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LUCRETIUS
ian malice. Nevertheless, brief and controversial though it may be, Jerome's
statement has done much to set the mould of Lucretian criticism.
Those who have stressed the temperamental differences between Lucretius
and Epicurus have often sought confirmation of their view in the poet's
pessimism. 'The Epicurean comedy of Nature', wrote Giussani, 'almost
changes into tragedy in Lucretius.' The whole question of the poet's pessimism
has been discussed at enormous length and widely different verdicts have been
reached, ranging from gentle melancholy to morbid depression. It is unlikely
that the subject would have bulked so large in Lucretian criticism if Jerome had
not written about the poet's madness and suicide and thus challenged critics
to find in the poem evidence of mental instability. Such an approach has no
doubt been encouraged by the poet's own interest in medical and psychological
matters. He is the most Freudian of Latin poets: not only does he discuss, as
his subject demanded, the working of the human mind, but he concerns himself
also with the explanation of dreams, human sexuality and the psychological
effects of fear and insecurity. For all of these interests he could claim respectable
Epicurean precedents, but the emphasis which he places on psychological
factors is his own. In discussing dreams, for example (4.962—1036), he first
makes the orthodox and commonplace point that dreams reflect the pattern of
one's waking life, but then he proceeds to discuss sex dreams and wish-fulfilment
dreams which cannot be so readily accounted for on the theory which he has
presented. Such interest in psychological matters is typical, but in none of the
relevant passages is it easy to find evidence of a mind in conflict with itself. The
attitude throughout is scientific and rational, not morbid or obsessive. One
must be on one's guard therefore against overemphasizing the darker side of
Lucretius' personality. It is true that there are sombre pages in the De rerum
natura and that Lucretius never softens the tragedy of human suffering or
human ignorance, but to compare him with Leopardi or to write, as Sellar
does, of the 'grandeur of desolation' is to go beyond the evidence of the poem.
Moreover the bleaker passages do not necessarily reflect a bias in the man himself.
As Seneca recognized (P'ita beata 13.1), there was an austere side to
Epicureanism, and much of what has been interpreted in Lucretius as pessimism
is in fact orthodox doctrine.
The same may be said about the internal conflicts which some have seen in
the poem. Here too we should look first at the poet's sources. The view of
Lucretius as a man divided against himself received its classic statement in the
essay which Patin published in 1868. Patin's thesis of an 'Antilucrece chez
Lucrece' is no longer so influential as it once was, but in various modified
forms it has become embedded in the tradition of Lucretian criticism. 1 It rests
on the belief that there are contradictions within the De rerum natura, and that
1 Patin (1883) 1 117-37.
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