LUCRETIUS AND THE POETICS OF VOID

LUCRETIUS AND THE POETICS OF VOID

James I. PORTERUniversity of Michigan

Don Fowler in Memoriam

Das Glück begreifen, daß der Boden auf dem Dustehst, nicht größer sein kann, als die zwei Füße ihnbedecken.

Franz Kafka, Oktavheft G (1916-1918)

Wer auf dem Kopf geht, der hat den Himmel alsAbgrund unter sich.

Paul Celan1

quod est ante pedes, nemo spectat, caeli scrutanturplagas.

Democritus ap. Cic., Div. 2.30

at conlectus aquae digitum non altior unumqui lapides inter sistit per strata viarum,despectum praebet sub terras impete tanto,a terris quantum caeli patet altus hiatus,nubilia despicere et caelum ut videare et apertacorpora mirande sub terras abdita cernas.

Lucr. 4.414-17

...nec tellus obstat quin omnia dispiciantur,sub pedibus quaecumque infra per inane geruntur.his ibi me rebus quaedam divina voluptaspercipit atque horror, quod sic natura tua vitam manifesta patens ex omni parte retecta est.

Lucr. 3.26-30

1 Cf. Lucr. 1.1061-1064.

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Chaos Theory

What precedes chaos ? The ancient anecdotal tradition tells us thatEpicurus’ schoolmaster failed to answer the question when it was addressedto Hesiodic cosmogony. The question Epicurus asked was, What, philoso-phically speaking, comes before Chaos in the poem, poetically speaking ?It is not a question the poem or any schoolmaster can answer, and so the youngboy decided it was time to look elsewhere – hence, the story goes, hisrejection of traditional paideia and his conversion to philosophy2. Epicuruswasn’t interested in the finer points of literary criticism. He wanted to knowwhat comes before Nothing. If nothing comes before Nothing, then theprinciple of nihil e nihilo will have been violated. There must be somethingand not nothing, and Hesiod’s primordial Chaos (h[toi me;n prwvtista Cavo"gevnet<o>, Hes. Th. 116) was plainly a threat to the instincts of the buddingphilosopher, who was already (or retrospectively, in the eyes of the doxogra-phical tradition) committed to the Eleatic and atomistic tenet that there isalways something and not nothing, and to the search for « the truth of reality(twfln o[ntwn) », as Sextus puts it3. That truth must be found in atoms (or body)and void (or the empty).

But what if nothing precedes chaos ? And isn’t chaos something ?Epicurus appears to have felt that chaos (or whatever precedes it) is evenmore vacuous (more chaotic, unregulated, unlawful, and unpredictable) thanthe nothingness of atomistic void. Void cannot be Chaos. But as Sextus’sophistical refutation shows, there is room for ambiguity and confusion in theatomistic solution4. Void is both not-being and a constituent of reality, real andnot quite real. Its properties overlap with those of body and they don’t. If voidis a place that receives body, is this place a body or void (empty) ? If itreceives body, isn’t the empty now full ? If void can undergo change, is it nota body ? But it cannot undergo change. So what is void ? The questions arecarping, but they do point up a zone of discomfort in Epicurean philosophy,and possibly in atomism generally5. The coherence of void is at stake, so

2 JAMES I. PORTER

2 DL 10.2 ; Sext. M. 10.18-19.3 Sext. M. 10.19. See the excellent discussion in Obbink, 1995, pp. 189-190 and also Laks,1976, pp. 36-38. Neither study quite addresses the issue I have in mind, namely the question ofEpicurus’ abhorrence of the void. See further Solmsen, 1977, pp. 276-277 : « Clearly to allow ori-gin e nihilo must have been for Epicurus tantamount to denying all law and regularity in nature ».And Bailey, 1928, p. 276 (cited by Solmsen, ibid.) : « all it was necessary for him to show wasthat every created thing was sprung from an antecedent something, was created of substancewhich already existed ».4 Sext. M. 10.20-23 ; cf. ibid., 10.2.5 This is true even on Sedley’s reading of Democritean void as a « negative substance whichoccupies empty space » (1982, p. 179). The paraphrase has a paradoxical ring to it (what is anegative substance ?). And it jars with the original atomists’ descriptions of void as « empty »(how can something that is empty occupy empty space ? are there two kinds of emptinessinvolved ?). I am not denying the aptness of Sedley’s reading. To the contrary, I would suggestthat these paradoxes were sought for by the early atomists themselves (see Porter, 2000, p. 86).

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much so that later critics would taunt Epicureanism with the charge that thevoid of atomism was the very Chaos that Epicurus had feared (in Epicureumillud chaos decidunt [sc., inperiti et rudi], inane sine termino)6. Void must beempty, but it cannot be nothing or chaos. It cannot be ajlhqwfl" kenovn, to adapta phrase from Aristotle7.

Gazing upon Hesiodic Chaos, wasn’t Epicurus faced with an unsought-forprospect, namely « the appalling condition of utter anarchy in nature ? »8.Genesis must be guaranteed by the iron-clad certainty that its process neverbegins and never ends ; dissolution can never be absolute : there must besomething and not nothing ; nihil ad nilum9. Atoms, imperishable andimpassive, are the inhibiting guarantor of these twin requirements. Theynecessarily exist for this reason, as a bulwark against nothingness ; take awaybody and you are left with unbounded void, an intolerable prospect ; such isthe primary « necessity » of the physical system of atomism, its law of laws10.Consequently, void for Epicurus is merely the accessory of atoms and no

LUCRETIUS AND THE POETICS OF VOID 3

Sedley has unpacked two senses of void here, and then allowed them to sit a bit too comfortablyside by side : a logical, metaphysical sense, whereby void is endowed with an « entirely negativecharacter » (p. 176) ; and a quasi-physical sense (« void is a space-filler » and an « element »).Both stem from the original bifurcation according to which void is-not and it is (sc., is real),i.e., void is a nothing that nonetheless is (cf. ibid., p. 183). The distinction that « insofar as theoccupant [of a place] is nothing it does not exist, but insofar as it occupies a place it does exist »,trades on this original ambiguity ; it does not resolve it. The atomistic ontology thus indeedremains what it is, a genuine « paradox » (ibid., p. 183).6 Sen. Ep. 72.9. On the threatening aspect of Chaos (in case Hesiod weren’t convincingenough), see Luc. 6.696 : ... et Chaos innumeros avidum confundere mundos. And cf. Lucr. 5.534-538, insisting on a firm foundation for earth (even if the universe has no such foundation[1.993-994]), whereas in Hesiod Gaia is a e{do" ajsfalev" for the universe, whilst the earth itselfhas no foundation, no alia natura subter, as in Lucretius – it rests bravely upon Chaos, or elseupon nothing (Th. 117 ; see West, ad loc., calling the « foundations » of the universe Chaos andearth the « floor » – a desperate picture that merely highlights the problem).7 Phys. 4.8.216a27.8 Solmsen, 1977, p. 277.9 Lucr. 1.216, etc.10 Ep. Hdt. 41 : ajll∆ ijscuvonta uJpomevnein ejn taifl" dialuvsesi twfln sugkrivsewn – plhvrh th;nfuvsin o[nta kai; oujk e[conta o{ph/ h] o{pw" dialuqhvsetai. w{ste ta;" ajrca;" ajtovmou" ajnagkaiflonei\nai swmavtwn fuvsei" ; text after Long and Sedley, 1987, 2 : 30) ; and ibid. 39, 56. Lucr. 1.215-216 : huc accedit uti quidque in sua corpora rursum/dissoluat natura neque ad nilum interematres (cf. 1.248-249). Setting a « limit » to « bound the universe against the void » is an Eleaticinspiration (Arist. GC 325a15). That limit in atomism is set by the very existence of atomsthemselves : they are the internal limit of the universe. Cf. Democr. 68A1.44 D.-K. (DL 9.44) :« Nothing arises from what is not [viz., from abstract void], nor does it perish into what isnot (mhdevn te ejk toufl mh; o[nto" givnesqai mhde; eij" to; mh; o]n fqeivresqai) ». In Lucretius, thisexplicitly translates into an argument against sheer, empty void : nisi contra corpora certa/essentquae loca complerent quaecumque tenerent,/omne quod est spatium vacuum constaret inane(1.521-523 ; cf. 5.366). The abhorrence of void runs deeply through Greek philosophy. Void wasfelt to be incoherent by Parmenides and Melissus ; Platonists and Strato of Lampsacus (fr. 60Wehrli) made sure that void is never absolutely vacant but is « always filled with body » (Sedley,1982, p. 188) ; and Aristotle’s arguments against void are legion (see n. 7 above and n. 20, below).

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longer tantamount to utter chaos (viz., the chaos of not-being) ; it is tamed,deprived of its prior metaphysical role as a negative ontological or theoreticalprinciple, and evidently made into a quasi-material principle (whence the easyinterchangeability of void, place, and room)11. Epicurean philosophy existsin good part in order to defend itself against the potentiality of blank chaos,whether of logic or of cosmological fact. Void, given a new philosophicalplace, is a distant reminder of this potentiality of incoherence12. Epicureanismis motivated by a horror vacui.

Motivated, but also drawn towards. For one of the characteristics ofatomism in general, and of Epicureanism in particular, is the way it trades on

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11 Sext. M. 10.2 ; Aet. 1.20.2. See Long and Sedley, 1987, 1 : 30 (with Sedley, 1982, p. 188) ;Solmsen, 1977 ; Inwood, 1981, p. 281 ; briefly, but similarly, Jammer, 1993, p. 12. Epicurusappears to have denied, tacitly, void’s equivalence to not-being (Rist, 1972, p. 56 ; Solmsen, 1977,p. 279). This is implied by his labeling void « intangible substance [phusis] », thus making it « thetrue contradictory of ‘tangible’ body » and making void and body « mutually exclusivesubstances » (Long and Sedley, ibid.). Epicurus, we might say, has displaced the negativecharacter of void, shifting the negation away from an essential quality (not-being) to a definingfeature or primary property (non-tangibility). (There is possibly a sleight of hand here, for in whatway are atoms tangible ? See n. 18, below). atoms, too, become materies, viz., more than o[nta,for Epicurus (so Solmsen, ibid.). Pace Solmsen, the ambivalence between being and being some-thing (material) may have existed for the first-generation atomists in another form : atoms arebodies just by virtue of being something ; and void qua existent is body-like at least to that extent.Cf. n. 5, above.12 For the assertion, without argument, that for Epicurus to; kenovn properly designates absolute(metaphysical) void or vacuity, in contrast to « (empty or occupied) space » (topos), see Adorno,1983. Interested as I am in the metaphysical sense of the term, I have been following anotherconsensus line. But what will ultimately be of interest in the present context is the way inwhich absolute vacuity comes to be circumscribed by Epicurus and his followers. Note too theemotional objection by the Epicurean Colotes to Democritean indifferentism : « when he says thatevery single thing is no more of such a sort than of such a sort, he has thrown our life into utterchaos and confusion (sugkevcuke to;n bivon) » (Plut. Mor. 1108F). A similar fear of chaos (afavorite metaphor, evidently, in the rhetoric of crisis) is found at Lucr. 4.504-506 (...quammanibus manifesta suis emittere quoquam/et violare fidem primam et convellere tota/fundamentaquibus nixatur vita salusque). See at n. 49, below. I am using « horror vacui » mainly in apsychological sense. The physical principle of horror vacui is documented in antiquity, e.g., forStrato of Lampsacus (see Furley, 1989, pp. 149-160). Furley implies that Epicurean physics isto be distinguished from Strato’s precisely by this physical principle (ibid., p. 159). But the twopositions may be closer than they appear to be. Strato won’t allow place to remain empty of body,while Epicurus will, at least in the short run. But for Epicurus there can be no void without bodyin the same universe for the same reason that Strato disallows void from existing outside thecosmos (frr. 54-55 Wehrli) : there can be no absolute void. Cf. Furley, ibid., 157 : « horror vacuiis simply the view that there is no massed void, and the latter is equally true for Aristotle’s theoryof matter... It is plain that the microvoid theorist needs some extra assumption in order to makehorror vacui work ». Furley is unable to locate such an assumption in Strato (ibid., p. 159) ; butthe specter of massed or utter void itself, viz., abhorrence of the void, provides all the motivationone needs. (The skepticism of Berryman, 1997, has little bearing on the present argument for thesame reasons as those stipulated by Furley, ibid., p. 157. See Lehoux, 1999, for a critical reply toboth Furley and Berryman).

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the ever-present threat of void. Even the prospect of infinite space emptied ofall body – mere space with nothing in it – is enough to conjure up the oldontological tremors of void in some absolute sense13. Unable to shake off thisspecter, Epicureanism is strangely drawn to the prospect of void as to a flame.This ambivalence towards void in Epicureanism will be the subject of thepresent essay. Void is a threatening concept and a rhetorical bludgeon, asource of philosophical argument and of never-ending anxiety. What followswill be about these twin facets of void in Epicureanism : the horror andfascination, or horror and voluptas, that are evoked, inseparably, by void. Asit turns out, Lucretius may display an even greater fascination with void thandoes Epicurus. If so, this is not only due to Lucretius’ superior attunement tothe poetic potentials of void. The poetic meanings are tied to conceptualinsights, and both are worth recovering.

Names for Reality

The challenge facing Lucretius as a poet was twofold. At the very least,he had to convert the logic of void into a poetics of void. But this conceals adistinctly harder problem : how do you talk about nothing ? The problem liesat the heart of the logic of void as well, and it is bound up with the problemof how reality gets named from the Epicurean point of view.

One way into the problem is to ask whether there are any proper names inLucretius (or on any Epicurean theory of language). What could a propername be in a universe that knows only a radical linguistic conventionalism ?The issue is not simply whether names naturally designate their targets, butwhether they can adequately hit them at all14. Nor do so-called « natural »prolepseis, or primary meanings, provide a way out of the problem, or away back to proper names. The reasons are to be sought less in Epicureannominalism or in its tension with linguistic naturalism (insofar as the lattertouches the historical origins of language) than in the Epicurean critique ofhuman psychology.

Death (existential void) is a case in point. Death is nothing to us becauseit is the name for a phenomenological fear and for a corresponding event thatno one can ever coherently face : you cannot coherently picture death (whencethe fundamental irrationality of the fear of death to an Epicurean). « Death »names a subjective fear and the objective disbanding of life. But it also names


13 Epicurus rejects the concept of a eijlikrinh;" kai; keno;" tovpo" as the site of the intermundia(Ep. Pyth. 89). He seems to be rejecting the very concept of « pure void » itself, while the phrasein any case describes a place or space, not a thing per se (he settles for a « fairly empty space[polukevnw/ tovpw/] », ibid.). Cf. Lucretius’ way of introducing void – namely, as a locus :quapropter locus est intactus inane vacansque (1.334). Leucippus seems to have put the mattermore simply, in terms of the mevga kenovn into which atoms are dispersed and out of which thevortex and all subsequent entities come to be formed (DL 9.31). Epicurus will have none of this.14 See further Vitr. 2.2.1 : « Democritus, although he did not name ‘things’ as such (nonproprie res nominavit), ...supposed ‘atoms’ (individua corpora) only », etc. (tr. Granger, in theLoeb Classical Library text). For a more standard view, see Long and Sedley 1987, 1 : 100-101.

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(viz., performs as its philosophical and poetic work) a third condition – theutter annulment (voiding) of the subjective perspective, a state for whichLucretius has no proper name, but which he simply labels with the word« death ». When we picture death, we picture ourselves picturing death ; an« adequate » picturing of death would require the subject of the representationto cancel itself out, impossibly so. This is the gist of Lucretius’ critique of thefear of death in book 3. The very idea of one’s own death, whereby death isrendered into an object of anything but utter indifference, is incoherentbecause it is self-refuting : conceiving ourselves as no longer existing, westand as it were in our own way, blocking our own view of ourselves15.

Could it be this fear of a radically third-personal perspective that underliesthe fear of death ? Are ordinary subjects capable of having, and of beingmotivated by, what are strictly speaking philosophical fears ? I believe theanswer for Lucretius is in the affirmative (and we will return to this below).But whatever the case, Lucretius’ criticism in book 3 is sweeping : it isboth logical and psychological ; and it crucially turns on a problem ofrepresentation (or representability). Lucretian arguments elsewhere, I want tosuggest, are typically complex in this same way. Here, let us simply put awayfor future reference the phrase in 3.881-882 : neque enim se dividit illim/necremovet satis a proiecto corpore. Lucretius is asking that when we picturedeath we remove ourselves from the body we picture as dead. The question asto how we can represent death to ourselves becomes a question as to how wecan detach ourselves from our conventional ideas about the body, given thatour conventional ideas about ourselves are so intimately wrapped up in ourview of ourselves as embodied souls. The project proposed in these two versescontains a threat that is only slightly concealed. Suppose we succeed in thisultimate kind of detachment. What kind of picture of ourselves will we have ?Will we even be recognizably ourselves again ? What do we look like whenwe detach ourselves from our current ideas of the body ? And isn’t thisdetachment, the third-personal perspective, exactly what atomism asks us todo every time we merely contemplate the hypothesis of atoms and void ?

So what is body ? Here we have to make an Epicurean distinction, betweenbody and the body proper. At one level, this comes down to a distinctionbetween phenomenal bodies and, as it were, the sheer materiality of the body,corresponding to the way in which bodies appear to us and the hard coreof body underlying these appearances. But to acknowledge the distinctionis to open the way to some interesting consequences. First, we have toacknowledge two uses of corpus in Lucretius. Corpora at the atomic levelare corpora stricto sensu ; at the macroscopic level they are compounds withproperties of their own, properties that are entirely distinct from those ofatoms. Thus, bodies as perceived are only metaphorically speaking bodies.Turn this around and you get something of a puzzle, or at least somethingpuzzling : is my perception of a body in some way a metaphorical perceptionof body, of what body properly is ? It would seem to be. Strictly speaking we

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15 Cf. Lucr. 4.1150 : nisi tute tibi obvius obstes.

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cannot perceive body at all, but only bodies composed of body and void16.Lucretius is crystal clear on this point, and emphatically so : firmarenecessest/nil esse in promptu nisi mixtum corpus inani (6.940-941), wherebyBailey’s rendering puts the accent right where it belongs : « there is nothingperceptible except body mingled with void »17. We cannot perceive bodyper se. Put differently, our sense and experience of body seem to be quiteremoved from the concept of body, not to say from the reality of body.

What we take to be solid is in reality porous, rarus, (6.936), and much ofDe rerum natura is devoted to illustrating how deceptive and disappointingappearances of body can be. The problem is not just that what appears solid israre (mixed with void) ; it is that the object of our perception is uncertain.When we stub our toe on a rock it may be that we experience a sensation ofthe hardness within the object ; but in what sense do we have a sensation ofthe rock itself ? Is the hardness you feel in any way related, as a perception,to the hardness of the atoms that make up the rock, except by a trick oflanguage ? Strictly, atoms are not hard ; they are solid (1.500). But in turn wecan never have a true perception of solidity (for that is the sole property ofatoms) : in rebus solidi nil esse videtur (1.497). Thus, perception gives us theillusion of a body perceived ; what it in fact gives us is the real perception ofa body in a derivative sense. Sensation is thus forever out of touch with theconstituents of reality, even as it is caused (haptically) by them18. Sensation isin some ways a metaphor. It is, after all, an improper name for motion (huncmotum quem sensum nominitamus, 3.352). Nor is sensation a proprium of thebody (3.356-358). But that leads to other complications. The egestas linguaeacutely sensed by Lucretius is not restricted to the expressive range of Latinalone. It touches the very limits of what can be conceived and represented bythe mind.

To go back to our original point above, simply to accept the Epicurean ideaof body is to detach ourselves from conventional understandings of body19. Is


16 Long and Sedley 1987, 1 : 30 make the interesting claim that Epicurus forbears from callingvoid an « element », because « it cannot itself be part of a compound object ». I am not surewhether this is true or how it might be so, or even what is at stake in the claim. Later on we readthe opposite-seeming claim about « the body and space that once constituted Paris, Helen,Troy etc. » (ibid., 37). Since there is no compounding without void being present and there areno compounds that do not contain void, and given that quantities of void determine qualitiesof compounds (including weight), it would seem natural to allow void a role in the compositionof objects. « Corpus mixtum inani » comes as close as one might wish to saying just this.Cf. Lucr. 1.478-479 on per se corpus.17 The text and translation of Lucretius here and below are from Bailey 1947.18 Cf. Lucr. 4.385 : nec possunt oculi naturam noscere rerum. Tangibility makes for a curiousproperty of atoms : why should tangibility be denied to void (1.437) but not to atoms ? (Thoughsee 3.813 : the gods’ bodies are « exempt from blows, as is the void, which abides untouched »).« Intrinsically observable » (Sedley, 1988, p. 315) neatly states the problem but begs the questionall over again.19 The materialist (atomistic) argument has always had this attraction. Cf. Lange, 1866,p. 485 : « If it was once amazingly hard for people to conceive the solid earth on which we stand,that picture of stillness and steadiness, as a thing in motion, it will be even harder for them

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our habitual notion of body a metaphor (a proxy), to be contrasted with theliteral body of atoms ? Or is it not the other way around ? Atoms, which noone has ever seen, look to be a good candidate for being a figure of thought,their properties having been derived by analogy, and improperly, from ourempirical experience of bodies. In this light, the question, posed earlier, is notonly how we can detach ourselves from the body, but also which body are weto detach ourselves from ? But this is not an option that is ever fully put onview in Lucretius’ poem, for the simple reason that it is not an option thatanyone can ever exercise (more on that below).

Void is susceptible to the same impossible constraint : our natural precon-ceptions fall irretrievably short of the real thing ; and the attempt correctly topicture void nullifies us whenever we contemplate its reality. Void is by natureimperceptible ; its meaning is derived if anything is20. To conceive of void onehas to start with the perceptible quality of emptiness and then think away eventhat : emptiness has to be emptied, as it were, a stage further21. (We are, notby chance I think, in the realm of bereavement once again). The logic is insome sense natural, but the philosopher’s term of art for « void » is in noway a natural derivative of a natural first meaning. On the contrary, it is aconventional derivative, and a strained and highly charged one at that, steepedin centuries of contention22. That said, Epicurus shows a remarkably relaxedattitude towards the problem of how to name void : « Epicurus says that thedifference between void, place, and room is one of name » (fr. 271 Us.)23,although the technical (genus) name for void is « intangible substance », anotion that is none the less ideal for its being aimed at a material reality (allof Epicurus’ protests to the contrary)24. Void, plainly, has no proper name. The

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to recognize in their own body, which is for them the picture of all reality, a mere schema ofrepresentation, a product of our optical apparatus », etc.20 Sedley, 1973, fr. 8 col. IV ; Long and Sedley, 1987, 1 : 101. Arist. Phys. 4.4.211b17 is clearon the role of the imagination (dokeifl ..., wJ" o[n) in the postulation of void as a concept.21 Void is by definition quaque vacat spatium (1.507 ; cf. 1.334).22 See Jammer, 1993, p. 7 on the « long and continuous process of abstraction » that permittedthe scientific concept of space to emerge ; and Long and Sedley, 1987, 1 : 101 on this sameprocess ; and more generally, Annas, 1993, 199. The movement, which was one of « abstractingthe concept of space from the experience of space », is precisely the process that Epicurus’ viewof prolepsis is designed to repeat (or capture). Things get complicated when what is abstractedis the concept of abstract space itself – or do we want to say (as nobody does) that abstractemptiness just is the intuitive content of the prolepsis of « emptiness » ? How one derives anabstraction from experience is a further problem (see below).23 Aet. 1.20.2 ; tr. as in Sedley, 1982, p. 188.24 According to Sext. M. 10.2, the proper genus of void is « intangible substance » (« space inits broadest sense » ; Sedley, 1982, p. 188) ; its species are the alternatives named by Aetius, andthese are functionally distinguished (« the names vary according to the different ways of lookingat it ») : void is unoccupied space (viz., intangible substance empty of all body) ; place is thisspace or substance when it is occupied by a body ; room is this space or substance traversed bybody. Schulz’s (somewhat strained) rendering of Epicurus’ void as « ideale Flüssigkeit », onefurther possibility (Schulz, 1958, 29 ; cited in Inwood, 1981, p. 279), helps point up thedifficulties of naming what void really is. A related problem : from what empirical experience do

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distinctions just given are all perspectival and purely logical ; in reality thereis just whatever it is that used to be called « void » : void is the sum of theseperspectival differences. Epicurus’ apparent permissiveness is, as we saw, tiedto the need to keep void in its place after having given it a place to be, even ashe bows to the inherent difficulties of saying what void really is.

But void has further meanings in Lucretius, if not also in Epicurus. Voidis a place of quies (2.238)25 ; indeed it is the most perfect instantiationof quies. Its primordial contrast is the restless jangling of atoms, in ways asad and pathetic spectacle (nimirum nulla quies est, 2.95), removed fromEpicurean ideals and rather close to contemporary realities (not to saypolitical unrest). One obvious comparison to draw is with the secura quies ofsleep (3.910 ; 3.939) and death (3.211 ; 3.939)26 ; another, which follows onfrom the first, is with the peaceful serenity of ataraxia (3.977), indeed withthe absolute quies of the gods themselves (3.18 ; 6.73)27. The proximity of


our prolepses of ideal states (viz., ideals) derive ? Possibly it is from the very imperfectness ofour experiences, from their inability to repeat themselves with perfect regularity and consistency.If so, then pure void (like immortality) is derived from our failure to have empirical observationsof emptiness and enduring vitality (a fly passes through the jar ; death intervenes). But isn’t thiscircular ? Was I looking for pure emptiness and unable to find it ? Or is it that emptiness andimmortality, states which do not occur in nature, are merely negative inferences that get reappliedto empirical observations ? Possibly, if these inferences can be made without the help of apreexisting concept of the inferred state. Can they ? One alternative is that Epicurus prohibitsunnaturally derived ideals ; he reduces them to a minimum of projection, inhibiting wild andwasteful speculation (he would have resented Hegel, for example). Void is for this reason boundto be intelligible in the light of common experience. But why should the laws of physics operateby analogy to experience ? And what guarantees can Epicurus bring that his account of void,grounded in preconceptions, has it right ? He does not, for instance, meet Aristotle’s objections atPhys. 4.4.211b17, where the very idea of a void is said to be a product of a paralogism. Kant’sattack on the objective reality of space presents another formidable challenge : space is not anidea or an object but an intuition ; indeed it is the condition that makes possible the perception ofsensible objects ; so we cannot perceive space proper, and the claim that we do (and can abstractfrom this an idea of space) is a paralogism : « Space is not an empirical notion which has beenderived from external experience » (cited by Jammer, 1993, p. 137).25 2.238-239 : omnia quapropter debent per inane quietum/aeque ponderibus non aequisconcita ferri.26 Cf. further 3.925 with 3.851-861 and 4.920-924 : sleep is a near-death.27 Rest is an epiphenomenon of bodies ; applied to void it is a poeticism (see Bailey ad 2.238) ;applied to gods, it must also be a poeticism. If we take away this feature from the literal featuresof gods, others will go the same way, and gods will turn out to be in large part a poeticism too.Lemke, 1973, pp. 44-45, cited by Jürss, 1977, p. 224, n. 62, argues that eternity and happinessare not given by the atomic images of the gods as part of their primary information but areonly inferred from those images. See also Kleve, 1963, p. 82. This seems right (cf. Lucr. 5.1175 ;Sext. M. 9.44), if we assume an empirical and external, viz. non-cognitive, derivation of divinesimulacra. Anyone who insists on the existence of gods according to Epicurus must face up to thiscriticism, or rather this qualification of their existence. Put differently, to view gods as Epicurusdoes is not to uncover the prolepsis of divinity but to correct a mistaken judgment about divinity ;the (correct) prolepsis of divinity will contain the information that gods exist as beautiful andshapely beings and it will contain nothing else. Is Epicurus’ definition of the prolepsis of the gods

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these three themes (death, stillness, tranquility) is disturbing28. It is alsodisturbed by other patterns of meaning in the poem. The death of the world isin one place imagined as an ex hypothesi consequence of the absence of void :take away void from what is, and matter will be brought to a standstill in acompact mass, a dead heap (stipata quiesset, 1.345). The image will return,horrifically, at the end of the poem, in the final scene of the Plague.

There are further paradoxes to void. Void, that supremely quiet element, isthe vital condition of motion, and so too of life itself ; but it is also, and forthe very same reason, an agent of dissolution and destruction, for asMetrodorus says, « that which has no share of the void endures lastingly »29.We are reminded of the principle, preserved in Lucretius, that change is deathto the thing changed30. And yet, although it ought to be the hidden world ofatomic figures that is cold, in stark contrast to the warmer, more familiartouches of the phenomenal world, the livelier image by far is that of atomsjostling one another and moving through the void. This contrast is as if bysome kind of ironic inversion, as though reality became more real the lessapparent it is. On the surface of things, quiet reigns : « the whole [of abody – of ‘the whole scene within our view’ – or is it ‘the sum total’ of theworld ?]31 seems to stand wholly at rest », until the whole is set into motion(2.310-311). Death is quiescence, but it is accompanied and followed by« a great [lit., « greater »] scattering abroad of the turmoil of matter »(3.928-930). Nothing ever quite is as it seems to be.

Void and body converge in other ways too. Void provides the concept ofwhat is nonsensical : it is a something that approaches nothing. But matter,while its existence is attested (« declared ») by sensation (1.422-423),paradoxically provides the concept of what is deprived of sense and vitalmotion (quid sit vitali motu sensuque remotum ; 5.125). It continues, at thislevel, to be hard to keep the functions, if not the conditions, of void andmatter apart32. Are the gods a symbol of ataraxia or death ? Are they morelike void or like atoms ? More like intangible void, insofar as they cannotbe touched (5.152) ; more like atoms, insofar as they are impassive and

10 JAMES I. PORTER

faulty ? It seems to contain more information than it validly should ; that is, it seems toexpress a judgment rather than to reflect a self-evident presentation of its objects (see Jürss,1972, 225).28 And seems to have been noticed in antiquity, for instance by the Cyrenaics, who complainedthat the highest (static) Epicurean pleasure was death-like (fr. 451 Us.) and like sleep (DL 2.89).29 In his work On Change (Philod. De piet. 1, col. 7 Obbink).30 2.753-754 : « For whenever a thing changes and passes out of its own limits, straightwaythis is the death of that which was before ». Cf. 3.519-520 ; 5.168-169 ; 5.826-836 ; also Schol.to Ep. Hdt. 74 : fqartouv" fhsi tou;" kovsmou", metaballovntwn twfln merwfln (with Sedley, 1998,p. 175).31 For the first alternative, see Bailey’s translation; for the second, Bailey’s commentary ; for thethird, Rouse’s translation in the Loeb text. Lucretius simply writes « summa ».32 It was the first atomists who brought them together ; cf. Democritus’ asking us to hear« body » in « void », the devn of mhdevn (fr. 156 D.-K.). For their (fleeting) approximation, see alsoDiano, 1974, 143.

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everlasting (5.159, 161 ; cf. 1.545 : esse immortali primordia corporedebent)33. Both, insofar as both stand for the complete voiding of sense,pressing our capacity to represent anything to an outer limit. « For the finenature of the gods, far sundered from our senses, is scarcely seen by theunderstanding of the mind ; and since it lies far beneath all touch or blow fromour hands, it cannot indeed touch anything which can be touched by us. Fornothing can touch which may not itself be touched. Therefore even theirabodes too must needs be unlike our abodes, fine even as are their bodies »,etc. (5.148-154). Gods represent the divinity of vitality itself (« divinefeeling » [5.144] and uninhibited life). But in their perfection they approacha deathly immortality. Indeed, their tranquility is the guarantee of theirsymbolic elimination : they live on as empty symbols of perfection, and asit were perfect themselves out of existence34. And so too does the atomisticsystem, viewed in all its intrinsic ambiguity, likewise approach a deathlyimmortality. But this, too, is but a metaphor. The true contrast inEpicureanism is not between life and death but only between sense andnonsense.


33 Totum video per inane geri res (3.17) is plainly glossed by the next line : apparet divumnumen sedesque quietae, etc. See also Nussbaum, 1994, p. 216 : inspired by Epicurus, « we,godlike ourselves, can see the void, the ‘peaceful homes of the gods’ (3.16-22) ». And De Lacy,1957, pp. 116-117, contrasting « the tarachê of the atoms ... with the ataraxia of the gods, whoappear rather to possess the imperturbability of empty space ». Dionysius of Alexandria bringsout this connection well in a parody (Euseb. Praep. Ev. 14.27.9 ; cited by De Lacy, 1957, p. 17,n. 17). De Lacy later extrapolates « emptiness » to a view of the world, available to humans, as« process » (ibid., 118) ; Nagel, 1986 would call this « a view from nowhere ». What De Lacyfails to ask is whether the gods have such a view or simply are its instantiation (whatever thatwould mean) ; but see the final paragraphs of the present paper.34 The point deserves to be stressed. The gods perfect themselves out of existence ; all thatremains is the memory of their empty symbolic position ; they are the neutral void of theEpicurean system. This is exemplified at 6.68-79, where we are enjoined to purge our ideas ofdivinity to the barest minimum required by Epicureanism, which is to say to the empty outlinesof the prolepsis of the gods (see Porter, 1996, p. 627). For an antecedent to these serene gods,whose vitality requires deliberate argument, see Arist. EN 10.8.1178b1-b23, a « deathlessactivity » « without action » about which Jonathan Lear writes, « But deathless activity isprecisely what the dead do ; only the living engage in activities which come to an end...Contemplation is the most deathlike form of life. Thus it is that, imaginatively speaking,immortality is a form of death ; it is what death would be like if death were a form of life » (Lear,2000, pp. 53-54). The idea recurs in Henry More ; cf. Koyré, 1962, pp. 124-149 (« Dieu etl’espace »), which closes : « Par une étrange ironie de l’histoire, le kenovn des anciens atomistesathées était devenu chez Henry More la propre extension de Dieu, la condition même de Sonaction au monde » (ibid., p. 149). Even so, More’s approximation of divinity to void is by thesame token an extension of the concept of matter (p. 134) ; gods are like a void that is ; space isa substance (ibid., 143). The idea of an « intelligentia extra-mundana, un ‘Dieu fainéant’ », wouldhave a long afterlife, in Newton and beyond (ibid., pp. 266-269). Its origins might, however, liein Heraclitus fr. 62 D.-K. : « Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, for the immortals live the deathof mortals, and die their life », or else in Homer, if you believe Longinus’ conscious echo ofHeraclitus ([Long.] 9.7).

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Consequently, whenever Lucretius talks (improperly) about death,appearances notwithstanding he is talking about something else, somethingmore philosophically motivated and profound. Death signifies an absolutevacuity, in the sense that it is a vacuity we cannot represent to ourselves :being nothing, it is literally nothing to us35. But what does that stand for ordo in turn ? Imagining death in this pregnant sense, as the voiding of repre-sentation and of meaning itself, is the supreme psychological test an atomistcan put us to, and he does this, I believe, at every turn. Atomism challengesus to confront void (the voiding of the phenomenologically familiar) and toovercome our fear of void (this absence of representational content). Butabove all, it shows us why this is a test that nobody can ever pass, not even thebest intentioned Epicurean, and not even Epicurus himself, malgré lui36.

Void and its Place in On the Nature of Things

To rephrase my argument so far, we can say that death perfectly replicateswhat is fearful about Chaos ; it maps out a deep metaphysical absence, onethe mind refuses to picture. And the reverse is true as well : void conjuresup this same horror. To read the De rerum natura in this light is to explore thisevacuation of meaning at the heart of the poem and as it appears in differentguises. So viewed, the poem takes on not only a fundamentally different

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35 And we, who are nothing to void, are also literally nothing, being but mortal atomiccompounds, « wellnigh dead while [we] still live and look on the light » (3.1046) : we are deadand do not even know (acknowledge) it. Although rightly connecting the fear of death with thethreatening prospect of non-being (o{qen oujde; oJ Kevrbero" oujde; oJ Kwkuto;" ajovriston ejpoivhsetoufl qanavtou to; devo", ajlla; hJ toufl mh; o[nto" ajpeilh v, Mor. 1006D ; cf. 1107A : hJ ejpivnoia thfl"yuchfl" w{sper eij" pevlago" ajcane;" to; a[peiron ejkceovmenh"), Plutarch’s objection (Mor. 1104C-1107C) that Epicurus failed to address the question of the extinction of consciousness upon death,what Plutarch takes to be the object of one of the most powerful fears concerning death (cf. Mor.1130E), is thus completely misplaced (and belied by Epicur. RS 2, which is cited in Mor. 1105Aand 1106A-C [fr. 500 Us.], viz., the view that death leads eijß ajnaisqhsivan kai; diavlusin).(Plutarch’s best argument is that Epicurus underestimated the power of this concern, not that heneglected it. The Epicurean answer is that the fear of death cannot be an object of the mind,because the mind cannot picture death coherently. Perhaps fear, in this case, gives over to vagueterror). See Giussani, 1896-1898, 2 : 140-141 ; Nagel, 1986, pp. 225-227 (drawing an importantdistinction between the prospect of the annihlation of consciousness and that of a blanknothingness) ; Rosenbaum, 1993 [1986], p. 122 ; Segal, 1990, p. 13 ; Long, 1992, p. 496. What Ihope to bring out in this discussion is the relevance, seen by Lucretius, of the problem of voidto the problem of death.36 A word on « tests », a concept that has been too simply dealt with (for instance, in thereductive idea that the finale of book 6 is a culminating test for the reader). There are at least fourkinds of test, two of which are set up for success, two for failure. There are (a) tests you cannotfail ; (b) tests you can fail but must work to do so ; (c) tests you cannot pass at all (Kafka’s« Es gibt unendlich viel Hoffnung –, nur nicht für uns ») ; and, most interestingly, (d) tests youfail insofar as you believe you have passed them (as in Nietzsche, who dares us to try andconceive the will to power as a coherent theory [Porter, 1998] ; or in Epicureanism as a whole,despite itself).

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aspect, but also a different structural shape and form. Some of the traces ofthis flirtation with vacuity are to be found in Lucretius’ reductivist accountof language, particularly in book 4 (which paradoxically uses structures ofmeaning, of sound and sense, to dismantle those same structures atomis-tically). But I believe the point can be demonstrated by an appeal to the formand structure of De rerum natura itself, the structure and divisions of whichseem, at least, to have been awarded consensus. I want to challenge thisconsensus opinion by focussing on the critical closing books, which in myview have been wrongly labeled as the last pair of a triad devoted to « World »(as opposed to the pairs « Atomic Physics » of books 1 and 2 and « Man » ofbooks 3 and 4)37. The uncertainty of these distinctions aside38, the largerpartitioning is only superficially accurate. Books 5 and 6, apparently orga-nized around ideas of prodigious earthly and cosmic marvels, are governedby a far subtler subtext. They are in fact about the porosity and voiding ofsensible matter, and they are ultimately about void as the absence (or unintel-ligibility) of matter itself. Hence the theme of book 5, the perishability ofmatter, its reducibility to nonsense (inanity)39. And hence, too, the extraor-dinary density, which I have never seen commented on, of terms for emptinessin book 6 : cava, cavernae, speluncae, vacuum, vacefit, inanis, fauces, caulae,foramina, barathrum, etc.

These emphases have philosophical point. Just as Epicureanism robs us ofthe sensation of what we improperly call « bodies », so too is it the case thatonly bodies which are to some extent voided (composed of interspersed void)are sensible as such : sensation is a phantasia that results from insensibleatomic impacts. Book 6 makes this disturbing argument as it were in extre-mis : its focus is trained on bodies lapsing into emptiness, collapsing, andcaving in. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, vast cloud formations, emptyspaces, and the boundless universe, are all analogues for this emptying out


37 I am not sure when this division first appears. See Ernout-Robin, 1925-1928, vol. 1,pp. v-xiii, whose commentary in three volumes divides along these lines ; Bright, 1971, p. 630 ;Fowler, 1995, p. 7 ; Sedley, 1998, pp. 144-145 ; and others. While the tripartition of the poemseems fairly widely accepted, various interpretive colorings, affecting the characterization of thelast pairing, are possible. Cf. Minadeo, 1969, p. 53 : « the broadening of scope in the final twobooks never quite reattains the literal universal compass of I and II », a remark that illustrates justhow subjective and how relative to one’s critical ends any partitioning can only be. Segal, 1990,pp. 229-230 (and passim) sees a dark progression towards mortality sweeping across the last threebooks of the poem.38 That is, Lucretius doesn’t describe events at any one level in the absence of referenceto events on any other level. His language is at once strongly anthropomorphizing and cosmic.Thus, atoms invoke psychology but also global cataclysm ; descriptions of natural marvels anddisasters explicitly involve both atomic structures and psychology ; and so on. See below.39 Viz., the nullity of all (non-Epicurean) values (5.1277 : on the vicissitudes of the materialvalues of gold and bronze), which is marked by the punctuating phrases nequiquam and inanis(e.g., 5.388, 846, 909, 1003, 1123, 1271, 1313, 1332) and by the unpalatable truth of 5.1430-1435about mankind’s inextinguishable « vain » (incassum frustraque) and « empty (inanibus) cares ».Matter is shown paradoxically to provide the concept of what is deprived of sense and vitalmotion, as we have seen (5.125).

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of sensation’s contents in the objects of sensation (this is the, as it were,inane rerum ; 1.517). But above all they suggest a link between the physicsof sensation and the psychology of belief. A closer look at these examples willhelp to make the point.

Thunder is the first of the natural terrors described. In a way that istypical of the imagery from book 6, it is quickly made into a cosmic image bymeans of a hyperbole, whereby the perspective of the terrorized onlooker isassumed (videntur) : « In this way, too, all things (omnia) seem often totremble with heavy thunder, and the great walls of the containing world(capacis moenia mundi) to be torn apart suddenly and leap asunder(dissiluisse) » (121-123). Wind invades a building cloud formation and causesit to « hollow itself out with body thickening all around » (cogit uti fiat spissocava corpore circum) until it finally « splits » (scissa) and explodes (displosa)with a crashing sound (121-129). Sixty lines later Lucretius returns to theimage, magnifying it further. He speaks of « thick clouds, which are also piledup high one on the other in wondrous slope (impete miro) », such that theyresemble mountains with gaping caverns (speluncas) within (185-196). Thehollows make it possible to imagine contents within ; the clouds quicklybecome prison-houses for raging beasts (clausi/...ferarum more minantur ;197-198) ; the growlings turn into seeds of fire « rushing about the hollowfurnaces within » (rotantque cavis flammam fornacibus intus ; 202). Thunderand lightening are masterful agents of death and dissolution : they can« melt » objects, « rarify » them, and cause them to scatter, literally atomizingthem, as in the spillage of wine (differt primordia vini, 235). The recourse toprimordia, where vinum would have done just as well, is doubly interesting.Lucretius’ descriptions move back and forth freely between the perspectiveof naïve terror and that of informed science (as in the example of theseeds of fire above). But they also move less predictably between empiricalperceptions (which needn’t be naïve at all) and the atomistic accounting ofthe same, a sight into the unseen (similarly at 316). There is a kind of hiddenterrorism to the microscopic perspective, which can be superimposed uponany given perception at will, unsettling it instantly40. As if to illustrate thefirst kind of move, Lucretius returns to the cloud formations, whosemagnae cavernae can be filled with the darkness of Acheron41, and so madeinto « shapes of black fear » impending upon us (ripe with the seeds ofsuperstitio)42 and ready to release their bolts again (250-255). Then he returnsto scientific description, reminding us of the elemental play involved, withtalk of « seeds » (272), of bodies large and small (corpora grandia... atque...parvula, 302-305), and of « pores (caulas) of the ether » and « breathing-

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40 The world is contest through and through, until the world finally ends (cf. 5.380-382). Thereis a strict coherence to these levels of description, moreover. Compare the combat of motes in asunbeam, likened to the natural turbulence of atoms at 2.116-122, with the conditions that makefor stormy weather in autumn at 6.369-370. See n. 38, above.41 Lake Acheron was traditionally bottomless ; cf. Ar. Ran. 137-138.42 Cf. 1.62-71, 3.37, etc.

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holes (spiracula) of the great world all around » (492-493), in a word, atomsand (little gaps of) void.

As these examples begin to show, the emphasis in book 6, unlike inprevious books, is not on the composition of the world or its visible (orinvisible) decomposition. It is on the dynamic function of void, whereby voidis to be understood not simply as an agent or precondition of motion but alsoan agent of commotion, terror, and destabilization (of change and death).Atomistic void is in this book the protagonist, and it is repeatedly drawn up inlarger-than-life settings. It is both the space for disaster and the setting for acosmic-like whirl (cf. the noun turbo at 6.395, 438, etc., but also in earlierbooks). But more than anything else, void, put center-stage, comes to standfor itself, and to gesture toward the nature of sheer vacuity43.

Earthquakes, the next natural phenomenon, are a case in point. No lessimpressive than thunderclouds, earthquakes represent a more proximatedanger. It is one thing to look upon gaps in matter (mountains of clouds whichnever really fall), and quite another to be swallowed up by them (here, wholemountains do just that : they fall and collapse, 546). The scientist calms uswith the reassurance that the whole of our familiar landmass is riddled withvoided parts : the earth below us is « full (plenam) on all sides of windycaverns (ventosis speluncas) » (536-538), where the clash of « full » andempty places (not to mention the collapsing of air and earth) correspondsneatly to the contradiction created by Lucretius’ offer of reassurance and hisprovision of unsettling scientific knowledge. The language from earlier on isrepeated, now in subterranean fashion : loca subcava terrae, loca cava, andthen magnum hiatum (557, 580, 584), the last term being freighted with


43 Previous studies have noted the undeniable presence of emptiness in the closing book, butwithout labeling the centrality of this concept or exploring some of its largest functions. Thegeneral tendency is to assimilate void to the instability, porosity, and fragility of all things, or tobarren « cosmic spaciousness » (Hardie, 1986, p. 200). See Penwill, 1996, p. 157 : « Everythingis hollow, everything is in motion, the force of moving matter tears objects apart » (and see ibid.,p. 165, n. 32, where « violent clashes » drowns out the presence of voids) ; Kany-Turpin, 1996,p. 239 : « L’impression qui domine est celle d’une nature en perpétuel movement » ; « le thème »(and « la notion ») « de la porosité ... entraîne celle d’afflux massifs des particules passant d’unerégion à une autre ». Closer to my emphases are the comments about « l’ouverture du cosmoset sa communication avec l’espace infini, appelé aussi le vide » (ibid., pp. 245-246). This latterapproach, derived here from Bruno, Kepler, and Pascal, raises the question about the ultimatehorrors of the universe in the face of its ultimate voiding of meaning (symbolized, and induced,by the thought of its immensity and spatial indeterminacy), a thought that is at once horrific andsublime : « Cette pensée porte en elle je ne sais quelle horreur secrète » (Kepler, cited by Koyré,1962, p. 66, and by Kany-Turpin, ibid., p. 246, n. 1). As an aside, it is worth inquiring why Cicerofound the metaphors coeli cavernae and Neptuni lacunae in his edition of the poem so offensive(see Clay, 1996, p. 783). One possibility is that it was not the two phrases but their conjunctionand implication that offended him : the gaps being exposed metaphorically here are truly cosmic :they reach from the sea to earth to the heavens (Clay calls this an « analogical metaphorinvolving three terms »), which is to say that together they create the impression of a gap that runsthrough the whole of the known world, and that was an intolerable prospect for Cicero. Worsestill, in that case, would be the example of the puddle cited in the fourth of my epigraphs.

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particularly menacing connotations (cf. 5.375). « So men quiver with doubleterror throughout the cities, they fear the houses above, they dread the hollowplaces beneath, lest the nature of the earth should break them open all atonce, and lest torn asunder she should open wide her maw, and, tumbled alltogether, desire to fill it with her own falling ruins » (596-600). The image isa paradox of self-consuming destruction : the gaps threaten to be filled innot with matter, but with ruins.

Earthquakes prefigure, in cosmic terms, nothing less than the cataclysm ofthis world, its final wrenching expiration. This is plainly the case forLucretius, who has already described this final state in similar terms, forexample in book 5 : « first of all look upon seas, and lands, and sky ; ...onesingle day shall hurl [these] to ruin ; and the massive form and fabric of theworld, held up for many years, shall fall headlong... Within a little while youwill behold earthquakes arise and all things shaken in mighty shock... [Andso] believe that all things can fall in with a hideous rending crash (horrisono...fragore) » (5.92-109). But it is also true for men in general, who have aforeboding of the world’s end whenever they behold the earth coming apart.For what they fear, without knowing it (Lucretius claims), is precisely thiscataclysm : they are afraid to believe what they unconsciously know44. This isa bold claim on Lucretius’ part. What he does is to show that the commonbelief in the indestructibility of the known world (6.601-602) is twice false :it goes against the plain truth of things from the Epicurean perspective (theworld will perish) ; and it goes against the underlying acknowledgement thatcommon belief is, so to speak, groundless. Presumably, we have a naturalpreconception (prolepsis) of the end of the world, and this preconceptionis buried in our confused assumptions about natural disasters. Lucretius’language is carefully chosen : « Men fear to believe (metuunt credere) that atime of destruction and ruin awaits the nature of the great world, even whenthey see » signs of its vulnerability and fragility all around (6.565-567). To beafraid to believe either is to have a formulated belief and to repress it, or it isto have a formulated idea (« the world will end ») and to refuse to enter it intoone’s beliefs.

But there is more. For what Lucretius also shows is that the certainty thatthe world is just the way it is commonly known and experienced (as somethingmore or less solid, permanent, and secure) is itself based on a desperate belief,indeed on a false belief that is betrayed by the truer underlying belief and fearthat the opposite is the case – namely, that the world isn’t exactly as it appearsto be. And it is this latter fear which, Lucretius wants us to know, is the truecause of fear in the face of natural disaster45. Thus, « let them then believeas they will that heaven and earth will be indestructible, entrusted to some

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44 Lucretius is a keen observer of secret disavowals of all kinds. Such is the case at 3.870-893,where the distorted psychology of the fear of death (discussed above) is savagely unmasked ;or at 3.1053-1070, discussed in n. 81, below.45 A plausible Epicurean response would be to hold that the world just is exactly as it appearsto be : it is perishable, etc.

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everlasting protection ; and yet from time to time the very present force ofdanger applies on some side or other this goad of fear, lest the earth, snatchedaway suddenly from beneath their feet (pedibus...subtracta), be carriedinto the abyss (in barathrum), and the sum of things, left utterly withoutfoundation, follow on, and there be a tumbling wreck (ruina) of the wholeworld » (601-607). The remarkable point here is that the common run of man,on this score at least, is unwittingly and unwillingly (nolens volens) Epicureanat heart46. I think this has to be the case : conversion is premised on this veryassumption. The aim of Epicurean therapy is to elicit the natural true beliefsfrom the confused hodgepodge of corrupted and baleful notions within themind, to purge the mind of false beliefs, and to leave standing and confirmedonly those which conform to the truth. That truth is the truth (or truths) ofatomism.

Now if this is correct, we need to ask more closely what the fear ofmankind really is. What is its actual object ? We have seen that the fear ofearthquakes belies a fear of the end of the world. But that fear expresses itselfas a fear of the abyss (barathrum). The phenomena picked out for descriptionin book 6 are emblematic of this fear. They represent the physics of sensation ;but as fearful, they represent an untrained response to the atomistic view ofnature. Such scenes are fearful, Lucretius shows, not because they threaten uswith mortal danger, but because they involve us, philosophically speaking, ina horror vacui47. They confront us with the potential absence of a materialfoundation in which we can securely place our trust. Matter gapes widein them. So stated, they are a precise mirror of the ontology of atomisticphilosophy itself and its ultimate threat to commonsense ontology : what wethink exists is not, or not in the way we believe it to be, while what exists is atbottom just as good as naught, at least from a first-personal perspective. If youhave any doubts about it, Lucretius says, just look down at the ground beneathyour feet : nec tellus obstat quin omnia dispiciantur,/sub pedibus quaecumqueinfra per inane geruntur (3.26-27 ; cf. 1.1105-1108).

In Lucretius’ poem, the spectacle of earthquakes evokes that of bodiesrushing through the unresisting void. The fear this scene produces is based ona senseless fear of a primary constituent of reality. « Death » improperlynames this fear48. Properly named, the fear is a horror of void that is sharedby Epicurean philosophy as well49.


46 See further Scott, 1989, 373-374.47 The phrase does not occur in Lucretius (or in any ancient text) but it nearly does (3.29), whilethe idea is actively present throughout. It is written directly into the shock-value of atomism.48 Sedley, 1988, p. 316, writes : « Epicurean ontology tends to have phenomenal entities as itscentral focus, and in no way privileges atoms over them ». I’m not sure if the first part of this istrue (what is the central focus of DRN ?), while the second part does a bad job of accounting forthe presence and force of a passage like that just quoted. The problem is as follows : Epicurusindeed follows a non-reductionist line ; but he cannot hold that line without taking on board thepremise of reductionism : atoms and void are causally prior to phenomena, and are « privileged »in this sense. I agree rather with Fowler, 1995, p. 11, n. 18 : « to deny some priority to atomicexplanation over other types would deprive Epicureanism of its distinctive approach ». The key

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Lucretius and Longinus

Given that body is in a sense merely the absence of void50, Lucretius’treatise is not only about the irrecuperable materiality of the body but alsoabout the immateriality of the cosmos, and the fears that such a counterin-tuitive perspective elicits. The ethical alternative to fear may well be thesublime. Simultaneously fascinating and fearful, a complex of horror acvoluptas, the sublime is (on one going definition of it) the gamut of responsesone has in the face of any object that both invites and resists integration intothe symbolic frameworks of understanding. The experience of shock onehas before a sublime object, on this view, is of the contingency of one’s ownframeworks of meaning and understanding51. The ethical value lies in therecalibration of our sense of meaning that this experience necessarily requiresof us. The ancient concept of the sublime, found in Longinus but discoverableprior to him, can be usefully rethought along these same lines. Doing sosuddenly opens up new ways of conceiving conversations across literary textsand traditions in antiquity52.

As it happens, the next segment of book 6 contains a series of geologicalprodigies that points in these very directions. Lucretius turns first to thenature of the sea, then to Etna (the supreme volcanic instance), and then to theNile. These have their place in the thematics of void from the preceding versesand are a natural extension of their logic. The sea is wondrously capacious (intanto spatio, 622), so much so that it seems to defy the laws of addition; it isa sum that cannot be added to (613-614). Etna’s jaws (fauces) open onto an« exceedingly gigantic » (ingens) furnace, but also to subterranean hollows(subcava natura, cavernae, speluncae, crateres, fauces et ora, 639-702),hollows which communicate again with the open sea (mari aperto, 698)53.And then there is the Nile, « the river of all Egypt », whose primarydistinction seems to be its fame for being famous. Lucretius’ account ofthe Nile is remarkably brief. A prodigy of nature, it seems to belong here

18 JAMES I. PORTER

here is, I believe, to acknowledge that there is an irreducible tension in Epicureanism betweenreductionism and anti-reductionism. Possibly, Epicurus interpreted Democritean reductionism asa form of eliminativism, which it may not consistently have been (color and time are decidedly« unreal », but can Democritus have sanely held that mental states are unreal too ?), anddeveloped a defense against the consequences of this assumption. It is equally possible that thereis a tension between reductionism and non-reductionism to be found already in Democritus, andthat Epicurus, and we, have misread it. But that is another story.49 Thus, the confounding of the deepest truths are likened to the ruin of earthly foundationsat Lucr. 4.505-506 (see n. 12, above).50 A conceit played upon in 1.524-527, where body is « marked off (distinctum) from [orpossibly ‘by’ : these are logically equivalent] void » and in turn « can mark off (distinguere)void space from what is full » at one and the same time. Alternatively, atoms can be thought ofas being « nothing but configurations of the Void » (Zizek, 1999, p. 129).51 This is how Kant took the sublime too (1987). See Zizek, 1989, p. 71.52 See Porter, 2000, on one such conversation between Longinus, Pausanias, and the discoursesof classicism.53 Similarly, Aetna 94-119, a later, abyssal poem devoted obsessively to Etna.

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thanks to its sheer size alone ; in other respects, it does not lend itself to thethematics of void or space. Nor is it to be found in Epicurus’ Letter toPythocles or, from what we can tell, its more detailed equivalent in On Naturebook 1354, possibly the immediate source of Lucretius’ treatment55. All ofthis suggests that Lucretius has included the river out of an obligation that hasyet to be stated56. One obvious candidate is a tradition of paradoxology ornatural wonders, now lost. But I believe we can be more specific.

Nowhere else do these same natural phenomena occur together inclassical literature, so far as I am aware (apart from diffuse Seneca whomentions just about everything), save in one other place : ch. 35.2-5 ofps.-Longinus’ treatise On the Sublime57. The examples are adduced there


54 See Sedley, 1998, p. 157. Aetius points to a Theophrastean origin of the material in DRN 6(and thus of On Nature 13). But significantly, the Nile but not Etna appears in Aetius ; andneither of these appears in what survives of Theophrastus. Thus, it is misleading in this instanceto call Lucretius’ sequence « selective » (Sedley, ibid., p. 158). It seems, on the contrary, or ratherin addition, to be accretive (see Runia, 1997). (The account of Avernus is one obvious instance).The very inflation of the motif of void in Lucretius, absent from Epicurus (so far as we candetermine from the matching passages of Ep. Pyth. [though see ta; ejx oujranou§ kai; ghfl" ...cavsmata at Plut. Mor. 1104B], but not in Democritus and Metrodorus of Chios [see n. 70,below]), points to a further possible kind of accretion : poetic emphasis. Emptiness occurswithout emphasis in the Theophrastean material, judging from the abridgement we have of hisMetarsiologica (ed. Daiber, 1992), nor is this counter to what one might have expected. It is mostprominent and similarly so in the section on earthquakes, where the earth is said to be « hollowlike a cave and like a cavern » (ibid., 270) ; otherwise, there is rarity, an implied porosity (withoutpores or spiraculae), and a bladder-image (264). Whether the poetic emphasis upon void isoriginal with Lucretius is harder to determine (there are signs of likely Ennian precedents aswell : cf. cava caerulea, Sc. 292 ; caeli fornices, Sc. 381 ; cohum caeli, Ann. 557 ; see Landolfi,1992). But he will in any case have styled the emphasis to match the internal poetic andconceptual demands of his poem.55 Sedley, 1998, Mansfeld, 1992, p. 326 suggests that Lucretius came by this material throughan epitome of On Nature, if not through On Nature itself.56 The Nile will come up again in connection with diseases, and the Athenian plague willbe said to have arisen « deep within the country of Egypt », a land of global extremes (6.1107,1114, 1141).57 « The universe therefore is not wide enough for the range of human speculation and intellect.Our thoughts often travel beyond the boundaries of our surroundings. If anyone wants to knowwhat we were born for, let him look round at life and contemplate the splendour, grandeur, andbeauty in which it everywhere abounds. It is a natural inclination that leads us to admire not thelittle streams, however pellucid and however useful, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, andabove all the Ocean. Nor do we feel so much awe before the little flame we kindle, because itkeeps its light clear and pure, as before the fires of heaven, though they are often obscured. Wedo not think our flame more worthy of admiration than the craters of Etna, whose eruptions bringup rocks and whole hills out of the depths and sometimes pour forth rivers of the earth-born,spontaneous fire. A single comment fits all these examples : the useful and necessary are readilyavailable to man, it is the unusual that always excites our wonder » (tr. Russell, in Russell andWinterbottom, 1972). (Seneca mentions the Rhine, the Danube, and the Nile together at NQ4a.2.20-21 and Ocean, Danube, and Nile at ibid., 3.22.1. The latter passage is the more relevant :« Some judge that also the rivers whose nature is inexplicable take their beginning along withthe universe itself : such as the Danube and the Nile, rivers so vast and so remarkable that they

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to illustrate how mankind is drawn to greatness. The world is as a « greatfestival », at which man is both « spectator and an enthusiastic contestant inits competitions ». But above all, « Nature... implanted in our minds fromthe start an irresistible desire for anything which is great and, in relation toourselves, supernatural (daimoniwtevrou) ». Whence it occurs that « ourthoughts often travel beyond the boundaries of our surroundings (tou;" touflperievconto" pollavki" o{rou" ejkbaivnousin aiJ ejpivnoiai) ». Mutatismutandis, Lucretius is making much the same point. The attraction to naturalprodigies is irresistible ; wonder comes naturally, as does the desire totransgress the limits of phenomena (Epicurus is a case in point).

But before turning to Epicurus, we need to quote a passage that is wedgedbetween the account of Etna and the Nile in Lucretius. Etna’s blaze is « exce-edingly gigantic ». But greatness is in itself a permanent attraction, andforever relative58 : each next greater thing puts us in mind of giants (haecingentia fingit) – there is a lesson here in the construction of supernaturaldivinity –, but the sum total of these greater things is « nothing to the wholesum of the universal sum », that is, compared to the universe itself (675-679).If Longinus is indeed quoting from some tradition of paradoxology, Lucretiusmight seem to be relativizing it59. In fact, he is outbidding it60. And he isrepeating, in effect, a thought from earlier in the description of Etna : « Hereinyou must look far and deep and take a wide view to every quarter (longecunctas in partis dispiciendum), that you may remember that the sum of thingsis unfathomable, and see how small, how infinitely small a part of the wholesum is one single heaven – not so large a part as is a single man of the wholeearth » (647-652). Nor does Longinus think any differently. For both, thewonders of nature are mere outward emblems of a greater attraction – to agreatness that has no measure, because its grandeur is absolute and – literally– immense. The verbal parallels in Longinus are astonishingly close : « Theuniverse therefore is not wide enough for the range of human speculation andintellect (oujd∆ oJ suvmpa" kovsmo" ajrkeifl). Our thoughts often travel beyond the

20 JAMES I. PORTER

cannot be said to have the same origin as the other rivers » [tr. T.H. Corcoran, in the Loeb text].Etna makes an unconnected cameo appearance at 2.30.1). For a later echo, see Kant, 1987,p. 120, on sublime spectacles : « Consider bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks,thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps,volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes will all the devastation they leave behind,the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on. Compared to themight of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle ».58 « So, too, be sure, is the river [such as the Nile] which is the greatest seen by a man, whohas never before seen any greater : so a tree or a man may seem gigantic, and in every kindof thing, the greatest that each man has seen, he always imagines gigantic, and yet all ofthem together, yea, with heaven and earth and sea besides, are nothing to the whole sum of theuniversal sum » (674-679).59 Cf. 653-654 : « And if you have this duly before you and look clearly at it and see it clearly,you would cease to wonder at many things ».60 Mirari multa relinquas : multa, not omnia. Cf. Sen. NQ 4b.11.2-5. The occasional proximityof Seneca’s NQ to the Longinian sublime is noted by Rosenmeyer, 2000, p. 112.

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boundaries of our suroundings. If anyone want to know what we were bornfor, let him look round at life (kai; ei[ ti" periblevyaito ejn kuvklw/ to;n bivon)and contemplate the splendour, grandeur, and beauty in which it everywhereabounds ». Parallels, or echoes ? Is De rerum natura a crucial link in thetradition of the sublime ? The suspicion has been mooted in the past, but onsomewhat different grounds, usually stylistic ones61. The collocation of thesefour prodigies – universe, Ocean, Nile, and Etna, conceived as naturalemblems of grandeur – is unique62. It has the look of belonging to a traditionof commonplaces that may now be lost. But there are other echoes.

The last quoted passage from Longinus cannot help but bring tomind Epicurus passing beyond the flammantia moenia mundi with his mind(1.72-73) or Lucretius’ generalization of this impulse to intellectual daringat 2.1044-1047. The underlying thought is, to be sure, a commonplace63, butLonginus’ use of ejpibolh; thfl" dianoiva" in 35.3 is not (cf. animi iactus at2.1047)64. The idea of passing unconstrained beyond the limits of the worldoccurs earlier in Longinus, in chapter 9, where we find a cosmic image ofdivine winged steeds about to stride off into another dimension, and where theaccent is laid upon the gap, the kosmiko;n diavsthma, by which Homer hastaken the world’s measure (9.5)65. This image is tied to another glimpse ofthe world gaping in its depths nearby (9.6)66. The image is Gigantomachic. Itis morally offensive on the surface, but can be salvaged as aestheticallyand ethically sublime. Longinus’ terms for these images are ei[dwlon andfantavsmata. Like Lucretius, he prefers to see divinity represented « asgenuinely unsoiled and great and pure » (9.8).


61 Conte, 1965, 1966 ; Segal, 1990 ; Ovid, Am. 1.15.23 : sublimis Lucretius, a comment on hisstyle, but wittily underpinned (i.e., qualified) by an allusion to the spectacle of the world’s finaldestruction (una dies ; cf. Lucr. 5.95). There is, however, a sublimity to the very idea of atomism,in its mere conception. See Nietzsche, 1933-1943, 3 : 332 : « An und für sich liegt eine großar-tige Poesie in der Atomistik. Ein ewiger Regen von diversen Körperchen, die in mannichfalt[iger]Bewegung fallen und im Fallen sich einschlingen, so daß ein Wirbel entsteht » ; and Bergson,1884, p. 23, n. 7 (ad Lucr. 1.945) : « Il y a quelque chose de grandiose dans cette conceptiond’une infinité d’atomes, tombant éternellement à travers le vide immense, et formant sanscesse des mondes nouveaux. Il ne faut donc pas s’étonner, comme on le fait généralement,que cette doctrine ait si bien inspiré Lucrèce ».62 Russell, 1964, ad loc., and Bühler, 1964, pp. 138-141, useful in other ways, are on thispoint silent. At the very least, Lucretius and even more so Longinus are probably offeringcompressed highlights of a much more diffuse tradition. But the selection of highlights is whatis striking.63 Cf. Russell, ad loc.64 [Long.] 35.3 : thfl/ qewriva" kai; dianoiva" thfl" ajnqrwpivnh" ejpibolhfl/... ; Epicur. Ep. Hdt. 62 :ejpei; tov ge qewrouvmenon pafln h] kat∆ ejpibolh;n lambanovmenon thfl/ dianoiva/ ajlhqev" ejstin.65 Cf. Lucr. 1.960-983 on the improbability of casting a lance beyond the limit of the boundlessuniverse, a cosmological puzzle that reaches back to Archytas (see Porter, 1992, p. 98). Lucretius’own puzzle is that his universe is a summa but without limits ; it knows natural bounds but hasno physical boundaries ; etc. See further Fowler, 1995.66 ajnatroph;n de; o{lou kai; diavstasin toufl kovsmou lambavnonto".

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These parallels ought to make us suspect either a direct dependency or elsea common source, possibly derived from metarsiological doxography67. Butthis latter may have already been filtered by writers in a sublime tradition, ofthe sort signaled by Doreen Innes in her work on Gigantomachy in the literarytradition, and which we no longer have apart from a few remnants in variouspoetic and non-poetic (natural philosophical) sources68. Crates of Malloswould have been one of the links in this chain69. An encouraging stimulusfrom the side of the early atomists down to Metrodorus of Chios is to besuspected, given the lavish use of the analogy of void in that tradition ofscience70. The thinking here is poetic and it is not ; such is the strange hybridthat characterizes this still understudied genre of speculation from antiquity71.

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67 The parallels are too close to be a mere coincidence. Nor is the mention of the Nile inLucretius to be explained alone by its connection to the plague (see above).68 Innes, 1979. Lucretius is not fully on her radar screen, however (he seems not to count asgenuinely sublime ; see ibid., p. 169 on Vergil, but see ibid., p. 170), and so the parallels withLonginus are not mentioned (indeed, the latter’s imagery from ch. 35 is labeled « his own » onthe same page, wrongly so). On Lucretius and the doxographic traditions, see Mansfeld, 1992 andRunia, 1997 ; further, Bollack, 1978, likewise without reference to Longinus. Aetius bk. 3contains a metarsiology that is remarkably close to Lucretius’ in DRN 6 ; earthquakes, Ocean,and Nile appear in both, but not the exact collocation that is found in Lucretius and Longinus.See Innes, 1979 on the rich links between natural philosophy and poetry and their confluencein Longinus ; and see also Hardie, 1986, in her wake. Runia, 1997, p. 98 observes : « What isremarkable is that [Lucretius] should thereby turn to many antiquated or even antiquarian views,instead of using what was available in contemporary scientific manuals ». The reason, I submit,is that Lucretius is drawing on a tradition that had already filtered natural speculation withpoetic insight and had in this way yielded a common set of topoi that lent themselves to thesublime. (On the Hellenistic epigrammatic tradition, which ranges over everything from volcaniceruptions to magnets, see Wick (ms.). Crates of Mallos is one further link in the chain ; see Porter,1992). Lucretius further blends these topoi with the teachings and information from Epicurus.Incidentally, since the entire idea of a doxographic (or Placita) tradition is something of a moderninspiration and construct, we might do well to imagine it as non-monolithic and as shaped by(intersecting) sub-traditions and according to different applications. (Traits can obviously beshared ; priorities will be harder to establish. If it is the case with « the Theophrastean expositorysequence » that « it works its ways steadily downwards from the upper levels of the atmosphereto the earth and its contents » [Sedley, 1998, p. 159], it is also unsurprising that this (intuitive)sequence is followed by poets and rhetoricians alike : « they move from the order of heaven toearthly phenomena such as storms and earthquakes » [Innes, 1979, p. 168 ; cf. p. 169]). Thesublime tradition, which is no less of a construct, is at least a plausible way of conceiving a bodyof knowledge as having been organized, filtered, and applied with the aim of blending poeticand philosophical insights along a single axis, one that explored the imaginative potentials ofsublimity.69 See previous note.70 Sen. NQ 6.19.1-2 (speluncae, inania : Metrodorus) ; 6.20.1 (pars terrae concava :Democritus). The analogy of void runs through many of the Democritean fragments, so much sothat it seems to have been a veritable figure of thought and instrument of reasoning for him. SeePorter, 1986, pp. 113-117, 178, 179-180, and 228-232. I hope to explore this in another context.71 See Sen. Ep. 79.5 : « Aetnam, ... hunc sollemnem omnibus poetis locum », an exaggerationthat nonetheless points the right way. The Aetna poet is a further example ; but he does not showthe same collocation of themes as Lucretius and Longinus do.

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But above all, the thinking is in both cases premised on what I have elsewherecalled « the aesthetics of the gap »72. For « gap », we may as well read« void » (bearing in mind the Epicurean term for void as a gap in matter,diavsthma)73. Whether or not Longinus is echoing Lucretius, I believe astrong case can be made that Lucretius’ treatise is exploiting a concept ofthe sublime, not only in its concluding books, but at the very heart of itsconception. He has, we might say, seen how Epicureanism can be sublime,possibly in a way that Epicurus had not. But let us continue with book 6.

The End of Book 6, and of All Things

The steady build-up of fears noticed earlier brings us closer to death andto the famous final conclusion of the work. The lacus Avernus appears next.A culmination of the preceding imagery, Avernus is something like a blackhole : a site of absolute death and desertion, it renders itself, as Lucretiusarrestingly writes, « an almost empty space (prope locus inanis) » (832),through which bodies, acted upon by as it were the sheer gravitational pull ofthat which is not (death, the void), disperse their life through their pores andinto the void (vacuum prope iam per inane iacentes/dispergunt animas percaulas corporis omnis, 838-839)74. This is one of the most chilling momentsin the poem. Not for nothing is it followed by an excursus on the coldnessof natural springs75.

Next, Lucretius prepares to wrap up his book, and his treatise, with areminder that void inhabits all things (941). Examples now are smaller andpettier, and closer to home : water sweats and ooze from caverns (speluncae)in rocks, as it does from the pores of the body ; limbs sprout outgrowths ofhair ; food passes through the veins ; diseases spread about the world, etc.(942-955). Magnets, mentioned earlier (and seemingly out of place in bothpassages), return to remind us that « all things must have air in their body »and thus body, seemingly full, contains emptiness within (1034-1045). Butmagnets do more than this76. What they illustrate, above all, is how space


72 Porter, 1992. If so, then it bears comparison with the euphonist criticism of the so-calledkritikoi, which constructs itself around a similar set of contrasts (see Porter, 2001).73 Ep. Pyth. 89, etc. ; already, Arist. Phys. 4.5.213a28 (oiJ de; a[nqrwpoi bouvlontai keno;n eiflvnaidiavsthma ejn w/ mhdevn ejsti sw`ma aijsqhtovn) ; cf. ibid., 4.4.211b7.74 There is an additional a play on inanis at 834 : the beating of the birds’ wings suddenly failsthem and becomes inanis, in vain (nisus inanis).75 Some potential word-plays : lacus conjures up lacunas, as in 6.538 : multosque lacusmultasque lacunas (with the fatal connotation established already at 1.115 : an tenebras Orci visatvastasque lacunas) ; loca ... lacusque (6.738) ; lacus/locus (6.746-747) ; nisus inanis (6.834) ;and possibly subliminally : laCus ... AVERNI, viz. caverni (6.746 ; cavernus always occurs in finalposition in the poem, as has been noticed by Karen Johnson [oral communication]).76 See Wallace, 1996 on the way magnets illustrate the miraculous working of action at adistance. Penwill, 1996, pp. 157-158, is right to point to more specific reasons for the inclusionof magnets here, as is Bollack, 1978, p. 415 (catching the analogy to bodies falling throughvoid).

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itself can become voided (hoc ubi inanitur spatium multusque vacefit, 1005),by degrees (factus inanitusque locus magis ac vacuatus, 1025), and thenhow bodies can fall into void, hurtling there as if by their nature (in vacuumprolapsa cadunt coniuncta, 1007 ; corpora continuo in vacuum vicinaferuntur, 1019), unable to rise up again (1020-1021). Thus does the frigidushorror (1011) of magnetism illustrate the fatal attraction of void, in a wayreminiscent of Avernus77. Which leads, abruptly, but not unintelligibly, to thefinal scene of the plague.

At first sight, the culmination of book 6 appears to contradict thethematic tendencies we have been tracing in the earlier parts of the same book.The focus now shifts entirely, and obsessively, to the body, while void as aconcept drops out of sight. In point of fact, something extraordinary happens :not only does the concept disappear entirely from view, but the words forvoid do so as well. Vacuus and inanis, the most frequent terms for void in thepoem and among Lucretius’ favorite vocabulary generally, stop occurringafter v. 1041, without exception, while terms that earlier conjured up voidmetaphorically, such as fauces, cava, and cavatus, are now reapplied to bodiesin their original literal or natural (everyday) senses (fauces for throat, e.g., perfauces rauca vix edita tussi [1189, 1147, 1151] ; cavati oculi ; cava tempora[1194]). The body (corpus) is made literal again as a human body (or corpse) ;and void is avoided, so to speak like the plague. To be sure, the basic laws ofthe earlier portions of the book are still in effect : bodies are fluid, empty, or« rare », they canalize disease, they are effluent and invaded (e.g., 1199-1207)– leaky vessels, indeed. But given the thematic absence of empty space,Lucretius, we might say, has enveloped us in a claustrophobic scene of bodies,of « bodies piled upon bodies » (corpora supra/corporibus, 1215-1216),with no outlet, no space for distance, and no room to breathe78. The closestparallel might be the cosmic hypothesis of a world emptied of void andrendered stagnant with body mentioned earlier in book 1 (1.345 : stipataquiesset) ; and in fact, a large thematic ring-composition is to be suspectedhere.

As the plague description draws near its end, the feeling of claustrophobiaintensifies. Lifeless bodies pile up to an excruciating extent. There seems tobe not enough space to contain them. « They would fill all places, all houses(omnia complebant loca tectaque) ; and so all the more, packed (confertos) instifling heat, death piled them up in heaps (acervatim) » (1262-1263). Theyoverflow private spaces and spill over into public spaces, occupying streets

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77 Cf. in vacuum ferri (1014) ; unde vacefit/cumque locus (1017-1018) ; fertur quopraecipitavit/iam semel et partem in vacuam conamina sumpsit (1040-1041). It is temptingto read the brief final section on the repellency of the inverted poles of magnets (1043-1055)as staging a flight/attraction scenario. As background to this, see Democr. 68A165 DK ; Stratofr. 62 Wehrli ; Furley, 1989, p. 154 ; Berryman, 1997, pp. 153-155.78 The suffocation by body imagery recalls from a distance Lanzmann, 1991, p. 91 : « Thelocomotive arrives and slowly the locomotive becomes the whole screen. There is no issue.You cannot get out ; it’s a wall ».

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and fountains, then shrines and temples79. These last references pave the wayfor a return to Lucretius’ grand attack on religion, and they do this withunmistakable irony : places of last resort now fulfill their function in a cruellyliteral and ineffectual way. Fear and grief overcome the Athenians ; theyare disabled by the very emotions that initially led them to seek succor indivinity ; burials are detached from customary rites and rituals (anothercruel literalization). There is a general regression, a de-idealization, and aliteralizing of human behavior. Athens is literally choked with bodies and withdeath. The final irony of the poem occurs in the last preserved lines. Surfeitedwith bodies, the Athenians would sooner add themselves to the pile of bodiesthan desert them : multo cum sanguine saepe/rixantes potius quam corporadesererentur.

The language of the final clause is trickier than it is usually made out tobe. Monro and Bailey’s « rather than abandon the bodies » (adopted byRouse ; similarly Ernout : « plutôt que d’abandonner leur cadavres ») is agloss rather than a translation, one that attempts to correct the problem ofagency and the direction of abandonment in the verb desererentur (abandonedto what ?), the logical subject of which is ambiguous (abandoned by whom ?),and whose grammatical subject is – precisely, or rather imprecisely – corpora.The actual meaning of the final clause is not « rather than abandon thebodies », but either « lest the bodies be abandoned » or more expansively« rather than see the bodies abandoned »80. Lucretius’ language is pointed andprovocative. It is calculatedly impersonal ; it accentuates the harsh objectalityof the bodies ; and it leaves the motivations of the Athenians – the source anddirection of their agency – undescribed. There is also a telling contrast at play.Where beasts of prey find themselves having to abstain from the corpses, outof sheer repulsion and against their own nature (absiliebat, 1217), theAthenians are desperately anxious lest the bodies of their loved ones shouldbe abandoned, and so they are drawn all the closer to them – and naturallyso. Why all this clinging to the body ? Moral compunction might look like


79 Segal, 1990, p. 41, interestingly suggests that Lucretius « seems to be going against thecurrent of the Master’s practice of de-individualizing and de-somatizing the process of dying »,and that « the difference is due, perhaps, to the Roman love of the particular and the concrete »(ibid., p. 42). But doesn’t Lucretius actually pit these two processes against one another ? The« somatizing » of death here goes hand-in-hand with a « de-individualizing » of the bodies, whichappear as a mere lifeless heap, lacking any particularity at all. In contrast, it is the particularity ofsuffering, one might wish to say, that is being underscored, its essential quality. But this too isdone as it were en masse, not en détail, producing something like a concrete universal. « Quodubi se quisque videbat » (1231 ; cited by Segal, ibid., p. 40, alongside of unus/quisquesuum ... maestus, 1280-1281) is generic and faceless ; it naturally attains the degree of third-person impersonality with which the poem closes, the nameless passive desererentur (whosesubject is precisely – or rather imprecisely – corpora). (The vagueness of the agency of this verbis rightly underscored by Kelly, 1980, p. 96).80 The latter rendering adopted by Kelley, 1980, p. 96. His alternate translations (« strugglingrather than see their own bodies left behind », and : « ... rather than see their own atoms leftbehind ») are, as Smith notes ad loc., bizarre.

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one factor. But any moral content we might wish to find in this emotion isvitiated by the circumstances, which reveal a self-canceling logic (wranglingto the death over the dead). Possibly, Lucretius is showing us the primitiveform of a moral emotion, in line with his general tendency to reduce refinedmoral feelings to their most basic and least examined origins. If so, what is thefeeling in question here ?

We might want to say it is, once again, a vague fear of death : the anxietyis over seeing the bodies abandoned to some uncertain posthumous fate,which anxiety Lucretius is exploring in its reduced and primitive expression.Fear is certainly a part of whatever complex of emotion the Athenians feel, forthe population is both shocked (perturbatus) and fearful (trepidabat, 1280).Perhaps they are victims of habit ; that is, the emotion is not a primitiveone that has been laid bare and shown to be hollow by circumstances ;rather, it is the remainder of a more refined emotion (the need for properburial, prompted by the dictates of religio) that has been reduced to a nearlyinarticulate form under the pressure of circumstances. This won’t rule outthe existence of a primitive fear, such as fear of death. But as I hope is clearby now, it may not be the case that fear of death is the most primitive fearoperative in man, not even on Lucretius’ own showing. Fear of death, Isuggested, is reducible to a fear of annihilation, a fear that sets in wheneverwe contemplate the imponderable fate of the body’s destruction (andconsequently our own). But more to the point, the fear named (howeverinarticulately) at the end of the poem and particularly in the last preserved lineof the poem is a fear of seeing bodies abandoned. Thus, I would suggest,Lucretius rounds off his treatise with a criticism of our absurd desire to clingto the durability of the body, to our fear of deserting the body and ofbeing deserted by it.

What would life be in the absence of bodies ? Plainly, empty. Why is itso hard to abandon a body ? Or rather : the body. The answer would appear tolie in a horror vacui, horror of what you’ll miss, what won’t be there, of theunimaginable abyss, which you can’t touch sense, feel, smell, or hold becausethis absence deprives you of your innermost possession, your self : identity,what-ness, that-ness. Gone. Lucretius ends his poem – or if you like, ended itthus in one of its incarnations – on this note : on the inability to relinquish thebody. The apparent focus on body thus turns out to be an obsessive focus inthe face of a greater fear, the fear that underlies the whole of book 6 : the fearof being engulfed by senseless void81. The fear that is named at the end of the

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81 Cf. 3.1068-1069 : « In this way each man struggles to flee from himself : yet, despite his willhe clings (haeret) to the self, which, we may be sure, in fact he cannot escape, and hateshimself... ». Lucretius’ lesson here is, Give it up, learn about the nature of things, « since it is[your] state for all eternity, and not for a single hour, that is in question ... after [your] death ».Atomism’s lessons can only have a posthumous value. See further Nagel, 1986, 225-226,describing « the expectation of nothingness » as « the ultimate form of abandonment », whileacknowledging that this prospect is one the mind refuses to picture, let alone accept (ibid.,231 : « the individual attachment to life will force its way back even at this level » of

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treatise is the fear of void after all. The poetic and philosophical significanceof void in the poem and its prominence in book 6 is thus maintained here atthe end – in silhouette. The scene of the plague brings to mind a disaster ofcosmic proportions. It forebodes the end of all things ; and it highlights thedeep-seated psychological – and to an Epicurean, irrational – need to cling tothe world and to things, in the face of their inevitable destruction and ultimatenegligibility.

In a sense, the finale to book 6 cannot help but bring to mind a catastropheso massive as this. Elsewhere, disease is a metaphor for the mortality ofthings, as in 5.345-347, where it is applied to the end of the world and ofthe human body together (nam cum res tantis morbis tantisque periclis/temptarentur, ibi si tristior incubuisset/causa, darent late cladem magnasqueruinas)82 ; and the connection is repeated in earlier tradition (Plato andTheophrastus)83. If this is right, the poem is brought full circle. Or rather, itcontinues to circle around the image that has been haunting it all along, rightfrom the end of book 1, with its apocalyptic scene of near utter annihilation.That scene is instructive in several ways, not least of all because in aculminating discussion of void the idea of « desertion » (abandonment) isapplied to void itself. Here, it is void that is being abandoned (desertum) – thistime, by body. Let’s look at it briefly.

Lucretius asks us to imagine a world in utter dissolution (due to someemergency, on a rival school’s geocentric cosmology, whether Platonic orPeripatetic)84. In such a universe, Lucretius objects, « the walls of the world[would] suddenly fly apart, dissolved through the great void (magnum perinane soluta), and... all else (cetera) [would] follow them in like manner » ;« the thundering quarters (templa) of the sky [would] rush upwards, and theearth in hot haste [would] withdraw itself from beneath our feet (se pedibusraptam subducat), and amid all the mingled ruin of things on earth and of thesky, whereby the frames of bodies are loosed, it [(sc., the earth) would]pass away through the deep void (per inane profundum), so that in an instantof time not a wrack [would] be left behind (nil extet reliquiarum), exceptemptied space (desertum praeter spatium) and unseen first-beginnings »(1102-1110). These extraordinary lines posit an unthinkable scene, or ratherscenes : we are asked to imagine a world in which matter suddenly gives wayto void ; and then to contemplate, at least as one component of this revisedworld, spatium desertum, a profound void emptied of body, freed from thematerial elements and released as it were to itself. That, at least, is what


self-abandonment) – an inadvertent echo, but intriguing for that very reason. See also Alberti,1990 ; Long, 1997, 138-139 ; and Porter, forthcoming.82 Cf. 6.1143 : incubuit tandem populo Pandionis omni.83 See Sedley, 1998, pp. 173-174 ; in Theophrastus (ap. Philo, De aet. mund. 124-127), whereeach of the four elements suffers and perishes, while air is said to become sickly (noseifln [Diels,1879, 487.19]).84 Sedley, 1998, 80-82. The emergency may just be the internal incoherence of the conceptionitself, as seen from Lucretius’ vantage-point (differently, Furley, 1989, 191).

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the cosmology under review would seem to suggest, with its notion of anextra-cosmic void that is « empty of all matter »85.

This notion, and the scenario of the world’s collapsing into void, arestrictly prohibited by Epicurean physics. The prohibition is the point of thepassage. Indeed, so inconceivable is the thought of sheer void, void free ofcosmic matter, that Lucretius has folded into the rival cosmology at the end ofbook 1 elements of his own, introducing atoms where there surely would havebeen none before : thus, even in the event of the utter cosmic ruin, Lucretiuscan now assure us, there will always still be atoms (corpora certa [1.521], thecertainty – the surety – of bodies) and void. Just what is Lucretius tryingto prevent here ? David Furley has the best answer : « he is canvassing thepeculiarly Epicurean fear of the earth’s falling downwards through space »86.Canvassing or expressing ? Interestingly, the argument for the impossibility ofthe voiding of the cosmos is simultaneously an argument against death. Thesequel runs : « For on whatever side you maintain that the bodies fail first(nam quacumque prius de parti corpora desse/constitues), this side will be thegate of death for things, by this path will all the throng of matter cast itselfabroad » (1111-1113). Death here is of things, and so too the horror before thevoid is a fear of death in this one sense – fear of the death of things.

Whether this passage, which is troubled by a prior lacuna of eight lines(and eight other mutilated lines), has been correctly understood or not,Lucretius nevertheless remains caught up in an Epicurean dilemma :representing to the imagination the physical hypothesis of atomism entailsbeing able to represent void. How do you conceive void ? With a powerful actof mind, an ejpibolh; thfl" dianoiva", you have to make the very same mentalabstraction that Lucretius is positing in these cataclysmic verses : you mustliterally void space itself, in order to divest it of all traces of matter. The mindshivers at the thought, and then rejects it (as at 1.523)87. Just to contemplatethe atomistic hypothesis is to undergo this radical destitution. It is to look theultimate death in the face, the death of representation itself, and then tostare into the abyss of sheer void. And it is to recoil again from that position,uncertainly, and to posit once again the existence of being (matter), and thusto keep the universe (and all possible worlds) from collapsing into infinitenothingness. Lucretius’ poem thus oscillates between the two poles of horror

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85 Sedley, 1998, 81, referring to Cic. Ac. 1.28 (no matter lies outside the universe). For a firmrejection of the extra-cosmic hypothesis, cf. 2.304-307 : « neither is there anything outside, intowhich any kind of matter may escape from the universe, nor whence new forces can arise andburst into the universe and change the whole nature of things ».86 Furley, 1989, 191. It is worth recalling that Hesiodic Chaos lies yawning beneath the« foundation » of Earth, the pavntwn e{do" ajsfale;" aijeiv (Hes. Th. 116-117). Cf. 5.534-563(« which explains why the heavy earth does not crash through the bed of air and fire on whichit rests », Furley, ibid.) and see n. 6, above.87 Or at 5.366 : nec tamen est [sc. natura mundi] ut inane, neque autem corpora desunt ;the world is not like void, for the reason that bodies are never lacking. Here, for once, thephenomenal world provides a reassuring analogical proof of what can and cannot exist belowthe limit of appearances.

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in Epicureanism, and we are left to ask ourselves which horror is greater :the overproximity of body (as in the plague) or the specter of abstract void(as here)88. Which is worse, the disappearance of void or that of body ? Thetwo horrors are plainly coordinate for an Epicurean, because body guaranteesa place for void and vice versa : remove one element, and the other must gotoo.

Paradoxically, Epicureanism claims to find tranquility in the midst of allthis horror. We might say that the Epicurean contemplation of void involves astrategic use of horror that is finally, or optimally, converted into a salvificvoluptas89. That is the unique achievement of Epicurean philosophy90.Lucretius’ unique achievement may lie in the way he reminds us of theprecariousness of this balance and its hard-won character. Ataraxy for humansrequires a kind of effort that forever keeps them at a remove from the divine.Gods, models of ethical perfection for us, are indifferent beings andeffortlessly so. Were humans ever to achieve the complete indifference ofthe gods, they would pass from humanity into a state of inhumanity. Andthat would be equivalent to deepest, quietest death. Epicurean gods, thoseparadigms of serenity, are sublime ; but sublimity is not a divine emotion anymore than serenity is one : sublimity is not an emotion the gods feel (it is notthey who experience horror and voluptas), while serenity may just be theabsence of emotion altogether, a state rather than a motion. That emotionbelongs to Epicurean converts who feel the gods to be sublime, and who, asthe true possessors of the emotion, can only ever recognize and acknowledgesublimity outside of themselves91. This tension goes some way towards


88 These are the two options canvassed at 1.520-523 : « If there were nothing which was emptyand void, the whole would be solid (omne foret solidum) ; unless on the other hand therewere bodies determined, to fill all the places they held (nisi contra corpora certa/essent quae locacomplerent quaecumque tenerent), the whole universe would be but empty void space (omnequod est, spatium vacuum constaret inane) ». Cf. 6.1272-1275 : omnia denique sancta deumdelubra replerat/corporibus mors exanimis onerataque passim/hospitibus loca quae complerantaedituentes.89 Cf. the proem to book 4, and esp. 4.20 : volgus abhorret ab hac (sc. ratione, viz.Epicureanism).90 An achievement that was no doubt marveled at subsequently, and occasionally emulated.Cf. Sen. NQ 5.15.1-2, where Seneca retails how men who were sent by Philip II of Macedon toexplore an abandoned mine discovered, not the riches he had hoped for, but something far morebreathtaking : vast reservoirs of subterranean water, held in the generous embrace of the earth :conceptus aquarum inertium vastos ... non sine horrore visos. The next line reads : cum magnahoc legi voluptate. (The close of the prologue to DRN 3 lies close to hand). A few sectionslater (5.15.4), Seneca continues in a Lucretian, moralizing vein : ulli ergo mortuo terra tamgravis est quam istis supra quos avaritia ingens terrarum pondus iniecit, quibus abstulit caelum,quos in imo, ubi illud malum virus latitat, infodit ? Illo descendere ausi sunt ubi novam rerumpositionem, terrarum pendentium habitus ventosque per caecum inanes experirentur et aquarumnulli fluentium horridos fontes et alteram perpetuamque noctem ; deinde, cum ista fecerunt,inferos metuunt !91 What the positive features of Epicurean divinity are is a more general problem. SeeNussbaum, 1994, pp. 255-257, on the featurelessness of the Epicurean gods (with conclusions

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explaining the unusual role of the sublime at the heart of De rerum natura,and its most precarious status92. As for the question what the gods are orrepresent, this is perhaps best left in the partial obscurity that Epicurus,no doubt deliberately, cast them into when he first conceived them.

To conclude : I hope I have shown why to claim that the actual structureof Lucretius’ poem passes from Atomology to World is to misdescribe thepoem in a most basic way. Rather, that structure describes a large-scale,macrocosmic trajectory that repeats the poem’s innermost, and most sublime,dialectic – namely, the passage from Body to Void – with the ethical responseof Humankind at its troubled and ever-present center93.

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that, however, go beyond what needs to be discussed here). The distinction between pleasure as astate and as a sensation is also made by Striker, 1986, 16, but with no reference to the conditionof the gods.92 The troubling ethical implications of immortality within the Epicurean system are impliedby Williams, 1972 and forcefully brought out Nussbaum, 1994.93 My thanks to the participants in Lille for responses to an earlier version of this essay. Thanksare also due to Sara Rappe and Tom Rosenmeyer for valuable comments on a later draft. Finally,I wish to dedicate this essay to the memory of Don Fowler, which is inseparable for me froma very intense encounter we had in 1993, trudging with a small group up and down the hilltopof Anacapri, and then later in Naples sipping midnight limoncello, all the while involved in ananimated conversation about the meaning of prolepsis and the divine in Epicurus – an experienceI have relived again and again in the presence of his many extraordinary papers.

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LUCRETIUS AND THE POETICS OF VOID

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