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LUCRETIUS AND THE POETICS OF VOID

James I. PORTER University of Michigan

Don Fowler in Memoriam Das Glück begreifen, daß der Boden auf dem Du stehst, nicht größer sein kann, als die zwei Füße ihn bedecken. Franz Kafka, Oktavheft G (1916-1918) Wer auf dem Kopf geht, der hat den Himmel als Abgrund unter sich. Paul Celan1 quod est ante pedes, nemo spectat, caeli scrutantur plagas. Democritus ap. Cic., Div. 2.30 at conlectus aquae digitum non altior unum qui lapides inter sistit per strata viarum, despectum praebet sub terras impete tanto, a terris quantum caeli patet altus hiatus, nubilia despicere et caelum ut videare et aperta corpora mirande sub terras abdita cernas. Lucr. 4.414-17 ...nec tellus obstat quin omnia dispiciantur, sub pedibus quaecumque infra per inane geruntur. his ibi me rebus quaedam divina voluptas percipit atque horror, quod sic natura tua vi tam manifesta patens ex omni parte retecta est. Lucr. 3.26-30

1

Cf. Lucr. 1.1061-1064.

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Chaos Theory What precedes chaos ? The ancient anecdotal tradition tells us that Epicurus’ schoolmaster failed to answer the question when it was addressed to Hesiodic cosmogony. The question Epicurus asked was, What, philosophically speaking, comes before Chaos in the poem, poetically speaking ? It is not a question the poem or any schoolmaster can answer, and so the young boy decided it was time to look elsewhere – hence, the story goes, his rejection of traditional paideia and his conversion to philosophy2. Epicurus wasn’t interested in the finer points of literary criticism. He wanted to know what comes before Nothing. If nothing comes before Nothing, then the principle of nihil e nihilo will have been violated. There must be something and not nothing, and Hesiod’s primordial Chaos (h[toi me;n prwvtista Cavo" gevnet, Hes. Th. 116) was plainly a threat to the instincts of the budding philosopher, who was already (or retrospectively, in the eyes of the doxographical tradition) committed to the Eleatic and atomistic tenet that there is always something and not nothing, and to the search for « the truth of reality (twfln o[ntwn) », as Sextus puts it3. That truth must be found in atoms (or body) and void (or the empty). But what if nothing precedes chaos ? And isn’t chaos something ? Epicurus appears to have felt that chaos (or whatever precedes it) is even more vacuous (more chaotic, unregulated, unlawful, and unpredictable) than the nothingness of atomistic void. Void cannot be Chaos. But as Sextus’ sophistical refutation shows, there is room for ambiguity and confusion in the atomistic solution4. Void is both not-being and a constituent of reality, real and not quite real. Its properties overlap with those of body and they don’t. If void is a place that receives body, is this place a body or void (empty) ? If it receives body, isn’t the empty now full ? If void can undergo change, is it not a body ? But it cannot undergo change. So what is void ? The questions are carping, but they do point up a zone of discomfort in Epicurean philosophy, and possibly in atomism generally5. The coherence of void is at stake, so 2 DL 10.2 ; Sext. M. 10.18-19. 3 Sext. M. 10.19. See the excellent discussion in Obbink, 1995, pp. 189-190 and also Laks, 1976, pp. 36-38. Neither study quite addresses the issue I have in mind, namely the question of Epicurus’ abhorrence of the void. See further Solmsen, 1977, pp. 276-277 : « Clearly to allow origin e nihilo must have been for Epicurus tantamount to denying all law and regularity in nature ». And Bailey, 1928, p. 276 (cited by Solmsen, ibid.) : « all it was necessary for him to show was that every created thing was sprung from an antecedent something, was created of substance which already existed ». 4 Sext. M. 10.20-23 ; cf. ibid., 10.2. 5 This is true even on Sedley’s reading of Democritean void as a « negative substance which occupies empty space » (1982, p. 179). The paraphrase has a paradoxical ring to it (what is a negative substance ?). And it jars with the original atomists’ descriptions of void as « empty » (how can something that is empty occupy empty space ? are there two kinds of emptiness involved ?). I am not denying the aptness of Sedley’s reading. To the contrary, I would suggest that these paradoxes were sought for by the early atomists themselves (see Porter, 2000, p. 86).

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much so that later critics would taunt Epicureanism with the charge that the void of atomism was the very Chaos that Epicurus had feared (in Epicureum illud chaos decidunt [sc., inperiti et rudi], inane sine termino)6. Void must be empty, but it cannot be nothing or chaos. It cannot be ajlhqwfl" kenovn, to adapt a phrase from Aristotle7. Gazing upon Hesiodic Chaos, wasn’t Epicurus faced with an unsought-for prospect, namely « the appalling condition of utter anarchy in nature ? »8. Genesis must be guaranteed by the iron-clad certainty that its process never begins and never ends ; dissolution can never be absolute : there must be something and not nothing ; nihil ad nilum 9. Atoms, imperishable and impassive, are the inhibiting guarantor of these twin requirements. They necessarily exist for this reason, as a bulwark against nothingness ; take away body and you are left with unbounded void, an intolerable prospect ; such is the primary « necessity » of the physical system of atomism, its law of laws10. Consequently, void for Epicurus is merely the accessory of atoms and no Sedley has unpacked two senses of void here, and then allowed them to sit a bit too comfortably side by side : a logical, metaphysical sense, whereby void is endowed with an « entirely negative character » (p. 176) ; and a quasi-physical sense (« void is a space-filler » and an « element »). Both stem from the original bifurcation according to which void is-not and it is (sc., is real), i.e., void is a nothing that nonetheless is (cf. ibid., p. 183). The distinction that « insofar as the occupant [of a place] is nothing it does not exist, but insofar as it occupies a place it does exist », trades on this original ambiguity ; it does not resolve it. The atomistic ontology thus indeed remains what it is, a genuine « paradox » (ibid., p. 183). 6 Sen. Ep. 72.9. On the threatening aspect of Chaos (in case Hesiod weren’t convincing enough), see Luc. 6.696 : ... et Chaos innumeros avidum confundere mundos. And cf. Lucr. 5.534538, insisting on a firm foundation for earth (even if the universe has no such foundation [1.993-994]), whereas in Hesiod Gaia is a e{do" ajsfalev" for the universe, whilst the earth itself has no foundation, no alia natura subter, as in Lucretius – it rests bravely upon Chaos, or else upon nothing (Th. 117 ; see West, ad loc., calling the « foundations » of the universe Chaos and earth the « floor » – a desperate picture that merely highlights the problem). 7 Phys. 4.8.216a27. 8 Solmsen, 1977, p. 277. 9 Lucr. 1.216, etc. 10 Ep. Hdt. 41 : ajll∆ ijscuvonta uJpomevnein ejn taifl" dialuvsesi twfln sugkrivsewn – plhvrh th;n fuvs in o[nta kai; oujk e[conta o{ph/ h] o{pw" dialuqhvsetai. w{ste ta;" ajrca;" ajtovmou" ajnagkaiflon ei\nai swmavtwn fuvsei" ; text after Long and Sedley, 1987, 2 : 30) ; and ibid. 39, 56. Lucr. 1.215216 : huc accedit uti quidque in sua corpora rursum/dissoluat natura neque ad nilum interemat res (cf. 1.248-249). Setting a « limit » to « bound the universe against the void » is an Eleatic inspiration (Arist. GC 325a15). That limit in atomism is set by the very existence of atoms themselves : they are the internal limit of the universe. Cf. Democr. 68A1.44 D.-K. (DL 9.44) : « Nothing arises from what is not [viz., from abstract void], nor does it perish into what is not (mhdevn te ejk toufl mh; o[nto" givnesqai mhde; eij" to; mh; o]n fqeivresqai) ». In Lucretius, this explicitly translates into an argument against sheer, empty void : nisi contra corpora certa/essent quae loca complerent quaecumque tenerent,/omne quod est spatium vacuum constaret inane (1.521-523 ; cf. 5.366). The abhorrence of void runs deeply through Greek philosophy. Void was felt to be incoherent by Parmenides and Melissus ; Platonists and Strato of Lampsacus (fr. 60 Wehrli) made sure that void is never absolutely vacant but is « always filled with body » (Sedley, 1982, p. 188) ; and Aristotle’s arguments against void are legion (see n. 7 above and n. 20, below).

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longer tantamount to utter chaos (viz., the chaos of not-being) ; it is tamed, deprived of its prior metaphysical role as a negative ontological or theoretical principle, and evidently made into a quasi-material principle (whence the easy interchangeability of void, place, and room)11. Epicurean philosophy exists in good part in order to defend itself against the potentiality of blank chaos, whether of logic or of cosmological fact. Void, given a new philosophical place, is a distant reminder of this potentiality of incoherence12. Epicureanism is motivated by a horror vacui. Motivated, but also drawn towards. For one of the characteristics of atomism in general, and of Epicureanism in particular, is the way it trades on 11 Sext. M. 10.2 ; Aet. 1.20.2. See Long and Sedley, 1987, 1 : 30 (with Sedley, 1982, p. 188) ; Solmsen, 1977 ; Inwood, 1981, p. 281 ; briefly, but similarly, Jammer, 1993, p. 12. Epicurus appears to have denied, tacitly, void’s equivalence to not-being (Rist, 1972, p. 56 ; Solmsen, 1977, p. 279). This is implied by his labeling void « intangible substance [phusis] », thus making it « the true contradictory of ‘tangible’ body » and making void and body « mutually exclusive substances » (Long and Sedley, ibid.). Epicurus, we might say, has displaced the negative character of void, shifting the negation away from an essential quality (not-being) to a defining feature or primary property (non-tangibility). (There is possibly a sleight of hand here, for in what way are atoms tangible ? See n. 18, below). atoms, too, become materies, viz., more than o[nta, for Epicurus (so Solmsen, ibid.). Pace Solmsen, the ambivalence between being and being something (material) may have existed for the first-generation atomists in another form : atoms are bodies just by virtue of being something ; and void qua existent is body-like at least to that extent. Cf. n. 5, above. 12 For the assertion, without argument, that for Epicurus to; kenovn properly designates absolute (metaphysical) void or vacuity, in contrast to « (empty or occupied) space » (topos), see Adorno, 1983. Interested as I am in the metaphysical sense of the term, I have been following another consensus line. But what will ultimately be of interest in the present context is the way in which absolute vacuity comes to be circumscribed by Epicurus and his followers. Note too the emotional objection by the Epicurean Colotes to Democritean indifferentism : « when he says that every single thing is no more of such a sort than of such a sort, he has thrown our life into utter chaos and confusion (sugkevcuke to;n bivon) » (Plut. Mor. 1108F). A similar fear of chaos (a favorite metaphor, evidently, in the rhetoric of crisis) is found at Lucr. 4.504-506 (...quam manibus manifesta suis emittere quoquam/et violare fidem primam et convellere tota/fundamenta quibus nixatur vita salusque). See at n. 49, below. I am using « horror vacui » mainly in a psychological sense. The physical principle of horror vacui is documented in antiquity, e.g., for Strato of Lampsacus (see Furley, 1989, pp. 149-160). Furley implies that Epicurean physics is to be distinguished from Strato’s precisely by this physical principle (ibid., p. 159). But the two positions may be closer than they appear to be. Strato won’t allow place to remain empty of body, while Epicurus will, at least in the short run. But for Epicurus there can be no void without body in the same universe for the same reason that Strato disallows void from existing outside the cosmos (frr. 54-55 Wehrli) : there can be no absolute void. Cf. Furley, ibid., 157 : « horror vacui is simply the view that there is no massed void, and the latter is equally true for Aristotle’s theory of matter... It is plain that the microvoid theorist needs some extra assumption in order to make horror vacui work ». Furley is unable to locate such an assumption in Strato (ibid., p. 159) ; but the specter of massed or utter void itself, viz., abhorrence of the void, provides all the motivation one needs. (The skepticism of Berryman, 1997, has little bearing on the present argument for the same reasons as those stipulated by Furley, ibid., p. 157. See Lehoux, 1999, for a critical reply to both Furley and Berryman).

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the ever-present threat of void. Even the prospect of infinite space emptied of all body – mere space with nothing in it – is enough to conjure up the old ontological tremors of void in some absolute sense13. Unable to shake off this specter, Epicureanism is strangely drawn to the prospect of void as to a flame. This ambivalence towards void in Epicureanism will be the subject of the present essay. Void is a threatening concept and a rhetorical bludgeon, a source of philosophical argument and of never-ending anxiety. What follows will be about these twin facets of void in Epicureanism : the horror and fascination, or horror and voluptas, that are evoked, inseparably, by void. As it turns out, Lucretius may display an even greater fascination with void than does Epicurus. If so, this is not only due to Lucretius’ superior attunement to the poetic potentials of void. The poetic meanings are tied to conceptual insights, and both are worth recovering.

Names for Reality The challenge facing Lucretius as a poet was twofold. At the very least, he had to convert the logic of void into a poetics of void. But this conceals a distinctly harder problem : how do you talk about nothing ? The problem lies at the heart of the logic of void as well, and it is bound up with the problem of how reality gets named from the Epicurean point of view. One way into the problem is to ask whether there are any proper names in Lucretius (or on any Epicurean theory of language). What could a proper name be in a universe that knows only a radical linguistic conventionalism ? The issue is not simply whether names naturally designate their targets, but whether they can adequately hit them at all14. Nor do so-called « natural » prolepseis, or primary meanings, provide a way out of the problem, or a way back to proper names. The reasons are to be sought less in Epicurean nominalism or in its tension with linguistic naturalism (insofar as the latter touches the historical origins of language) than in the Epicurean critique of human psychology. Death (existential void) is a case in point. Death is nothing to us because it is the name for a phenomenological fear and for a corresponding event that no one can ever coherently face : you cannot coherently picture death (whence the fundamental irrationality of the fear of death to an Epicurean). « Death » names a subjective fear and the objective disbanding of life. But it also names 13 Epicurus rejects the concept of a eijlikrinh;" kai; keno;" tovpo" as the site of the intermundia (Ep. Pyth. 89). He seems to be rejecting the very concept of « pure void » itself, while the phrase in any case describes a place or space, not a thing per se (he settles for a « fairly empty space [polukevnw/ tovpw/] », ibid.). Cf. Lucretius’ way of introducing void – namely, as a locus : quapropter locus est intactus inane vacansque (1.334). Leucippus seems to have put the matter more simply, in terms of the mevga kenovn into which atoms are dispersed and out of which the vortex and all subsequent entities come to be formed (DL 9.31). Epicurus will have none of this. 14 See further Vitr. 2.2.1 : « Democritus, although he did not name ‘things’ as such (non proprie res nominavit), ...supposed ‘atoms’ (individua corpora) only », etc. (tr. Granger, in the Loeb Classical Library text). For a more standard view, see Long and Sedley 1987, 1 : 100-101.

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(viz., performs as its philosophical and poetic work) a third condition – the utter annulment (voiding) of the subjective perspective, a state for which Lucretius has no proper name, but which he simply labels with the word « death ». When we picture death, we picture ourselves picturing death ; an « adequate » picturing of death would require the subject of the representation to cancel itself out, impossibly so. This is the gist of Lucretius’ critique of the fear of death in book 3. The very idea of one’s own death, whereby death is rendered into an object of anything but utter indifference, is incoherent because it is self-refuting : conceiving ourselves as no longer existing, we stand as it were in our own way, blocking our own view of ourselves15. Could it be this fear of a radically third-personal perspective that underlies the fear of death ? Are ordinary subjects capable of having, and of being motivated by, what are strictly speaking philosophical fears ? I believe the answer for Lucretius is in the affirmative (and we will return to this below). But whatever the case, Lucretius’ criticism in book 3 is sweeping : it is both logical and psychological ; and it crucially turns on a problem of representation (or representability). Lucretian arguments elsewhere, I want to suggest, are typically complex in this same way. Here, let us simply put away for future reference the phrase in 3.881-882 : neque enim se dividit illim/nec removet satis a proiecto corpore. Lucretius is asking that when we picture death we remove ourselves from the body we picture as dead. The question as to how we can represent death to ourselves becomes a question as to how we can detach ourselves from our conventional ideas about the body, given that our conventional ideas about ourselves are so intimately wrapped up in our view of ourselves as embodied souls. The project proposed in these two verses contains a threat that is only slightly concealed. Suppose we succeed in this ultimate kind of detachment. What kind of picture of ourselves will we have ? Will we even be recognizably ourselves again ? What do we look like when we detach ourselves from our current ideas of the body ? And isn’t this detachment, the third-personal perspective, exactly what atomism asks us to do every time we merely contemplate the hypothesis of atoms and void ? So what is body ? Here we have to make an Epicurean distinction, between body and the body proper. At one level, this comes down to a distinction between phenomenal bodies and, as it were, the sheer materiality of the body, corresponding to the way in which bodies appear to us and the hard core of body underlying these appearances. But to acknowledge the distinction is to open the way to some interesting consequences. First, we have to acknowledge two uses of corpus in Lucretius. Corpora at the atomic level are corpora stricto sensu ; at the macroscopic level they are compounds with properties of their own, properties that are entirely distinct from those of atoms. Thus, bodies as perceived are only metaphorically speaking bodies. Turn this around and you get something of a puzzle, or at least something puzzling : is my perception of a body in some way a metaphorical perception of body, of what body properly is ? It would seem to be. Strictly speaking we 15 Cf. Lucr. 4.1150 : nisi tute tibi obvius obstes.

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cannot perceive body at all, but only bodies composed of body and void16. Lucretius is crystal clear on this point, and emphatically so : firmare necessest/nil esse in promptu nisi mixtum corpus inani (6.940-941), whereby Bailey’s rendering puts the accent right where it belongs : « there is nothing perceptible except body mingled with void »17. We cannot perceive body per se. Put differently, our sense and experience of body seem to be quite removed from the concept of body, not to say from the reality of body. What we take to be solid is in reality porous, rarus, (6.936), and much of De rerum natura is devoted to illustrating how deceptive and disappointing appearances of body can be. The problem is not just that what appears solid is rare (mixed with void) ; it is that the object of our perception is uncertain. When we stub our toe on a rock it may be that we experience a sensation of the hardness within the object ; but in what sense do we have a sensation of the rock itself ? Is the hardness you feel in any way related, as a perception, to the hardness of the atoms that make up the rock, except by a trick of language ? Strictly, atoms are not hard ; they are solid (1.500). But in turn we can never have a true perception of solidity (for that is the sole property of atoms) : in rebus solidi nil esse videtur (1.497). Thus, perception gives us the illusion of a body perceived ; what it in fact gives us is the real perception of a body in a derivative sense. Sensation is thus forever out of touch with the constituents of reality, even as it is caused (haptically) by them18. Sensation is in some ways a metaphor. It is, after all, an improper name for motion (hunc motum quem sensum nominitamus, 3.352). Nor is sensation a proprium of the body (3.356-358). But that leads to other complications. The egestas linguae acutely sensed by Lucretius is not restricted to the expressive range of Latin alone. It touches the very limits of what can be conceived and represented by the mind. To go back to our original point above, simply to accept the Epicurean idea of body is to detach ourselves from conventional understandings of body19. Is 16 Long and Sedley 1987, 1 : 30 make the interesting claim that Epicurus forbears from calling void an « element », because « it cannot itself be part of a compound object ». I am not sure whether this is true or how it might be so, or even what is at stake in the claim. Later on we read the opposite-seeming claim about « the body and space that once constituted Paris, Helen, Troy etc. » (ibid., 37). Since there is no compounding without void being present and there are no compounds that do not contain void, and given that quantities of void determine qualities of compounds (including weight), it would seem natural to allow void a role in the composition of objects. « Corpus mixtum inani » comes as close as one might wish to saying just this. Cf. Lucr. 1.478-479 on per se corpus. 17 The text and translation of Lucretius here and below are from Bailey 1947. 18 Cf. Lucr. 4.385 : nec possunt oculi naturam noscere rerum. Tangibility makes for a curious property of atoms : why should tangibility be denied to void (1.437) but not to atoms ? (Though see 3.813 : the gods’ bodies are « exempt from blows, as is the void, which abides untouched »). « Intrinsically observable » (Sedley, 1988, p. 315) neatly states the problem but begs the question all over again. 19 The materialist (atomistic) argument has always had this attraction. Cf. Lange, 1866, p. 485 : « If it was once amazingly hard for people to conceive the solid earth on which we stand, that picture of stillness and steadiness, as a thing in motion, it will be even harder for them

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our habitual notion of body a metaphor (a proxy), to be contrasted with the literal body of atoms ? Or is it not the other way around ? Atoms, which no one has ever seen, look to be a good candidate for being a figure of thought, their properties having been derived by analogy, and improperly, from our empirical experience of bodies. In this light, the question, posed earlier, is not only how we can detach ourselves from the body, but also which body are we to detach ourselves from ? But this is not an option that is ever fully put on view in Lucretius’ poem, for the simple reason that it is not an option that anyone can ever exercise (more on that below). Void is susceptible to the same impossible constraint : our natural preconceptions fall irretrievably short of the real thing ; and the attempt correctly to picture void nullifies us whenever we contemplate its reality. Void is by nature imperceptible ; its meaning is derived if anything is20. To conceive of void one has to start with the perceptible quality of emptiness and then think away even that : emptiness has to be emptied, as it were, a stage further21. (We are, not by chance I think, in the realm of bereavement once again). The logic is in some sense natural, but the philosopher’s term of art for « void » is in no way a natural derivative of a natural first meaning. On the contrary, it is a conventional derivative, and a strained and highly charged one at that, steeped in centuries of contention22. That said, Epicurus shows a remarkably relaxed attitude towards the problem of how to name void : « Epicurus says that the difference between void, place, and room is one of name » (fr. 271 Us.)23, although the technical (genus) name for void is « intangible substance », a notion that is none the less ideal for its being aimed at a material reality (all of Epicurus’ protests to the contrary)24. Void, plainly, has no proper name. The to recognize in their own body, which is for them the picture of all reality, a mere schema of representation, a product of our optical apparatus », etc. 20 Sedley, 1973, fr. 8 col. IV ; Long and Sedley, 1987, 1 : 101. Arist. Phys. 4.4.211b17 is clear on the role of the imagination (dokeifl ..., wJ" o[n) in the postulation of void as a concept. 21 Void is by definition quaque vacat spatium (1.507 ; cf. 1.334). 22 See Jammer, 1993, p. 7 on the « long and continuous process of abstraction » that permitted the scientific concept of space to emerge ; and Long and Sedley, 1987, 1 : 101 on this same process ; and more generally, Annas, 1993, 199. The movement, which was one of « abstracting the concept of space from the experience of space », is precisely the process that Epicurus’ view of prolepsis is designed to repeat (or capture). Things get complicated when what is abstracted is the concept of abstract space itself – or do we want to say (as nobody does) that abstract emptiness just is the intuitive content of the prolepsis of « emptiness » ? How one derives an abstraction from experience is a further problem (see below). 23 Aet. 1.20.2 ; tr. as in Sedley, 1982, p. 188. 24 According to Sext. M. 10.2, the proper genus of void is « intangible substance » (« space in its broadest sense » ; Sedley, 1982, p. 188) ; its species are the alternatives named by Aetius, and these are functionally distinguished (« the names vary according to the different ways of looking at it ») : void is unoccupied space (viz., intangible substance empty of all body) ; place is this space or substance when it is occupied by a body ; room is this space or substance traversed by body. Schulz’s (somewhat strained) rendering of Epicurus’ void as « ideale Flüssigkeit », one further possibility (Schulz, 1958, 29 ; cited in Inwood, 1981, p. 279), helps point up the difficulties of naming what void really is. A related problem : from what empirical experience do

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distinctions just given are all perspectival and purely logical ; in reality there is just whatever it is that used to be called « void » : void is the sum of these perspectival differences. Epicurus’ apparent permissiveness is, as we saw, tied to the need to keep void in its place after having given it a place to be, even as he bows to the inherent difficulties of saying what void really is. But void has further meanings in Lucretius, if not also in Epicurus. Void is a place of quies (2.238)25 ; indeed it is the most perfect instantiation of quies. Its primordial contrast is the restless jangling of atoms, in ways a sad and pathetic spectacle (nimirum nulla quies est, 2.95), removed from Epicurean ideals and rather close to contemporary realities (not to say political unrest). One obvious comparison to draw is with the secura quies of sleep (3.910 ; 3.939) and death (3.211 ; 3.939)26 ; another, which follows on from the first, is with the peaceful serenity of ataraxia (3.977), indeed with the absolute quies of the gods themselves (3.18 ; 6.73)27. The proximity of our prolepses of ideal states (viz., ideals) derive ? Possibly it is from the very imperfectness of our experiences, from their inability to repeat themselves with perfect regularity and consistency. If so, then pure void (like immortality) is derived from our failure to have empirical observations of emptiness and enduring vitality (a fly passes through the jar ; death intervenes). But isn’t this circular ? Was I looking for pure emptiness and unable to find it ? Or is it that emptiness and immortality, states which do not occur in nature, are merely negative inferences that get reapplied to empirical observations ? Possibly, if these inferences can be made without the help of a preexisting concept of the inferred state. Can they ? One alternative is that Epicurus prohibits unnaturally derived ideals ; he reduces them to a minimum of projection, inhibiting wild and wasteful speculation (he would have resented Hegel, for example). Void is for this reason bound to be intelligible in the light of common experience. But why should the laws of physics operate by analogy to experience ? And what guarantees can Epicurus bring that his account of void, grounded in preconceptions, has it right ? He does not, for instance, meet Aristotle’s objections at Phys. 4.4.211b17, where the very idea of a void is said to be a product of a paralogism. Kant’s attack on the objective reality of space presents another formidable challenge : space is not an idea or an object but an intuition ; indeed it is the condition that makes possible the perception of sensible objects ; so we cannot perceive space proper, and the claim that we do (and can abstract from this an idea of space) is a paralogism : « Space is not an empirical notion which has been derived from external experience » (cited by Jammer, 1993, p. 137). 25 2.238-239 : omnia quapropter debent per inane quietum/aeque ponderibus non aequis concita ferri. 26 Cf. further 3.925 with 3.851-861 and 4.920-924 : sleep is a near-death. 27 Rest is an epiphenomenon of bodies ; applied to void it is a poeticism (see Bailey ad 2.238) ; applied to gods, it must also be a poeticism. If we take away this feature from the literal features of gods, others will go the same way, and gods will turn out to be in large part a poeticism too. Lemke, 1973, pp. 44-45, cited by Jürss, 1977, p. 224, n. 62, argues that eternity and happiness are not given by the atomic images of the gods as part of their primary information but are only inferred from those images. See also Kleve, 1963, p. 82. This seems right (cf. Lucr. 5.1175 ; Sext. M. 9.44), if we assume an empirical and external, viz. non-cognitive, derivation of divine simulacra. Anyone who insists on the existence of gods according to Epicurus must face up to this criticism, or rather this qualification of their existence. Put differently, to view gods as Epicurus does is not to uncover the prolepsis of divinity but to correct a mistaken judgment about divinity ; the (correct) prolepsis of divinity will contain the information that gods exist as beautiful and shapely beings and it will contain nothing else. Is Epicurus’ definition of the prolepsis of the gods

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these three themes (death, stillness, tranquility) is disturbing28. It is also disturbed by other patterns of meaning in the poem. The death of the world is in one place imagined as an ex hypothesi consequence of the absence of void : take away void from what is, and matter will be brought to a standstill in a compact mass, a dead heap (stipata quiesset, 1.345). The image will return, horrifically, at the end of the poem, in the final scene of the Plague. There are further paradoxes to void. Void, that supremely quiet element, is the vital condition of motion, and so too of life itself ; but it is also, and for the very same reason, an agent of dissolution and destruction, for as Metrodorus says, « that which has no share of the void endures lastingly »29. We are reminded of the principle, preserved in Lucretius, that change is death to the thing changed30. And yet, although it ought to be the hidden world of atomic figures that is cold, in stark contrast to the warmer, more familiar touches of the phenomenal world, the livelier image by far is that of atoms jostling one another and moving through the void. This contrast is as if by some kind of ironic inversion, as though reality became more real the less apparent it is. On the surface of things, quiet reigns : « the whole [of a body – of ‘the whole scene within our view’ – or is it ‘the sum total’ of the world ?]31 seems to stand wholly at rest », until the whole is set into motion (2.310-311). Death is quiescence, but it is accompanied and followed by « a great [lit., « greater »] scattering abroad of the turmoil of matter » (3.928-930). Nothing ever quite is as it seems to be. Void and body converge in other ways too. Void provides the concept of what is nonsensical : it is a something that approaches nothing. But matter, while its existence is attested (« declared ») by sensation (1.422-423), paradoxically provides the concept of what is deprived of sense and vital motion (quid sit vitali motu sensuque remotum ; 5.125). It continues, at this level, to be hard to keep the functions, if not the conditions, of void and matter apart32. Are the gods a symbol of ataraxia or death ? Are they more like void or like atoms ? More like intangible void, insofar as they cannot be touched (5.152) ; more like atoms, insofar as they are impassive and faulty ? It seems to contain more information than it validly should ; that is, it seems to express a judgment rather than to reflect a self-evident presentation of its objects (see Jürss, 1972, 225). 28 And seems to have been noticed in antiquity, for instance by the Cyrenaics, who complained that the highest (static) Epicurean pleasure was death-like (fr. 451 Us.) and like sleep (DL 2.89). 29 In his work On Change (Philod. De piet. 1, col. 7 Obbink). 30 2.753-754 : « For whenever a thing changes and passes out of its own limits, straightway this is the death of that which was before ». Cf. 3.519-520 ; 5.168-169 ; 5.826-836 ; also Schol. to Ep. Hdt. 74 : fqartouv" fhsi tou;" kovsmou", metaballovntwn twfln merwfln (with Sedley, 1998, p. 175). 31 For the first alternative, see Bailey’s translation; for the second, Bailey’s commentary ; for the third, Rouse’s translation in the Loeb text. Lucretius simply writes « summa ». 32 It was the first atomists who brought them together ; cf. Democritus’ asking us to hear « body » in « void », the devn of mhdevn (fr. 156 D.-K.). For their (fleeting) approximation, see also Diano, 1974, 143.

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everlasting (5.159, 161 ; cf. 1.545 : esse immortali primordia corpore debent)33. Both, insofar as both stand for the complete voiding of sense, pressing our capacity to represent anything to an outer limit. « For the fine nature of the gods, far sundered from our senses, is scarcely seen by the understanding of the mind ; and since it lies far beneath all touch or blow from our hands, it cannot indeed touch anything which can be touched by us. For nothing can touch which may not itself be touched. Therefore even their abodes too must needs be unlike our abodes, fine even as are their bodies », etc. (5.148-154). Gods represent the divinity of vitality itself (« divine feeling » [5.144] and uninhibited life). But in their perfection they approach a deathly immortality. Indeed, their tranquility is the guarantee of their symbolic elimination : they live on as empty symbols of perfection, and as it were perfect themselves out of existence34. And so too does the atomistic system, viewed in all its intrinsic ambiguity, likewise approach a deathly immortality. But this, too, is but a metaphor. The true contrast in Epicureanism is not between life and death but only between sense and nonsense.

33 Totum video per inane geri res (3.17) is plainly glossed by the next line : apparet divum numen sedesque quietae, etc. See also Nussbaum, 1994, p. 216 : inspired by Epicurus, « we, godlike ourselves, can see the void, the ‘peaceful homes of the gods’ (3.16-22) ». And De Lacy, 1957, pp. 116-117, contrasting « the tarachê of the atoms ... with the ataraxia of the gods, who appear rather to possess the imperturbability of empty space ». Dionysius of Alexandria brings out this connection well in a parody (Euseb. Praep. Ev. 14.27.9 ; cited by De Lacy, 1957, p. 17, n. 17). De Lacy later extrapolates « emptiness » to a view of the world, available to humans, as « process » (ibid., 118) ; Nagel, 1986 would call this « a view from nowhere ». What De Lacy fails to ask is whether the gods have such a view or simply are its instantiation (whatever that would mean) ; but see the final paragraphs of the present paper. 34 The point deserves to be stressed. The gods perfect themselves out of existence ; all that remains is the memory of their empty symbolic position ; they are the neutral void of the Epicurean system. This is exemplified at 6.68-79, where we are enjoined to purge our ideas of divinity to the barest minimum required by Epicureanism, which is to say to the empty outlines of the prolepsis of the gods (see Porter, 1996, p. 627). For an antecedent to these serene gods, whose vitality requires deliberate argument, see Arist. EN 10.8.1178b1-b23, a « deathless activity » « without action » about which Jonathan Lear writes, « But deathless activity is precisely what the dead do ; only the living engage in activities which come to an end... Contemplation is the most deathlike form of life. Thus it is that, imaginatively speaking, immortality is a form of death ; it is what death would be like if death were a form of life » (Lear, 2000, pp. 53-54). The idea recurs in Henry More ; cf. Koyré, 1962, pp. 124-149 (« Dieu et l’espace »), which closes : « Par une étrange ironie de l’histoire, le kenovn des anciens atomistes athées était devenu chez Henry More la propre extension de Dieu, la condition même de Son action au monde » (ibid., p. 149). Even so, More’s approximation of divinity to void is by the same token an extension of the concept of matter (p. 134) ; gods are like a void that is ; space is a substance (ibid., 143). The idea of an « intelligentia extra-mundana, un ‘Dieu fainéant’ », would have a long afterlife, in Newton and beyond (ibid., pp. 266-269). Its origins might, however, lie in Heraclitus fr. 62 D.-K. : « Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, for the immortals live the death of mortals, and die their life », or else in Homer, if you believe Longinus’ conscious echo of Heraclitus ([Long.] 9.7).

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Consequently, whenever Lucretius talks (improperly) about death, appearances notwithstanding he is talking about something else, something more philosophically motivated and profound. Death signifies an absolute vacuity, in the sense that it is a vacuity we cannot represent to ourselves : being nothing, it is literally nothing to us35. But what does that stand for or do in turn ? Imagining death in this pregnant sense, as the voiding of representation and of meaning itself, is the supreme psychological test an atomist can put us to, and he does this, I believe, at every turn. Atomism challenges us to confront void (the voiding of the phenomenologically familiar) and to overcome our fear of void (this absence of representational content). But above all, it shows us why this is a test that nobody can ever pass, not even the best intentioned Epicurean, and not even Epicurus himself, malgré lui 36.

Void and its Place in On the Nature of Things To rephrase my argument so far, we can say that death perfectly replicates what is fearful about Chaos ; it maps out a deep metaphysical absence, one the mind refuses to picture. And the reverse is true as well : void conjures up this same horror. To read the De rerum natura in this light is to explore this evacuation of meaning at the heart of the poem and as it appears in different guises. So viewed, the poem takes on not only a fundamentally different 35 And we, who are nothing to void, are also literally nothing, being but mortal atomic compounds, « wellnigh dead while [we] still live and look on the light » (3.1046) : we are dead and do not even know (acknowledge) it. Although rightly connecting the fear of death with the threatening prospect of non-being (o{qen oujde; oJ Kevrbero" oujde; oJ Kwkuto;" ajor v iston ejpoivhse toufl qanavtou to; devo", ajlla; hJ toufl mh; o[nto" ajpeilhv, Mor. 1006D ; cf. 1107A : hJ ejpivnoia thfl" yuchfl" w{sper eij" pevlago" ajcane;" to; a[peiron ejkceovmenh"), Plutarch’s objection (Mor. 1104C1107C) that Epicurus failed to address the question of the extinction of consciousness upon death, what Plutarch takes to be the object of one of the most powerful fears concerning death (cf. Mor. 1130E), is thus completely misplaced (and belied by Epicur. RS 2, which is cited in Mor. 1105A and 1106A-C [fr. 500 Us.], viz., the view that death leads eijß ajnaisqhsivan kai; diavlusin). (Plutarch’s best argument is that Epicurus underestimated the power of this concern, not that he neglected it. The Epicurean answer is that the fear of death cannot be an object of the mind, because the mind cannot picture death coherently. Perhaps fear, in this case, gives over to vague terror). See Giussani, 1896-1898, 2 : 140-141 ; Nagel, 1986, pp. 225-227 (drawing an important distinction between the prospect of the annihlation of consciousness and that of a blank nothingness) ; Rosenbaum, 1993 [1986], p. 122 ; Segal, 1990, p. 13 ; Long, 1992, p. 496. What I hope to bring out in this discussion is the relevance, seen by Lucretius, of the problem of void to the problem of death. 36 A word on « tests », a concept that has been too simply dealt with (for instance, in the reductive idea that the finale of book 6 is a culminating test for the reader). There are at least four kinds of test, two of which are set up for success, two for failure. There are (a) tests you cannot fail ; (b) tests you can fail but must work to do so ; (c) tests you cannot pass at all (Kafka’s « Es gibt unendlich viel Hoffnung –, nur nicht für uns ») ; and, most interestingly, (d) tests you fail insofar as you believe you have passed them (as in Nietzsche, who dares us to try and conceive the will to power as a coherent theory [Porter, 1998] ; or in Epicureanism as a whole, despite itself).

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aspect, but also a different structural shape and form. Some of the traces of this flirtation with vacuity are to be found in Lucretius’ reductivist account of language, particularly in book 4 (which paradoxically uses structures of meaning, of sound and sense, to dismantle those same structures atomistically). But I believe the point can be demonstrated by an appeal to the form and structure of De rerum natura itself, the structure and divisions of which seem, at least, to have been awarded consensus. I want to challenge this consensus opinion by focussing on the critical closing books, which in my view have been wrongly labeled as the last pair of a triad devoted to « World » (as opposed to the pairs « Atomic Physics » of books 1 and 2 and « Man » of books 3 and 4)37. The uncertainty of these distinctions aside38, the larger partitioning is only superficially accurate. Books 5 and 6, apparently organized around ideas of prodigious earthly and cosmic marvels, are governed by a far subtler subtext. They are in fact about the porosity and voiding of sensible matter, and they are ultimately about void as the absence (or unintelligibility) of matter itself. Hence the theme of book 5, the perishability of matter, its reducibility to nonsense (inanity)39. And hence, too, the extraordinary density, which I have never seen commented on, of terms for emptiness in book 6 : cava, cavernae, speluncae, vacuum, vacefit, inanis, fauces, caulae, foramina, barathrum, etc. These emphases have philosophical point. Just as Epicureanism robs us of the sensation of what we improperly call « bodies », so too is it the case that only bodies which are to some extent voided (composed of interspersed void) are sensible as such : sensation is a phantasia that results from insensible atomic impacts. Book 6 makes this disturbing argument as it were in extremis : its focus is trained on bodies lapsing into emptiness, collapsing, and caving in. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, vast cloud formations, empty spaces, and the boundless universe, are all analogues for this emptying out 37 I am not sure when this division first appears. See Ernout-Robin, 1925-1928, vol. 1, pp. v-xiii, whose commentary in three volumes divides along these lines ; Bright, 1971, p. 630 ; Fowler, 1995, p. 7 ; Sedley, 1998, pp. 144-145 ; and others. While the tripartition of the poem seems fairly widely accepted, various interpretive colorings, affecting the characterization of the last pairing, are possible. Cf. Minadeo, 1969, p. 53 : « the broadening of scope in the final two books never quite reattains the literal universal compass of I and II », a remark that illustrates just how subjective and how relative to one’s critical ends any partitioning can only be. Segal, 1990, pp. 229-230 (and passim) sees a dark progression towards mortality sweeping across the last three books of the poem. 38 That is, Lucretius doesn’t describe events at any one level in the absence of reference to events on any other level. His language is at once strongly anthropomorphizing and cosmic. Thus, atoms invoke psychology but also global cataclysm ; descriptions of natural marvels and disasters explicitly involve both atomic structures and psychology ; and so on. See below. 39 Viz., the nullity of all (non-Epicurean) values (5.1277 : on the vicissitudes of the material values of gold and bronze), which is marked by the punctuating phrases nequiquam and inanis (e.g., 5.388, 846, 909, 1003, 1123, 1271, 1313, 1332) and by the unpalatable truth of 5.1430-1435 about mankind’s inextinguishable « vain » (incassum frustraque) and « empty (inanibus) cares ». Matter is shown paradoxically to provide the concept of what is deprived of sense and vital motion, as we have seen (5.125).

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of sensation’s contents in the objects of sensation (this is the, as it were, inane rerum ; 1.517). But above all they suggest a link between the physics of sensation and the psychology of belief. A closer look at these examples will help to make the point. Thunder is the first of the natural terrors described. In a way that is typical of the imagery from book 6, it is quickly made into a cosmic image by means of a hyperbole, whereby the perspective of the terrorized onlooker is assumed (videntur) : « In this way, too, all things (omnia) seem often to tremble with heavy thunder, and the great walls of the containing world (capacis moenia mundi) to be torn apart suddenly and leap asunder (dissiluisse) » (121-123). Wind invades a building cloud formation and causes it to « hollow itself out with body thickening all around » (cogit uti fiat spisso cava corpore circum) until it finally « splits » (scissa) and explodes (displosa) with a crashing sound (121-129). Sixty lines later Lucretius returns to the image, magnifying it further. He speaks of « thick clouds, which are also piled up high one on the other in wondrous slope (impete miro) », such that they resemble mountains with gaping caverns (speluncas) within (185-196). The hollows make it possible to imagine contents within ; the clouds quickly become prison-houses for raging beasts (clausi/...ferarum more minantur ; 197-198) ; the growlings turn into seeds of fire « rushing about the hollow furnaces within » (rotantque cavis flammam fornacibus intus ; 202). Thunder and lightening are masterful agents of death and dissolution : they can « melt » objects, « rarify » them, and cause them to scatter, literally atomizing them, as in the spillage of wine (differt primordia vini, 235). The recourse to primordia, where vinum would have done just as well, is doubly interesting. Lucretius’ descriptions move back and forth freely between the perspective of naïve terror and that of informed science (as in the example of the seeds of fire above). But they also move less predictably between empirical perceptions (which needn’t be naïve at all) and the atomistic accounting of the same, a sight into the unseen (similarly at 316). There is a kind of hidden terrorism to the microscopic perspective, which can be superimposed upon any given perception at will, unsettling it instantly40. As if to illustrate the first kind of move, Lucretius returns to the cloud formations, whose magnae cavernae can be filled with the darkness of Acheron41, and so made into « shapes of black fear » impending upon us (ripe with the seeds of superstitio)42 and ready to release their bolts again (250-255). Then he returns to scientific description, reminding us of the elemental play involved, with talk of « seeds » (272), of bodies large and small (corpora grandia... atque... parvula, 302-305), and of « pores (caulas) of the ether » and « breathing40 The world is contest through and through, until the world finally ends (cf. 5.380-382). There is a strict coherence to these levels of description, moreover. Compare the combat of motes in a sunbeam, likened to the natural turbulence of atoms at 2.116-122, with the conditions that make for stormy weather in autumn at 6.369-370. See n. 38, above. 41 Lake Acheron was traditionally bottomless ; cf. Ar. Ran. 137-138. 42 Cf. 1.62-71, 3.37, etc.

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holes (spiracula) of the great world all around » (492-493), in a word, atoms and (little gaps of) void. As these examples begin to show, the emphasis in book 6, unlike in previous books, is not on the composition of the world or its visible (or invisible) decomposition. It is on the dynamic function of void, whereby void is to be understood not simply as an agent or precondition of motion but also an agent of commotion, terror, and destabilization (of change and death). Atomistic void is in this book the protagonist, and it is repeatedly drawn up in larger-than-life settings. It is both the space for disaster and the setting for a cosmic-like whirl (cf. the noun turbo at 6.395, 438, etc., but also in earlier books). But more than anything else, void, put center-stage, comes to stand for itself, and to gesture toward the nature of sheer vacuity43. Earthquakes, the next natural phenomenon, are a case in point. No less impressive than thunderclouds, earthquakes represent a more proximate danger. It is one thing to look upon gaps in matter (mountains of clouds which never really fall), and quite another to be swallowed up by them (here, whole mountains do just that : they fall and collapse, 546). The scientist calms us with the reassurance that the whole of our familiar landmass is riddled with voided parts : the earth below us is « full (plenam) on all sides of windy caverns (ventosis speluncas) » (536-538), where the clash of « full » and empty places (not to mention the collapsing of air and earth) corresponds neatly to the contradiction created by Lucretius’ offer of reassurance and his provision of unsettling scientific knowledge. The language from earlier on is repeated, now in subterranean fashion : loca subcava terrae, loca cava, and then magnum hiatum (557, 580, 584), the last term being freighted with 43 Previous studies have noted the undeniable presence of emptiness in the closing book, but without labeling the centrality of this concept or exploring some of its largest functions. The general tendency is to assimilate void to the instability, porosity, and fragility of all things, or to barren « cosmic spaciousness » (Hardie, 1986, p. 200). See Penwill, 1996, p. 157 : « Everything is hollow, everything is in motion, the force of moving matter tears objects apart » (and see ibid., p. 165, n. 32, where « violent clashes » drowns out the presence of voids) ; Kany-Turpin, 1996, p. 239 : « L’impression qui domine est celle d’une nature en perpétuel movement » ; « le thème » (and « la notion ») « de la porosité ... entraîne celle d’afflux massifs des particules passant d’une région à une autre ». Closer to my emphases are the comments about « l’ouverture du cosmos et sa communication avec l’espace infini, appelé aussi le vide » (ibid., pp. 245-246). This latter approach, derived here from Bruno, Kepler, and Pascal, raises the question about the ultimate horrors of the universe in the face of its ultimate voiding of meaning (symbolized, and induced, by the thought of its immensity and spatial indeterminacy), a thought that is at once horrific and sublime : « Cette pensée porte en elle je ne sais quelle horreur secrète » (Kepler, cited by Koyré, 1962, p. 66, and by Kany-Turpin, ibid., p. 246, n. 1). As an aside, it is worth inquiring why Cicero found the metaphors coeli cavernae and Neptuni lacunae in his edition of the poem so offensive (see Clay, 1996, p. 783). One possibility is that it was not the two phrases but their conjunction and implication that offended him : the gaps being exposed metaphorically here are truly cosmic : they reach from the sea to earth to the heavens (Clay calls this an « analogical metaphor involving three terms »), which is to say that together they create the impression of a gap that runs through the whole of the known world, and that was an intolerable prospect for Cicero. Worse still, in that case, would be the example of the puddle cited in the fourth of my epigraphs.

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particularly menacing connotations (cf. 5.375). « So men quiver with double terror throughout the cities, they fear the houses above, they dread the hollow places beneath, lest the nature of the earth should break them open all at once, and lest torn asunder she should open wide her maw, and, tumbled all together, desire to fill it with her own falling ruins » (596-600). The image is a paradox of self-consuming destruction : the gaps threaten to be filled in not with matter, but with ruins. Earthquakes prefigure, in cosmic terms, nothing less than the cataclysm of this world, its final wrenching expiration. This is plainly the case for Lucretius, who has already described this final state in similar terms, for example in book 5 : « first of all look upon seas, and lands, and sky ; ...one single day shall hurl [these] to ruin ; and the massive form and fabric of the world, held up for many years, shall fall headlong... Within a little while you will behold earthquakes arise and all things shaken in mighty shock... [And so] believe that all things can fall in with a hideous rending crash (horrisono... fragore) » (5.92-109). But it is also true for men in general, who have a foreboding of the world’s end whenever they behold the earth coming apart. For what they fear, without knowing it (Lucretius claims), is precisely this cataclysm : they are afraid to believe what they unconsciously know44. This is a bold claim on Lucretius’ part. What he does is to show that the common belief in the indestructibility of the known world (6.601-602) is twice false : it goes against the plain truth of things from the Epicurean perspective (the world will perish) ; and it goes against the underlying acknowledgement that common belief is, so to speak, groundless. Presumably, we have a natural preconception (prolepsis) of the end of the world, and this preconception is buried in our confused assumptions about natural disasters. Lucretius’ language is carefully chosen : « Men fear to believe (metuunt credere) that a time of destruction and ruin awaits the nature of the great world, even when they see » signs of its vulnerability and fragility all around (6.565-567). To be afraid to believe either is to have a formulated belief and to repress it, or it is to have a formulated idea (« the world will end ») and to refuse to enter it into one’s beliefs. But there is more. For what Lucretius also shows is that the certainty that the world is just the way it is commonly known and experienced (as something more or less solid, permanent, and secure) is itself based on a desperate belief, indeed on a false belief that is betrayed by the truer underlying belief and fear that the opposite is the case – namely, that the world isn’t exactly as it appears to be. And it is this latter fear which, Lucretius wants us to know, is the true cause of fear in the face of natural disaster45. Thus, « let them then believe as they will that heaven and earth will be indestructible, entrusted to some 44 Lucretius is a keen observer of secret disavowals of all kinds. Such is the case at 3.870-893, where the distorted psychology of the fear of death (discussed above) is savagely unmasked ; or at 3.1053-1070, discussed in n. 81, below. 45 A plausible Epicurean response would be to hold that the world just is exactly as it appears to be : it is perishable, etc.

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everlasting protection ; and yet from time to time the very present force of danger applies on some side or other this goad of fear, lest the earth, snatched away suddenly from beneath their feet (pedibus...subtracta), be carried into the abyss (in barathrum), and the sum of things, left utterly without foundation, follow on, and there be a tumbling wreck (ruina) of the whole world » (601-607). The remarkable point here is that the common run of man, on this score at least, is unwittingly and unwillingly (nolens volens) Epicurean at heart46. I think this has to be the case : conversion is premised on this very assumption. The aim of Epicurean therapy is to elicit the natural true beliefs from the confused hodgepodge of corrupted and baleful notions within the mind, to purge the mind of false beliefs, and to leave standing and confirmed only those which conform to the truth. That truth is the truth (or truths) of atomism. Now if this is correct, we need to ask more closely what the fear of mankind really is. What is its actual object ? We have seen that the fear of earthquakes belies a fear of the end of the world. But that fear expresses itself as a fear of the abyss (barathrum). The phenomena picked out for description in book 6 are emblematic of this fear. They represent the physics of sensation ; but as fearful, they represent an untrained response to the atomistic view of nature. Such scenes are fearful, Lucretius shows, not because they threaten us with mortal danger, but because they involve us, philosophically speaking, in a horror vacui 47. They confront us with the potential absence of a material foundation in which we can securely place our trust. Matter gapes wide in them. So stated, they are a precise mirror of the ontology of atomistic philosophy itself and its ultimate threat to commonsense ontology : what we think exists is not, or not in the way we believe it to be, while what exists is at bottom just as good as naught, at least from a first-personal perspective. If you have any doubts about it, Lucretius says, just look down at the ground beneath your feet : nec tellus obstat quin omnia dispiciantur,/sub pedibus quaecumque infra per inane geruntur (3.26-27 ; cf. 1.1105-1108). In Lucretius’ poem, the spectacle of earthquakes evokes that of bodies rushing through the unresisting void. The fear this scene produces is based on a senseless fear of a primary constituent of reality. « Death » improperly names this fear48. Properly named, the fear is a horror of void that is shared by Epicurean philosophy as well49. 46 See further Scott, 1989, 373-374. 47 The phrase does not occur in Lucretius (or in any ancient text) but it nearly does (3.29), while the idea is actively present throughout. It is written directly into the shock-value of atomism. 48 Sedley, 1988, p. 316, writes : « Epicurean ontology tends to have phenomenal entities as its central focus, and in no way privileges atoms over them ». I’m not sure if the first part of this is true (what is the central focus of DRN ?), while the second part does a bad job of accounting for the presence and force of a passage like that just quoted. The problem is as follows : Epicurus indeed follows a non-reductionist line ; but he cannot hold that line without taking on board the premise of reductionism : atoms and void are causally prior to phenomena, and are « privileged » in this sense. I agree rather with Fowler, 1995, p. 11, n. 18 : « to deny some priority to atomic explanation over other types would deprive Epicureanism of its distinctive approach ». The key

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Lucretius and Longinus Given that body is in a sense merely the absence of void50, Lucretius’ treatise is not only about the irrecuperable materiality of the body but also about the immateriality of the cosmos, and the fears that such a counterintuitive perspective elicits. The ethical alternative to fear may well be the sublime. Simultaneously fascinating and fearful, a complex of horror ac voluptas, the sublime is (on one going definition of it) the gamut of responses one has in the face of any object that both invites and resists integration into the symbolic frameworks of understanding. The experience of shock one has before a sublime object, on this view, is of the contingency of one’s own frameworks of meaning and understanding51. The ethical value lies in the recalibration of our sense of meaning that this experience necessarily requires of us. The ancient concept of the sublime, found in Longinus but discoverable prior to him, can be usefully rethought along these same lines. Doing so suddenly opens up new ways of conceiving conversations across literary texts and traditions in antiquity52. As it happens, the next segment of book 6 contains a series of geological prodigies that points in these very directions. Lucretius turns first to the nature of the sea, then to Etna (the supreme volcanic instance), and then to the Nile. These have their place in the thematics of void from the preceding verses and are a natural extension of their logic. The sea is wondrously capacious (in tanto spatio, 622), so much so that it seems to defy the laws of addition; it is a sum that cannot be added to (613-614). Etna’s jaws (fauces) open onto an « exceedingly gigantic » (ingens) furnace, but also to subterranean hollows (subcava natura, cavernae, speluncae, crateres, fauces et ora, 639-702), hollows which communicate again with the open sea (mari aperto, 698)53. And then there is the Nile, « the river of all Egypt », whose primary distinction seems to be its fame for being famous. Lucretius’ account of the Nile is remarkably brief. A prodigy of nature, it seems to belong here here is, I believe, to acknowledge that there is an irreducible tension in Epicureanism between reductionism and anti-reductionism. Possibly, Epicurus interpreted Democritean reductionism as a form of eliminativism, which it may not consistently have been (color and time are decidedly « unreal », but can Democritus have sanely held that mental states are unreal too ?), and developed a defense against the consequences of this assumption. It is equally possible that there is a tension between reductionism and non-reductionism to be found already in Democritus, and that Epicurus, and we, have misread it. But that is another story. 49 Thus, the confounding of the deepest truths are likened to the ruin of earthly foundations at Lucr. 4.505-506 (see n. 12, above). 50 A conceit played upon in 1.524-527, where body is « marked off (distinctum) from [or possibly ‘by’ : these are logically equivalent] void » and in turn « can mark off (distinguere) void space from what is full » at one and the same time. Alternatively, atoms can be thought of as being « nothing but configurations of the Void » (Zizek, 1999, p. 129). 51 This is how Kant took the sublime too (1987). See Zizek, 1989, p. 71. 52 See Porter, 2000, on one such conversation between Longinus, Pausanias, and the discourses of classicism. 53 Similarly, Aetna 94-119, a later, abyssal poem devoted obsessively to Etna.

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thanks to its sheer size alone ; in other respects, it does not lend itself to the thematics of void or space. Nor is it to be found in Epicurus’ Letter to Pythocles or, from what we can tell, its more detailed equivalent in On Nature book 1354, possibly the immediate source of Lucretius’ treatment55. All of this suggests that Lucretius has included the river out of an obligation that has yet to be stated56. One obvious candidate is a tradition of paradoxology or natural wonders, now lost. But I believe we can be more specific. Nowhere else do these same natural phenomena occur together in classical literature, so far as I am aware (apart from diffuse Seneca who mentions just about everything), save in one other place : ch. 35.2-5 of ps.-Longinus’ treatise On the Sublime 57. The examples are adduced there 54 See Sedley, 1998, p. 157. Aetius points to a Theophrastean origin of the material in DRN 6 (and thus of On Nature 13). But significantly, the Nile but not Etna appears in Aetius ; and neither of these appears in what survives of Theophrastus. Thus, it is misleading in this instance to call Lucretius’ sequence « selective » (Sedley, ibid., p. 158). It seems, on the contrary, or rather in addition, to be accretive (see Runia, 1997). (The account of Avernus is one obvious instance). The very inflation of the motif of void in Lucretius, absent from Epicurus (so far as we can determine from the matching passages of Ep. Pyth. [though see ta; ejx oujranou§ kai; ghfl" ... cavsmata at Plut. Mor. 1104B], but not in Democritus and Metrodorus of Chios [see n. 70, below]), points to a further possible kind of accretion : poetic emphasis. Emptiness occurs without emphasis in the Theophrastean material, judging from the abridgement we have of his Metarsiologica (ed. Daiber, 1992), nor is this counter to what one might have expected. It is most prominent and similarly so in the section on earthquakes, where the earth is said to be « hollow like a cave and like a cavern » (ibid., 270) ; otherwise, there is rarity, an implied porosity (without pores or spiraculae), and a bladder-image (264). Whether the poetic emphasis upon void is original with Lucretius is harder to determine (there are signs of likely Ennian precedents as well : cf. cava caerulea, Sc. 292 ; caeli fornices, Sc. 381 ; cohum caeli, Ann. 557 ; see Landolfi, 1992). But he will in any case have styled the emphasis to match the internal poetic and conceptual demands of his poem. 55 Sedley, 1998, Mansfeld, 1992, p. 326 suggests that Lucretius came by this material through an epitome of On Nature, if not through On Nature itself. 56 The Nile will come up again in connection with diseases, and the Athenian plague will be said to have arisen « deep within the country of Egypt », a land of global extremes (6.1107, 1114, 1141). 57 « The universe therefore is not wide enough for the range of human speculation and intellect. Our thoughts often travel beyond the boundaries of our surroundings. If anyone wants to know what we were born for, let him look round at life and contemplate the splendour, grandeur, and beauty in which it everywhere abounds. It is a natural inclination that leads us to admire not the little streams, however pellucid and however useful, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and above all the Ocean. Nor do we feel so much awe before the little flame we kindle, because it keeps its light clear and pure, as before the fires of heaven, though they are often obscured. We do not think our flame more worthy of admiration than the craters of Etna, whose eruptions bring up rocks and whole hills out of the depths and sometimes pour forth rivers of the earth-born, spontaneous fire. A single comment fits all these examples : the useful and necessary are readily available to man, it is the unusual that always excites our wonder » (tr. Russell, in Russell and Winterbottom, 1972). (Seneca mentions the Rhine, the Danube, and the Nile together at NQ 4a.2.20-21 and Ocean, Danube, and Nile at ibid., 3.22.1. The latter passage is the more relevant : « Some judge that also the rivers whose nature is inexplicable take their beginning along with the universe itself : such as the Danube and the Nile, rivers so vast and so remarkable that they

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to illustrate how mankind is drawn to greatness. The world is as a « great festival », at which man is both « spectator and an enthusiastic contestant in its competitions ». But above all, « Nature... implanted in our minds from the start an irresistible desire for anything which is great and, in relation to ourselves, supernatural (daimoniwtevrou) ». Whence it occurs that « our thoughts often travel beyond the boundaries of our surroundings (tou;" toufl perievconto" pollavki" o{rou" ejkbaivnousin aiJ ejpivnoiai) ». Mutatis mutandis, Lucretius is making much the same point. The attraction to natural prodigies is irresistible ; wonder comes naturally, as does the desire to transgress the limits of phenomena (Epicurus is a case in point). But before turning to Epicurus, we need to quote a passage that is wedged between the account of Etna and the Nile in Lucretius. Etna’s blaze is « exceedingly gigantic ». But greatness is in itself a permanent attraction, and forever relative58 : each next greater thing puts us in mind of giants (haec ingentia fingit) – there is a lesson here in the construction of supernatural divinity –, but the sum total of these greater things is « nothing to the whole sum of the universal sum », that is, compared to the universe itself (675-679). If Longinus is indeed quoting from some tradition of paradoxology, Lucretius might seem to be relativizing it59. In fact, he is outbidding it60. And he is repeating, in effect, a thought from earlier in the description of Etna : « Herein you must look far and deep and take a wide view to every quarter (longe cunctas in partis dispiciendum), that you may remember that the sum of things is unfathomable, and see how small, how infinitely small a part of the whole sum is one single heaven – not so large a part as is a single man of the whole earth » (647-652). Nor does Longinus think any differently. For both, the wonders of nature are mere outward emblems of a greater attraction – to a greatness that has no measure, because its grandeur is absolute and – literally – immense. The verbal parallels in Longinus are astonishingly close : « The universe therefore is not wide enough for the range of human speculation and intellect (oujd∆ oJ suvmpa" kovsmo" ajrkeifl). Our thoughts often travel beyond the cannot be said to have the same origin as the other rivers » [tr. T.H. Corcoran, in the Loeb text]. Etna makes an unconnected cameo appearance at 2.30.1). For a later echo, see Kant, 1987, p. 120, on sublime spectacles : « Consider bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes will all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on. Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle ». 58 « So, too, be sure, is the river [such as the Nile] which is the greatest seen by a man, who has never before seen any greater : so a tree or a man may seem gigantic, and in every kind of thing, the greatest that each man has seen, he always imagines gigantic, and yet all of them together, yea, with heaven and earth and sea besides, are nothing to the whole sum of the universal sum » (674-679). 59 Cf. 653-654 : « And if you have this duly before you and look clearly at it and see it clearly, you would cease to wonder at many things ». 60 Mirari multa relinquas : multa, not omnia. Cf. Sen. NQ 4b.11.2-5. The occasional proximity of Seneca’s NQ to the Longinian sublime is noted by Rosenmeyer, 2000, p. 112.

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boundaries of our suroundings. If anyone want to know what we were born for, let him look round at life (kai; ei[ ti" periblevyaito ejn kuvklw/ to;n bivon) and contemplate the splendour, grandeur, and beauty in which it everywhere abounds ». Parallels, or echoes ? Is De rerum natura a crucial link in the tradition of the sublime ? The suspicion has been mooted in the past, but on somewhat different grounds, usually stylistic ones61. The collocation of these four prodigies – universe, Ocean, Nile, and Etna, conceived as natural emblems of grandeur – is unique62. It has the look of belonging to a tradition of commonplaces that may now be lost. But there are other echoes. The last quoted passage from Longinus cannot help but bring to mind Epicurus passing beyond the flammantia moenia mundi with his mind (1.72-73) or Lucretius’ generalization of this impulse to intellectual daring at 2.1044-1047. The underlying thought is, to be sure, a commonplace63, but Longinus’ use of ejpibolh; thfl" dianoiva" in 35.3 is not (cf. animi iactus at 2.1047)64. The idea of passing unconstrained beyond the limits of the world occurs earlier in Longinus, in chapter 9, where we find a cosmic image of divine winged steeds about to stride off into another dimension, and where the accent is laid upon the gap, the kosmiko;n diavsthma, by which Homer has taken the world’s measure (9.5)65. This image is tied to another glimpse of the world gaping in its depths nearby (9.6)66. The image is Gigantomachic. It is morally offensive on the surface, but can be salvaged as aesthetically and ethically sublime. Longinus’ terms for these images are ei[dwlon and fantavsmata. Like Lucretius, he prefers to see divinity represented « as genuinely unsoiled and great and pure » (9.8).

61 Conte, 1965, 1966 ; Segal, 1990 ; Ovid, Am. 1.15.23 : sublimis Lucretius, a comment on his style, but wittily underpinned (i.e., qualified) by an allusion to the spectacle of the world’s final destruction (una dies ; cf. Lucr. 5.95). There is, however, a sublimity to the very idea of atomism, in its mere conception. See Nietzsche, 1933-1943, 3 : 332 : « An und für sich liegt eine großartige Poesie in der Atomistik. Ein ewiger Regen von diversen Körperchen, die in mannichfalt[iger] Bewegung fallen und im Fallen sich einschlingen, so daß ein Wirbel entsteht » ; and Bergson, 1884, p. 23, n. 7 (ad Lucr. 1.945) : « Il y a quelque chose de grandiose dans cette conception d’une infinité d’atomes, tombant éternellement à travers le vide immense, et formant sans cesse des mondes nouveaux. Il ne faut donc pas s’étonner, comme on le fait généralement, que cette doctrine ait si bien inspiré Lucrèce ». 62 Russell, 1964, ad loc., and Bühler, 1964, pp. 138-141, useful in other ways, are on this point silent. At the very least, Lucretius and even more so Longinus are probably offering compressed highlights of a much more diffuse tradition. But the selection of highlights is what is striking. 63 Cf. Russell, ad loc. 64 [Long.] 35.3 : thfl/ qewriva" kai; dianoiva" thfl" ajnqrwpivnh" ejpibolhfl/... ; Epicur. Ep. Hdt. 62 : ejpei; tov ge qewrouvmenon pafln h] kat∆ ejpibolh;n lambanovmenon thfl/ dianoiva/ ajlhqev" ejstin. 65 Cf. Lucr. 1.960-983 on the improbability of casting a lance beyond the limit of the boundless universe, a cosmological puzzle that reaches back to Archytas (see Porter, 1992, p. 98). Lucretius’ own puzzle is that his universe is a summa but without limits ; it knows natural bounds but has no physical boundaries ; etc. See further Fowler, 1995. 66 ajnatroph;n de; o{lou kai; diavstasin toufl kovsmou lambavnonto".

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These parallels ought to make us suspect either a direct dependency or else a common source, possibly derived from metarsiological doxography67. But this latter may have already been filtered by writers in a sublime tradition, of the sort signaled by Doreen Innes in her work on Gigantomachy in the literary tradition, and which we no longer have apart from a few remnants in various poetic and non-poetic (natural philosophical) sources68. Crates of Mallos would have been one of the links in this chain69. An encouraging stimulus from the side of the early atomists down to Metrodorus of Chios is to be suspected, given the lavish use of the analogy of void in that tradition of science70. The thinking here is poetic and it is not ; such is the strange hybrid that characterizes this still understudied genre of speculation from antiquity71. 67 The parallels are too close to be a mere coincidence. Nor is the mention of the Nile in Lucretius to be explained alone by its connection to the plague (see above). 68 Innes, 1979. Lucretius is not fully on her radar screen, however (he seems not to count as genuinely sublime ; see ibid., p. 169 on Vergil, but see ibid., p. 170), and so the parallels with Longinus are not mentioned (indeed, the latter’s imagery from ch. 35 is labeled « his own » on the same page, wrongly so). On Lucretius and the doxographic traditions, see Mansfeld, 1992 and Runia, 1997 ; further, Bollack, 1978, likewise without reference to Longinus. Aetius bk. 3 contains a metarsiology that is remarkably close to Lucretius’ in DRN 6 ; earthquakes, Ocean, and Nile appear in both, but not the exact collocation that is found in Lucretius and Longinus. See Innes, 1979 on the rich links between natural philosophy and poetry and their confluence in Longinus ; and see also Hardie, 1986, in her wake. Runia, 1997, p. 98 observes : « What is remarkable is that [Lucretius] should thereby turn to many antiquated or even antiquarian views, instead of using what was available in contemporary scientific manuals ». The reason, I submit, is that Lucretius is drawing on a tradition that had already filtered natural speculation with poetic insight and had in this way yielded a common set of topoi that lent themselves to the sublime. (On the Hellenistic epigrammatic tradition, which ranges over everything from volcanic eruptions to magnets, see Wick (ms.). Crates of Mallos is one further link in the chain ; see Porter, 1992). Lucretius further blends these topoi with the teachings and information from Epicurus. Incidentally, since the entire idea of a doxographic (or Placita) tradition is something of a modern inspiration and construct, we might do well to imagine it as non-monolithic and as shaped by (intersecting) sub-traditions and according to different applications. (Traits can obviously be shared ; priorities will be harder to establish. If it is the case with « the Theophrastean expository sequence » that « it works its ways steadily downwards from the upper levels of the atmosphere to the earth and its contents » [Sedley, 1998, p. 159], it is also unsurprising that this (intuitive) sequence is followed by poets and rhetoricians alike : « they move from the order of heaven to earthly phenomena such as storms and earthquakes » [Innes, 1979, p. 168 ; cf. p. 169]). The sublime tradition, which is no less of a construct, is at least a plausible way of conceiving a body of knowledge as having been organized, filtered, and applied with the aim of blending poetic and philosophical insights along a single axis, one that explored the imaginative potentials of sublimity. 69 See previous note. 70 Sen. NQ 6.19.1-2 (speluncae, inania : Metrodorus) ; 6.20.1 (pars terrae concava : Democritus). The analogy of void runs through many of the Democritean fragments, so much so that it seems to have been a veritable figure of thought and instrument of reasoning for him. See Porter, 1986, pp. 113-117, 178, 179-180, and 228-232. I hope to explore this in another context. 71 See Sen. Ep. 79.5 : « Aetnam, ... hunc sollemnem omnibus poetis locum », an exaggeration that nonetheless points the right way. The Aetna poet is a further example ; but he does not show the same collocation of themes as Lucretius and Longinus do.

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But above all, the thinking is in both cases premised on what I have elsewhere called « the aesthetics of the gap »72. For « gap », we may as well read « void » (bearing in mind the Epicurean term for void as a gap in matter, diavsthma)73. Whether or not Longinus is echoing Lucretius, I believe a strong case can be made that Lucretius’ treatise is exploiting a concept of the sublime, not only in its concluding books, but at the very heart of its conception. He has, we might say, seen how Epicureanism can be sublime, possibly in a way that Epicurus had not. But let us continue with book 6.

The End of Book 6, and of All Things The steady build-up of fears noticed earlier brings us closer to death and to the famous final conclusion of the work. The lacus Avernus appears next. A culmination of the preceding imagery, Avernus is something like a black hole : a site of absolute death and desertion, it renders itself, as Lucretius arrestingly writes, « an almost empty space (prope locus inanis) » (832), through which bodies, acted upon by as it were the sheer gravitational pull of that which is not (death, the void), disperse their life through their pores and into the void (vacuum prope iam per inane iacentes/dispergunt animas per caulas corporis omnis, 838-839)74. This is one of the most chilling moments in the poem. Not for nothing is it followed by an excursus on the coldness of natural springs75. Next, Lucretius prepares to wrap up his book, and his treatise, with a reminder that void inhabits all things (941). Examples now are smaller and pettier, and closer to home : water sweats and ooze from caverns (speluncae) in rocks, as it does from the pores of the body ; limbs sprout outgrowths of hair ; food passes through the veins ; diseases spread about the world, etc. (942-955). Magnets, mentioned earlier (and seemingly out of place in both passages), return to remind us that « all things must have air in their body » and thus body, seemingly full, contains emptiness within (1034-1045). But magnets do more than this76. What they illustrate, above all, is how space 72 Porter, 1992. If so, then it bears comparison with the euphonist criticism of the so-called kritikoi, which constructs itself around a similar set of contrasts (see Porter, 2001). 73 Ep. Pyth. 89, etc. ; already, Arist. Phys. 4.5.213a28 (oiJ de; a[nqrwpoi bouvlontai keno;n eiflvnai diavsthma ejn w`/ mhdevn ejsti sw`ma aijsqhtovn) ; cf. ibid., 4.4.211b7. 74 There is an additional a play on inanis at 834 : the beating of the birds’ wings suddenly fails them and becomes inanis, in vain (nisus inanis). 75 Some potential word-plays : lacus conjures up lacunas, as in 6.538 : multosque lacus multasque lacunas (with the fatal connotation established already at 1.115 : an tenebras Orci visat vastasque lacunas) ; loca ... lacusque (6.738) ; lacus/locus (6.746-747) ; nisus inanis (6.834) ; and possibly subliminally : laCus ... AVERNI, viz. caverni (6.746 ; cavernus always occurs in final position in the poem, as has been noticed by Karen Johnson [oral communication]). 76 See Wallace, 1996 on the way magnets illustrate the miraculous working of action at a distance. Penwill, 1996, pp. 157-158, is right to point to more specific reasons for the inclusion of magnets here, as is Bollack, 1978, p. 415 (catching the analogy to bodies falling through void).

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itself can become voided (hoc ubi inanitur spatium multusque vacefit, 1005), by degrees (factus inanitusque locus magis ac vacuatus, 1025), and then how bodies can fall into void, hurtling there as if by their nature (in vacuum prolapsa cadunt coniuncta, 1007 ; corpora continuo in vacuum vicina feruntur, 1019), unable to rise up again (1020-1021). Thus does the frigidus horror (1011) of magnetism illustrate the fatal attraction of void, in a way reminiscent of Avernus77. Which leads, abruptly, but not unintelligibly, to the final scene of the plague. At first sight, the culmination of book 6 appears to contradict the thematic tendencies we have been tracing in the earlier parts of the same book. The focus now shifts entirely, and obsessively, to the body, while void as a concept drops out of sight. In point of fact, something extraordinary happens : not only does the concept disappear entirely from view, but the words for void do so as well. Vacuus and inanis, the most frequent terms for void in the poem and among Lucretius’ favorite vocabulary generally, stop occurring after v. 1041, without exception, while terms that earlier conjured up void metaphorically, such as fauces, cava, and cavatus, are now reapplied to bodies in their original literal or natural (everyday) senses (fauces for throat, e.g., per fauces rauca vix edita tussi [1189, 1147, 1151] ; cavati oculi ; cava tempora [1194]). The body (corpus) is made literal again as a human body (or corpse) ; and void is avoided, so to speak like the plague. To be sure, the basic laws of the earlier portions of the book are still in effect : bodies are fluid, empty, or « rare », they canalize disease, they are effluent and invaded (e.g., 1199-1207) – leaky vessels, indeed. But given the thematic absence of empty space, Lucretius, we might say, has enveloped us in a claustrophobic scene of bodies, of « bodies piled upon bodies » (corpora supra/corporibus, 1215-1216), with no outlet, no space for distance, and no room to breathe78. The closest parallel might be the cosmic hypothesis of a world emptied of void and rendered stagnant with body mentioned earlier in book 1 (1.345 : stipata quiesset) ; and in fact, a large thematic ring-composition is to be suspected here. As the plague description draws near its end, the feeling of claustrophobia intensifies. Lifeless bodies pile up to an excruciating extent. There seems to be not enough space to contain them. « They would fill all places, all houses (omnia complebant loca tectaque) ; and so all the more, packed (confertos) in stifling heat, death piled them up in heaps (acervatim) » (1262-1263). They overflow private spaces and spill over into public spaces, occupying streets

77 Cf. in vacuum ferri (1014) ; unde vacefit/cumque locus (1017-1018) ; fertur quo praecipitavit/iam semel et partem in vacuam conamina sumpsit (1040-1041). It is tempting to read the brief final section on the repellency of the inverted poles of magnets (1043-1055) as staging a flight/attraction scenario. As background to this, see Democr. 68A165 DK ; Strato fr. 62 Wehrli ; Furley, 1989, p. 154 ; Berryman, 1997, pp. 153-155. 78 The suffocation by body imagery recalls from a distance Lanzmann, 1991, p. 91 : « The locomotive arrives and slowly the locomotive becomes the whole screen. There is no issue. You cannot get out ; it’s a wall ».

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and fountains, then shrines and temples79. These last references pave the way for a return to Lucretius’ grand attack on religion, and they do this with unmistakable irony : places of last resort now fulfill their function in a cruelly literal and ineffectual way. Fear and grief overcome the Athenians ; they are disabled by the very emotions that initially led them to seek succor in divinity ; burials are detached from customary rites and rituals (another cruel literalization). There is a general regression, a de-idealization, and a literalizing of human behavior. Athens is literally choked with bodies and with death. The final irony of the poem occurs in the last preserved lines. Surfeited with bodies, the Athenians would sooner add themselves to the pile of bodies than desert them : multo cum sanguine saepe/rixantes potius quam corpora desererentur. The language of the final clause is trickier than it is usually made out to be. Monro and Bailey’s « rather than abandon the bodies » (adopted by Rouse ; similarly Ernout : « plutôt que d’abandonner leur cadavres ») is a gloss rather than a translation, one that attempts to correct the problem of agency and the direction of abandonment in the verb desererentur (abandoned to what ?), the logical subject of which is ambiguous (abandoned by whom ?), and whose grammatical subject is – precisely, or rather imprecisely – corpora. The actual meaning of the final clause is not « rather than abandon the bodies », but either « lest the bodies be abandoned » or more expansively « rather than see the bodies abandoned »80. Lucretius’ language is pointed and provocative. It is calculatedly impersonal ; it accentuates the harsh objectality of the bodies ; and it leaves the motivations of the Athenians – the source and direction of their agency – undescribed. There is also a telling contrast at play. Where beasts of prey find themselves having to abstain from the corpses, out of sheer repulsion and against their own nature (absiliebat, 1217), the Athenians are desperately anxious lest the bodies of their loved ones should be abandoned, and so they are drawn all the closer to them – and naturally so. Why all this clinging to the body ? Moral compunction might look like 79 Segal, 1990, p. 41, interestingly suggests that Lucretius « seems to be going against the current of the Master’s practice of de-individualizing and de-somatizing the process of dying », and that « the difference is due, perhaps, to the Roman love of the particular and the concrete » (ibid., p. 42). But doesn’t Lucretius actually pit these two processes against one another ? The « somatizing » of death here goes hand-in-hand with a « de-individualizing » of the bodies, which appear as a mere lifeless heap, lacking any particularity at all. In contrast, it is the particularity of suffering, one might wish to say, that is being underscored, its essential quality. But this too is done as it were en masse, not en détail, producing something like a concrete universal. « Quod ubi se quisque videbat » (1231 ; cited by Segal, ibid., p. 40, alongside of unus/quisque suum ... maestus, 1280-1281) is generic and faceless ; it naturally attains the degree of thirdperson impersonality with which the poem closes, the nameless passive desererentur (whose subject is precisely – or rather imprecisely – corpora). (The vagueness of the agency of this verb is rightly underscored by Kelly, 1980, p. 96). 80 The latter rendering adopted by Kelley, 1980, p. 96. His alternate translations (« struggling rather than see their own bodies left behind », and : « ... rather than see their own atoms left behind ») are, as Smith notes ad loc., bizarre.

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one factor. But any moral content we might wish to find in this emotion is vitiated by the circumstances, which reveal a self-canceling logic (wrangling to the death over the dead). Possibly, Lucretius is showing us the primitive form of a moral emotion, in line with his general tendency to reduce refined moral feelings to their most basic and least examined origins. If so, what is the feeling in question here ? We might want to say it is, once again, a vague fear of death : the anxiety is over seeing the bodies abandoned to some uncertain posthumous fate, which anxiety Lucretius is exploring in its reduced and primitive expression. Fear is certainly a part of whatever complex of emotion the Athenians feel, for the population is both shocked (perturbatus) and fearful (trepidabat, 1280). Perhaps they are victims of habit ; that is, the emotion is not a primitive one that has been laid bare and shown to be hollow by circumstances ; rather, it is the remainder of a more refined emotion (the need for proper burial, prompted by the dictates of religio) that has been reduced to a nearly inarticulate form under the pressure of circumstances. This won’t rule out the existence of a primitive fear, such as fear of death. But as I hope is clear by now, it may not be the case that fear of death is the most primitive fear operative in man, not even on Lucretius’ own showing. Fear of death, I suggested, is reducible to a fear of annihilation, a fear that sets in whenever we contemplate the imponderable fate of the body’s destruction (and consequently our own). But more to the point, the fear named (however inarticulately) at the end of the poem and particularly in the last preserved line of the poem is a fear of seeing bodies abandoned. Thus, I would suggest, Lucretius rounds off his treatise with a criticism of our absurd desire to cling to the durability of the body, to our fear of deserting the body and of being deserted by it. What would life be in the absence of bodies ? Plainly, empty. Why is it so hard to abandon a body ? Or rather : the body. The answer would appear to lie in a horror vacui, horror of what you’ll miss, what won’t be there, of the unimaginable abyss, which you can’t touch sense, feel, smell, or hold because this absence deprives you of your innermost possession, your self : identity, what-ness, that-ness. Gone. Lucretius ends his poem – or if you like, ended it thus in one of its incarnations – on this note : on the inability to relinquish the body. The apparent focus on body thus turns out to be an obsessive focus in the face of a greater fear, the fear that underlies the whole of book 6 : the fear of being engulfed by senseless void81. The fear that is named at the end of the

81 Cf. 3.1068-1069 : « In this way each man struggles to flee from himself : yet, despite his will he clings (haeret) to the self, which, we may be sure, in fact he cannot escape, and hates himself... ». Lucretius’ lesson here is, Give it up, learn about the nature of things, « since it is [your] state for all eternity, and not for a single hour, that is in question ... after [your] death ». Atomism’s lessons can only have a posthumous value. See further Nagel, 1986, 225-226, describing « the expectation of nothingness » as « the ultimate form of abandonment », while acknowledging that this prospect is one the mind refuses to picture, let alone accept (ibid., 231 : « the individual attachment to life will force its way back even at this level » of

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treatise is the fear of void after all. The poetic and philosophical significance of void in the poem and its prominence in book 6 is thus maintained here at the end – in silhouette. The scene of the plague brings to mind a disaster of cosmic proportions. It forebodes the end of all things ; and it highlights the deep-seated psychological – and to an Epicurean, irrational – need to cling to the world and to things, in the face of their inevitable destruction and ultimate negligibility. In a sense, the finale to book 6 cannot help but bring to mind a catastrophe so massive as this. Elsewhere, disease is a metaphor for the mortality of things, as in 5.345-347, where it is applied to the end of the world and of the human body together (nam cum res tantis morbis tantisque periclis/ temptarentur, ibi si tristior incubuisset/causa, darent late cladem magnasque ruinas) 82 ; and the connection is repeated in earlier tradition (Plato and Theophrastus)83. If this is right, the poem is brought full circle. Or rather, it continues to circle around the image that has been haunting it all along, right from the end of book 1, with its apocalyptic scene of near utter annihilation. That scene is instructive in several ways, not least of all because in a culminating discussion of void the idea of « desertion » (abandonment) is applied to void itself. Here, it is void that is being abandoned (desertum) – this time, by body. Let’s look at it briefly. Lucretius asks us to imagine a world in utter dissolution (due to some emergency, on a rival school’s geocentric cosmology, whether Platonic or Peripatetic)84. In such a universe, Lucretius objects, « the walls of the world [would] suddenly fly apart, dissolved through the great void (magnum per inane soluta), and... all else (cetera) [would] follow them in like manner » ; « the thundering quarters (templa) of the sky [would] rush upwards, and the earth in hot haste [would] withdraw itself from beneath our feet (se pedibus raptam subducat), and amid all the mingled ruin of things on earth and of the sky, whereby the frames of bodies are loosed, it [(sc., the earth) would] pass away through the deep void (per inane profundum), so that in an instant of time not a wrack [would] be left behind (nil extet reliquiarum), except emptied space (desertum praeter spatium) and unseen first-beginnings » (1102-1110). These extraordinary lines posit an unthinkable scene, or rather scenes : we are asked to imagine a world in which matter suddenly gives way to void ; and then to contemplate, at least as one component of this revised world, spatium desertum, a profound void emptied of body, freed from the material elements and released as it were to itself. That, at least, is what

self-abandonment) – an inadvertent echo, but intriguing for that very reason. See also Alberti, 1990 ; Long, 1997, 138-139 ; and Porter, forthcoming. 82 Cf. 6.1143 : incubuit tandem populo Pandionis omni. 83 See Sedley, 1998, pp. 173-174 ; in Theophrastus (ap. Philo, De aet. mund. 124-127), where each of the four elements suffers and perishes, while air is said to become sickly (noseifln [Diels, 1879, 487.19]). 84 Sedley, 1998, 80-82. The emergency may just be the internal incoherence of the conception itself, as seen from Lucretius’ vantage-point (differently, Furley, 1989, 191).

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the cosmology under review would seem to suggest, with its notion of an extra-cosmic void that is « empty of all matter »85. This notion, and the scenario of the world’s collapsing into void, are strictly prohibited by Epicurean physics. The prohibition is the point of the passage. Indeed, so inconceivable is the thought of sheer void, void free of cosmic matter, that Lucretius has folded into the rival cosmology at the end of book 1 elements of his own, introducing atoms where there surely would have been none before : thus, even in the event of the utter cosmic ruin, Lucretius can now assure us, there will always still be atoms (corpora certa [1.521], the certainty – the surety – of bodies) and void. Just what is Lucretius trying to prevent here ? David Furley has the best answer : « he is canvassing the peculiarly Epicurean fear of the earth’s falling downwards through space »86. Canvassing or expressing ? Interestingly, the argument for the impossibility of the voiding of the cosmos is simultaneously an argument against death. The sequel runs : « For on whatever side you maintain that the bodies fail first (nam quacumque prius de parti corpora desse/constitues), this side will be the gate of death for things, by this path will all the throng of matter cast itself abroad » (1111-1113). Death here is of things, and so too the horror before the void is a fear of death in this one sense – fear of the death of things. Whether this passage, which is troubled by a prior lacuna of eight lines (and eight other mutilated lines), has been correctly understood or not, Lucretius nevertheless remains caught up in an Epicurean dilemma : representing to the imagination the physical hypothesis of atomism entails being able to represent void. How do you conceive void ? With a powerful act of mind, an ejpibolh; thfl" dianoiva", you have to make the very same mental abstraction that Lucretius is positing in these cataclysmic verses : you must literally void space itself, in order to divest it of all traces of matter. The mind shivers at the thought, and then rejects it (as at 1.523)87. Just to contemplate the atomistic hypothesis is to undergo this radical destitution. It is to look the ultimate death in the face, the death of representation itself, and then to stare into the abyss of sheer void. And it is to recoil again from that position, uncertainly, and to posit once again the existence of being (matter), and thus to keep the universe (and all possible worlds) from collapsing into infinite nothingness. Lucretius’ poem thus oscillates between the two poles of horror 85 Sedley, 1998, 81, referring to Cic. Ac. 1.28 (no matter lies outside the universe). For a firm rejection of the extra-cosmic hypothesis, cf. 2.304-307 : « neither is there anything outside, into which any kind of matter may escape from the universe, nor whence new forces can arise and burst into the universe and change the whole nature of things ». 86 Furley, 1989, 191. It is worth recalling that Hesiodic Chaos lies yawning beneath the « foundation » of Earth, the pavntwn e{do" ajsfale;" aijeiv (Hes. Th. 116-117). Cf. 5.534-563 (« which explains why the heavy earth does not crash through the bed of air and fire on which it rests », Furley, ibid.) and see n. 6, above. 87 Or at 5.366 : nec tamen est [sc. natura mundi] ut inane, neque autem corpora desunt ; the world is not like void, for the reason that bodies are never lacking. Here, for once, the phenomenal world provides a reassuring analogical proof of what can and cannot exist below the limit of appearances.

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in Epicureanism, and we are left to ask ourselves which horror is greater : the overproximity of body (as in the plague) or the specter of abstract void (as here)88. Which is worse, the disappearance of void or that of body ? The two horrors are plainly coordinate for an Epicurean, because body guarantees a place for void and vice versa : remove one element, and the other must go too. Paradoxically, Epicureanism claims to find tranquility in the midst of all this horror. We might say that the Epicurean contemplation of void involves a strategic use of horror that is finally, or optimally, converted into a salvific voluptas 89. That is the unique achievement of Epicurean philosophy90. Lucretius’ unique achievement may lie in the way he reminds us of the precariousness of this balance and its hard-won character. Ataraxy for humans requires a kind of effort that forever keeps them at a remove from the divine. Gods, models of ethical perfection for us, are indifferent beings and effortlessly so. Were humans ever to achieve the complete indifference of the gods, they would pass from humanity into a state of inhumanity. And that would be equivalent to deepest, quietest death. Epicurean gods, those paradigms of serenity, are sublime ; but sublimity is not a divine emotion any more than serenity is one : sublimity is not an emotion the gods feel (it is not they who experience horror and voluptas), while serenity may just be the absence of emotion altogether, a state rather than a motion. That emotion belongs to Epicurean converts who feel the gods to be sublime, and who, as the true possessors of the emotion, can only ever recognize and acknowledge sublimity outside of themselves91. This tension goes some way towards 88 These are the two options canvassed at 1.520-523 : « If there were nothing which was empty and void, the whole would be solid (omne foret solidum) ; unless on the other hand there were bodies determined, to fill all the places they held (nisi contra corpora certa/essent quae loca complerent quaecumque tenerent), the whole universe would be but empty void space (omne quod est, spatium vacuum constaret inane) ». Cf. 6.1272-1275 : omnia denique sancta deum delubra replerat/corporibus mors exanimis onerataque passim/hospitibus loca quae complerant aedituentes. 89 Cf. the proem to book 4, and esp. 4.20 : volgus abhorret ab hac (sc. ratione, viz. Epicureanism). 90 An achievement that was no doubt marveled at subsequently, and occasionally emulated. Cf. Sen. NQ 5.15.1-2, where Seneca retails how men who were sent by Philip II of Macedon to explore an abandoned mine discovered, not the riches he had hoped for, but something far more breathtaking : vast reservoirs of subterranean water, held in the generous embrace of the earth : conceptus aquarum inertium vastos ... non sine horrore visos. The next line reads : cum magna hoc legi voluptate. (The close of the prologue to DRN 3 lies close to hand). A few sections later (5.15.4), Seneca continues in a Lucretian, moralizing vein : ulli ergo mortuo terra tam gravis est quam istis supra quos avaritia ingens terrarum pondus iniecit, quibus abstulit caelum, quos in imo, ubi illud malum virus latitat, infodit ? Illo descendere ausi sunt ubi novam rerum positionem, terrarum pendentium habitus ventosque per caecum inanes experirentur et aquarum nulli fluentium horridos fontes et alteram perpetuamque noctem ; deinde, cum ista fecerunt, inferos metuunt ! 91 What the positive features of Epicurean divinity are is a more general problem. See Nussbaum, 1994, pp. 255-257, on the featurelessness of the Epicurean gods (with conclusions

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explaining the unusual role of the sublime at the heart of De rerum natura, and its most precarious status92. As for the question what the gods are or represent, this is perhaps best left in the partial obscurity that Epicurus, no doubt deliberately, cast them into when he first conceived them. To conclude : I hope I have shown why to claim that the actual structure of Lucretius’ poem passes from Atomology to World is to misdescribe the poem in a most basic way. Rather, that structure describes a large-scale, macrocosmic trajectory that repeats the poem’s innermost, and most sublime, dialectic – namely, the passage from Body to Void – with the ethical response of Humankind at its troubled and ever-present center93.

that, however, go beyond what needs to be discussed here). The distinction between pleasure as a state and as a sensation is also made by Striker, 1986, 16, but with no reference to the condition of the gods. 92 The troubling ethical implications of immortality within the Epicurean system are implied by Williams, 1972 and forcefully brought out Nussbaum, 1994. 93 My thanks to the participants in Lille for responses to an earlier version of this essay. Thanks are also due to Sara Rappe and Tom Rosenmeyer for valuable comments on a later draft. Finally, I wish to dedicate this essay to the memory of Don Fowler, which is inseparable for me from a very intense encounter we had in 1993, trudging with a small group up and down the hilltop of Anacapri, and then later in Naples sipping midnight limoncello, all the while involved in an animated conversation about the meaning of prolepsis and the divine in Epicurus – an experience I have relived again and again in the presence of his many extraordinary papers.