In the early part of the twentieth century the renowned philosopher and Harvard professor, George Santayana, published a wonderful little book entitled Three Philosophical Poets. It is aptly, though perhaps not too inventively, named, as it treats in chronological order three of the more overtly philosophical poets whose magna opera belong to the Western canon: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Santayana’s principal contention in the book is that each one of the three gives voice to a distinct philosophical position or worldview; the work of each poet, that is to say, illustrates his own position’s highest expression. More particularly, he says of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura that it is the Western world’s loftiest vehicle for NATURALISM, Dante’s Divine Comedy is this same for SUPERNATURALISM, and Goethe’s Faust for ROMANTICISM. These three are, he maintains, the chief phases of European philosophy.
It is an interesting argument, to be sure, and also compelling. But as I read this book and continued to consider its title, I could not help but waver over its implicit argument. These three authors, it seemed to me, exhibited a greater degree of disparity than of kinship. I sensed chiefly that Lucretius and the De Rerum Natura resisted inclusion in this group. Dante and Goethe, I thought, were indeed philosophical poets, but Lucretius would more suitably be classed among the poetic philosophers, in whose company one would find the likes of Empedocles, Parmenides, Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida and others. After all, Lucretius himself claimed that his verse was merely ancillary to his larger purpose – namely, to introduce the salvific doctrines of his master, Epicurus, to the Romans, an audience so clearly and so desperately in need of them. Toward the end of Book I, Lucretius remarks, in a passage that has very justly become famous:
Nunc age, quod super est, cognosce et clarius audi.
nec me animi fallit quam sint obscura; sed acri
percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor
et simul incussit suavem mi in pectus amorem
Musarum, quo nunc instinctus mente vigenti 925
avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis
atque haurire iuvatque novos decerpere flores
insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam,
unde prius nulli velarint tempora Musae; 930
primum quod magnis doceo de rebus et artis
religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo,
deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango
carmina musaeo contingens cuncta lepore.
id quoque enim non ab nulla ratione videtur; 935
sed vel uti pueris absinthia taetra medentes
cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum
contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore,
ut puerorum aetas inprovida ludificetur
labrorum tenus, interea perpotet amarum 940
absinthi laticem deceptaque non capiatur,
sed potius tali facto recreata valescat,
sic ego nunc, quoniam haec ratio plerumque videtur
tristior esse quibus non est tractata, retroque
volgus abhorret ab hac, volui tibi suaviloquenti 945
carmine Pierio rationem exponere nostram
et quasi musaeo dulci contingere melle,
si tibi forte animum tali ratione tenere
versibus in nostris possem, dum perspicis omnem
naturam rerum, qua constet compta figura. 950
De Rerum Natura I.921-950
which I translate as follows:
“Now come, learn and listen more clearly to what remains. It does not escape me how dark these matters are; but the hope of praise has struck my heart with the sharp thyrsus, and at the same time it has struck into my chest the sweet love of the Muses, impelled by which I now wander with vigorous mind through places pathless to the daughters of Pieros, worn away by the foot of none before. It pleases me to approach untouched fountains and drink, and it pleases me to pluck off new flowers and thereupon to seek for my head the illustrious crown, whence the Muses have covered the temples of none before; first, because I teach about great things and proceed to free the soul from the tight bonds of religion, next because I compose verses so clear about an obscure topic, touching all with musical charm. For this too has a function: as with children, when doctors attempt to administer foul wormwood, they first touch the rims around the cups with the sweet, yellow fluidity of honey, so that their unwitting age might be deluded as far as the lips, so that they might drink off the bitter liquid of wormwood and, though deceived, would not be cheated, but rather, restored by such a deed, grow strong. Thus do I now, since this account commonly seems to be rather gloomy to those by whom it has not been considered, and the crowd shrinks back from this doctrine, I have chosen to set forth for you in sweet-speaking Pierian song my account and, as it were, to touch it with the sweet honey of the Muses, if by chance I might be able in my verses to hold your attention with such an account, while you see clearly the nature of things.”
And so it would certainly appear that Lucretius himself conceived the poetic form of the De Rerum Natura as purely incidental. To modernize his simile, the roughly seven thousand and two hundred hexameters were little or no more than the cherry flavoring in Children’s Tylenol. Moreover the motivation behind the passage seems one of justification, as if he were fully expecting some or all of his readers to question or even challenge his chosen medium.
And this brings us to a more profound problem. Indeed, were we to doubt the significance of this passage, this simile, or perhaps miss it the first time round, we could not fail to recognize that it appears again, almost verbatim, as the opening lines of Book IV. Clearly, Lucretius wanted his readers to take note of this simile. But why? Did he have good reason to expect some raised eyebrows over his decision to convey the Epicurean philosophy through the medium of poetry? I believe he in fact had two reasons to believe this, pertaining respectively to Plato on the one hand and to Epicurus himself on the other.
Turning initially to Epicurus, Lucretius’s conception of this philosopher, hailing from what is today commonly referred to as the ‘silver age’ of Greek philosophy, was absolutely unambiguous: he quite literally worshiped him. Not only do the first, third, fifth and sixth books of the De Rerum Natura contain, either at or very near their beginnings, eulogies to him, but also within these eulogies he names him either “divus homo” or, more bluntly, “deus ille.” One would guess that for Lucretius Epicurus was the closest thing to those almost hopelessly contrived, Martian-like deities, who were said to dwell within the intermundia or ‘spaces between the worlds’ and who served for Epicurus and his followers as models of excellence and exemplars of the highest good: perfect tranquility. The trouble was that this ‘god-like’ man, it would seem, did not dig poetry. In his indispensable text, The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius wrote in reference to the Epicurean sage that “he would not compose poems assiduously.” (10.117-21b) Now, the degree of importance we would attach to the adverb ‘assiduously’ is beside the point; the fact remains that Epicurus evidently urged his disciples to approach the composition of poetry tentatively or, even better, not at all. So, one might well wonder why Lucretius should choose to lay out the central doctrines of Epicureanism in seven-plus thousand lines of beautifully crafted and hard-won lines of dactylic hexameter.
But what was the rationale behind Epicurus’s patent, albeit slightly qualified, prohibition of the poet’s artistry? It appears to have been twofold: first of all, most poetry, and certainly the poetry that is most universally loved and admired, like that, say, of Homer, Hesiod, and company, is positively riddled with lies; indeed, Hesiod’s own Muses admit as much when they inform him that while they surely have the capacity to deliver unto him the truth, they also know how, when they are of a mind, to tell him lies so persuasive that he would have no means of adjudicating the difference between the two. Secondly, poetry, both reading that of others and composing one’s own, is an enterprise so resplendent with passion, with love – also a big no-no in the eyes of the master – that it presents too great a risk of disturbing one’s ataraxia or, to use Lucretius’s term, ‘tranquillitas’. And this brings us to Plato.
In the midst of their theoretical construction of the ideal polis in the Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors eventually confront the problem of education. In the end, they decide, though it pains them all, and not least of all Socrates, to do so, that poetry, replete with lies as it is, would ultimately cause greater harm than good, and so must be banished from the perfectly balanced and therefore perfectly just state.
And yet we cannot help but feel that Socrates, himself Plato’s own artistic rendering of the man, kept his fingers crossed while uttering this pronouncement. For not only must Plato have had some cognizance of the generally poetic character of his dialogues, we also find him, when faced with an especially intractable concept, resorting to metaphor, a tool of the poet, not the philosopher. Thus has he given us his twin-horsed chariot, his ladder of love, his myth of Er, and his allegory of the cave, to name just a few of the more noteworthy examples. Plato’s condemnation of poetry is undermined by the very form in which it is pronounce.
And do we not feel that the same might well be true of Lucretius, that is to say, that his work as a whole, and the simile of the honey-rimmed cup in particular, possesses the same self-refuting character? That simile, as well as the haunting beauty one encounters at almost every turn in the De Rerum Natura, is not reducible to mere supplement. Memos and shopping lists are supplemental; the De Rerum Natura is high art, and as an achievement, it simply would not have been possible without an enormous share of passion, or love.
So it seems Santayana has been vindicated: Lucretius was indeed, and perhaps even despite himself, more the philosophical poet than the poetic philosopher. And we thank our lucky stars.
