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LUCRETIUS 6.391: AN EMENDATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2023

Boris Kayachev*
Affiliation:
Wolfson College, Oxford
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Abstract

This article argues that at Lucr. 6.391 (icti flammas ut fulguris halent) fulguris is a corruption, and proposes to read sulpuris instead. While the case against fulguris may in itself not be incontrovertible, the advantages of sulpuris include the acquisition of a new Homeric intertext in Il. 8.135 δεινὴ δὲ φλὸξ ὦρτο θεείου καιομένοιο.

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Lucretius argues that thunder and lightning have natural causes, for if they are produced by the gods –

cur quibus incautum scelus auersabile cumquest
non faciunt icti flammas ut fulguris halent
pectore perfixo, documen mortalibus acre?       (6.390–2)

The passage is seemingly sound and appears not to have attracted critical attention.Footnote 1 I propose to argue that fulguris is a corruption, but I admit from the outset that the case against the transmitted reading may, per se, be inconclusive.

To begin with, what exactly does halent mean? Bailey glosses it with ‘reek of’, comparing 6.221 notaeque [sc. fulminis] grauis halantes sulpuris auras (a passage to which we shall return), but there halantes rather means ‘exhaling, emitting’.Footnote 2 As OLD s.v. halo makes clear, this is the normal sense of halare with the accusative, whereas the meaning ‘to smell of’ is expressed by halare with the ablative. It seems clear that flammashalent must mean ‘exhale flames’, as can additionally be confirmed by Enn. trag. 169 Jocelyn quadrupedantes flammam halitantes (of the Sun's fire-breathing horses) or Ov. Met. 15.343 spiramenta locis flammam exhalantia multis (of volcanoes as the Earth's breathing holes), as well as by Virgil's imitation of the Lucretian passage, Aen. 1.44 illum exspirantem transfixo pectore flammas (of Locrian Ajax, struck by Athena's thunderbolt).Footnote 3 Apart from the linguistic considerations, this construal also seems superior in terms of content: seeing someone set aflame by a lightning bolt is much more of a documen than deducing that the person was killed by lightning from the smell of the corpse. The obvious problem is that flammas … fulguris is what a person struck by lightning receives rather than emits, though it can perhaps be got around by taking the phrase to mean something like ‘flames produced by lightning’ or ‘flames of the nature of lightning’.Footnote 4 This no doubt was the reasoning behind Rouse's translation: ‘breathe out sulphurous flames’.Footnote 5

This I suggest is indeed the sense we need, but it should be obtained not by forcing the transmitted text but by substituting sulpuris for fulguris. Although the shortcomings of fulguris may not be unsurmountable, the advantages of sulpuris seem overwhelming. First of all, it must be noted that the corruption is extremely easy in minuscule script (ſulp- → fulg-) and would further be facilitated by contextual pressure.Footnote 6 More to the point, writing sulpuris will produce unambiguous Latin, while also harmonizing the two Lucretian passages describing the effect of lightning: the one speaking about places struck by lightning ‘exhaling sulphurous fumes’, the other about people struck by lightning ‘exhaling sulphurous flames’.Footnote 7 In and of itself, this harmonization may not be a strong argument for making the change, but it opens up attractive interpretative possibilities.

One might think that the idea of lightning smelling of sulphur was a commonplace in antiquity, but in fact before Lucretius it is only explicitly attested in Homer.Footnote 8 The Odyssey features two identical contexts referring to a ship being struck by a thunderbolt, which as a result ἐν δὲ θεείου πλῆτο (12.417 = 14.307); these appear irrelevant for our present concerns. The other two passages, from the Iliad, have greater potential. One belongs to a simile comparing Hector felled by Ajax to an oak struck by a thunderbolt, which produces a strong smell of sulphur (14.415–16 δεινὴ δὲ θεείου γίγνεται ὀδμὴ | ἐξ αὐτῆς). Given the lack of other pre-Lucretian references to the phenomenon, it is difficult not to connect 6.221 notaeque grauis halantes sulpuris auras to this Homeric passage (grauis ~ δεινή, sulpuris ~ θεείου, auras ~ ὀδμή).Footnote 9 Lucretius is there arguing that the sulphurous smell which lightning leaves betrays its fiery nature, and it must have pleased him to be able to derive this physical argument from Homer. The fourth, and last, Homeric passage associating lightning with sulphur is potentially the richest intertext. In Iliad 8 Diomedes and Nestor are about to attack Hector, but are stopped by a thunderbolt striking right in front of them and producing an explosion of sulphurous flames (8.135 δεινὴ δὲ φλὸξ ὦρτο θεείου καιομένοιο); Nestor interprets this as a warning from Zeus (which in fact it is), and the two heroes halt their attack. First of all, if we accept my proposal to read sulpuris at 6.391, here we obtain another exact point of contact between Lucretius and Homer: not only on the lexical level (flammassulpuris ~ φλὸξ … θεείου), but also in that the reference is in both cases not to the flame of a lightning bolt as such but to that produced by its strike. While this alone makes sulpuris an attractive correction (we thus have two interrelated Lucretian passages modelled on two interrelated Homeric passages), the context in Iliad 8 also proves a fitting target of polemic allusion. On the one hand, Diomedes and Nestor are exactly the kind of superstitious cowards Lucretius is admonishing his readers not to be. On the other, the fact that the thunderbolt actually misses Diomedes—who, we may remember, wounded Aphrodite and Ares on the previous day—cannot but prove that it was not sent by Zeus: with characteristic irony, Lucretius thus obtains an argument against Homer from Homer himself.Footnote 10 Virgil, in turn, may be seen to be disputing him when he refers at Aen. 1.44 to Locrian Ajax as being struck by Athena's thunderbolt, in a clear imitation of the Lucretian passage (cf. above).Footnote 11

Textual critics usually ask, before accepting a conjecture, whether we can be certain that the transmitted reading is corrupt; it may be more honest, especially in the case of texts whose tradition is demonstrably unreliable, to ask, before accepting a transmitted reading, whether we can be certain that it is intact. In the case of Lucr. 6.391 fulguris, I admit that the answer to the former question may not be positive; at the same time, especially if we consider the alternative sulpuris, I cannot see how the answer to the latter question can be positive either.

References

1 Suffice it to note that both Deufert's apparatus criticus and his commentary have nothing to say on this passage (Deufert, M., Titus Lucretius Carus: De rerum natura libri VI [Berlin, 2019], 260Google Scholar; Deufert, M., Kritischer Kommentar zu Lukrezens ‘De rerum natura’ [Berlin, 2018], 396–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

2 Bailey, C., Titi Lucreti Cari De rerum natura libri sex, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1947), 3.1613Google Scholar.

3 Taylor, B., ‘Rationalism and the theatre in Lucretius’, CQ 66 (2016), 140–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 144–5 plausibly suggests that Lucretius alludes here to a fragment of Accius’ Clytemestra, likewise referring to Locrian Ajax (trag. 35 pectore fulmen inchoatum flammam ostentabat Iouis), but its exact text and sense are uncertain, so as to be of little help in construing the Lucretian line.

4 One may, though, have some misgivings about the plausibility of the expression as such: fulgur properly means ‘flash’, and normally implies the visual aspect of a thunderbolt rather than, so to speak, its essence, so that ‘flames of a flash’ would be a rather odd way of putting it (Lucretius can speak, conversely, about 1.725 flammai fulgura and 6.182 fulgura flammae: ‘flashes of flame’, both a periphrasis for lightning); flammae fulminis is the expression we might rather expect (cf. e.g. Verg. Aen. 10.177 fulminis ignes, and note Serv. on Aen. 1.44, quoted above: non animam dicit flammas, sed cum anima fulminis flammas uomentem).

5 Rouse, W.H.D., Smith, M.F., Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 523Google Scholar. Smith, M.F., Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, rev. ed. (Indianapolis, 2001), 188Google Scholar translates literally: ‘exhale the lightning's flames’.

6 The archetype of Lucretius as well as its exemplar were in all likelihood written in minuscule; see e.g. Butterfield, D., The Early Textual History of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (Cambridge, 2013), 268–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, citing as evidence, among other things, the confusion of s and f (at 269 n. 3); he concludes that the archetype ‘was a manifestly corrupt codex that still requires a good dose of conjecture’ (272). The postulated corruption can be paralleled e.g. at Claud. Rapt. Pros. 3.399 stridunt admisso sulpure rami, where some manuscripts read fulgure.

7 Lucretius refers to sulphur two more times, both later on in the same book (6.747 and 806), though in rather different contexts; note, however, that the former (acri sulpure) uses of sulphur the same adjective that occurs in 6.392 documen mortalibus acre, where it may hint at the smell of sulphur (I owe this observation to the anonymous reviewer).

8 For a recent overview of the evidence, see Cowan, R., ‘The smell of Sophokles’ Salmoneus: technology, scatology, metatheatre’, Ramus 43 (2014), 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 3–7, focussing on Soph. fr. 538 Radt, which alludes to but does not actually name sulphur; cf. also E.S. McCartney, ‘Classical weather lore of thunder and lightning’, CW 25 (1932), 183–92, 200–8, 212–16, at 185–6.

9 Lucretius’ pervasive and sophisticated engagement with Homer is well known, if still understudied; for some specific examples, see e.g. Aicher, P.J., ‘Lucretian revisions of Homer’, CJ 87 (1992), 139–58Google Scholar; cf. more recently e.g. Kyllo, E.A., ‘Two allusions to the songs of Demodocus in LucretiusDe rerum natura’, CB 73 (1997), 31–7Google Scholar; L. Kronenberg, ‘The light side of the moon: a Lucretian acrostic (luce, 5.712–15) and its relationship to acrostics in Homer (leukē, Il. 24.1–5) and Aratus (leptē, Phaen. 783–87)’, CPh 114 (2019), 278–92; for Lucretius’ indebtedness to (Greek) epic more generally, see e.g. West, D., ‘Lucretius and epic’, in D. West, The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius (Edinburgh, 1969), 2334Google Scholar and Kenney, E.J., ‘Doctus Lucretius’, Mnemosyne 23 (1970), 366–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar, both reprinted in M.R. Gale (ed.), Lucretius (Oxford, 2007), 289–99 and 300–27.

10 On Lucretius’ practice of turning against his opponents their own ipsissima verba, cf. Lacy, P.H. De, ‘Lucretius and Plato’, in Συζήτησις: Studi sull'epicureismo greco e romano offerti a Marcello Gigante (Naples, 1983), 291‒307Google Scholar, at 291, observing that Lucretius ‘not only rejected Platonism but even derived anti-Platonic arguments from the Dialogues, thus turning Plato against himself’.

11 The matters are further complicated by Accius’ fragment that already referred to Ajax’ death by a thunderbolt, to which Lucretius appears to be alluding (see n. 3 above); Lucretius may be seen to be correcting Accius, since in the Homeric account Ajax drowns (Od. 4.510)—or perhaps simply silencing him (after all, even in Homer Ajax’ death is brought about by Athena's and Poseidon's actions)?