Machismo was hard-wired into the ancient psyche. Thersites[1] has a go at the Greeks, calling them Ἀχαιίδες, οὐκέτ’ Ἀχαιοί (‘Achaean women, no longer men’). Being a successful man for Cicero[2] included ‘authority and celebrity at home, fame and favour abroad, a special toga, the curule chair, ensigns of rank, rods of office, armies to command and provinces to run’. Virtus for Cicero was to be demonstrated and exercised in the service of the state and he was quick to lambast the Epicurean garden-dwelling peaceniks as useless cowards. This book argues powerfully that Lucretius was mounting an attack on precisely this sort of chauvinist faux-virility. ‘Epicurean man’ was in fact more faithful to the laws of nature and the uses of society than the broad-shouldered, narrow-minded iron-clad warriors of legend and history. Pope even makes the claim that ‘the poet’s view of masculinity might just save the republic’. The opening chapter (‘Odd Men Out’) makes a strong case for seeing the Epicureans in general and Lucretius in particular as counter-cultural rebels against the phallocratic power-seekers—precisely those men who (the poet tells us) ‘die for the sake of statues and a name’ (DRN 3.78). Men in Rome, engaging in agonistic feats of dominance, rejected all forms of ‘womanish’ passivity, but Lucretius shows that all bodies are porous and that the physics of atomic motion and void is ‘inescapably emasculating’ (p.26). Sensation itself is all about atomic penetration of bodily orifices: ‘a casual glance your way, your atoms are in me’ (pp.27-8). Not so armour-clad now, eh?
Chapter 2 (‘Humbled Beginnings’) looks at paternity in its most basic sense: are babies born from just the male seed? Is the mother any more than a peapod carrying the man’s child? Lucretius, unlike Aristotle (and Apollo in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (658–689)) regarded the woman’s body as not just ‘a passive site to be seminally colonised’ (p.37). Women can even (as it were) wear the trousers in determining the sex of the baby. Babies (after all) often look like their mothers, and half the time they are female. When this happens it is put down to the preponderance of maternal ‘seeds’ (semina 4.122-31)—and Lucretius stresses that both male and female seeds are needed to make a baby: ‘both sexes are androgynous at the level of semina, mutually ejaculating and mutually receiving’ (p.56). A man can take delight in a child which is (a) female and (b) looks just like her mother, despite ‘the loss that his semen suffered at conception’ (p.56), presumably because he loves his wife and his little daughter.
Chapter 3 (‘Nature’s Assault upon the Senses’) examines sensation and perception, which depend on our tactile experience of the world (DRN 2.434–435) in which ‘images’ (simulacra) penetrate the sense-organs and the skin (p.58). Perception is a passive activity which makes women of us all. Men may think they take the lead in sex, but Venus is ‘the genitive and genital source’ of these simulacra (p.62). The woman/boy therefore visually rapes the man—or as Pope bluntly puts it: ‘Venus fucks them over’ (p.63). Men—even the superbutch god Mars—grow weak in the presence of beauty, but then Mars is certainly enjoying the view (1.36) from where he is lying and the results of their consensual sex is the peace which is what Lucretius craves for Rome (DRN 1.29–37). This sort of sexual union differs totally from the unfulfilled infatuation in book 4 which delivers neither peace nor pleasure. Poetry itself is also able to cash in on this: since our hearing only works if our ears are penetrated, the Romans can easily be ‘turned into effeminized repositories of semen-like verse and philosophy’ (p.68). Lucretius’ addressee Memmius—a man whom Lucretius’ contemporary Catullus described as an ‘oral rapist’[3]—may well not have liked this but then he was precisely the sort of man whom the poet was targeting.
Chapter 4 (‘Death: The Hole that Gapes for All’) takes on the Grim Reaper and contrasts the futile raging against the dying of the light with the wise man’s acceptance of death as part of nature. Here again Pope produces some wonderful phrases: the lover in the throes of his climax wishes (DRN 4.1111) to ‘depart into another body’ and enact a Liebestod of ‘final erotic liquescence’ (p.90) as he ‘utterly disappears in the corporeally unravelling jouissance of his own orgasm’. The atomic cycle of birth and death turns all living bodies into food and vice versa (2.879–280). We stave off death by consuming anything and everything but ‘our bodies are unfillable and incontinent, or in a word, female’, and the fool is like a diner who cannot stop eating, always wanting what he has not got and despising what is to hand (3.957). Not that we go to any mythical black pit of Tartarus (3.963–967), since nature needs our atoms to build the next generation (pp.98-9), making our end also a beginning, the earth a womb as well as a tomb[4], with corpses acting as the breeding ground of maggots (3.727–729) and providing the seeds to create new life.
Chapter 5 (‘The Ties that Bind’) looks at the famous ‘honey on the cup’ passage (DRN 1.935–950 = 4.10–25) and places the poet himself centre stage as ring-master of his universal circus. Pope explores the intertextual links between this passage and Homer’s Odyssey and finds a lot of common (if at times ironic) ground. The poet is now Circe, now Helen, now a Siren, now a Demodocus. Circe’s potion, for instance, induces oblivion[5] whereas Lucretius ‘mixes a tonic that acts like smelling salts’ (p.125). Helen is both druggist and seductress (p.129), like the poet, while the Sirens claim to know everything and (like Lucretius) offer honeyed pleasure (p.130).
A more straightforward form of ‘ties that bind’ is explored in the lengthy passage on magnets in the final book of the poem: in simple atomic terms, magnetism is explained as being caused by porous atomic gaps which are entered by air atoms[6] which has obvious resonance with the theme of this book—but the force extends beyond metals. In more metaphorical terms, nature unmans us with its use of ‘bonds’ (vincula), love can bind and bridle a man, and men are often hamstrung by their fear of death. Religio with its gravitational pull downwards has a touch of religare (‘to bind’) about it, causing the poet to seek to ‘untie the mind from the tight bindings of superstition’ (1.932=4.7).
Chapter 6 (‘Vir Recreandus’) seeks to rehabilitate men after all this relentless emasculation. What can a male do in a world in which he is porous, soft and powerless? Can he accomplish anything in a universe which is pointless (p.148)? Lucretius harps on the theme of existential futility and mutability: sexual desire can be an unfulfillable craving, the romantic lover is shown wasting his money and his time, and the old man who does not want to die is rebuked by Nature for wasting his life moaning about it. In a justly famous line, ‘Life is not given to us as freehold, but only leasehold’ (3.971). Facing this pointlessness at least spares us the fear of suffering after death, as well as saving us from a life which is an ‘aimless, wandering, zombie-like sleepwalk’ (p.156). Lucretius redeems this potential despair and turns it into positive poetic pleasure, exchanging the dread of uncaring gods and painless death with a pleasurable horror as he surveys nature herself (3.28–30).
The book ends as it began. The masculine culture which prized political commitment and the pursuit of glory is seen as a waste of time. Power is ‘pointless’ (inane) and promises things which it cannot deliver—stable security, control over others and ultimately happiness. The aspiring politician, like Sisyphus,[7] ends up defeated and disappointed. ‘Cicero’s polemics—that Epicureans have no place in traditional statecraft—were not entirely wrong’ (p.166). Only knowledge and ‘true thinking’ (vera ratio) confer happiness in ‘a designless universe’ (p.165), and part of this ratio is the Epicurean paradox[8] that great wealth is great poverty. When applied to rugged masculinity this even works in our favour. Men in primitive times were ‘softened’ by having babies who ‘broke the fierce independence of their parents’ (5.1013–1018), and sex also diminished their strength (5.1017) but it was this weakness which fostered their concern for the common good and caused them to make laws. The Realpolitik is still there—the plague showed people dying whether they fled for safety or stayed to help others, and their death is hideously disgusting (6.1268–1271)—but the weakening of primitive brutality makes people form social bonds as they no longer wish to suffer and inflict violence. ‘Weakness and softness, those most feminine of traits, are both the stimuli towards, and products of, more peaceful human existence’ (p.176), as shown both in society and also in the bedroom. Sex is no longer the arena of male domination as offspring will not come without a measure of harmonia in embryological terms. The poet singles out the pathetic man who tries to manipulate the indifferent gods with sacrifices of ‘much blood’ to impregnate his wife (4.1233–1239): this man is a crazy (but less dangerous) version of the Agamemnon (1.80–101) who spilled his own daughter’s blood to get the wind to blow.
The thesis of this outstanding book is that (according to Lucretius) a man is ‘infinitely penetrable’ (p.181) and therefore not superior to women, children, slaves—or the humblest rabbit, for that matter. We cannot prevent our particles sheering off as sense-data for others: neither can we stop their particles invading our own orifices. ‘Inevitably I emit, inevitably I receive’ (p.182). Lucretius also recalibrates language itself: Epicurus is a Graius homo (‘a Greek person’ not a vir), homines can become heroes (1.78–79) of the victory over superstition, a victory won ‘not by weapons but by words’ (5.50). Epicurus’ conquest is couched in something of the conventional epic language of masculine achievement—divine status (5.8), glory rising to heaven (6.7–8)—but the poet still elevates a ‘pleasure-bringing philosopher from Athens’ into the greatest hero of all (p.190). Looked at one way, men are now soft, penetrable, and effeminate: alternatively, they can be recognised as ‘accessible, tractable, capable of learning’.
Not everyone will be convinced by all this. It pushes a line to its limit and does not pretend to be the last word on this most universal of poets: Pope discusses the Roman concept of virtus without mentioning passages such as Lucilius 1196–1208W—or the figure of the vir as he appears in love elegy—for comparison and contrast. The argument, however, has coherence and cumulative force so that by the end this reader was totally convinced that Pope is definitely on to something worth saying and worth recommending to our students.
The book has twenty-three pages of bibliography, a general index, and an index locorum. I spotted a dozen or so typos[9] but the book is generally a credit to its publishers and most definitely to its author.
Notes
[1] Homer Iliad 2.235, imitated later by Menelaus at 7.96
[2] Cicero Pro Cluentio 154
[3] irrumator (Catullus 10.12–13: cf. also Catullus poem 28)
[4] 5.259 (omniparens eadem rerum commune sepulcrum (‘the same earth is parent of all and our shared tomb’)
[5] Homer Odyssey 10.236
[6] 6.10311033
[7] 3.995-1002
[8] Epicurus Vatican Sayings 25, drawing on Democritus (283-4DK)
[9] The most egregious being p.186 which misquotes 1.72 as vivida vis menti (for vivida vis animi)