The New Lifetime Reading Plan

His temperament was original, his thought less so. As he proudly avers, he borrowed his system from the Greek Epicurus (341-270 b.c.e.), who in turn derived parts of his theory from two earlier Greek thinkers, Democritus (fl. 5th century b.c.e.) and Leucippus (ca. 460-370 b.c.e.). The Epicurean philosophy has little in common with our modern use of the phrase. Acknowledging pleasure (or, more accu- rately, the absence of pain) as the highest good, it rests its ethics on the evidence of the senses. But the pleasures Epicurus recommends are those flowing from plain living and high thinking.

Denying the existence of any supernatural influence on men^ lives, Epicurus holds that the world and ali things in it are the consequence of the meeting and joining of refined but quite material atoms. Lucretius expounds this materialism sys- tematically, explaining everything from optics to ethics in terms of atoms. He empties the world of God; his gods are do- nothing creatures living in the "interspaces," caring nothing about men. In effect he is an atheist. He attributes the origin and behavior of ali things to the movement of the atoms com- posing them. Free will is saved by the idea of the "swerve" of some atoms, a break in the general determinism. To Lucretius, the soul dies with the body. He exhorts the human race to live without the fear born of superstition. Of the Nature of Things is pioneer rationalist propaganda.

The "atomic theory" of Lucretius was less absurd than many other early Greek explanations of the universe, but in ali truth it has little resemblance to our modern atomic theory, and too much should not be made of the anticipation. On the other hand, Lucretius foreshadows much of our own thought in the fields of anthropology, sociology, and evolution. Like Euripides [7], he would have been quite at home in our century.

As we should expect, his poem is knotty and difficult, for physics and cosmology do not translate easily into verse. It is remarkable that he should have succeeded as well as he did. While there are many opaque stretches, they are worth strug- gling through in order to come upon the frequent passages of intense eloquence and beauty. These flow from Lucretius's ability, unmatched until we meet Dante, to hold in his head a complete vision of things and to body it forth in concrete, sometimes unforgettable images.

In Virgil's [20] famous line, "Happy is he who knows the causes of things," the reference is probably to Lucretius. It is Lucretius^ passion for knowing causes, his stubborn refusal to be fobbed off with myth and superstition, together with his uneven but powerful art, that commend him to our modern temper. No matter how wrong he was in detail, it was a titanic achievement to build a universe out of nothing but matter and space.

C.F.

20

VIRGIL

70-19 B.C.E. The Aeneid

The poet called by Tennyson "wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man" used that measure to cele- brate Rome^ high destiny, yet was no Roman but a Gaul. He was born near Mantua, situated in what was then called Cisalpine Gaul. His quiet life was marked by study in Rome and by years of contemplation and composition at his Mantuan farm and later on at his residences in Campania. His relatively brief life span may point to the fragile physique of which we have other evidence. The great Maecenas, minister of the

greater Emperor Augustus, was his patron, as he was that of VirgiPs friend, the poet Horace.

Labor on his masterwork occupied his entire last decade. He felt the Aeneid to be unfinished and, dying, ordered its destruction. This was prevented by Augustus, however, whose gesture seems odd to us in an age when heads of state are not only proudly ignorant of literature but in some cases not even particularly literate.

Homer [2,3] may be said to have begun European litera­ture, Virgil to have begun one of its subdivisions, the literature of nationalism. The Aeneid was written with a deliberate pur- pose: to dramatize, through the manipulation of legend, the glory and destiny of that Rome which had reached its high point in VirgiPs own Augustan Era. The Aeneid is no more an "artificial" epic than is the Iliad. But it is a more self-conscious one. Writing it, Virgil felt he was performing a religious and political duty. Aeneas is called "pious," by which is meant that he was not merely orthodox in religious observance but faithful to the idea of Roman supremacy. The Aeneid⁹s political center of gravity may be located in the famous lines of Book VI, in which the spirit of Anchises is showing forth to his son the glo- rious future of Rome: "Romans, these are your arts: to bear dominion over the nations, to impose peace, to spare the con- quered and subdue the proud."