As part of the diatribe against the fear of death in Book 3 of the De rerum natura, Lucretius puts words into the mouths of unenlightened mourners. In a famous and often imitated passage the mourners address the dead man and commiserate with him on his losses (3.894–9):
‘Your happy home will no longer welcome you, nor your excellent wife, nor will your sweet children run to snatch kisses and touch your heart with unspoken sweetness. You will not have the power to protect either your prosperity or your family. One hateful day (they say) has pitifully robbed pitiful you of all these things—so many rewards of life.’
The passage has been described as sentimental kitsch which can only be rescued if it is read as sarcastic parody.Footnote 1 Kenney,Footnote 2 for instance, describes its tone as one of ‘irony, rising at times to parody and overt mockery’, and describes the sentiments expressed as ‘conventional ideas’ which the poet attacks ‘using the technique of the diatribe’. Both Kenney and Wallach remind readers of the traditional epitaph form as seen in an inscriptionFootnote 3 from third-century Alexandria:
No longer,Footnote 4 Philoxenus, does your mother receive you and cast her arms lingeringly about your lovely neck, nor do you go to the famous city with the young men and rejoice in the shaded floor of the gymnasium.
Wallach compares the Lucretian speech unfavourably with Virgil's imitation of it at G. 2.523–4 and also Ovid's account (Tr. 1.3.63–8, 79–81) of his ‘death’ on leaving Rome, suggesting that Lucretius’ words ‘are intended as a parody of the type of expression found in grave inscriptions … or in the lamentation sections of epicedia’.Footnote 5
The language of the mourners may be mawkish, but it is not without skill: the repeated iam iam imitating the wailing grief, the expressive use of laeta as applied to the house itself, the juxtaposition of the key terms optima … dulces, the assonance of optima … occurrent oscula evoking the open-mouthed children, the repetition of dulces … dulcedine, the dental consonants of tacita pectus dulcedine tangent perhaps indicating the frisson of pleasure enjoyed by the father. The repeated use of enjambement (optima … praeripere … praesidium … una) adds powerful movement to the speech, along with emphasis of the element of competition in praeripere and the importance of familial praesidium. Their speech ends with the thing which the dead man misses most—uitae. The fact that the imagery of the passage inspired Virgil (G. 2.523–4) to imitate it might cause us to think again about its literary quality.
MynorsFootnote 6 comments on the Virgilian imitation (‘Lucretius began it [3.894–6]’), but this is to ignore Lucretius’ debt to earlier literature, and in particular to HomerFootnote 7 who is later singled out as ‘the one and only ruler of the poets’ (quorum unus Homerus | sceptra potitus, 3.1037–8) among those poets who belong to the ‘great dead’. KenneyFootnote 8 observed that the dead man's future inability to be a source of protection to his family (3.897–8) recalls the scene in Homer's Iliad (6.441–65) where Hector is taking his leave of Andromache and is grieving in advance for the suffering which his death will cause her ‘when some bronze-clad Achaean’ will take her away in tears and reduce her to the status of a servant at the loom of an unnamed woman.
Tellingly, Hector ends his speech (6.464–5) with the wish that he should be dead before any of this can come to pass, on the understanding that as a dead man he will not suffer it—an understanding which Lucretius would certainly share.
There is, however, far more Homeric material than this in Lucretius’ words. To begin with, the poignancy of dying abroad and not coming home again is a common toposFootnote 9 in Homer's Iliad. At 14.503–4, for example, Peneleos holds up the head of his enemy Promachos and predicts that his wife will not ‘rejoice in the homecoming of her dear husband’: closer to Lucretius is Sarpedon's request (5.684–8) to Hector to rescue his body:
‘Son of Priam, do not leave me to lie as prey to the Danaans, but help me: let life leave me in your city, since I am not destined to return home to my own native land, to gladden my dear wife and infant son.’
More graphically, Diomedes (11.393–5) tells Paris that, if he hits a man, ‘his wife's cheeks are gashed in grief, his children are orphaned, while he rots, reddening the earth with his blood, and there are more birds around him than (weeping) women.’
The notion of dying far from home and leaving one's family was, of course, to become something of a feature of funerary laments and elegies,Footnote 10 but it is tempting to believe that the precedent for this sort of language was to be found in the Homeric epics, and that Lucretius (writing in the same epic metre) was well aware of the epic intertext, especially in view of the massive use made by later writers of themes from the Odyssey in particular, as demonstrated by Kaiser.Footnote 11 When Lucretius’ mourners use this same combination of home, wife and children as part of their exploration of the pathos of death, they are tapping into the language of Homer's Iliad, with the significant difference that Homer's speakers are living men anticipating death, whereas Lucretius’ mourners are addressing a corpse who cannot share their sadness.Footnote 12 But there is a closer and even more pertinent source for the mourners’ lament.
In the Odyssey (12.39–46) Odysseus is being given guidance by Circe about what is in store for him and his men if and when they pass by the Sirens:
‘First of all you will arrive at the Sirens, who beguile everyone who comes to them. Whoever unwittingly draws near to them and hears the voice of the Sirens—for him no wife and infant children stand by thrilled as he returns home. On the contrary, the Sirens bewitch him with their clear-toned singing, as they sit in a meadow, and around them is a massive beach of bones from putrefied humans, with the skin shrinking all round them.’
The same basic elements are here again: the home, the wife and the children. The wife lacks an epithet, but the νήπια τέκνα (‘infant children’) share with her the combination of the verbs παρίσταται (‘stand by’) and γάνυνταιFootnote 13 (‘are thrilled’), which well encapsulates both their standing in wait for his return and also their shared excitement at seeing him. The theme of joy in γάνυνται is picked up in Lucretius with laeta, and οἴκαδε νοστήσαντι becomes Lucretius’ domus accipiet. Striking also is the contrast of the cosy domestic scene (which will not happen) with the dreadful certainty of the dead sailors as a ‘beach of bones from putrefied humans, with the skin shrinking all round them’: this same contrast (of hope vs reality) is also found in the Iliad (for example 11.816–18).
The Sirens lure sailors with the promise of giving them knowledge,Footnote 14 but actually secure their deaths via what HalliwellFootnote 15 calls ‘a kind of psychotropic paralysis (12.39–46)’. This point was remembered by Plato (Symp. 216a), when Alcibiades compares the power of Socrates over him to that of the Sirens: βίᾳ οὖν ὥσπερ ἀπὸ τῶν Σειρήνων ἐπισχόμενος τὰ ὦτα οἴχομαι φεύγων, ἵνα μὴ αὐτοῦ καθήμενος παρὰ τούτῳ καταγηράσω, ‘So I am forced to withhold my ears as if from the Sirens, and make off as fast as I can, for fear I should go on sitting beside him till old age was upon me.’
At this point we need to recall that Epicurus was critical of the dangers of poetry and ‘culture’, and warned against it in terms reminiscent of the Sirens (Diog. Laert. 10.6):Footnote 16
παιδείαν δὲ πᾶσαν, μακάριε, φεῦγε τἀκάτιον ἀράμενος
Hoist the sails, my boy, and steer clear of all culture.Footnote 17
Lucretius may well be tapping into the topos of ‘Siren voices’ in his choice of language here, but things are not simple. The mourners are not quoting the Sirens themselves—nobody could do that and live, with the sole exception of Odysseus. They are quoting from Circe's dire warning against approaching the Sirens—and Circe's own bewitching of Odysseus had itself been foiled by the hero being forewarned and forearmed by the god Hermes.Footnote 18 Lucretius is thus having it both ways and adding a layer of irony to the text whereby the mawkish mourners are actually undermining their own case by the intertextual reminiscences at work.
Inspired and informed by the divinity (Hermes/Circe/Epicurus), the wise man/Odysseus uses his intelligence to hear the mourners’ sentimental irrationality without incurring disaster.Footnote 19 The poetic lament for the losses suffered by the corpse is itself a seductively pathetic view of death, which readers have found beautiful enough to imitateFootnote 20 but which the poet at once swats with the voice of Epicurean philosophy:
they do not also say at this point: ‘but you will no longer have any craving for these things by now.’
Odysseus faces the threat of imminent death unless he heeds the advice of Circe, while we will all one day end up part of the inanimate heap of bones on the Sirens’ shoreline. The Epicurean wise man, however, will face this prospect armed with the atomic truth about life and death, just as the reader of Lucretius cannot harbour any romantic views of death after the grim realism of the poet's description of putrefaction (3.580–91, 719–21). The Sirens lure sailors with a seductive song which claims to be giving knowledge but only deals out death: Lucretius gives us the knowledge which allows us—like Odysseus—to enjoy the pleasure of the song without losing sight of the fundamental statement (Lucr. 3.830, Diog. Laert. 10.124–5) that ‘death is nothing to us’ and the serenity which acceptance of this can bring.
