Any lengthy assessment of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (DRN) must devote care to its opening lines. In the following pages and chapters, it will become clear that these verses certainly weigh heavy in my own reading of the poem. Though frequently cited in smaller segments hereafter, I wish to quote the initial forty lines in full both for the sake of their sheer beauty and because, as we shall see, they inaugurate Lucretius’ attention to sensuousness and sensuality obtaining throughout the poem. All subsequent renderings from DRN will be mine but here I defer to Anthony Esolen’s verse translation since it so well captures the poet’s enticing urgency.Footnote ¹ Whether in Latin or English, I recommend reading these lines aloud before continuing.

Piercingly stunning verse, but also a bit disorienting. What, we may justifiably ask, is this long poem about? An unambiguous theme, like Achilles’ rage in the Iliad’s first line, appears lacking (“Sing, goddess, the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus” μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος). As we read on, DRN reveals itself, rather surprisingly, to have a didactic message clad in dactylic hexameter and to be concerned, at least in part, with the physics of purposeless atoms in a universe radically free of divine design or providence.Footnote ² Strange indeed, and potentially scandalous! Still, at first blush, the poem seems to begin innocently enough with a joyful-sounding hymn to Venus and her sway over fecundity and peace.Footnote ³ Reading further, we may sense that the hero of the teacherly epic is the long-dead philosopher Epicurus, his theories on physics and ethics, the poet himself, or perhaps the audience, or maybe all simultaneously.Footnote ⁴ The verses propound a philosophy that vaunts itself as the preeminent way of living, a philosophy that also happened to be imported from allegedly soft Greeks conquered by Roman military supremacy.Footnote ⁵ By Lucretius’ own admission, Latin, as the poem’s target language, is inferior for rendering novel concepts and technical vocabulary from Greek (1.136–39).Footnote ⁶

Strange also are some of the topics scrutinized in the poem. The author frequently goes on at length, for dozens or hundreds of lines, about subjects as disparate as magnets (6.906–1089)Footnote ⁷ and the materiality of free will (2.251–293; 4.877–906).Footnote ⁸ As we just saw, the proem of the first book grins (rident; 1.8) with verdant fertility (1.1–20) while Lucretius apparently ends his work in a hellscape epidemic with faces of the stricken drawn in ghastly smiles (in ore iacens rictum; 6.1195).Footnote ⁹ The historical moment of the poem’s composition – if not its immediate points of reference – is the final, tumultuous years of the Republic when figures like Cicero, Catiline, Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey dominate high politics and in turn disrupt the lives of Romans at home and abroad.Footnote ¹⁰ Lucretius, in counterpoint, insists that living simply and quietly is best (5.1117–19).Footnote ¹¹ The poet’s authorial voice is that of a Roman man addressing Roman men of the ruling class.Footnote ¹² But the poem, a protreptic invitation to adopt Epicureanism,Footnote ¹³ is rife with language, imagery, and an overarching message corrosive to the norms and perquisites enjoyed by these men of elite society.Footnote ¹⁴ Flouting both literary genre suggested by the meter and the glory-driven agonism at the heart of Roman masculinity, the epic is not about men at war or dangerous feats, but lucid observation of nature and its harsh realities.Footnote ¹⁵ As I read it, perhaps the weirdest, hardest, and most unnerving reality of all for a Roman male audience is the prospect that men might not really be men, not by conventional criteria for assessing masculinity.Footnote ¹⁶ If the bodily comportment and vulnerability of Mars is an early indicator, male continence and self-mastery might be in peril.

Far from innocent, the poem, right from the start, is a purposively disquieting assault upon the physical senses and privileged Roman sensibilities for imagining and maintaining a culture of gendered dominance.Footnote ¹⁷ How does this attack end? Upon closer reading, Lucretius tips his hand in the very first verse by invoking Aeneas and the fall of Ilion: One polity must die in order to give birth to a new Rome.Footnote ¹⁸ And what sort of men and forces will topple the one and found the other? If we break with chronology and permit ourselves a brief comparison to Aeneid 1.1, the first line of DRN might propose suspiciously sub-masculine agents: unarmed and unremarkable people (homines) instead of a man and his weapons (arma virumque).Footnote ¹⁹ Delight (voluptas), moreover, seems hardly the stuff to foment social revolution.Footnote ²⁰ As though to instantiate the unmanliness of the venture, the initial verse hums and undulates, soft and liquid (Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas).Footnote ²¹ Like the apparently innocuous horse that saps Troy, there is something strange, deceptive, alluring, and deeply subversive at play in the poem’s cold opening.Footnote ²² My argument is that the male audience, should they read on, risks breaching their constructed masculinity and falling conquered like Mars a few lines later (devictus; 1.34).Footnote ²³ Is voluptas in the final position of verse one playful inducement or a siren call to ruin?

To undertake a fresh analysis of a canonical text requires some situating and some justification. Before settling into the business of making the argument, I think it necessary to explain briefly how I am analyzing the poem and why this effort matters. For those coming to this book with a background in critical theory, you will note common ground throughout the argument. If I were pressed, I would say that the entire study is a sort of queer theoretical reading of DRN, and the queerness of this reading, at least as I see it, emanates from the text. My debt to the labors of Williams, Skinner, Hallett, Nussbaum, Fredrick, Gordon, Olson, and others is obvious.Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, Gordon’s conclusion to her 2002 paper “Some Unseen Monster: Rereading Lucretius on Sex” serves as a practical jumping-off point for this book:

Regarding methodology, Williams’ Roman Homosexuality, now in its second edition with new responses to subsequent critical assessments, remains a primary touchstone for my own readings of Latin literature and Lucretius especially.Footnote ²⁶ However, in an attempt to avoid retreading ground already traveled better and to train this study directly on Lucretius’ verse, I mostly steer away from engaging the historical march and metalanguages of theory, probably to the relief of some and minor frustration of others. For those encountering this book with a background in ancient philosophy, you too will find many shared points of discussion. One does not write a book about Lucretius if one is not ready to talk about physics and ethics. For the most part, however, on questions of historical development and discrete points of dogma and interpretation both ancient and modern, I refer readers to the magisterial works of Bailey, Asmis, Long, Sedley, Hankinson, Fowler, and Frede, to identify a few.Footnote ²⁷

If my reading appears undertheorized on the one hand and a bit light on historicized philosophical discussion on the other, it is because my first allegiance is to the poetic language and imagery before me, a product of my own love for Latin and preference for allowing ancient verse to reveal its own beauty and difficulties as we encounter it afresh. What the poem says to me, in 2023, is, at a fundamental level, comparable to what it has said in the recent past to Brown, Nugent, Nussbaum, Keith, Gordon, Holmes, and, before them, Stearns, Snyder, and Betensky: There is something destabilizing and troubling about Lucretius’ handling of gender, sexuality, and erotics and it demands attention.Footnote ²⁸ What I seek to add to this existing scholarly conversation is both scale and focus. Outside of Brown’s excellent commentary on the famous verses on love and sex in Book 4, there is no monograph-length inquiry considering gender and sexuality in Lucretius. Moreover, there is no study examining these issues throughout all six books of the poem. This book is an attempt to address that gap and to draw out what I see as a unifying effort across the poem: From the opening proem to the final verses, Lucretius seeks to overthrow the imagined masculinity of Roman men and replace it with a new vision, an Epicurean vision, for what a real man is. As Nugent has so sharply and enduringly noted about patriarchal aspects of the poem, Lucretius is a man writing for men.Footnote ²⁹ I want to complicate this observation by showing that Lucretius’ male audience, if they take his poem seriously, end up acknowledging themselves as beings closer to objects rather than subjects. Male privilege, at least the most virulent strains at Rome, they learn to be a manmade myth.

Individual bias coupled with fondness for a given poet’s verse can blind reader and critic alike to problems in that poetry, from the stylistic to the ethical.Footnote ³⁰ Despite my best attempts, I am sure to demonstrate infelicities of this sort at some point.Footnote ³¹ However, born from this bias and fondness is one conceit that I wish to bring to the fore in order that it not be mistaken as a blind spot: I am allowing myself to assume that Lucretius, in spite of the inequities and injustices of the time and culture from which he wrote and in spite of his quaint empiricism and outmoded scientific theories, still has something valuable to say to modern audiences. In what might be called a positive or optimistic reading, I cannot help but find some of Lucretius’ criticisms of the domineering masculinity from his own historical context pertinent and even constructive to ours, though I say this with as much caution as I can.Footnote ³² Indeed, it is with some trepidation that I even attempt what is, to some degree, a recuperative reading of Lucretius in light of Sharrock’s incisive and self-consciously despairing argument that Lucretius might prove to be exclusively and irredeemably masculinist in its approach to science/philosophy on the one hand and ethics on the other.Footnote ³³ I find myself in a position very similar to Fowler’s when he responded to Nugent’s criticism that Lucretius’ poem only further instantiates all the damaging suppositions of Roman masculinism. Nugent:

Fowler:

I likewise examine that “more nuanced and acceptable view of gender” and, more prominently in this study, how Lucretius goes about presenting it with regard to theme and poetics. Like Fowler, I want to emphasize that the results must only be “partial” because though we might find material to entertain our interest and even to consider as relevant criticisms of our own time and place, Lucretius cannot wholly bear modern apology.Footnote ³⁶ Thus, this study is old-fashioned in that it is a philological analysis of ancient poetry, its language, its rhythms, its texture on the tongue and in the ears, and its imagery. At the same time, it is a product of this particular intellectual and cultural moment since it is concerned with questions of gender, sexuality, and the hazards of unchecked male domination.Footnote ³⁷ Classical literature must never be employed uncritically as a template for modern ethics and justice, but it can serve as a mirror reflecting back at us some discomforting and illuminating features about ourselves that we cannot or do not wish to perceive. On this point I think Sharrock and I agree, that even when – and perhaps especially when – a text refuses to yield readings that comport with twenty-first-century ideas about what is right and what is useful for reforming discourses, culture, and even public policy, we persist in doing theoretically informed “analysis anyway, because the process brings personal and intellectual growth, even if it doesn’t bring answers.”Footnote ³⁸

If Lucretius means to guide readers away from culturally entrenched gender codification and toward more complex and indeterminateFootnote ³⁹ ways of considering human experience,Footnote ⁴⁰ the effeminizing strangeness of his poem is also a concession to prevailing negative discourses about Epicureanism.Footnote ⁴¹ Well before Lucretius entered the scene, Epicurus and adherents to his school in succeeding generations had been polemically framed as suspiciously inactive (inertis) and like delicate boys (delicati pueri; Cic. Nat. D. 1.102).Footnote ⁴² With a single slur – κιναιδολόγος, “author of corruption” – Epictetus designated Epicurus as irredeemably perverse, effeminate, revolting, and dangerous (D. L. 10.6).Footnote ⁴³ The name Garden did not help.Footnote ⁴⁴ Perhaps Epicurus did not intend to give his school a suggestive epithet but later critics ruthlessly capitalized on the double entendre offered by κῆπος/hortus. The term means “orchard” or “garden” in a primary sense, but it is readily transferred into derogatory sexual register to indicate “vagina” (e.g., D. L. 2.116) or “anus” (Priap. 5.4), that is to say, the grounds into which the male (and masculine) actor plows his seed.Footnote ⁴⁵ Heraclitus’ (the commentator on Homer, not the philosopher) derisive assessment of Epicurus pivots on this sort of androcentric innuendo.Footnote ⁴⁶

The passage can be read plainly with “plowman” meaning “plowman” and “garden” meaning “garden,” but the presence of “indecent pleasure” (τῆς ἀσέμνου ἡδονῆς) shifts it toward sexual metaphor. Note also how Heraclitus forms the relative clause to make κήπους the central ring around (περί) which Epicurus’ exerts his indecently pleasurable labors.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Garden is like an orifice garnering unseemly autoerotic attention and Epicurus therefore, as Heraclitus asserts, is not a man worth noticing. In De Natura Deorum, when Cicero makes the Academic skeptic Cotta deprecate Leontium, a female Epicurean, he rates her a lowbrow sex worker (meretricula; 1.93).Footnote ⁴⁹ He then scoffs at the indecency of Epicurus permitting a woman to participate and write philosophical treatises: “Epicurus’ Garden had this much license” (tantum Epicuri hortus habuit licentiae; Nat. D. 1.93). With meretricula and licentia already coloring the passage in a sexual hue, Epicuri hortus ends up sounding like a location for sexual malfeasance. A few sections later Epicurus’ Garden is mentioned again and this time it is not so much locative as anatomical.

Compared to the intellectual achievements of Democritus, Epicurus’ diminutive little seedbed, as Cicero disparages it, is on the receiving end of that real man’s (vir) fluids.Footnote ⁵⁰ Cicero makes this obscene wordplay on the name of the philosophical school even more forthright in De Oratore when he dismisses Epicureans as unfit models for ideal statesmen.Footnote ⁵¹ The pleasure-advocating philosophy (philosophia quae suscepit patrocinium voluptatis; 3.63) does not really want to involve itself in political matters. Instead,

The tableau is plain: Epicureanism pleasures itself in its own little seedbed and offers itself as a soft, delicate, seductive anus or vagina to distract a man of affairs from discharging his duties. The Garden, that is to say Epicureanism, as Cicero mocks it, is sociologically feminine.Footnote ⁵²

To simplify matters a bit, the philosophy’s generally retiring posture (“live quietly” λάθε βιώσας; fr. 551 Us.=Plut. De lat. viv. 1128c8–9) toward traditional aristocratic masculine pursuits like politics (e.g., Epicurus:RS 7, 14; Sent. Vat. 58, 67) or martial exploits (e.g., RS 31) loaned itself to mockery, whether at fourth- and third-century Athens or at late Republican Rome.Footnote ⁵³ As Geert notes of Epicurus’ dictum,

For us in the twenty-first century, caught up in a changing climate and relentless exploitation of natural resources, modest living and minimalism might seem altogether virtuous.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet, conscientious refusal to perform illustrious deeds and speak notable words in public – and eschewing all associated costs and rewards, social and material – was tantamount to rejecting the most basic scripts for Athenian or Roman masculinity.Footnote ⁵⁶ Furthermore, as Gordon demonstrates, Epicureanism’s relative inclusiveness toward female participants and even slaves, legally and socially disenfranchised members in both Greek and Roman polities, offered additional fodder to its critics.Footnote ⁵⁷ Social and physical proximity to members of these marginalized underclasses of Rome who were culturally prescribed objects of male contempt and sexual aggression risked blurring or transgressing lines of male status and personhood.Footnote ⁵⁸

For Cicero, at least, the fundamental strangeness and corrosiveness of Epicureanism was the notion that virtue could somehow be derived from inactivity and pleasure.Footnote ⁵⁹ When theorizing how to establish states and cities on a secure footing and how to ensure a citizenry’s health (Leg. 1.37), Cicero explicitly rejects any contribution from Epicurean thinking.

According to Cicero, even if Epicureans stumble upon something true, they should not be heeded because their moral criterion is the body as it reckons pleasure and plain.Footnote ⁶⁰ That Epicureans should have no say in the affairs of the state is Cicero’s main argument, but the way he makes it points up the issue of the philosophy’s eccentricity.Footnote ⁶¹ Epicureans are self-indulgent and slave-like and, like women and others of low status, they are ignorant about the high-minded pursuit of statecraft. Best of all is for them neither to be seen nor heard so that, sequestered away, they do not threaten the solidity of the state (res publica firmanda) or the wellbeing of the populace (populus sanandus; Cic. Leg. 1.37). In contradistinction to the firm body politic, the indulged and cosseted bodies of Epicureans are soft. They are fit only for engaging in empty talk with each other in their hortuli, “little garden patches.”Footnote ⁶² In this mash-up of legitimate tenets (e.g., hedonist calculus) and polemics (e.g., slaves to bodily pleasures), Epicureans come out as supple voluptuaries, people who will be told what to do and where. Such “erotic distraction,” notes Edwards, was “felt to divert a man from his public responsibilities. In neglecting the public good for the pursuit of his private desires he became like a woman, in Roman eyes.”Footnote ⁶³ To follow Cicero, Epicureans’ questionable masculinity might be tolerated within the state, but their voices have no say in its establishment or in the morals of its populace. The province of these Epicureans is to take it, quietly, perhaps a sarcastic rejoinder to Epicurus’ maxim (λάθε βιώσας).

Elsewhere, Cicero is more explicit in his dismissal of Epicureans as effeminate and delicate. Regarding the philosophical proposition that pain is the chief evil (summus malus dolor), Cicero counts Epicurus as one who “offers himself readily submissive to that languid and womanly teaching” (ad hanc enervatam muliebremque sententiam satis docilem se Epicurus praebuit; Tusc. 2.15).Footnote ⁶⁴ Through the persona of Cotta, Cicero chides Epicureans for acting as though they “disdain soft and delicate pleasures” (aspernari Epicureos mollis et delicatas voluptates; Nat. d. 1.113). This is piquant language, as Williams has shown.

Whether offering himself pliable (docilem se praebere) or feigning as though he does not enjoy soft pleasures (mollis voluptates), the Epicurean man is depicted by Cicero with language relegating him to a position of sexual receptivity and, therefore, deviance.Footnote ⁶⁶

The short, famous, and grammatically challenging mention of Lucretius in one of Cicero’s letters perhaps reinforces this stereotype of Epicureans as unmanly.Footnote ⁶⁷ “As you write, Lucretius’ verses are graced with much inventive brilliance, yet skill too” (Lucreti poemata ut scribis ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis; Cic. Q Fr. 2.10.3).Footnote ⁶⁸ Cicero then goes on state, “But when you arrive, if you read Sallust’s Empedoclea, I will consider you a real man. I will not think you a mere person” (sed cum veneris. virum te putabo si Sallusti Empedoclea legeris, hominem non putabo; Q Fr. 2.10.3). Sidestepping the issue of interpreting this somewhat cryptic assessment of the artistic merits of Lucretius’ verses, we can see that Cicero perhaps sets up a derisive comparison in chiastic form: Reading Empedoclean material will make you a vir.Footnote ⁶⁹ In tacit counterpoint, reading the Epicurean poem, though artfully composed, is the stuff of a homo. At this point Walters’ disambiguation of vir and homo deserves quoting in full.

Reading the short excerpt from Cicero’s letter with sensitivity to this distinction also coheres with Gordon’s point that when Cicero elsewhere appraises Epicurus as a vir optimus, an “exemplary man,” it is clearly sarcastic since he is in the act of deprecating the philosopher’s teachings on scorning pain and death (mortis dolorisque contemptio; Tusc. 2.43).Footnote ⁷¹ We could continue at length multiplying examples from Cicero and others, but one final selection from Seneca serves to show that the polemical mold had staying power in the ancient world.

Seneca does not need to identify which school plies its trade softly and seductively.Footnote ⁷³ He can safely assume his readership knows exactly which womanish philosophers cultivate enjoyable distractionsFootnote ⁷⁴ rather than embark on a manly journey. Everyone already knows that Epicureans are natural subordinates.

Throughout this present study, I both assume and try to prove that Lucretius consciously accepted this derogatory paradigm and manipulated it toward his own poetic, philosophical, and protreptic ends. I can best communicate the essence of my reading of DRN by composing a brief speech in the character of Lucretius’ poetic voice to his aristocratic male audience: 

We have already roughed out what socially fabricated masculinity looked like for men of status in late Republican Rome. Without wading through the expansive and ever-growing corpus of scholarship reconstructing this cultural artifact, let me trace some additional outlines.Footnote ⁷⁷ A male at Rome proved himself a vir by varying forms of agonism and violence. Battlefields, courts, assemblies, and political canvassing were all public venues for winning and retaining externally assessed manliness. At a more personal level, a Roman man curated his virtus by enduring physical and emotional hardship, by regulating his speech, dress, and bodily comportment in order to convey no sign of effeminacy, and in all matters sexual by acting in such a way as to avoid any suspicion of orificial receptivity. Manliness was not necessarily demonstrated in sexual violence toward other parties, but culturally ensconced assumptions that “masculine” entailed activity/infliction while “effeminate” involved passivity/suffering perhaps weighted accepted and expected sexual practices of a vir toward aggression and force. Certainly, public accusation or even insinuation that a man was the object of a sexual act, or worse, enjoyed the incursion, could be devastating to reputation and career. In public, on campaign, in private chambers, a Roman man must assert himself.

Lucretius’ poem, as an effort to establish the superiority of Epicurus’ teachings and as an invitation to embrace them, collides directly with this deeply embedded script for performing, maintaining, and policing masculinity. As we will see, rather than seek to soften the clash, Lucretius, over the course of his poem, sharpens it by playing up just how unavoidably effeminate nature reveals every man to be. Lucretius does not seek to erase masculinity altogether but instead to reorient virtus toward a much-circumscribed goal of rational and ethical assertiveness. It is no coincidence that the first instance of the term itself, virtus, used sparingly by Lucretius, describes the intellectual acuity of Epicurus (acrem | … animi virtutem; 1.69–70) rather than exploits of a typical man of action. The other five occurrences of virtus are telling. One occurs in reference to the poem’s addressee, Memmius (tua … virtus; 1.140).Footnote ⁷⁸ Whatever reputation of manliness attained by the statesmanFootnote ⁷⁹, mention of it here is stripped of any sense of male agonism since it is placed in the context of Lucretius seeking the “pleasure” of Memmius’ “sweet friendship” (voluptas/sauvis amicitiae; 1.140–41) – not exactly a heroic sounding locution.Footnote ⁸⁰ Other instances are similarly denuded of traditional androcentrism since they refer to the survival faculties of both sexes of wild animals (5.858, 862–63) and primitive humans (5.966).Footnote ⁸¹ The only instance of virtus in a setting featuring male aggression comes in the description of boys (pueri) who perform a martial dance (chorea; 2.635) in cultic celebration, an enterprise which Lucretius dismisses immediately as being “far afield from rational thinking” (longe … a vera ratione; 2.645).Footnote ⁸² Lucretius reminds his audience what a real man is at the opening of Book 6 where Epicurus is rated a vir on account of his “great mind” (virum tali cum corde; 6.5). By the poem’s end, manliness and the point of being a man confound the polemics of Cicero. As with every other ethical principle in the poem, Lucretius’ understanding of Epicurus’ materialist physics generates both the cause and urgency of his project to reimagine Roman masculinity and to redirect its aim toward lucid observation and thinking.Footnote ⁸³ To this atomist physics we now must turn.

Lucretius does not wait long to introduce one of the two fundamental laws of Epicurean physics. Between the famed Mars and Venus tableau (1.29–43) and initial criticism of religio (1.62–65), Lucretius shoehorns in a handful of verses about atoms, their role in the universe, and the suite of terms he employs to discuss them.

Atoms are the inscrutably minute building blocks of nature that at times come together and at times dissolve.Footnote ⁸⁵ The names and qualifiers that Lucretius gives them suggest a cyclically reproductive-like function (materies from mater, genitalia, semina) while their function in nature is something procreative (creare).Footnote ⁸⁶ Indeed, since Friedländer’s important study, this generative language has been noted.Footnote ⁸⁷ Anderson’s comments are instructive:

I would add that even at this early point in the poem, Lucretius introduces lactic or suckling language with alere, an image of oral intake that will pay dividends throughout the poem. Note also that Lucretius pairs auctare with female lactation, at root a term more at home in traditional masculine interests of strength and influence (i.e., auctor).Footnote ⁸⁹ But much more on this interplay of language and imagery later.

Perhaps more readily noticeable in the lines cited above is the term semina for “atoms.” No statement in this paragraph will be without controversy in the history and interpretation of Epicurean physiology, ancient and modern, and I direct the reader to Fowler’s excellent discussion for a digest of these challenges.Footnote ⁹⁰ What I want to bring to the fore is the reproductive valence Lucretius employs to present this physics.Footnote ⁹¹ As Lucretius later figures them, atoms are eternally existing seeds (aeternum semen) that cannot be utterly (ad nilum) destroyed (1.215–24; cf. 1.485–86). They are infinite in number (1.1008–20) but finite in size and shape so that, for example (2.478–531), there are numberless worlds but a limited range of materials of which any given world can consist. Atoms’ primal motion is downward through the universe like falling drops of fluid (imbris … guttae; 2.222), language elsewhere associated with semen (2.991–93; 4.1286–87). Completely independent of any external force or design, atoms also can swerve (declinare; 2.216–22). The inevitability of motion along with this deviation from a downward trajectory allows for atomic collision to be born (offensus natus … plaga creata), altered courses of motion, and atomic cohesion ranging from simple molecules all the way up the scale to worlds (2.223–24).Footnote ⁹² Without the semina swerving, ramming into each other, and sticking together, “nature would never have given birth to anything” (nil umquam natura creasset; 2.224). Everything that exists is comprised of atoms and every complex of atoms, whether a living thing like a gnat or a non-animated thing like a mountain, is constantly dispersing (e.g., dispergere, amittere) seminal atoms from itself (1.298–328). Perpetual atomic replenishment is impossible, and everything, except the atoms themselves, has a half-life and must decay (2.1122–74).

The second fundamental principle of physics is untouchable space or empty void (locus est intactus inane vacansque; 1.334).Footnote ⁹³ As with atoms, any comment on Epicurean theory of void comes with its own set of debates and interpretive challenges.Footnote ⁹⁴ These I wish to sidestep to train my focus on Lucretius’ poetics in presenting the concept of space. Void must logically be part of materialist physics, according to Lucretius, because void allows for movement of atoms and movement allows for atomic collision and cohesion, the importance of which we just noted.Footnote ⁹⁵ For the moment, my attention is not on Lucretius’ physics of void at the scale of cosmogony, but rather at the level of human bodies. Here too the concept of void plays vital roles. At 1.329–30, after setting forth that atoms comprise all things that exist, Lucretius states that “nevertheless, not all atomic composites are held tightly packed by nature, for there is also void in things” (nec tamen undique corporea stipata tenentur | omnia natura; namque est in rebus inane). A few lines later Lucretius offers proofs for his claim.

To depict how the void within stone renders it porous, Lucretius opts for the language of human bodily functions: humors, secretions, incontinence.Footnote ⁹⁶ Lucretius also employs uber, a distinctly non-masculine-sounding term to refer to rock’s permeability. Although as an adjective uber by transferal means “copious” or “rich,” the noun from which it is derived, also uber, at base means breast or nipple when applied to women. Lucretius employs the noun in just this way later in the poem (5.885; cf. 1.886–87). Given the following line dealing with living bodies and nourishment, and the earlier language of bodily secretions, I think we are justified to express the lactic sense of uberibus. But note also that the adjective modifies guttis, a term that we stated above is linked to semen elsewhere in the poem. This is a strange confounding of imagery: unyielding as it may seem, observation proves stone to be rife with pouches and passageways of void and thus incontinent, always susceptible to semen- and milk-like seepage.Footnote ⁹⁷ Similarly, the surface of the earth is not covered with an impermeable crust, but instead it has “soft fields” (mollia terrae | arva 5.780–81). If so for rocks and earth’s solid shell, so much more for human bodies that are far spongier, more porous sieves. No matter how unyielding and self-restrained a man may imagine himself to be, the pockets of void throughout his body render him analogous to a woman’s uber or a leaky penis rather than the robur of masculine toughness in Roman imagination.Footnote ⁹⁸ Put in a simple equation, if there is void in things (est in rebus inane), those things are, to varying degrees, necessarily mollia, “soft” (1.567–69), a term that we have already noted was especially fraught for Roman men.

Moreover, however resilient we might think our bodies are, nature compels us to confess their weakness and permeability.

External assaults master (domare) everyone, Lucretius goes on to conclude (2.1143). Grant, if you will, that a man does attain to a relative degree of strength (robor), soon enough that apparently hard body will reveal itself to be incontinent and squirting (dispargere/mittere) in every direction (in cunctas undique partis). In fact, his robor is only maintained by constant nurturing or suckling (alescendum), again to drive straight to the root of the term as Lucretius uses it a few lines later (alit; 2.1156). No longer nursed along, age (aetas) breaks (frangere) his robor and it necessarily succumbs to external blows (externae plagae). The reality is that, in the aggregate, all the imperceptibly minute pouches of void inherent to his atomic structure make him a leaky vessel requiring a continual influx of material for maintenance and growth. But when a man can no longer receive sufficient material to fill up these ever-vacuating receptacles at the micro level, his body as a whole begins to become a gaping void (rarefactum) destined for collapse. The physics of atomic motion and void, as Lucretius depicts it, is inescapably emasculating. A man is like a lactating breast on the one hand, but also in need of constant suckling on the other. He is like an ejaculating phallus, but one that cannot maintain its rigidity or control its emissions. Whether as source or recipient of atomic flow, the male body appears only tenuously resilient and inevitably soft. When nourishment runs dry, a man becomes an unfillable hole. And then he will be mastered. What the man’s invisible pockets of void want, what his body needs to stave off disintegration, is repeated ingestion of semina, to use Lucretius’ parlance. I will have much more to say on this theme of emasculation, male softness, and various forms of atomic insemination in subsequent chapters. For the present, let us now, in preparation for later discussions, consider how Lucretius accounts for embodied awareness based upon the physics of atoms and void.

Lucretius’ Epicurean empiricism is founded on unwavering trust in sense perceptions, so long as what is perceived is correctly interpreted and accurate inferences result from it (4.478–521; cf. Epicurus Ep. Hdt. 46–53, RS 23, 24).Footnote ⁹⁹ These senses are the traditional five – sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste (4.217–33) – plus an additional mode of perception, mental receptivity (mens, animus; 4.722–31).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ All six Lucretius treats as physical operations of bodily organs, or, to keep it closer to Lucretius’ terminology, the senses are corporeal. The sensing organ, the sensation, and the trigger of sensation are all composed of atoms.Footnote ¹⁰¹ How does this work? As we noted earlier, in Epicurean physics, atoms move, collide, and interact because space or void allows for motion. Therefore, a working schema for the physics underlying corporeal sensation is as follows: (1) sensation triggering material from a source is in motion (2) and in its trajectory strikes and enters the sensing organ, (3) whereupon the sense organ both houses the infiltrating material trigger and materially responds to its presence.Footnote ¹⁰² All three facets we can see in a case of sight where a seen thing (1) has seeds in its body (in corpore) that are released (semina … inmissa), (2) move to the seeing thing’s eyes (oculis), and bore into its pupils (pupillas interfodiunt), (3) producing in the seeing thing physical pain (acremque dolorem; 4.714–16). To augment this outline a bit more, we need to recall that all atomic compounds, no matter their size or apparent hardness, are lattice works of atoms that encapsulate pockets and passages of space/void. So, following Lucretius’ explanation of taste, if we were to zoom in on the surface of a human tongue until we could see it at microscopic level, it might look something like a sieve (rara lingua) with gaps (caulae, foramina, fauces, viae) amid a web of solid tissue. And if we were to train our view on these gaps as the person chewed a mouthful of apple, we would observe atoms or simple molecules (corpora, semina) of the masticated apple moving and entering those gaps (penetrare). The varying sensations (sensus) of taste occur – sweet, bitter, acidic, and so on – as these corporeal semina pleasurably (suaviter attingunt, suaviter tractant) or painfully (pungunt, lacerant) contact the sensing surfaces of the interstices within the tongue (4.617–71).

The mechanics of sense perception, as Lucretius theorizes it, is inevitably particulate and therefore intimate. That is to say, when I smell an odor, it is because atoms have sheared off something, entered my nose, and lodged within it. Or, to underscore the intimacy involved, when I smell you, the aroma of the toiletries you use, your body’s natural scent, or whatever other odor emanates from you, stuff from you has breached my nasal orifices and infiltrated the latticed tissues within my nose (4.673–705). What is true for sight, taste, and smell holds for hearing (4.595–614) and even touch (“it is inevitable that touch and sight are moved by similar cause” necessest | consimili cause tactum visumque moveri; 4.232–33), Lucretius avers. If we are occupying proximate space, the only way I can recognize your existence is by transfer of material from you into me. A casual glance your way, your atoms are in me. I hear your voice, whether or not you are addressing me, your atoms have struck my senses (inpellere sensus; 4.527) and are now in me. Lovers share a kiss and the material vestiges of pesto from the one’s lunch pass into the pores of the other’s tongue. Awareness of you, at any level, means that some of you has entered me. Even if you are distant, I can picture you in my thoughts because particulate traces of your face move speedily across spaces to impinge upon my mind (4.798–99). Awareness, simply stated, is unavoidably intimate. The problem, at least for an elite Roman man who presumes orificial integrity and entitlement to act, is that sense functions conferred by physics do not support claims of exclusive, assertive subjectivity in this eroticized world of human experience. The percipient male is the penetrated male, whether he likes it or not.

One might find those previous two sentences overstated, a case of the interested critic conjuring what the critic wants to see. However, if we look closely at the linguistic and figural apparatus Lucretius employs to explain and depict the senses, we find abundant evidence that Lucretius is indeed sexualizing the phenomenon of percipience and demonstrating that men are not exempt from ingressive and egressive corporeal traffic. As we might expect in discussions on sense perception, Lucretius employs expected and somewhat colorless terms like sentire (“sense” e.g., 4.229), cernere (“detect” e.g., 4.229), and percipere (“perceive” e.g., 4.24). Similarly, when referring to a specific sense, Lucretius uses innocuous terms like tueri (“see” 4.332) and odorari (“smell” 4.229). Given the physics involved, it is not surprising that Lucretius often emphasizes the action of the particles inducing the sense perception within the sense receptacles. Thus, for example, we find atomic material entering (inire; 4.339) or passing through (perlabi; 4.248; transire; 4.249) eyes to produce sight. The sense organs themselves Lucretius calls by their normal names (e.g., oculi; 4.257; aures; 4.486; lingua; 4.624), though, as we noted, he frequently zooms in to the microscale and refers to the permeable apertures (foramina, caulae, fauces, viae) of bodily tissues comprising the organs. Sometimes at the microscale of pores, sometimes at the macro level of orifices, Lucretius opts for more sensual language. Various material stimuli can “touch” (tangere; 4.224) or “titillate” (titillare; 2.429) or “stroke” (mulcere 2.422) the senses. Combination of this more intimate diction with the clinical-sounding procreation language noted above (e.g., semina inmissa, penetrare) shifts Lucretius’ depiction of percipience toward a semantic realm that trades upon anatomy and genital sensations. More disturbingly, however, as we broaden our survey, we encounter a slate of terms trending toward force and violence, often with a sexual hue.

Putting increased emphasis on material moving across corporeal boundaries, Lucretius frequently refers to atoms infiltrating (e.g., insinuare; 4.331) the human body at scales both minute and large. We should pause momentarily to appreciate that the basic meaning of insinuare indicates motion “into a cavity/hollow” (in + sinus). Moreover, we should note that sinus bears a sexual connotation limited almost strictly to vagina or womb.Footnote ¹⁰³ An overly literal rendering of a line from Ovid serves as an instructive example: “She is touched and conceives, since her sinus was touched” (tangitur et tacto concipit illa sinu; Fast. 5.256).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In Lucretius’ hand, the use of insinuare to depict ineluctable atomic penetration figures the penetrated object as female anatomy, regardless of the biological sex or sociological gender of the insinuated.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But the most common terminology to express material contact and ingress resulting in sense perception is not sensual at all. Instead, it is intimately violent. Atomic effluences assault and force the senses – pores and organs – in all manner of ways. Atoms in motion “attack” (lacessere; 4.217), “strike” (ferire; 4.243), “beat” (tundere; 4.934), “dash” (pulsare; 4.882), “gash” (verberare; 4.259), “hack” (rescindere; 2.406), “injure” (laedere; 4.721), “rupture” (perrumpere; 2.407), “stab” (compungere; 2.432), and “batter” (pellere; 4.525). This list is not exhaustive. In addition to their basic meaning of transitive violent force, nearly all of these words have a sexual valence as well, and since we are dealing with sense perception derived from contacted and penetrated bodily receptacles, we must entertain this range of meaning as we encounter this language.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The unifying sexualized sense of this group of terms hinges on an empowered androcentric erotics of aggressor–victim/object. In such a schema, victims of these violent actions are women, boys, girls, slaves, and humiliated men of status. Objects are their bodily orifices: vaginas, mouths, and anuses. With an eye toward sexualized discourse intrinsic to such a corporeal system, Nugent has already drawn critical attention to bodies as permeable receptors of violent ingress.

The real man, as Lucretius reforms him over the course of the poem, is one who can accept this harsh fact: The price of sense perception and wisdom gained from it is a body subject to aggressive commerce across its borders. “You will discover,” Lucretius says directly to his male audience, “that recognition of truth is given birth by the senses first and that the senses cannot be refuted” (invenies primis ab sensibus esse creatam | notitiem veri neque sensus posse refelli; 4.478–79).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The imagery is one of parturition with the man’s eyes, ears, and so on, becoming wombs that receive the incoming material data from the natural world and in turn birth within him awareness of reality. The sense of compulsion in the future tense invenies is echoed by the incontestable offspring of his uterine orifices. Nature will force you to understand, O Man.

We begin to recognize how discomfiting this proposition must have seemed to the audience: Lucretius, a Roman man purveying Epicurean theories of sense perception to Memmius, a Roman man, imagines every man’s sense-perceiving organs and the tissues comprising them as sexually violable receptacles.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ To put it more bluntly, a man’s percipience of the world around him and his place in it is a naturally occurring byproduct of suffering continuous and ineluctable atomic invasion all over one’s body.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Maria Wyke’s assessment helps us appreciate the tension: 

The power implicated on that corporeal surface is predicated, in part, on a fictional discourse of impermeability, a force field that nature happily transgresses at every turn. Like his master who broke through the seemingly impervious gates of nature’s laws (1.70–71), Lucretius is going to force his audience through that cultural facade, in and out, out and in, over and over, in a merciless demonstration of male and female porosity.Footnote ¹¹² Lucretius hijacks men’s gaze to compel the reader to regard his own body so intensely that he enters it in an autoeroticizing meditation of his every opening, fissure, and hole. Such introspection is therapeutic, in theory, and leads to the birth of a new man free of the desires, anxieties, and fears foisted upon him by virtue of society’s pre-constructed male gender.Footnote ¹¹³ The poem, then, is a guide to becoming one’s own man.

Because this is a book-length investigation of one discourse, with its terms and figures, within a single poem, recurrent analyses of key passages and a certain degree of repetition is inevitable.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It also happens to reflect the spiral-like recursivity of the poem’s structure and Lucretius’ penchant for recycling language and images – perhaps a meta-figure of the perpetual cycle of atoms.Footnote ¹¹⁵ I return frequently, for example, to the purple proems and the discussion on sex and love in Book 4, and to themes like procreation, orifices, eating, secreting, receptivity, and the unsettling, and perhaps titillating, strangeness of the poem for its male audience. Each visit to these passages will be freighted with new information to reinterpret and rethink what we might persuade ourselves to be settled. And, of course, every literary work has its own language and to gain fluency we need repeated exposure to the author’s linguistic, syntactic, and figural paradigms.

I can imagine that some may suspect that this treatment of Lucretius will be oversexed, especially since the didactic epic is, at base, concerned with atoms and emptiness (mixtum corpus inani; 6.941). My rebuttal is that we are nearly always at risk of underappreciating sexuality in ancient literature. Sissa’s introduction to the sexualized world of Rome is a useful corrective for misgivings about overemphasizing sexuality. It deserves to be cited at length:

Lucretius’ poem is an act of intrusion and transgression of this very sort, and it invites its male readership to trespass gender boundaries into a revised domain of male prerogatives.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The argument proceeds over the course of five subsequent chapters. Chapters 2–4 combine to form a substantial survey and analysis of Lucretius’ language, imagery, physics, and poetics directed toward unseating assumptions of masculine exceptionalism. The program will trace a man’s life, from pre-conception to final decomposition. Chapter 2, “Humbled Beginnings,” is a revised and expanded version of the article “Embryology, Female Semina, and Male Vincibility in De Rerum Natura.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The chapter takes us to the moment of biological conception and explores the question of male autonomy in embryonic fertilization and development. We will follow Lucretius’ lead into the reproductive organs of men and women to show how generative material supplied by female and male sexual partners both competes and cooperates at conception. What Lucretius reveals in forceful language and imagery is that men are impotent in the face of universal physics and that female reproductive assertiveness gives the lie to exclusive male dominion from the moment when genetic material from both parents first coheres in utero.

From microscopic beginnings, we move on to Chapter 3, “Nature’s Assault upon the Senses,” and examine how Lucretius depicts a man’s tactile experience with the phenomenal world around him. We resume the above discussion about sense perception and violence and delve further into the campaign Lucretius wages against presumed subjectivity. This chapter is a combination of two previously published articles (“Ocular Penetration, Grammatical Objectivity, and an Indecent Proposal in De Rerum Natura”Footnote ¹¹⁹ and “Seminal Verse: Atomic Orality and Aurality in De Rerum Natura”Footnote ¹²⁰) both of which have undergone revision and expansion for the present volume. The weight of inquiry falls especially on sight and hearing, which are, perhaps not coincidentally, the primary modes of experiencing the poem or – to put it more in Lucretius’ parlance – the senses being assailed by the poem itself. Shown to be less than powerful in the womb in Chapter 2, here we find that Lucretius alters this uterine imagery to prove that men and their sense orifices are involuntary, womb-like repositories for nature’s inseminating forces.

From conception and lived experience, we proceed to death in Chapter 4. Although my focus is on Lucretius’ treatment of death and men’s fears of it, in “Death: The Hole That Gapes for All” I persist with analyzing the themes of wombs, semen, fecundity, and the ways by which Lucretius weaves this imagery into his criticism of human appetite for consumables, sex, and protracted life. In Lucretius’ poetics, the universe, the world, and individual human bodies all become sites of decomposition, insemination, and (re)birth. Death itself is shown to be pathologically eroticized as the final object of a man’s fear and lust – a desire Lucretius seeks to reform into an ethical acceptance of death. Lucretius’ point, I argue, is that, regardless of biological maleness and the security it bestows on Roman men, nature’s laws make wombs and tombs of them all in a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth.

Chapter 5, “The Ties That Bind,” takes us in a new direction as we begin to explore Lucretius’ curative efforts toward his male audience. Quite naturally then, we train our focus on the famous honey-rimmed cup of medicine metaphor of 1.921–50 (4.1–25). We find that the verses present a figure denser than the simple doctor-patient-medicine schema. Rather surprisingly, Lucretius has woven into the image a complex set of allusions to mythical female characters. In overlapping ways, Lucretius identifies his authorial voice with Circe, Helen, and the Sirens as he seeks to seduce, drug, and divert his audience away from what they might imagine to be their dearest goals in life. Lucretius reveals that the emasculating web of deceit he spins becomes a safety net to rescue his audience from the trap of self-delusion and superstition in the face of nature’s laws.

In the sixth and final chapter, we continue to trace how Lucretius rehabilitates Roman men and their performed gender. Although I resume exploring the sexual language and figures by which Lucretius depreciates male presumptions of anatomical and sociological advantage, in “Vir Recreandus” I also tease out from the poem a positive argument about masculinity. Following the poet’s cues, I construct what an Epicurean man is, what he can do, what he is for, and how he can flourish in Lucretius’ reordering of the world. This Epicurean homo turns out to be manly in behaviors that, in part, map onto traditional scripts for a vir even while acting and self-regarding in ways that Romans would deem strange indeed. Much to Cicero’s vexation, Epicurean men become Rome’s true patriots.