Introduction
Lucretian Allusion, Virgilian Allegory
Non verba autem sola, sed versus prope totos et locos quoque Lucreti plurimos sectatum esse Vergilium videmus
Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 1.21.6–7
Moreover, we see that Virgil has imitated not only individual words of Lucretius, but also almost entire verses and a great many passages.
Aulus Gellius1
What is the overarching purpose and nature of intertextual references to Lucretius’s de Rerum Natura in Virgil’s Aeneid? Does there exist a “program” of Lucretian allusion in Virgil’s epic? And if so, what are the common characteristics of these varied intertextual moments, which are woven into the fabric of so many important scenes throughout the poem? Although legions of scholars since Aulus Gellius have remarked upon Virgil’s profound literary debt to Lucretius—a debt second only, perhaps, to the debt to Homer when measured by the sheer volume of identifiable verbal parallels—there have been surprisingly few accounts of Lucretian allusion in the Aeneid that are both comprehensive and compelling.2 Of course, many insightful studies
1 Unless otherwise specified, all translations are my own. For Latin quotations of Virgil and Lucretius, I have followed the text of Mynors (1969) (Oxford Classical Texts) and Bailey (1947), except where noted. Throughout this book I have used underlining within quotations to draw attention to intertextual echoes, while more general emphasis is conveyed through the use of italics.
2 The loss of most of Ennius’ Annales makes it hard to rank the relative importance of Lucretius versus Ennius, but Lucretius was undoubtedly one of the most important Latin models for Virgil’s epic style in the Aeneid. For a rough measure of the sheer volume of references to Lucretius in Virgil, see Merrill 1918: “Parallels and Coincidences in Lucretius and Vergil,” which offers a Knauer-like table of parallels running 83 pages. Although this table contains many errors and dubious attributions, it nevertheless attests the remarkable level of detailed engagement with Lucretian idiom that one finds throughout Virgil’s poetry. A less comprehensive, but more judicious, tabulation of Virgil’s allusive
Atomism in the Aeneid. Matthew M. Gorey, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518748.003.0001
already exist that shed light on particular aspects of Lucretian intertextuality in Virgil’s poetry, but in the gaps between these works lie a significant number of overlooked passages that engage with Lucretius’ Epicurean philosophy, and with atomism especially. Broadly speaking, therefore, this book is concerned with providing a global framework for understanding many of the Lucretian words and verses found in the Aeneid one that synthesizes much of the existing scholarship while filling in a crucial gap in our understanding of Virgilian allusions pertaining to Epicurean physics and cosmology.
My objective in pursuing this global account of Lucretian intertextuality in the Aeneid is twofold. First, I wish to identify and analyze allusions in the Aeneid that evoke the philosophy of Epicurean atomism, and in doing so, to illustrate the great extent to which Virgil engages with Lucretius’ poem as a philosophical text. Second, from this diverse collection of philosophical allusions, which are scattered throughout the poem, I will endeavor to draw some general conclusions about the dominant political and cosmological worldview of the Aeneid 3 I believe that careful attention to atomic details in the Aeneid, however minor, may help us to form a better understanding of the poem’s overall orientation toward teleology and order, as illustrated by the negative example of atomic disorder. In particular, I am concerned with demonstrating the interdependence of the poem’s mythological, political, and cosmological narratives, all of which share a common teleological understanding of order and progress that is starkly opposed to the worldview of Epicurean atomism. Furthermore, by investigating how and why Virgil employs atomic imagery and ideas in the poem, I hope to avoid creating a false dichotomy between philosophical reference and literary allusion, and to show instead that many intertextual references to Lucretius in the Aeneid participate in an allegorical conflict between order and disorder that is neither exclusively literary nor philosophical, but simultaneously and inextricably both.
I devote the rest of this Introduction, as a prelude to this task, to the consideration of two important subjects: (1) a review of the main threads of scholarship that deal with Virgil’s Lucretian intertexts, and (2) the use of philosophical allegory (both ancient and modern) as a method of interpreting
debts to Lucretius in the Aeneid can be found in the Index Locorum of Hardie’s Cosmos and Imperium (1986: 387–88).
3 For discussion of the permeability of the “political” with other categories of meaning and reference in Augustan poetry, see Kennedy (1992).
the Aeneid. Chapter 1“(Characterizations of Epicurean Atomism”) assesses pre-Virgilian attitudes toward atomism, arguing that Virgil adopts his tendentious portrayal of atomism in the Aeneid as a system of disorder from the hostile critiques of earlier non-atomist philosophers. Chapter 2 (“Trojans under the Influence of Atomism”) examines scenes in which the poem’s Trojan protagonists are faced with obstacles that are associated with atomic disorder, while Chapter 3 (“Non-Trojans under the Influence of Atomism”) analyzes the atomic characterization of prominent non-Trojan antagonists. Chapter 4 (“Turnus and the End of the Epicurean World,” investigates the dense cluster of Lucretian intertexts present in the duel at the end of Book 12 between Aeneas and Turnus, whose defeat in combat represents a defeat for the non-hierarchical worldview of atomism and a victory for teleological order—albeit one that is tempered in the final moments of the poem. Last, Chapter 5 (“Atomism and the Worldview of the Aeneid”) summarizes the ideological significance of Virgil’s negative attitude toward atomism in the Aeneid, and how this view fits into the available ancient evidence concerning the poet’s personal and literary ties to Epicurean philosophy. I conclude by suggesting some directions for further study, with respect both to literary receptions of atomism and to Lucretian allusion more generally in Augustan poetry.
I.1 Global Approaches to Virgil’s
Lucretian Intertexts
As previously noted, Lucretius’ pervasive influence upon Virgil’s poetic language has been widely acknowledged since ancient times, and yet scholars and critics have disagreed sharply about what sort of meaning (if any) to attribute to such intertexts. In addition, scholarship on Virgil’s allusive relationship to Lucretius has tended to favor investigation of the Georgics, whereas the Aeneid has received comparatively less attention.4 While there are numerous studies devoted to the analysis of discrete Lucretian allusions
4 A number of studies have outlined programs of Lucretian (or generally philosophical) allusion in the Georgics. While an exhaustive list is beyond the scope of this book, important works for the study of Lucretian physics in the Georgics include Gale (2000), Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition; Farrell (1991), Virgil’s Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic; and pace Ross (1987), Virgil’s Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics, which pointedly denies Lucretius any role as an intertextual model for Virgil’s didactic poetry. For a list of earlier works on the question of Epicureanism in the Georgics, see Gigante 2004: 93.
or episodes in the Aeneid at a local level, few works since Philip Hardie’s 1986 Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium have attempted to provide a larger framework for understanding the many Lucretian intertexts scattered throughout the poem—that is, to articulate a systematic program of Lucretian allusion.5
All the same, most of the studies that examine individual Lucretian allusions in the Aeneid subscribe to some existing framework or methodology of interpretation (explicit or otherwise) that guides how they make sense of local details. In the following review of previous works of scholarship, I identify three main camps of interpretation: one that interprets correspondences between Lucretius and Virgil primarily as a stylistic (and less meaningful) function of their writing in the same epic genre; a second that interprets Lucretian intertextuality as evidence of the supposedly proEpicurean sentiments of the poem or its author; and a third focused upon an adversarial style of intertextuality that Benjamin Farrington has labeled “polemical allusion,” in which Virgil adopts the language of de Rerum Natura while displacing or inverting its philosophical content (1999: 18). Of course, these are not hard and fast categories, and there is in practice a certain amount of overlap among them. Yet they will suffice for a useful (if perhaps overly schematic) sketch of the current trends in Virgilian and Lucretian scholarship, while giving a sense of certain persistent interpretive shortfalls that this study aims to address.
I.1.1 Genre, Style, and Tone
One popular response to the presence of Lucretian intertexts in Virgil has been to interpret them as markers of generic or authorial style that are largely devoid of specific philosophical reference or meaning.6 Although this attitude is most evident in scholarship on the Georgics, it nevertheless continues to influence contemporary analyses of the Aeneid, at both the local and global
5 By “program” I have in mind studies along the lines of Knauer’s Die Aeneis und Homer (1964), Nelis’s Vergil’s Aeneid and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (2001), and Farrell’s Vergil’s Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic (1991), all of which go beyond investigation of local meanings to posit comprehensive interpretations of how and why Virgil alludes to a particular author or genre, what Nelis calls “a consistent, structured pattern of imitation” from “the Aeneid’s first line to its closing scene” (2001: 7).
6 See, e.g., Tarrant 2012: 318 (ad 12.887–918); Thomas 1999: 117–18, 1988: 4 (vol. 1); Ross 1987: 27–28; Innes 1979: 169; and Wigodsky 1972: 139.
levels of interpretation. Richard Thomas, in his typology of poetic reference articulated in Reading Virgil and His Texts (1999), defines this style of verbal recall as “casual reference”:
Casual reference will not concern us for long. It is quite simply the use of language that recalls a specific antecedent, but only in a general sense, where the existence of that antecedent is only minimally important to the new context, where, one could say, an atmosphere, but little more, is invoked. This occurs most frequently in the Georgics with reference to Lucretius. (Thomas 1999: 117–18)
Like Thomas, many of the scholars who espouse this minimalist attitude toward certain kinds of intertextuality (typically contrasted with a more elevated type of “conscious” or “meaningful” allusion) cite Virgil’s use of Lucretius in the Georgics as the paradigm for such generic or stylistic signaling. For instance, David Ross, in the introduction of his 1987 book on natural philosophical allusion in the Georgics, states that Virgil evokes Lucretian lines “only to convey some required tone (e.g., of philosophical cosmogony), not to contrast contexts or recall the idea” (Ross 1987: 27–28). Similarly, in his survey of Virgil’s intertextual engagement with early Latin poetry, Michael Wigodsky argues that the poet alluded to Lucretius throughout his works most frequently for reasons of style, rather than specific reference.7
While this type of stylistic or generic gesturing does not automatically exclude the possibility of more meaningful or substantive allusive engagement with Lucretius (Thomas, for example, has elsewhere documented a number of Lucretian allusions in the Aeneid that engage closely with the original context of the source text),8 the tendency to dismiss Lucretian intertexts as stylistic background noise or as ornamental markers of genre affiliation continues to influence contemporary scholarship on the Aeneid. Joseph Farrell, for instance, in his 2014 survey chapter “Philosophy in Vergil,” argues that many Virgilian references to philosophy in the Aeneid are simply generic “gestures” toward philosophical discourse. That is, they are meant to evoke the genre of philosophical writing “in order to acknowledge the place
7 See Wigodsky 1972: 139: “Formulaic expressions and casual verbal reminiscences greatly predominate over specific imitations.” In a similar spirit, Karl Maurer argued that such non-allusive “echoes” are “omnipresent” in classical Latin poetry (2003: 124).
8 See, e.g., Thomas 2001: 6, which investigates the potentially subversive Lucretian implications of the phrase aurea condet/saecula (“he will found a golden age”) at Aen. 6.792–93.
of philosophy in the Roman epic tradition, not to articulate a coherent philosophy, and still less to assert [Virgil’s] own, personal beliefs” (2014: 84).9
Similar assumptions undergird many observations and analyses in Richard Tarrant’s 2012 commentary on Aeneid 12. While Tarrant demonstrates a keen sense for the literary qualities of Virgil’s Lucretian intertexts, he often discounts the possibility that such borrowings may convey philosophical meanings.10 The essential shortcoming of this approach is that, even when scholars identify striking Lucretian intertexts, they may pass over philosophically meaningful words and phrases, thus missing a crucial component of Virgil’s allusive relationship to Lucretius.
I.1.2 The “Epicurean Aeneid”
In contrast, from the last century there is a small but noteworthy body of scholarship that takes the issue of philosophical meaning to the opposite extreme, inferring a hidden pro-Epicurean agenda from the many Lucretian references in the Aeneid. 11 As a countercurrent to more traditional proStoic readings of Virgil’s epic, this view has always been something of a minority opinion, and is only sparsely attested in earlier scholarship.12 Among more recent attempts at a universal Epicurean reading of the Aeneid, the two most ambitious are Viviane Mellinghoff-Bourgerie’s
9 See Farrell 2014: 81 on philosophical reference in the Aeneid: “In contrast with other intertextual relationships, specific verbal indices (other than words like ira and rex) are generally scarce.” Cf. similar remarks on the Georgics: “Virgil wished not to pass on to his readers any specific philosophical truth, but simply to combine certain characteristic topics of philosophical speculation with characteristic tropes of philosophical argument as components of an essentially poetic, not philosophical, discourse” (74).
10 See, e.g., Tarrant 2012: 178 (ad 12.354): “inane as a noun can evoke Lucretian descriptions of the void (as in Ecl. 6.31–32 magnum per inane coacta | semina), but here it is a loftier equivalent of aer.” Even when allowing for the possibility of a complementary philosophical interpretation, Tarrant often hedges: “Language recalling Lucretius is also frequent, clustering around the simile in 908–12 . . . Using Lucretian language is a means of elevating the tone, but it also seems possible that Lucretius was associated in V.’s mind with a certain area of experience or type of emotion, as was Catullus. A possible specific factor is the prominence of the fear of death in the portrayal of T. in this final section” (2012: 318, ad 12.887–918; emphasis added). Further examples can be found in this book’s Chapter 4, which discusses Lucretian allusions in Book 12 of the Aeneid.
11 For a critique of various attempts to “claim” Virgil for a particular philosophy, see Braund 1997: 205–7, 220–21. Cf. Gigante 2004: 95: “Vergil is resistant to imprisonment in any preconceived scholastic formula.”
12 For earlier attempts at reading the Aeneid as a pro-Epicurean poem, see Herrmann (1938) and Frank (1920). While both of these articles are brief and focused on local details, they articulate a global reading that anticipates those of Mellinghoff-Bourgerie and Adler, discussed in nn. 13 and 14.
Les incertitudes de Virgile: Contributions épicuriennes à la théologie de l’Énéide (1990), and Eve Adler’s Vergil’s Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid (2003), each of which argues for a reading of the poem that endorses Epicurean philosophy in some way. Mellinghoff-Bourgerie, for instance, argues that Aeneas represents the Epicurean idéal du sage (228), who is knowledgeable about the world and takes responsibility for his own actions.13 In a similar vein, Adler interprets the Aeneid as a cryptoEpicurean poem caught in the tension between the depressing reality of a godless atomic cosmos and the need to protect people from that truth with the pleasant fictions of mythology.14
While both studies deserve praise for their detailed and thorough cataloguing of possible Lucretian intertexts in the Aeneid, their core arguments are ultimately weakened by assumptions about Virgil’s philosophical beliefs and intentions that are both unknowable and unlikely. This methodological bias leads to a skewed interpretation of many passages that privileges possible Epicurean connections at the expense of structurally important references to epic models such as Homer, Apollonius, and Ennius.15 At the same time, however, a number of studies with a more limited scope, such as Kronenberg (2005), Indelli (2004), and Erler (1992), have fruitfully investigated the application of Epicurean theory to individual scenes or topics, strongly supporting the notion that certain muted voices of Epicurean dissent really do exist within the Aeneid. 16
13 See Mellinghoff-Bourgerie 1990: 226: Le héros est pourvu d’une qualité qui manque à tous ceuxlà: le courage de ne pas s’abandonner aveuglément au surnaturel, mais d’affronter, au contraire, la réalité en se sachant seul et abandonné à ses propres forces, responsable de son destin, prêt à construire et à assumer ses fata (“The hero is equipped with a quality that all the others lack: the courage not to abandon himself blindly to the supernatural. On the contrary, he faces reality, knowing he is alone and that he has been left to his own resources, responsible for his own destiny, ready to build and to take up his own fata”).
14 See Adler 2003: x: “Vergil is indeed persuaded by Lucretius’ argument that we live in a godless world, but is also persuaded by other things that the propagation of this truth is harmful to human life.” This attitude is prefigured by Williams 1983: 213: “In my view, the text of the Aeneid enjoins a reading that is entirely consistent with the theology of Epicurus [. . .] The gods are a narrative device, a fiction of the poet, a synecdoche of human attempts to explain an essentially hostile universe.”
15 See Monica Gale’s critical review of Adler’s book in The Classical Review 54: 376–38 (2004a) for further discussion of these issues.
16 Kronenberg (2005) investigates Mezentius’ impiety through the lens of Lucretian teachings, while Indelli (2004); Erler (1992); and Galinsky (1988: 335–37) argue for Virgil’s engagement with Epicurean emotional theory, particularly that of Philodemus, in constructing Aeneas’ anger. See also Cowan (2015) and Fish (2004) on Virgil’s constructive engagement with Epicurean kingship theory.
I.1.3 Polemical Allusion
A third approach to Lucretian intertextuality in the Aeneid, and arguably the most influential in scholarship from the 1990s onward, is to interpret Lucretian references as instances of what Benjamin Farrington calls “polemical allusion.” A number of compelling studies favor the idea that Virgil’s use of Lucretian source material is fundamentally tendentious and philosophically adversarial, characterized by the use of Lucretian language to express distinctly anti-Lucretian sentiments.17 Much good work has been done along these lines to elucidate a coherent program of Lucretian allusion in the Aeneid, and my present work builds upon these studies.18 Philip Hardie, whose chapter in Cosmos and Imperium on Virgil’s “remythologizing” of Lucretian cosmology represents the most comprehensive effort to date at applying this approach to the Aeneid, defines the strategy as “a very close and detailed dependence on the De Rerum Natura combined frequently with a total transformation of the content of Lucretius” (1986: 233).19 In general, studies of this type focus on Virgilian allusions that appropriate the language of de Rerum Natura while pointedly excluding its original philosophical meaning.
The shared framework of polemical allusion and remythologization is particularly useful because it accounts for the possibility of both literary and philosophical dimensions to Virgil’s Lucretian borrowings, while also positing a fairly consistent and comprehensive program of allusion. Tendentious allusions to Lucretius are frequent in the Aeneid and thus suggest that Virgil’s Lucretian intertexts are indeed part of a bigger picture of “global inversions,”
17 See Farrington’s pithy formulation of this concept: “To reverse the religious and moral contents of the Lucretian world-picture while retaining the Lucretian vocabulary is Vergil’s plan” (Farrington 1963/1999: 22).
18 Though not from an exhaustive list, examples of “polemical allusion” readings can be found in Dyson (1996) and (1997); Farrell (1991) and (2014); Farrington (1963/1999); Gale (2000); Giesecke (2000); Gordon (1998) and (2012); Hardie (1986) and (2009); Weber (1995); and Wigodsky (1972).
19 Cf. Hardie 2009: 178: “[The Aeneid] ends by realizing the ‘epic’ plot of Epicurus’ career in the final victory of Aeneas, but at a point at which the hero of rational exploration has been turned back into a representative of the religio defeated by Epicurus.” For a helpful summary of earlier approaches focused on polemical allusion, including the differing terminology of various scholars for what is essentially the same phenomenon, see Hardie 1986: 233 (esp. footnotes): “Jackson Knight speaks of inversion [1944: 91]; Farrington of polemical allusions; Heinze, Büchner, and Guillemin all see in Virgil the embodiment of an anti-Lucretius originally defined as an internal aspect of Lucretius himself; Buchheit uses the concept of Kontrastimitation.”
as Hardie puts it, and not simply a random collection of incidental verbal echoes (1986: 234). Furthermore, Hardie links this style of hostile allusion to the manner in which ancient philosophers themselves argued, thus providing a plausible meta-literary dimension to Virgil’s relationship to Lucretius: not only does Virgil invert and remythologize Lucretian doctrine at the local level, but in doing so, he also defeats the Epicurean philosopher with a variation of his own (Lucretius’) polemical tactic, which is adopted from philosophical discourse.20
Among the various works that adhere to this anti-Epicurean interpretive framework, one particularly important group has focused on the ways in which Dido can be considered an Epicurean.21 In these studies, the focus is not so much on the inversion of individual details in order to displace their original philosophical content, but on moments in which Virgil showcases Epicurean ethical teachings in a way that shows them to be impossible or undesirable. Julia Dyson Hejduk in Dyson (1996) summarizes this interpretation as follows:
The Dido episode belongs to a larger pattern in which Virgil employs Lucretian language and imagery to contradict Lucretian doctrine: the words of the queen herself, of the narrator, and of other characters continually remind us of the Epicurean ideal even as they show it to be unattainable. (Dyson 1996: 204)
Even while allowing for the presence of certain philosophically meaningful details, such studies nevertheless conform to the overall pattern suggested by Farrington, Hardie, and others, in which Lucretian language is used to refute Lucretian doctrine. The key difference is that Hejduk and Gordon give more consideration to the tendentious presence of Epicurean philosophy in certain Lucretian intertexts in the Aeneid, while Hardie and others privilege passages in which doctrinal significance is absent from Lucretian intertexts.
20 See Hardie 1986: 235 on the polemics of Greek philosophy: “One of the tactics of this polemic was to adopt the terms of reference of the opponent but to invert them so that the opposite message emerges.”
21 See especially Gordon (1998) and (2012), and Dyson (1996) and (1997). For a helpful summary of earlier treatments of Dido’s Epicureanism, see Pease 1967: 36–37.
I.1.4 Polemical Allusion: A Synthesis
My own approach follows the consensus of “polemical allusion” scholarship that the Aeneid is profoundly hostile to key tenets of Epicurean philosophy, while I attempt to offer a more philosophically sensitive assessment of that hostility as philosophical, and not exclusively or predominantly literary. To do so, I combine an emphasis on close reading of precise verbal details with the interpretive focus of Hejduk and Gordon, who investigate passages in which Epicurean doctrines are alluded to without inversion, albeit still with a negative or tendentious purpose. Many of the studies cited in this Introduction illustrate allusions in which references to Lucretian physics and cosmology are emptied of their original Epicurean content. However, no one has yet done a comprehensive study of allusions to Epicurean physics and cosmology that preserve that content in some way. This is the shortfall that I aim to address. Although scholars have pointed out individual allusions throughout the poem—mostly pertaining to Epicurean ethics— where the original philosophical content of the Lucretian passage is preserved, I mean to show that there are actually quite a few such allusions that engage with atomic physics. I also mean to fit these details into a coherent whole that can tell us something about Virgil’s reception of Epicurean natural philosophy.
This emphasis on atomic physics springs from two sources. First, ancient physics was a popular topic for Homeric critics interested in philosophical allegory, and the exegeses of these early literary scholars exerted considerable influence upon Virgil’s own use of allegorizing details in the Aeneid. 22 Second, although critics ancient and modern have tended to focus upon the hedonistic ethics of Epicureanism as its defining characteristic, physics was foundational to Epicurean philosophy in a way that is unique among Hellenistic philosophies. According to Cicero, atomic physics was, in addition to being highly idiosyncratic when compared with other systems of cosmology, a source of special pride among Epicurean philosophers: principio, inquam, in physicis, quibus maxime gloriatur [Epicurus], primum totus est
22 See Hardie 1986: 26: “the physical universe bulks large in the interests of allegorizers; the earliest preserved reports of Homeric allegorization are largely on cosmological matters.” Cf. Thornton 1976: 18–19 for evidence within Virgil’s poetry of his familiarity with ancient physics and with atomic philosophy. For more detailed discussion of the Greek allegorical interpretations of epic poetry and Virgil’s reception of this tradition, see my discussions later in the present book.
alienus (“To begin, I said, it is in physics that Epicurus most greatly gloried; and in this, first of all, he is completely strange,” Cic. Fin. 1.6.17; cf. 1.19.63). Although it is uncertain whether Cicero’s judgment reflects the actual self-image of Roman Epicureans or simply an unfair stereotype of them, Lucretius’ de Rerum Natura provides a rough quantitative measure of the importance of atomic physics for the Epicurean system of philosophy as a whole: of six books, the first four focus almost entirely upon minute atomic interactions, which are used as the principal evidence for why one should believe the ethical teachings of the Epicureans about pleasure, fear, love, and death.
In following this natural-philosophical thread, I seek to answer the question of what happens when Virgil alludes to Epicurean physics without inverting or displacing its philosophical content. Ultimately, this is a question about the worldview of the Aeneid 23 It is my contention that such allusions do not endorse Epicureanism, but actually serve the larger polemical purpose of recasting the atomic world of Lucretius’ poem as an ideological threat that must be defeated by the teleological cosmos of the Aeneid.
The fundamental argument of this book is that Virgil uses images of atomic motion in the Aeneid as a metaphor for disorder, part of a larger allegorical narrative that assimilates Aeneas’ personal struggles against various enemies into a cosmic conflict between order and disorder. Within this allegorical conflict, atomism functions as a sort of philosophical antagonist, an anarchic vision of natural philosophy over which Aeneas, who is generally aligned with natural, theological, and political forces of order, must ultimately triumph.24
23 I occasionally use biographical information about Virgil to argue for or against his being familiar with a particular text or philosophical argument, insofar as that has any bearing on the text of the Aeneid. However, my arguments throughout this book focus on interpreting the text itself, rather than attempting to reconstruct the personal beliefs of its author. I offer some brief concluding thoughts on the place of Epicureanism in the Virgilian biographical tradition in Chapter 5.
24 Thomas 2001: 11 carefully notes that, while there are many instances in the Aeneid in which ambiguous lexical or allusive details undermine Aeneas’ (and Augustus’) positive portrayal, such subversive details may not necessarily invalidate a more optimistic global interpretation of the poem as a whole.
I.2 Philosophical Allegory in the aeneid
I.2.1 Why Epicureanism?
Although the idea that the world follows a divine teleology claims adherents in many philosophical schools, atomism is one of the few ancient cosmologies that is systematic and system building, but embraces a non-purposive vision of nature. Thus, the triumph of Aeneas and Rome’s future imperium may be interpreted through the lenses of any number of teleological philosophies, whereas disorder is typically cast as a specifically Epicurean phenomenon (philosophically speaking). To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, one might say that Cosmic Order in the Aeneid has a hundred fathers, while Cosmic Disorder is an Epicurean orphan. Granted, there are isolated moments of destruction in the poem that tap into other apocalyptic eschatologies, such as the Stoic ekpyrosis 25 But even these details are typically harnessed to Epicureanism through a layer of intervening Lucretian intertexts, with the effect that virtually every philosophical vision of disorder and turmoil in the Aeneid becomes “Epicureanized” at some level.26
The notion of interpreting parts of the Aeneid or the poem as a whole in terms of philosophical allegory goes back to its earliest commentators.27 As Hardie notes, natural philosophy and cosmology figured prominently in the early readings of Classical and Hellenistic critics, with whom Virgil was acquainted by virtue of his familiarity with Alexandrian and Pergamene scholarship.28 By Virgil’s own time, educated readers had access to a variety of allegorical interpretations of epic poetry, and even readers lacking expertise in the Greek tradition could find discussions of philosophical allegory in the more recent works of Roman authors such as Cicero (N.D.) and Varro (Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum et Divinarum).29 In the centuries following the publication of the Aeneid, ancient commentators repeatedly affirmed the
25 See Hardie 1986: 191–93, which documents references to apocalyptic floods and fires (in the spirit of ekpyrosis), especially in the burning of Troy.
26 See Hardie 1986: 193, which lists Lucretian parallels in Virgil’s descriptions of Troy burning.
27 See Obbink 2010: 15: “It is surely the case that among the Greeks evidence for reading allegorically . . . is as old as any evidence we have for reading poetry.” On the origins and development of allegoresis in Homeric criticism, see Feeney 1991: 8–11, 34–40, and Dawson 1992: 23–52. For the role of the Stoics in particular, see Zeller 1962: 354–69.
28 See Hardie 1986: 26–28. For Virgil’s use of the Hellenistic Homeric scholia in composing the Aeneid, see Schlunk (1974), The Homeric Scholia and the Aeneid.
29 For a useful discussion of pre-Virgilian allegoresis in Roman criticism, including the possibility of Roman audiences’ familiarity with such interpretations, see Wlosok 1987/1999: 394. Cf. Thomas 2001: 7–11 on the acknowledgment of lexical ambiguity and double meanings in ancient GrecoRoman rhetorical theories.
importance of philosophical allegory in both the composition and early reception of ancient epic poems, including the Aeneid. 30
While Virgilian scholars interested in systematic studies of allegory have in the past tended to focus their attention on Book 6, where Stoic, Pythagorean, and Platonic models dominate, commentators since Servius have acknowledged the possibility of latent Epicurean meanings throughout the poem, either in isolated local details or underlying the work as a whole.31 In the realm of natural philosophy, much has been written on Virgil’s allegorizing of Epicurean cosmology and physics, with Hardie (1986) providing the most comprehensive study of such material in the Aeneid. Much of Hardie’s work on “remythologizing” allusions is essentially allegorical, inasmuch as it demonstrates Virgil’s interest in refuting Epicurean cosmology through veiled allusions and through metaphorical language that is suggestive of natural philosophy. Yet while Hardie advances an allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid’s narrative as a triumph of order over cosmic and political chaos, he deals only with those instances in which Lucretian details have been recruited to the cause of hierarchical order in a way that directly contradicts their original intent and meaning. While acknowledging the strength and validity of Hardie’s analysis of intertextual moments that invert or displace Epicurean philosophy, I want to supplement that understanding of polemical allusion by also considering allusions to Lucretius in which that philosophical content remains intact and serves as the central focus of the allusive reference.
30 See especially Serv. ad Aen. 6.719: miscet philosophiae figmenta poetica et ostendit tam quod est vulgare, quam quod continet veritas et ratio naturalis (“He mixes poetic fictions with philosophy, and in equal measure he shows both what is commonplace and what is encompassed by truth and natural reason”). Cf. similar comments at Serv. Praef. ad Aen. 6 and at 10.467; Sen. Ep. 88.5; and Macrob. in Somn. 1.9.8: geminae doctrinae observatione praestiterit et poeticae figmentum et philosophiae veritatem (“By his observance of a twofold style of learning, he showed both the fiction of poetry and the truth of philosophy”).
31 See Norden 1984: 20–23 for an overview of sources in Book 6. For early attempts to record Epicurean readings of local details, see, e.g., Serv. ad 4.210: latenter secundum Epicureos locutus est (“He has secretly said this in accordance with the Epicureans”). Servius’ commentary on the Aeneid contains at least 33 similar notes, often phrased in a manner that implicitly argues against the proposed Epicurean reading, as in the comment ad 4.548: aut secundum Epicureos, qui stulte solem de atomis dicunt constare et cum die nasci, cum die perire (“Alternatively, [he wrote this] in agreement with the Epicureans, who foolishly declare that the sun is composed of atoms, and that it comes into existence when the days starts and perishes when the day ends”). Cf. Serv. ad 1.11, 227, 331, 743; 2.405, 515, 646, 689; 3.138, 587; 4.34, 210, 379, 548, 654; 5.81, 527; 6.11, 127, 239, 264, 272, 376, 596, 885; 7.4, 37; 8.187; 10.467, 487; 12.87, 794. For modern attempts at a universal Epicurean reading of the Aeneid, see the discussion of Adler (2003) and Mellinghoff-Bourgerie (1990) in the section “ ‘The Epicurean Aeneid.’ ”
I.2.2 Static versus Dynamic Allegory
I believe that the methodology of “polemical allusion” is fundamentally correct, and that Virgil’s Aeneid consistently rejects Epicurean philosophy, both as a model of the universe and as a way of conducting one’s life. To the extent that the narrative of the Aeneid can be interpreted as an allegory for competing cosmologies, that allegory is utterly opposed to Epicurean atomism. Yet one can think of this allegorical agenda as having two levels, one static and one dynamic, each of which employs Lucretian intertexts in different ways. The remythologizing allusions investigated by Hardie and others are essentially static, in that they presuppose a world of divine intention and order that gives no space to the possibility of a literal Epicurean atomic cosmos. Through the tactics of inversion and remythologizing, atomism as a physical reality is defeated, in a sense, before the poem even begins.
Yet what is missing from these studies is attention to the philosophical allegory as a dynamic process—a story. Against a backdrop of polemical allusions, which firmly establish the world of the Aeneid as one in which divine mythological figures direct nature and influence human affairs, Virgil also depicts an ongoing struggle throughout the poem’s narrative, in which the stable cosmology of divine teleology and national purpose must face and overcome various forces of disorder. This struggle can be mapped onto Aeneas’ journey from the ruins of Troy to the settlement of the Trojans in Latium, during which the possibility of cosmic and political anarchy is treated as a real threat, despite oracular assurances of Rome’s eventual triumph.32 I am interested in bridging the gap between Virgil’s static polemical allusions, already well documented, and the more dynamic allegorical narrative just described.
My purpose, therefore, is not to refute Hardie’s thesis of remythologization, but to supplement it by showing how allusive inversion works in concert with other often-overlooked allusions that import the imagery of atomism into the poem, using the atomic cosmology as a metaphor for disorder rather than displacing it entirely from the text. While advocates of polemical allusion tend to identify most Lucretian allusions as instances of inversion or remythologizing, the picture is more complicated. For instance, there are certain details in the Aeneid that seem to demand a didactic or philosophical
32 For further discussion of this aspect of dynamic narrative in ancient allegory, see Dawson 1992: 4–5, 11–17. Even Lucretius’ philosophical epic contains a narrative of sorts, as Gale 2004b: 52–57 demonstrates.
understanding of the source text (e.g., when Virgil uses the Lucretian didactic tagline quippe (“of course”) to conclude a description of stormy weather; see pp. 57–58), and in such cases one should consider the philosophical background when assessing how the allusion works in the Aeneid. Yet often the choice of how much or how little of Epicurean philosophy to read into Virgil’s Lucretian intertexts cannot be dictated by anything within the poem itself, but falls to our own subjective considerations of what makes for a stronger, more consistent reading of the poem. In the chapters that follow, I argue that we can achieve a better understanding of philosophical and political allegory in the Aeneid by allowing atomism into certain passages of the poem as a metaphor where it has previously been excluded by the scholarly consensus. Ultimately, this approach will allow readers to synthesize elements of all three interpretive approaches to Lucretian intertextuality in the Aeneid as previously outlined. One way of thinking about this coordination of different intertextual methodologies is through the analogy of a theatrical performance. At the level of style and tone, Lucretian language performs an essential function simply by identifying the genre of the performance. In the same way that playbills, marquees, and the presence of actors on a stage tell you that “this is theater,” the ubiquitous presence of Lucretian language in the Aeneid indicates in a very basic way that “this is an epic poem on a cosmic scale.” Within this genre, remythologizing allusions of the static Hardian variety construct a sort of backdrop or stage decoration that indicates what kind of world the characters of the drama inhabit—specifically, a relatively stable mythological world in which, contrary to Lucretian teaching, the gods ultimately control the universe, regularly directing the affairs of individuals and peoples alike. However, the allegorical drama that takes place on that stage—the narrative of the poem—conveys a dynamic conflict between Order and Disorder. By consistently associating atomic imagery with doubt, hesitation, violence, and disorder, Virgil casts Epicurean physics in the role of an allegorical antagonist, opposed to numerous symbols of Roman order and progress, which include Aeneas, Augustus, Roman imperium, and the Homeric gods, along with various teleological philosophies and Roman religious cults.
In a literal sense, I will not be arguing that Epicurean atoms really “exist” at any moment within the physical world of the poem. Instead, atomism serves as a symbol of the disorder that arises in the absence of hierarchy and purpose, not just in the physical world, but in political, cosmic, and religious contexts as well. Therefore, atomic imagery functions primarily as a metaphor within
the fiction of the poem—one that illustrates both the undesirability and the inherent danger or instability of a non-teleological universe, if it were actually to exist. Nevertheless, Virgil’s well-documented tendency to allusively (and allegorically) conflate the realms of physics, politics, and theology tends to problematize any search for a “real” or “true” physical world that can be neatly separated from its metaphorical portrayal. In the final analysis, I believe that Virgil’s epic is concerned more with ideology than with ontology, and thus my interpretive focus remains on the allegorical implications of atomism’s negative portrayal: namely that the repeated association of atomism with hesitation and failure signals a rejection of non-teleological models of order both in cosmology and politics.
In advancing this argument, I also hope to blur some of the sharp lines that separate philosophical and poetic interpretations in contemporary literary criticism of the Aeneid, and to push back against the idea that philosophy in Virgil is always (or even mostly) subordinated to poetic concerns. By showing the interdependency between philosophical doctrines and poetic context in many of Virgil’s Lucretian borrowings, this study advances an understanding of philosophy and poetry in the Aeneid as being deeply complementary, rather than dichotomous. As Don Fowler has argued in the context of the de Rerum Natura, this dichotomy is an artificial one that reflects the purposes and biases of scholars more than poets, and never more so than in the ancient world:33
The celebrated opposition between philosophy and poetry in the De rerum natura can to an extent be rephrased in terms of an opposition between the differing reading practices of two interpretative communities. The frontier between the “philosophical” and “literary” traditions is not itself, of course, timeless, and how close or distant they are from each other will depend on the nature of the philosophical or literary-critical positions adopted by readers as well as on the general intellectual climate. (Fowler 2000: 138)
If we attend to the moments in the Aeneid that engage with philosophy as philosophy, then we will discover that the text advances a vision of cosmology
33 Compare the similarly perceptive comment by Feeney about the dismissive attitude of earlier religious-studies scholars toward literary evidence in their assessments of Roman practice: “The challenge is to put the right adverb in front of the word ‘literary’: not ‘merely,’ but ‘distinctively’ ” (1998: 41). When considering Lucretian intertexts in the Aeneid, one could substitute “philosophical” where Feeney says “literary.”
and society that thoroughly rejects the worldview of Epicurean physics in favor of top-down models of order and authority. In the chapter that follows, I begin by tracing the history of atomic physics, in order to better understand the cultural and philosophical sources for Virgil’s tendentious portrayal of atomism. For in light of ancient evidence that Virgil studied under the guidance of Epicurean philosophers in the Bay of Naples, we must first ask from what sources this anti-atomist orientation stems, since it is conspicuously not that of the Epicureans themselves.
