Prayer to Venus
VenusThe opening of Lucretius' poem On the Nature of Things — the most famous hymn in Latin literature and the most awkward.
The awkwardness is that the poem is Epicurean, and a few hundred lines later it will prove that the gods exist but take no interest in the world and hear no prayers. It nevertheless opens with a faultless hymn to a goddess.
The form is exactly observed: address, epithets, the per te clause — through you every kind of living thing is conceived — and then unbroken second-person anaphora: te … te … tibi … tibi. This is how the Greeks built hymns, and Lucretius departs from it in nothing.
His Venus is hominum divomque voluptas, the delight of men and gods. Voluptas, pleasure, is the foundation of Epicurean ethics; a physical force driving nature is thereby dressed in a goddess's costume. Daedala tellus, the crafty earth, belongs to the same order: in Lucretius creative work is attributed to matter itself.
How to read this has been argued for four centuries. Some see allegory — Venus as a name for a natural force; some a poetic due paid to tradition, which a philosopher may pay; some a contradiction the author never resolved. The question is open, and this card does not settle it.