The Six Books of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura: Antecedents and Influence

Lucretius’ De rerum natura is one of the relatively few corpora of Greek and Roman literature that is structured in six books. It is distinguished as well by features that encourage readers to understand it both as a sequence of two groups of three books (1+2+3, 4+5+6) and also as three successive pairs of books (1+2, 3+4, 5+6). This paper argues that the former organizations scheme derives from the structure of Ennius’ Annales and the latter from Callimachus’ book of Hynms. It further argues that this Lucretius’ union of these two six-element schemes influenced the structure employed by Ovid in the Fasti. An appendix endorses Zetzel’s idea that the six-book structure of Cicero’s De re publica marks that work as well as a response to Lucretius’ poem. Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Classics This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/114 The Six Books of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: Antecedents and Influence 2 Dictynna, 5 | 2008 Joseph Farrell The Six Books of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: Antecedents and Influence 1 The structure of Lucretius’ De rerum natura is generally considered one of the poem’s betterunderstood aspects. For most critics, poetic structure is the servant of Lucretius’ philosophical argument. In general, that argument proceeds in linear fashion from discussion of the simplest components of the universe to analysis of complex and unusual phenomena. This linear structure involves three distinct stages comprising two books each. Broadly speaking, these stages concern the existence and behavior of atoms and void individually and in combination (books 1–2), the material nature of the soul (books 3–4), and the origin and development of human societies (books 5–6). At the same time, on a slightly higher plane of abstraction, the poem can be understood as falling into halves, the first three books dealing with the basic principles of atomic theory and the latter three with the ethical implications of the theory. These two overlapping arrangements (2+2+2 and 3+3) both support the overall argument of the poem by stressing its clarity and orderly progression, and by giving discursive form to the interrelationship between its several parts. 2 But however well the structure of DRN serves Lucretius’ argument, it was not dictated by that argument itself. From a purely expository point of view, other arrangements could have served just as well. Nor was a six-book structure recommended by Lucretius’ philosophical sources. Indeed, compositions in prose or poetry comprising six distinct “movements” are rather unusual in classical literature. Among such works, the combination of binary (3+3) and ternary (2+2+2) structures within existing six-element designs is rarer still. This means that specific structural models or even antecedents for the Lucretius’ poem are hard to find, as are later compositions modeled in turn on DRN. 3 With all of this in mind, I attempt in this paper to account for the distinctive structure of Lucretius’ poem by looking for similar structures in the work of his predecessors and successors. My concern is with the significance of the poem’s six-book structure when we view it in terms of literary history. Do Lucretius’ six books look back to any specific model (or models), placing the poem within an identifiable literary tradition, and do they establish a pattern for later poets to follow? The answer, I think, is that Lucretius’ poem stands at the center of a quite interesting, if select tradition of Greco-Roman poetry. This tradition begins with two poets, Callimachus and Ennius, who I believe supplied Lucretius with the characteristic elements of his six-book design. It continues with Ovid, who clearly acknowledges, through its structure of the Fasti and through other allusive gestures, that poem’s debt his debt to Lucretius and to Callimachus and Ennius as well. I would suggest in addition that Lucretius’ combination of the methods for dividing a six-part ensemble that he found in Callimachus and Ennius – the binary pattern in the latter and the ternary pattern in the former – are a token of his influence not only on Ovid but also on Augustan poets more generally. 4 The Callimachean work in question is the collection of Hymns. These form not a multi-book corpus but a single book containing six poems. The manuscript tradition transmits them in an order, which Pfeiffer believed originated with Callimachus and that clearly reflects an artistic arrangement of three pairs. The first two hymns are mimetic, have single male subjects (Zeus and Apollo), and are the shortest poems in the collection (96 and 113 lines). The next two (Artemis and Delos) are narrative; both have the twins Artemis and Apollo as their subject, and are the longest poems in the collection (268 and 326 lines). Hymns 5 and 6 (Baths of Pallas and Demeter) are again mimetic, have female subjects, and in length fall between the extremes established by the first two pairs (142 and 138 lines). The last two hymns are further linked by being in the Doric dialect, while the first four hymns are in Epic/Ionic. The design of the book, then, is quite obviously based on three pairs of adjacent hymns. The arrangement is predominantly symmetrical (two pairs of short, “mimetic” poems surround two longer, narrative ones), but it involves elements of progression as well (movement from male to mixed The Six Books of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: Antecedents and Influence 3 Dictynna, 5 | 2008 to female addressees; from Ionic to Doric dialect; the introduction of a new meter, elegiac couplets, in poem 5). 5 These formal elements make the book of Hymns at least a forerunner, and perhaps a specific model, for Lucretius’ decision to structure DRN as three groups of two books each. Additional similarities strengthen this possibility. 6 Most obviously, several books of Lucretius’ poem begin with a hymn. The specific addressees of Lucretius’ hymns – Venus in book 1, Epicurus in book 3 and 5, Athens in book 6 – do not, of course, correspond with those of Callimachus.But the fact that Lucretius uses the hymnic form at all in a poem dedicated to convincing the reader that traditional religious beliefs are mistaken is remarkable and has occasioned much discussion. One motive for using this form so prominently may be to indicate a literary debt to Callimachus’ Hymns as a structural model for Lucretius’ poem. 7 It is also the case that Callimachus’ design puts a certain emphasis on the central two hymns of the collection. It achieves this effect by placing the two longest hymns in the central position. In DRN the length of individual books is more variable, while each successive pair of books is longer than the one that precedes it. But Epicurus’ doctrine of the soul is in many ways the essential point of Lucretius’ poem. The elemental doctrines of books 1–2 precede it logically, and the social and anthropological discussions of books 5–6 follow from it. But the sheer fact that human soul is mortal – and that we therefore have nothing to fear from death – is Lucretius’ paramount concern, and his proof of this doctrine receives great emphasis from its central position in books 3 and 4. It may be that Lucretius’ decision to emphasize this point by placing it in this central position was partly inspired by Callimachus’ making his two longest and most ambitious hymns the centerpiece of a six-element design. 8 I shall return to Callimachus, but at this point let us turn to consider the other inspiration for Lucretius’ six-book design. In book 1 of DRN Lucretius famously and programmatically cites Ennius noster in such a way as to declare that his poem will be Ennian in form if not in content. The gesture is usually interpreted as a reference to the Ennian phrases and metrical effects with which the poem is liberally endowed. But it would not be surprising if some additional aspect of the poem’s formal design also derived from Ennius. 9 What then about the structure of the Annales? On a few points, there is fairly general agreement. In the Annales, book-divisions were for the first time in Latin poetry part of the author’s artistic design. Almost certainly groups of three books formed another, higher-level structural unit. But while these aspects of the poem’s structure can be regarded as definite or nearly so, others remain a puzzle. The chief problem is that the Annales evidently existed as a corpus of fifteen books for some period of time. Ennius then added new books to the existing poem, eventually bringing it to a total of eighteen. Accordingly, it is unclear how to assess the poem as a unified design. Most scholars currently focus on books 1–15 as the most fully realized, unified instantiation of Ennius’ ambitions and regard books 16–18 as an essentially different work that may even have circulated separately. The question of what form of the Annales best and most fully reflected Ennius’ intentions (and whether we mean his original or his final intentions) is too large and too theoretically murky to go into here. But fortunately, there is no need to do so. For our purposes, the important point is not how Ennius structured his poem, but how readers, and especially Lucretius, understood its structure. Lucretius was certainly in a better position than we are to make this sort of judgment. He had vastly more of the poem than the scraps that are left to us. We may presume that he knew the entire Annales, including books 16–18. But in one sense, Lucretius was in no different a position from our own. The architectural design of any poem depends on decisions made by its author, but the perception of that (or of any other) design is a matter of readerly interpretation. The proem to book 16, which makes it clear that Ennius has returned to the Annales after a period of some years, might have led Lucretius (as it has many modern scholars) to regard everything that followed as extraneous to Ennius’ original design. On the other hand, having before him a single, eighteen-book corpus, Lucretius may (like other scholars) simply have tried to make The Six Books of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: Antecedents and Influence 4 Dictynna, 5 | 2008 sense of the Annales as a unified composition in eighteen books. If he did so, what will have been the result? 10 Most books of the Annales are so fragmentary that we cannot say in total confidence what features may have served to articulate the poem’s internal structure. But we do know that books 1 and 7 both began with major proems that were famously influential in antiquity—not least on Lucretius. Johannes Vahlen assumed that every book of the Annales began with a formal proem of some sort, even if they were not all as ambitious as those of 1 and 7. But at least one book seems to have plunged right into narrative. 20 So it makes sense to assume, as the majority of scholars have done, that proems were reserved for some special effect or other. It would be consonant with earlier Greek and later Roman practice if such proems served to introduce major points of articulation in the poem’s design. Given a poem in eighteen books with major proems in books 1 and 7, a knowledgeable reader ancient or modern might infer the existence of a tripartite structure based on groups of six books (hexads). This impression would be strengthened if there were a similar proem in book 13 as well, but unfortunately we have no evidence either way. 11 Were there other proems? Some of the evidence is equivocal. It does seem likely, though, that books 10 and 16 began with formal proems. The impression gained from the ancient reception of these proems is that they were less grand than those of books 1 and 7, and this suggests that they played some lesser role than what I have suggested for those. Two obvious possibilities present themselves. In the first place, books 10 and 16 both begin new triads, and it may be that all such books featured proems that will have reinforced the reader’s sense of the poem’s structure at that level. Such a system could have worked together with the distribution of more ambitious proems in 1, 7, and perhaps 13 to create a clear sense of a two-tiered structure of triads and hexads. If this is the case, or even if it is not, more can be said about these books in particular. The years that had evidently lapsed since the composition of books 15 and 16 and the opportunity to compare the wars of the present to those of the past may (in Ennius’ judgment) have called for a more ample and reflective proem in book 16 than did the beginnings of other triads. Book 10 is also a special case, not least because it evidently began with a new invocation of the Muses. As such, it would seem to exemplify the phenomenon that Gian Biagio Conte has dubbed the “proem in the middle” if assessed in the context of an eighteen-book design. 12 Of course none of this is at all conclusive, particularly regarding Ennius’ own design of the Annales. But it does indicate how readers of the complete poem in eighteen books might have understood its design. And for Lucretius in particular, several elements of the design that I have sketched could have been interesting. 13 To begin with, there is the relationship of triads and hexads within this design. We have seen that the idea of structuring DRN as a sequence of three pairs of books is congruent with the design of Callimachus’ Hymns. But that work shows no sign of a bipartite organization. Most scholars agree, however, that three-book units (triads) are an important element in the design of the Annales. And, as we have seen, the poem contains gestures that might encourage readers to group adjacent triads into coherent hexads (1–3 + 4–6, 7–9 + 10–12, etc.) This is congruent with the other major organizational scheme of DRN. Adoption of this scheme could thus be an element of Lucretius’ Ennian imitatio. 14 There might be additional reasons why Lucretius would invite the reader to consider his poem as an Ennian hexad. For instance, while Ennius certainly remains Lucretius’ principal model in Latin poetry – the only one that he cites by name – alongside Ennius he cites Homer. Just as in Ennius’ own conceit, Lucretius’ greatest Greek and Roman predecessors are almost fused together into a single personality. If we imagine the structure of DRN as alluding in some way to this fusion, then the decision to divide the poem into six books makes additional sense, in the following way: Lucretius’ six books may be regarded as “completing” Ennius’ Homeric imitatio by rounding out the number of books in the Annales, eighteen, to the number of books in either of the Homeric poems, twenty-four. Some corroboration for this idea may come from Vergil’s treatment of Homer in the Georgics and the Aeneid. Vergil’s epic, as everyone knows, combines more or less all of the Iliad and the Odyssey into twelve books, half the number of a single Homeric epic. But Llewelyn Morgan has made the very clever suggestion that Vergil’s The Six Books of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: Antecedents and Influence 5 Dictynna, 5 | 2008 treatment of book 4 of the Odyssey in book 4 of the Georgics allows the reader of the Aeneid to regard the earlier poem as the Telemachian prelude to the latter. Something not entirely dissimilar may be at work if Lucretius’ six books are intended to complete Ennius’ eighteen. It would also be consonant with the dominant aesthetic principles of Lucretius’ day if he were in effect boasting that he could accomplish his own Homeric agon in the space of only six books, while Ennius had required three times as many. 15 How do these observations concerning Ennius comport with our earlier argument concerning Callimachus? As we have seen, by structuring the six books of DRN as three pairs of books, Lucretius may have been inspired by Callimachus’ arrangement of his Hymns.But by incorporating a different structure not found in Callimachus, one based on two groups of three books, Lucretius may have been overlaying his Callimachean structure with that of an Ennian hexad as well. If we put these results together, we can account for the decision to give DRN a six-book structure and to inform that structure with two mathematical systems, one based on pairs of books (2+2+2) and the other based on triads (3+3). Interestingly, this involves a combination of Callimachean and Ennian structures in ways that are not just formally opportune, but thematically interesting as well. In terms of scale, Lucretius’ poem, both in whole and in part, represents a middle way between Callimachean minimalism and Ennian grandiosity. Thematically, Lucretius borrows from a collection of religious hymns and from a historical epic. Again, his own poem rejects the hypostasization either of conventional religiosity or of history as determiners of meaning or as means to salvation. As in other respects, Lucretius’ command of the poetic tradition and his admiration for the literary masters of the past does not prevent him from going his own way philosophically. Indeed, his adaptation of these formal elements may serve to underline the distinctive message of his own poem. 16 In literary-historical terms, the combination of these two models might be seen as a surprising move. But Ennius has been seen as being aware of and even as following Callimachus in some respects. If this is so, then Ennius’ use of Callimachus should have been apparent to at least some ancient readers; certainly to Lucretius, who is himself obviously familiar with and hardly hostile towards some of Callimachus’ characteristic literary ideals. This is not to deny that Callimachus may have acquired a new and more specific significance for some of Lucretius’ contemporaries. But even if this is the case, the idea of an unbridgeable gap between the followers of Ennius, including Lucretius, and those of Callimachus, such as Catullus and the “neoterics,” has sometimes been greatly overstated. Even if we suppose that Catullus and a few like-minded poets took an extreme view of these matters, Lucretius need not have joined battle on their terms. And of course these “incompatible” traditions were effectively reconciled in the poetry of the Augustan period. It would be interesting in light of this later development if Callimachus played such an important role in an expansive Lucretian poetics. Such an example, in contrast to that commonly ascribed to “the neoterics,” might help to explain the more eclectic approach of the Augustan poets to earlier poetic traditions. 17 It is in fact to a notable example of such Augustan eclecticism that I now turn. If there is any poem of the Augustan period that owes important aspects of its structure to that of De rerum natura, that poem is Ovid’s Fasti. And what is most interesting about this relationship is that the Fasti not only follows Lucretius’ formal approach to the structure of a six-book poem, but it does so while remaining fully engaged with both of Lucretius’ sources for this design, Callimachus and Ennius. 18 First the formal considerations. The Fasti as it stands is, like the De rerum natura, a six-book didactic poem. This fact can easily be overlooked and, until recently, most critics have treated the Fasti not as a complete poem in six books, but as a radically incomplete poem in twelve. Of course, the idea that the Fasti is or ought to be a twelve-book poem is hugely overdetermined. Not only would a twelve-book design allude to that of the Aeneid, a major intertext both in the Fasti and practically everywhere else throughout Ovid’s oeuvre, but it is even demanded by the structure of its subject, the twelve-month year of the Roman calendar. Moreover, Ovid insists on twelve as the proper number of books for this poem. Perhaps understandably, then, the The Six Books of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: Antecedents and Influence 6 Dictynna, 5 | 2008 poem’s apparently fragmentary and only partially-revised state for a long time inhibited critics from making serious efforts to interpret it as a poetic whole; and under such circumstances, the idea that we are dealing with a poem intended to be complete in twelve books could hardly have encouraged the exploration of any possible parallel with Lucretius’ six-book structure. In recent years, however, critics have increasingly entertained the possibility that Ovid decided at some point to design or redesign the poem as a deliberate fragment, “complete” in six books. The results have been well received, although the implications of this insight have only begun to be worked out. 19 For this reason, we may consider whether the six-book Fasti might owe aspects of its structure to DRN. If we do, we find that the internal structure of the Fasti exhibits a number of similarities to that of Lucretius’ poem. It remains true that any analysis of the Fasti is complicated by the poem’s really or notionally incomplete state, and by evidence that the poet’s plan changed while he composed it, and also by uncertainties concerning his Callimachean and Ennian models. But even these factors, I will argue, are creatively implicated in the Lucretian structure of Ovid’s calendar. 20 To begin with some obvious points. Like Lucretius’ poem and Callimachus’ Hymns, the Fasti is organized as a sequence of three paired elements. The first two books are paired because their respective months, January and February, are the two that were added to Romulus’ original, ten-month year. 34 The next two books deal with months, March and April, that are named for two divinities, Mars and Venus (Aphrodite), who form a natural pair in terms of Homeric mythology, Empedoclean philosophy, and Julian dynastic propaganda. In Ovid’s hands, they also provide the occasion for a sustained meditation on generic decorum: book 3 is occupied in no small part with the poet’s concern that the month of the war-god is too weighty a subject for his elegiacs; while part of the work of book 4 is to repair, under the auspices of the consummately elegiac Venus, the breach of generic decorum that had taken place in the previous book. The last two books, on May and June, are also a thematic pair linked through etymology: May is the month of the elders, the maiores, while June belongs to the youngsters, the iuniores. Thus this aspect of Ovid’s general plan – three groups of two books each – remains clear. 21 The six books of Fasti share a further element with those of DRN when viewed, in this case, as an Ennian hexad. Both Ovid’s and Lucretius poems fall clearly into halves, or triads. This much is indicated by the device of “proems in the middle,” which are of course a feature of many poems and poetry collections from Hellenistic times onwards. Because the device is so widespread, it may be difficult to attribute Ovid’s use of it here to a more extensive Lucretian program. Nevertheless, I think there is good reason to believe that he had Lucretius specifically in mind. The “proem in the middle” is generally hard to miss. But Lucretius’ contribution to this tradition went unappreciated until very recently – until, in fact, Conte explained in these terms a feature of Lucretius’ poem that had traditionally been ascribed either to poor workmanship or to the poem’s unfinished state. The opening of DRN 4 repeats, nearly verbatim, about 25 lines from book 1. The opening of book 4 of the Fasti, like all other books of the poem,is replete with programmatic gestures of various kinds, but nothing on the order that we find in most of Conte’s examples. Like book 4 of De rerum natura, however, it does repeat, nearly verbatim, a passage from book 1. Here we are dealing with only a couplet, so that the gesture of repetition is made with great tact. But the Fasti repeats a couplet from the very opening lines of its first book. This change makes the “proem in the middle” motif that much clearer as an allusion to Lucretius in particular. 22 It is also significant, I would suggest, that the proem to Fasti 4 alludes with great clarity to the opening of Lucretius’ poem. The first word of each book is alma; in both cases alma is the epithet of Venus; each address to Venus is in the context of a cletic hymn in which the goddess is enlisted as the poet’s ally; and so forth. The sophistication whereby Ovid alludes to Lucretius’ initial proem by way of fashioning a “proem in the middle” is typical of Ovid. He undertakes the converse operation at the beginning of the Amores, where the opening of book 1 alludes both the opening of the Aeneid – the final poem of Vergil’s career – and to the beginning of Eclogue 6 – the “proem in the middle” found in Vergil’s first major work. The Six Books of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: Antecedents and Influence 7 Dictynna, 5 | 2008 And of course, here in Fasti 4 Ovid alludes not just to Lucretius 1 and 4, but to the beginning of Horace, Odes 4 (another fourth book devoted to Venus) and to himself at the beginning of the Amores, as well. In addition, the central, Empedoclean image of Lucretius’ “Hymn to Venus,” that of the goddess of love subduing the god of war, speaks very directly to the position of Ovid’s allusion in the center not just of his poem, but of its central pair of books, at the very point where the month of Venus follows (and so replaces) the month of Mars. 23 Here it may also be worth considering what Lucretius changes when he repeats in book 4 what he had said in book 1. Stratis Kyriakidis correctly notes that the lines that Lucretius repeats are part of a digression that is “a distinct and complete unit of thought.” The digression begins as follows: Nunc age, quod super est, cognosce et clarius audi. nec me animi fallit quam sint obscura; sed acri percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor et simul incussit suavem mi in pectus amorem Musarum, quo nunc instinctus mente vigenti 925 avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis atque haurire 24 But in book 4, Lucretius omits the first five lines and begins abruptly with the words avia Pieridum.... What is the effect of this omission? To quote Kyriakidis, The five lines opening the paragraph in Book 1 inevitably draw the reader’s attention. There, the poet acted not only under the influence of his quest for renown, but also because of his love for the Muses.... The amor for the Muses put the poet under their spell and they became his driving force. The exclusion, however, of these five lines from the beginning of Book 4 drastically alters the context of the remainder: Lucretius now has a free hand to form his own poetry by not being instinctus any more. 25 The significance of these observations for interpreters of Ovid should be obvious. Lucretius’ repetition, in effect, involves a renuntiatio amoris. Ovid’s allusion to Lucretius’ repetition restores love, a theme that the poet had “abandoned” in the first three books of the Fasti, to its former preeminence while placing Venus herself in the position of Ovid’s Muse. 26 So there is a case, I think, for believing that the six-book structure of De rerum natura influenced that of the Fasti. But since there is also reason to suspect that Lucretius based his structure on features of Callimachus’ Hymns and of Ennius’ Annales, an obvious question arises. Does Ovid’s version of this structure indicate any debt to Callimachus and Ennius as well as Lucretius? 27 This should be a promising line of investigation, since Ovid’s links to both authors are many. And in fact, the case that Ovid does have both Callimachus and Ennius in mind as models both for Lucretius’ poem and for his own, is clear. The traces of this indebtedness are presented with great sophistication, as is typical of Ovid, and in a way that, to my mind, serves to clinch the argument. The sophistication has to do with the fact that the Fasti, in its relationship with the Metamorphoses, is but one half of a pair of poems that challenge conventional notions of poetic unity. So it is not surprising if Ovid draws his formal models into the field of indeterminacy that these twin poems create between them. 28 Ovid’s general debt to Callimachus in the Fasti is widely acknowledged. Understandably, this debt is most often referred to the subgenre of aetiological elegy and so to the Aetia. But the Hymns were also influential, not only in the Fasti but throughout Ovid’s career. Ovid’s detailed familiarity with the Hymns and his frequent use (and reuse) of specific passages in the Fasti and other works makes it virtually certain that he was aware of the structure of Callimachus’ hymn-book. It remains true, as was noted above, that it is the Aetia and not the Hymns that is the chief conceptual model of Ovid’s poem. But the Aetia is a poem (or collection of poems) in four books, while the Hymns are a collection of six poems. In light of Ovid’s demonstrated familiarity with this collection, it is difficult to imagine that he was unaware that the structure of Fasti 1–6 so closely resembles the arrangement of the Hymns. The Six Books of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: Antecedents and Influence 8 Dictynna, 5 | 2008 29 With that we may return to Ennius, and so to another problem that involves “two poems,” or rather, two versions of the same poem. A number of scholars have embraced the notion that the structure of the Metamorphoses is based on that of the Annales. But this idea assumes that Ovid’s fifteen books of Metamorphoses follow the structure of a fifteen-book edition of the Annales.The final, fifteenth book of this version will have dealt with the Ambracian campaigns of Ennius’ patron, Fulvius Nobilior; and it may have concluded with Fulvius’ transferring the cult of Hercules of the Muses to Rome as part of his triumph. In such a design, Fulvius’ military and cultic achievement will have closed the ring opened in book 1 when Ennius replaced Roman Camenae with Greek Muses. What is more, here as elsewhere, the Metamorphoses and the Fasti demand that we read them as an ensemble. The final episode of Fasti 6 (and so of the poem as we have it) celebrates the cult of Hercules of the Muses, the very cult that Fulvius Nobilior brought to Rome, and so may very well allude to the final episode of Annales 15. All of this suggests that both the Fasti and the Met regard the Annales as a poem in fifteen, not eighteen, books. If so, the case that the six books of the Fasti are in any sense an Ennian hexad looks difficult to sustain, and Ovid’s treatment of the Annales would thus seem to differ from that of Lucretius in a crucial respect. But there may be a relationship among all these poems after all. To see it, we have only to think a bit harder about Ovid’s stance towards Ennius. 30 It makes sense to assume that the fifteen-book structure of the Metamorphoses presupposes an awareness of a similarly structured version of the Annales, and that Ovid’s purpose in alluding to this structure was to trump Ennius’ universalizing ambitions. Ennius composed a poem about the history of Rome from its beginnings down to his own day; Ovid outdid him by writing one about all of time from the beginning of the universe down to his own day. Viewed through this lens, the fifteen-book structure of both poems connotes completeness, permanence, stability, and so forth. And indeed, the end of the Metamorphoses emphasizes these properties. Ovid’s own exile poetry, however, forces us to regard any claims made in the Metamorphoses with skepticism. To cite only the most explicit piece of revisionism, Tristia 1.7 completely undermines the claim that the Metamorphoses ever attained its perfect form. This is an argument has been made very effectively by Stephen Hinds. 31 Without going into great detail, let me just suggest that the structural relationship that Ovid creates between his Metamorphoses and Ennius’ Annales may be read as looking forward to the revisionism of the exile poetry; for, as we know, the fifteen-book structure of the Annales was not stable. The Annales evidently remained in this form only a few years before morphing into an eighteen-book poem; and this later version of the Annales may be as important to Ovid’s design of a fifteen-book Metamorphoses as was the earlier version. The Metamorphoses alludes to the fifteen books of Annales as if to a fixed account of all of Roman time. In its own fifteen-book structure, the Metamorphoses invites comparison with Ennius’ poem, which it surpasses in scope even as it usurps the outward form of permanence and fixity that Ennius had given his poem. But that design proved not to be fixed: in order to cover all of Roman time, Ennius eventually had to add three more books to his fifteen-book edifice. Of course, neither was the Metamorphoses a fixed structure: that is among the main points developed in Tr. 1.7, which represents a characteristically exilic perspective on Ovid’s masterpiece. 32 Recent criticism has emphasized that the Fasti, too, is an exile poem. It would make sense if it, too, cast doubt in some way on the claims to immutability that Ovid registers when he concludes his fifteen books of Metamorphoses. I would submit that the poem’s six-book structure does just that. It may be that the appearance of Hercules Musarum at the end of Fasti 6 alludes to the end of Annales 15; but if so, we can hardly regard this agreement as a definitive statement of closure. Rather, we have to admit that the end of the Fasti (as we have it) alludes to a passage that was once, apparently, the end of the Annales, but that was eventually replaced when Ennius added three books to what had been fifteen. This is perhaps a very appropriate gesture to make at the “end” of a poem that should really not end until another six books have been written; all the more so in a poem whose “end” alludes to the final episode of an Annales The Six Books of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: Antecedents and Influence 9 Dictynna, 5 | 2008 in fifteen books, but whose six-book structure derives, by way of Lucretius, from an Annales in eighteen books. 33 More could be said, but the key point is simple: Ovid’s references in the Metamorphoses and in the Fasti to the Annales as a poem in fifteen books, look very much as if they were part of a larger thematic complex whereby images of stability are re-imagined as proof that all is in flux. Under these circumstances, it seems to me characteristic that the end of the Fasti might allude to the end of Annales 15, while the entire poem presented itself as an Ennian/Lucretian hexad. 34 To conclude: the nature of our evidence makes this a very speculative topic. The reason I think it is worth our time to consider them is that Lucretius’ subject matter tends to place him somewhat outside the mainstream of research in Latin poetry. This is perhaps particularly true at a time when our sources for and knowledge about the Roman reception of Epicureanism in the first century are expanding, much more quickly than is the case for our knowledge of Roman poetry in general. What I have tried to do is to identify a factor that might allow us to understand Lucretius’ place in the history of Roman poetry qua poetry. My hope is that the points I have raised, however provisionally, may become a provocation to further research in this area.