Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/65

Rh LUCRETIUS 51 Chronicle, Jerome followed, often carelessly and inaccurately, the accounts contained in the lost work of Suetonius De Viris Illustribus. But that work was written about two centuries after the death of Lucretius ; and, although it is likely that Suetonius used the information transmitted by earlier grammarians, there is nothing to guide us to the original sources from which the tradition concerning the life of Lucretius was derived. The strange character of the story which has been transmitted to us, and the want of any support to it from external evidence, oblige us to receive it with a certain reserve. According to this account the poet was born in the year 94 B.C. ; he became mad (&quot;in furorem versus&quot;) in conse quence of the administration of a love-philtre ; and after composing several books in his lucid intervals, which were subsequently corrected by Cicero, he died by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of his age. The statement of Donatus in his life of Virgil, a work also based on the lost work of Suetonius, that Lucretius died on the 15th of October 55 B.C., the same day on which Virgil assumed the toga virilis, is inconsistent either with the date assigned for the poet s birth or with the age at which he is said to have died. A single mention of the poem (which from the condition in which it has reached us may be assumed to have been published posthumously) in a letter of Cicero s, written early in 54 B.C., is confirmatory of the date given by Donatus as that of the poet s death. Similar errors in chronology are common in the summaries of Jerome ; and, where there is an inconsistency between the date assigned for the birth of any author and the age at which he is said to have died (as, for instance, in the case of Catullus), there are grounds for believing that the error lies in the first date. Taking the statements of Donatus and of Jerome together, we may consider it probable that Lucretius died in the October of 55 B.C., in the forty-fourth year of his age, and that he was born either late in the year 99 B.C. or early in the year 98 B.C. He would thus be about seven years younger than Cicero, a year or two younger than Julius Csesar, about the same age as Memmius, to whom the poem is dedicated, and about fifteen years older than Catullus and Calvus, the younger poets of his generation, from whom he is widely separated both by his more archaic style and rhythm and by the greater seriousness of his art and the more earnest dignity of his character. The other statements of Jerome have been questioned or disbelieved on the ground of their intrinsic improbability. They have been regarded as a fiction invented in a later time by the enemies of Epicureanism, with the view of discrediting the most powerful work ever produced by any disciple of that sect. It is more in conformity with ancient credulity than with modern science to attribute a permanent tendency to derangement to the accidental administration of any drug, however potent. A work characterized by such strength, consistency, and con tinuity of thought is not likely to have been composed &quot;per intervallainsanise.&quot; Donatus, in mentioning the poet s death, gives no hint of the act of suicide. The poets of the Augustan age, who were deeply interested both in his philosophy and his poetry, are entirely silent about the tragical story of his life. Cicero, by his professed anta gonism to the doctrines of Epicurus, by his inadequate appreciation of Lucretius himself, and by the indifference which he shows to other contemporary poets, seems to have been neither fitted for the task of correcting the unfinished work of a writer whose genius was so distinct from his own, nor likely to have cordially undertaken such a task. Yet these considerations do not lead to the absolute rejection of the story as a pure invention of a hostile and uncritical age. The evidence afforded by the poem rather leads to the conclusion that the tradition contains some germ of fact. We need not attach any importance to the supposed efficacy of the love-philtre in producing mental alienation, nor are we called upon to think of Lucretius as one liable to recurring fits of insanity, in the ordinary sense of the word. But it is remarkable, as was first observed by Mr Munro, his English editor, that in more than one passage of his poem he writes with extraordinary vividness of the impression produced both by dreams and by waking visions. It is true that the philosophy of Epicurus put great stress on these, as affording the explanation of the origin of supernatural belicts. But the insistence with which Lucretius returns to the subject, and the horror with which he recalls the effects of such abnormal phenomena, suggest the inference that he himself may have been liable to such hallucinations, which are said to be consistent with perfect sanity, though they may be the precursors either of madness or of a state of despair and melancholy which often ends in suicide. 1 Other passages in his poem, as, for instance, the lines &quot; Nos agere hoc autem, et naturam quserere rerum, Semper et inventam patriis exponere chartis,&quot; 2 where he describes himself as ever engaged, even in his dreams, on his task of inquiry and composition, produce the impression of an unrelieved strain of mind and feeling, which may have ended* in some extreme reaction of spirit, or in some failure of intellectual power, from the conscious ness of which he may, in accordance with examples which he himself quotes, have taken refuge in suicide. But the strongest confirmation of the existence of some germ of fact in the tradition is found in the unfinished condition in which the poem has reached us. The subject appears indeed to have been fully treated in accordance with the plan sketched out in the introduction to the first book. But that book is the only one which is finished in style and in the arrangement of its matter. In all the others, and especially in the last three, the continuity of the argu ment is frequently broken by passages which must have been inserted after the first draft of the arguments was written out. Thus, for instance, in his account of the transition from savage to civilized life, he assumes at v. 1011 the discovery of the use of skins, fire, &c., and the first beginning of civil society, and proceeds at 1028 to explain the origin of language, and then again returns, from 1090 to 1160, to speculate upon the first use of fire and the earliest stages of political life. These breaks in the continuity of the argument show what might also be inferred from frequent repetitions of lines which have appeared earlier in the poem, and from the rough work manship of passages in the later books, that the poem could not have received the final revision of the author, and must have been given to the world by some editor after his death. Nor is there any great difficulty in believing that that editor was Cicero. It is not necessary to press the meaning of the word &quot; emendavit &quot; as applied to the task fulfilled by him. Cicero certainly was incap able of &quot; improving &quot; any of the poetry of Lucretius, and the slight mention which he makes of the poem in a letter to his brother (&quot; the poem of Lucretius is, as you describe it, a work not of much genius but of much art &quot; 3 ) seems to imply that he was not very capable of appreciating it. But other motives, besides appreciation of the poet s genius or sympathy with his doctrines, may have induced 1 Of. Fortnightly Review, September 1878. 2 &quot; While I seem to be ever busily plying this task, to be inquiring into the nature of things, and to be expounding my discoveries by vvritings in my native tongue.&quot; 3 The reading is so uncertain that it is doubtful whether it is the claim of genius or of art that Cicero refuses to concede. Some inter pretations of the passage imply that he conceded both.