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A Note on ‘Vis Abdita Quaedam’ (DRN 5.1233)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
The curious phrase ‘vis abdita quaedam’ has traditionally divided commentators into two camps. One group cautiously ensures that 5.1233–5 is kept consistent with the poem's overall scientific perspective and pre-empts any reference on the poet's part to a supernatural force. Munro, for instance, glosses the phrase as ‘the secret power and working of nature’. He supports this interpretation by finding in Book 6 a passage that he believes refers to the same disruptive and destructive physical force (6.29–31). Along the same lines Minadeo proposes that we regard ‘vis abdita quaedam’ as ‘the principle of destruction in the universe’. He understands the phrase to refer to a force which balances the creative or generative force in nature, just as Strife counters Love in the Empedoclean cosmology. It can be said in favour of this interpretation that the words ‘vis abdita quaedam’ must refer most immediately to lines 1226–32. Certainly, vis recalls the phrase ‘vis violenti… venti’ (1226), the violent force of the wind which destroys a naval effort, by sweeping a general, his fleet, his legions and his elephants into the sea.
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References
1 Cited from Bailey, C., Lucreti De Rerum Natura Libri Sex2 (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar
2 See Giussani, C., T. Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex (Torino, 1929), v.146.Google Scholar
3 Munro, , T. Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex (Cambridge, 1893), p. 344Google Scholar.
4 Richard, Minadeo, The Lyre of Science. Formal Meaning in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (Detroit, 1969), p. 96Google Scholar. Also see Giussani, op. cit., v.146; Bailey, C., T. Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex (Oxford, 1947), i.1519Google Scholar; Ernout, A. and Robin, L., Lucrèce De Rerum Natura (Paris, 1962), iii.170Google Scholar.
5 The historical reference here seems to be the invasion of Pyrrhus. Cf. DRN 5.1302, 1339; Pliny, HN 8.16.
6 Giancotti, F., ‘Postilla metodologica sull'esegesi de Lucrezio’, in C. J. Classen, Probleme der Lukrez Forschung (Hildesheim, 1986), p. 426Google Scholar; Bollack, M., La Raison de Lucrèce (Paris, 1978), p. 214Google Scholar; Schrijvers, P. H., Horror ac Divina Voluptas. Etudes sur la poétique et la poésie de Lucrèce (Amsterdam, 1970), p. 170Google Scholar; Costa, C. D. N., Lucretius De Rerum Natura V (Oxford, 1984), p. 138Google Scholar.
7 This interpretation was suggested to me by an anonymous referee of CQ. Incidentally, Diskin, Clay, Lucretius and Epicurus (Ithaca, 1983), p. 219Google Scholar advocates another ambiguous reading for lines 1233–5. He argues that the phrase ‘vis abdita quaedam’ functions in one of two ways depending on the type of audience. The scientific reader will know this vis cannot refer to the power of the gods and understand it as superstition, while the layperson will take vis to be a reference to the gods' power and thereby reveal his ignorance.
8 See James, Jope, ‘The Didactic Unity and Emotional Import of Book 6 of De rerum natura’, Phoenix 43 (1989), 16–34, especially pp. 22–3.Google Scholar
9 opterit is the reading of O, which was deduced from Q's unmetrical operit. obterit is to be found in O corr. ELF.
10 An Ibycus search (kindly done by Professor David Furley) reveals that Lucretius frequently handled the scansion of infinitives by placing them before ‘et’. There are seventy-five other instances of the pattern -ere et in De Rerum Natura, including one of ‘-erere et’ (‘gerere et’, 6.539).