‘Lucretius and (early) modernity’ has a familiar ring to it. I once participated in a conference entitled Lucrezio e la modernità (G. Mormino et al. [2010]); C. Wilson, a contributor here, published a book around the same time entitled Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (2008). Several volumes on Epicureanism-reception have appeared recently, some more text-based (P.-F. Moreau and A. Deneys-Tunney [2003], G. Paganini and E. Tortarolo [2004], N. Leddy and A.S. Lifschitz [2009], F. Lestringant and E. Naya [2010]), some more ‘theory’-oriented, whether in an aleatory-Althusserian or a more Deleuzo-Serrian, clinamen-centred mode (B. Holmes and W.H. Shearin [2012], J. Lezra and L. Blake [2016]). These interpretative trends are discussed in D. Norbrook's elegant introduction.
This volume focuses on the ‘language and material circulation’ of De rerum natura (DRN), including manuscripts. Methodologically it is more conservative, challenging the ‘contingency’ motif in Lucretian readings (a partial exception is W. Williams's chapter on Montaigne, with its nod to distributed cognition). We learn how Cicero and Virgil influenced early modern (and our) readings of Lucretius. Many classic criticisms of Epicureanism were closer to the Roman parodies thereof than to the Epicurean sources themselves. Also featured are Lucretius' early modern translations and the translators themselves (Marolles in French; Evelyn, Hutchinson and Creech in English).
S. Harrison does not address the early modern period, but rather DRN as a Roman reception of Greek philosophical elements, focusing on the first proem. Lucretius' presentation of Epicurean doctrines in first-century b.c.e. Rome ‘negotiates some fundamental tensions between that radical Greek philosophy and traditional Roman culture’ (p. 29), by appropriating and undermining key Roman concepts and institutions. Promoting peace against war is Lucretius’ ‘countercultural’ move in relation to patriotic Roman culture, using ‘superficially conventional Roman elements to argue for an Epicurean philosophy which is fundamentally subversive in Roman terms’ (p. 42).
D. Butterfield elegantly discusses early modern manuscripts and private editions of DRN (including an unattributed translation in the Bodleian), stressing how surprising it is that ‘the DRN avoided irrevocable loss’, ‘joining the miserable catalogue of classical works known only by their titles and the occasional quotation’, given the ‘unfavourable environment towards Lucretius and Epicureanism through the Middle Ages’ (p. 49). What Poggio Bracciolini discovered in 1417 was a copy of the Ur-manuscript that has survived since the ninth century. Lambin's and Creech's commentaries/editions are the most important, the latter being intended critically: ‘“I have heard that the best Method to overthrow the Epicurean Hypothesis (I mean as it stands opposite to Religion) is to expose a full system of it to publick view”’ (p. 64). Yet Creech later dropped such attacks almost completely. Lucretius, ‘although battered and bruised from his turbulent transmission, was at last ready to be read more carefully and more attentively than at any point since antiquity itself’ (p. 68).
A. Brown studies Lucretius’ influence on Machiavelli, who did not cite DRN directly but made a transcription, now in the Vatican. By c. 1450, DRN was circulating in Florence, encouraging ‘new, transgressive thinking’ (p. 69). Lucretius’ ‘primitivism’ and atomistic cosmology influenced Machiavelli's equally peculiar combination of freedom and determinism: the world has always been the same, including human behaviour and constitution. Ultimately, Machiavelli's insistence on ‘the freedom of all living creatures to act independently, despite the constraints of necessity and chance’ reflected the ‘Epicurean balance of forces’ running counter to ‘Christian providentialism and Aristotelian teleology’ (p. 86). Brown also notes Lucretius’ influence on Hobbes.
Y. Haskell surveys Latin Lucretian poems published in sixteenth-century Italy: contrary to expectations, these poems are not necessarily ‘vehicles for heresy’ (p. 92), nor a coherent tradition, being quite miscellaneous. ‘The philosophical flights of the Cinquecento Lucretian poets range from cautious Christian raptures through to bold spiritual and cosmological thought experiments’ (p. 119), the latter including Giordano Bruno. Bruno's attraction to atomism was indeed raised at his trial for heresy, but not, it seems, his having imitated Lucretius in the Frankfurt poems.
N. Davidson discusses the Italian dissemination of manuscript copies of DRN. As several contributors note, it was possible to study Lucretius without compromising Christian belief. The ecclesiastical authorities, at least outside the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Florence, were not especially concerned by the circulation of DRN. The only reference to Lucretius in the Venetian Inquisition archives before 1600 was in Bruno's trial, where it was brought up by Bruno himself, rejecting the Lucretian idea of a shared origin of humans and animals. In Venice, there was no local equivalent of the 1517 Florentine decree against DRN’s use in schools, no campaign against those who owned or read the text.
Williams beautifully examines Montaigne's complex, layered and concealed reading and annotations of DRN, rejecting a distinction between sense and style. DRN holds ‘a distinctive place in the Essais’: some 150 extracts, totalling 454 lines quoted; ‘more than a sixth of the poem either directly cited or paraphrased’ (p. 144). Montaigne's first reading of DRN in 1564 helped him deal with La Boétie's death, but the near-hundred new Lucretian passages added in later editions of the Essais indicate ‘new and distinct lines of thinking’ (ibid.). While most of his citations (76) are in the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’, in the essay on Virgil, Lucretius is the hidden topic: quotations from DRN are longer than any from Virgil. When Montaigne annotates Lucretius in French, his ‘recurrent tag line’ is ‘contre la religion’ (p. 149).
L. Cottegnies discusses the English reception of Lucretius, including Marolles's influence on Evelyn and his contemporaries, highlighting the milieu of English exiles in Paris, for example Charleton and Digby, and thus overlooked links between France and England. In Charleton's dialogue The Immortality of the Human Soul … (1657), the character Lucretius defends … the soul's immortality. This ‘very convoluted piece of propaganda’ reflects ‘Charleton's uneasy reception of Evelyn's schizophrenic edition of DRN I, with its Janus-like paratexts, epideictic preface and damning commentary’ (p. 188). Even if Marolles had ‘blazed a trail, by treating Lucretius as just another classical author worth reading and treating with respect’, his influence was ultimately limited in England by the ‘anti-Hobbesian climate of the 1660s’: ‘this Epicurean moment was over’ (p. 189).
W. Poole discusses the impact of DRN as a ‘theory of human origins’: evolutionary or not? He notes that, like many translators, Charleton left out Book 5 (on ‘evolution’) from his study: Creech, the only early modern English translator of Lucretius to publish a complete version, ‘defensively sneered about “men springing out of the Earth, as from the teeth of Cadmus his Dragon”’ (p. 195), although he owned a copy of La Peyrère's polygenecist treatise Prae-Adamitae. Epicuro-Lucretian polygenecist theories of human origins and the ‘Mother Earth’ impacted otherwise hostile authors, like Milton.
N. Hardy challenges the fashionable ‘swerve’ readings of DRN, promoting ‘flux, contingency, instability, and materialism’ rather than ‘“order” and “reason”’; in contrast, its early modern English translators saw in DRN a more Ciceronian vision of ‘nature's law-like regularity and intelligibility’ (p. 201), closer to natural theology. Hardy approves, emphasising continuities between DRN and ‘non-Epicurean traditions of writing about nature’ (p. 202) (e.g. the foedera naturae understood as leges naturales), even if ultimately he admits it is a ‘natural theology manqué[e]’ (p. 220). Of course one can take Hardy's philosophical presuppositions with a grain of salt, as when he presents Lucretius’ account of ‘the relationship between human reason, natural phenomena, and atoms’ as ‘comforting synergy rather than alienating materialism’ (p. 205, using a rather unargued-for definition of materialism).
Norbrook examines the ‘Epicurean moment’ in revolutionary England, describing a ‘complex dialectic’ in the reception of Lucretius, wherein ‘the most radically secular narrative of human history in existence could play a key role in political debates’ within a ‘strongly religious framework’ (pp. 223–4). The philosophical ‘paradigms’ here derived especially from Gassendi and Hobbes, although their Lucretianism differed: Gassendian readings were ‘more faithful to the content’ of DRN, but Hobbesian readings, ‘harder-edged’, ‘might pick up provocations in tone’ (p. 228); the former tied Lucretius to political moderation and free will, the latter to intellectual radicalism.
Wilson discusses Epicureanism in early modern political philosophy, in contrast to the more obvious presence of Stoicism. Three Epicurean theses central to ‘post-Machiavellian political theory’ are the ‘mind-dependence or “conventional” nature of values and political status’; that the justice of a law ‘depends on its utility in the circumstances of its application’, and a stages-theory of human history. Despite professing anti-Epicureanism, authors including Grotius appropriated Lucretius’ account of human cultural evolution. Wilson also reflects on DRN’s influence on Rousseau, a useful overlap with Norbrook (e.g. a Lucretian social contract); curiously, she presents Fréret's Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe as by d'Holbach.
This is an excellent volume, with uniformly good, clear, elegant contributions, impeccably edited. The ‘schizophrenia’ in translations and critiques of Lucretius was astonishing, as was the complexity of annotation, marginalia and manuscripts in Lucretian reception-history.
