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EMBRYOLOGY, FEMALE SEMINA AND MALE VINCIBILITY IN LUCRETIUS, DE RERVM NATVRA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2019

Michael Pope
Michael Pope*
Affiliation:
Brigham Young University
*
mike_pope@byu.edu
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Extract

In a poem setting forth the way things are in nature, it is fitting for Lucretius to address, among many other phenomena, human conception and embryonic determination. With an eye toward ethics, Lucretius demonstrates how sexual reproduction at the seminal level can be explained by Epicurean atomism. In this paper, I am concerned with the biological ‘how’ of conception as explained in De Rerum Natura (= DRN) but also with the ethical ‘therefore’ for Lucretius’ readership and (over)estimations of male autonomy. For modern audiences with a basic grasp of procreation that includes sperm supplied by a male and egg supplied by a female, encountering Lucretius’ verses on women contributing semen (semina) to the process of conception can be surprising (4.1209–62). The idea of female semen may give us pause as we calibrate it with our understanding of eggs and ovulation, but Lucretius, in his time, was not advancing some novel theory. Wading into established debates on male-only or joint male-female semen production and gendered insemination (that is, who produces semen and whose semen is active at conception), Lucretius sides with those promulgating mutuality for both questions (for example Democritus [DK 24 A13]) and rejects Aristotle's representative exclusivist claim of male activity vs female passivity (τὸ ἄρρεν ἐστὶν ὡς κινοῦν καὶ ποιοῦν, τὸ δὲ θῆλυ ὡς παθητικόν, Gen. an. 729a28–30; cf. 726a30–6). That is to say, a sexually mature female, like her male counterpart, emits semen that has determining potency in the formation of a human embryo (Lucr. 4.1209–62). Although the discharge and activity of female semen is the focus of this paper, my investigation is not a Quellenforschung or historical survey of Greco-Roman ideas about women's contributions to insemination and fertility, since others have treated these matters extensively. I concentrate rather on how Lucretius employs the concept of female semen in terms of his poetics in Book 4 and what I see as an ethical argument against the domineering nature of Roman masculinity. The problem of female semen, from the point of view of Lucretius’ Roman male audience, is that it is potentially costly to men because it rivals and threatens their status from the physiological to the discursive level. Iain Lonie broaches the same issue from Greek perspectives.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , May 2019 , pp. 229 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2019 

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References

1 I borrow the phrase ‘the way things are’ from the title of Humphries, R., Lucretius: The Way Things Are: The De Rerum Natura of Titus Lucretius Carus (Bloomington, 1968)Google Scholar.

2 For a brief survey of these theories and the questions driving them, see Blayney, J., ‘Theories of conception in the ancient Roman world’, in Rawson, B. (ed.), The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives (London, 1986), 230–6Google Scholar.

3 For primary sources and discussion of male vs male and female semen production, see Cilliers, L., ‘Vindicianus’ Gynaecia and theories on generation and embryology from the Babylonians up to Graeco-Roman times’, in Horstmanshoff, H.F.J. and Stol, M. (edd.), Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman Medicine (Leiden, 2004), 344–67, at 347–9Google Scholar.

4 Betensky, A., ‘Lucretius and love’, CW 73 (1980), 291–9Google Scholar, at 294 paraphrases the theory with modern verve: ‘genetic seeds … are produced, quite democratically, by both partners’. Snyder, J.M., ‘Lucretius and the status of women’, CB 53 (1976), 17–20, at 18Google Scholar briefly (one paragraph) anticipates my investigation of female semen production in Lucretius, but comes to a somewhat different conclusion about Lucretius’ presentation of men and women (i.e. that Lucretius is invested in maintaining the superiority of men vis-à-vis women).

5 Bailey, C., Lucretius: De Rerum Natura: Edited with Prolegomena, Critical Apparatus, Translation and Commentary (Oxford, 1947 3), 3.1313–19Google Scholar; Lonie, I.M., The Hippocratic Treatises, ‘On Generation’, ‘On the Nature of the Child’, ‘Diseases IV’ (Berlin, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cilliers (n. 3); Brown, R.D., Lucretius on Love and Sex: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura IV, 1030–1287 with Prolegomena, Text, and Translation (Leiden, 1987), 320–60Google Scholar.

6 The literature on the aggressive and exploitative character of Roman male sexuality is vast, but the brief, graphic and violent formulation of Veyne, P., ‘L'homosexualité à Rome’, Communications 35 (1982), 26–33, at 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar tersely gets to the heart of the issue: ‘L'important est d’être le sabreur: peu importe le sexe de la victime.’ So also Oliensis, E., ‘The erotics of amicitia: readings in Tibullus, Propertius, and Horace’, in Hallett, J.P. and Skinner, M.B. (edd.), Roman Sexualities (Princeton, 1997), 151–71, at 154Google Scholar: ‘Penetration is the prerogative of free men, penetrability the characteristic condition of slaves and women; sexual intercourse is an enactment and reflection of social hierarchy, and, conversely, social subordination always implies the possibility of sexual submission.’

7 For Lucretius’ audience as implicitly male, see Nugent, S.G., ‘Mater matters: the female in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura’, ColbyQ 30 (1994), 179–205, at 180–2Google Scholar.

8 Roman masculinity, inseparable from status, was constantly under threat of being rendered effeminate or soft because of external impingements, ranging from the erotic to the gustatory. The literary locus classicus is Sall. Cat. 11.1–12.1. For acquisition, maintenance, loss and insecurity of Roman male status, see Barton, C., Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley, 2001), 199–291Google Scholar.

9 Lonie (n. 5), 119.

10 Active and empowered women were likewise destabilizing forces. See Barton, C., The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton, 1993), 73Google Scholar.

11 While Lucretius is commonly acknowledged for promulgating a theory of female seed, the way by which he overlays the theory with ethical and societal consequences deserves more attention. See, for example, the cursory treatment of Lucretius in Brachet, J., Chemical Embryology (New York, 1968), 77–8Google Scholar. For Roman men and vulnerability in terms of power, status and bodily integrity, see Walters, J., ‘Invading the Roman body: manliness and impenetrability in Roman thought’, in Hallett, J.P. and Skinner, M.B. (edd.), Roman Sexualities (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar and Fredrick, D., ‘Mapping penetrability in Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome’, in Fredrick, D. (ed.), The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power, and the Body (Baltimore, 2002), 236–64Google Scholar.

12 Miller, W.I., The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, 1997), 103Google Scholar.

13 Although we approach from different trajectories the issue of Lucretius’ confrontation with Roman masculinity, I am in full agreement with the thesis of Gordon, P., ‘Some unseen monster: rereading Lucretius on sex’, in Fredrick, D. (ed.), The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power, and the Body (Baltimore, 2002), 86–109, at 87Google Scholar, that Lucretius vigorously promulgates a new vision of effeminized masculinity.

14 Referring to the latter portion of Book 4, Gordon (n. 13), 93 notes that ‘what is most salient in the Lucretian sex scene is the language of violence, domination, and suffering’. Through a different line of inquiry, Betensky (n. 4) treats Lucretius’ confrontation with Roman masculinity and sexuality. Nugent (n. 7), 179–205 argues that Lucretius’ poem is a sustained act of defining what it is to be a proper Epicurean male at the cost of objectifying the female body. I agree with Nugent that Lucretius does in fact objectify the female body, but I add that he does the same with the male body and all of its various orifices. Moreover, as will become clear later in this paper, Lucretius often turns the table and subjects male bodies to female inspection, dominance and penetration. This I see as part of Lucretius’ project of demonstrating mutuality between the sexes. This is not some sort of ancient feminist criticism by any measurement. It is rather an unbiased devaluation of human self-appreciation in the face of the universe's laws of (Epicurean) physics. Fitzgerald, W., ‘Lucretius’ cure for love in the “De Rerum Natura”’, CW 78 (1984), 73–86, at 77–8Google Scholar puts it succinctly: the problem is ‘the inability to see oneself as part of the atomic universe’.

15 In comments on this phrase, Schrijvers, P.H., ‘Seeing the invisible: a study of Lucretius’ use of analogy in the De rerum natura’, in Gale, M. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Lucretius (Oxford, 2007), 255–88, at 260Google Scholar understands, as do I, Lucretius to be referring here to ‘the union of male and female seed’ and ‘conception’. Cf. Wakefield, G., T. Lucretii Cari De rerum natura libri sex (London, 1813 3), 3.1462–3Google Scholar. I am in agreement with Wakefield that the language in the following lines refers both to the intermingling of the respective semen and to the sexual congress of the parents. But I do not find cause to agree with Wakefield that the image painted in lines 1209–10 suggests some sort of leakage of male semen from female genitalia to account for female semen prevailing over male semen (‘nam saepe semen uirile effluit ex locis muliebribus’). For coitus in DRN ‘as the verbal euphemism par excellence for copulation heterosexual, homosexual or bestial’, see Adams, J.N., The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore, 1982), 178–9Google Scholar.

16 There is confusion in the manuscripts, but most editors, including Bailey (n. 5), 3.1314, emend uirili/uirile in line 1209 to uirilem making the adjective agree with uim in line 1210. My approach to the passage depends upon this emendation.

17 For the Latin text of DRN I use Bailey (n. 5).

18 This and all subsequent translations are my own.

19 The notion of female and male semen battling at the moment of conception goes back to the Presocratics. Censorinus, for example, attributes to Parmenides the theory that the semen of ‘female and male fight among themselves’ in determining the sex of the offspring (at inter se certare feminae et maris, DN 6.5 = DK 28 A54); for fighting (pugnent) at the mixing of female and male seed (permixto semine), cf. DK 28 B18. Although he is not addressing war violence specifically, the observation of Walters (n. 11), 39 underscores the artificiality of my categorizing: ‘Sexual penetration and beating, those two forms of corporeal assault, are in Roman terms structurally equivalent.’

20 For miscere and compounds as metonymy for sexual intercourse, see Adams (n. 15), 180–1.

21 The asyndeton of the two verses reges expugnant, capiuntur, proelia miscent | tollunt clamorem, quasi si iugulentur ibidem (Lucr. 4.1013–14) perhaps reflects the disturbing rapidity with which scenes and events progress and shift in dreams, often in defiance of logical order (i.e. expugnant preceding proelia miscent, capiuntur separated from iugulentur). The lines are probably intentionally harrowing.

22 Brown (n. 5), 328.

23 Lucretius characterizes atomic combination (misceri, conciliis) as battle (aeterno certamine proelia pugnas, 2.117–20).

24 C. Giussani, T. Lucreti Cari De rerum natura libri sex: revisione del testo, commento e studi introduttivi (Turin, 1896–84), 3.274 notes the implied sexual violence of uirilem uim and the surprising gender table-turning: ‘Il superare della uis femminile pare a Lucrezio un atto di sorpresa, come una usurpazione sulla naturale prepotenza maschile.’

25 As does Brown (n. 5), 325.

26 OLD 2 s.v. uis, 24a–c.

27 For the ancient theory of seminal pangenesis (i.e. semen produced throughout the body rather than the genitals alone), see Lonie (n. 5), 115–19.

28 Brown (n. 5), 187: ‘Note Lucretius’ choice of the neutral term homo. Doubtless he is thinking mainly of the influence of women upon men, but the terminology leaves room for that of boys upon men (cf. 1053) and men upon women (cf. 1192 ff.).’

29 Brown (n. 5), 324–5 comes close to seeing the uis here in terms of sexual violence: ‘Vim: a vague concept here, amounting in atomistic terms to the ability of one seed to impose its own atomic structures and motions on the other.’

30 See Lonie (n. 5), 124–32 on ancient theories of sex and trait determination.

31 For Lucretius and mutuality between the sexes, see Nussbaum, M., ‘Beyond obsession and disgust: Lucretius’ genealogy of love’, Apeiron 22 (1989), 1–59, especially 24–5, 45–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 For Venus as metonymy for intercourse, see Skinner, M.B., Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (Malden, MA and Oxford, 2014 2), 297Google Scholar.

33 See Brown (n. 5), 328.

34 Like the author of the Hippocratic treatise On Generation, Lucretius may have also understood that the female's pleasure anticipated the emission of semen and that mutual pleasure was inseparable from semen release (4.1–2). Lonie (n. 5), 120 notes that the author of On Generation ‘both equates pleasure with the production of semen, and the highest point of that pleasure with its discharge: it is thus a confirmation of the author's general argument in the chapter, namely that the woman's experience of pleasure is evidence that she produces semen’.

35 Unlike in the dominant culture, for Lucretius softening was a natural and beneficial consequence that came from observing the natural world. Note in 5.1102–4 how primitive humans learn to soften (mollire) and cook their food by observing the effects of the sun on plant life (fire, along with offspring, also helps to soften the primitive couple in 5.1013–14). For the Roman disgust with and sexual attraction to softness as feminine, see Richlin, A., ‘Not before homosexuality: the materiality of the cinaedus and the Roman law against love between men’, JHSex 3 (1993), 523–73, especially 538Google Scholar. For softness as moral vice, see e.g. Cic. Tusc. 2.27; Cat. 25.1, 10 and Gordon, P., The Invention and Gendering of Epicurus (Ann Arbor, 2012), 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For softening and loss of hardness as results of sexual congress and child-bearing/rearing, see Nussbaum, M.C., ‘By words not arms: Lucretius on gentleness in an unsafe world’, Apeiron 23 (1990), 41–90, at 72–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nugent (n. 7), 182 unfairly reads Lucretius as assigning ejaculation to males only as well as the pleasure of sex and ejaculation to males alone. Just the opposite, Lucretius makes the emission of female semen (4.1210) consequent to female pleasure (4.1209). As noted, Lonie (n. 5), 120 shows that, for those promulgating the theory of female semen contribution, ‘the woman's experience of pleasure is evidence that she produces semen’.

36 Nussbaum, M.C., The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, 1994), 183Google Scholar notes that this ‘new understanding of intercourse, one that makes its aim the giving and receiving of pleasure on both sides’, can only come about when the woman is no longer viewed by the man as an object of obsessed desire and ‘the woman is present to him as a whole human being, with a mind and body of her own’.

37 We have, perhaps, some intimations that Lucretius entertains notions of women releasing semen outwardly. In the opening lines on semen production and nocturnal emissions, we find no specifically gendered language delimiting these bodily functions to males (4.1030–48). More language possibly suggesting female ejaculation occurs several lines later. When describing the moment of sexual climax shared by a man and a woman, Lucretius states that ‘the collected semen burst from their genitals’ (se erupit neruis conlecta cupido, 4.1115) (for cupido as semen, see A. Schiesaro, ‘A note on Lucretius 4.1046’, CQ 39 [1989], 555–7, at 557). The term nerui commonly means male genitals and likely is limited to male genitalia in this passage as it would be at 1043 (see Adams [n. 15], 25, 38, 224). That Lucretius has male ejaculation in mind is probably confirmed by the seed-sowing-female-fields figure that he employs in 4.1107 (muliebria conserat arua). However, we must note that it is Venus (Venus? Metonym for penis?) who does the sowing in the figure. This rather confuses the metaphor. It is also notable that, in the instance of nerui at 1043, Lucretius employs the word in conjunction with loca (in loca conueniens neruorum certa), a term which can be a general euphemism for external female genitalia or womb (see Adams [n. 15], 94–5). Moreover, the plural subjects of the verbs in 4.1105–20 are indeterminate and might suggest that both man and woman are the joint subjects of them all and thus also suggesting female ejaculation at 4.1115. Given what we have already seen Lucretius do with agentive female semen, I would not be alarmed if he also depicted women having nerui. At any rate, I think that Lucretius probably is referring to male ejaculation throughout 4.1030–48 and 4.1105–20, but the passages are not unambiguous.

38 Cf. cruentent, ‘bloody’, to describe the semen staining during nocturnal emissions in 4.1036. Bartsch, S., The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago, 2006), 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar notes that cruentent ‘evokes the topos of the wound of love [at 4.1048–9], and it reminds us that ocular penetration is, after all, a form of violation of the integrity of bodily boundaries’. Fitzgerald (n. 14), 73–86, at 76 with n. 11 offers parallels for the love-as-violence/love-as-war topos in Roman comedy. See also Fantham, E., Comparative Studies in Republican Latin Imagery (Toronto, 1972), 26–33, 85–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Brown (n. 5), 64. For this violence, see Gordon (n. 13), 93.

40 For the umor (semen) and amor (love) pun—that love, at base, is just semen produced, roused and released—see Brown (n. 5), 64 and Snyder, J.M., Puns and Poetry in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (Amsterdam, 1980), 94–5Google Scholar. Cf. Plaut. Mil. 640–1.

41 Cf. cui Veneris membris uis omnibus exoriatur (Lucr. 4.1172): ‘Let the force of Venus spring forth from all her limbs.’ Although simulacra are not named in this verse, we should understand the uis here as both calling back to the earlier spear-metaphor signifying the simulacra and as the actual atoms sheering off the woman.

42 Though he employs it to summarize the chain reaction of seeing and ejaculation, Brown's ([n. 5], 63) admirable locution ‘a conspiracy of sight and semen’ is also applicable to the mechanics of atomic motion and ejaculation.

43 See discussion on eidōla and Epicurean material sight-theory in Asmis, E., Epicurus’ Scientific Method (Ithaca, 1984), 106–7Google Scholar.

44 On the other hand, in his extended discussion on sight in Book 4, Lucretius uses simulacra far more frequently.

45 Semen, sight and atoms, as Brown (n. 5), 69 notes; he observes further that there is a ‘strong analogy’ ‘between the genital semina and the invisible semina rerum (1.59, etc.), whose combinations and dissolutions underlie the flux of all nature’. Indeed, when he speaks of the ‘many primary particles mixed in many ways’ (multa modis primordia multis | mixta, 4.1220–1), from which Venus brings forth various forms (inde Venus uaria producit sorte figuras, 1223), each determined by ‘a definite seed’ (<de> semine certo, 1225), the theme of animal procreation momentarily fuses with that of atomic generation and becomes its microcosm.’

46 Cf. the sun sowing the earth with light (lumine conserit arua, 2.211).

47 See Fitzgerald (n. 14), 79–80 for the iac– lexeme here. Fitzgerald perhaps adumbrates my point about female ejaculation with this line: ‘The ambiguous word tossed off by his mistress’ (my emphasis).

48 For hearing, see Koenen, M.H., ‘Lucretius’ explanation of hearing in “De rerum natura” IV 524–562’, Mnemosyne 52 (1999), 434–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Koenen, M.H., ‘Lucretius’ olfactory theory in “De rerum natura” IV’, in Algra, K.A., Koenen, M.H. and Schrijvers, P.H. (edd.), Lucretius and his Intellectual Background (Amsterdam, 1997), 163–77Google Scholar. For perception and pain in DRN, see Graver, M., ‘The eye of the beholder: perceptual relativity in Lucretius’, Apeiron 23 (1990), 91–116, at 98–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Epicurus, see Lee, E.N., ‘The sense of an object: Epicurus on seeing and hearing’, in Machamer, P.K. and Turnbull, R.G. (edd.), Studies in Perception: Interrelations in the History of Philosophy and Science (Columbus, 1978), 27–59Google Scholar.

49 For review of ancient theories on sight, intromissive and extramissive being the basic categories, see van Hoorn, W., As Images Unwind: Ancient and Modern Theories of Visual Perception (Amsterdam, 1972), 42–71Google Scholar; Park, D., The Fire within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light (Princeton, 1997), 34–43Google Scholar; and Bartsch (n. 38), 57–67.

50 For effeminizing gaze, see Bartsch (n. 38), 160–3. Bartman, E., ‘Eros's flame: images of sexy boys in Roman ideal sculpture’, in Gazda, E.K. (ed.), The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity (Ann Arbor, 2002), 270Google Scholar reminds us that female gaze also obtained in the Late Republic and Early Empire. Unless close attention is paid to how Lucretius uses the iac– lexeme as technical language for particle motion, translation of 4.1139 can obscure the sudden rupture in Lucretius’ terminology. For example, in the otherwise instructive reading of 4.1139–40 in Lehoux, D., ‘Seeing and unseeing, seen and unseen’, in Lehoux, D., Morrison, A.D. and Sharrock, A. (edd.), Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science (Oxford, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, the translation ‘she locks eyes’ for iactare oculos does not fully convey the atomic implications of iactare.

51 For the martial sense of stimulus, see OLD 2 s.v. 1c.

52 Cf. Mars deuictus as Venus masters him, his eyes (auidos uisus) taking her in and she pouring liquid-like words (suauis … loquellas | funde) onto, or more true to the physics, into him at 1.34–40.

53 Brown (n. 5), 379–80 is hesitant to take pertundere here in a sexual sense. For contemporary erotic use, see Catull. 32.11. For the related noun pertunsorium as penis, see Adams (n. 15), 25.

54 Limiting her comment to guttae and pertundere, Gordon (n. 13), 105 similarly notes that Lucretius employs these terms in an ‘obvious reversal of sexual imagery’.

55 For the argument that Lucretius is suggesting that amor is etymologically derived from umor—again, a devastating mechanization of romanticized love—see Friedländer, P., ‘Pattern of sound and atomistic theory in Lucretius’, AJPh 62 (1941), 16–34, at 17–18Google Scholar.

56 Brown (n. 5), 69 n. 37, 379. Betensky (n. 4), 294 notes neither the violence nor the sexual undertones of the image.

57 Notably, in 1.922–7 Lucretius makes himself the object of feminine penetration from the Muses (percussit, incusit) and insemination (incussit suauem me in pectus amorem with amor = humor as discussed above) with language similar to the closing lines of Book 4. Clayton, B., ‘Lucretius’ erotic mother: maternity as a poetic construct in De Rerum Natura’, Helios 26 (1999), 69–84Google Scholar, at 74 sees Venus in 1.922–7 but does not comment on the erotics of inspiration violently coming from Venus and fluidly entering the poet.

58 Campbell, G., Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura Book Five, Lines 772–1104 (Oxford, 2003), 69Google Scholar notes the traditional connection between Aphrodite/Venus and birds as well as their lead-off appearance here in the account of creation and in the proem's hymn to Venus. I note further that the birds’ occurrence in those opening lines is occasioned by Venus’ propagative penetration or even rape of them (uolucres … | … perculsae corda tua ui, 1.13–14).

59 No clear source has been detectible for Lucretius’ earth womb theory, though Campbell (n. 58), 75–7 makes a tentative argument based on two inconclusive evidentiary points that such a theory may have been traditional in Epicureanism.

60 The verbal game with the creata sunt is also a careful one since, even while playing with the figure of a personified earth, Lucretius reminds us that the genesis of humans was not brought about under some force's agency.

61 However, in Books 1 and 2 there is a marriage/sexual congress image of Father Aether who casts down rains into the lap (gremium) of Mother Earth (1.250–1, 2.991–1006). But in both passages this image is used not to advance a theory of original conception and parturition of humans as the image of Mother Earth is in Book 5, but as an exemplum to prove the law of conservation of matter throughout the universe, a fundamental thesis in Lucretius’ materialist physics (‘nature dissolves everything back into its atoms and does not extinguish things to nothing’, quidque in sua corpora rursum | dissoluat natura neque ad nilum interemat res, 1.215–16). That is to say, atomic rains fall from the heavens not to disappear upon the earth but to become leaves, grass, flowers, fruit, etc. Fowler, D., ‘The feminine principal: gender in the De Rerum Natura’, in Giannantoni, G. and Gigante, M. (edd.), Epicureismo greco e romano (Atti del Congresso Internazionale, Napoli, 19–26 Maggio 1993) (Naples, 1996), 813–22, at 816–19Google Scholar does not register the rhetorical purpose of the Father Aether/Mother Earth imagery and instead reads it straightforwardly as Lucretius propounding traditional sex roles in human procreation even as he goes on to complicate those roles by noting that ‘the emphasis falls not on the fertilizing power of the male seed as in other accounts, but on the power of Mother Earth and her sister Natura (1.250–64)’, an argument with a trajectory similar to mine.

62 Campbell (n. 58), 74 notes that superabat may also suggest the heat ‘left over’ as ‘a relic of the cosmogony’.

63 For apti = adepti, see Munro, H.A.J., T. Lucreti Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex (Cambridge, 1866 2), 607Google Scholar. ‘Having penetrated’ appropriately renders apti, since it captures both the nature of vegetal root growth into and through soil while picking up the phallic valence of radix.

64 For radix as penis, see Adams (n. 15), 27, 219. Campbell (n. 58), 78–9 does not consider the phallic sense of radix but, based on solid literary exempla, entertains comparison between roots and umbilical cords.

65 Campbell (n. 58) observes that, owing to common ideas about wombs moving about in bodies and seeking sex and moisture, ‘there must be an assumption that the womb has some will or intelligence of its own’.

66 Locus itself can mean female genitalia or wombs and does so in Lucretius’ section on seminal conception, as noted by Campbell (n. 58), 77.

67 Adams (n. 15), 35.

68 Nugent (n. 7), 182–6 reads the Mother-Earth section as an instance of Lucretius objectifying the female body writ large upon the earth as a whole, reducing it to the status of child-bearer and child-nourisher alone. Her interpretation does not take into account the agentive dynamism with which Lucretius imbues the earth quite apart from any male persona. I concede, though, that Lucretius’ empowering of the earth by granting it phalluses, semen and penetrative capability instantiates traditional masculinity even while excluding any male from the process of humanity's generation.

69 For the analogical utility rather than the ontology of the mother-earth imagery in this passage, see Schrijvers (n. 15), 267–71.

70 Campbell (n. 58), 117–18 makes a case that manare is not referring to ejaculation but to the internal movement of semen from limbs to genitals. Pointing to junctures where Lucretius depicts the motion of ejaculation with terms like profundant (4.1035), eicere (4.1046), erupit (4.1115) and iacere (4.1056), Campbell is right that manare is less forceful a verb. However, manare, as Lucretius uses it when referring to bodily fluids like sweat, indicates movement of fluid from inside the body to outside the body (e.g. manat item nobis e toto corpore sudor, 6.944). Closer to ejaculation from engorged genitalia is the external secretion of white milk from swollen udders (candens lacteus umor | uberibus manat distentis, 1.257–8), the rush of milk being a forceful process in earth's primeval lactation (impetus in mammas, 5.815).

71 Snyder (n. 4), 17 writes analogously about Epicureanism in general: ‘According to Epicurean doctrine, human beings were not created by the gods, nor were they created to serve any purpose; rather, along with plants and animals, humans simply evolved naturally out of Mother Earth. According to such reasoning, neither men nor women would have any special role to play in society, except for the male and female roles involved in reproduction. Lacking in the Epicurean system are any theological principles which postulate a divinely ordained low status for women; there is no theory that man was created to serve anyone, nor that woman was created to serve man.’

72 Commager, H.S., ‘Lucretius’ interpretation of the plague’, in Gale, M. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Lucretius (Oxford, 2007), 182–98, at 189–90Google Scholar discusses additional disease language and figures from Book 4 and Book 6 as part of the larger ethical issue, the fear of death. For atomic motion and politics, see the discussion and additional scholarship in Fowler, D., Lucretius on Atomic Motion: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura Book Two, Lines 1–332 (Oxford, 2002), 185Google Scholar. For male passivity as a political expression of Epicurean ethics, an egregious upheaval of dominant cultural norms, see Fowler (n. 61), 820–1.

73 For Lucretius moralizing Thucydides’ account, see Commager (n. 72), 187 and Müller, G., ‘The conclusions of the six books’, in Gale, M. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Lucretius (Oxford, 2007), 234–55, at 253Google Scholar.

74 Gordon (n. 13), 98.

75 For effeminate bodies as consumables, see Adams (n. 15), 140. For women as consumables alongside food, see Beacham, R.C., Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome (New Haven, 1999), 221–2Google Scholar. Note also that Lucretius subjects the Sisyphuses of real life (in uita) to our, the audience's, gaze (nobis ante oculos est, 3.995).

76 Holmes, Like B., ‘The poetic logic of negative exceptionalism in Lucretius, Book Five’, in Lehoux, D., Morrison, A.D. and Sharrock, A. (edd.), Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science (Oxford, 2013), 153–91, at 181Google Scholar, I take the ‘they’ of these lines as fathers. I follow Nussbaum (n. 36), 267 in reading this passage as feminizing these primitive men.

77 It should be noted that Lucretius, just before this section, includes several then vs now, natural vs unnatural comparisons denouncing contemporary Roman, exploitative appetites and violence (5.999–1010). For review of the extensive debates and scholarship on 5.1011–27, see Holmes (n. 76), 170–80.

78 For the moment of father acknowledging paternity of children and subsequent recognition of their own vulnerability, see Holmes (n. 76), 188.

79 Snyder (n. 4); Nugent (n. 7).

80 Nugent (n. 7), 180, 182.

81 Gordon (n. 13), 87.

82 For vulnerability as a central aspect of human life, family and community, see Holmes (n. 76).