1. PROVISIONAL ARGUMENTATION

Given that Lucretius offers a systematic and cohesive explanation of the workings of nature, we should not expect inconsistencies in his poem. The explanation presented by Lucretius emphatically rejects any interventionist divine machinery of the cosmos, offering in its place the eminently regular dynamics of atomic configuration and dissolution, which can explain everything that pertains to natural philosophy without necessitating the activity of any divinity. The reader who understands the basics of Lucretius’ philosophy, therefore, should be surprised that the DRN begins with an anthropomorphic description of the goddess Venus, whom the poet petitions to intervene actively in human affairs. Lucretius gradually refines this initial presentation of the goddess’ essence throughout the poem, suggesting that the Venus who inaugurates the poem must be nuanced once one has learned the basic principles of Epicurean philosophy. At the end of DRN 4, Venus is presented not as a divine being but as nothing more than the sexual drive shared by all creatures in nature (haec Venus est nobis, 4.1058).Footnote ¹ Historically scholars have been keen to ‘correct’ perceived inconsistencies such as this, either by arguing that such imperfections derive from later interpolators or by appealing to the incomplete nature of the text as we possess it. Of course, no one has suggested that Lucretius would have changed or removed the proem, so the Venus problem remains an issue.Footnote ² One major aim of this article is to show that the process we witness with Lucretius’ Venus is not inconsistent but programmatic, a point grasped by many with regard to Venus herself but not in respect to the DRN as a whole.Footnote ³ In other words, this article extends this insight about Lucretius’ Venus, whose providential attributes are only provisionally attached to her at the outset of the poem and, in due course, are completely removed. In fact, I will argue that the technique of gradually redefining initial propositions—a process I will refer to as provisional argumentation—fundamentally informs Lucretius’ famous metaphor of the honeyed cup, and I will suggest that we ought to recognize this technique as a major aspect of Lucretius’ discursive method throughout the DRN.Footnote ⁴

Provisional argumentation plays as central a role in Lucretius’ philosophy as analogy and extrapolation, even as it is not explicitly discussed in the poem.Footnote ⁵ While provisional argumentation is clearly a feature of Lucretius’ poem, it is not openly discussed at any point, and for a long time was dismissed as simple inconsistency, decorative irrelevance or something worse. Nevertheless, the technique is widespread in the DRN, appearing in prominent positions and discussions throughout the poem. For example, Lucretius has been seen to emphasize the emotions that attend the fear of death as a means of calming his readers’ anxiety.Footnote ⁶ Initially he would appear to sympathize with—or even to condone—such emotionality; such sympathy, however, is finally rejected, as Lucretius insists on the absurdity of fearing death in the light of Epicurean physics.

The so-called Anti-Lucrèce chez Lucrèce, formulated by Patin to account for this dissonance, provides a useful avenue into the persistent misunderstanding of provisional argumentation.Footnote ⁷ On this view, Lucretius’ Venus was held to be the quintessential manifestation of an apparent contradiction between philosophy and poetry in the DRN; the result was that Lucretius’ inconsistent treatment of Venus led to much of the misunderstanding regarding provisional argumentation.Footnote ⁸ Such an approach to the poem—and, as a result, this explanation for the problem of Venus’ inconsistent presentation—has fallen out of favour more recently, not least because it is founded upon unreliable biographical information about Lucretius found in Jerome.Footnote ⁹ But this view of the DRN as a poem whose philosophical content was at odds with its poetic form was dominant in the scholarly literature for some time to the detriment of the poem; in its most extreme form, it argued that the DRN was a dry but versified technical disquisition with a number of essentially meaningless ‘purple passages’ inserted into it to relieve the reader's tedium.Footnote ¹⁰ While no one takes Patin seriously any more, his theory nevertheless demonstrates the extent and the nature of the problem involved with provisional argumentation by showing that seriously misguided interpretations of the DRN have been advanced which were largely predicated on misunderstanding this discursive technique.

Patin's misunderstanding ultimately produced a more sophisticated approach that has re-evaluated the relationship between poetry and philosophy in Lucretius. On the one hand, scholars have stressed that any contradictions between Epicurean philosophy and the poetic trappings of the DRN actually serve to direct the reader from traditional religious belief to the uera ratio of Epicureanism.Footnote ¹¹ Form, then, functions for Lucretius as a rhetorical tool to reinforce Content. On the other hand, recent critics have argued, largely on the basis of the atoms-letters analogy, in which Lucretius connects the letters (στοιχεῖα, elementa) that make up the words and verses of the DRN to the atoms (στοιχεῖα, elementa) that make up the compounds and higher-level existents in the universe, that the poet represents his work as a sort of microcosm or imago mundi.Footnote ¹² In fact, in addition to this general re-evaluation of the relationship between Form and Content in Lucretius, there have been a number of studies that underscore their harmony in individual passages of the DRN.Footnote ¹³

Any re-evaluation of how poetry and philosophy interact in the DRN must necessarily begin with what Lucretius says explicitly about the relationship between Form and Content in his poem. The perceived discrepancy between philosophy and poetry can be traced back to Lucretius’ own image of the honeyed cup, in which the honey of poetry is smeared upon a cup of bitter philosophy as an enticement to swallow down the medicine that will save our souls.Footnote ¹⁴ Too often, however, critics go no further than pointing out this metaphor, usually taking it as a clear announcement of the separation of Form and Content, and often assuming the subordination of the former to the latter.Footnote ¹⁵ In what follows, taking up the issue of Form and Content in Lucretian thought, I argue that the image of the honeyed cup employs provisional argumentation in much the same way as the Venus passages do and that it functions analogously: what appears on first reading as a straightforward statement of the relationship between Form and Content is gradually refined in Lucretius’ subsequent arguments about atomic configuration.Footnote ¹⁶ In making this argument, I suggest that the other, subsequent discussions of honey and wormwood in Lucretius, passages neglected in other readings of this metaphor, are meant to inform our reading of the honeyed-cup passage itself. Lucretius finally implies a deep, atomic similarity between honey and wormwood that is not part of his description of the honeyed cup.

2. HONEY AND WORMWOOD IN LUCRETIUS

The image of the honeyed cup is presented twice by Lucretius (1.935–50 = 4.10–25). The lines that precede this image are important for our interpretation of the honeyed cup, but they are often overlooked in discussions of the analogy (1.928–34 = 4.3–9):

Lucretius suggests that the poetic form of the DRN clarifies the philosophical content (obscura de re tam lucida pango | carmina ‘on a dark subject I put forward verses so full of light’) and thus that Form and Content are mutually reinforcing.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, this relationship is pictured as profound: Lucretius ‘touches’ (contingens) everything with the charm of the Muses. The participle contingens implies the permanent effect of dye (cf. 2.755).Footnote ¹⁹ That he so touches everything, moreover, suggests that the content of the DRN, its obscura res, is inalterably affected by its form, its lucida carmina. With respect to the honeyed cup, just as the honey makes the wormwood palatable because it makes the bitterness of the substance sweet, so too does Lucretius sweeten the amarum laticem of his philosophy through versification.Footnote ²⁰ In other words, the image of the honeyed cup suggests that, when one mixes honey and wormwood, the result is sweeter wormwood—one substance and no longer two. The implication is that Lucretius performs a similar type of alchemy with his verses. Already there is a hint, therefore, that the image of the honeyed cup is not as straightforward an insistence on the distinction between Form and Content as we might infer on the basis of the honeyed cup.

Throughout his poem, Lucretius returns to the substances of honey and wormwood as a means of illustrating different atomic characteristics, first reintroducing honey and wormwood to illustrate the fact that atoms can be endowed with different shapes (2.398–407):

While this passage maintains the difference between honey and wormwood that is implied in the image of the honeyed cup, it also subtly elides this separation. On the one hand, Lucretius’ main point in this passage is to explain the difference between bitter and sweet things by appealing to differences in the shape of their constituent atoms. One tangential conclusion that the reader can draw from this main argument, however, is that, even if honey and wormwood are composed of differently shaped atoms, they still ultimately are composed of atoms. This fact suggests a similarity between honey and wormwood that is more profound than any superficial difference we may perceive, even if this difference results from atomic configuration.

Every other mention of wormwood in Lucretius references its exemplary bitterness, a quality that is always explained as resulting from its composition of hooked atoms (4.218–29 = 6.924–35). Lucretius mentions honey for additional reasons in the rest of the poem, permitting us to learn more about the atomic nature of honey. Interestingly, what we learn would seem to associate honey fundamentally with what we know of wormwood. For example, whereas in the previous example honey is explicitly described as being composed of smooth and round atoms (e leuibus atque rutundis, 2.402) because of its sweet taste, we learn later that honey must not, in fact, be made only of atoms of this type, at least in comparison to those that make up water. This must be the case, since honey moves so slowly (3.184–95):

Obviously, honey is being compared to water here and it is in respect to this comparison that its atoms are described as less smooth and less round. Nevertheless, we can see here that the nature of honey is not as simply understood as it appeared in its comparison with wormwood. In respect to taste, honey must be made up of smooth and round particles because smooth and round particles create sweetness; in respect to movement, however, we must infer that honey has some particles that impede the easy movement of those same smooth and round atoms. Otherwise, honey would flow as easily as water. From these lines, then, it is clear that Lucretius is refining our understanding of honey, even if we must infer the exact terms in which he does so. Honey, then, may very well be closer to wormwood at an atomic level than we have been led to believe thus far in the poem. This stipulation does not contradict what we have learned so far, but rather shows Lucretius actively nuancing his account of honey without changing it.

The atomic nature of honey is further explained in DRN 4, where we learn that honey is, in fact, composed of two types of particles: the smooth and round particles we have come to expect and the hooked particles that make up wormwood (4.658–72):

Honey, it turns out, is composed of both very smooth atoms (leuissima corpora, 4.659) and rough and hooked atoms (aspera … hamataque, 4.662). These rough and hooked atoms have the exact same shape as those that Lucretius says wormwood contains (aspera … magis hamatis … teneri, 2.404–5). Despite any superficial differences between honey and wormwood, therefore, we finally learn that these two substances, which Lucretius deploys as the images for Form and Content, are similar. Not only are they both made up of atoms, but also many of their atoms must share the same shape. We remember that Lucretius argues that shape is the only possible way that atoms can be differentiated from one another.Footnote ²¹ We should note as well that both this passage and the honeyed-cup passage involve someone who is sick. In the honeyed-cup passage, it is the reader who is (implied to be) sick, but here in DRN 4 the reader is someone who has been sick but is now well enough to understand the more complex argument that Lucretius presents. This aspect of these two passages seems to suggest that having taken in the honey and the wormwood, as it were, we are able to recognize the similarities between the two.

Finally, Lucretius caps off this demonstration with the unexpected suggestion that he has ‘often’ shown this fact to us. We may be tempted to see this as an inconsistency in the DRN, given that Lucretius has hardly shown us this fact in any explicit way; he has, however, shown us the fact that honey is made of hooked atoms by implication in his discussion of honey's sluggish movement. In fact, Lucretius could be said to be sanctioning an inferential approach to his philosophical arguments. By explicitly saying that he has often shown this information to his reader, Lucretius claims, in effect, that there are multiple passages in his poem that presuppose this point or make it by implication and the reader is meant to recognize this. We are encouraged, that is, to read between the lines, as it were, both because of the fundamental regularity of atomic physics that Lucretius repeatedly and steadfastly emphasizes throughout the poem and because Lucretius has frequently argued that atomic activity produces everything in nature. Moreover, Lucretius explicitly sanctions this encouragement when earlier he tells his reader to extend his arguments into other areas through logical inference and extrapolation (1.400–9 and 1.1114–17):

Lucretius describes the process of inference as causally related. Note the preposition ex, which, in addition to ‘from’ carries with it the further meaning ‘because of’.Footnote ²² One is encouraged by Lucretius, therefore, to use inference to extend what he says explicitly in the DRN to other areas of natural philosophy not covered by the poem. To be fair, this encouragement is undercut by the fact that, when Lucretius says that he is providing an inferential model for his reader's education at 1.400–9, he has just given the reader seventy lines of direct (and somewhat strident) argument about the existence of void (1.334–97), and he then goes on to tell Memmius that, if his attention flags, he will inundate him with arguments to keep him engaged (1.410–17). While this context may complicate my suggestion that here Lucretius implies that the reader should be prepared to track down scattered hints across the text of the sort that I have highlighted above, it certainly is evidence that Lucretius does not mean his exposition in the DRN to be comprehensive and that he does encourage his reader to use inference and extrapolation of the sort that I have been employing in my analysis.Footnote ²³