Octavian, now in possession of Cleopatra’s treasure and therefore enormously wealthy, returned to Rome, paid off his debts, discarded Lepidus (but without killing him), changed his name to Caesar, pulled in all his strings, and declared himself—nothing very great, just “the first man at Rome.” He was cunning. He let people from all walks of life decide to accept him as their leader. Then as their ruler. Then as their dictator. Finally, under his new name of Caesar Augustus, as their god. The Republic was dead, and the Roman Empire had come into being.
It began better than it ended. A Silver Age, so-called, of Roman literature was inaugurated by Lucretius, included Virgil and his friends Horace, Ovid, and Catullus, and played out in less than a century. None of it, with the possible exception of Ovid’s works, was really original—not even the philosophical writings of Cicero, who admitted he was simply trying to teach the Romans what the Greeks knew and what the Romans had always been too busy fighting wars to learn.
Virgil was the greatest of imitators. His Eclogues were based on the Pastorals of Theocritus, although several of them had a considerable charm; he wrote them to show that a Roman could write Eclogues. Virgil’s Georgics were based on Hesiod’s Works and Days, although they too had an ulterior purpose. The unending civil wars had impoverished the Roman countryside as peasants were drafted before every campaign by one side or another. Virgil had been a farmer; his Georgics tried to teach Roman youth how to farm in the way he and his father had. And of course even The Aeneid was a frank imitation of Homer’s two great epics, with the first half of the Latin poem based on The Odyssey and the second half on The Iliad. Virgil was the greatest Roman poet. His imitations were elegant and beautiful, but they lacked the passion and humanity of the Greek originals. Of all the Latin poets Ovid may have been the best (apart from Virgil, of course), but he fell afoul of the Emperor and was banished
LUCRETIUS
96?–55 BCE
On the Nature of Things
The only biography of Titus Lucretius Carus is two sentences long and was written four hundred years after his death by a man who had little cause to like him. Here it is, from the Chronicles of Saint Jerome:
94 B.C. Titus Lucretius is born. He was rendered insane by a love-potion and, after writing, during intervals of lucidity, some books which Cicero emended, he died by his own hand in the forty-third year of his life.
This may be true, but there is no evidence either to confirm or deny it. Saint Jerome would not have approved of Lucretius’s Epicureanism, which may invalidate the account; on the other hand, love potions were so common in Lucretius’s day (roughly the first half of the first century BCE) that there were Roman laws against their use. Whether Cicero amended Lucretius’s great poem is also not known, although Cicero does say in a letter to his brother that the poem was being read in Rome in 54 B.C. Lucretius may have died the year before.
Scholars may favor the story of the love potion because they detect in Lucretius’s work an ardent interest in love. On the Nature of Things begins with a very beautiful invocation to Venus, goddess of love. But there were other reasons for dedicating such a poem to Venus. She was the mother of Aeneas, the founder of Rome, and thus the primal ancestor of all Romans, and Lucretius was writing in Latin (not in Greek, the more common “literary” language of his time) for Romans who, in his opinion, needed the kind of instruction his verses could impart.
More important is the role that the invocation plays in the poem itself. Lucretius sings of the delights of love and of the beauty of a world that is made by the love that is in all things; but this is merely to emphasize his true doctrine, namely that all of the visible world is merely an appearance. All of its color and charm and motion are nothing more than an illusion, for the only reality is atoms and the void—“first bodies, [from which] as first elements all things are.”
The shock of this message as conveyed in the very first pages of On the Nature of Things is not soon forgotten. Reach out and touch the cheek of your beloved—in fact you touch nothing but tiny pellets, indestructible and persisting from the beginning of the universe, some with hooks and some without, flying hither and yon at great speed within the emptiness of space. But do not weep; your fingers are made of atoms, too, as is your heart and also your mind, with which you delude yourself. Strange doctrine for a man who was supposed to have been driven insane by a love potion!
The theory of atomism had been first proposed by the Greek scientists Democritus and Leucippus early in the fifth century BCE. The reality we think we see, they contended, is an appearance only. In fact, all things are made of tiny elements, of which there are only a small number of types, but which in various combinations produce all the material things that we observe. Democritus had said there are two kinds of atoms, corporeal ones and soul ones, and that the two are mixed within us. The Greek atom could not be split; its very name indicated that it was primitive, the beginning and basis of all other things.
The atomic theory as proposed twenty-five hundred years ago and as kept alive by poets, philosophers, and alchemists until it was finally triumphantly confirmed in our own century, is really a very simple idea. It is much harder to believe that things are as they seem than to believe they are underlain by a more intelligible substratum of entities that cannot be seen and that we can therefore speculate about with relative impunity. Reality, in short, is always the hardest thing for human beings to face. It is therefore not surprising at all that Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus held to the theory long before there was any “scientific” evidence for it. What is really surprising is that it took two thousand years to prove it.
One reason for that long delay is a serious mistake made by the early atomists. They imagined a universe composed entirely of atomic particles constantly in motion in a space without limit, and they furthermore imagined that the motion of the particles was utterly unpredictable, ruled by chance alone. Their first idea was sound, but their failure to see how useful it would be to suppose that the motion of the particles was governed by natural laws proved a great error. Only when the laws of that motion were discovered within the past two hundred years were we able to confirm the theory.
It was also a mistake, I think, for the old atomists to deny the freedom of the will, which they did when they said that all was ruled by chance. It was not necessary to suppose that there were no immaterial entities in the universe. And if there were and are such they could have been and could still be free—like you and me, when “you” and “me” refer to entities that are not material (I do not know about you, but I know about me!).