But by the seventeenth century the pressure of the new science, growing intellectual speculation, and the lure of the great poem itself became too great to contain. The brilliant French astronomer, philosopher, and priest Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) devoted himself to an ambitious attempt to reconcile Epicureanism and Christianity, and one of his most remarkable students, the playwright Molière (1622–1673), undertook to produce a verse translation (which does not, unfortunately, survive) of De rerum natura. Lucretius had already appeared in a prose translation in French by the abbé Michel de Marolles (1600–1681). Not long afterwards, an Italian translation by the mathematician Alessandro Marchetti (1633–1714) began to circulate in manuscript, to the dismay of the Roman Church, which successfully banned it from print for decades. In England, the wealthy diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706) translated the first book of Lucretius’ poem; a complete version in heroic couplets was published in 1682 by the young Oxford-educated scholar Thomas Creech.
Creech’s Lucretius was greeted as an astonishing achievement when it appeared in print, but an English translation of almost the entire poem, also in couplets, was already in very limited circulation, and from a surprising source. This translation, which was not printed until the twentieth century, was by the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson, the wife of Colonel John Hutchinson, parliamentarian and regicide. What is most striking perhaps about this remarkable accomplishment is that, by the time the learned translator presented the text to Arthur Annesley, first Earl of Anglesey, on June 11, 1675, she had come to detest its central principles—or so she claimed—and to hope that they would vanish from the face of the earth.
She would certainly have consigned these verses to the fire, she wrote in her autograph dedicatory letter, “had they not by misfortune17 been gone out of my hands in one lost copy.” This sounds, of course, like the familiar gesture of feminine modesty. It is a gesture she reinforces by refusing to translate several hundred sexually explicit lines in book 4, noting in the margin that “much here was left out for a midwife to translate whose obscene art it would better become than a nicer pen.” But in fact Hutchinson made no apology for what she called her “aspiring Muse.”18 Rather, she abhorred “all the atheism and impieties” in Lucretius’ work.
The “lunatic” Lucretius, as Hutchinson called him, is no better than the other pagan philosophers and poets routinely commended to pupils by their tutors, an educational practice that is “one great means19 of debauching the learned world, at least of confirming them in that debauchery of soul, which their first sin led them into, and of hindering their recovery, while they puddle all the streams of Truth, that flow down to them from divine grace, with this pagan mud.” It is a lamentation and a horror, Hutchinson wrote, that now, in these days of the Gospel, men should study Lucretius and adhere to his “ridiculous, impious, execrable doctrines, reviving the foppish, casual dance of atoms.”
Why, then, when she earnestly hopes that this wickedness will disappear, did she painstakingly prepare a verse translation, pay a professional scribe to write out the first five books, and carefully copy out book 6, along with the Arguments and the marginalia, in her own hand?
Her answer is a revealing one. She had not initially realized, she confessed, how dangerous Lucretius was. She undertook the translation “out of youthful20 curiosity, to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand.” We have, through this remark, a glimpse of those quiet conversations, conducted not in the lecture hall or from the pulpit, but away from the prying ears of the authorities, in which Lucretius’ ideas were weighed and debated. This gifted, learned woman wanted to know for herself what the men in her world were arguing about.
When her religious convictions matured, Hutchinson wrote, when she “grew in Light and Love,” this curiosity and the pride she felt and in some sense continued to feel in her accomplishment began to sour:
The little glory21 I had among some few of my intimate friends, for understanding this crabbed poet, became my shame, and I found I never understood him till I learned to abhor him, and dread a wanton dalliance with impious books.
But why, in that case, should she have wished to make this wanton dalliance available to others?
Hutchinson said that she was simply obeying Anglesey, who had asked to see this book that she now beseeched him to conceal. To conceal, not to destroy. Something restrained her from urging that it be consigned to the fire, something more than the copy that had already gone out of her hands—for why should that have held her back?—and more even than her pride in her own accomplishment. An ardent Puritan, she echoed Milton’s principled opposition to censorship. She had, after all, “reaped some profit22 by it, for it showed me that senseless superstitions drive carnal reason into atheism.” That is, she learned from Lucretius that childish “fables” meant to enhance piety have the effect of leading rational intelligence toward disbelief.
Perhaps too Hutchinson found the manuscript strangely difficult to destroy. “I turned it23 into English,” she wrote, “in a room where my children practiced the several qualities they were taught with their tutors, and I numbered the syllables of my translation by the threads of the canvas I wrought in, and set them down with a pen and ink that stood by me.”
Lucretius insisted that those things that seemed completely detached from the material world—thoughts, ideas, fantasies, souls themselves—were nonetheless inseparable from the atoms that constituted them, including in this instance the pen, the ink, and the threads of the needlework Hutchinson used to count the syllables in her lines of verse. In his theory, even vision, so seemingly immaterial, depended on tiny films of atoms that constantly emanated from all things and, as images or simulacra, floated through the void until they struck the perceiving eye. Thus it was, he explained, that people who saw what they thought to be ghosts were falsely persuaded of the existence of an afterlife. Such apparitions were not in reality the souls of the dead but films of atoms still floating through the world after the death and dissolution of the person from whom they had emanated. Eventually, the atoms in these films too would be dispersed, but for the moment they could astonish and frighten the living.
The theory now only makes us smile, but perhaps it can serve as an image of the strange afterlife of Lucretius’ poem, the poem that almost disappeared forever, dispersed into random atoms, but that somehow managed to survive. It survived because a succession of people, in a range of places and times and for reasons that seem largely accidental, encountered the material object—the papyrus or parchment or paper, with its inky marks attributed to Titus Lucretius Carus—and then sat down to make material copies of their own. Sitting in the room with her children, counting the syllables of translated verses on the threads of her canvas, the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson was serving in effect as one of the transmitters of the atomic particles that Lucretius had set in motion centuries and centuries earlier.
By the time Hutchinson reluctantly sent her translation to Anglesey, the idea of what she called “the foppish, casual dance of atoms” had already long penetrated the intellectual imagination of England. Edmund Spenser had written an ecstatic and strikingly Lucretian hymn to Venus; Francis Bacon had ventured that “In nature nothing24 really exists besides individual bodies”; Thomas Hobbes had reflected wryly on the relationship between fear and religious delusions.
In England, as elsewhere in Europe, it had proved possible, though quite difficult, to retain a belief in God25 as the creator of atoms in the first place. Thus Isaac Newton, in what has been called one of the most influential pieces of writing in the history of science, declared himself an atomist, making what appears to be a direct allusion to the title of Lucretius’ poem. “While the Particles continue entire,” he remarked, “they may compose Bodies of one and the same Nature and Texture in all Ages: But should they wear away, or break in pieces, the Nature of Things depending on them, would be changed.” At the same time, Newton was careful to invoke a divine maker. “It seems probable to me,” Newton wrote
in the second edition of the Opticks (1718),
That God in the Beginning26 form’d Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportions to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he form’d them; and that these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary Power being able to divine what God himself made one in the first creation.
For Newton, as for other scientists from the seventeenth century to our own time, it remained possible to reconcile atomism with Christian faith. But Hutchinson’s fears proved well grounded. Lucretius’ materialism helped to generate and support the skepticism of the likes of Dryden and Voltaire and the programmatic, devastating disbelief expressed in Diderot, Hume, and many other Enlightenment figures.
What lay ahead, beyond the horizon of even these farsighted figures, were the astonishing empirical observations and experimental proofs that put the principles of ancient atomism on a whole different plane. When in the nineteenth century he set out to solve the mystery of the origin of human species, Charles Darwin did not have to draw on Lucretius’ vision of an entirely natural, unplanned process of creation and destruction, endlessly renewed by sexual reproduction. That vision had directly influenced the evolutionary theories of Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, but Charles could base his arguments on his own work in the Galápagos and elsewhere. So too when Einstein wrote of atoms, his thought rested on experimental and mathematical science, not upon ancient philosophical speculation. But that speculation, as Einstein himself knew and acknowledged, had set the stage for the empirical proofs upon which modern atomism depends. That the ancient poem could now be safely left unread, that the drama of its loss and recovery could fade into oblivion, that Poggio Bracciolini could be forgotten almost entirely—these were only signs of Lucretius’ absorption into the mainstream of modern thought.
Among those for whom Lucretius was still a crucial guide, before this absorption had become complete, was a wealthy Virginia planter with a restless skeptical intelligence and a scientific bent. Thomas Jefferson owned at least five Latin editions of On the Nature of Things, along with translations of the poem into English, Italian, and French. It was one of his favorite books, confirming his conviction that the world is nature alone and that nature consists only of matter. Still more, Lucretius helped to shape Jefferson’s confidence that ignorance and fear were not necessary components of human existence.
Jefferson took this ancient inheritance in a direction that Lucretius could not have anticipated but of which Thomas More, back in the early sixteenth century, had dreamed. Jefferson had not, as the poet of On the Nature of Things urged, withdrawn from the fierce conflicts of public life. Instead, he had given a momentous political document, at the founding of a new republic, a distinctly Lucretian turn. The turn was toward a government whose end was not only to secure the lives and the liberties of its citizens but also to serve “the pursuit of Happiness.” The atoms of Lucretius had left their traces on the Declaration of Independence.
On August 15, 1820, the seventy-seven-year-old Jefferson wrote to another former president, his friend John Adams. Adams was eighty-five, and the two old men were in the habit of exchanging views on the meaning of life, as they felt it ebb away. “I [am] obliged27 to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne,” Jefferson wrote:
“I feel: therefore I exist.” I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.
These are the sentiments that Lucretius had most hoped to instill in his readers. “I am,” Jefferson wrote28 to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, “an Epicurean.”
This portrait of the young Poggio Bracciolini appears in the preface to his Latin translation of Xenophon’s account of the education of the ideal ruler, the Cyropaedia.
Proudly noting that he is the secretary to Pope Martin V, Poggio signs his characteristically elegant transcription of Cicero, made in 1425, and wishes the reader farewell. Poggio’s handwriting was prized in his own lifetime and was one of the keys to his advancement.
This bronze Seated Hermes was found in fragments in 1758 at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. A pair of winged sandals reveals his identity as the messenger god Hermes. To an Epicurean the figure’s elegant repose might have suggested that the gods had no messages to deliver to mankind.
The enemies of Epicureanism associated it not with the thoughtful pose of the Seated Hermes but with the drunken abandonment of this Silenus, sprawled on a wineskin draped over a lion’s pelt, found near the Hermes sculpture at the Villa of the Papyri.
The small bust of Epicurus, which retains its original base with the philosopher’s name inscribed in Greek, was one of three such busts that adorned the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. In his Natural History (chap. 35), the Roman author Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) noted a vogue in his time for portrait busts of Epicurus.
“Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged” (John 19:1). The biblical text inspired images like this painting by the Austrian Michael Pacher and helped promote not only sympathy for the cruelly mistreated Messiah and rage at his tormentors but also a fervent desire to emulate his suffering.
The heretic Hus, forced to wear a mock paper crown declaring his misdeeds, is burned at the stake. Afterwards, to prevent any sympathetic bystander from collecting a relic of the martyr, his ashes are shoveled into the Rhine.
This portrait of Poggio appears in a manuscript of his work De varietate fortunae. The work, written when Poggio was sixty-eight years old, eloquently surveys the ruins of ancient Roman greatness.
Poggio’s friend Niccoli here brings his long-awaited transcription of On the Nature of Things to a close with the customary word “Explicit” (from the Latin for “unrolled”). He enjoins the reader to “read happily” (“Lege feliciter”) and adds—in some tension with the spirit of Lucretius’ poem—a pious “Amen.”
At the center of Botticelli’s painting stands Venus, surrounded by the ancient gods of the spring. The complex choreography derives from Lucretius’ description of the great seasonal renewal of the earth: “Spring comes and Venus, preceded by Venus’ winged harbinger, and mother Flora, following hard on the heels of Zephyr, prepares the way for them, strewing all their path with a profusion of exquisite hues and scents” (5:737–40).
Montaigne’s signature on the title page of his heavily annotated Lucretius—the great edition published in 1563 and edited by Denis Lambin—was written over by a subsequent owner—“Despagnet”—and hence not identified for what it is until the twentieth century.
A bronze statue of Bruno, sculpted by Ettore Ferrari, was erected in 1889 in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori on the spot where he was burned at the stake. In the monument, on the base of which are plaques devoted to other philosophers persecuted by the Catholic Church, the larger-than-life Bruno looks broodingly in the direction of the Vatican.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
Portrait of young Poggio. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ms. Strozzi 50, 1 recto. By permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali with all rights reserved
Poggio’s transcription of Cicero. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ms. Laur.Plut.48.22, 121 recto. By permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali with all rights reserved
Seated Hermes. Alinari / Art Resource, NY
Resting Hermes. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
Bust of Epicurus. By courtesy of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli / Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei
The Flagellation of Christ, Michael Pacher. The Bridgeman A
rt Library International
Heretic Hus, burned at the stake. By courtesy of the Constance Rosgartenmuseum
Portrait of elderly Poggio. © 2011 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. lat.224, 2 recto
Niccoli’s transcription of On the Nature of Things. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ms. Laur.Plut.35.30, 164 verso. By permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali with all rights reserved
La Primavera, Sandro Botticelli. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
Montaigne’s edition of Lucretius. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library
Ettore Ferrari’s statue of Giordano Bruno. Photograph by Isaac Vita Kohn
NOTES
PREFACE
1 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (London: Sphere Books, 1969; rev. edn., Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 1:12–20. I have consulted the modern English translations of H. A. J. Munro (1914), W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (1975, 1992), Frank O. Copley (1977), Ronald Melville (1997), A. E. Stallings (2007), and David Slavitt (2008). Among earlier English translations I have consulted those of John Evelyn (1620–1706), Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681), John Dryden (1631–1700), and Thomas Creech (1659–1700). Of these translations Dryden’s is the best, but, in addition to the fact that he only translated small portions of the poem (615 lines in all, less than 10 percent of the total), his language often renders Lucretius difficult for the modern reader to grasp. For ease of access, unless otherwise indicated, I have used Smith’s 2001 prose translation, and I have cited the lines in the Latin text given in the readily available Loeb edition—Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.