Lucretius' Split Personality: An Examination of the Tension Between his Philosophical and Literary Aims

Michael J. Reddoch (University of Cincinnati)

Lucretius opens his De Rerum Natura (DRN) with an invocation to Venus which stresses her creative role and power over all life. The characteristics which Lucretius here ascribes to Venus are of course not original, but have clear antecedents in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and Euripides' Hippolytus. There are two Greek fragments, one from Aeschylus (44 N²) and one from Euripides (898 N²), which, although similar in terms of the power ascribed to Aphrodite, differ from Lucretius' invocation in their association of Aphrodite with the hieros gamos, the holy marriage of Father Sky and Mother Earth. Lucretius does not refer to the hieros gamos in his initial invocation, but he does include his own description of the hieros gamos in DRN I.250-264, where it is used as illustrative proof of his more general argument in this section that things are not destroyed into nothing. In this passage, Lucretius does not make explicit reference to Venus, and it is generally thought that Lucretius took as a model for this passage a similar description of the hieros gamos from Euripides lost Chrysippus (fr. 839), which also contains no explicit reference to Aphrodite. There are, however, correspondences between Lucretius' invocation to Venus and his hieros gamos, and the fact that Lucretius chose to model his hieros gamos after the version found in the Chrysippus reveals that Lucretius places less emphasis on personified deities as instigators of natural processes when he is interested in making a serious philosophical point. This distinction reveals that although the conventions of his literary tradition are at times at odds with his philosophical program, Lucretius nonetheless finds ways to adapt appropriate models to support his particular agenda at a given point in the text. This also raises questions about the conflict between Lucretius' identity as both poet and Epicurean philosopher, and, thus, the purpose of this paper will be to examine the tension which exists between Lucretius' literary and philosophical aims.