In a poem setting forth the way things are in nature, it is fitting for Lucretius to address, among many other phenomena, human conception and embryonic determination.Footnote ¹ With an eye toward ethics, Lucretius demonstrates how sexual reproduction at the seminal level can be explained by Epicurean atomism. In this paper, I am concerned with the biological ‘how’ of conception as explained in De Rerum Natura (= DRN) but also with the ethical ‘therefore’ for Lucretius’ readership and (over)estimations of male autonomy. For modern audiences with a basic grasp of procreation that includes sperm supplied by a male and egg supplied by a female, encountering Lucretius’ verses on women contributing semen (semina) to the process of conception can be surprising (4.1209–62).Footnote ² The idea of female semen may give us pause as we calibrate it with our understanding of eggs and ovulation, but Lucretius, in his time, was not advancing some novel theory. Wading into established debates on male-only or joint male-female semen production and gendered insemination (that is, who produces semen and whose semen is active at conception), Lucretius sides with those promulgating mutuality for both questions (for example Democritus [DK 24 A13]) and rejects Aristotle's representative exclusivist claim of male activity vs female passivity (τὸ ἄρρεν ἐστὶν ὡς κινοῦν καὶ ποιοῦν, τὸ δὲ θῆλυ ὡς παθητικόν, Gen. an. 729a28–30; cf. 726a30–6).Footnote ³ That is to say, a sexually mature female, like her male counterpart, emits semen that has determining potency in the formation of a human embryo (Lucr. 4.1209–62).Footnote ⁴ Although the discharge and activity of female semen is the focus of this paper, my investigation is not a Quellenforschung or historical survey of Greco-Roman ideas about women's contributions to insemination and fertility, since others have treated these matters extensively.Footnote ⁵ I concentrate rather on how Lucretius employs the concept of female semen in terms of his poetics in Book 4 and what I see as an ethical argument against the domineering nature of Roman masculinity.Footnote ⁶ The problem of female semen, from the point of view of Lucretius’ Roman male audience,Footnote ⁷ is that it is potentially costly to men because it rivals and threatens their status from the physiological to the discursive level.Footnote ⁸ Iain Lonie broaches the same issue from Greek perspectives:

More to the point, because Lucretius asserts the existence of active and even antagonistic female semen vis-à-vis male semen and male bodies,Footnote ¹⁰ he necessarily destabilizes cultural assumptions about the radical agency of Roman men on the one hand and their obsessive anxieties over vulnerability and orificial security on the other.Footnote ¹¹ Although he is considering the greater sweep of the western tradition, William Miller's comments on semen underscore the violence to precarious Roman masculinity posed by the secretion:

The effeminizing capacity of semen would be appreciably greater coming from a female subaltern. As Lucretius reconfigures the dominant culture's moral ordering, a woman may still endure penetration, but she produces semen too and her body is no longer a passive site to be seminally colonized. To force this rapprochement with the assumed perquisites of Roman male reproductive dynamism, Lucretius does not opt for subtleties or flanking manoeuvres.Footnote ¹³ Instead, he attacks head on with empowered agentive female semen presented in a sustained programme of violent imagery and expression.Footnote ¹⁴

When we first meet with female semen at 4.1211 (materno semine; cf. muliebri semine, 4.1247), we find it amid violent language. The image is a clash between mother and father, with battle at the macro scale of sexual congress between two bodies and at the micro scale of intermingling semen, the coital and the seminal scales having already been collapsed together early in Book 1 (that is, ‘seminal coitus’ coitum seminis, 1.185) (Lucr. 4.1209–12):Footnote ¹⁵

Recognizing that the terms and figures of these verses can bear significance in various registers, let us temporarily separate the language of violence here into two categories, war violence and sexual violence.Footnote ¹⁹ In line 1209 commiscendo (cf. ut semina possit | seminibus commisceri, 4.1257–8), contextually appropriate for its sexual meaning, also conjures up the notion of armies locked in combat (cf. multa ui proelia miscent, Verg. G. 3.220), a use that Lucretius has already employed at 2.117–18 when discussing atomic motion (corpora misceri … | et uelut aeterno certamine proelia pugnas).Footnote ²⁰ A littler earlier in Book 4, in the same paragraph on dreams that introduces the production and nocturnal emission of semen, the simplex miscere appears in this martial sense. Addressing the phenomenon of peoples’ waking activities appearing in reveries (Lucr. 4.1011–36), Lucretius notes that in their sleep ‘kings conquer, are captured, join battle’ (reges expugnant, capiuntur, proelia miscent, Lucr. 4.1013).Footnote ²¹ Back to our passage under review, the vernacular of war violence continues in verse 1210 with uicit (cf. Lucr. 5.1347) and corripuit (cf. Caes. BCiv. 3.109.5) and returns a few lines later, as Brown notes, with male and female semen at stalemate, when ‘neither of the two has conquered or has been conquered’ (et neque utrum superauit eorum nec superatumst, 4.1217; cf. Caes. BCiv. 2.22.1).Footnote ²² The commingling of female and male semen may end up being productive, but it is a battle none the less and one in which the victor is not predetermined by the sex of the semen's emitter.Footnote ²³

In addition to more readily identifiable martial vocabulary, the language of sexual violence is also implied in this pericope and hinges on the phrase uirilem uim along with gender-reinforcing terms. Of the many meanings conveyed by uis, forcible sex or rape is a primary one, especially in tableaux concerned with men's comportment toward women (cf. Plaut. Epid. 110). In elucidating 4.1209–12, we need not settle on that connotation alone, but it is demonstrably within Lucretius’ verbal palette. In Book 5, when laying out human prehistory, Lucretius gives three possibilities to account for primitive sexual coupling: shared attraction, compulsion (uis) or bribery (5.962–5). Leaving no uncertainty about the nature of this gendered sexual coercion, Lucretius modifies uis with the pleonastic uiolenta and makes a man its owner (uiolenta uiri uis, 5.964). The uiri uis of 5.964 lexically echoes the uirilem uim of 4.1209–10 and though these lines lack a uiolentam, we know, given the focus of the scene, that this violence is sexual. But Lucretius upends the expected man-violating-woman script in 4.1209–12.Footnote ²⁴ Unlike the primitive sexual pairing in Book 5, here it is the male's coercive force (uirilem uim) that is sometimes subjugated by female force (ui) in the mingling of their respective semen. There is some ambiguity to the domination here. Should we understand it as occurring only at the seminal level or are we to think that the woman physically masters the man, or both? It might not pay to insist on one over the other, though on the grounds that I argue below, I tend to see the domination occurring between the respective semen of the woman and the man.Footnote ²⁵

If we examine uis in this pericope more closely, my artificially imposed classifications of war and sexual violence dissolve and we see that Lucretius’ violent language is dynamic and polyvalent. In addition to meaning forcible sex, uis, among various martial senses, can denote military strength abstractly, as in ‘fighting capability’, and numerically, as in ‘forces’, ‘hosts’, or even ‘units’.Footnote ²⁶ These two senses are especially pertinent in our passage. As he does with all sensible objects, Lucretius imagines semen in the aggregate to be composed of atomic particles. Each discrete seed, he explains, convenes (conueniens) from throughout the whole body to the genitals (partis genitalis, 4.1041–4), much like the converging forces of an army (cf. legiones … in agrum Stellatem conuenerunt, Livy 10.31.5).Footnote ²⁷ This language of congregating appears a few lines earlier in 4.1032, where we learn that an inrush of external simulacra ‘converges’ (conueniunt) upon the pent-up semen and triggers ejaculation. That these simulacra are also like military units Lucretius suggests in 4.1040, where he renames them aggregately as a uis: ‘Only a human force can discharge human semen from a person’ (ex homine humanum semen ciet una hominis uis).Footnote ²⁸ At this juncture, when the uis of another person, that is to say, an invasion of troops of simulacra assail the eyes, the semen, like blood (sanguis), is ready to discharge back in the direction whence we are struck by the assault of the uis (unde icimur ictu, 4.1046, 1049–50). With this additional insight into Lucretius’ use of uis, if we return to the lines (4.1209–17) about internal strife between maternal and paternal semen where the woman's uis conquers (uicit) the uirilis uis, still more thematically consistent military language comes into view.Footnote ²⁹ Internally, at the seminal level, both man and woman release their respective host of discrete militaristic semen atoms and battle ensues. One force wins or the engagement ends in a stalemate with neither side outstripping the other (et neque utrum superauit eorum nec superatumst, 4.1217). The double occurrence of superare here is not just resumptive uariatio for the uincere from line 1210. This term, unlike, say, uincere, expugnare or pellere, connotes numerical advantage in addition to pre-eminence and conquering. Victory and numerical troop superiority, of course, go hand in hand (for example superanti multitudini uictoriam fore, Livy 5.38.4). And this is exactly what Lucretius suggests: sometimes a woman, via the number of her semina, prevails over a man's semen and determines the appearance of their progeny.Footnote ³⁰ He says as much a few lines later (4.1229–31):

At the level of atomic semen, in regard to the fundamental biological imperative to propagate life through sexual intercourse—Lucretius’ focus from the poem's earliest lines (saecla propagent, 1.1–20)—we see Lucretius undermining masculine prerogative and domination. He replaces it with a vision of gendered seminal competition in which women's reproductive material participates on equal footing. This is mirrored in agonism between the sexes wherein one can master the other. But this does not mean that one human must subjugate another in a sexual encounter. That would only feed back into discourses of Roman male domination. Instead, the warlike intermixing of semen at the atomic level is a foil to the possibility of a more peaceful and mutual engagement at the human level.Footnote ³¹ Semen must, like all atoms in the act of coalescing (misceri), continually fight it out turmatim, ‘by squadrons/units’ (2.118–19), a more patently martial synonym for the uis of 4.1210. Men and women, on the other hand, can cooperate in producing children, rearing them and forming communities, linked ends which, Lucretius suggests in Book 5, follow naturally upon their primitive sexual coupling (1013–23). At this juncture in the poem, the respective uires of the parents again appear, but now Venus, metonymy here for mutual sexual congress between a woman and a man (et mulier coniuncta uiro concessit in unum, 5.1012), has abated their violent antagonistic tendencies by the birth of offspring (et Venus inminuit uiris, 5.1017).Footnote ³² Necessary atomic conflict at the seminal level permits at the human level tranquillity and friendship (amicitiem) that eschews interpersonal violence (nec laedere nec uiolari, 5.1019–20).

Indeed, if we return to the lines from Book 5 on prehistoric mating, we recall that, before Lucretius lists rape (uiolenta uis) as a cause, he first offers ‘mutual desire’ (mutua … cupido, 5.963). Mutuus and similar terms appear frequently in Lucretius’ discussion of human sexual congress and semen.Footnote ³³ We find it also within the pericope on male/female semen battles. As noted above, Lucretius acknowledges that sometimes these seminal clashes result in a draw with neither side prevailing. The deadlocked melee between the parents’ semen is a distorted reflection of their sexual embrace. The parents and semen both engage at their respective scales, but whereas the opposing seminal forces are joined in contest (that is, superare) to determine the appearance of the resulting embryo, mutual fervency and shared breathing (conspirans mutuus ardor, 4.1216) unite the parents. This biological and erotic mutuality looks forward to the mutua cupido of 5.963 and is anticipated and underscored by mutua uoluptas (4.1201), mutua gaudia (4.1206) and communia uoluptas (4.1209) enjoyed by animals in their own mating acts. Whatever strictures or taboos humans might impose upon sex, mutual pleasure is natural, Lucretius infers.Footnote ³⁴ The notion of mutual desire and pleasure between a man and a woman in copulation must have been potentially threatening to an ancient male audience since any shift toward mutuality must come with the spectre of softening, a consequence of shared procreation, according to Lucretius (mollescere coepit, 4.1013–14), and at the cost of the male sexual prerogative.Footnote ³⁵ In accordance with Lucretius’ recurring motif of the macro paralleling the micro (for example death of flora/fauna and destruction of the world, Lucr. 2.1122–52), the vulnerability that a man must concede in acknowledging mutuality resonates with the potential vincibility of his semen vis–à–vis female semen. These subversive couplings come at a price.Footnote ³⁶

Throughout his exposition on the biology and psychology of sex, Lucretius further discomfits male privilege and reiterates male vincibility through the figure of externalized female ejaculation. Even if Lucretius does not suggest actual external ejaculation of female semen analogous to male ejaculation, he nevertheless vividly exploits its imagery.Footnote ³⁷ 4.1045–57 is a protracted ejaculatory exchange between male and female (or effeminate) emitters and receptors. As he does with the intermingling of male and female semen, Lucretius colours this reciprocal ejaculation with martial language and figures (for example wounds, mens saucia, 4.1048; injury, uulnus, 4.1049; blood, sanguis, 4.1050;Footnote ³⁸ blows, ictus, 4.1050, 1052; spears, tela, 4.1052; etc.).Footnote ³⁹ Yet, contrary to what we might expect to result from a confrontation between masculine and effeminate contenders, upon close examination, it is not the man (hunc, 4.1053) who prevails or is even decisively active in the battle. Reading backward from that hunc, we find that, a) quite independent of the man, the grammatically feminine noun ‘desire’ (fitque uoluntas), of its own accord, causes the discharge (eicere = ex– + iacere, 4.1045–6) of his volley of semen, and b) that this discharge is not an initial thrust but a reflexive response to being hit (as in touché) and wounded (mens saucia, 4.1048). And what is he wounded by? Amor (mens saucia amore), which, as Brown and Snyder observe, is part of a pun simultaneously implying umor, or semen.Footnote ⁴⁰ That is to say, the man's release of semen is predicated on first being figuratively ejaculated upon. Continuing on we learn that the blow (ictus, 4.1050, 1052) eliciting this ejaculatory reaction is delivered by a woman or a boy with womanish limbs (puer membris muliebribus, mulier, 4.1053, 1054). The stroke from both aggressors is also ejaculatory, but initial rather than reactive. The boy ‘hurls’ (iaculatur, 4.1053) and the woman ‘casts love (= umor/semen)’ (iactans … amorem, 4.1054) at the grammatically objectified man (hunc, 4.1053).Footnote ⁴¹ In reaction, the man then ‘casts the fluid culled from his body into the other body’ (et iacere umorem in corpus de corpore ductum, 4.1056). If we map Lucretius onto Miller's claim about the power of semen, the man has been feminized fourfold: he has been wounded in the duel, he has been touched by another's semen, a woman is the source of both the blow and the semen, and the semen itself is female. Quite beyond the embryological, as Lucretius portrays it, ejaculated female semen is potent stuff. At any rate, stripped of procreative symbols, the actual discharges from the woman and the womanish boy to the man, we learn a few lines later, are sight-producing material simulacra (4.1063) that fool lovers as they look (spectando, 4.1101–2) at the objects of their desire.

That Lucretius presents the seminal and the optical on equal footing is also demonstrable by investigating his use of ‘casting’ terminology in the passage.Footnote ⁴² Elsewhere in the poem, where ejaculation and semen are not considered, we find the exact language describing the woman and boy's casting motions used to explicate the physics of seeing. In his discussion on the tactile quality of sight earlier in Book 4, Lucretius notes that seen objects are continually ‘shooting out’ (iaculentur, 4.146; cf. effeminate boy iaculatur at 4.1053) the simulacra that produce sight when they strike and enter our eyes.Footnote ⁴³ Similarly, in Book 2, when arguing that colour is perceived when ‘the pupil receives a certain kind of blow’ from the simulacra (plagae quoddam genus excipit in se | pupula, 2.810–11), Lucretius employs the term iactare (2.823; cf. woman iactans, 4.1054) to describe their emission. Indeed, Lucretius demonstrates verbal consistency throughout the poem. In addition to these early instances of iac– terminology, Lucretius sets forth the same lexical pieces for his disquisition on sex and reproduction at the very beginning of Book 4. Directly after the proem, Lucretius introduces the book's topic as the material effluences that he terms simulacra (4.26–30). Their motion from sensed thing to human sense receptacle Lucretius describes with forms of mittere (for example 4.43, 64) and variations on the iac– lexeme. Referring to the discharging motion of atomic simulacra, we find the now familiar iacere in 4.72 (also in the passive iaci in 4.68) and iaculantur in 4.86. The ejaculatory quality of simulacra movement is clear. Though Lucretius does not say that simulacra are composed of semina in the atomic sense in these early lines of Book 4, he does use synonyms for semina which he introduced back in 1.55–61 (for example primordia, 4.41; corpora, 4.55). There is no reason to doubt that Lucretius considered simulacra to be seminal. If we return briefly to Book 2, we note that in the line following an occurrence of iactare, sight-producing material is referred to as semen (4.824), a synonym for simulacra that Lucretius prefers in this treatment on atoms and colour (for example 2.733, 760, 776).Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, in the ejaculatory fracas of Book 4, the man is rendered orificially insecure twice over: he receives in his eyes the seminal simulacra emitted first by the woman (or womanish boy) and then cannot help but issue semen from his genitals. To combat this ocular and genital incontinence, Lucretius, using the same iac– lexeme as he does for the motion of simulacra and the woman's discharged missiles, advises men to ejaculate pent-up semen in the body of any person other than a beloved (et iacere umorem conlectum in corpora quaeque, 4.1065). Indeed, from the commencement of his discussion on sex, Lucretius makes ejaculation contingent upon the inrush of external simulacra ‘encountering’ (conuenient, 4.1031–2) semen, conuenire being the very term, as we noted above, used in a slightly different sense to describe the internal gathering of semen to the genitals a few verses later (in loca conueniens neruorum certa, 4.1043). The language and the metaphor for semen and sight are, to be sure, tightly consistent.Footnote ⁴⁵

That the woman's discharged simulacra are to be understood seminally is also underscored by the appearance of Venus in the passage. The spears (read: simulacra) that the man visually receives (accipit) belong to Venus (Veneris … telis, 4.1052; cf. ‘arrows of Venus’, Venerisque sagittis, 4.1278). The woman with her off-shooting visual material is like the deity: a female who casts phallic spears and arrows. Beyond hurling projectiles, Venus herself becomes ejaculating male genitalia later in Lucretius’ treatment of sex. In 4.1107 she is, metaphorically, a penis-like ploughshare sowing feminine fields at the moment of sexual climax (Venus ut muliebra conserat arua, 4.1107).Footnote ⁴⁶ When Lucretius revisits this metaphor toward the close of Book 4, Venus is now a synonym for man's penis (uiri Venerem), which is also a plough (uomeris) sowing or discharging semen (seminis, 4.1270–3). In both occurrences of the Venus/plough/penis figure, it is the woman's genitalia which receive the seed/semen. However, just as Lucretius flipped the uis/rape script, when it comes to spears and arrows, we are to imagine the man's eyes as receiving these instruments of violence.

In 4.1137–40 Lucretius adds variation to the question of female discharge and male susceptibility. A man too taken with his beloved is subject to gnawing bitterness, Lucretius asserts (4.1133–5). Because of this obsession, even an ambiguous word flung (uerbum iaculata, 4.1137) by the object of his adoration can internally wound him as it penetrates and sticks in his lustful heart (cupido adfixum cordi, 4.1138).Footnote ⁴⁷ Perhaps worse, she might cast her eyes or gaze upon another (iactare oculos aliumue tueri, 4.1139). We know these terms and metaphors. The projectile/war/wound figure is evident with iaculata/iactare and adfixum cordi, but the erotic and the seminal are just as patent. In dominant fashion, the mistress discharges her uerbum at and into the man's aural orifices, a spoken uerbum being a collection of discrete litterae just as seminal as the atoms comprising the visual simulacra. Indeed, Lucretius refers to the material that invade our sense organs as semen in one verse and then immediately parallels this with the elementa/litterae making up uerba in 2.687–94. For Lucretius, the particle physics for the production of hearing and sight are more or less stable.Footnote ⁴⁸

If we slow down for a moment, though, and consider the implications of the locution iactare oculos of 4.1138, the lexical familiarity of the idiom runs counter to the abnormality of its physics. Rather than an intromissive theory of sight and other sense perceptions—argued especially in the preceding portion of Book 4—here we suddenly meet with something like extramissive seeing.Footnote ⁴⁹ Either Lucretius has nodded or he is up to something. Given the technical precision with which he employs the iac–lexeme to describe the properties of atomic motion and sense perception in addition to the analogous control over the lexeme when he deals with human spermatology, I do not think that we can deem this a slip or poetic laxity. Moreover, it seems to me beyond coincidental that this rupture in the poem's atomic physics occurs in close proximity to other instances of male vincibility in relation to semen and sight. Lucretius, I contend, suspends his atomist program and strains his own carefully wrought verbal palette in order to discomfit male prerogative by rendering men into objects of effeminizing female gaze (aliumue tueri).Footnote ⁵⁰ With this intentional lexical subversion, Lucretius reiterates that male sexual privilege is a cultural fiction, whether it comes to embryology or to convivial flirtations.

As a coda to his treatment of the biology and psychology of sex, Lucretius again assails male advantage in the closing verses of Book 4. As we might now expect, he does so with language evoking female semen and male vulnerability. Lucretius begins the section with martial imagery and gestures back to the earlier passages about women who discharge (iactans) Venus’ shafts/simulacra (Veneris telis) at men who in turn receive the blows (accipit ictus, 4.1052) and the contest of male and female semen of 4.1209–17 in which semina are roused up by Venus’ goads (Veneris stimulis, 4.1215).Footnote ⁵¹ In these lines, however, Lucretius asserts that Venus’ arrows (Venerisque sagittis, 4.1278) do not explain why a less physically desirable woman is sometimes loved by a man (deteriore fit ut forma muliercula ametur, 4.1279). Although no arrows, that is to say, no material discharge of sight-producing, sexually stimulating simulacra are in play, Lucretius subjects the man to the woman with another violent insemination figure. The man is like a thing crushed by the woman's repeated blows, however lightly they fall (nam leuiter quamuis quod crebro tunditur ictu, 4.1284). He ends up conquered (uincitur, 4.1285) not by a spearman's masterstroke but, like a stone, by continual drops of falling fluid (guttas in saxa cadentis | umoris longo in spatio, 4.1286–7).Footnote ⁵² The violent language (tunditur, uincitur) is both lexically and thematically parallel to the embryological tableau of female seed assaulting and conquering male seed (uicit, corripuit, 4.1210). Similar to female semen prevailing at conception, in the face of this liquescent onslaught, the man cannot withstand penetration (pertundere, 4.1287).Footnote ⁵³ That we are dealing with another ejaculation image is certain.Footnote ⁵⁴ The incidence of guttae and umor call our attention back to the verses about women casting their simulacra into the eyes of men.Footnote ⁵⁵ In fact, lying between the mulier iactans in 4.1054 and Lucretius’ admonition to the lover to discharge his collected semen into other bodies (et iacere umorem conlectum in corpora quaeque) in 4.1065, we find the only other instance of the term gutta in Book 4. In verses 1058–60, the primary sense of gutta is not seminal, but, with the image of secretion and internal distillation (in cor | stillauit gutta, 4.1059–60), it very nearly replicates the concentration of semen (in loca conueniens neruorum certa, 4.1043) discussed a few verses earlier. As Brown has already observed, the force of guttas umoris in the book's final two lines is in part seminal.Footnote ⁵⁶ What Brown does not link together is the repeated superiority of female seed over male seed/masculinity throughout Lucretius’ disquisition on sex, for which these concluding lines serve as a mirror reflecting backward to his argument.Footnote ⁵⁷

Beyond the rivalry of female/male semen in 4.1209–17, Lucretius touches on the genesis of human embryos once more in Book 5, as he puts forth a theory to solve the chicken-and-egg primacy problems (and when it comes to actual fowl, Lucretius favours the egg, 5.801–4).Footnote ⁵⁸ With respect to humanity's initial parturition, Lucretius’ solution is notable for its ingenuity—spontaneously generating, subterranean dirt uteruses!—but it is also remarkable for how it genders this natural phenomenon as female and effaces any externalized male contribution even while masculinizing feminized natural processes.Footnote ⁵⁹ The earth, Lucretius asserts, ‘has deservedly received the name mother since from the earth all life has been birthed’ (ut merito maternum nomen adepta | terra sit, e terra quoniam sunt cuncta creata, 5.795–6). In accord with cultural norms, in the active voice, the meaning of creare is determined by the gender of its subject: if male, creare means ‘sire’ or ‘beget’, if female, ‘birth’ or ‘deliver’. In the passive, as creata sunt is in verse 796, the verb means ‘be born’. This passive should not be understood as diminishing mother earth's activity, partly implied with the directional e terra.Footnote ⁶⁰ More importantly, there is no sire here.Footnote ⁶¹ A few verses later, earth's feminine agency becomes explicit: ‘Then, you see, for the first time earth produced mortal peoples’ (tum tibi terra dedit primum mortalia saecla, 5.805). In the following three verses familiar language emerges, terms that reaffirm and privilege enabled female semen (Lucr. 5.806–9):

We are acquainted with umor, superare and arua. As we have already seen, Lucretius readily slides from the agricultural sense of arua, ‘fields’ or ‘furrows’, to female genitalia, while his oft-utilized umor for ‘water’ or ‘liquid’ becomes a favourite synonym for semen when treating of procreation. Superare, as we also noted, is the term that Lucretius uses to indicate numerical superiority in the mingling of female/male semina at conception (cf. 4.1217). Although we have not encountered calor, we have seen ardor, a term with a similar range of meaning, appearing in the context of mutual desire between the sexes. Two new words require noting: uterus and radix. The first appears only here in the poem and bears the straightforward meaning of ‘uterus’ or ‘womb’. Radix, in conjunction with aruis, carries its basic meaning ‘root’ on one level. However, in sexual register it is also a common cipher for penis, a sense which it must convey here as well, paired as it is with uterus in the context of propagation and penetrating the earth.Footnote ⁶⁴ So, in these verses we have all the components for sexual reproduction that we saw in Book 4: desire, semen, seminal superiority, female organs and male organs. But the alignment of the terms has shifted. Maternal earth has semen and desire in her aruae, but they are her own and not sown by a plough. Radices, like phalluses, penetrate mother earth (terra), but are not attached to any male. Rather, they belong to uteruses which, of their own accord,Footnote ⁶⁵ like empowered phalluses, take advantage of open spaces (loci regio opportuna, Lucr. 5.807).Footnote ⁶⁶ We even find ejaculation of a sort in the following verses when maternal earth is said to ‘discharge from her open veins a secretion similar to milk’ (sucum uenis … fundere apertis | consimilem lactis, Lucr. 5.812–13). The ejaculatory image is patent with the phallic uenis Footnote ⁶⁷ and seminal sucum … consimilem lactis, while fundere lexically matches profundant (4.1035) that Lucretius uses when first describing the discharge of nocturnal emissions. But again, as for the radices so for the uenae: there is no distinctly male wielder or actor. Lucretius turns mother earth into a self-penetrating, self-inseminating, gestating, lactating and ejaculating figure.Footnote ⁶⁸ Still, based on his caveat regarding Magna Mater in 2.658–60, we should not understand that this strange hermaphroditic image is somehow reifying traditional divine female earth anthropomorphism.Footnote ⁶⁹

Rather, the point of erasing of providential creative masculinity in this theoretical model for the genesis of human existence seems to be another assault on assumed male advantage. For Lucretius, there are no gods, male or female, designing and creating. Nature, like the uterus with its phallic roots or the vulvic furrows with their self-sowed seed, is androgynous, interpenetrating and unbiased toward male or female prerogatives. After making this swipe against phallogocentric cosmological thinking, Lucretius returns again to discussing human procreation with his recognizable themes of non-gender-specific semen emission (semina … manare, 5.852), female/male conjugation (feminaque ut maribus coniungi possit, 5.853) and exchanges of mutual pleasures between male and female (mutua qui mutant inter se gaudia uterque, 5.854).Footnote ⁷⁰ Men do play a role in reproduction, Lucretius seems to emphasize, just not a primary or hegemonic one, and the pleasure involved is not their special province.

For Lucretius, demiurgic domineering masculinity represents ignorance of how atomic motion, collision and cohesion operate at the microscopic level of biological reproduction.Footnote ⁷¹ This failure to grasp particle physics results in confusing the natural processes of shared seminal conception and infecting female/male relationships. Indeed, the language of disease appearing in the verses on sex (for example ulcus, languent, aegrotat, 4.1068, 1123, 1123) is the same found in the plague-scene of Book 6 (for example ulceribus, languens, aegros, 6.1200, 1260, 1236), as though the contaminated masculine sexuality from Book 4 is a contributing factor to the growing epidemic.Footnote ⁷² What is more, in the plague-scene we again find violence against masculinity and the bodily parts most obviously linked to male semen. Among the various modifications that Lucretius makes to source material from Thucydides is the detail that those men whose genitals (partes genitalis, 6.1207) were ravaged by the disease sometimes ‘cut off their penises with a blade’ (ferro priuati parte uirili, 6.1209). In 2.49.8 Thucydides mentions that the disease attacked the genitals (κατέσκηπτε γὰρ ἐς αἰδοῖα) and notes that many survived having been deprived of these (στερισκόμενοι τούτων), but he does not specify penises and there are no blades. As Lucretius recasts it, the society-destroying plague compels men literally to emasculate themselves in an act of self-destruction. This addition to his source reads like a moral epilogue to Book 4: unless Roman men accept the reality of atomic physics and its ethical import that everyone is unavoidably interpenetrable and thus of equal status lacking artificially imposed masculine and effeminate categories, then nature will violently force this reckoning and men will desex themselves.Footnote ⁷³ By a similar tack, to demonstrate that Lucretius rejects the toxic state of Roman masculinity and its violent sexuality, Pamela Gordon points to the Tityos passage in 3.984–94.

In addition to Gordon's observation, I note that in its punishment Tityos’ body lies resupine (iacentem, 3.984) over fields (iugera, 3.988) he neither ploughs nor sows, penetrably vulnerable to the gaze and the pointed beaks of birds (uolucres scrutentur, uolucres lacerant, 3.985, 993), and consumable (praebere cibum proprio de corpore, 3.991).Footnote ⁷⁵ That is to say, he is rendered wholly effeminized, the inescapable consequence of corporeality, regardless of sex, in Lucretius’ universe.

I wish to make two closing observations, the first dealing with Lucretius and men, the second with Lucretius and women. Since he is an ardent Epicurean, we are justified in asking whether Lucretius suggests that this forfeiture is conducive to male pleasure. To vary our original questions, we can wonder whether acknowledging loss of propagative autonomy and abandoning sexual aggression could be pleasurable for a Roman man. Can he enjoy sex that is non-domineering? Can he delight in children at whose conception his wife's semen has clearly overpowered and conquered his own? To the second question it seems that Lucretius answers in the affirmative since he invokes, with great emotive result, the pleasure which a father receives from his children (‘they strike his heart with silent pleasure’, tacita pectus dulcedine tangent, 3.896). And if we cycle back to the verses in Book 5 on early human coupling and community formation, we find that sex (mulier coniuncta uiro) and the bearing of children has a natural softening (mollescere) effect on fathers, since the adorable charms (blanditiis) of children are capable of breaking or mollifying (fregere) the haughtiness (ingenium superbum) of men (5.1012–18).Footnote ⁷⁶ Conquered in this way, these men in turn seek protection for women and children (5.1021) since they recognize that it is ‘right to have compassion on the weak (imbecillorum esse aequum misererier omnis, 5.1023). The language in this tableau of sexual congress, reproduction and, in consequence, the natural development of social contracts (foedera, 5.1025) based on mutual non-aggression (nec laedere nec uiolari, 5.1020) exposes the perquisites of violent Roman masculinity as an unnatural and more recent fiction.Footnote ⁷⁷ And perhaps this is the key to answering the question about enjoying non-violent sex. If a man naturally delights in his child, even when, say, the sex of the child is female and the appearance altogether favours the mother, then the loss that his semen suffered at conception ends up becoming a pleasure to him.Footnote ⁷⁸ If he can accept that defeat at the atomic seminal level, and take pleasure in its long-term product, maybe he can likewise embrace at the human level the loss of sexual domination as his exclusive right. He can, perhaps, achieve fulfilment in the mutual copulative pleasure that Lucretius claims, as we have already seen, to be natural for males and females of all creatures. Indeed, the animals of both sexes in the first proem, dominated and penetrated by Venus’ ingress and her uis (tuumque | significant initum perculsae corda tua ui, 1.12–13; cf. omnibus incutiens blandum per pectora amorem, 1.19), have pleasure (lepore, 1.15) as they follow her lead and together fulfil their shared biological imperative to contribute to the propagation of their species (generatim saecla propagent, 1.20).

But what about women and DRN? Although as modern readers we might take some satisfaction in Lucretius assailing Roman male privilege and its exploitative sexuality, we also are right to be suspicious of the poet's aims and methods. The trenchant criticisms of Snyder and Nugent remain valid: this poem is not for women—and by ‘for’ I mean that the poem does not lend itself to being readily interpreted as either pro-women or directed to them.Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, I do not think that poetically weaponizing female semen and female sexual pleasure against Roman masculinity necessarily or even logically suggests that Lucretius demonstrates interest in habilitating or empowering real women. Rather, Lucretius’ apparent purpose in attacking masculinity, at least as I have read it in this paper, is to effeminize men by masculating women with the result that both sexes end up androgynous at the level of semina, mutually ejaculating and mutually receiving. Rather than feminine, Nugent is right to assert that Lucretius’ ‘model reader’ is ‘implicitly gendered as masculine’.Footnote ⁸⁰ But I ask, ‘Does Lucretius intend him to remain so?’ Gordon observes that

I would add that not only are the contents of the poem inimical to Roman male culture, they are also communicable, and Lucretius’ model audience, if he is a receptive reader, risks uncovering that his assumed dominant ‘he’ is much closer to a vulnerable ‘she’.Footnote ⁸²