ABSTRACT
In his epic poem the De Rerum Natura Lucretius advocates a worldview in many ways at odds with the philosophy and religion found in the Homeric poems, revealing a world in which gods play no role: it is the invisible atoms that are responsible for every human action and physical phenomenon. Nonetheless Lucretius’s poem is heavily indebted to the (Homeric) epic tradition; it is therefore unsurprising that a katabatic episode be included: it has been argued by Tobias Reinhardt (2002 and esp. 2004) that the structure of part of the third book of the De Rerum Natura is based on the epic trope of a heroic descent to the underworld. The difference is that Lucretius’s symbolic tour of the underworld is, in essence, a paradoxical rejection of the very existence of such a place. In the De Rerum Natura there is no space for hell, souls cannot survive independently after the death of the body, and there is therefore no need of a fear of death. 1
This chapter explores the ways in which Lucretius uses the trope of the heroic journey to the underworld for his own philosophic purpose, and explores how his adaptation of the trope changes the epic landscape with respect to the descent narrative, paying particular attention to subsequent underworld episodes found in Vergil’s poetry: the Aeneid and the epyllion found towards the end of the earlier Georgics.
I analyse the ways in which Lucretius uses implied prior knowledge of the Iliadic and mythic tales of the underworld to drive home his Epicurean message that there is no such thing as hell, only a hell humans create for themselves here on Earth. Attention is also paid to the ways in which Vergil’s own versions of katabatic narratives in the Georgics and the later Aeneid might be read with or without recollection of Lucretius’ text. The discussion explores the role of memory in the story of Orpheus at Georgics 4.485-527, who is described as ‘forgetful’ (immemor; a loaded word after Catullus’ multiple uses to describe Theseus in poem 64) when he turns back to look at Eurydice and in so doing loses her forever to the underworld. The chapter also analyses the remarkable speech of Anchises in Aeneid 6 in which he presents a markedly Epicurean philosophic outlook, in unmistakeably Lucretian diction. The speech includes this devastating statement of the souls awaiting a second chance at life, who must first drink from the river of Forgetting (Lethe): ‘when the final light of life has left the wretches are not rid of all misfortune nor entirely do all bodily diseases leave them; a disease long ingrained must in amazing ways grow firmly rooted within them’. The notion of a disease (pestis) within is Lucretian (3.1070), stemming from the idea that (without Epicurean philosophy) humans create a hell on earth for themselves; the disease within will recur in Camus’s La Peste (‘chacun la porte en soi, la peste, parce que personne, non, personne au monde n’en est indemne’). 2 Exploring these ideas, the chapter demonstrates the important roles that cultural memory, the remembrance, or forgetfulness of the characters in the narratives themselves, and broader networks of remembrance in intertextuality all play in these depictions of hell and misery.
It is striking in addition that the Lucretian katabasis appears at the midpoint of his poem, while similarly Odysseus travels to the underworld around the midpoint of the Iliad (Book 11) and later Virgil’s two descents to hell also appear in the middle: at the middle of the epyllion of the Georgics and in the sixth book of 12 in the Aeneid.
In a way the plague is a description of a hell on earth which has a tradition starting from antiquity, including versions by Thucydides, Lucretius, and Vergil.
