human race would not have been preserved (a sometimes forgotten aspect of the 'survival of the fittest').
Language was not arbitrarily invented but grew out of natural cries, as can be seen from the variety of
sounds made by dogs:
when they set about licking their puppies fondly with their tongues or throw them about with their paws
and as they go for them with bites put on a show of soft gobbling without using their teeth, they nuzzle
up to them with eager moans that are very different from their baying when left alone in the house or
their whimpers when with cringing body they shrink from a beating. (1067 ff.)
Here we have a poet who loves words and dogs and ideas all at once.
Towns were built and lands distributed, and men competed for wealth in a self-defeating search for
security (1120 ff.). Kings rose, and were toppled by envy, and violence gave way to law. Men saw gods
in visions and dreams, and falsely assumed that natural phenomena were devised by them (1183 ff.); that
is why they still spatter altars with blood, and shiver at thunder, and pray in storms at sea. Metals were
discovered in forest fires (1241 ff.), and then mined in the earth (first bronze, then iron). Horses were
tamed for war (1297 ff.), and less successfully bulls and lions. Plaiting came before weaving, as looms
need metal parts (1350ff.); men worked wool before women, as they are the more ingenious sex. Then
as things became easier, music was made in imitation of birds and the wind (1379ff); by Epicurean
doctrine the inventiveness that was first prompted by necessity was extended to add the graces of life.
Lucretius has no nineteenth-century belief in ever-continuing improvement, but following ideas current
in the Hellenistic world he recognizes that progress has historically occurred: 'usus et impigrae simul
experientia mentis / paulatim docuit pedetemptim progredientis' (1452 f. 'practice and with it the
experimentation of the active mind taught men gradually as they felt their way forward').
After a eulogy of Epicurus and Athenian civilization, which serves as a climax to what has preceded, the
sixth book expounds irregular natural phenomena, thunder and lightning, waterspouts and rain,
earthquakes and volcanoes. Lucretius wishes to show that his system can provide rational explanations
for these traditional puzzles, some of which were responsible for the terror and superstition that the
Epicureans were so concerned to avert; if some of his details were now out of date, that simply
underlines that he was a moralist and a poet rather than a scientist. Finally he turns to epidemics with a
description of the plague at Athens four centuries before (1138ff); his treatment is less objective than
that of Thucydides, on whom he depends, but he is not so concerned with a clinical scrutiny of the
physical symptoms as with a rhetorical presentation of human nature under stress. The end of the work
is gruesome and abrupt, with mourners fighting to lay their dead on other people's pyres, and some have
suspected that j the poet was interrupted by terminal illness; yet the passage implies a plan, as it sets off
not only the panegyric of Athens at the beginning of the book but the joyous hymn to Venus at the
beginning of the poem. Familiar themes recur, the mechanical causation of the calamity, man's social
and self-seeking propensities, the terror of death, the uselessness of religion. If we are not explicitly
offered the consolations of philosophy, that is not just because the plague came before Epicurus. Better
simply to describe things as they are, and the limits of human capacity.