This, I repeat, is observation, not experience. To the man burdened with the commonplaceness of life he recommends the study of nature: Nothing is so easy of belief that it does not at first seem difficult, nothing so great, so wonderful that men do not gradually cease to stand in awe of it. Look at the pure, bright light of heaven and the wandering stars and the moon and the dazzling light of the sun. If these were now for the first time suddenly revealed to man, what could be more strange and less likely to win his belief? Nothing I think, so strange would seem the sight. And yet how seldom is anyone, wearied as men are with satiety of seeing, moved to look up to the bright regions of heaven. Come now, give yourself to the contemplation of nature. Cease to be terrified by the novelty of the study. Weigh all things, and learn to separate the true from the false. Since the sum of space is unlimited outside beyond the walls of this world, the mind seeks to know what there is yonder then toward which man's spirit yearns and his mind reaches in free and unembarrassed flight. The world is doomed to destruction because like all other things it is the result of a chance combination of atoms and is therefore subject to dissolution. It came up from nothing by natural processes. Life on the earth is of gradual growth. Earth in her time of strength brought forth man; no golden chain let down the human race from heaven. Stage by stage, from its primitive beginnings, Lucretius traces the progress of the human race. It is an account which Tylor in Primitive Culture can quote with approbation and which many later sociologists are glad to borrow. Where so much, even now, is left to the imagination, one may be pardoned for preferring Lucretius to more recent theories. Compare the modern "hollowbone theory" of the invention of music with the explanation of the same thing by Lucretius: Men imitated the liquid notes of birds long before they knew how to sing finished songs, and the whistling of the wind through hollow reeds first taught man to play upon the pipe. Then gradually he learned sweet plaints, which the flute under the beat of the players' fingers poured forth through the pathless groves and the inmost glades of the forest in desert places divinely still. At liquidas avium voces imitarier ore ante fuit multo quam levia carmina cantu agrestis docuere cavas inflare cicutas. avia per nemora ac silvas saltusque reperta, per loca pastorum deserta atque otia dia. (V:1379-1387). Master as Lucretius was of vivid representation and sustained argument, great as he was in his unfaltering pursuit of truth, the De Rerum Natura depends chiefly for the vigor of its inspiration upon the flash of his poetic genius, the vivida vis animi which illuminates the details of his philosophy and raises the poem to its commanding position in the literature of Rome. The glory of the sum of things inspires him to enter upon the pathless way of the Pierides. He is of those who sing because they must. Like Jeremiah his bones burned within him and the truth as he saw it was poured forth in language such as had never before been heard at Rome and never was again in all its rugged strength and splendid virility. His style, pure and dignified, if sometimes rhetorical, is free from the conceits of the popular and affected Alexandrianism of his day. There is in him no trace of the seeking after the phrase which belongs to the studied attitudinizing of court poetry. "Whatever definition of poetry we may borrow from the poets," says John Morley, "the tense, defiant, concentrated, scornful, fervid, daring and majestic verse of Lucretius is unique and his own." The recognition of this poetic gift, together with a renewed interest in the subject matter of the De Rerum Natura, explains the increased admiration for Lucretius at the present time. He has never been a popular poet. There are few references to him in Latin literature, and in the Middle Ages he drops out altogether not to re-appear again until he lives in the thought of Giordano Bruno and Gassendi. In French scepticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he plays the roll of master and prophet. our own time, Tylor and Tyndall and Huxley pay homage to his scientific spirit and bear witness to the value of his observations and his speculations. The future epic of modern science may well begin, as has been suggested, with the lines of Lucretius: res non posse creari de nihilo, neque item genitas in nil revocari. In If the prolonged reasonings on the structure of the universe grow wearisome at times, even unreadable, as Mommsen asserts, if they sometimes bury out of sight the charm of his nature allusions, they are never able to obscure the impressive personality of the poet: his moral earnestness, his intense enthusiasm, his capacity for sympathy, his largeness of view and strength of imagination. When the imperfect knowledge of the time is understood and its inadequate methods of science, one cannot too much respect the vision and far-reaching hope of this man who could see that the sum of things is ever changing, that mortals live by dependence on each other, and that the generations of men, like runners, hand on the lamp of life to those coming after them. His theme was the advancement of human knowledge; not the place of Rome in the world, but the progress of the race toward perfection. His intellect spanned the centuries and comprehended vast areas of human life. His faith in the power of knowledge was unbounded. "One thing after another will grow clear, nor will dark night seize the road and hide from our sight the ultimate bounds of nature; so does one thing light the torch for another." Namque alid ex alio clarescet nec tibi caeca nox iter eripiet quin ultima naturai pervideas, ita res accendent lumina rebus. (I:1115-1117). AN EGYPTIAN FARMER W. L. WESTERMANN "Lucius Bellenus Gemellus to his sonn Sabinus, greeting. "Aunes thee donkey driver hes bought a rotten bondle of hay for twelve drachmas, and it is a little bondle and the hay rotten and the hole thing broken up like dung. Sabinus, Psellus son, of Psinachis, the one with you, hes brought a letter of the prefect to Dionysis the strategus, to learn from him, (Three broken lines. But old Gemellus cannot forget his indignation over the matter of the hay.) "Where did you putt the receipt for the hay and the contract of his lone of the mina? You wil send thee littl key and tel me where they lie inn order that I may take them out so that I may hav them if I am about to reckon with him. Now do not niglect this. Takke care of yurself. Rigards to Epagathus and those who love us truly. Goodby. Choiak 12th. "For the Saturnalia you wil send ten cocks from the market and for the birthday of Gemella you will send feesh and . . . and one artaba bread wheat. (On the left margin, at right angles, Gemellus adds:) "You wil send the animals to carry manure to the vegetable garden at Psinachis and the manure carts, since Pasis is croaking that it must not be broken into bitts by thee water. And let them fetsh his hay. You wil send the animals strateway." (On the back): "Deliver to Sabinus his sonn from Lucius Bellenus Gemellus. " The above is a translation of a letter of a prosperous old farmer living in the Fayum in Egypt about the year 100 of our era. It is fairly difficult to give a correct impression of the atrocities of the old gentleman's Greek, in spelling and grammar. The attempt will not be repeated. 1 Grenfell, Hunt, Hogarth, Fayum Towns and their Papyri, (P. Fay.), London, 1900, no. 119. The group of letters which passed between Gemellus and members of his family was unearthed in the winter of 1898-99 in the ruins of a small village in the northwest corner of the Fayum. The Gemellus documents consist of thirty-five letters, two contracts, and one column of an account of wages paid for help on a farm which belonged to Gemellus. Of these the editors of the Fayum papyri have published fourteen letters, the account of wages, and one of the contracts. The remainder are briefly noted in the "descriptions" at the end of the volume.3 P. Fay. 260, a contract for a loan of 140 drachmas made by Gemellus, was later published in full by Wessely.* The chief persons met with in the Gemellus letters are: Lucius Bellienus5 (Bellenus) Gemellus himself, head of the family; his brother Marcus Antonius (?) Maximus; his son Sabinus, to whom or by whom a number of the letters are written; two other sons, Harpocration and Lycus, whose names appear but seldom; a fourth son, whose name is lost in a break of the papyrus; Epagathus, a highly trusted slave' who managed several of the small farms of Gemellus; Geminus, probably also a trusted slave;1o Gemella, presumably a married daughter of old Gemellus;" and a little boy whom Gemellus speaks of affectionately as "the little one." This child was in all probability the old gentleman's grandson, son of Gemella.12 The letters written by Gemellus cover the period from the last years of Domitian13 to the fourteenth year of Trajan, A. D. 110. In the year 99 Gemellus made a contract with a young woman named Thenetkoueis, of the village of Euhemeria, to 2 P. Fay., 102, introduction. 3 Ibid., 248-49, 252, 254-55, 259, 260-61, 265-73, 274-77. Wessely, C., Studien zur Palaeographie und Papyruskunde, (Stud. Pal.), IV:117, Leipzig, 1905. In P. Fay., 110, the nomen is distinctly spelled Bellienus. See Plate V and cf. Preisigke, Berichtigungsliste der griech. Papyrusurkunden, 2 p. 131. Cf. also P. Fay., 122, Beλλiñvos Zaẞivos. P. Fay., 252. 7 Ibid., 123. Idem, 1. 27. • dià 'E#[a]yá[0]ov [a]dapí[ov] in Stud. Pal. IV: 117 disposes of the assumption (P. Fay., p. 262) that Epagathus was a nephew of Gemellus. 10 P. Fay., 121. 11 Ibid., 110, introduction. 12 Ibid., 113, 11. 14-15, ἐπὶ τὰ τετρακοστὰ τοῦ μικροῦ . . . ο ιειού Γεμέλλης. 13 Ibid., 110, 111. P. Fay. 259 also falls in the principate of Domitian. 14 Ibid., 118. |