In 1585, the greatest Elizabethan scientist, Thomas Harriot, was sent by his patron, Sir Walter Raleigh, to the nascent English colony in Virginia to assess the natural resources, observe the Algonquian inhabitants, and weigh the colonists’ chances of survival. Harriot, who went out of his way to learn at least some of the Carolina Algonquian language and to establish what he calls a “special familiarity with some of their priests,” was impressed by much of what he observed. He admired the natives’ skills in agriculture, hunting, and fishing; their eloquent, dignified leaders; their strong family and clan bonds.
The English were only a small, ragged band of men—Raleigh had sent no women at this exploratory stage—in a vast, uncharted land inhabited by well-organized, prosperous, and proud peoples. Harriot saw that they could not be effortlessly subjugated. But, as he wrote in “A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia,” from 1588, he was confident that the colonists could profit from their manifest technological superiority: “guns, books, writing and reading, spring clocks that seem to go of themselves,” etc. And the new arrivals, though small in number, had an additional advantage. Wherever the English went, Harriot reported, if any of the natives plotted against them, “within a few days after our departure from every such town, the people began to die very fast, and many in short space; in some towns about twenty, in some forty, in some sixty and in one six score, which in truth was very many in respect of their numbers. . . . The disease also so strange, that they neither knew what it was, nor how to cure it, the like by report of the oldest men in the country never happened before, time out of mind.”
Harriot was observing, of course, the terrifying effects of viruses—smallpox, measles, influenza, and the like—on a population that had been entirely unexposed to them, but he interpreted these effects as a providential punishment on those natives who “used some practice against us.” For their part, the Algonquians also perceived that there was a relation between the epidemics and the new arrivals, but, as Harriot noted, they had a very different explanation of what was happening. They speculated that the handful of colonists was only the beginning. There were more, they feared, yet to come, “to kill theirs and take their places.” “Those that were immediately to come after us [the first English colonists],” Harriot wrote, “they imagined to be in the air, yet invisible and without bodies, and that they by our entreaty and for the love of us did make the people die . . . by shooting invisible bullets into them.”
“Invisible bullets”: the Algonquians used the murderous technology that the English had brought into their midst as a brilliant metaphor for the disease that the colonists had also introduced, a disease that they correctly feared would facilitate the destruction of their society. That Harriot took the trouble to record this metaphor is a mark of his unusual gifts as an ethnographer, but it may also reflect his own speculative interests. Officially, he articulated the notion, so reassuring to his English readers, that the disease struck those who were secretly plotting against the colonists, and hence that it was “the special work of God.” (In the circular logic that always characterizes such explanations, the evidence for the existence of the conspiracies is precisely the death of the alleged conspirators.) But Harriot was suspected throughout his career of being an atheist, and more specifically of being a disciple of the ancient Epicurean philosopher Lucretius. And Lucretius, as it happens, devoted particular attention to epidemics.
In his philosophical masterpiece “On the Nature of Things,” written around 50 B.C.E., Lucretius laid out the arguments for a radical materialism. Humans should not cower in fear of divine punishment, he wrote, or perform slavish sacrificial offerings in the hope of divine rewards. The universe is not the mysterious plaything of gods or demons; it consists of atoms and emptiness and nothing else. The atoms—Lucretius called them semina rerum, “the seeds of things”—are in movement, endlessly swerving, colliding, combining, separating, and recombining in new and unforeseen patterns. There is, in all of this movement, no fixed pattern, no overarching intention, no trace of intelligent design. Instead, over a boundless expanse of time and space, there are ceaseless, random mutations. Old forms are constantly dying; new forms are constantly surging up.
For Lucretius, this vision was profoundly consoling: instead of fretting about the gods or worrying about the afterlife, you should focus your attention on this world, the only one you will ever experience, and calmly go about enhancing pleasure for yourself and for everyone around you. But he knew that the news he brought was not unequivocally reassuring. If diseases were not inflicted upon you by angry gods, they nonetheless had to come from somewhere, namely from the same ceaselessly swirling atoms that produced everything else. The seeds of things, he wrote (in Rolfe Humphries’s translation),
When particles hostile to us begin to move, confusion stirs, “and changes are enforced / In our familiar quarters.” At such times, something strange happens to the world we thought we so intimately knew. The sky above our heads seems at once like itself and alien, and the things that enable existence come to seem deeply threatening. The plague, Lucretius writes,
Small wonder that gloom descends on people’s faces, and that minds become unsettled with melancholy and fear. In “On the Nature of Things,” Lucretius ends with a harrowing account of the devastating epidemic that struck Athens during the Peloponnesian War. That the poem abruptly closes on such a dark note has led many scholars to conclude that Lucretius must have left it unfinished. There was even a legend that he died suddenly from the effects of a love potion, given to him by his wife.
Perhaps this is so. But our current struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic casts the poem’s ending in a different light. A plague, after all, tests us in unique ways. It ruthlessly takes the measure of our values, calls into question our familiar assumptions, shines a pitiless light on our social and political and religious order. As I sit here in my “voluntary self-isolation”—for I have only recently returned to the United States from Italy—I wonder if the poem’s closing focus on epidemic disease might, in fact, have been fully intended. This is precisely the existential challenge, Lucretius thought, that any society worth inhabiting and any philosophy worth embracing must address. When everything is going well, it is easy enough to contemplate our place in the material world. But what if everything is not going well—if mutations in the seeds of things bring disease and death? Only if you can face the invisible bullets all around us, and still keep calm, remain rational, and somehow find it possible to take pleasure in life, have you learned the lesson that the poem set out to teach.
To judge from the news, most of us seem very far from this Epicurean achievement. But the recent reports from Italy, which detail many of Lucretius’ quarantined countrymen standing out on their balconies and singing in the midst of the plague, give me hope. They remind us that, alongside science, the other realm in which human resilience and inventiveness are at their height is art. In Lucretius, the two are joined: his philosophical disquisition on atoms, pleasure, and the plague takes the form of a poem, a song to be sung.
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