A Lucretian Version of Pastoral

Abstract

On the infrequent occasions when De Rerum Natura is discussed in terms of pastoral, it is assumed that Lucretius describes the typical locus amoenus familiar since Plato's Phaedrus, and critics concentrate either on tracing his Hellenistic sources or on the basic contrast between luxury and simplicity. But there is more to Lucretian pastoral, just as there is more to Lucretius' atomic universe, than meets the eye. The essence of his pastoral is original, centered around animals rather than shepherds, and his use of pastoral pervades the poem and is integral to its design.The most inclusive definition of pastoral possible is Empson's, the expression of the complex through the simple. It is more useful, however, to think of pastoral as the expression of an unfulfillable longing for a simpler and happier life, which may include a return from the city to the country, from politics to the land, from the Iron Age to the Golden Age, from war to peace, from vice to virtue, or from adulthood to childhood. Traditional pastoral is usually set in the country among shepherds and flocks, and man and nature interact harmoniously according to what has been called since Ruskin the ‘pathetic fallacy’. Plato ‘creates’ pastoral by contrasting city and country in the Phaedrus. Roman poetry uses elements of the urban-rural contrast not only in pastoral poetry as such but in satire, elegy and epic as well. The varied directions in which individual poets take the generic pastoral form are as interesting as the persistence of the form itself, and Lucretius' version, occurring as it does in a didactic epic, is extremely individual when viewed both from within and without the classical tradition of pastoral.