Abstract

At Book 5.324–37, the DRN’s narrator says that the world is young, claims that the nature of the world has been understood only recently, and asserts that he is either the ‘very first’/‘most pre-eminent’ or, as I suggest here, ‘among the first’/‘among the most pre-eminent’ to turn Greek Epicureanism into Latin. It is the last of these three claims that concerns us:denique natura haec rerum ratioque repertast 335nuper, et hanc primus cum primis ipse repertusnunc ego sum in patrias qui possim vertere voces.Commentators and translators persistently interpret the phrase primus cum primis at line 336 to mean ‘the very first’, taking cum primis as an intensifier of primus and providing primus with a temporal denotation. A comment by Reid is typical: ‘The phrase cum primis, as used by [Lucretius], has lost its literal sense, and means “particularly”, “especially”’. It is not immediately clear, however, whether one should choose the temporal or qualitative denotation for primus or whether one should allow ambiguity and grant that some readers may interpret the adjective temporally while others may interpret it qualitatively. I suggest that the passage primus cum primis ipse repertus | nunc ego sum in patrias qui possim vertere voces means ‘I myself have now been discovered to be a pre-eminent person, among pre-eminent people, of the type who is able to turn this into our native tongue’. Cum primis should be understood literally, following standard Latin grammar, as an ablative construed with cum denoting accompaniment rather than as an intensifier. While Leonard and Smith suggest that ‘the phrase cum primis … seems to have originated in the idea of accompaniment and implicit comparison’, here I show that the prepositional phrase cum primis retains its original meaning of accompaniment in Lucretius. As I shall argue, we should be sceptical of commentators who exhort us to interpret cum primis at 5.336 as an intensifier, since the phrase makes good sense, following standard Latin grammar, as an ablative of accompaniment, and Lucretius’ use of the phrase cum primis elsewhere is always qualitative, never temporal. Moreover, several scholars have used 5.336 to date early Italian Epicureans, including C. Amafinius, and the interpretation of 5.336, accordingly, affects Lucretius’ temporal position, as well as, perhaps, his intellectual engagement in relation to Italian Epicureans. There is, then, much at stake in the interpretation of 5.336, since the narrator may be found to be either honest or not, when he positions Lucretius in relation to the translation of Epicureanism into Latin.