Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/69

Rh L U C L U C 55 stition.&quot; Thus he describes with a grave solemnity of feeling the procession of the image of Cybele through the cities of men, and acknowledges the beneficent influence of the truths symbolized by that procession. The supposed &quot; atheism &quot; of Lucretius proceeds from a more deeply reverential spirit than that of the majority of professed believers in all times. His moral attitude is also far removed from that either of ordinary ancient Epicureanism or ordinary modern materialism. Though he acknowledges pleasure to be the law of life, &quot;dux vitse dia voluptas,&quot; yet he is far from regarding its attainment as the end of life. What man needs is not enjoyment, but &quot; peace and a pure heart.&quot; &quot; At bene non potorat sine puro pcctore vivi.&quot; The victory to be won by man is the triumph over fear, ambition, passion, luxury. With the conquest over these nature herself supplies all that is needed for happiness. Self-control and renunciation are the lessons which he preaches with as much fervour and as real conviction as any of the preachers of Stoicism. &quot; Great riches consist in living plainly with a contented spirit &quot; &quot; Diviti;e grandes homini sunt vivere pare* animo.&quot; As was mentioned above, it is uncertain whether the short criticism of Cicero (&quot;Lucretii poemata,&quot; &amp;lt;fec.) con cedes to Lucretius the gifts of genius or the accomplishment of art. Readers of a later time, who could compare his work with the finished works of the Augustan age, would, if they refused his claim to the full possession of the two necessary constituents of the greatest poets, have certainly disparaged his art rather than his power. But with Cicero it was different. He greatly admired, or professed to admire, the genius of the early Roman poets, while he shows that indifference to the poetical genius of his younger contemporaries which men who have formed their taste for puetry in youth, and whose own intellectual interests have been practical and political, often do to the new ideas and new modes of feeling which an original poet brings into the world. On the other hand, as one who had himself written many verses in his youth, and as one of the greatest masters of style who have ever lived, he could not have been insensible to the immense superiority in rhythmical smoothness which the hexameter of Lucretius has over that of Ennius and Lucilius. And no reader of Lucretius can doubt that he attached the greatest importance to artistic execution, and that he took a great pleasure, not only in propelling &quot;the long roll of his hexameter&quot; to its culmi nating break at the conclusion of some weighty paragraph, but also in producing the effects of alliteration, assonance, &c., which are so marked a peculiarity in the style of Plautus and the earlier Roman poets. He allows his taste for these tricks of style, which, when used with moderation by writers of a more finished sense of art such as Virgil and even Terence, have the happiest effect, to degenerate into mannerism. And this is the only drawback to the impression of absolute spontaneity which his style produces. But those who recognize in him one of the most powerful and original poetical forces which have appeared in the world feel, when they compare him with the greatest poets of all times, that he was unfortunate in living before the natural rudeness of Latin art the &quot; traces of the country,&quot; which continued to linger &quot; in rude Latium &quot; down to the time of Horace had been successfully grappled with. His only important precursors in serious poetry were Ennius and Lucilius, and, though he derived from the first of these an impulse to shape the Latin tongue into a fitting vehicle for the expression of elevated emotion and imagina tive conception, he could find in neither a guide to follow in the task he set before himself. He had thus, in a great measure, to discover the way for himself, and to act as the pioneer to those who came after him. The difficulty and novelty of his task enhances our sense of his power. His finest passages are thus characterized by a freshness of feeling and enthusiasm of discovery, as of one ascending, alone and for the first time, the &quot; pathless heights of the Muses.&quot; 1 But the result of these conditions and of his own inadequate conception of the proper limits of his art is that more than in the case of any other work of genius his best poetry is clogged with a great mass of alien matter, which no treatment in the world could have made poetically endurable. If the distinction suggested by a brilliant living poet and critic between the Titans and the Olympians of literature be a valid one, it is among the former certainly that Lucretius is to be classed. The genius of Lucretius, as of all the greatest poets, does not reveal itself as any mere isolated or exceptional faculty, but as the impassioned and imaginative movement of his whole moral and intellectual being. It is the force through which the sincerity and simplicity, the reverence, the courage, the whole heart of the man have found an outlet for themselves. It is also the force from which both his speculative and his observant faculty derive their most potent impulse. His poetical style is as simple, sensuous, and passionate as that of the poets who reproduce only the immediate appearances* and impressions of the world of nature and of human feeling. But it assumes a more majestic and elevated tone from the recognition of the truth that the beauty of the world, the unceasing life and movement in nature, the destructive as well as the bene ficent forces of the elements, the whole wonder and pathos of human existence, are themselves manifestations of secret invisible agencies and of eternal and immutable laws. The fullest account of the MSS. and of the various editions of Lucretius, and of the influence which he exercised on the later poets of Rome, is to be found in the introductions to the critical and explanatory notes of Mr Munro s edition of the poet, a work recog nized as the most important contribution to Latin scholarship made in England during the present century. For scholars that edition contains all that is needed for the full understanding of the author. For those who are not classical scholars, the work of C. Martha, Le Poeme dc Lucrece, may be recommended, as containing an interesting and eloquent estimate of the genius of the poet, and of his moral, religious, and scientific position. Among recent English works on the author, an essay, by Professor Veitch, aad one by Mr J. A. Symonds, are especially good. The subject is also discussed at length in chaps, xi.-xiv. of the Roman Poets of the Republic, by Professor Sellar. (W. Y. S. ) LUCULLUS. The Luculli appear in Roman history shortly after the close of the second Punic war. They belonged to the Licinian &quot; gens,&quot; a plebeian house which became noted for its special ability in amassing wealth. By far the most famous of its members was Lucius Licinius Lucullus, surnamed Ponticus from his victorious campaigns in Asia Minor against one of the most formidable enemies Rome ever encountered, the great Mithridates, king of Pontus. His father had held an important military com mand in Sicily, but on his return to Rome he was considered to have acquitted himself so discreditably that he was pro secuted on a charge of bribery and corrupt practices, and was condemned to exile. His mother was Csecilia, of the family of the Metelli, and was the sister of the distinguished Metellus Numidicus. The career of Lucullus coincides with the first half of the 1st century B.C. It appears that he was rather senior to Pompey, who was born in 106 B.C. We hear of him when quite a young man as making a determined though unsuccessful attempt to avenge his father s downfall on the author of the prosecution, and this won him credit and popularity. Early in life he attached himself to the party of Sulla, and to that party 1 &quot; Avia Pieridum peragro loca, nullius ante Trita solo.&quot;