Lucretius, Anti-Lucrèce and the Loeb Translation

Lucretius has, for a long time, been one of the most demonised, disparaged and misinterpreted Latin poets. The Father of the Church St. Jerome famously claimed that Lucretius had been driven mad by a love potion and eventually committed suicide. Jerome dismissed Lucretius’ epic, the De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of the Universe”), as having been written per intervalla insaniae, that is to say, during the intervals his insanity allowed him. Whilst most (though not all) scholars have for a long time agreed that St. Jerome’s rather extreme account was constructed for the purpose of discrediting the poet and is therefore unlikely to be true, the idea that Lucretius was somehow confused or troubled with his message in the DRN is a persistent one.
One important example of this is the pervasive influence of the concept of a Lucretius at war with himself, divided between his poetry and his didactic purpose, between his attraction to non-Epicurean practices — particularly to religion — and his Epicurean reason. This idea is summarised by the phrase “anti-Lucrèce chez Lucrèce” (“Anti-Lucretius in Lucretius”), as coined by the nineteenth-century French scholar, Henri Patin. Several scholars of the twentieth century have pointed to the apparent contrasts between the highly poetic proems and the dryer arguments and explanations that make up the bulk of each book, or the seemingly too involved descriptions of non-Epicurean passions, such as sexual love and religious awe. Religious awe in particular is often quoted as an example of something Lucretius can’t help but feel himself, and his detailed description of the rites of Cybele in book 2 of the DRN is seen as an example of this. The conclusion drawn from this is usually that despite wanting to be, Lucretius was not a true Epicurean, he did not truly achieve enlightenment because of his own inherent tendency towards extreme passions and religious feeling.
This conception also goes hand in hand with the notion of Lucretius as a pessimist. As Sebastiano Timpanaro puts it:
“In the De Rerum Natura, it has been said, despite Lucretius’ doctrinal loyalty to Epicurus […] there predominates, involuntary and untamed, a tragic vision of life, which constitutes the highest inspirational motif of Lucretian poetry”.
Timpanaro goes on to explain how this leads to “aberrant” conclusions, such as the “transformation of his [Lucretius’] anti-providentialism and materialism into a desperate need for religion”. Interestingly, he compares this attitude to disingenuous spiritualistic and Catholic interpretations of the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, who (unlike Lucretius) was an atheist. This demonstrates a general trend amongst certain scholars to soften or reinterpret the views of authors considered “extreme”, particularly on matters of religion, whatever their historical context.
Further, the phrase “anti-Lucrèce chez Lucrèce” itself derives from an eighteenth-century poem by Cardinal Polignac, Anti-Lucretius, in which Lucretius is forced to acknowledge the superiority of Polignac’s Christian arguments. The poem accuses Lucretius of immorality on religious grounds:
If you were desiring of virtue, and for justice and goodness
Also eager, why was holy religion harmful to you?
Because it appears excessively harsh. Harsh certainly
To those who delight in vice, but not to lovers of virtue.
I quote this as an example of how Lucretius’ attitude towards traditional pagan religion has not only been the focus of an “anti-Lucrèce chez Lucrèce” type of argument, but also, crucially, it has been the main source of controversy surrounding Lucretius throughout history. I believe this is a possible explanation as to why theories that wish to portray Lucretius as conflicted over religion are so pervasive. They soften the full force of his argument, allow us not to take his criticisms of religion seriously. It is essentially a toned-down, more scholarly version of the method employed by Jerome in his description of Lucretius as mad. Whilst this inherent “pro-religion bias” (for want of a better term) was explicit in people such as Jerome, it is probably latent and subconscious in later scholars of the twentieth century. It is, I believe, a mark of how strong Lucretius’ arguments against traditional religion were that they were so held against him by later authors, despite the pagan practices he criticised having been replaced by Christian ones. Indeed, why should Christian authors be concerned with what an ancient poet had to say about gods they did not believe in and practices that they themselves condemned? It seems to me that any criticism of institutionalised religion as a physical and mental structure (whatever the doctrinal specifics of the religion may be) appears unacceptable to a society in which these structures still exist and exert power. The tangible result in the twentieth century is that many scholars read the DRN with the unshakable assumption that Lucretius couldn’t possibly have fully meant what he wrote.
This is the context in which I fit my relatively minor gripe about translation. Specifically, I mean the translation of the word religio. Most scholars translate this word, correctly, as “religion”. However, Rouse, who is responsible for the Loeb edition, chose to translate religio as “Superstition”. He does this at various points, but the most interesting is at 1.63. This translation takes away the entire force of the argument being made. Lucretius is making the point that whilst some may think that Epicureanism leads to vice, it is in fact religio which leads men to commit impious acts. He uses the myth of the sacrifice of Iphigenia to show how religio, and traditional conceptions of the gods as requiring sacrifice, causes unjust death and breaks the natural bonds between parents and children. The fact that this sacrifice is happening at the level of the state, sanctioned by the King, Agamemnon, in order to gain success in a foreign war, is a damning parallel to the state religion of Lucretius’ own Republican Rome. Lucretius will later go on to condemn sacrifice occurring in the modern day, making his position even more obvious (2.352–66). Clearly, it is not superstition, which is associated with fools or uneducated masses, but the official state-sanctioned religion that Lucretius is criticising. Whilst this translation dates back to 1924, this has not been changed despite several revisions of the text. Rouse justifies this in a footnote, claiming that “this [Superstition], or ‘false religion’, not ‘religion’ is the meaning of religio” and that wordplay at 1.65 (“super […] instans”) implies that Lucretius considers superstition synonymous with religio. Now, it is obviously true that Lucretius does connect the two concepts. However, if this is the case, then surely translating religio directly as Superstition negates the force of the comparison. It would be tautological for Lucretius to simply be implying that “superstition is synonymous with Superstition”. Instead, he is claiming that traditional conceptions of religion are mere superstition.
This is the only explanation Rouse offers for why religo does not mean “religion”. His translation seems particularly dubious therefore, also because there are several instances in other authors in which the word is clearly used to mean religion. One of many examples of this comes from Cicero’s De Divinatione (“On Divination”), 2.72: Nec vero — id enim diligenter intellegi volo — superstitione tollenda religio tollitur (“But I want it distinctly understood that the destruction of superstition does not mean the destruction of religion”). This quote clearly makes a distinction between superstition (supersitio) and religion (religio), the former being an illegitimate form of practice which Cicero has stated he wants to uproot and the second an expression of true piety. In Cicero, the two concepts very explicitly do not correspond. For the purposes of this article, I tried my utmost best to find an instance in which religio can be correctly (or at least reasonably) taken to mean “superstition”. This definition is not listed in either Lewis and Short, or any other dictionary I consulted. The only exception was the Italian version of the Olivetti Online Dictionary (but for some reason not the English version). “Superstition” is listed as one possible translation of the word, but the only example provided of this usage comes, surprise, surprise, from Lucretius, in particular from DRN 1.931–2: artis religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo (“I proceed to unloose the mind from the close knots of religion” — or “of superstition”, according to Olivetti and the Loeb). Why Olivetti should assume that Lucretius must mean “superstition” in this passage is a complete mystery to me. I can only assume that any instance of religio being mentioned in such an explicitly negative context provokes the instinctive reaction of trying to mitigate the sentiment. After all, even Harrison, who does not subscribe to the “anti-Lucrèce” theory, states that the Iphigenia episode is an example of an “extreme instance of religio, religious observance devoid of ethical or humane considerations, often translated as ‘superstition’”, despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence that the word had such a limited definition. By far, the most common definition listed in Lewis and Short is “reverence for God (the gods), the fear of God, […] piety, religion”, followed by “conscientiousness, scrupulousness”, “a strict scrupulousness, anxiety, punctiliousness”, “an object of religious veneration”. Nowhere is superstition mentioned.
In all this, it is important to remember that Epicureans did have their own sense of religion and piety, and Lucretius himself makes this very clear, particularly in book 5.1198–1204:
“It is no piety to show oneself often with covered head, turning towards a stone and approaching every altar, none to fall prostrate upon the ground and to spread open the palms before shrines of the gods, none to sprinkle altars with the blood of beasts in showers and to link vow to vow; but rather to be able to survey all things with tranquil mind”.
The last line shows what the Epicureans mean by piety: to contemplate the gods correctly conceived as perfectly serene beings who do not intervene in human life. This is a conception of piety entirely distinct from the practices of traditional religion. This passage makes it especially clear that “superstition” simply is not an adequate translation of what Lucretius is criticising throughout the DRN. Approaching altars with veiled heads, performing sacrifices and worshipping stones (such as the Jupiter Stone) were all practices of traditional Roman religion, endorsed by the state — not some kind of extreme superstition, but something that would have been considered “false religion” only by Lucretius and the Epicureans themselves. To translate religio as Superstition from the very beginning falsely implies that Lucretius is condemning what the Romans themselves considered to be superstition, when he is in fact condemning the official religious practices of the Roman Republic.
Lucretius in the DRN is attacking a religion recognisable both in the ancient world and, crucially, by modern readers, thereby causing an instinctive need to reinterpret his views and soften his argument. This is achieved either by presenting him as conflicted (and therefore unreliable and not entirely sincere), or by misinterpreting and mistranslating his words. Both methods are a way of bypassing what is actually written in the original Latin in order to satisfy an instinctive aversion to Lucretius’ explicit anti-religious sentiment. I believe that pointing out this trend in some (generally older) scholarship is important in recognising the subversive quality of Lucretius’ religious stance, and in highlighting the force and radical quality of the argument itself.
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