Lucretius

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30200, 3 August 1963, Page 3

Lucretius

Lucretius on the Nature of Things. Translated by L. 1.. Johnson, Centaur Press. 242 pp.

Lucretius was a Roman philosopher who lived in the earlier half of the last century 8.C., a contemporary of Caesar, Cicero and Catullus. He was not an original thinker and derived most of his philosophy from the Greeks, especially Epicurus. Little is known of the life of Lucretius, but it is very probable that his one poem “De rerum nature” (on the nature of things) was written in the intervals of sanity preceding his suicide at the age of 44 This great philosophical poem, Lucretius divided into six books beginning with invocation to Venus, mother of Aeneas, mistress of Mars and ending with a grim description of the plague at Athens. The poem expresses the orthodox Epicurean view that pleasure is the sole gbod and that the most valuable pleasure is freedom from fear. The main reason for the study of nature, the earthquakes. thunder and all that might seem supernaturally caused is to free men from religious fears of the gods, who have no share in creation or control of the cosmos and who are powerless to intervene either to help or harm men. Epicurus, th® master-mind of all time in Lucretius’s eyes, was not intimidated by theological myths or the thunder and lightning, but ranged through the universe, burst through the citadel of nature and returned in triumph with the knowledge of what can and cannot be. Wherefo'e noj> to Religion cast unde: foot, and tn turn Is, Trampled upon, and his victory makes us the equal of heaven.

Mr Johnson's translation is written in hexameters, the English form of stressequivalents which corresponds most closely to the original metre, in the belief that in this way the reader can come nearest to the meaning and sound of this classic. Mr Johnson does not hesitate to make use of archaisms where these seem appropriate and the translation is as nearly literal as is compatible with idiomatic English and the requirements of the metrical form. Even if Lucretius's views would probably cause protest if spoken by a contemporary over the 8.8. C “De rerum nature" is one of the literary classics, the greatness of which is immediately apparent, even to the casual reader.