except where one was fighting for one’s own life or freedom, had to be relinquished. The relationship of Leviathan to the DRN was readily apparent. Creech noted it, and Pufendorf stated that Hobbes had ‘borrowed from Epicurus’ the notion of justice as keeping of covenants ((1710) I.vii.xiii), commenting on Hobbes’s affinity for ‘the old theory of the Epicureans, which he believed Hobbes had derived from his “great friend” Pierre Gassendi who had undertaken to rehabilitate the views of the Epicureans’ (Hochstrasser 2000 79). Hobbes’s book met with outrage and resistance. ‘Without religion, Societies are but like soapy bubbles, quickly dissolved’, said Bishop Bramhall, a leading critic, along with Thomas Tenison, in his refutation of ‘Hobbism’ ((1657) 465). He accused Hobbes of ‘destroying all humane society, and all relations between man and man’ (1657 preface). Hobbes was seen as failing to make the elementary and essential distinction between the expedient and the right and as adopting a harsh and cynical view of human nature. The characterization of Epicureanism and Hobbism as ‘selfishness’ is in some ways easy to understand, but it also reflected a failure on the part of Hobbes’s critics fully to understand Leviathan; and it has tended to distort interpretation ever since, for Hobbes was not only a proponent of the general welfare (Baumrin 1989) but also the champion of the weak against the mighty (Goldenbaum 2011). Other commentators object that Hobbes’s appropriation of Epicurean theory tends towards democratization and so a form of vulgarization of political life (Nichols (1976) 192). According to Bramhall, Hobbes had: devised us a trim Common-wealth, which is founded neither upon Religion towards God, nor Justice towards Man; but meerly upon selfinterest, and self-preservation. Those raies of heavenly Light, those natural seeds of Religion, which God himself hath imprinted in the heart of man, are more efficatious towards preservation of a Society; whether we regard the nature of the thing, or the blessing of God, then all his Pacts, and Surrenders, and Translations of power. ((1657) 464–5)

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Creech, accordingly, read ‘Hobbian’ self-interest back into Lucretius; in his notes to book 5, he commented that ‘here, agreeable to the Epicurean Principles’, Lucretius ‘supposeth Interest to be the cause of all good nature, and the only spring of Action’ ((1682) sig. (e)2v).14 This had dire consequences, according to Creech, insofar as it follows that ‘if Societies began thus, tis evident that they are founded on Interest alone, and therefore self-preservation is the only thing that obliges Subjects to Duty; and when they are strong enough to live without the protection of their Prince, all the bonds to Obedience are cancell’d, and Mutiny and Rebellion will necessarily break forth’ ((1682) sig. (e)4r).15 The fear of discovery and the virtual inevitability of detection and punishment which spoil the enjoyment of ill-gotten gains are cited by Lucretius as well as Epicurus as motives to be just and to obey the law (5.1151). Their emphasis on hedonic incentives stands in contrast to the sui generis aspiration to correct demeanour in the form of disinterested attachment to the pulchrum et honestum of the Stoics. However, neither Epicurean nor Lucretian anthropology anticipates the dark views presented by Hobbes and Pufendorf where self-interest is concerned. The Stoic thesis that every animal is dear to itself and seeks to preserve itself (Cicero (1931) 233 (3.16) was brutally transformed by the two early modern philosophers from a manifestation of the providential government of the universe into a personal passion with malign effects including ‘Hatred’ and ‘A desire for Revenge’ on any aggressors in Pufendorf ((2003) 1.1.3).16 The grim description of natural man in Hobbes’s De Cive and Pufendorf ’s insistence that we must regard the nature of man as ‘corrupted’ and man ‘an animal

14 The Lucretian text contains no axioms of self-interest. Lucretius broadly condemns ambition, greed, and violence and supposes that pity for the weak, especially women and children, was an early addition to the human psyche (5.1019). 15 Montesquieu (1777) iv. 4 in turn had to defend himself against the charge of ‘Spinozism’ in his De l’Esprit des Lois of 1748 by insisting that he was in fact ‘attempting to overthrow Hobbes’s system; a system the most terrible, it making all the virtues and vices depend on human establishments: and by endeavouring to prove, that all mankind are born in a state of war, and that the first natural Law, is that all should make war against all, he, like Spinosa, overthrows both all religion, and all morality’. 16 As Grotius paraphrases them. ‘Every animal has regard for itself, is impelled to preserve itself, to have zealous consideration for itself and shrinks from things liable to cause it destruction. Everyone would prefer to have all his parts and not be deformed’ ((2005) 51).

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seething with evil desires’ ((2006) 10) has given rise to the suggestion of a fusion of Augustinian and Epicurean anthropologies in an emergent doctrine of self-interest that dominates later economic theory (Force 2003).17 Alternatively, one may ascribe to both Hobbes and Pufendorf a kind of selective appeal to experience, aimed at demolishing the unscientific, ineffective, misleading, and accordingly pernicious doctrine of natural sociability. Fear had to continue to ‘smoulder’ to prevent sedition (Nichols (1976) 186; Evrigenis 2008), so peace had to be represented as desirable and attainable and simultaneously as insecure. Not all commentators ascribed a selfishness theory to Epicurus or Lucretius. For Grotius, the position that all behaviour is motivated and rightly so by self-interest is associated with the position of Carneades the sceptic. Pufendorf as well identifies Carneades and other ancients as the original proponents of the self-interest theory, or the doctrine that ‘profit’ rather than ‘nature’ determines right and wrong,18 noting that Epicurus and Lucretius, by contrast, say that justice is general profit or mutual interest (II.iii.x). However, the damage that had been done by the Hobbes–Pufendorf hyperbole added to the background disapproval of the Epicureans remained to be undone. Christian Thomasius, according to Thomas Ahnert, agreed with Pufendorf as to the merit of Epicurus over Aristotle, but he appreciated the danger of publicly avowing this (Ahnert (2009) 58). In an effort to redeem Epicurean theory, he distinguished between ‘corrupt’ self-interest and ‘true’ self-interest, arguing that ‘everything truly good is useful, because it preserves and sustains humans. It is also pleasant . . . honesty is based on the general utility

17 Bernard Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees declares that ‘All untaught Animals are only Sollicitous of pleasing themselves, and naturally follow the bent of their own Inclinations, without considering the good or harm that from their being pleased will accrue to others’ ((1732) 81). Mandeville is a ‘satirical’ writer who genuinely deplored the cruelty and exploitation of his times, against which he protested in bitter terms, unlike the philosophers of sympathy and the advocates of the pulchrum et honestum. According to his preface (1732) his personal preference is for a modest life in a ‘small, peaceable Society’ in an Epicurean grove, removed from the clash of arms, and the pursuit of luxury and debauchery. 18 Carneades the sceptic and Pyrrho, according to Pufendorf, believe that men initiated laws to secure and promote their own advantage. ‘Mankind and all other Animate Beings, are by the guidance of Nature, carried on to the Pursuit of their own Profit; and . . . consequently, there can be no Justice’ ((2003) II.iii.x.128). Horace was known to have represented the view that utility is the ‘mother of justice’.

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of mankind, and we will soon show that he who leads an honest life also leads a joyful and pleasant life.’19 Hume adopted a similar view in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals and he went so far as to question the rationality of institutions that do not serve human interests. Indeed, he claimed to side with Horace and against Grotius and Pufendorf on the question whether ‘utility’ is not ‘the mother of justice and equity’ (Moore (2006) 304). The modern critics of ‘selfishness’, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, asserted that benevolence and sympathy were native to man and the foundation of social relations. Unlike the Stoics, however, they assigned no political importance to benevolence except in the case of love of country. For Hume and Smith, benevolence and sympathy are psychological traits that pertain to private life, to relations with intimates and fictional characters. They do not extend to strangers, or to the poor and downtrodden.20 They implicitly agree however with the Epicureans that only punishment, fear of punishment, and conscience can function in the absence of certainty about the life to come to maintain the social order.

3. STADIAL HISTORY Hobbes’s brief account of the state of nature was given firmer historical reality by Pufendorf. After the Fall, humanity, or at least a substantial portion of it, rapidly dispersed into the wild. Man became ‘a naked Creature no better than dumb, wanting all Things, satisfying his Hunger with Roots and Herbs, slaking his Thirst with any Water he can find’ ((2003) II.1.viii–ix). The ‘history of humanity’ on which these scenes are likely based is laid out in DRN 5.925–1457. Here Lucretius describes the spontaneous appearance of human beings, along with other animals, from 19

§92.

Quoted in Ahnert (2009) from Thomasius’s Einleitung zur Sittenlehre, ch. 1,

20 Thus Smith, ‘The administration of the great system of the universe, however, the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man’ ((2002) VI.2, 3). He may be talking about the inhabitants of other planets, but the point is consistent with his views on the natural limits of sympathy.

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mother earth and their gradual rise to a condition of sophisticated luxury, a history punctuated by his accounts of the invention of speech and the invention of religion. These passages constituted his major contribution to political philosophy and are correlated with the ‘sudden appearance’ (Emerson (1984) 65) of ‘conjectural history’21 around 1750 in France and Scotland. The long history of the pagans, confirmed by geological discoveries and inferences pointing to the great age of the earth replaced, for the learned, the short, cryptic scriptural history,22 whose baffling chronology had engaged such dedicated problem-solvers as Isaac Newton. The discovery of wild tribes in the New World who appeared to live, as the Comte de Buffon observed, ‘without rules, or masters, or laws’, gave reality to the state of nature, and the alternative civilizations of Central and South America prompted intense reflections on the relativity of justice and morality and their dependence on chance, invention, and the demands of the environment. For Buffon, and for Diderot, nature, and by implication human society which was an element of nature, constituted an evolving succession of forms extending deep into the human past and yet to be realized in an unknown future (Diderot (1975– ) ix. 95). Lucretius was by no means the only source of material relating to human prehistory. Drawing on oral traditions, Hesiod and Horace narrated versions of the golden age story, as did Plato, and Dicaearchus, Diodorus Siculus, and Tacitus contributed details and speculations. The presence of ‘barbarians’, hardly distinguished in their eyes from dangerous animals, on the borders of Greek and Roman cities lent everyday reality to the contrast between natural man and civilized man. Lucretius’s account surpasses them, however, in its affectionate portrait of humanity before civilization, and its intelligible presentation of the transition to settlement and the discovery of agriculture and the domestication of animals, and the evolution of the social emotions of pity and mutual assistance. Further, its balanced—that is to say deeply ambivalent—attitude towards civilization permitted it to be read affirmatively, with Hobbes, 21

The term was Dugald Stewart’s, applied to Adam Smith. Compare the account in Genesis: the interval between the expulsion from the Garden and the struggles of warring nations goes by in the twinkling of an eye. Adam is outfitted by God with language right from the start. Agriculture is commanded by God as punishment for Adam’s fall, and Tubal-Cain discovers the knack of working in brass and iron. 22

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Pufendorf, and Adam Smith, or somewhat pessimistically with Buffon, Diderot, and Rousseau. The notion that the state of nature was a miserable one, in which terrified, cowering humans faced a violent, inexplicable nature and sought to placate the imaginary gods with mutilations and sacrifices, was invoked to explain the origins of priestcraft; political subordination was seen as a natural extension of the irrational habit of appeasement (Boulanger 1772). The notion that the state of nature was, on the contrary, free, happy, and pacific offered another Lucretian thought-pathway to criticism of the status quo.23 Lucretius explained, in a leisurely fashion, how originally wild, solitary humans came together in small groups for mutual assistance and protection. The transition to civilization was effected by the accidental discovery of metallurgy. Forest fires devoured trees down to their roots and acquainted people with the molten ores of silver, gold, copper, and lead which they saw could be formed into different shapes. Later, the smelting of iron brought into use the loom, tools for farming and hewing trees, hence shipbuilding, and so commodities and trade. As well, humans crafted, for the first time, effective weapons; for, he observes, bare hands, nails, teeth, stones, and branches are of limited use in fighting. Lucretius supposed accordingly that a warlord-driven state of slaughter and rebellion and regicide followed. ‘Proud sceptres tumbled down in the dust, and the glorious crown that adorned the sovereign head, now blood-bespattered beneath the feet of the rabble, mourned the loss of its high prerogative’ (5.1137–40). Anarchy followed, ‘with all seeking sovereignty and supremacy for themselves’ (5.1141–2). In short, there was a war of all against all. The set of original habits of forbearance based on the sentiments of pity and goodheartedness having proved inadequate to the complexities of the new materially advanced culture, order was at last established by law and enforced by magistrates, with a new equilibrium as Norbrook observes, following on the disequilibrium produced by the chance discovery of metal. The quality of life now improved. ‘Navigation, agriculture, city walls, laws, arms, roads, clothing . . . as well as every one of life’s rewards and refinements . . . 23 We still lack an extended study of the relationship between the Lucretian materialism of the philosophes and their political views. Holbach’s ‘Lettre de Thrasibule a Leucippe’, published in ‘Londres’ c.1768 under the name of ‘Jean Fréret’ and allegedly presenting a recovered Greek manuscript, moves in Lucretian fashion from an opening assault on religion, to an atomist account of experience, to a radical critique of monarchy.

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all . . . were gradually taught by experience . . . as humanity progressed step by step’ (5.1448–57). The narrative of book 5 emphasized that human are animals, sprung like them from the earth, but uniquely inventive animals. For the eighteenth-century anthropologist of a materialistic stamp, the distinguishing characteristic of the human being is not the possession of a soul or even ‘rationality’, but the capacity for improvement, both as an individual and as a species, enabled by language, dexterity, and intelligence. Intellectual, moral, technological, and material progress were, in the eyes of most philosophers, on a steady upward course. For Adam Smith, who neatly categorized human history into the four stages of hunting, herding, agriculture, and commerce in his Lectures on Jurisprudence of the 1760s, the world was experiencing a marvellous transformation from a lawless state of want and misery to a highly regulated but deeply pleasing universal opulence (Smith (1978) 336–40). On another reading suggested by book 5, the progress of civilization is inseparable from greed, corruption, immiseration, and death-dealing. Kings, as far as the narrative is concerned, are both the cause and the effect of strife and bloodshed, their rivalry catching the innocent in their crossfire, and misguided human beings ‘sweat out their blood and weary themselves in vain, struggling along the narrow path of ambition’ (5.1129–31). All improvements have been accompanied by new misfortunes. Early man might have faced starvation and been torn by wild beasts, and terrified by storms, but ‘never in those times did a single day consign to destruction many thousands of men marching beneath military standards; never did the boisterous billows of the ocean dash ships and sailors upon the rocks’ (5.999–1001). To make matters worse, by coming to believe the gods responsible for the heavens, the seasons, and the weather, the unfortunate human race prepared ‘wounds’ and ‘sorrows’ for itself and ‘tears for generations to come’ (5.1194–7). In any case, humanity was doomed as a species. Nothing except individual atoms was a permanent fixture of the universe; all composite entities were subject to disintegration into their multiple parts. Indeed, the book ends with a ghastly, pathetic image of political futility; the plague, borne by invisible malign seeds, unleashes a war of all against all conducted by the dead and the dying.24 24 ‘All the sacred shrines of the gods had been filled by death with lifeless bodies, and all the temples of the celestials, which the sacristans had crammed with guests,

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The theme of civilization-as-decline was developed to great effect by Rousseau, under the promptings of Denis Diderot. In 1751, four years before Rousseau published his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, the Abbé de Prades had laid his semi-Epicurean thesis before the faculty of theology of the Sorbonne, creating a scandal (Morel 1909). According to the Abbé, knowledge is derived from the senses, men are naturally equal, the exit from the state of nature was a gradual and real historical process; all choices are made on the basis of utility; and the rebellion of the weak against the strong is a manifestation of the struggle for self-preservation. The thesis was burned as ‘discours séditieux’, and, censured by the Bishop of Auxelles, the Abbé fled to Prussia. He began to write an apology for himself, and Diderot completed it on his behalf ((1981) iv. 315–77). This exercise seems to have prepared him for further engagement in Lucretian civilizations-critique. The questions of the relationship of civilization to virtue and the significance of the growing divide between aristocratic luxury and rural poverty had as noted aroused the interest of French and Scottish philosophers, and it was natural if somewhat unexpected for the Academy of Dijon to invite contributions on the question of the moral value of the European arts and sciences for its prize essay competition of 1749 and on the origins of inequality for 1754. By way of disseminating his critical views on contemporary French society, Diderot induced Rousseau to write his first and his second Discourses in a contrarian mode (Morel (1909) 20–143), which, instead of celebrating the modern revival of the arts and sciences and the progress of civilization, would present an account of enslavement, frivolity, and decline. Rousseau claimed to have worked out the history of humanity in his head whilst walking in the forest. ‘I sought and found the vision of those primitive times, the history of which I proudly traced. I demolished the petty lies of mankind’ ((1990–2010) v. 326). While he referred to ‘those philosophers who have inquired into the foundations of society’, his expanded narrative was clearly based on De rerum natura, embellished with details from contemporary travel were continually littered with corpses . . . The entire population was in perturbation and panic . . . With loud clamouring people would place their own relatives on pyres piled high for others and apply torches to them, often engaging in bloody brawls rather than abandoning the bodies’ (DRN 6.1272–86).

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literature, and he recapitulated its main points, including the happiness of humans in small families, the invention of language, and the moral catastrophe unleashed by the discovery of agriculture and metallurgy.25 The emphases on the corruptions induced by reason and the delights of solitude and autonomy were, however, Rousseau’s own. After paying the respects due to the story of Adam and Eve, he explained how ‘different accidents . . . were able to perfect human reason while deteriorating the species [and making] a being evil while making him sociable’ ((1990–2010) iii. 42). Rousseau found early humans living in a state of ‘barely perceptible’ and socially inconsequential inequality, making clothes of the skins of animals, sewn together with thorns and fish-bones, adorning themselves with paint and shells and living ‘free, healthy, good, and happy lives’. The happiest epoch of the human race was the middle stage after family life and compassion had taken hold, but before the age of metals. Iron and corn, he says, ruined humanity, through ‘the extraordinary circumstance of some Volcano’. Tools and weapons created different levels of demand for different products, and, as commerce and interdependency grew, some flourished at the expense of others, property was introduced ‘and vast forests were changed into smiling Fields, which had to be watered with the sweat of men, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow with the crops’ ((1990–2010) iii. 49). As Lucretius deplored the growing taste for luxury in the disdain for acorns, grass beds, and fur and leather garments and declared that ‘gold and purple plague human lives with cares and weary them with wars’ (5.1423–4), Rousseau finds superfluities and delicacies producing riches and slavery. Civilized man is seen to be ‘always moving, sweating, toiling, and racking his brains to find still more laborious occupations’. Unhealthy trades poison workers with the fumes of lead, copper, mercury, cobalt, and arsenic. Increasing opulence brings increasing misery; there is a flight to the cities that depopulates the countryside, its ‘fallow fields . . . flooded with unhappy Citizens who have become beggars or thieves, destined to end their misery one day on the rack or on a dung heap’ ((1990–2010) iii. 78). In his Social Contract of 1762, he proposed a new form of social contract aimed at the benefit of all subscribers to prevent their victimization ((1964)

25

The parallelism is treated by Morel (1909) and more recently Black (2001).

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iii 281–97)—in effect, a new equilibrium, but with distributed rather than centralized political power. Rousseau’s deductions predictably failed to meet with the approval of James Beattie who found them perverse, and Adam Smith who reviewed the Second Discourse in 1756 (Smith 1982). There were two systematic refutations in French of the Second Discourse, by Jean de Castillon (1756) and by Joseph de Maistre (1794–5, posth.). Castillon’s was the more impressive work, and he knew the DRN well. He describes Rousseau as having ‘revived the delirium of the Epicureans on our origins; that he reduced our first parents to the level of the most stupid beasts’. He quoted the relevant passages of Lucretius (5.923–79), in his appendix, and he established carefully Rousseau’s anthropological differences with his source. De Maistre’s central objection to Rousseau was that, like Lucretius, he left the evolution of human society up to chance. According to de Maistre, chance has no place in the providential universe where God controls everything, either directly or through the operations of a plastic nature.26 The main points of book 5 were nevertheless absorbed and developed. That status and authority are human inventions adjusted to local needs was a point further reinforced by the Scottish school of conjectural historians.27 John Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779) presents genealogical accounts, based in material and social conditions, of development of the authority of husbands over wives, fathers over children, tribal leaders over tribes, sovereigns over their people, and masters over slaves, emphasizing, on one hand, the ubiquity of these authoritarian arrangements, as explained by their perceived expediency, on the other hand, their diversity and contingency. Changing material conditions call forth different forms of social organization. They are seen to be determined by such features as ‘the fertility or barrenness of the soil, the nature of its productions, the species of labour requisite for procuring subsistence, the number of individuals collected together in one community, their proficiency 26 ‘Man being an active and perfectible being and his action only being exercised on the beings that surround him, it follows that these beings are coordinated with the existence and attributes of man, and that the one being can only act on the other to modify it. If the substances around man were refractory his perfectibility would be a vain quality since it would have neither objects nor materials. [T]he ox is made to work, the horse to be bridled, marble to be cut, the wild vine to be grafted, etc.’ (Maistre (1996) 28). 27 See Stocking (1977) for further references.

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in arts, the advantages which they enjoy for entering into mutual transactions, and for maintaining an intimate correspondence’ (Millar (1779) 2). There is much chance, or at least contingency, in all this. Although the political message drawn from the ‘experimental’ as opposed to ‘metaphysical’ account of status is that existing relations are normally adapted to circumstances, and cannot be altered without throwing society into chaos, the reader could also draw the conclusion that the material conditions of the future, while not replicating the conditions of primitive equality, would demand entirely different social relations including the abolition of status distinctions and inequality.28 One can understand, in light of Pufendorf ’s mockery of kingliness as a real quality, and the demystifying analysis of the conjectural historians, Edmund Burke’s impassioned plea, in the wake of the French Revolution, to restore the fiction of natural aristocracy, even if from ‘the wardrobe of a moral imagination’. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. (Burke (2006) 76)

4. CONCLUSION The rediscovery and rehabilitation of ancient atomism and its associated cosmology was an enabling condition of the emergence of the ‘new sciences’ of the seventeenth century, giving rise to multiple patterns of conflict and accommodation with theism and with Christian institutions. Analogously, the political and social theory of the Greek and Latin atomists was the enabling condition of the ‘new 28 Emerson ((1984) 66) objects to attempts to link Scottish conjectural history with Marxism. The Scots, he says, ‘were closer in their outlook to Lucretius, Vives or Bacon than to Marx’ (83). Marx’s familiarity with Epicurus is less relevant here than his and Engels’s familiarity with Rousseau as a transmitter of Lucretian evolutionary theory. ‘Already in Rousseau we find . . . a sequence of ideas which corresponds exactly with the sequence developed in Marx’s Capital ’: Engels (1935) 158 ff.; cf. Marx and Engels (1956–90) 20: 91–2.

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politics’ of early modernity that gave rise to analogous patterns of conflict and accommodation. The contempt of Hobbes and Pufendorf for ancient philosophy and their demand that political philosophy be put on a newer and sounder footing was chiefly directed at Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, whose social and political theory were each ‘naturalistic’ in the following sense: relationships and patterns in natural phenomena and especially in the heavens served as models for conduct and incitements to effort (Cicero (1931) 197). The relationship of ruler to ruled is ubiquitous in nature; some are born to be masters; others to be slaves, as Aristotle states in his Politics (1252a30 ff.). For the Epicurean, there are no governors in the sky and there are no hierarchies in nature that serve as models for rational human political organization. There are however, as Lucretius emphasizes, mechanisms that account for the cohesion and persistence of the entities, both large and small, around us, and insofar as the city or the state is another such entity, there must be mechanisms that produce it and maintain its stability, at least for a time. The ‘pact of nature’ that keeps her on a steady course is mirrored in the social pacts that prevent fragmentation. Political authority, on the neo-Epicurean view, comes into existence in the human world only through the explicit agreement by subjects to be ruled, or their passive acquiescence in being ruled, or through their forced subjugation. The duty of obedience to the law and its representatives can only be grounded, on this view, in its usefulness to those who are bound by it, rather than in the necessity of rule over the inferior by the superior or on account of any supernatural mandate or dispensation or any qualities pertaining to nature as opposed to imposition or convention.29 Writing in the mid-nineteenth century Henry Maine characterized the evolution of social and political theory since Roman times as a movement ‘from status to contract’ (Maine 2005). This implied an evolution from conceptions of rights and duties based on such ‘natural’ features as ancestral lineage, sex, and birth order, which doomed or entitled human beings to certain social experiences and opportunities, to conceptions of rights and duties as pertaining to interchangeable

29 Contract theories of sovereignty antedate Hobbes; the contract envisioned between the sovereign and ‘the people’ is however between the ‘estates’ or the aristocracy and the monarch, not between the sovereign and ‘the multitude of single individuals within the state’, nor, as in Hobbes’s formulation, between the individuals themselves to alienate their natural right to all things; see Goldenbaum (2011).

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individuals free to enter into voluntary contractual relations. In accord with Maine’s general thesis, it is apparent that the very notion of ‘natural law’ is reinterpreted in early modern period to signify a convention that can be appreciated as necessary or desirable by a rational, welfare-oriented observer who has no illusions about human nature. When Pufendorf defines the law as the will or decree of a superior ((1710) I.vi.iv) and when Hobbes denies that anything is just or unjust outside of a system of promulgation and enforcement, these claims should not be taken as suggesting that the law is arbitrary. The appeal to authority does not reflect the ontological status of the law, but the need to impress its necessity on the malicious man or woman who cannot be depended upon to think like a philosopher. In the course of laying out his ontology, Lucretius insisted that, unlike ‘matter’, historical events, however well-attested, have no independent existence (1.464–70). The configurations and movements of the atoms that underlie and produce these events are contingent; what we call historical reality might have been constituted in some other way. Further, insofar as time does not exist, except as a mode of experience, these events are now ‘real’ only in their subsistence as memory images. The emphasis of these passages is on the superficiality of the social relations and ideals that structure our experience and our aspirations and on the ephemerality of human history. While this might seem a poor foundation for political theory, the reality of human cruelty and the physical and mental suffering humans inflict on one another is a recurring theme of the poem. The contrast with Stoicism is striking in this regard. The Stoic position is that it is always within the soul’s power to ‘preserve its own fair weather and calm, and not accept [pain] as an evil’ (Marcus Aurelius (1983) 78; 8.28); that ‘pain is slight if opinion has added nothing to it’ and a man is ‘only as wretched as he thinks himself to be’ (Seneca (1917–25) iii. 189; Epistle 78.11–14). Pity is as troublesome an emotion as envy (Cicero (1927) 251; 3.9–10). Poetry and song may be allowed as vehicles for grieving (though not perhaps by the Platonist), but the wise man is above complaints and accusations, and it is beneath the dignity of philosophy to dwell on misery. With Lucretius, there is a powerful fusion of the two genres, allowing for protest and lamentation in the context of physical and ethical theory. The DRN forces a psychological confrontation not only with natural evils such as the absolute finality of death and the pain of bereavement, the anguish of jealousy, and the ravages of

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disease, but also with man-made evils: the loss of life and limb in war and shipwreck, and the human propensity for domination and cruelty. Despondency in the face of the shocks and misfortunes of life is to be mitigated, it seems, by the realization that all is ephemeral, and that experience, memory, and pain are annihilated by the death of the individual. It is the sublime of the suave mari magno writ large, so that tranquillity is theoretically the outcome for the Epicurean as well as the Stoic. But the fusion of poetry and philosophy in Lucretius established at the same time the conditions for a philosophy of grievance. It was a stimulus to the ‘torrent of tears’ (Fusil (1930) 176) of eighteenth-century letters and to the perceptive and critical attitude towards institutionally mediated cruelty that emerges in that century. Lucretius’s many references to affection, generation, and renewal and his refusal to be impressed by military valour upend the conventional ethical values of ancient philosophy. This might help to explain his otherwise somewhat mysterious appeal to his female readers.30 His stadial history, into which he inserts an aside about the fearsome inventions of warfare and some bloody experiments with rampaging lions and bulls (5.1308–40), was arguably important in encouraging Enlightenment scepticism regarding militarism and conquest. The view that waging war was not a necessary and meritorious human activity, but instead a murderous practice that had appeared for chance reasons late in human prehistory, suggested that in some future stage of cultural evolution a civilized society might dispense with it.

These engaged readers included Lucy Hutchinson, the first English translator of the complete DRN (see Hutchinson 2012), esp. lix–lxv), and the ‘libertine’, Aphra Behn (Tomlinson 2012). Margaret Cavendish was likely exposed to Lucretian ideas through the Cavendish circle and Hobbes and her acquaintance with Hutchinson. They would have had to contend with Lucretius’s derogatory remarks regarding women’s appearance and wholesomeness at 4.1149–91 and their intelligence and skill at 5.1350–60. 30

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Index Adriani, Marcello 75, 78 Anaxagoras 205 animals 14, 22, 71, 73, 80–2, 110–11, 193–6, 228–9, 234, 248–9, 268 Annesley, Arthur, Earl of Anglesey 62 Anon., anonymous translator of Lucretius 62–3 Aquinas, Thomas 215 Aristotle, Aristotelianism 10, 15, 18, 54n19, 70–1, 76, 94, 96, 109, 128, 130–1, 133, 196, 199, 218, 219, 259, 263, 271, 280 atheism 7, 12, 24–5, 123–33, 187–9, 209, 219, 227, 248–9, 253, 260 Avancius (Girolamo Avanzio) 54, 124–7 Averroes 15 Bacon, Francis 209–10 Barozzi, Pietro 126 Behn, Aphra 22, 64, 249 Bembo, Pietro 94–6, 105–7, 120, 127 Bentley, Richard 48n6 Bloom, Harold 1 Bodleian Library, Oxford 46–68, 126n13 Boyle, Robert 63, 64, 217–19 Bracciolini, Poggio 1, 4, 14n35, 30, 49, 50, 55 Bramhall, John 88, 269–70 Brome, Alexander 63, 172 Browne, Richard 172 Bruno, Giordano 16–17, 91–4, 100, 102–3, 106n58, 130, 180, 186 Burke, Edmund 279 Burton, Robert 180, 208 Caesar, Julius 13, 30–1, 33, 36, 37, 239 Candidus (Pietro Candido) 54 Capece, Scipione 16, 91–2, 94–5, 116–19, 121, 127 Casaubon, Isaac 11–12 Casaubon, Meric 11, 61, 63, 179 Castillon, Jean de 278 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle 21, 180n57, 227, 282n30 Cavendish, Sir Charles 63 Cavendish, William, Duke of Newcastle 171

censorship 15–18, 49, 91n4, 97–8, 127–8, 131, 170n32, 194n11, 248 chance 22, 70–1, 86, 88, 129, 131, 167, 186, 201–21, 230, 249, 278–9 Charleton, Walter 61, 63, 162, 171, 180, 187–8, 194, 197, 198, 217, 227n10 Christina, Queen of Sweden 21–2, 163–6, 168 Cicero 5, 7, 29–31, 37–8, 40, 42, 75, 80, 101, 112n70, 206–8, 239, 240, 262, 270, 280, 281 Cipelli, Giovanni Battista 124 Cosimo, Piero di 228n14 Cotton, Charles 246 Coverdale, Miles 7 Cowley, Abraham 248 Crassus 30, 36 Creech, Thomas 12, 21, 22–5, 63–8, 162 n6, 176, 183–5, 188–9, 192, 195, 197, 201–2, 211, 213–15, 219, 220, 235, 247–54, 269–70 Cromwell, Oliver 242–3, 246–7, 252 Cudworth, Ralph 63, 189 Davidson, William 171 Democritus 54n19, 206–9 Denham, Sir John 243 Descartes, René 164, 168, 180, 187, 197, 260 Diderot, Denis 273, 276 Digby, Sir Kenelm 63, 162, 167–8, 180, 187, 188 Diogenes Laertius 7, 11, 20, 60, 69, 71, 74n15, 76, 225 Dionysius of Alexandria 207 Donne, John 208–9 Dryden, John 9, 19, 192, 214, 220, 253–5 du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, sieur 97, 99 Egnazio, Battista 124, 126 Empedocles 16, 32, 37, 39n22, 43, 94, 100, 109, 205 Ennius 13, 30, 33, 36, 40, 206, 231 Epicurus, Epicureanism 6–8, 14–21, 25, 26, 38–42, 55–8, 73–4, 84, 87, 98, 100, 112–14, 162, 167, 169,

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312

Index

Epicurus, Epicureanism (cont.) 179, 187–9, 207, 215, 224–5, 229, 232, 234, 236, 240, 262, 267, 271 Erasmus, Desiderius 11, 94n18, 131 ethics, Epicurean 7, 25, 69–89, 104–5, 203–4, 245, 262 Evelyn, John 11–12, 21–2, 48n6, 61, 176–89, 191, 213, 214, 215, 227, 234–5, 242–3 Evelyn, Mary 21–2, 176–8 Faber, Tanaquillus (Taneguy Le Fevre) 60 Fanshawe, Sir Richard 172, 178 Ferandus, Thomas 53, 123 Ficino, Marsilio 15–16, 55, 96, 119 Florio, John 20, 147, 148, 155, 157, 158, 159 Fonzio, Bartolomeo 75 Fracastoro, Girolamo 94 Frachetta, Girolamo 17, 18 Francus (Raffaele Franceschi) 56 Fridenperger, Paulus 53, 123–5 Gassendi, Pierre 20–1, 24, 60, 64, 65, 162, 163, 167, 169–70, 178, 179, 187, 193–4, 218, 225–9, 232, 234, 236, 238, 239, 269 Genesis, book of 22, 192–5, 249, 265, 273 Ghislieri, Michele 127 Giannotti, Donato 54n19 Gifanius, Obertus 58–9, 62–3, 65, 170, 182 Greenblatt, Steven, The Swerve 1, 4–6, 9, 26, 138, 153 Grotius, Hugo 164, 260, 261, 268, 270, 271 Guicciardini, Luigi 82–3 Hérault, Jean 164–5 Hermarchus 77n26, 228, 238 Hesiod 207, 229, 273 Hobbes, Thomas 21, 22, 24–5, 77, 87–9, 171, 187, 189, 225–7, 231–5, 238, 240–1, 242, 243, 246, 248, 250–5, 260–70, 280–1 Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’ 274n23 Homer 33, 154, 205, 250 Hooke, Robert 63, 196, 217 Horace 40, 105n54, 135, 140, 271n18, 272 Huet, Pierre-Daniel 164 Hume, David 272

Hutchinson, Lucy 22, 61–2, 178, 191, 210, 213–15, 243–7, 257, 282n30 Hyde, Edward, first Earl of Clarendon 226 Jansson, Cornelius 60, 170, 172–4, 182 Julian the Apostate 3 Lachmann, Karl 3, 10, 18, 68 Lactantius 5, 6, 46, 112n70, 194, 207, 210 Lambinus, Dionysius (Denys Lambin) 10, 18–19, 21, 56–9, 65, 138, 164, 166, 170, 182 Lamoignon, Guillaume de 165 Langlois, Jean 170 Lateran Council, fifth 15, 16, 18, 128 Livy 14, 74, 240 Locke, John 219n94, 264, 265 Lucian 18, 103 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) De rerum natura civilization, origins of 74–80, 227–41, 272–9 clinamen (swerve) 1, 6, 8, 22–4, 26, 29–31, 70, 72, 201–3 conventionalism 85, 234–5, 263–6 ethics, see separate entry gender and sexuality 19–20, 135–60, 173, 176, 234–5, 313 imitations of 91–121 language and style 3, 8–9, 13, 19, 35, 39, 42, 149–60, 202–3, 226, 230–1, 236–8, 250 pacifism 31–6, 38–40, 282 poetry and philosophy 3, 8, 18, 21, 205–11, 224 politics 13–14, 24–6, 69–89, 223–57, 259–82 primitivism 74–5, 81, 85, 229–30, 246, 255, 268, 272–9 reception England 21–5, 51–2, 61–8, 176–89, 201–21, 223–57, 263–72 France 18–21, 56–7, 60–1, 135–60, 161–89, 276–9 Germany 263–6, 271–2 Italy 13–18, 49–50, 52–6, 59–60, 69–89, 91–121, 123–33 religion 21, 36–8, 183–5, 191–9, 201–21, 239–41, 260–1 social contract 70, 78–9, 87–8, 228–30, 235, 266–72, 277–9

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Index soul, mortality of 15–17, 108–19, 184–5 textual transmission 3–6, 9–10, 45–68 Venus in see Venus Machiavelli, Niccolò 10–11, 13–15, 69–89, 238, 240, 254n81 Maistre, Joseph de 278 Mandeville, Bernard 271n17 Manutius, Aldus 54–5, 125 Marchetti, Alessandro 18, 55, 128, 255 Marolles, Michel de 18, 20–1, 62–3, 161–89, 194 Marullus, Michael 54, 94 Marvell, Andrew 243, 252 Marx, Karl 1, 26, 279n28 materialism, aleatory 1, 26 Memmius, C. 30, 34 Millar, John 278 Milton, John 22, 24n48, 191–2, 195–6, 248 Molière (J.-B. Poquelin) 165n17, 170 Montaigne, Michel de 19–20, 135–60 mortalism 10, 11, 16, 18, 46, 96, 113, 115, 129–31, 167, 184–5, 210, 226 Muscoletta, Gianfrancesco 55 Nanteuil, Robert 178n46 Nardi, Giovanni 59–60, 65 natural theology 201–21 Naugerius (Andrea Navagero) 54–5 neo-Latin poetry 15, 91–121, 226 Newton, Isaac 64, 217, 273 Oldmixon, John 66–7 Ovid 75n19, 229 Owen, Jane 51–2 Owen, John 51–2 Paleario, Aonio 16–17, 95–6, 114–16 Palingenius (‘Marcello Palingenio Stellato’) 16, 17, 91–3, 98–103, 128n19 Parisetti, Lodovico 16, 92, 103–13, 119–20 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 179 Petrarch 4 Peyrère, Isaac de la 22, 197–9 Pinelli, Gian Vincenzo 17 Pio, Alberto 125 Pius, J. P. (Giovanni Battista Pio) 56, 214 Plato, Platonism 55, 57, 70, 93–4, 96, 109, 111, 114, 119, 219, 235, 266n10, 281 Plutarch 5, 7, 26, 36, 82, 239 Poggio see Bracciolini, Poggio

313

Pomponazzi, Pietro 15, 18, 93n13, 96, 114, 133n33 Porphyry 238 Prades, Jean-Martin de 276 Pufendorf, Samuel 260–2, 264–72, 274, 279, 281 Pyrrhus of Epirus 40 Quirini, Vincenzo 127 Ragazonibus, Theodorus de 123 Rand, William 179, 227 Rawlinson, Richard 62 reason 1, 71, 87, 93, 99, 125, 201–21, 232, 249, 254, 265, 277 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 276–8 Sarasin, Jean-François 60 Savonarola, Girolamo 78 Scala, Bartolomeo 75 Scandianese, Tito Giovanni 17 Seneca 7, 158, 207 Sherburne, Edward 172 Smith, Adam 275, 278 Spinoza, Baruch de 25, 197, 260 Stanley, Thomas 61, 64, 193 Stoicism 7, 37, 93n13, 203, 211, 223, 280, 281 Strauss, Leo 15, 26–7, 224 sublime, the 100, 227, 242, 282 Tarquinius Superbus 237 Taylor, Jeremy 179 Tiptoft, John, first Earl of Worcester 51 Tonson, Jacob 67–8, 253–5 Turnebus (Adrien de Tournebou) 57 Urquhart, Sir Thomas 171 Venus 19, 26, 30n2, 31–3, 37n15, 42–3, 59, 135–60, 172–3 Virgil 4, 6, 11, 19, 118–19, 141, 154, 155–7, 160, 208, 227, 231, 236, 251, 255 Vossius, Isaac 47, 68n40 Waller, Edmund 179, 186–7, 242–3, 246–7, 251–2, 254 Wilmot, John, second Earl of Rochester 196, 249 Zeno, Jacopo 126