7 - Lucretius and later Latin literature in antiquity

Summary

Parcus deorum cultor et infrequens, insanientis dum sapientiae consultus erro, nunc retrorsum uela dare atque iterare cursus

cogor relictos: namque Diespiter igni corusco nubila diuidens plerumque, per purum tonantis egit equos uolucremque currum,

quo bruta tellus et uaga flumina, quo Styx et inuisi horrida Taenari sedes Atlanteusque finis concutitur …

I used to worship the gods grudgingly and not often, a wanderer, expert in a crazy wisdom, but now I am forced to sail back and once again go over, the course I had left behind. For Jupiter who usually parts the clouds with the fire of his lightning has driven his thundering horses and flying chariot through a cloudless sky, shaking the dull earth and restless rivers, the Styx and the fearsome halls of hateful Taenarus, and the Atlantean limits of the world.

(Horace, Odes 1.34.1-12, transl. West 1995)

Horace recants the ‘madness’ of Epicurean philosophy, which teaches that the gods take no part in the affairs of the world. The poet is forced to reverse his position after witnessing a thunderbolt from the blue, a display of the power that Jupiter wields throughout a universe whose limits are sketched in the panorama of the third stanza. That vision, based on a description by the early Greek poet Hesiod of the cosmic effects of the battle between Zeus and the monstrous Typhoeus (Theogony 839-41), implicitly corrects the vision at the beginning of DRN 3 of the peaceful and remote abode of the gods (itself modelled on another early Greek description of the divine, the calm of Olympus at Odyssey 6.42-6) and of a universe marvellously empty of all but the atoms eternally tumbling through the void.