Gail Hareven’s short story ‘The Slows’ unfolds through a trick of focalization1. The first-person narrator is an anthropologist who has been living with a deviant population – the ‘Slows’ of the story’s title – for some fifteen years. He has just learned that his field study is about to come to end with the closing of the ‘Preserves’ and, we can infer, the destruction of his research subjects. After a night of hard drinking, he arrives early in the office the next morning in search of coffee only to find a Slow waiting for him, a female. Instead of buzzing the security guards, he decides to see if he can get some final data out of the intruder. He immediately questions the wisdom of his decision when she reaches behind the desk for what he suspects is a weapon. What she lifts up, to his surprise, is a ‘human larva’ or, in the language of the Slows, a ‘baby’.

It is this larva that turns out to divide our narrator from his savage guest. Indeed, it is what shocks us out of our identification with him. For the Slows, we find out, are defined by their refusal to submit their infants to A.O.G.: Accelerated Offspring Growth, which turns newborns into autonomous, productive adults in less than three months. And what defines the narrator through whose posthuman eyes we view the ‘squirm-ing pinkish creature’ is sheer disgust. There are times in a person’s life that are meant to be private, he observes, and the state of infancy certainly ranks among the most important. He cannot fathom why the Slows are so attached to the helplessness of their larvae, the ‘deplorable fervor’ of the little creatures, their long-term dependence on the mother and her ‘milk bulges’. The story leaves us with a question. Does our naked vulnerability contribute in some significant way to our definition as human?

Lucretius had no doubt that the human condition could be summed
up by the image of the defenseless infant. Toward the beginning of Book 5 of the De Rerum Natura, as he is preparing to discuss the origins of our world, he introduces the figure of the newborn in lines that enjoyed a robust afterlife as a recognizably Lucretian topos2.

Tum porro puer, ut saevis proiectus ab undis
navita, nudus humi iacet, infans, indigus omni
vitali auxilio, cum primum in luminis oras
nixibus ex alvo matris natura profudit,
vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut aequumst
cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum (Lucr. 5.222-7).

Then further the child, like a sailor cast forth by the cruel waves, lies naked upon the ground, speechless, in need of every kind of vital support, as soon as nature has spilt him forth with throes from his mother’s womb into the regions of light, and he fills all around with doleful wailings – as is but just, seeing that so much trouble awaits him in life to pass through3.

The idea that we are born into such great unhappiness that it is better not to be born at all has well-known parallels in earlier Greek authors4. But Lucretius is not primarily after the grim pessimism familiar from archaic poetry (and condemned by Epicurus himself [Ep. Men. 126]). He is engaged, rather, in a polemic, first launched in Book 2, against the idea that the world was created providentially for us. The naked infant is the crowning proof in a series of arguments designed to show how very inhospitable the world is to human beings. In fact, what distinguishes us from other species is that we are least at home here:

At variae crescunt pecudes armenta feraeque,
nec crepitacillis opus est, nec cuiquam adhibendast
almae nutricis blanda atque infracta loquella,
nec varias quaerunt vestes pro tempore caeli,
denique non armis opus est, non moenibus altis,
qui sua tutentur, quando omnibus omnia large
tellus ipsa parit naturaque daedala rerum (Lucr. 5.228-34).

But the diverse flocks and herds grow, and wild creatures; they need no rattles, none of them wants to hear the coaxing and broken baby-talk of the foster-nurse, they seek no change of raiment according to the season, lastly they need no weapons, no lofty walls to protect their own, since for them all the earth herself brings forth all they want in abundance, and nature the cunning fashioner of things.

The human race, in short, seems to be the only species shut out of nature’s spontaneous bounty5.

The idea that humans alone have needs that are unmet by the natural world can be traced back to Greek rationalist prehistory, and not least of all to the fragments of Democritus6. But from the later fourth century bce on, it gained a polemical edge in response to the growing traction of the opposing claim that the world was created for the sake of people (hominum causa). By the time Lucretius was writing his poem, anthropocentric teleology was flourishing, no doubt thanks in large part to the Stoics’ enthusiasm for teleology (their anthropocentrism is more complicated)7. He was most certainly not alone in trying to refute it. We have evidence of criticisms by others – not only Epicureans, but also Academics and Sceptics – and often for reasons similar to those introduced by Lucretius (such as the abundance of creatures deadly to humans and the vast swaths of uninhabitable regions)8. Still, Lucretius expends considerable rhetorical energy on dismissing the idea that nature bestows providential care on humankind. Moreover, the further criticism that humans are far worse off than all the other species appears to be a particularly Lucretian preoccupation, more at home in the poetic and moralizing tradition than in philosophical and scientific debates about teleology9. However much Lucretius’s approach to anthropogony and anthropology must cleave to Epicurus’s own (lost) account, then, it shows signs of being marked by his acute awareness of the unusual vulnerability of human beings within an indifferent natural world10. I refer to an approach to the human condition in these terms as ‘negative exceptionalism’.

From the perspective of negative exceptionalism, we can see more easily that the image of the naked child, for all the work it does in the anti-providentialist argument, poses one of the greatest challenges to the story that Lucretius will tell about the origins of humankind. For if the defenselessness so starkly on display at birth makes it difficult to argue for a benevolent creator, how can we explain the survival of the species at all? Here, too, the problem does not originate with Lucretius. The infancy of the human race is a puzzle that goes back at least to Anaximander, who seems to have believed that our first ancestors were nourished inside fish-like creatures until they reached puberty, at which point they emerged, self-sufficient, into the world11. Yet it is a puzzle, like that of negative exceptionalism more generally, that holds an uncommonly powerful charge for Lucretius in Book 5, where he aims to give an account of the success of human evolution while respecting the anti-teleology that is so foundational to Epicurean doctrine.

In this paper, I argue that the problem of nakedness, both literal and figurative, exerts considerable pressure on Lucretius’s anthropogony and his reconstruction of early human life. The vulnerability spectacularly expressed by the infant can help us better understand, in particular, Lucretius’s opaque and much-discussed explanation of the origins of the family and what has variously been called justice, altruism, pity, and friendship at 5.1011-27. What is more, recognizing the sudden appear-ance of children in Lucretius’s story of early human life makes us aware of their puzzling absence from the more primitive stages of that story and the problem posed by infancy to the survival of the human race after the very literal maternal function of the earth is exhausted and only mothers remain. The emergence of the nuclear family entrusts children to fathers, who take over the protective role once exercised by nature. Yet by taking on the paternal role, men recognize their own vulnerability. They are thus compelled to form a community of equals, thereby completing the transition from nature to a human nature that is nevertheless deeply gendered, a fact that has been largely ignored by scholars. The success of human nature will be, of course, mixed. However much social life realizes human nature it also creates abundant conditions for its perversion, a problem Lucretius faces not just within his narrative but as a poet seeking to undo the damage caused by society to his readers and enable their flourishing. And whether he achieves his aim has much to do with how well he can account for our survival – or rather what Lucretius describes at 5.1027 as the propagation of the species to the present day – in the absence of providential care.

I have adopted an interpretive strategy that attends to the ‘poetic logic’ of Lucretius’s account as it responds to philosophical and scientific problems – namely, the problems of, first, reconciling the exceptional vulnerability of humans with their survival as a species in a world with-out providence; and, second, explaining the role of communities in this evolutionary success. Or, to put it another way, I inquire into how Lucretius confronts specific problems within the tradition of natural history through the conceptual idiom of Book 5. In pursuing the poetic logic of negative exceptionalism, I hope not only to shed light on the difficult excursus at 5.1011-27 and the prehistory more generally but also to contribute to our understanding of how poetry, philosophy, and science work together in the De Rerum Natura.

The paper falls into two uneven halves. In the first part, I concentrate on how Lucretius handles vulnerability in the earliest stages of human life both as a poetic theme and as a plot device that drives human evolution. In recent years, scholars have succeeded in advancing discussion of the prehistory beyond the debate about progressivism versus primitivism towards a more nuanced and incisive look at its competing elements12. They have enriched our understanding of how Lucretius engages with his major sources, including Golden Age myths, the ‘rationalist’ pre-histories that start to appear in the fifth century bce, and Epicurus’s own On Nature, a text largely lost to us. Building on this work, I argue that the well-known ambivalence of the prehistory serves a specific purpose in that it enables Lucretius to keep humans alive while mounting the necessary pressure to split them off from the natural world.

In the second, longer part of the paper, I inquire into the ways in which the unresolved problem of the prehistory – namely, the uncertain future of the human race – shapes Lucretius’s description of the origins of sociality. If the early history of humans has been approached in predominantly poetic terms, 5.1011-27 has been seen largely in terms of doctrinal Epicurean positions. It is often read in isolation from the rest of the poem, paired instead with other sources on the social dimension of Epicurean ethics. While such an approach has fleshed out the philosophical background to the passage, it has not succeeded in accounting for all the details of Lucretius’s story. I cannot claim to have solved all the difficulties either. But I do hope to show that we can make better sense of the passage by taking it as part of Lucretius’s larger attempt to manage the exceptional status of the human race, an attempt that must be understood not simply in analytical and philosophical terms, but also in poetic and narrative ones.

I. The State of Nature

Despite the lack of consensus regarding the targets of Lucretius’s argument against anthropocentric teleology, we can easily conclude he saw it as an important one in his arsenal13. The argument first appears in Book 2, as I noted above, where Lucretius attacks the belief that the gods are responsible for the fixity of the seasons, the resulting success of human agriculture, and, most important, the propagation of the species. It is obvious to anyone, he declares, even if they lack knowledge of atomic reality, that the world was not created on our behalf:

Nam quamvis rerum ignorem primordia quae sint,
hoc tamen ex ipsis caeli rationibus ausim
confirmare aliisque ex rebus reddere multis,
nequaquam nobis divinitus esse creatam
naturam mundi: tanta stat praedita culpa.
quae tibi posterius, Memmi, faciemus aperta (Lucr. 2.177-82).

For although I might not know what first-beginnings of things are, this nevertheless I would make bold to maintain from the ways of heaven itself, and to demonstrate from many another source, that the nature of the universe has by no means been made for us through divine power: so great are the faults it stands endowed with. All this, Memmius, I will make clear to you later.

Lucretius promises to come back to the flaws that vitiate the argument for a providential creator. In Book 5, he fulfills that promise. The argument is again introduced with the claim, repeated almost verbatim from the earlier version, that one need not have a grasp of the first-beginnings to see that the world was not made for us (5.195-9). Lucretius once more blames its flaws, but now he goes on to list them: wild animals, lands made uninhabitable by extremes of heat and cold, grudging soil that forces men to work hard for their sustenance, and untimely death. It is at this point that we reach the newborn.

The invocation of the child concludes the argument against providentialism, and Lucretius moves on to a demonstration of the mortality of the earth. But the indictment of cosmic benevolence continues to be felt when Lucretius deals with our place in the natural world more directly in his account of the origins of the human race. It is felt, more specifically, as a tension between the harsh state of affairs in the present and the primeval conditions of human existence. For what is so remarkable about the story of early human life is that it flies in the face, at least initially, of the idea that the earth is indifferent or hostile to people. In the beginning, we, too, were provided for by a very mother-like nature. Lucretius is thus under obligation to explain how the break in our harmonious relationship with the earth came about without destroying the human race.

The first human young gain access to the care of the earth by being lumped together with the other species in the phrase mortalia saecla (5.791, 805)14. Yet if the specificity of the human is suppressed at this point, it resurfaces in the surprisingly anthropomorphic image of the earth in its youth. The spontaneous emergence of animal life is due first and foremost to the abundance of heat and moisture, crucial factors for organic development in virtually all our early medical and biological texts15. But these factors alone are not sufficient for viable life forms. Rather than arising directly from the earth, the first animals gestate in disembodied wombs that take root in suitable places, forcing their way out into the world only once they have reached an appropriate age16. The earth sends forth a milk-like liquid to nourish the newborns (pueris), who are clothed in the warmth of the young earth and sleep on beds of downy grass17. Even if, then, the earth was not created for us, the fact that it created us seems to entail, at least initially, the provision of vital support, just as, Lucretius says, nature directs milk to the breasts of a new mother to nourish the infant (5.813-15)18. The language of provision, admittedly, does not seem appropriate to an orthodox Epicurean. The care received by the first animals should be the outcome of contingent processes19. Yet the earth’s assimilation to a mother carries with it a cluster of ideas that resist disentanglement.

The motif of maternity is, of course, a live wire in the poem. When Lucretius remarks at 5.795-6 that the earth, by virtue of having created all things, merits the title of ‘mother’, we are probably meant to recall the extended Magna Mater passage in Book 2 (2.586-660) and, more distantly, the figure of Venus that opens the poem in its most famous allegorical excursus20. Those passages, like the discussion in Book 5, build on a longstanding analogy between the earth and a mother21. Yet whereas calling the earth ‘mother’ in Book 2 is fraught with the risks of mistaking something lacking even sensation for a personified figure and failing to understand the true nature of the gods, the surreal maternity of the earth in Book 5 has a crucial pragmatic function in that it subtly resolves the problem of caring for the first living creatures. Lucretius borrows the spontaneous wombs and the lactating earth not from the poets or religious cult but from early biological writing and, presumably, from Epicurus himself, if we are to trust Censorinus’s account of his beliefs22. To the extent that it solves a pressing logistical difficulty, the earth presumably acquires the name of ‘mother’ legitimately. That is not to say that Lucretius’s language and imagery here, and especially the extent to which he personifies the earth, do not test the limits of poetic artifice, threatening to implicate Lucretius’s own account in the myths he sets out to counteract. Nevertheless, from a pragmatic perspective, the pressure on earth’s function qua mother has to do with time. For the earth, like a woman, eventually grows old and can no longer give birth, at least not so prodigiously (5.826-33). The name of ‘mother’ thus points primarily toward an earlier phase of natural history rather than to a different register of representation within the poem.

Even before the exaggerated fecundity of the earth disappears, how-ever, we run into the problem of how the different species that have been created spontaneously will be perpetuated. For while the care furnished by the earth looks suspiciously providential, the principle of randomness flagrantly rules the actual production of living beings, preventing the earth from producing the same types of creatures with any regularity. Under these conditions, it is up to the creatures themselves to reproduce in kind. Lucretius signals the shift from spontaneous generation towards sexual reproduction succinctly:

Sic igitur mundi naturam totius aetas
mutat, et ex alio terram status excipit alter,
quod tulit ut nequeat, possit quod non tulit ante (Lucr. 5.834-6).

So therefore time changes the nature of the whole world, and one state of the earth gives place to another, so that which bore cannot, and what could not bear can23.

Yet the transition is not, in truth, so straightforward, as we learn when Lucretius narrates what happened in the experimental period between the earth-wombs and regularized sexual procreation. He dwells, first, on those creatures that make it out of the first phase without crossing into the second, that is, the ‘monsters’ (portenta) randomly generated by the young earth, of which some are almost immediately doomed, while others fail to feed themselves or reproduce. The failure of these types throws into relief what it takes to become a viable species: the capacity to gain nourishment independently; the successful transport of seed to the genitals; and the sexual congress of male and female (5.851-4)24.

But even these attributes do not guarantee the success of a species. In the next phase, Lucretius turns from the mechanics of survival to the survival of the fittest. He points first to those qualities that enabled different species to avoid extinction: the courage of the lion, the cunning of the fox, the speed of the stag. He then creates a special class of animals who owe their survival to the protection of human beings, who happened to find them useful: dogs, horses, sheep, and cattle. Those animals that fall into neither of these categories – that is, animals who are neither endowed with special qualities nor taken under the wing of humans – are doomed to disappear from the earth. They disappear because they are unable to propagate (multaque tum interiisse animantum saecla necessest / nec potuisse propagando procudere prolem, 5.855-6; see also 5.850). It is not that they lack the physical capacity for sexual reproduction, but rather that they lack the skills and the strength to survive to an age when they would be capable of reproducing.

It is worth pausing here to survey what at first glance appears to be a disruption in the chronology of the prehistory. Lucretius presents, as if on the same plane, the survival of animals in the wild and the survival of animals that owe their existence to human beings. What is missing from this picture is an account of how humans not only survived but also acquired a position in the natural order that allowed them to extend protection to other species. Indeed, the people in question seem to be at a settled level of domesticity – among the animals to be protected are ‘load-bearing’ horses, cattle, and sheep – that is notably out of place here. When Lucretius focuses on humans directly a little less than a hundred lines later, they are still at a primitive stage of development, isolated from one another and dependent on nature for their own survival.

It is possible to chalk up the intrusion of this later stage to the chrono-logical fuzziness of the prehistory25. The displacement, however, is not simply temporal but, I would argue, calculated. For what Lucretius has done is effectively shift human beings into the position properly occupied by natura by making them capable of determining the survival of other species26. It is true that humans are not exactly like nature. They bestow security in exchange for the utility the animals provide (utilitas: 5.860, 870, 873), in contrast to the bounty freely provided by nature27. Nevertheless, it is humans who are primarily responsible for feeding these species and keeping them safe, bestowing (damus) these rewards on them just as nature grants (tribuit) certain qualities to animals who survive in the wild. More important still, even if humans are technically inside the world of competitive survival, they remain apart from the other species for the simple reason that their own existence is never called into question (the utility of domestic animals is not represented as a prerequisite of survival)28. Rather, by establishing humans here as protectors instead of a species in need of protection, Lucretius deftly exempts them from the struggle for survival in which they should, at this very moment, be engaged. People are invested with the evolutionary advantages of the community before it has taken shape.

Lucretius’s sleight of hand is strategic. For it allows him to gloss over any concerns about the competitiveness of the human race by projecting a more ‘advanced’ stage of the anthropology back into the primordial contest for survival. Yet if any hint of human weakness is muted at the level of narration, the particular vulnerability of the species is intimated obliquely in the following excursus, where Lucretius sets out to disprove the possibility that Centaurs (and a host of other mythical creatures) ever existed. He begins by observing the lag in the development of the child in relationship to that of the horse: while the horse is already in his prime at three years of age, this is not at all the case for the child who, ‘even at this time will often in sleep seek his mother’s milky breast’ (5.884-5)29. It is only when the powers of the horse are beginning to fail that the child arrives at maturity. The belated maturity of the human child, together with the infantile dependence it entails, thus lingers in the background of Lucretius’s account of species survival, where it exerts a quiet pressure on the logistics of his account. Acknowledging that pressure can help us understand why children and propagation become so important down the road.

There are no children at all, however, when the chronology straightens out and we pick up the thread of early human life. These first people, in fact, arrive on the scene as unusually self-reliant adults, wandering monad-like through a world that has grown markedly harsher than it was during the spring of creation. The toughness of early adult humans obviously compensates for their nakedness in this new climate: thick bones and tough sinews protect against fluctuations of temperature, strange foods, and disease (5.925-8). In other respects, though, these people still rely on what is provided by the earth, which remains in its ‘flowering infancy’ (novitas... florida, 5.943). The land continues to produce food of its own accord (sponte sua, 5.938); the acorns and arbute-berries are more abundant and larger than they are now (5.940-2). Rivers and springs invite these primitive people to drink, just as they call still now to the ‘thirsting generations of beasts’ (sitientia saecla ferarum, 5.945-7).

Early humans, who ‘pass their lives after the wide-wandering fashion of wild beasts’ (volgivago vitam tractabant more ferarum, 5.932), are thus fully integrated into the natural world. Lucretius’s description of their ongoing sympathetic relationship with that world, in spite of the hardening of the earth, returns us to their original inclusion in the mortalia saecla after the excursus on species survival and the debunking of myths about impossible hybrids. The inclusion of human beings in the natural community obviates, at least at this point, the need for social relationships, and Lucretius is clear that early people have no concern for others30.

Nec commune bonum poterant spectare, neque ullis
moribus inter se scibant nec legibus uti.
quod cuique obtulerat praedae fortuna, ferebat
sponte sua sibi quisque valere et vivere doctus (Lucr. 5.958-61).

They could not look to the common good, they did not know how to govern their intercourse by custom and law. Whatever prize fortune gave to each, that he carried off, every man taught to live and be strong for himself at his own will.

The repetition of sponte sua at 5.961 complements the description of the earth’s spontaneous abundance, enforcing a vision of natural harmony. At the same time, the picture we are left with privileges not so much the dependence of people on the earth but, rather, self-sufficiency.

What is the relationship of this tough species to the first autochthonous humans we encountered at 5.791 and 5.805? It is possible to see the abrupt shift from earth-nurtured infants to autarchic adults as reflecting the life cycle of a single generation. Lucretius himself supplies some evidence for this interpretation when he declares that early humans survived without clothing or shelter because they were ‘harder’ (durius) than men are now, as is appropriate for the products of the hard earth (5.925-6). His explanation explicitly recalls the emergence of the species from the earth.

And yet, such an interpretation comes at the cost of an apparent contradiction: the earth that produced the first humans was soft, not hard. The conflict has been explained in various ways. Gordon Campbell points to the tension created by Lucretius’s adaptation of different traditions of human origin, one with its roots in myths of a tough race born from earth, trees, or stone, the other based on lush Golden Age motifs31. Joseph Farrell has drawn attention even more forcefully to the ‘text’s pointed ambivalence’ in presenting both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ aspects of early human life, arguing that we should read this tension not simply in chronological terms but also in synchronic ones representing the two sides of the human condition at any point in history32.

But while I agree with Farrell that the poetic charge of such ambivalence has not been sufficiently recognized, I see the diachronic aspect of the hard/soft distinction as indispensable to an understanding of the prehistory. It is admittedly difficult to get around the conflict between the soft earth and the hard earth if we take the creasset at 5.926 literally. But P. H. Schrijvers has offered another, more palatable strategy of interpretation. We can take the sense of creasset more loosely to mean that a hard environment and hard food give rise to a hard species. The idea that climate and terrain shape the character of a land’s inhabitants, fleshed out in the Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places, is popular in both Greece and Rome and plays a crucial role in Epicurean linguistic theory (Epic. Ep. Hdt. 75). We then end up with two phases of correspondence between the earth and human beings, each supporting a scenario where the earth provides for these people, as it does for other animals33. One way of understanding these phases is in terms of different stages in human life, infancy and maturity. In the beginning, soft children are cared for by a soft earth. Later, the now hardened earth does not simply sustain but actively gives rise to the hardness of the adults34.

Yet if we do pursue this reading, we arrive at a crucial question. If, as we have been led to expect by the image of the naked child and the proleptic reference to humans as guarantors of other species’ survival, the human race is somehow an exceptional species, what will trigger the break between such a race and everything else sustained by the earth? What will put an end to the symbiosis, both soft and hard, of humans with the natural world?

Lucretius offers us two unresolved problems capable of triggering the separation of humans from the natural world. The first has been recog-nized by a number of commentators. As the ‘hard’ stage of the prehistory wears on, Lucretius begins to introduce a gap between humans and the world around them that leaves them increasingly vulnerable; at the same time, he embeds them in the contest for survival from which they had earlier been exempted. The dangers of wild animals, in particular, loom larger (5.982-7, 990-8)35. The defenses outlined earlier are systematically inverted. Before, the lack of fire or clothing had been dealt with by having early humans shelter in woods and caves. These makeshift homes are now invaded by boars and lions, making sleep impossible. Whereas solitude had earlier signaled a life of autarchy, isolation here means that people die alone, eaten alive by wild animals or dying of their wounds with no comrade or companion to lend aid. If earlier the rough fare (pabula dura, 5.944) provided by nature had been sufficient, the threat of starvation is now acute, and the once nourishing earth turns out to harbor poisons. These dangers, especially the roving beasts and the threat of untimely death, recall Lucretius’s earlier attack on the idea that the earth was made for the sake of humans. The abrupt resurgence of that hostile world strands primitive humans in a precarious state, extending the vulnerability of the newborn to the race as a whole. It is at this moment that Lucretius, as if on cue, shifts to the origins of family and community. By recognizing his exquisite timing, we can see the excursus at 5.1011-27 as a response to the problem of vulnerability.

The second trigger for the breaking off of humans from the natural world is less visible, with the result that it has not been adequately recog-nized by commentators. It is, however, no less significant. For while the self-sufficiency of the adult human can temporarily explain the survival of the species, it does little to solve the problem of the defenseless newborn. The first generation of humans must, at some point, give way to a second and a third. The succession of generations may be implied by 5.931, where people are said to live more ferarum ‘for many rolling cycles of the sun through the heavens’ (multaque per caelum solis volventia lustra). Yet the continuity of the human race also requires a solution to a problem, namely, the problem of human infancy36. For what happens to the newborn baby after the surreally maternal earth is no longer there to provide care? It is unimaginable that the infant fends for itself (if the ‘hard earth’ produced a race of baby Hercules, Lucretius probably would have mentioned this). Its utter defenselessness was a problem recognized by the philosophical tradition from Anaximander onwards, and it is of course Lucretius himself who provides us with the powerful image of the newborn naked on the ground, ‘in need of every kind of vital support’ (indigus omni vitali auxilio)37. What this means is that the question of who will care for children in the absence of a soft earth eventually has to be dealt with. In the end, if Lucretius is vague about whether there are multiple generations, it is likely because he has not yet dealt with the problem of how to fill the function of nurture and protection exercised by the maternal earth. A newborn child will, of course, have its mother. But for reasons I discuss further below, the mother is an inadequate substitute for the earth’s maternal function: fathers, too, are required, not just as biological actors but as social ones.

For Lucretius does, in fact, deal with the problem of infantile vulnera-bility. What makes his narrative so elegantly economical is that in the excursus at 5.1011-27, he nests the response to the first problem (the vulnerability of the human race) in the second (the vulnerability of the infant). That is, as we will see, he implicates the vulnerability of children in the process by which men come to acknowledge their own vulnerability and forge societies organized by justice in place of a state of nature. The origins of the family and society are thus deeply bound to the preceding narrative insofar as they address two kinds of nakedness that, by the end of the prehistory, call out to be clothed: that of the newborn and that of a race lacking in adequate defenses, especially against the threat of wild animals. The apocalyptic but puzzling reference to narrowly averted extinction at the end of the excursus lends support to an interpretation of these lines as a response to the problems posed – but also cannily side-stepped – by the preceding account of early human life.

The passage at 5.1011-27, however, is far from lucid, and, as a result, it has been read in very different ways. In particular, it has often been used to shore up reconstructions of Epicurean views on the nature of social relationships, about which we know relatively little. Before analyzing the passage within the framework I have been establishing, then, I want to sketch some of the approaches to these lines that have privileged philosophical and doctrinal frameworks over poetic, narrative, and conceptual context. My aim in doing so is to indicate some of the problems these readings run into and to suggest other ways of conceptualizing the logic of Lucretius’s account. Only then can we tackle that account on its own terms.

II. Social Life

1. The State of the Problem

The passage in question runs as follows:

Inde casas postquam ac pellis ignemque pararunt,
et mulier coniuncta viro concessit in unum
…………………………………………………….38.
cognita sunt, prolemque ex se videre creatam,
tum genus humanum primum mollescere coepit.
ignis enim curavit ut alsia corpora frigus
non ita iam possent caeli sub tegmine ferre,
et Venus inminuit viris, puerique parentum
blanditiis facile ingenium fregere superbum.
tunc et amicitiem coeperunt iungere aventes
finitimi inter se nec laedere nec violari,
et pueros commendarunt muliebreque saeclum,
vocibus et gestu cum balbe significarent
imbecillorum esse aequum misererier omnis.
nec tamen omnimodis poterat concordia gigni,
sed bona magnaque pars servabat foedera caste;
aut genus humanum iam tum foret omne peremptum,
nec potuisset adhuc perducere saecla propago (Lucr. 5.1011-27).

Next, when they had got themselves huts and skins and fire, and woman mated with man moved into one [home, and the laws of wedlock] became known, and they saw offspring born of them, then first the human race began to grow soft. For the fire saw to it that their shivering bodies were less able to endure cold under the canopy of heaven, and Venus sapped their strength, and children easily broke their parents’ proud spirit by coaxings.

Then also neighbors began to join friendship pacts amongst themselves neither to harm nor to be harmed, and they asked protection for their children and womankind, signifying by voice and gesture with stammering tongue that it was right for all to pity the weak. Nevertheless concord could not altogether be produced, but a good part, indeed the most, kept the covenant unblemished, or else the human race would have been even then wholly destroyed, nor would birth and begetting have been able to prolong their posterity to the present day.

It is easy to see here that Lucretius is describing the beginnings of something. It is much harder to say what this something is. The excursus is sometimes said to describe the origins of justice, sometimes the origins of friendship, sometimes the origins of altruism or sympathy or pity. The difficulty can be traced in part to the brachylogy and elided transitions of Lucretius’s account. But the proliferation of interpretations is due, as well, to the different expectations that scholars have about how Epicurus viewed the relationship between the individual and a larger community. The commentary on the passage is, accordingly, a microcosm of larger debates about the relationship between narrow self-interest and a richer, Other-oriented ethics in Epicureanism39.

For the Other and, more specifically, the Other as an object of care turns out to be unavoidable in the excursus. Lucretius moves abruptly from a description of how the human race ‘softened’, in part through caring for children, to the negotiation of contracts ‘to neither harm nor be harmed’ among neighbors. In the same breath he adds that the negotiators entrusted women and children to one another on the grounds that ‘it is right that all should pity the weak’ (imbecillorum esse aequum misererier omnis, 5.1023). In his commentary, Bailey speculates that, in making provisions for the weak, Lucretius was ‘humanizing’ and ‘soften-ing’ Epicurus’s austere utilitarianism40. Yet many scholars, unsatisfied with these charges of rogue sentimentalism, have tried to reconcile these lines, and the passage more generally, with broader Epicurean tenets.

Two basic strategies, each with its own permutations, are evident. For some readers, all the aspects of the description conform to the demands of utility, making the passage consistent with the traditional reading of Epicurean hedonism. From this perspective, the word amicitiem at 5.1019 designates a pact based on self-interest rather than affection, and pity has some benefit for the community41. For others, the passage indicates the genuine importance of Other-care within Epicurean ethics. They have thus argued that it refers to non-utilitarian friendship and emphasized the affective nature of pity42.

Keimpe Algra has offered a defense of this latter position, arguing that Lucretius is describing the growth of social bonds that do not involve utility43. In place of utility he appeals to a concept more closely associated with the Stoics, namely that of ‘fellow-feeling’ (οἰκείωσις)44. But whereas for the Stoic, ‘fellow-feeling’ signifies an innate human disposition to care for others, for the Epicurean, Algra argues, it arises from the familiarity that develops when people live in close proximity to one another45. The process of familiarization begins in the family, but it also leads neighbors to negotiate ‘friendship pacts’ with one another. What makes such a reading attractive to Algra is that, on his view, Lucretius fails to give sufficient utilitarian motivation for the contracts. For despite the apparent gain from these pacts – namely, security – they seem to arise without reflection or deliberation regarding the advantages they would provide. Rather, coming close on the heels of the softening process, the contracts seem less like a calculation and more like the outcome of a physical transformation in human nature46. Algra, in other words, presents the process described by Lucretius as a spontaneous response to circumstances that exceeds any utilitarian calculation: ‘It appears that people no longer act as isolated individuals who have merely their own interests in mind; instead there is room for mutual bonds... and a certain degree of unity or concord is established’47.

It is difficult, however, to fit this reading to our text. It is one thing to say that people got used to one another, quite another to say that they sought to join together in quasi-formal pacts. It is surely important, moreover, that these pacts, later described as foedera, are devised for the purpose of protecting people from each other and, presumably, from other threats – that is, for gaining security, which is the motivation behind the formation of virtually all social relationships in Epicureanism48. In fact, it is here that we have the most obvious kernel of Epicurus’s own teachings. Lucretius’s Latin (nec laedere nec violari) translates his master’s definition of justice: ‘neither to harm nor to be harmed’ (μὴ βλάπτειν μηδὲ βλάπτεσθαι)49. Algra aims to dismiss this objection by arguing that Epicurus recognized different degrees of friendship50. But why would a contract that fits the definition of justice be a form of friendship at all, especially when friendship is defined, as it is by Algra, in non-utilitarian terms51?

It would make more sense to use ‘fellow-feeling’ to account for the growth of family bonds or the pledge to ‘pity the weak’, where utility more obviously falls short as a motivation. Yet Algra is largely uninterested in the problem of women and children52. And although the softening process is one of the reasons that he gives for pursuing a non-utilitarian explanation of the excursus at 5.1011-27, the relationship between this process and the men’s predisposition to form friendships is left vague. The concept of ‘appropriation’ ends up doing most of the work at the level of the larger community. The reading advocated by Algra leaves us, then, with an explanation in terms of Other-care where we do not seem to need it. At the same time, the explanatory force of the ‘softening’ remains untapped and the Others most in need of care – women and children – are left on the sidelines.

Before considering readings that address pity more directly, I would like to take a look at readings that see the justice contracts in terms of utility. Such an approach seems relatively straightforward. For if, as John Armstrong has observed, ‘the contracting situation arose in the first place because each party saw the other as a potential threat’, then a mutual non-interference agreement is obviously useful for acquiring peace of mind53.

But the situation is not so straightforward. For, as Phillip Mitsis has argued, Lucretius gives us no good reason why people suddenly become dangerous to one another. Before greed and envy took hold, Mitsis points out, there were no conflicts of interest to speak of54. It is indeed interesting that at almost no point in the prehistory does Lucretius mention human-on-human violence (rape is a notable exception: see 5.964). Even though such violence will be projected back into the story later on (5.1418-22), we have to acknowledge Lucretius’s ‘whitewashing’ of the prehistory55. Moreover, as Armstrong himself recognizes, ‘threats of harm or retaliation are, at this stage of social development, nowhere offered as reasons for abiding by the contract’56. We might also wonder why people become more dangerous to each other at the very moment their ‘proud spirit’ has been broken down57.

Mitsis nevertheless remains committed to a reading of the excursus in terms of ‘justice’ rather than ‘friendship’, concluding that ‘these early covenants serve more to coordinate common familial interests and to facilitate the creation of offspring than to solve conflicts of interest’58. He is almost certainly right to point to mutual benefit. Nevertheless, the apocalyptic reference that Lucretius makes to the averted extinction of the human race suggests that a serious threat motivates the formation of these pacts and the negotiations concerning the obligation to pity the weak. We may wonder further about how, exactly, the men making these pacts understand what Mitsis calls ‘familial interests’ and the importance of creating offspring.

One way around the problem of explaining sudden human-on-human violence is to locate the threats that drive the formation of contracts outside the community itself. The dangers of wild animals and starvation become increasingly acute in the final phase of the prehistory, as we saw above, suggesting that these pressures have some causal power in the next stage of Lucretius’s account. In fact, in a number of sources, both Epicurean and non-Epicurean, the first human communities form precisely to defend against attack by wild beasts59. The most relevant evidence in this context is the account of justice developed by Epicurus’s successor Hermarchus, paraphrased at length by Porphyry in his On Abstinence. The account is unambiguous on the point that the threat of animal attacks drove primitive men to band together, securing the survival of the species60. This passage, read together with the threat of beasts in Lucretius, suggests that we should understand Epicurean justice not simply in terms of a mutual non-aggression pact but in terms of a commitment to protect other members of the community against external threats such as wild animals, as Tim O’Keefe has argued61.

Such a reading is not, however, without difficulties for our under-standing of Lucretius. For while he does dwell on the vulnerability of primitive humans in the wild just before making the transition to early social arrangements, he does not draw a direct line, as Hermarchus apparently did, from these unresolved dangers to the justice contracts or the negotiation of protection for the weak. The shift from the isolated suffering of the individual to the formation of communities around contracts is interrupted by the softening of the human race by fire and domestic life62. Moreover, even if we do recognize the dangers posed by wild animals, we will not yet have determined how women and children are perceived as integral to the benefit of the community and, hence, worthy of protection.

Some defenders of a reading of 5.1011-27 in terms of utility have approached the softening process head on, seeing it as a modification in human nature that is due to a change of lifestyle and bears a direct relationship to the development of pity (as well as to the negotiation of friendship pacts)63. Instead of understanding compassion and affection as superfluous emotions or touches of Lucretian sentimentality, they have pegged them to a game-changing evolutionary shift within the species, responsible for nothing less than the survival of the species, as the last line of the excursus implies64. The position has been defended in the most detail by Gordon Campbell, who has drawn on research on altruism in contemporary evolutionary theory to vindicate the view that he ascribes to Lucretius – namely, ‘for humans it was their ability to co-operate, form friendship pacts, and pity the weak that were the particular abilities that enabled them to survive’65.

But what makes pity (or compassion or affection) so useful to the survival of the species? Here we have to be careful about conflating the two types of social relationships – justice pacts and pity for the weak – under the rubric of cooperation. There are good reasons to respect the differ-ences between the genealogy of the family and the genealogy of society in Lucretius’s account66. For one thing, if we lay too much weight on generalized feelings of affection towards others, we have to wonder what happens to the function of utility, a problem I raised earlier in response to Algra.

One could respond that utility is at work in all the developments at 5.1011-27, given that each development, in its own way, enables the species to survive. But utility in this context, if it is to apply to the emergence of the family, would have to be understood as the happy outcome of a spontaneous development towards cooperation and compassion, rather than as a good consciously or rationally sought by those entering into social relationships. There is some support for such an interpretation from a basic principle of Epicurean prehistory – namely, people stumble across what is useful before pursuing it in a reasoned manner, as we see in the origins of language67.

But if taking this line of interpretation makes it easier to explain the origins of the family and the care that it makes possible, as I argue further below, we cannot overlook the fact that 5.1019 looks like the beginning of a process whereby people begin to seek their security with at least a vague perception of its utility68. Moreover – and even more important – the negotiation of justice pacts is simply not the same as the appeal to pity. Whereas men have something to offer each other by way of security, women and children cannot barter their power to protect in exchange for protection. Lucretius acknowledges this when he emphasizes that it is men working on behalf of women and children who secure their safety69. To ignore the asymmetries created by gender is fatal to any intepretation of these lines.

I have stressed these points in order to show that we must approach the utility of social relations and any motivations for undertaking them at 5.1011-27 through a fine-grained analysis that is attentive to a persistent difference between the origins of the family, the formation of justice pacts, and pity for the weak. The desideratum for readers of 5.1011-27 is an account capable of identifying the relationship between first, the end of the prehistory; second, the softening process; and, finally, the negotiation of contracts that are evidently useful for those undertaking them. Such an account should also aim to explain the motivations behind the emergence of the nuclear family and the integration of women and children into a community formed primarily by men guaranteeing each other’s security.

The difficulties of meeting these requirements should be, by this point, apparent. Lucretius elucidates causal relations only sparingly, despite the seeming complexity of causes at work in the transition at 5.1011-27. Moreover, he is giving a historical account of the emergence of social relationships that has no direct parallel in Epicurus’s limited writings on the subject70. Nor does his account mirror that of Hermarchus, our other major Epicurean source71.

Yet for all the apparent gaps in Lucretius’s logic at 5.1011-27, we also have the poetic and narrative resources outlined earlier in this paper to guide us. Indeed, if we intend to grasp what Lucretius is doing here, we cannot avoid taking account of the conceptual momentum built up in the prehistory and the overarching themes of the anthropology. One of the central tenets of the story Lucretius tells is his decision to take the survival of the human race out of the hands of a providential creator and embed it in a non-teleological context where our survival is not guaranteed in advance. That decision entails accounting for how the species survived in a state of nature. But it also forces Lucretius to explain why our survival ultimately required us to exit that state. It is precisely at 5.1011-27 that humans first splinter off from the natural world. That splintering should play as much of a role in our interpretation of the passage as our expectations about Epicurean justice and views on the Other, not because Lucretius is a poet (rather than a philosopher) but because he sees our need to become social creatures as arising in part from the lack of care provided to us by nature.

Nevertheless, Lucretius is working in poetry. We should not be surprised, then, if the lack of care and what it entails are problems expressed not through a series of propositions but through conceptual and verbal correspondences that bind the different parts of the story together. Let us return, then, to the two kinds of vulnerability left unresolved by the prehistory: the nakedness of the newborn and the nakedness of primitive people exposed to predators and food shortages. I have suggested that the bipartite excursus at 5.1011-27, introducing, first, the origins of the nuclear family, then a social community organized around the desire for security, addresses just these two aspects – related, yet distinct – of human vulnerability. But in order to understand how these developments are related to each other, we need to turn to the origins of the family and the softening process it entails.

2. The Poetic Logic of Negative Exceptionalism

The domesticating sequence is triggered when people first acquire huts, skins, and fire, developments that appear without Lucretius indicating how they came about72. Men and women, having previously met only in chance couplings, settled down together, at which point ‘they saw the offspring created from them’ (prolemque ex se videre creatam, 5.1013)73. Lucretius goes on to describe the softening of the human race that these changes precipitate: fire makes them less resistant to the cold; sex drains their strength; and the children break the proud spirit of their parents with coaxing. Each of these factors – fire, sex, and parenthood – plays an important role in what is often described as a transformation of the species. Yet they also create a crescendo of sorts, making the recog-nition of children by their fathers a culminating – and, I suggest, crucial – moment.

I say ‘fathers’ because it is certain here that the ‘they’ in question are men. Women would have no need to recognize that their children come from their bodies74. What makes the recognition so significant is that it responds to a question lingering in the background of the prehistory. Who will take care of the newborn after the earth has withdrawn its care? Lucretius had last dealt with pueri directly when he described them breaking free of their terrestrial wombs to enjoy idyllic childhoods in the bosom of the young earth. The shift to sexual reproduction leaves them virtually invisible. In effect, as we saw earlier, the problem of the exceptionally helpless human infant is suppressed during Lucretius’s discussion of the inter-species competition for survival, recalled only by the image of the toddler sleepily seeking his mother’s breast at an age when his equine counterpart is robustly self-sufficient.

More specifically, the problem is displaced onto just those species which, incapable of fending for themselves in the wild, survive because they are entrusted to humans on account of their utility (5.860-1). These species, I argue, are a placeholder for the absent children. In support of this reading we can look to the recurrence of the verb ‘to entrust’, commendare, at 5.1021 to describe the protection of women and children. At the very least, the repetition of the verb suggests that the process at 5.1011-27 echoes the preservation of domesticated species of animals. The process is first set in motion when men, recognizing that children are created ‘from them’ (ex se), extend care to their offspring, thereby stepping into the role vacated by the soft earth earlier in the story and remedying the problem of the infant’s helplessness. It is completed with the negotiation of the protection of the weak (women and children).

On this occasion, then, instead of ending up with a picture where the human race protects other species, we see the race divide to occupy the roles of protector and protected simultaneously. The stakes involved could not be higher, as the final lines of the excursus make clear. Had the pacts not been kept for the most part, the human race ‘could not have led the generations to the present day through propagation’ (nec potuisset adhuc perducere saecla propago, 5.1026). The emphasis on propagation recalls the role of reproduction in species survival at 5.850 and 5.856. It seems to reflect Lucretius’s underlying awareness of the need to protect human infants through to maturity if the race is to reproduce sexually and, hence, escape extinction75.

Such a reading raises several questions, the most obvious of which is where mothers belong in this arrangement. If they had already had chil-dren in the wandering stage, we can infer, as I said earlier, that they had assumed the responsibility of caring for the young at that time. But even if the tough humans represent a single generation – something we cannot rule out, given Lucretius’s reference to ‘many cycles of the sun’ (multa... solis... lustra) at 5.931 and the sense at 5.1013 that the recognition of paternity is a new development – the care of children would have fallen to mothers, had the shift towards domesticity and the recognition on the part of fathers not occurred.

Either way, however, we meet with a problem: women are on the wrong side of the protecting relationship as it is described by Lucretius. That is, they are the objects of the verb commendare at 5.1021, not its subjects. They are classed together with children rather than occupying a position where they can guarantee the children’s survival. The faint split within Lucretius’s account of human development, where it is men who come to recognize their children at a specific stage in history, begins to look symptomatic of a deeper asymmetry. The fissure of sexual difference was already visible in the greater strength and lust of men (5.964) that led to rape in the prehistory. Now, at the moment that women are separated off from the community to be recognized explicitly as objects of protection, sexual difference comes to the fore76. If we accept that women cannot guarantee security, we have to admit that the phase of early human life in which children – who, as Lucretius reminds us more than once, are so dependent for so long – are under the care of their mothers alone, is precarious. It is as precarious, in fact, as the more obviously grim state of affairs that we are left with at the close of the prehistory. The point is not that mothers become irrelevant. Their nurture remains necessary. Rather, because Lucretius implies that mothers themselves require protection, we need fathers to step in. Such a need is met by the formation of the nuclear family.

The passage at 5.1011-18 raises another question – namely, how does the moment of paternal recognition lead to fathers assuming the responsibility of care, first within the family and later through the negotiation of the protection of the weak? The question requires us to reflect on what it is that men are seeing when they ‘see’ (videre) offspring created from them.

One possibility is that the men simply look upon their children for the first time. But Lucretius may mean that men realize that these children have been created from them. In other words, they infer, for the first time, the bonds of kinship77. What makes the second reading preferable is that, in presenting the recognition of paternity as an important ‘evolutionary’ step, it provides grounds for understanding why men take on responsibility for the care of children, thereby opening themselves up to their softening influence at 5.1017-18. But how does recognition entail care?

Answering this question is made more difficult by the fact that the bonds of affection within the family are a bit puzzling in Epicureanism more generally. Epicurus himself was notoriously unenthusiastic about marriage and childbearing78. It is not impossible to fit child-rearing into an ethics based on self-interest. At the end of Book 4, Lucretius implies that the aim of raising children is future security – that is, ‘to protect one’s old age with children’ (gnatis munire senectam, 4.1256) – and Plutarch represents Epicurus’s reasoning regarding progeny in similarly utilitarian terms79. Yet in the absence of textual cues, we are better off not reading such calculations into the scene at 5.1011-18, especially because the util-ity of children is, presumably, impossible to recognize at this stage.

It is precisely because of the absence of clear motivations for the affection towards and care of children that commentators have been quick to privilege physiological changes (that is, softening) in explaining the emergence of the family, a reading that gains support from the overtly physical role of fire and shelter in the softening process and the language Lucretius uses to describe the effects of domestic life (inminuit viris, ingenium fregere superbum). But of course, men begin to soften only after they have taken wives and recognized that their children come from them. If we are to understand the growth of domestic bonds, we need to keep in mind, too, the cognitive element(s) of 5.1013 (videre, and perhaps cognita sunt).

What would such a reading look like? I have suggested that the formation of the family is informed by and responds to the first emergence of human life from the earth and the primeval childhood of the species. In light of the correspondence between these scenes, it becomes possible to see the care that follows the recognition of paternity as an imitation of the bond between birth and care that we saw in the earth’s nurturing of the creatures it had produced. Yet with paternity there is an important difference. The provision of care in the case of the earth and the mother is automatic and physical, no doubt in part because the recognition of mother and child is perceived as ‘natural’ and unthinking. Recall that the new mother produces milk spontaneously, a fact of much interest to ancient authors80. Consider, in particular, the use of the mother cow in Book 2 as the very model of ‘recognizing one’s own’ (2.349-70)81. By contrast, for the father to take on the role of nature in the provision of care, we need him to infer his participation in the creation of the child. Paternity is not spontaneous but requires act of cognition (and the conditions for its performance).

We may complain that a scenario where the act of creating entails care is not particularly Epicurean, as we might have indeed complained when Lucretius described the care provided to us by the earth. Moreover, the affection widely recognized to be at work in the domestic scene veers dangerously close to the naturally ‘providential’ love of offspring. But despite allegations that Epicurus denied the natural affection of parents for children, there is some evidence that such affection could be justified on Epicurean grounds82. More important, we have already seen a precedent for an ‘instinctive’ care in the figures of the earth and the mother. Indeed, it is precisely the poetic logic that Lucretius developed earlier to negotiate the problem posed by the vulnerability of the first earthborn creatures that can shed light on what is happening at 5.1011-27. For he seems to be appropriating the mechanism invoked earlier in Book 5 whereby care is extended not because of utility but because of a bond with those created from the self83.

Utility is very much still in play in this development. But it is oper-ating primarily at the level of the species. These collective stakes are suggested by Lucretius’s use of prolem (5.1013), which recalls the earlier discussion about the need to secure the sexual reproduction of the species if it is to avoid extinction (e.g., prolem at 5.856)84. The echo of that discussion suggests that Lucretius is collapsing two levels and two types of ‘recognition’ into one: the father’s recognition of the origins of his own child, on the one hand; and a kind of recognition of how offspring are produced, that is, how the future of the human race is secured, on the other. The second recognition can be seen as emerging collectively and conferring a benefit on the human race as a whole.

The presence of two levels, that of the individual father and that of fathers as a collective, persists in the negotiations to safeguard women and children. On the one hand, men negotiate with each other to protect each other’s families because they see their own families as extensions of themselves85. On the other hand, if the recognition of paternity leads to a collective understanding of how generation works, then we can better understand the community’s effort to protect not only children but also women, now recognized as partners in sexual reproduction86. Regardless of which perspective is privileged, however, the negotiation of ‘pity’ pacts is clearly a critical component of the process whereby the security of the species is transferred into the hands of men. It is important not only because it ensures the preservation of children, as we saw earlier, but also because it ensures the protection of women.

Yet men, too, require protection. The last phase of the prehistory, as we saw earlier, brings the vulnerability of early humans front and center. Their weakness in relation to other species is the other half of the problem that the developments at 5.1011-27 solve. In fact, the need to devise strat-egies of security becomes all the more urgent once men have started to grow softer by spending time with their families next to the fire.

The softening process has been read as a resurgence of the softness that characterized the first earthborn creatures, as well as a ‘feminization’ of primitive men87. It is sometimes also read as the primary trigger for the formation of justice pacts88. This last reading, however, is problematic. For if we make the softening process the trigger of the pacts, we are forced to dismiss the growing emphasis that Lucretius places on the vulnerability of primitive people in the last phase of prehistory as redundant. Such a reading betrays the taut economy of Lucretius’s account. More problematic still, the erosion of the species’ harshness makes fathers more like those who should be protected at the very moment we would expect them to be represented as protectors. Much as the discoveries of shelter, clothing, and fire – discoveries that should respond to pressing needs in primitive humans (the need for protection from the elements; the need for cooked, that is, softer, food, as at 5.1101-4) – do, the domestication process magnifies and, indeed, exacerbates weakness. But why should men soften just when they are emerging to fill the role of the paterfamilias?

We can begin to answer this question by recalling that, in the prehistory, people live in isolation, ‘each taught to live and be strong for himself at his own will’ (sponte sua sibi quisque valere et vivere doctus, 5.961). Such people have no need of a community: Lucretius says outright that, ‘they could not look to the common good’ (nec commune bonum poterant spectare, 5.958). Things begin to change during the first phase of family life as fire and sexual intimacy soften a once tough species and children break their parents’ arrogant spirit (ingenium... superbum, 5.1018)89. The process, however, is not simply passive, with men being transformed into the children they once were and the children whom they now nurture. It also involves, I suggest, men’s recognition of their own vulnerability. We can imagine that children act as mirrors to their fathers. They offer an image that captures the softness of those from whom they were created, a softness that is increased by parent-child interactions (as if the mirror were also part of a feedback loop)90.

It is not just the erosion of self-sufficiency, then, that motivates the formation of society. The domestication narrative, by forcing men to confront their offspring and exposing them to the cascading effects of sex and infantile coaxings, brings them face to face with their own vulner-ability, largely latent until the very end of the prehistory and sharply exaggerated by the softening process. Of course, if I am being eaten alive, I can see my own vulnerability. That can explain why such events are sufficient to motivate the formation of communities in, say, Hermarchus. For Lucretius, however, the recognition of paternity, together with the softening process it triggers, seems to play an important role in men’s recognition of their own need to seek security within social institutions. In other words, men have to see themselves in their children and become more like children in order to recognize and remedy the precarious state of the species.

It is presumably only once they have realized their own vulnerability that men form alliances with one another by negotiating pacts designed to counter their inherent weakness. Such alliances differ from the family insofar as they are negotiated with the expectation of mutual security and, thus, offer mutual benefit. Yet, like the formation of the family, they represent the forging of a community that is capable of remedying the disadvantages of humans in a state of nature. They thus respond to the dangers of life in the wild that Lucretius brought to the foreground at the end of the prehistory, countering the weakness of the individual by promising safety in numbers. Nevertheless, the formation of the first community is not simply a parallel development to the development of the family. Rather it builds on the family, emerging out of the father’s encounter with the child and extending his power to protect across a population of women and children through the agreement to pity the weak.

The reading of 5.1011-27 that I have offered aims to make sense of the excursus in terms of what I earlier called Lucretius’s poetic logic. We can understand that logic now as organizing an account whereby men move to compensate for the inherent vulnerability of the race, first by forming families and assuming some responsibility for their children, then by negotiating accords designed to guarantee their own security and the security of their families. These developments do not simply remedy the unsettling and ultimately unsustainable vulnerability of the human race in the wild91. Rather, by instituting a break between humans and nature, each stage turns the negative exceptionalism exemplified by the naked child at 5.222-7 into the positive exceptionalism that is initially represented by the image of a species that preserves other species and eventually equated with the idea of a species that takes its survival into its own (male) hands. What we are witnessing is the initial process through which humans exit the state of nature for the enhanced security of social institutions created by men: families and communities.

Lucretius’s foregrounding of recognition at 5.1013 and his representation of the first communities as organized around a justice compact suggest that the shift from the state of nature to the social domain conforms to a larger organizing principle in Book 592:

Sic unumquicquid paulatim protrahit aetas
in medium ratioque in luminis erigit oras;
namque alid ex alio clarescere corde videbant,
artibus ad summum donec venere cacumen (Lucr. 5.1454-7).

So by degrees time brings up before us every single thing, and reason lifts it into the precincts of light. For they saw one thing after another grow clear in their minds, until they attained the highest pinnacle of the arts.

The passage of time and the operation of reason, in other words, gradually make things clear to humans, who progress, accordingly, along the path of culture and civilization towards the cacumen that concludes Book 5. The movement forward is triggered, in part, by acts of recognition that lead men to take responsibility for their own safety, as well as that of women and children93.

The care of the young by the earth had been spontaneous, much as it still is for those species from whom humans are distinguished in the attack on anthropocentric teleology at 5.222-34. The earth’s role may be taken over by the mother in the prehistory. But, even so, nurture continues to be automatic and ‘natural’, as we saw above, and the earth still sustains adult humans as it does other species. The seam between the human race and nature finally begins to split with the acknowledgment of paternity, enabled by an inferential act that sets the stage for men’s perception of their own weakness (and, at some level, the weakness of the species), which lies behind the first contracts94. These contracts decisively transfer the care of the race away from nature and chance to a community of men trying to control survival, both their own survival but also that of the human race, in a hostile world. What was freely given by the earth to the first children is, in the end, brought under the management of this community of reasoning, male agents. Such an attempt to secure happiness against contingency, predicated on cognitive acts, prefigures what happens in the present day at the level of the individual, who uses reason to manage pain and pleasure in the interests of ataraxia in a world that is resolutely indifferent to human flourishing.

By line 1027, then, a crucial stage of transition in the story of human origins has been completed. Lucretius has led us from the earth wombs, where humans are indistinguishable from other creatures, to surrogate social formations overseen by the power of fathers. These formations cement the difference between humans and other animals that is made starkest by the human infant tossed helpless onto the shores of light. The story that Lucretius plots converts the static truth of negative exception-alism into a historical one. It also, at least temporarily, turns a negative into a positive: the vita prior described at 5.1011-27 is often seen as an idyllic state95.

But, of course, the tragic truth of Book 5 is that it is impossible to arrest the narrative here. The rise of social formations will breed new kinds of vulnerability, and, in turn, novel and unhealthy defenses. In fact, if we go back to the argument against providence, we see Lucretius antici-pating civilization’s mad spiral out of control. The child’s needs begin with human attention and care. They end with weapons and protective walls. But once we have come this far, neither the earth nor fathers can provide the care required. At this point, we need Epicurus and the security only his philosophy can afford.