Empedocles Redivivus: Poetry and Analogy in Lucretius

Chapter One
Personification
2.1 INTRODUCTION
Since the very beginning of mythology and literature, in an effort to comprehend
the perplexing world around him, man has found in himself a
convenient model, with which to concretize the abstract and unveil the
unseen. So, he ascribed to inanimate things an anthropomorphic appearance,
human capabilities or emotions. 1 In the first part of this chapter
(2.2), I will explore how Lucretius uses personification in order to sketch
abstract natural forces and to enlarge the invisible first beginnings of
things. In the second (2.3) and third part (2.4) respectively it will be seen
how Lucretius envisages the world and the earth as human beings, in order
to reduce their size so that his audience might visualize and conceive their
unseen workings.
Lucretius, while resorting to personification, widely employed in
poetry and prose, found in Empedocles’ poem a specific model for turning
this literary device into an effective philosophical tool, and thus exploited
it widely for heuristic and demonstrative purposes. Although several points
related to this particular aspect of Empedocles’ and Lucretius’ intertextual
relationship have been repeatedly noted, an overall study is still needed.
In what follows I will examine anew the extent of Lucretius’ intertextual
debt to Empedocles, which in the case in question should not be restricted
only to the latter’s poetical method. It is in this spirit that Lucretius’ overall
stance towards this specific Empedoclean device will be sketched and the
general impact upon DRN that this choice entails will be considered. Given
the common principles in their philosophical doctrines, in his effort to
communicate similar ideas, Lucretius could resort to Empedocles’ device in
a more concrete way and adopt specific instances of personification, which
anyhow were inextricably linked with the latter’s precepts. There are in fact
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