Table Of ContentGeorge Kazantzidis
Lucretius on Disease
Trends in Classics –
Supplementary Volumes
Edited by
Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos
Associate Editors
Stavros Frangoulidis · Fausto Montana · Lara Pagani
Serena Perrone · Evina Sistakou · Christos Tsagalis
Scientific Committee
Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck
Claude Calame · Jonas Grethlein · Philip R. Hardie
Stephen J. Harrison · Stephen Hinds · Richard Hunter
Christina Kraus · Giuseppe Mastromarco
Gregory Nagy · Theodore D. Papanghelis
Giusto Picone · Alessandro Schiesaro
Tim Whitmarsh · Bernhard Zimmermann
Volume 117
George Kazantzidis
Lucretius
on Disease
The Poetics of Morbidity in De rerum natura
ISBN 978-3-11-072265-9
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-072276-5
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-072292-5
ISSN 1868-4785
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932591
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
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detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
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Contents
Acknowledgments VII
Introduction 1
Disease and the (Un)Making of the World 11
. Disease as an Architect 13
. Re-reading the clinamen 20
. Conclusion 33
Disease, Closure and the Sense of an Ending 37
. What’s in a Disease? 41
. Sex Can Kill 51
. The End of it All 60
. Plague and the Suffering Body 67
. Conclusion 74
Disease and the Marvellous. Epilepsy in Book 3 and 6 76
. Epilepsy and the Hippocratic Tradition 78
. Epilepsy Re-considered 89
. Epilepsy, Earthquakes and Volcanic Eruptions. Reinstating the
Wondrous in a World of Sickness 99
. Epilepsy and the Female in the Paradoxographical Tradition 108
. Conclusion 120
From Callimachean Aesthetics to the Sublime. The Plague in
Book 6 122
. Lucretius and Callimachean Aesthetics 123
. Lucretius’ Plague and Callimachus 136
. Lucretius’ Plague and the Sublime 147
. Conclusion 160
. Appendix 165
Afterword 173
Bibliography 175
Index Rerum et Nominum 197
Index Locorum 203
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to all those people who have read parts of the book or the entire
manuscript and helped me with their feedback: Gordon Campbell, Philip Hardie,
Katerina Oikonomopoulou, Theodore Papanghelis, Sotiris Paraschas, Chiara
Thumiger. I have benefited tremendously from the friendship of my colleagues at
the Department of Philology in Patras: special thanks are due to Aristoula and
Katerina. The book would not have been written without the support and pa-
tience of Antonios Rengakos: I owe him a lot.
Chapter 2 is a revised and extended version of “Disease, Closure and Lucre-
tius’ Sense of an Ending”, which was first published in A.N. Michalopoulos, S. Pa-
paioannou and A. Zissos (eds.) (2017), Dicite, Pierides: Classical Studies in Honour
of Stratis Kyriakidis, Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Some of the
material discussed in Chapter 4 has already appeared in G. Kazantzidis (2018),
“Intratextuality and Closure: The End of Lucretius’ De rerum natura”, in S.J. Har-
rison, S. Frangoulidis and T.D. Papanghelis (eds.), Intratextuality and Latin Litera-
ture, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter.
The book is dedicated to the people I love; they know who they are, so no
need of lists of names here. Meropi, Savvas, Olga and Marilia are a league of their
own: a concilium to treasure like no other.
Patras, October 2020
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722765-203
Introduction
Towards the end of Book 1 Lucretius sets out to explain why he chose poetry to
communicate his philosophical message. The passage, which contains one of the
most celebrated similes in the DRN, runs as follows (1.926–50):
avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis
atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
unde prius nulli velarint tempora Musae:
primum quod magnis doceo de rebus et artis
religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo,
deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango
carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore.
id quoque enim non ab nulla ratione videtur;
sed veluti pueris absinthia taetra medentes
cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum
contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore,
ut puerorum aetas inprovida ludificetur
labrorum tenus, interea perpotet amarum
absinthi laticem deceptaque non capiatur,
sed potius tali pacto recreata valescat,
sic ego nunc, quoniam haec ratio plerumque videtur
tristior esse quibus non est tractata, retroque
volgus abhorret ab hac, volui tibi suaviloquenti
carmine Pierio rationem exponere nostram
et quasi musaeo dulci contingere melle,
si tibi forte animum tali ratione tenere
versibus in nostris possem, dum perspicis omnem
naturam rerum qua constet compta figura.
I traverse pathless tracks of the Pierides never yet trodden by any foot. I love to approach
virgin springs and there to drink; I love to pluck new flowers, and to seek an illustrious
chaplet for my head from fields whence before this the Muses have crowned the brows of
none: first because my teaching is of high matters, and I proceed to unloose the mind from
the close knots of superstition; next because the subject is so dark and the lines I write so
clear, as I touch all with the Muses’ grace. For even this seems not to be out of place; but as
with children, when physicians try to administer rank wormwood, they first touch the rims
about the cups with the sweet yellow fluid of honey, that unthinking childhood be deluded
as far as the lips, and meanwhile may drink up the bitter juice of wormwood, and though
beguiled be not betrayed, but rather by such means be restored and regain health, so now
do I: since this doctrine commonly seems somewhat harsh to those who have not used it,
and the people shrink back from it, I have chosen to set forth my doctrine to you in sweet-
speaking Pierian song, and as it were to touch it with the Muses’ delicious honey, if by
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722765-001
Introduction
chance in such a way I might engage your mind in my verses, while you are learning to see
in what shape is framed the whole nature of things.1
The meaning in these lines seems fairly straightforward:2 just as doctors smear
honey around the rim of the cup to make children drink their bitter medicine,3 so
does Lucretius sweeten his apparently harsh doctrine by applying the soothing
medium of hexameter poetry; this is not a deception meant to do harm but a nec-
essary step to be taken for the patient’s own sake.4 Intrinsic to the simile is Lucre-
tius’ emerging role as a doctor. The idea that philosophy steps in to fill a gap for
the treatment of the soul, since conventional medicine is predominantly focused
on the body, can be traced back to classical sources (especially Plato),5 and be-
comes particularly prominent during the Hellenistic period. Indeed, despite their
different views and strong disagreements on a number of important matters, both
Epicurean and Stoic ethics appear to agree at least on the fact that what is princi-
pally at stake is the remedy of people’s soul by means of curing it of false assump-
tions and of the attendant affections or “passions” (pathē).6 Chrysippus is re-
ported by Galen to have claimed that since there is an art (technē) which we call
1 Translations of Lucretius are adapted from Rouse/Smith whose 1992 Loeb text I have used
unless otherwise noted. 1.926–50 is repeated, with a few minor alterations, in 4.1–25.
2 Bibliography on this passage is rather extensive. For some illuminating discussions, see Clas-
sen 1968; Mitsis 1993; Gale 1994, 138ff.; Volk 2002, 96–99; Clay 2003; Nethercut 2019; Gellar-
Goad 2020, 103–105.
3 In ancient botany and pharmacology the bitter and unpleasant taste of a plant was believed
to make it suitable to be used as a drug; see Theophr. Caus. pl. 6.4.5–6. In this respect, Lucretius’
choice of wormwood — the bitter herb par excellence — is not incidental; for the plant’s medicinal
properties, see Dioscorides, De materia medica 3.23, with Totelin 2018, 60–61.
4 Reasonable and resourceful as Lucretius’ didactic choice at this point appears to be, later writ-
ers respond to it in a critical way. Persius proposes a kind of poetry which can be efficient only
as long as it retains its “acerbity”; for the satirist’s “poetics of discomfort” and his opposition to
Lucretius’ method of deceptive sweetness, see Freudenburg 2001, 182; Bartsch 2014, 246. Quin-
tilian also revisits the Lucretian image with a certain touch of irony (Inst. 3.1.3–4, on the author’s
“apology” for the relative absence of voluptas in the pages to follow, which deal with the history
of rhetoric): “I have tried to add some touch of elegance … to lure young people into learning
what I regarded as necessary for their studies, in the hope that they might be attracted by some
pleasure in reading … This is the reason Lucretius gives for writing philosophy in verse … [cita-
tion of Lucretius 1.936–38 = 4.11–13] … But I fear this book may appear to have too little honey
and too much wormwood, and be more healthy for the student than agreeable” (… sed nos
ueremur ne parum hic liber mellis et absinthii multum habere uideatur, sitque salubrior studiis
quam dulcior); translation by Russell in Hunter/Russell 2011, 70. Cf. Sen. Ep. 75.5–7.
5 For the so-called “medical analogy”, according to which philosophy treats the mind/soul just
as medicine treats the body, see Holmes 2010a; 2013.
6 Nussbaum 1994 remains the most comprehensive and illuminating treatment on the subject.
