The farmer, Virgil tells us in the finale to book 2, would be truly fortunate, could he but understand the advantages of his lot. For though he may lack wealth and luxury, he enjoys the greatest blessing of all: secura quies (‘untroubled peace’), far from war and the rumour of war. But this is only part of the story: throughout the poem, the farmer is represented as a warrior, engaged in a constant battle against the destructive and chaotic forces of nature. In this chapter, we shall consider these conflicting images of agriculture in relation to the traditions of both epic poetry and agricultural writing. Once again, however, the main focus of my discussion will be the DRN. Like Virgil, Lucretius holds out to his reader the promise of peace and tranquillity, but also depicts the cosmos as the setting for a perpetual war waged between the atoms and natural forces. He asks us to reject the wars and violence which have dominated human history, while accepting the reality of atomic ‘warfare’. As we shall see, this paradox, which is so central to Lucretius' text, becomes in Virgil the expression of an insoluble dilemma: if violence and conflict are inherent in the physical nature of the world, can they ever be wholly banished from the human soul or from human society?

War in Lucretius

Lucretius' use of military imagery seems not to derive from his Epicurean sources. Epicurus does not speak of the war of the atoms, or of ‘fighting’ his philosophical opponents.