ay surprise the Muses in relenting
moods, and seek out 'mollia tempora fandi;' all times and seasons
must serve him; the terrible, the discordant, the sublime, and the
magnificent shall drag his thundering car-wheels, as he lists, along
the road of thought.

At the very outset of the poem we feel ourselves within the grasp of
the Roman imagination. It is no Aphrodite, risen from the waves and
white as the sea-foam, that he invokes:--

AEneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas,
alma Venus.

This Venus is the mother of the brood of Rome, and at the same time
an abstraction as wide as the universe. See her in the arms of
Mavors:--

in gremium qui saepe tuum se
reicit aeterno devictus volnere amoris,
atque ita suspiciens tereti cervice reposta
pascit amore avidos inhians in te, dea, visus,
eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore.
hunc tu, diva, tuo recubantem corpore sancto
circumfusa super, suavis ex ore loquelas
funde petens placidam Romanis, incluta, pacem.

In the whole Lucretian treatment of love there is nothing really
Greek. We do not hear of Eros, either as the mystic mania of Plato,
or as the winged boy of Meleager. Love in Lucretius is something
deeper, larger, and more elemental than the Greeks conceived; a
fierce and overmastering force, a natural impulse which men share in
common with the world of things.[1] Both the pleasures and the pains
of love are conceived on a gigantic scale, and described with an
irony that has the growl of a roused lion mingled with its
laughter:--

ulcus enim vivescit et inveterascit alendo
inque dies gliscit furor atque aerumna gravescit.

The acts of love and the insanities of passion are viewed from no
standpoint of sentiment or soft emotion, but always in relation to
philosophical ideas, or as the manifestation of something terrible
in human life. Yet they lose nothing thereby in the voluptuous
impression left upon the fancy:--

sic in amore Venus simulacris ludit amantis,
nec satiare queunt spectando corpora coram
nec manibus quicquam teneris abradere membris
possunt errantes incerti corpore toto.
denique cum membris conlatis flore fruuntur
aetatis, iam cum praesagit gaudia corpus
atque in eost Venus ut muliebria conserat arva,
adfigunt avide corpus iunguntque salivas
oris et inspirant pressantes dentibus ora,
nequiquam, quoniam nil inde abradere possunt
nec penetrare et abire in corpus corpore toto.