Be that as it may, the theory came down to Lucretius via the offices of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who taught a kind of Stoicism in a school he established in Athens in the third century BCE. For the Epicureans all was calm and peace because nothing was really important except the soul, and nothing could hurt that. The gods were very far away. They didn’t care about men, or maybe they laughed at them. Pain was an illusion, as was pleasure, but of the two pleasure was the greater good, so why not follow it? A moderate life ended by a composed and peaceful death was the greatest pleasure of all.
That is the doctrine of Lucretius’s long philosophical poem, combined with the atomism that, in his view, somehow strengthened the moral implications of Epicurus’s teaching. As such it seems a curious subject for a long poem, and an impossible subject for a great poem. But the poem is great nevertheless.
It is very beautiful in its antique Latin, with a beauty the best translations retain. It is also imbued with passion, which Epicurus might have disapproved of but to which no reader can object. Lucretius was indeed a passionate man who saw no contradiction in his passionate attempts to convince us that we should be free of passion. Maybe there is none.
On the Nature of Things has much to say about love, but no less to say about death. It begins with love and ends with death; the last book (unfinished, as it turns out—as though Lucretius had died in the writing of it; and if he did kill himself, maybe he did so because he could not finish it) describes at awful length the horrors of the plague at Athens that had killed Pericles and so many other noble souls and left Athens vulnerable to the high tide of Spartan tyranny. From an invocation to Venus, lover of “increase,” to a paean to Mars, the provider of death and dissolution—that is the road Lucretius leads us down.
VIRGIL
70–19 BCE
The Aeneid
Little more than a century ago, most educated people knew Virgil reasonably well, had read some Virgil in school—in the original Latin—and could quote Virgil on appropriate occasions. They also knew Homer, of course, but they did not like Homer as much as they liked Virgil. Homer, in their view, was somewhat primitive and quite indefensible as far as his morals went, while Virgil was in all the important respects impeccable. Today the pendulum has swung the other way. We tend nowadays to appreciate Homer much more than we do Virgil; in fact, we sometimes find it hard to see much good in Virgil at all. He has become a poet who is paid more lip service than real affectionate attention and regard.
The modern judgment regarding the relative merits of Homer and Virgil is, I believe, correct. Homer is the greater poet, and Virgil has serious defects that are hard for us to accept. But this doesn’t mean the works of Virgil, especially The Aeneid, should no longer be read. The Aeneid is a wonderful poem, although it is not as wonderful as The Iliad or The Odyssey, both of which it often imitates closely. Nor are the reasons to read The Aeneid merely antiquarian. Virgil’s poem retains life and meaning for us in the twenty-first century. It also contains beauties that are rare if not unique in all of poetry.
Publius Vergilius Maro was born on a farm near the town of Mantua, in Italy, in 70 BCE. (Because of his birthplace he has been called “Mantovano” by later poets.) He came of good peasant stock, but his genius must have been recognized very early because he received an excellent education and soon came to the attention of important men in Rome. Virgil’s youth was a troubled and chaotic time. When he was twenty, Julius Caesar swept down across the Rubicon from Gaul into Italy and carried the civil war with Pompey close to home. Caesar was the victor, but war erupted again after his assassination in 44 BCE and continued until the final victory by Octavian (later called Caesar) over the combined naval forces of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE. Virgil was, in short, nearly forty years old before peace came to his country, peace which he and most living men and women had never known. It was an enormous relief and Virgil, like most Romans, felt indebted to the man who had brought it about—to Augustus, now the single ruler of the Roman world.
Virgil was well known as a poet long before the final triumph of Augustus, who later became his friend. Virgil’s Eclogues, a collection of ten pastoral poems composed between 42 and 37 BCE, were much admired for their limpidity and perfection of tone. One of them, the Fourth Eclogue, brought to Virgil great fame at a later time, when most Roman and pagan poets were almost forgotten. In it, Virgil prophesies in mystic verse the birth of a child who will banish sin, restore peace, and bring back the Golden Age. The poem can be dated to 41–40 BCE, a time when the civil war seemed to be drawing to a close (in fact it did not end for ten years). Virgil was probably referring to the expected child of Antony and Octavia, sister of Octavian. In any event, Christians later read it as prophesying the birth of Christ and this kept the name and works of Virgil alive when other pagan reputations withered and died.
The civil wars, besides keeping the Roman cities in a state of continuous political turmoil, also nearly depopulated the countryside as farmers everywhere were forced to leave their farms and go to war. Virgil’s Georgics, a didactic work pleading for the restoration of the traditional agricultural life of Italy, was written in the period between 36 and 27 BCE. It is filled with the deep and sensitive love of the country of Italy that marked everything Virgil, once a farmer, wrote.
Virgil began The Aeneid almost immediately, it seems, after Augustus’s victory at Actium had made peace possible at last. His theme—the founding of Rome by Aeneas, the last of the Trojans and the first of the Romans—made it possible for Virgil to operate on a double time scale. The poem could be and was read as describing an antique world, that of the heroes in the mythical past, but also the world of today (that is, of the late first century BCE), when Roman virtues had finally been proven triumphant and would now ensure peace forevermore.
Virgil was a shy, timid man, although he must have been a charming one, too, for he had many loving friends including the poet Horace, the emperor Augustus, and the art patron Maecenas, who supported him financially for most of his later years. But despite his success Virgil was not happy. He had been born under the Roman Republic and he died under the Empire, unable for personal as well as political reasons to express his growing sense that the change, for all it had to recommend it, was for the worse, and would become more and more so with the passage of time. I think it is obvious Virgil felt so; nothing else accounts for the persistent note of sadness and melancholy that imbues the Aeneid. The poem is about glory, duty, and sacrifice for the sake of a great aim, but it is also pervaded by what Virgil in one of his most unforgettable phrases called, “the tears in things.” That there are tears in things, that there is a deep sadness at the very heart of reality, was not an ordinary Roman idea.
The Aeneid begins with the fall of Troy. Aeneas, carrying his old father Anchises on his shoulders and leading his little son Ascanius by the hand, escapes from the burning city, silhouetted against the lurid light of the flames. It is one of Virgil’s unforgettable word pictures. Aeneas then takes a ship and sails across the sea to Carthage, where he meets and seduces Queen Dido. The seduction is necessary—Aeneas must have help for himself and his men—and so, he feels, is his departure from the queen. As he sails away never to return, Dido stands upon the shore, knowing in her heart (despite his protestations) that she will never see him again. She then immolates herself upon her funeral pyre. This image, of the ship sailing away into the distance and the flames leaping up high above the cliff, is also unforgettable. These huge, sad, heartrending scenes have shaped the imaginations of men and women for two thousand years.