Lucretius Diagnosed:
The De Rerum Natura
in the Thought of Marsilio Ficino

...let us not be disturbed by an argument that seeks to scare us into preferring the friendship of the sane to that of the passionate. For there is something more that it must prove if it is to carry the day, namely that love is not a thing sent from heaven for the advantage of both lover and beloved. What we have to prove is the opposite, namely that this sort of madness is a gift of the gods, fraught with the highest bliss.
—Plato, Phaedrus ¹

Love is not heaven-sent...
—Epicurus ²

Regarding his unprecedented use of Lucretius' poem, timing was evidently on Ficino's side: Lucretius was all but unknown to the humanists and scholars of the fourteenth century, and was familiar to many of Ficino's immediate predecessors, such as Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457), only at second hand. It was the Italian humanist Poggio (1380-1459) who was instrumental in rescuing the De Rerum Natura from obscurity. While attending the Council of Constance (1414-1418) as apostolic secretary to the Pope, Poggio undertook several expeditions to monasteries in the region in search of forgotten Latin manuscripts. On one such expedition in 1417—probably to the monastery of Murbach, in Elsass, Germany—he came upon a rare MS of Lucretius' poem and had it copied. Ironically, Poggio may never have laid eyes on his precious transcript of the MS, which somehow fell into the hands of a covetous friend of Poggio's, his fellow humanist, Niccolò de' Niccoli. He disregarded Poggio's entreaties for the return of the transcript and may never have returned it to him. Poggio's own manuscript has since been lost, but all copies made of the De Rerum Natura during the fifteenth century are believed to have descended from Poggio's own transcript, or from Niccoli's autograph copy of the same transcript (which is now housed in the Laurentian library of Florence). By the middle of the fifteenth century, copies of Lucretius' poem had begun to circulate among the intelligentsia of Florence—in time for Ficino to incorporate the author into the philosophical studies of his early manhood.

Of Ficino's unacknowledged debt to Lucretius and the philosophical school of Epicureanism in the body of his works, little is known. Paul Kristeller has detected "a trace" of Lucretian Epicureanism in Ficino's mature philosophic works.

In any case, given Ficino's unswerving commitment to Platonism, and his lifelong effort to reconcile Platonic philosophy to the Christian faith, we can have little doubt that Ficino would have had as small a sufferance for the Epicurean denial of divine creation and the immortality of the soul as had his scholastic and humanist predecessors. At the same time, however, unlike his predecessors, Ficino had the opportunity to examine these arguments fully in their philosophical, poetic, and didactic context. And then, of course, there is Ficino's peculiar and special gift of synthesis, by which he weaves a new and vivid textual fabric from inherited authority—sifting; shifting; recontextualizing; unifying.

Ultimately, Ficino skillfully circumvents some of the thornier and more intractable aspects of Epicurean philosophy by casting Lucretius in the De amore (somewhat artificially, perhaps) in a largely physiological context. And the De amore may have provided a congenial forum in which to draw on his earlier studies of Lucretius.
Ficino's employment of Lucretius in the De amore is not only interesting for its precedence, but for a number of compelling questions that it raises regarding Ficino's philosophical method and modus legendi:

inritata tument loca semine, fitque voluntas
eicere id quo se contendit dira lubido,
idque petit corpus, mens unde est saucia amore;

Those parts thus excited swell with the seed, and there arises a desire to emit it towards that whither the dire craving tends; and the body seeks that which has wounded the mind with love.: 12
(IV.1045-46;1048)

eximia veste et victu convivia, ludi,
pocula crebra, unguenta, coronae, serta parantur—
nequiquam, quoniam medio de fonte leporum
surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat,
[aut] cum conscius ipse animus se forte remordet
desidiose agere aetatem lustrisque perire...

Banquets are prepared with magnificent trappings and rich fare, entertainments, bumpers in abundance, ointment, garlands, festoons; but all is vanity, since from the very fountain of enchantment rises a drop of bitterness to torment even in the flowers;...when a guilty conscience chances to sting him with the thought that he is passing his life in sloth and perishing in debauches...: 14
(IV.1131-1136)

For the remainder of this paper, I shall explore the following questions as they pertain to the representation of Lucretius and his poem De Rerum Natura in the De amore: How does Ficino engage the authority of Lucretius, as a poet, a philosopher, and as an historical personage?; What kind of "misprision", or creative misreading, of Lucretius' poem must Ficino enact to effect his synthesis?

; Do any of his inherited attitudes towards Lucretius facilitate his misreading? First, I will look briefly at a few references to Lucretius among Ficino's private and public correspondence, in order to provide a slightly broader context for examining the representation of Lucretius in the De amore, and to better assess what aspects of that representation are local to the text in question.
Four of Ficino's early letters—dating from 1457 and 1458—refer extensively to Lucretius, and they all reflect wide reading in the De Rerum Natura.

Ficino, in these early letters, draws on Lucretius in three ways: He quotes a passage or lifts a phrase or metaphor from the poet to serve his own argument, often with little reference to the original context for the passage; he uses Lucretius to illustrate his (sometimes enigmatic) interpretation of Epicurean philosophy; and, most of the time, he does a little of both. In two of the letters, he appears to allegorize Epicurean teaching, which he sets forth as a sort of esoteric riddle for his reader.

His starting point for these enigmatic allegories is a line from Lucretius: "omniparens eadem rerum commune sepulcrum" (V.259).
Conspicuously absent in all these letters is any mention of those aspects of Lucretius' Epicureanism that are wholly irreconcilable to Neo-Platonic or Christian doctrine. I do not want to risk overstating this point—these are after all personal letters and not polemical tracts—but, nonetheless, Ficino has a knack here for drawing out those aspects of Lucretius' philosophy and poetic imagery that most seamlessly integrate into his Christian and Neo-Platonic philosophical construct. For instance, he frequently selects images or passages from Lucretius that evoke common Christian and philosophical topoi: the straight and narrow path to wisdom (and later, salvation [VI.624-628]); the venator sapientiae (I.402-409); the lofty citadels of wisdom (II.8-13); the tyranny of ignorance (e.g. I.62-79); and the contrast between the light of wisdom and the obscurity and darkness of ignorance—characteristic of the mystery cults of the ancient world, and later appropriated by Christians (e.g.III. 1-2).

Somewhat paradoxically perhaps, this selective tendency in Ficino in the early letters at times seems to work towards a fuller and more sympathetic understanding of Epicurean teaching.
Limitations of space have precluded anything more than a cursory investigation of the letters (the complex contents of which really merit a paper of their own), but let us look at one key passage. Ficino's most conclusive and straightforward early statement on Epicureanism can be found in his letter of 1457 to Antonio Seraphico. Here, Ficino discusses what is judged to be the "summum bonum of human beings by Democritus and the Epicurean philosophers". He finds his answer in Lucretius, "ille noster epicureorum philosophorum clarissimus", and rather correctly and sympathetically concludes that they seek above all "quietem et tranquillitatem".

As his statement that he burned his commentary on Lucretius suggests, Ficino may have undergone some later change of heart or disillusionment with regard to the poet. Indeed, Ficino himself seems to ascribe his early interest in Lucretius to youthful excess: "I suppressed a commentary that I wrote as a boy; I burned it, just as Plato did his tragedies and elegies".

As you say, some letters are being passed around under my name which are written in the style of Aristippus, and to some extent in that of Lucretius, rather than of Plato. If they are mine, Angelo, they are not like that: and if they are like that, they are definitely not mine, but fabricated by my detractors; for as everyone knows, I have followed the divine Plato from my youth.
But you will easily distinguish my own writings from others in this way: in my letters, as far as in me lies, there is always a purpose relating to morals, natural subjects, or theology. But if occasionally there is anything in them in some way relating to love, it is certainly Platonic and honorable, not Aristippian and wanton. 23

Ficino draws on Lucretius as an authority on sensual love in two ways: first, he cites him as a medical authority to illustrate the physiological causes and effects of sensual love (and in this regard, Ficino can be at times almost absurdly literal in his interpretation of Lucretius' often ironic language of erotic affliction); and even more importantly, he considers Lucretius an expert on erotic morbidity because, for Ficino, Lucretius is himself the melancholy victim of erotic obsession par excellence, ultimately driven to madness and suicide by amatory affliction. These two conceptions of Lucretius as both medical authority and erotic sufferer dovetail in the De Amore: Lucretius' "physiological" testimony carries so much weight with Ficino because he believes the poet to be speaking from personal experience.
Before we investigate these issues, an important point must be made about the discussion of sensual love in Speech VII of the treatise: the kind of sensual love Ficino condemns here should in no way be conflated wiht his conception of procreative vulgar love. Earlier in the treatise, Ficino celebrates procreative love as not only natural, but as something divine. He says:

...the instinct for procreation is innate in all things. But since procreation renders mortal things like divine things in continuity, it is certainly a divine gift....What is the love of men, you ask? What purpose does it serve? It is the desire for procreation with a beautiful object in order to make eternal life available to mortal things. This is the love of men living on earth; this is the goal of our love.... Certainly by this means are preserved whatever things are mutable in the soul or the body, not because they remain forever completely the same (for that is peculiar to divine things), but because whatever wastes away and departs leaves behind something new and like itself. Certainly by this remedy mortal things are rendered like immortal ones (130-131).

Indeed, the remarkable dignity and beauty Ficino affords to procreative love is one of the most moving and novel aspects of the treatise.
What Ficino cautions against in Speech VII is erotic obsession—a kind of madness induced by a disease of the blood and spirits that afflicts the heart. In this sense, erotic love is not really love at all, but its "opposite" (41). Ficino negotiates the distinction thus: love arises from the "desire for beauty" (40). Beauty manifests itself hierarchically in the world, descending from the beauty of souls, to the beauty of bodies, to the beauty of sounds. Beauty of souls—the most exalted kind of beauty—is perceived by the intellect, beauty of bodies by the eyes, beauty of sounds by the ears. Thus the three lower orders of sense—smell, touch, taste—do not properly partake of beauty at all, and any "appetite" that arises from them "is not called love, but lust, or madness" (41). In this light then, the difference between procreative vulgar love and sensual "love" is one of ends and means: the sensual lover copulates in a futile and desperate attempt to sate the lower senses; the praiseworthy vulgar lover in order to propagate divine beauty in the world and share in immortality. The sensual lover seeks physical gratification in vain, as beauty is by nature incorporeal (89); hence the sensual lover is driven to distraction by frustrated desire. In Speech VII, Ficino presents this kind of erotic obsession as the precise antithesis of divine madness, by which the soul of the divine lover, "flying up to divine beauty," reascends to God (172). Socrates represents this ideal type of divine lover, and Lucretius, his opposite.
The notion of Lucretius' madness and erotic obsession has had wide currency even into the present day, and has informed a number of modern scholarly treatments of the De Rerum Natura. For centuries, the legend of Lucretius' mental instability and resulting suicide has colored the reading and interpretation, not only of the treatment of love in Book IV of the poem, but of the work as a whole. Among the personal charges leveled at Lucretius in the last fifty years by scholars are those of sexual sadism, obsessive sexual revulsion, and manic depression.

The "story" to which Bailey refers is given in Jerome's additions to Eusebius' Chronicle for the year 94 BCE:

T. Lucretius poeta nascitur, qui postea amatorio poculo in furorem versus, cum aliquot libros per intervalla insaniae conscripsisset quos postea Cicero emendavit, propria se manu interfecit anno aetatis xliiii.

The poet Titus Lucretius was born. Later on he went mad from drinking a love potion. In the lucid intervals of his insanity he wrote several books, which were later edited by Cicero. Then he died by his own hand at the age of forty-four. 27

The story is the fullest biographical account we have of Lucretius. It is also, as far as modern scholarship can assess, unreliable. Lucretius was almost certainly born earlier in the century (c.99 BCE), and there is nothing in the works of Cicero to suggest that he had any part in editing Lucretius' writings. With regard to Jerome's account of Lucretius' madness and suicide, I concur with Martha Nussbaum: "The story, with its edifying conclusion,...fits in far too well with the spirit of Christian polemic against atheism and materialism not to be deeply suspect as biography" (141). Given the willingness of many modern scholars to interpret the De Rerum Natura through the scrim of Lucretius' supposed madness and sexual obsession, it is no wonder, then, that this dubious biographical anecdote becomes the central referent for Ficino's treatment of Lucretius in the De amore.
The "speaker" of Speech VII is Cristoforo Marsuppini, Ficino's twenty-three year old student. Despite its complex of literary and philosophical allusions and associations, the speech steers a clear course—from an account of the physiological causes and effects of erotic obsession, to a celebration of its antithesis, divine frenzy. And Ficino sets up a conscious diametrical opposition between the two. A discussion of Guido Cavalcanti's esoteric poem on love, the "Donna me prega", provides the frame for the beginning of the speech.

Simply put, two types of love can arise from the apprehension of a beautiful body, one inclined towards the senses, the other inclined towards the universal species of things in the intellect. Says the speaker:

The former he [Cavalcanti] placed in lust, the latter in contemplation. The former he thinks revolves around the particular beauty of a single body, the latter around the universal beauty of the whole human race. He says that these two loves certainly oppose each other in man, and that the former drives him down to a bestial life, whereas the latter raises him up to an angelic or contemplative life (154).

Sensual love, then, fixates on the beauty of the individual, whereas divine love—which arises in the universal species in the intellect—partakes in the universal love of humanity. This contrast between the sensually apprehended particular and abstractly conceived universal is Aristotelian in origin, but it sets the stage for Ficino's employment of Lucretius in the speech.

The driving idea behind Lucretius' attack on love is that the natural urge to copulate turns into unhealthy erotic obsession when we fixate our desires upon a specific love object. Ficino seizes on this notion in Lucretius, and it becomes the linchpin for his integration of Lucretius into his broader philosophical argument. He draws on the notion twice in the short speech, once, importantly, in reference to the malady of melancholy lovers, saying that "Fixation of thought always accompanies this [i.e. melancholy] blood." Later in the speech, in his discussion of remedies for the melancholy lover, he cites Lucretius on how to overcome erotic fixation:

Sed fugitare decet simulacra; et pabula amoris
Absterrere sibi, atque alio convertere mentem,
Et iacere humorem coniectum in corpora quaeque
Nec retinere semen conversum unius amore. 31

But it is fitting to avoid images and remove from himself the foods of love, and to turn his mind elsewhere, and cast the accumulated humor into various bodies and not to retain it, once it has been infected by the love of a certain person (168). 32

Most important for Ficino here is the (gender-neutral) concept of unius amore—that sensual love arises from erotic fixation on a single human being. This is where, for Ficino, Lucretius' attack on love and the Aristotelian construct of Cavalcanti's poem dovetail.
The next section of the speech constitutes an extended praise of Socrates and a vindication of his love. The Porus and Penia frame of the previous speech is taken up once again, this time read as an allegory of Socrates' virtues. Here, Socrates is the God of Love of Plato's myth, as "he is most like love and for that reason the truest lover" (157). Having identified divine love with the chaste love of Socrates, the speaker then sets out to show what divine love is not, and it is in this context that Ficino draws most heavily from Lucretius: "What good does this Socratic love do the human race? Why should it be celebrated with such great praises? What harm does its opposite do?' I shall tell you..."(158).

Ficino cites Lucretius three times in his discussion of the causes and effects of sensual love. Significantly, all three passages are drawn from the same family of erotic imagery in the poem—traditional images of erotic affliction, rendered by Lucretius with a chill, ironic twist. This irony is lost on Ficino, and thus Lucretius' erotic vocabulary takes on a whole new resonance in the De Amore. He transforms Lucretius' love imagery in two ways: by integrating it into his discussion as straightforward physiological evidence, and by reading into it the fateful story of Lucretius' amatory suffering and suicide. In this light, Lucretius' coldly rational attack on love becomes the embittered testimony of a mad melancholic poet, written in a brief interval of lucidity (per intervalla insaniae).
This misprision has fundamental implications not only for the meaning and intent of Lucretius' erotic imagery, but for the role that imagery plays in Ficino's treatise. Stripped of its irony, Lucretius' imagery of erotic obsession no longer functions as deflationary weaponry aimed at the mythological and idealized conception of love, such as that championed by Ficino, but now instead partakes in the very same erotic discourse that it seeks to undermine.
For Ficino, erotic fixation is a disease of the blood and spirits that poisons the heart: "We think the madness by which those who are desperately in love are afflicted is, strictly speaking, caused by a disease of the heart, and that it is wrong to associate the most sacred name of love with these" (158). This is not metaphorical imagery, but straightforward pathology. We should remind ourselves that Ficino's first calling was medicine, and he is speaking here self- consciously as a doctor. Ficino likens erotic obsession to other types of virulent infection, such as leprosy, pneumonia, consumption, and dysentery (162). Ficino's theory of medical spirits—largely traditional for its day—becomes the basis for his pathology of erotic fixation (it is also, significantly, the basis for his physiological analysis of melancholy), and provides the physiological context for his citations of Lucretius' poem. Seen in this light, Lucretius' ironic language of erotic affliction may be read as straightforward medical pathology.
For instance, Ficino quotes from Lucretius: "Hinc in te primum Veneris ducedinis in cor / Stillavit gutta, et succesit frigida cura" (IV.1059-.1060).

Lucretius' evocation of the name of Venus in this context is in itself ironic: "Nec divinitus...Venerisque sagittis" (IV.1278). Indeed, the gods play no active role in Lucretius' materialistic universe. Yet, Ficino employs the metaphor literally, and uses it to illustrate the virulence of amatory infection—how the sweet, thin medical spirits of a younger man infect the heart of his older lover.
Ficino effects a similar transformation of the lines:

Idque petit mens unde est saucia amore.
Namque omnes plerumque cadunt in vulnus, et illam
Emicat in partem sanguis unde icimur ictu.
Et si communis set, hostem ruber occupat humor
(4.1057- 1051). 37

And the body seeks that whence the mind is wounded by love, for we all fall for the most part toward the wound, and the blood spurts out in the direction whence we are struck by the blow; and if he is nearby, the red humor seizes the enemy (162).

Once again, here, Lucretius invokes the conventional literary trope of the saucia amore—with its accompanying mythological associations—only to undermine it, ironically associating the wound of love with a wound sustained in battle. Ficino interprets the image literally and reconciles it to his physiological framework:

In these verses, Lucretius can only mean that the blood of a man wounded by a ray of the eyes flows forward into the wounder, just as the blood of a man slain with a sword flows back on the slayer (161).

Ficino then illustrates this physiological analogy by the example of the slaying of Patroclus by Hector on the battlefield. Significantly, this mythological reference also serves as an allusion to the Symposium, which celebrates the bravery and love of Achilles who avenged his lover's death.
For Ficino, Lucretius is explicitly "the most unhappy of all lovers"(163). His very unhappiness makes his poem expert testimony; his perceptions are called upon in these matters as authoritiative. But Lucretius is more to Ficino than someone experienced in the futilities of sensual love; he is also a melancholic. Repeatedly in the De amore, Ficino returns to the theme of Lucretius' madness and melancholy. Indeed, in Speech VI, well before he cites Lucretius' poem in the treatise, he draws on the legend of Lucretius' suicide. The context here is his interpretation of the Porus and Penia allegory of Plato's Symposium. He then digresses briefly into a discussion of the relationship of love and melancholy—both how love causes melancholy and how melancholics are most susceptible to love:

Hence the body [of the lover] dries out and grows squalid, and hence lovers become melancholics. For from dry, thick, and black blood is produced melancholy, that is, black bile, which fills the head with its vapors, dries out the brain, and ceaselessly troubles the soul day and night with hideous and horrible images. This, we have read, happened to the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius on account of love; shaken first by love and then by madness, he finally laid hands on himself. [...quod Lucretio philosopho Epicureo propter amorem legimus accidisse.] 38 These things were accustomed to happen to those, who, having abused love, converted what is a desire for contemplation into a desire for embrace....When ancient physicians observed these things, they said that love was a passion very close to the disease of melancholy....And not only does love render men thus [i.e. melancholic] but conversely those who are thus by nature are more susceptible to love (121-122).

Again, in Speech VII, Ficino attributes Lucretius' suicide to his melancholy: "Melancholy provokes to sulking and bitter complaining; for these [people of melancholic temperament] the issue of love is often the same as it was for Phyllis, Dido, and Lucretius" (166). Perhaps the "bitter complaining" to which Ficino refers with regard to Lucretius is the romantic "testimony" of Book IV of the De Rerum Natura. That Lucretius should be associated here with two such legendary exemplars of erotic suffering indicates the resonance of Jerome's story in Ficino's imagination.
What are the implications of Ficino's diagnosis of Lucretius' melancholy? Perhaps there is a moralizing note in Ficino's association of Lucretius with the lovesick Dido and Phyllis, who, in their human frailty, were undone by their sensuality and (in Dido's case literally) self-immolated through desire. It is interesting that in adapting Jerome's account of Lucretius' suicide to the De Amore, Ficino edits out the love-philtre, and thereby makes Lucretius answerable for his own downfall. But Lucretius keeps company in the De Amore with other less symbolically charged melancholics—among them the divine lover Socrates (122). As a physician, Ficino had a personal stake in investigating the potentialities of the melancholic disposition: he was a melancholic himself. He devotes the better part of his medical treatise De Vita to both vindicating the melancholic temperament and administering to its special needs. For Ficino, melancholy was at once the most physiologically and psychologically treacherous of the four temperaments, but also that most given to intellectual genius and poetic inspiration. Writing to Cavalcanti, he says of melancholy: "I shall in agreement with Aristotle say that this nature itself is a unique and divine gift." 39 Speaking of the madness associated with melancholy in the De Vita, he says:

Democritus too says no one can ever be intellectually outstanding except those who are deeply excited by some sort of madness. My author Plato in the Phaedrus seems to approve this, saying that without madness one knocks at the doors of poetry in vain. Even if he perhaps intends divine madness to be understood here, nevertheless, according to the physicians, madness of this kind is never incited in anyone else but melancholics. (I.v. pg.117)

We have here the blueprint for the suffering romantic genius of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In a letter entitled "Poeticus furor a Deo est" addressed to Antonio Pelotti and Baccio Ugolini, Ficino associates Lucretius with divinely inspired poetic frenzy, saying of him: "...neither prudent men nor those learned from their youth have proved to be the best poets. Indeed, some were out of their minds, as Homer and Lucretius were known to have been.... Passing beyond the limitations of skill, these men suddenly produced astonishing poetry." 40
Ficino's conception of melancholy, then, is not monolithic. Indeed, his portrait of the melancholic has been singled out for the psychological and emotional complexity that it affords the creative thinker, for the manifold positive and negative potentialities that it embraces, for its precocious "insight" into the dualistic tensions inherent to the creative sensibility. In his profile of the melancholic, Ficino recognizes the paradoxical capacity of the creative genius for both transcendence and self-destruction. And it is these potentialities and paradoxes that Ficino explores in the De amore. It is a conscious symmetry, I think, that in Speech VII Ficino brings together the examples of Lucretius and Socrates, the one vanquished by base erotic obsession, the other exalted and transformed by his love of God. And perhaps somewhere in the middle is the poet, philosopher, and melancholy lover, Ficino himself, exploring in the treatise his own nature, his own potentialities.




Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.

Brown, Robert D. Lucretius on Love and Sex: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura IV, 1030-1287 .... Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition XV. New York: Brill, 1987.

Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia. Trans. and ed. Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.

Ficino, Marsilio. Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love. Trans. Sears Jayne. Woodstock, CT: Spring, 1985.

——. Commentary on Plato's Symposium. Trans. Sears Jayne. University of Missouri Studies, Vol. XIX No.1. Columbia, MO: Missouri UP, 1944.

——. The Letters of Marsilio Ficino. Vol.I. London: Shepherd-Walwyn, 1979.

Hadzsits, George Depue. Lucretius and His Influence. Our Debt to Greece and Rome. New York: Cooper Square, 1963.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1964.

——. "Marsilio Ficino and His Circle." Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters. Storia e Letteratura: Raccolta di studi e testi 54. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1956.

——, ed. Supplementum Ficinianum: Marsilii Ficini Fiorentini Philosophi Platonici opuscula inedita et dispersa. 2 vols. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1937.

Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Trans. W.H.D. Rouse. Loeb Classical Library 181. Revised ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. New Series, Volume 2. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.



Endnotes

1
245b, Bollingen translation. See Brown, Robert, Lucretius on Love and Sex, pg.115n which led me to this quotation.
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2
Diogenes Laertius, Report of Epicurus' Ethical Views, 10.118.
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3
The question of Ficino's unacknowledged debt to scholastic, literary, and ancient sources and influences in the De amore is of course a huge one, which is why I speak here only of his direct references and appeals to Plato as an authority.
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4
For a general history of Lucretius in the Renaissance, see Hadzsits, George, Lucretius and His Influence, ch.XI, pg.248-283, from which I have culled most of this background information.
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5
The first edition of De Rerum Natura was printed in Brescia. There are three extant copies. See Gordon, Cosmo, A Bibliography of Lucretius, pg.49-50. Although I am dealing with the text and translation into English of Ficino's original Latin commentary on the Symposium, I will refer to it in this paper by the less prolix Italian title De amore.
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6
See Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, pg.39. The only work—to my knowledge—dealing with Ficino's "Epicureanism" is a short article entitled "L'Epicureismo di Marsilio Ficino" (in the Rivista di filosofia scientifica, X [1891], 428ff), which was brought to my attention in the works of Kristeller. (Unfortunately, I do not yet read scholarly Italian.)
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7
See Jayne, Sears, Commentary... pg.29n and Kristeller, "Marsilio Ficino and his Circle", Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, pg.49. Jayne cites only one burned commentary; Kristeller's plural "commentaries" suggests that Ficino may have burned more than one.
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8
See Hadzsits, pg.258. As a very general work, this book suffers from an inadequate scholarly apparatus, and does not list the source for this information. Sears Jayne remarks that Ficino may have been under the impression that Epicurus was a follower of Plato, and may therefore have undertaken his study of Epicureanism on that account. See Commentary..., pg.29n.
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9
Harold Bloom, in Poetry and Repression, has pointed out the etymology of "text": from teks, meaning "to weave"; "to fabricate", pg.1.
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10
I use the verb legere here in its full Latin sense, meaning not only "to read", but "to pick"; "to select"; "to gather together"; "to follow in the footsteps of".
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11
See Loeb edition 1975 for all Latin citations and English translations. For short quotations I may supply my own translation, as I have done here.
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12
The Epicureans, among other philosophical schools, considered both men and women to emit semen. Thus, Lucretius may be referring here to both male and female sexual desire. The specific imagery, however, seems to refer to male physiology. The mens here has a special force: Epicureans considered all delusions (such as love) to derive from the faulty interpretation of sensory data—not from the senses themselves, which never err.
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13
Robert Brown also makes this suggestion. He also rightly points out, however, that Plato also recognizes "the existence of an unphilosophical kind of love—like that attacked by Lucretius—which is entirely sensual and contrary to reason." See pg.86n.
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14
David Clark, Ph.D. candidate in Columbia's Classics department, drew my attention to this passage.
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15
Misprision is Harold Bloom's term for the creative misreading of one's philosophic or artistic predecessors, by which the author is afforded an illusion of creative autonomy or freedom. See Poetry... pg.4ff.
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16
See the Supplementum Ficinianum vol.II for these letters (pgs.81ff). My attention was drawn to the letters in the works of Kristeller.
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17
See the introduction to the Three Books on Life for a discussion of Ficino's syncretism. "Habits of Mind", pg.39ff.
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18
This appears to be his intent in his letter to Michael Mercati of 1457. His letter to Petro Pactio of c.1457, which elaborates a similar allegory, seems more straightforwardly didactic. See the Supplementum Ficinianum, pgs. 81 and 84-85.
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19
Thanks to Professor Rice for pointing out the venator sapientiae motif. My examples can be found in the following letters respectively: I. Antonio Seraphico (pg.83); II. Michael Mercati (pg.81); III. Petro Pactio (pg.84-85); IV. Pactio and Mercati; V. Pactio. Ibid.
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20
Ibid., pg.82.
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21
Indeed, Epicurus was more of an ascetic than a hedonist. The erroneous reputation for sensuous living that the ancient Epicureans had gained in the Christian era is carried over in the current colloquial sense of the term epicurean.
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22
See Sears Jayne, pg.29n. He cites the Opera Omnia, pg. 993, for this statement.
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23
See The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, vol.I. pg.55. The letters of the first volume were written between 1457 and 1476.
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24
Commentary, pg.168. Since I will be quoting frequently from the text of Sears Jayne's translation of the Commentary, I will, from this point on, use parenthetical citation when referring to it.
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25
See Nussbaum, Martha, Therapy of Desire, pg.143n. She cites Perelli (1969) and Logre (1946) respectively for these views. She also notes that many recent scholars have begun to question this approach to the poem.
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26
Ibid. From Baileys's commentary on the De Rerum Natura of 1947.
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27
Nussbaum's translation, pg.140.
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28
See Jayne, Commentary..., Introduction, pg.17.
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29
See Jayne's introduction to the Commentary for a discussion of the esoteric meaning of Cavalcanti's poem, pg.17.
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30
For Lucretius' clearest refutation of the existence of absractions, see I.449ff.
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31
Jayne's 1944 edition, pg.114. There are minor textual variations here from the Loeb edition of Lucretius.
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32
I should mention here that Lucretius' prescription is precisely related to his materialistic explanation for the causes of erotic fixation. For Lucretius, amor arises from delusion—from the faulty interpretation of sensory data. Lucretius' attack on love develops out of a broader discussion of how images—or simulacra—although real in themselves, can lead to perceptual error. Quite literally for Lucretius, love is in the same category of perceptual experience as dreams of the dead and nocturnal ejaculation. Of course, this has little, if any, bearing on Ficino's use of the quotation.
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33
In his introduction to the commentary, Jayne says that Ficino cites Lucretius in this discussion "in support of the argument that physical love must be a good thing because it is physiologically natural" (16). I am at a loss how as to how Jayne arrived at this conclusion regarding the discussion of physical love in Speech VII. Although it is physiologically natural, sensual love, for Ficino, is in no way "a good thing". See, for instance, his condemnation of homosexuality on pg.163, and this is the context for much of his citation from Lucretius. Perhaps Jayne is conflating this discussion with Ficino's praise of procreative vulgar love earlier in the treatise.
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1060
Jayne (1944), pg.110.
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35
See Brown, pg. 203.
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36
Ibid.
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37
Jayne (1944), pg.110.
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38
The Latin is from Sears Jayne's 1944 edition, pg.87. All my references to the Latin text are from this edition.
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39
"Ficino's Melancholy", De Vita, pg.22.
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40
The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, Vol.I, pg.98.
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