Chapter 7 - Lucretius: Dream Images and Beyond the Infinite

Summary

Like Aristotle, the Roman epic poet Lucretius was mistakenly credited with knowledge, or even use, of the camera obscura. Few classical scholars today are aware of this strange but fascinating facet in Lucretius’ intellectual afterlife. The error arose from the misunderstanding of a passage in On the Nature of Things, in which Lucretius referred to the changes and movements of bodies in dreams. Nineteenth-century scientists compared Lucretius’ lines to stroboscopic light effects. Although Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau, inventor of the phenakistiscope, set the record straight, the misunderstanding continued into the age of cinema. The first part of this chapter traces the error through the historiography of the cinema with all its amusing misconceptions, which include an anecdote about Lucretius himself. The chapter’s second part examines the striking resemblances to Lucretius’ epic in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.