St Jerome and the Love Potion

Near the end of the fourth century, the Christian priest and theologian St Jerome circulated a story about Titus Lucretius Carus, the Roman poet-philosopher: ‘Lucretius’, as he is known to posterity, ‘was driven mad by a love potion, and when, during the intervals of his insanity, he had written a number of books, which were later emended by Cicero, he killed himself by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of his life’. Almost all ensuing scholarly accounts consider this story to be an apocryphal invention that was published in order to vilify and discredit the most prominent voice of a philosophical tradition called ancient atomism. Contrary to all these accounts, however, we should not so readily dismiss this story, but instead take it quite seriously. Rather than read it as a slanderous act of defamation, we can see it as a confused interpretation of Lucretius’ attempt to transmit, in the form of his now famous text De rerum natura, the power of his own formative and forceful encounter with the idea of atomism. Rather than simply the deranged effects of a love potion, this defining work of ancient atomism was the articulated effect of a truly overwhelming conception of the world. When Lucretius first encountered the idea of atomism, his entire way of thinking and living was shaken to the core. He wrote De rerum natura in order to make sense of the dynamism of this aleatory encounter and thereby cultivate an affirmative, joyful and pleasure-filled life. When that life eventually became impossible, due simply to the natural limits of the human body, it was time to die. After all, death is nothing to an atomist.

Contemporary scholars have tried to conceptualise the intensity of such an encounter by turning to the model of the sublime. Longinus, the first ancient figure to write about sublimity, describes it this way: the sublime ‘tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator's whole power at a single blow’, leaving the witness stunned, deranged, groping for a way to make sense of such violence.