Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/66

Rh 52 him to undertake a task which has not been very success fully performed. It may be remarked further that scepticism as to statements about their lives is less warranted in the case of the great Roman than of the great Greek writers, from the fact that the work of criticism went on at Rome contemporaneously with the progress of original creation, and that the line of gram marians and commentators by whom these statements were transmitted continued unbroken almost from the first beginning of Latin literature. We find in the instance of nearly all the other Latin poets, even of the most obscure among them, that their birthplace has been recorded, and it has often been remarked that Latin poetry was an Italian and provincial rather than a purely Roman product. From the absence of any claim on the part of any other district of Italy to the honour of having given birth to Lucretius it is inferred that he was an exception to the rule, and was of purely Roman origin. No writer certainly is more purely Roman in personal character and in strength of understanding. He seems to speak of Rome as his native state in such expressions as &quot; patriai tempore iniquo,&quot; &quot; patrii sermonis egestas,&quot; and &quot; patriis chartis.&quot; His silence on ths subject of Roman greatness and glory as contrasted with the prominence of these sub jects in the poetry of men of provincial birth such as Ennius, Virgil, and Horace, may be explained by the principle that the familiarity of long-inherited traditions had made the subject one of less wonder and novelty to him. The Lucretian gens to which he belonged was one of the oldest of the great Roman houses, nor do we hear of the name, as we do of other great family names, as being diffused over other parts of Italy, or as designating men of obscure or servile origin. It seems from the evidence of the name, confirmed by the tone in which he writes, as probable as any such inference can be that Lucretius was a member of the Roman aristocracy, belong ing either to a senatorian or to one of the great equestrian families, living in easy circumstances, and familiar with the spectacle of luxury and artistic enjoyment which the great houses of Rome and the great country houses in the most beautiful parts of Italy presented. If the Roman aristocracy of his time had lost much of the virtue and of the governing qualities of their ancestors, they showed in the last years before the establishment of monarchy a taste for intellectual culture which might have made Rome as great in literature as in arms and law, if the republic could have continued. The discussions which Cicero puts in the mouth of Velleius, Cotta, &c., indicate the new taste for philosophy developed among members of the governing class during the youth of Lucretius ; and we hear of eminent Greek teachers of the Epicurean sect being settled at Rome at the same time, and living on terms of intimacy with them. The inference that Lucretius be longed to this class, and shared in the liberal culture which it received, is confirmed by the tone in which he addresses Memmius, a man of an eminent senatorian family, and of considerable oratorical and poetical accom plishment, to whom the poem is dedicated. His tone to Memmius is quite unlike that in which Virgil or even Horace addresses Maecenas. He addresses him as an equal ; he expresses sympathy with the prominent part his friend played in public life, and admiration for his varied accomplishment, but on his own subject claims to speak to him in the tones of authority. Although our conception of the poet s life and circum stances is necessarily vague and meagre, yet his personal force is so remarkable and so vividly impressed on his poem, and his language bears so unmistakably the stamp of sincerity, that we seem able to form a consistent idea of his tastes and habits, his sympathies and convic tions, his moral and emotional nature. If we know nothing of the particular experience which determined his passionate adherence to the Epicurean creed and his attitude of spiritual and social isolation from the ordinary course of Roman life and belief, we can at least say that the choice of a contem plative life was not the result of indifference to the fate of the world, or of any natural coldness or even calmness of temperament. In some of his most powerful poetry, as in the opening lines of the second and of the third books, we can mark the strong recoil of a humane and sensitive spirit from the horrors of the raign of terror which he witnessed in his youth, and from the anarchy and confusion which prevailed at Rome during the later years of his life ; while his vivid realization of the pains and disappointments of passion, of the unsatisfying nature of all violent emotion, and of the restlessness and weariness of life which excessive luxury entails, suggest at least the inference that he had not been through his whole career so much estranged from the social life of his day as he seems to have been in his later years. Passages in his poem attest his familiarity with the pomp and luxury of city life, with the attractions of the public games, and with the pageantry of great military spectacles. But much the greater mass of the illustrations of his philosophy scattered through the poem indicate that, while engaged in its composition, and in the studies preparatory to it, he must have lived in the country or by the sea-shore, and that he must have passed much of his time in the open air, exercising at once the keen observa tion of a naturalist and the contemplative vision of a poet. He shows a fellow feeling with the habits and moods of the animals associated with human toil and adventure. He seems to have found a pleasure, more congenial to the modern than to the ancient temperament, in ascending mountains or wandering among their solitudes (vi. 469, iv. 575). References to companionship in these wander ings, and the well-known description of the charrn of a rustic meal (ii. 29) enjoyed with comrades amid beautiful scenery and in fine weather, speak of kindly sociality rather than of any austere separation from his fellows. Other expressions in his poem (e.g., iii. 10, &c.) imply that he was an ardent student of books, as well as a sympathetic observer of outward phenomena. Foremost among these were the writings of his master Epicurus ; but he had also an intimate knowledge and appreciation of the philosophical poem of Empedocles, and at least an acquaintance with the works of Democritus, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Plato, and the Stoical writers. Of other Greek prose writers he knew Thucydides and Hippocrates ; while of the poets he expresses in more than one passage the highest admiration of Homer, whom he lias imitated in several places. Next to Homer Euripides is most fre quently reproduced by him. There is an evident struggle between the impulses of his imaginative temperament, prompting him to recognize the supremacy of the great masters in art and poetry, and the influence of the teach ing of Epicurus, in accordance with which the old poets and painters of Greece are condemned as the authors and propagators of false ideas both of nature and the gods. But his poetical sympathy was not limited to the poets of Greece. For his own countryman Ennius he expresses an affectionate admiration ; and he imitates his language, his rhythm, and his manner in many places. The fragments of the old tragedian Pacuvius and of the satirist Lucilius show that Lucretius had made use of their expressions and materials. In his studies he was attracted by the older writers, both Greek and Roman, in whose masculine temperament and understanding he recognized an affinity with his own. He had a most enthusiastic admiration foi genius, especially when exercised in the investiga-