Professor of Classics University of Manitoba Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
A synopsis of manifold artistic and discursive representations of insects covering approximately fifteen centuries, from the beginnings of European literature in archaic Greece to the onset of the Middle Ages, provides context for close reading of a compactly structured passage of Latin poetry from de Rerum Natura (Book 5, lines 795-820) by the Epicurean polymath Lucretius. The historical spectrum involves numerous authors and most genres of Classical prose and poetry. While quite extensive, the cast of insects, frequently anthropomorphized, playing heroic, tragic, comic, satirical, erotic, politically allegorical, or morally exemplary roles, is weighted towards ‘social’ (bees, ants) and musical (cicadas, crickets) varieties. The record documents the ancients’ generally accurate observation of insect ethology and natural history. Lucretius’ poem, while written in Latin in the mid-first century BCE, draws extensively on (now mainly lost) Greek writings including, notably, those of Epicurus (4th – 3rd century BCE) and his school, but also including matter relayed from scientific and philosophical thinkers belonging to earlier centuries. That general indebtedness applies to the passage of entomological interest where Lucretius, theorizing on primordial zoogony, evidently exploits detailed observation of the subterranean phase of the ‘earth-born’ cicada’s life cycle to present the insect as a sort of living fossil that supports a hypothetical model for the primeval origin of species, many of which did not survive. This proposition of an expanded and more intricate function for the Lucretian cicada necessarily involves applying a classicist’s poetic interpretations to ancient and modern observations of entomological realities.
