in what a mist of lifeEnclosed with dangers and with noisy strife He spends his little span; and overfeeds His crammed desires, with more than nature needs!. For nature wisely stints our
Trang 1O wretched man! in what a mist of life
Enclosed with dangers and with noisy strife
He spends his little span; and overfeeds
His crammed desires, with more than nature needs!
For nature wisely stints our appetite
And craves no more than undisturbed delight;
Which minds unmixed with cares and fears obtain;
A soul serene, a body void of pain.
So little this corporeal frame requires,
So bounded are our natural desires,
That wanting all, and setting pain aside,
With bare privation sense is satisWed (2 16–28) The third book sets out the Epicurean theory of the soul and the mechan-isms of sensation Once we understand the material nature of the soul, we realize that fears of death are childish A dead body cannot feel, and death leaves no self behind to suVer It is those who survive who have the right to grieve Give up fear of death, Lucretius tells his patron,
For thou shalt sleep, and never wake again,
And, quitting life, shalt quit thy living pain.
But we, thy friends, shall all those sorrows Wnd
Which in forgetful death thou leav’st behind;
No time shall dry our tears, nor drive thee from our mind The worst that can befall thee, measured right,
Is a sound slumber, and a long goodnight (3 90–6) Even Epicurus had to die, though his genius shone so brightly in compari-son with other thinkers that he reduced them to nothing just as the rising sun puts out the stars (3 1042–4)
Lucretius’ fourth book, on the nature of love, is full of lively description
of sexual activity, as well as atomistic explanations of the underlying physiology No doubt it was the content of this book that gave rise to the legend, reported by St Jerome and dramatized by Tennyson, that Lucretius wrote the poem in the lucid intervals of a madness brought on
by over-indulgence in an aphrodisiac
St Jerome also preserves a tradition that the poem was left unWnished and edited, after the poet’s death, by Cicero This seems unlikely, for Cicero, having expressed his admiration on Wrst reading of the poem, never mentions it in his own philosophical writing, even though he devotes considerable attention to the Epicurean system
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