The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

Thou,OVenus, art sole mistress of the nature of things, and without thee nothing rises up into the divine realms of life, nothing grows to be lovely or glad….Through all the mountains and the seas, and the rushing rivers, and the leafy nests of the birds, and the plains of the bending grass, thou strikest all breasts with fond love, and drivest each after its kind to continue its race through hot desire…. For so soon as the spring shines upon the day, the wild herd bound over the happy pastures, and swim the rapid streams, each imprisoned by thy charms, and following thee with desire.

(TRANSLATION BY MUNRO.)

He is a strange man, this Lucretius, obviously nervous and unstable; story has it that a love-philtre has poisoned him, and left him subject to fits of melancholy and insanity. He is all sensitivity, all pride, wounded by every prick of circumstance; a man born for peace, and forced to live in the midst of Caesar’s alarms; a man with the make-up of a mystic and a saint, hardening himself into a materialist and a skeptic; a lonely soul, driven into solitude by his shyness, and yet pining for companionship and affection. He is a dark pessimist, who sees everywhere two self-canceling movements—growth and decay, reproduction and destruction,Venus and Mars, life and death. All forms begin and have their end; only atoms, space, and law remain; birth is a prelude to corruption, and even this massive universe will thaw and flow back into formlessness:

No single thing abides, but all things flow.

Fragment to fragment clings; the things thus grow

Until we know and name them. By degrees

They melt, and are no more the things we know.

Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift

I see the suns, I see the systems lift

Their forms; and even the systems and their suns

Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.

Thou too,O Earth—thine empires, lands and seas—

Least, with thy stars, of all the galaxies,

Globed from the drift like these, like these thou too

Shalt go. Thou art going, hour by hour, like these.

Nothing abides.Thy seas in delicate haze

Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place;

And where they are shall other seas in turn

Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.

(PARAPHRASE BY MALLOCK.)

It is a sad philosophy, hardly calculated to give men courage in the face of fate; no wonder story tells how Lucretius killed himself (55 B.C.) at the age of forty-one.What ennobles this verse for us is the sincerity of the poet, and the rugged power of the poetry. The Latin of his lines is rude yet; a generation must pass before the language of the Romans will be polished into rhythm and refinement by Cicero’s vain (and Virgil’s careful) pen; but the liquid fluency of the great orator, and the feminine grace of Augustus’ favorite, yield to these masculine hexameters, these picturesque unwonted adjectives, these stately verbs and resounding substantives. As we listen we are transported into the Garden of Epicu-rus, and hear the distant laughter of Democritus, who knew what Lucretius did not know: that gaiety is wiser than wisdom.