Smith - On the Nature of Things

ON THE NATURE OF THINGS

For my daughter, Lucinda, with love

carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti exitio terras cum dabit una dies.

The verses of sublime Lucretius are destined to perish only when a single day will consign the world to destruction.

Ovid Amores 1.15.2324

LUCRETIUS

ON THE NATURE OF THINGS

Translated, with Introduction and Notes,
by MARTIN FERGUSON SMITH

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge

Original translation and introduction copyright 1969 by Martin Ferguson Smith.

Revised translation and editorial apparatus copyright 2001 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lucretius Carus, Titus.

[De rerum natura. English]

On the nature of things / Lucretius ; translated, with introduction and notes, by Martin Ferguson Smith.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-87220-588-6 (cloth) ISBN 0-87220-587-8 (paper)

1. Didactic poetry, LatinTranslations into English. 2.

Philosophy, AncientPoetry. I. Smith, Martin Ferguson. II. Title.

PA6483.E5 S6 2001
187dc21 2001026403

ePub ISBN: 978-1-60384-779-7

CONTENTS

This translation, a product of my mid-twenties, was first published by Sphere in 1969, but has been out of print since 1972. I am grateful to Hackett for reissuing it in the autumn of my life.

The bulk of the translation has been left unchanged, but many minor alterationsimprovements, I hopehave been made. The opportunity has been taken not only to remove misprints, mistakes, and infelicities, but also to take account of advances in Lucretian scholarship over the past thirty years or so; and whereas the original version was based on the Latin text in Cyril Baileys three-volume edition of Lucretius (Oxford University Press, 1947), the present version follows, except in a few places indicated in the footnotes, my own text in the latest printing of the Loeb Classical Library edition (Harvard University Press, 1992). American English spellings have been substituted for British English ones.

The Introduction has been considerably extended and, where not rewritten, thoroughly revised. The same applies to the footnotes. The Suggestions for Further Reading and Index are new.

It is not only Lucretian scholarship that has moved on since the late 1960s. So has Western society, and I believe that mine is the first English translation of Lucretius to have consistently avoided the most obvious manifestations of sexist language: man and he are never used unless the reference is to a male.

I gratefully acknowledge my debts to the following: to D. S. Hutchinson of the University of Toronto for helpful comments on a draft of the Introduction; to Maggi Reyner, Foulas school teacher, for expert word processing; to Meera Dash for her careful management of the books production; above all to Deborah Wilkes, whose constant enthusiasm and warm encouragement spurred me on as I battled, sometimes by the light of a gas lamp or candles, to accomplish my task in the depths of a dark Shetland winter.

M. F. S.
Isle of Foula, Shetland Islands
February 2001

The autumn of my life has turned to winter, but it warms my heart to know that this translation continues to be useful to its readers. In his award-winning book The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (Norton: New York, 2011), Stephen Greenblatt describes how the access the translation gave him to Lucretius opened up a whole new world for him. Of course all the credit for changing Greenblatts life belongs to Lucretius, but I am pleased that it was my translation that introduced him to On the Nature of Things, a philosophical and scientific poem of unsurpassed brilliance, whose message is as profoundly relevant and important today as it was two thousand years ago.

M. F. S.
Foula
March 2012

(Numerical references are always, unless otherwise indicated, to the text of Lucretius.)

Of all the great Latin writers, we know least about Titus Lucretius Carus, author of the philosophical poem On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura). He does not talk about himself in the way that his contemporary Catullus does, and information from other sources is meager and unreliable. St. Jerome, writing more than four hundred years after Lucretius death, makes the sensational statement that the poet went mad in consequence of drinking a love potion, wrote in the intervals of his insanity, and committed suicide. Since earlier writers show no knowledge of this story, which is fine; unfortunately, however, it is not always confined to the realm of fiction: under its influence some critics have detected in Lucretius work signs of morbid pessimism and even mental unbalance and then have used their discoveries as confirmation of what St. Jerome saysa circular procedure that is completely out of order. The correct approach is to consign Jeromes statement to the wastepaper basket and to approach On the Nature of Things with an unprejudiced mind.

Lucretius was born at the beginning of the first century B.C., perhaps in 99 B.C., and it is most probable that he died in 55 B.C. If we assume that the dates 9955 are correct, he was born when Cicero was aged seven and Julius Caesar was a toddler; and when he died, Virgil and Horace were aged fifteen and nine or ten respectively. Catullus probably died in 54 B.C.

We know nothing of Lucretius family, but, whether he was highborn or of humbler origin, it is evident that he received an excellent education: a master not only of Latin, but also of Greek, he possessed a wide knowledge of the literature of both languages; and his partiality for legal and political metaphors suggests that he may have been prepared for a forensic or political career.

He was familiar with the city and may have spent much of his life in Rome. He appears to have witnessed military exercises on the Campus Martius (2.4043, 323332); he had attended horse races (2.263265; 4.990) and theatrical performances (2.416417; 4.7583, 978983; 6.109110). His vivid description of the man who leaves his fine mansion in the city out of boredom, jumps into the ancient equivalent of a fast car, dashes out to his country villa as though on his way to save a house on fire and, as soon as he has arrived, yawns and either goes to sleep or returns to the city (3.10601067), must be based on his own experience of the restless and unsatisfactory life led by some wealthy Romans.

It is clear, however, that not all his time was spent in the city. Numerous passages in his poem show his familiarity with the countryside, woods and forests, mountains, rivers, and streams. He has an extraordinary sympathy with nature and possesses the keen powers of observation of an artist. Witness his vivid picture in the opening lines of the poem (1.120) of the effect of spring on climate, flowers, pastures, sea, sky, winds, birds, wild animals, and cattle. Witness too his descriptions of animals in the fields: the cow searching vainly for her lost calf (2.352366); the flock of sheep and lambs moving on the green hillside, but appearing only as a motionless white blur when viewed from the distance (2.317322); and the newborn calves and lambs, intoxicated with milk, frisking on unsteady legs in the tender grass (1.259261). The probability is that he owned a villa in the country and spent as much time as possible there.

A line in Book 4 (1277) has been taken, perhaps rightly, to imply that he was a married man. Several passages in the poem suggest that he was fond of children, but of course do not prove that he had any of his own. The celebrated attack on sexual love (4.10581191), which has sometimes been thought to reflect his own unhappy experience of the opposite sex (compare the story of the love potion), is in line with the Epicurean view that while it is all right to satisfy sexual desire, provided that this does not cause one physical or mental disturbance, the passion of love is disturbing and destructive and therefore to be avoided.