Family Proclamations: “Roamin' Masculinity,” with Mike Pope

About the Guest

Mike Pope is Associate Professor of Classics at Brigham Young University. He is author of Lucretius and the End of Masculinity.

Transcript

What does it mean to be a man? Depends on who you ask. Depends on *when* you ask, because masculinity has always been a moving target. In this episode we travel back to ancient Rome, where manly men loved war, violence, and sexual conquest. Mike Pope says this history has powerful relevance for us today. We're talking about his book, Lucretius and the End of Masculinity. 

Mike Pope is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Brigham Young University.

Transcript

MIKE POPE: I don't look like a classicist. I have a shaved head and a big old mustache and I dress like a lumberjack. My constant study of Lucretius has turned me into a joke of myself where I can actually think about what it means to be male.

And Lucretius is right. Life is better for me when I don't act out in a "traditional" masculine way. And it's taken my adult life to rethink what masculinity looks like for me.

BLAIR HODGES: Mike Pope is a professor of ancient literature, the classics. And it's true—he looks more like a lumberjack than a college professor. But love is a strange mistress, and this manly man fell head over heels in love with the epic poetry of an ancient Roman philosopher named Lucretius.

The more Mike studied, the more he realized Lucretius's message about men is as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago. Learning about ancient views of sex and gender sheds a ton of light on how we think about sex and gender today.

Mike Pope joins us to talk about his book Lucretius and the End of Masculinity.

There's no one right way to be a man, and every kind of man has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.

WHO WAS LUCRETIUS? (1:40)

BLAIR HODGES: Mike Pope joins us on Family Proclamations. Mike, welcome.

MIKE POPE: Thanks for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: We're looking at your book, Lucretius and the End of Masculinity. We're going further back in time than usual in this episode. This is back to the first century BCE, one hundred years or so before Jesus, or thereabouts. Rome is the place. Lucretius is our guide.

Tell us a little bit about Lucretius and why people today might find him interesting.

MIKE POPE: Weirdly enough, we don't know a whole lot about Lucretius and his biography. A few things we do know is he's got a really old timey Roman name that goes all the way back to Rome's founding mythology. We can assume he is from the upper crust, aristocratic classes, highly educated, probably was from a political family, meaning if he himself did not then other men in his family held political office, fought in wars, did all the things Roman aristocratic men would do.

Outside of that we know almost nothing. He is mentioned by Jerome. Some people refer to him as St. Jerome. He has some nasty things to say about Lucretius, but St. Jerome has a lot of nasty things to say about many people who he disagreed with, so we discount those as being not biographical at all.

One thing we can nail down historically is that he, if not knew personally, then at least felt comfortable addressing this guy Memmius, who appears a few times in the poem. Memmius was historical, a contemporary, he held the second highest political office at Rome, praetor. He failed to make the highest office, but an important figure in Rome nonetheless.

The other historical thing we can nail down is that Cicero, the great Roman statesman, politician, sometimes poet, although not very good, and letter writer and so forth, mentions Lucretius and his poems in a letter. A very brief mention, but it helps us nail down the historical moment when some of these verses at least were being circulated among literary classes.

A POEM ABOUT THE NATURE OF THINGS (3:45)

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so we're trying to figure out who Lucretius is. We have a couple of mentions of him by important people. But the biggest thing we have is this poem. That's what your book focuses on, this huge epic poem.

The title of your book is Lucretius and the End of Masculinity. I wondered if there's a double meaning to that. Is Lucretius challenging masculinity? Is he also talking about the “end” or the purpose of masculinity? Because it could be both of those things.

MIKE POPE: Yes. It's at least a double entendre, if not a triple. The end of the received masculinity for elite Roman men. End as in a new purpose to redirect their energies towards. And also making them the butt end of a recurring joke throughout the poem.

BLAIR HODGES: He's challenging Roman masculinity here. His poem is called On the Nature of Things. It's a really long poem. There have been a number of theories about what exactly Lucretius was trying to communicate to his audience. Your book builds on that past work, but you suggest some new things. Before we dig into specifics, give us the movie trailer version of Lucretius' poem. If there's a movie trailer, coming this summer, Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, what would the gist be?

MIKE POPE: In a world where men dominate. [laughter] In a world where rich men dominate—so they control property, the levers of political power, the levers of military aggression, the law courts. Powerful men controlling everything right down into their homes. A fairly well-known word, paterfamilias, they have legal standing in their homes to contract marriages, to end marriages, to actually enact the death penalty upon their dependents if they choose to, though it would be a rare thing. Really utmost control. This is the Rome Lucretius is born into. This is his heritage. It is also his birthright. He could have accepted it and moved forward on that course of life.

Then the movie trailer version would go something like this: But one man stood up to all this! Now, Lucretius wasn't the only person, but he was a person and he didn't like it. He had adopted a foreign philosophy, Epicureanism. He decides he's going to convince his audience, his social cohort, that they're all wrong.

BLAIR HODGES: The way he's going to do that is scientific. He's trying to give this materialistic scientific explanation of the natural world, like how does the world actually work. He's going to do that, you say, to make people less afraid of death, to help them not feel afraid of divine punishment, and he's trying to promote this happy, tranquil life.

If people understood how nature works, they would better understand what it means to be a man, and how men should act and behave and everything. Science is going to solve the questions of what men should be. As you said, it's a send up of Roman masculinity, and he's going to make fun of what a real man was supposed to be.

As he's doing that, how acceptable do you think this was? Do we know how it was received? Or if there were other poems doing similar things? Did he wind up like Socrates, getting killed? What happened here?

MIKE POPE: Romans had a bit more leniency with poets than perhaps earlier generations. He seemed to have suffered nothing negative from his poem, but we actually don't know. We don't have a lot in the first generation, reading his poem, reception history. We know Cicero read them and he found the poetry brilliant, although he was also like, "But the philosophy—meh." Cicero was not a fan of Epicureanism.

BLAIR HODGES: It's like, “that song rules, but the lyrics aren't great.”

MIKE POPE: “I like the beat.”

Lucretius, we know from later generations—when I say later generations I only mean thirty years—the next generation loved his poetry. The next generation of poets loved his poetry. They cite him and riff on his style, on his word choice, on some of his philosophical underpinnings. He was received heartily later. At the moment, we don't know. That's as far as we can really say.

BLAIR HODGES: This is speculative, but if he had some kind of terrible death or something, it seems his later haters maybe would have brought that up. Maybe he died a nice death or something, otherwise, they would have been like, "Ha ha, remember when Lucretius totally got screwed," or whatever.

MIKE POPE: That's probably true, because it would take four hundred years and a somewhat vindictive, ill-tempered Christian named Jerome to spread some nasty slander about him that he took a love filter—which is like a love potion that has some magic involved—because he was madly in love with somebody and then he died out of lust or love, which is completely ridiculous. If you've read the poem, you know Lucretius is pretty much against that sort of erotic adventure.

BLAIR HODGES: Later Christians would be attacking Lucretius because they didn't like the his message and it was still influential. Is that what was happening?

MIKE POPE: Yes, so you go with the most basic attack that anyone does, and that's ad hominem kind of thing.

HOW BABIES GET MADE (9:14)

BLAIR HODGES: Like attack his character kind of thing. Ok.

Let's talk about where Lucretius begins in the poem, which is with beginnings. It's sort of like the book of Genesis in that way. He's going to talk about the genesis of life, how sexual procreation works. In your book, you say what we call the scientific explanation of procreation, the biological "how," would also be used by Lucretius to inform ethics. How sex works would tell us something about life and our values. The “how” is the “therefore.” How babies get made tells us what our lives are supposed to be about.

How did he explain the science of procreation and tie it to those ethics?

MIKE POPE: Yes, I want to reiterate that for Lucretius science is a tool for the greater purpose, and the greater purpose is ethics. That's always the goal. So the science of procreation, although this initially will seem unfamiliar to us, we can adjust quickly.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, it was very interesting.

MIKE POPE: For Lucretius, the world and the universe is one of two things. It's either stuff or not stuff, and the not-stuff doesn't exist. This is emptiness or void. Stuff that exists is all made out of atoms. Atoms from the Greek word, just “not cut” or “not cuttable.” Similar to our idea of atoms, although of course we've cut atoms and done horrible things with that by now. But these little atoms are everything. If something exists, it's atomic. Lucretius' atomology is pretty rudimentary, and so everything can be explained by atoms and atoms in motion.

When we talk about procreation, for Lucretius, he does not have the concept we have of sperm and ovum—not yet. What he does have is the idea of seed. There is male seed, which is not unfamiliar to us. I mean, that's still kind of an awkward thing to say, but people would understand if I talk about seed. But for Lucretius he also posits female seed. Now again, no ovum or eggs, but female seed.

So in the act of procreation, during sex, both male and female partners ejaculate in some way and they both produce and emit seed. And then that atomic seed interacts, coalesces—the way he describes it is like a battle. Whichever side has the more copious amount or overpowers the other seed wins. The offspring looks like the mother if the mother seed wins out in the war.

He plays with the war imagery because again, it's always the joke against Roman men. The joke is, “Hey, all your semen totally loses to female semen when your kid looks like your wife!” It's a joke, but the joke is real because every Roman man will have seen this firsthand: "Why does my kid look like my wife?"

BLAIR HODGES: He's basically saying, "Ha ha, you lost to a girl," which to Roman masculinity would be really offensive? The epitome of weakness is being dominated by a female.

MIKE POPE: Then it's redoubled and made even worse by the fact that you were beaten down by semen. Not just semen, but female semen. This is totally emasculating!

BLAIR HODGES: You also point out this wasn't Lucretius trying to be feminist. He wasn't trying to elevate women and put them on an equal plane with men, it was more about demoting men to a lower plane. So everybody is on this equal lower plane, compared to the earth and the universe, everybody's relatively powerless. But he's talking about human procreation, and then he's situating it in terms of how Earth was created and how the universe works.

This is pretty amazing, though. They didn't have microscopes to look through and figure things out, so to come up with these ideas about atoms and stuff is pretty cool. We can chuckle about it now, because it is sort of elementary. I mean, yeah, they thought both had seed, they didn't know about eggs, et cetera. But this is an interesting theory.

As you said, he's using it to talk about the proper role of men and women. I feel like we still are kind of doing that. Just to give people an example, during the sixties there was a great feminist thinker who was talking about how eggs and semen interact. Their theory, a feminist theory, was the egg takes in the sperm, like grabs the sperm and wrestles it in and rather than being penetrated, it would be the dominator. It would grab the sperm.

That's still something people might think about today, and you're saying back then there was this idea of warfare happening in the act of sex, that these seeds are sort of battling each other. I really liked your explanation of this. It was very foreign to me, but as you said, also kind of similar.

MIKE POPE: Let me jump in with an important upshot of this. After the imagery of warfare, Lucretius goes on to ensure his audience knows that in order for ejaculation to happen, there has to be a pleasurable component. Now for a male audience that would be a given from their mindset, but what he also wants his male audience to know is that female pleasure has to be there as well.

He doesn't come right out and say it, but for female ejaculation there needs to be pleasure on both sides. He uses terms like "mutual pleasure" and "mutual fervency" and "mutual joys" in the act of procreation. That right there is somewhat revolutionary to be thinking about female pleasure as a key component to procreation.

COMING FROM MOTHER EARTH (14:54)

BLAIR HODGES: I mentioned how he also ties humans into the Earth. How does he view the creation of the earth and how that parallels human procreation?

MIKE POPE: Our language here is going to fail us, because when we say "create" it automatically presumes an agent, a creator, who makes a created thing, but we have to use the language we're given even though “creation" is going to fail us. That being said, Earth comes to be, and the way it comes to be is by atoms in motion, atoms colliding, atoms coalescing, cohering, getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Eventually, on this large mass of atoms, things come to be.

Lucretius does not have a well-developed theory of evolution. There is a kind of evolution after things exist, but he doesn't have a good explanation for how things initially came to exist. He puts forth this ridiculous image, that he himself makes fun of, how things first got started, referring to Mother Earth.

Mother Earth has wombs all throughout the soil. In another shot across the bow, he refuses to allow there to be a male creator figure. There's not a god creating this. There's not a god sowing the earth. Nope, it's just a Mother Earth with her own wombs that she then self-inseminates, and then self-gestates, and then self-births—completely cutting out the middleman, or the creator man. There's no male counterpart in his funny little creation myth he puts in there.

BLAIR HODGES: He would want Roman men to take away from that, that maybe they're not the prime agents. They're not the top dogs, so to speak.

MIKE POPE: There's no Jupiter here. It's just Earth. Just Gaia, or whatever.

GIVING IS PLEASURABLE (16:52)

BLAIR HODGES: So as men are supposed to be reconfiguring their relationship to sex away from something that's dominant and aggressive, you point out their loss of semen is pleasurable—that giving something away, the loss of something, can be a good thing.

Again, the poet is challenging the belief that accumulation is the best thing, he’s saying that sometimes something can feel good when you give it away. He doesn't always use that war metaphor when he's talking about male and female semen combining, but he's also talking about how men could take pleasure and joy in giving something away, not taking something.

MIKE POPE: Pleasure in cooperation. He does an anthropological study in his mind of what it would look like when primeval peoples, like cavemen or whatever, decided or were compelled to join together in the most basic social contracts. And as always for Lucretius, it's going to be atomic. And for this moment, it's also sexual. In this primeval period where we have humans walking around, they're living alone, they occasionally joined together in sex, and he gives three options. He says either it's by compulsion or it's by gift—and there he says acorns and special pears, like you give food for sex—or mutual pleasure. And he says this is how the species survived early on.

But there came a point—and it's not like it was one singular moment, but probably there is an epoch where male humans started to notice that females, when they had babies, were left in incredible pain, and there was a long recovery, and they were extremely vulnerable. Then the babies were also extremely vulnerable. In this moment, post-sex, many months later, males of the species looked upon the pain and vulnerability of the females and the babies and the actual sight of their pain and their weakness and vulnerability. And the sight of it hits the male (literally for Lucretius—atoms project off of bodies and hit eyeballs, so sight is actually physical like that) and the male sees pain and he realizes he needs to protect, to give something of himself to alleviate this pain.

So he extends his ability to help those suffering. And then he realizes he also needs help from others. These early primitive humans started to signal to the next primitive humans in the next cave over, let's not hurt each other. Let's protect these weak ones, and ourselves being weak, let's join together. Lucretius points to sex and childbirth as these humanizing events that change the trajectory of the species.

BLAIR HODGES: Would that have sat well with his audience? Or was that a weird idea? The audience he was challenging, the masculine audience, how would they have thought about that kind of thing? I know it's speculative. We don't have journals and records where they're unpacking their responses to Lucretius. But based on general thinking at the time, how do you think they would have responded to that?

MIKE POPE: This is speculative. I find it strange and compelling that we have men in the room, so to speak, at childbirth. This would not have been normal parturition practices in Rome. Men would not have been there. If there was a doctor, maybe the doctor would have been there, but there would have been midwives, and the men would have been somewhere else. The fact that he has this intimate scene of birth, and the sights and the sounds and the smells, all the things you perceive during childbirth, to have the husband or the father right there is itself somewhat strange. I don't know how this would have sat with Roman men.

Sometimes we over-ascribe harsh masculinity to Roman men, like they weren't caring fathers and they weren't devoted to their children. That's probably overdoing it. We have plenty of sources where Roman fathers are definitely concerned about their children. However, the child death rate aged twelve and under was so incredibly high we also have to imagine Roman parents didn't get too attached to their children until they had come of age a little bit. So to think of these primitive humans as being so invested in the welfare of a mother and the welfare of a baby is a bit revolutionary, and way more intimate than I found in other Roman literature.

SENSES AND PENETRATION (21:27)

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about your third chapter. It looks at how we experience life through our senses. Senses are really important to Lucretius. Sight, hearing, taste, all of these things. For Lucretius, you say it's all about penetration, that Lucretius says our senses are constantly penetrated. Talk about why he focused on penetration and what that means.

MIKE POPE: To answer the last point first, he's going to play with the image of penetration over and over throughout the poem because that's the basic joke, is that Roman men are penetrable. This would be socially humiliating for a Roman man of privilege. He is never penetrated. In the act of sex, he is always the one who does the doing. He is the actor. If he is the sexually receptive party, that undermines his masculinity and could in fact damage his career. We know this.

A nasty rumor, perhaps true, about Gaius Julius Caesar, the famous Julius Caesar, was that in his youth he was the beloved of a certain king from the east. When I say beloved, I'm using that very specifically. He was not the lover, but the one who received the love, which meant he was sexually penetrated, probably, anally or orally. That was the rumor. This dogged him throughout his political career. There was a time when Caesar was very powerful and a kind of up-and-comer poet named Catullus, an exact contemporary of Lucretius, writes a really nasty poem about Caesar and accuses him of being sexually receptive. Caesar takes great offense at this. They eventually have a reconciliation, but Caesar is worried about the rumor. That's the underpinnings of why penetration images have such a pointedness to them for a Roman audience. Again our language is going to fail us.

I'll use an example I use in the book. When I say in English, "I see you," I am the subject, you are the object and see is the verb, and I'm seeing you. I'm putting the action of my seeing upon you. That defies what we know about physics. In the most basic sense, I don't ever see you, you project things at me. We understand now that light photons bounce off of a surface and then strike my eye. So really, you are seen to me or something like that.

BLAIR HODGES: Because we know about light photons we would know the light itself is what's affecting our physical body in a way.

MIKE POPE: Yes. We grew up with this, we know it. For Lucretius, it's a slightly different physics. He didn't understand light photons bouncing off of things, like I mentioned before. For him, every solid thing is made of atoms and those atoms aren't in a completely solid state, which means surface atoms are constantly shearing off of the thing and moving through space and air and hitting other things.

BLAIR HODGES: He might get this idea from—if you slam your hand down on a dusty surface and you see dust. That would be like, "Oh, that's pieces of the desk flying off into our eyes."

MIKE POPE: He uses a very similar image of that to explain how there's always these atoms in motion. When I see you, I'm not seeing you. I'm seeing the surface atoms shearing off of you, striking my eye. The act of sense perception for sight is an act of penetration. I don't acknowledge anything until some piece of you, literally pieces of you, enter into my eyes.

And this also actually explains smell. That's an obvious one. We understand that olfactory sensation is particulate, which is gross when you think about it, but quite intimate also.

BLAIR HODGES: If you're in the bathroom, that's terrible. Microscopic pieces of poo are entering your nose.

MIKE POPE”: Yes. That's exactly right. There's no such thing as a virtual smell. If you smell something, it's real. Taste—also obvious for us. Every sense perception is a particulate transfer and reception. Therefore it's a penetration.

If we expand this to a basic human conversation where I'm looking at you face to face, and we're speaking back and forth, that is a nearly all-encompassing act of interpenetration. If I'm close enough to you, I can smell the deodorant you're wearing or what you had for lunch. This is a very closely bound moment, and Lucretius plays upon this at length.

ROMAN HOMOPHOBIA HITS DIFFERENT (25:58)

BLAIR HODGES: If you start to think about it, it is really intimate. We can touch each other at a distance. We can, today. Lucretius extended this, as you said, to sight. It wasn't just the light photons, it was pieces of a body that were striking you. Lucretius, instead of saying something like, "I see that dog," he would have to say, "That dog is making me see him." Or "I'm being penetrated by that dog” in that sense. And as you said, Roman masculinity was against penetration.

It seems to be highly homophobic, an idea that there was something really wrong about being penetrated by a man. Maybe talk about that a little bit. How homophobia might be situated historically, because the way "homosexuality" would be thought about at the time was different than what it is today. How might we think of homophobia in the context of their fear of penetration?

MIKE POPE: This is a very important point. Most of our terms, and even our discourse and our ideologies around sexuality, don't exactly map well onto what we think we know about ancient concepts of sexuality. Again, here we're beholden to our sources which are written by elite males for the most part. This is a limited scope we have to keep ourselves to, but our basic schemas today don't quite work in the past.

A Roman man of standing and property and some wealth could engage in any sexual act with any other party so long as he is the one who is the actor—meaning having sex with a male slave is no big deal so long as he's the penetrating party. A female slave—it's all the same. This is not indicative of a Roman man's masculinity if he enjoys penetrating males. There would be almost no accusation of anything we might think of as homophobia about that.

Now, were there certain men who had predilections in various ways and maybe they had small interpersonal jokes and things? Yes, but for the most part if a Roman man pursued younger men sexually, that's nothing. It becomes an issue if a Roman man enjoys being penetrated. That's the problem. There are different forms of this. If a Roman man likes to be submissive to women, that would be a problem. If he's submissive to another man, that's a problem. If he's submissive to a young man, a late teenager, that's a problem. If a Roman man erotically, romantically, pursues a male Roman citizen youth, that could be a problem if sex occurs, but the attraction, the desire for that—that's nothing. That's just being a Roman man.

PENETRATION AND HEARING (28:53)

BLAIR HODGES: Let's tie this back into how our senses work again. Hearing is something you spend some time on because Lucretius is talking about men being penetrated by sounds. When people talk to you, you're being penetrated. So speech itself is like semen. He compares it literally to semen. He's making these connections directly, like the sexual parallel of hearing something is like being ejaculated into.

MIKE POPE: This is where he sets up his monumental stunner of a poetic image and joke. And it's a doozy. If you're following along closely through books two and three, you'll start to realize, if I'm hearing this poem performed at me, I guess I'm being penetrated. If I'm reading this poem to myself, I'm being penetrated through my eyes.

Let's say I'm doing what most ancient people did. Most people didn't read it. Ancient people didn't read inside their heads. They always read out loud. So I'm reading this poem by Lucretius and I'm hearing myself talk. I'm interpenetrating myself. And he starts to build on this. It is kind of a funny thing. But then, Lucretius drops the hammer.

He says, "Now listen, I know what I'm telling you guys is hard to take. It's a bitter pill, bitter medicine. But here's the thing, I'm making it so sweet. I am coating every one of these difficult philosophical precepts in the sweetest honey and you're going to put it to your lips, and you're going to drink it down, and you're going to like it. That bitterness will hit you, but you'll be okay because I made it so sweet."

At that moment, a Roman male audience must have felt really strange. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: He's saying “I'm screwing you.”

MIKE POPE: It's not just I'm screwing you. I just made you the receptor of oral insemination. This is one of the primary jokes in Roman political polemic, how you attack your friends in a joking way or attack your enemies in a serious way. You make them into the receiving end of oral penetration. Lucretius plays on this joke, and he does it twice. Just in case you missed it the first time.

BLAIR HODGES: He's doing it, you say, to hopefully help them accept that. He's not just squeezing their shoes. He's also trying to be like, "You know what? That's okay. All of us are experiencing this. The Earth itself is constantly penetrating us as we are going about our day." You say he is doing this really funny, mocking sort of satire. He's also serious saying, "Just accept this. This is how it is. You need to change the way you relate to the world and each other by recognizing your vulnerability."

MIKE POPE: That's correct. What Lucretius is so good at doing is moving from poetic image to joke to offensive joke, and then immediately making himself the butt of that same joke. Sometimes translations pick it up well, sometimes it's easier in Latin, but you'll see him switch from, “you're going to do this, you're going to do this,” and then "we do this.” He'll use the first-person plural, or I'll do the first person, but "I" do this.

In this very image of him making his bitter medicine so sweet you'll want to put it to your lips and drink it, in that same passage he says, "I have drunk from the springs as well." He turns himself into this effeminate wanderer who was looking and was so thirsty and he comes up on these springs, and he drinks them in. It turns out the springs come from a person, and that person is a man. And his name's Epicurus.

Then he gets really intimate. He says, "These words came from the lips of Epicurus and I drank them in." It's kissing. Then he's going to turn around and purvey it to others. It's this chain reaction. It is queer.

EPICURUS AND THE GARDEN (33:01)

BLAIR HODGES: That's exactly what it is. You mentioned Epicurus. Epicurus's philosophy, and he had this idea of the garden. I think this is an interesting place to mention this, which I learned from your book, the garden is a place of learning for Epicurus. He would say instead of a great, grand temple with a giant shaft or whatever, he would go to a garden. That would be the place of learning. People would actually make fun of that, Romans would. The garden was thought to be a feminine place, almost like a vulva in fact, you explain. They would think of this as a very feminized thing.

But Lucretius is like, "No, the garden rules." He wants people to appreciate the garden rather than mock it.

MIKE POPE: We don't know whether Epicurus chose the nickname for his philosophical school as "the garden," but in his last will and testament he talks about wanting to hand the garden—and this used to be an actual piece of real estate—over to one of his best students. He's at least thinking about an actual garden and very quickly if not contemporaneously, Epicureanism is the garden.

Whether he chose the nickname or the nickname was given or whatever, it just so happens the word in Greek, kipos, or the word in Latin, hortus, these are charged words. In poetry all over the place, these are euphemisms for sites of sexual trysts or anatomical sites of pleasure. This doesn't take much imagination to understand gardens. There's fruit and there's water, there's irrigation. There are all sorts of shapes of fruits and vegetables. It's pretty obvious stuff. As you might expect, people who don't like the philosophy are going to capitalize on this and use it polemically, or to make fun of people.

BLAIR HODGES: This is where misogyny comes up. It's a bad thing to think of, a garden, so anything that brings that to mind would be bad. That's a good way to make fun of a dude.

MIKE POPE: Lucretius in his stance, kind of counteracting these polemics, is like, "Oh, yes. It's a garden. It's so effeminate. It's super queer, and we're all in it!”

BLAIR HODGES: Queer is a perfect word here because queer began as an insult, and then queer communities took that back and said, "We are queer." And used it as a badge of honor. It seems Lucretius is queering in that way of reclaiming words that could be used as insults and being like, "No, actually it is that, and that rules."

MIKE POPE: Whether you want to or not, you are all part of it. The entire world is a garden, and you are planted, and you're the planter. You are the inseminator; you are the inseminated. In the end, you're going to decompose and something is going to be planted in you. That's just the way it is.

GLORY IN WAR AND DEATH (35:50)

BLAIR HODGES: That's the perfect transition. We're talking with Mike Pope. He's Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He earned his PhD in New Testament and early Christian literature at the University of Chicago. We're talking about his book Lucretius and the End of Masculinity.

Mike, you just mentioned death. This is chapter four of the book. It's called the "Hole that Gapes for All." [laughs] You say at the beginning of the chapter that Roman culture was all about glory in war, like war glory. They had all kinds of stories about being brave in the face of imminent death. Death as this glorious thing if you engage it with bravery and courage and die in a glorious battle. That was the best thing you could do.

Give us a little bit of context, because for me, that's hard to wrap my head around. We have our war heroes, obviously, so we can kind of understand it that way. But this seems to be next level worship of war and death.

MIKE POPE: When we think of Rome, our images are from the Empire, where Rome is a big kind of behemoth dominating the Northwestern world. But in the early and middle Republic and into the late Republic, Rome was not that. It was a growing thing, and it was often an outnumbered thing. It fought all sorts of wars. These wars occurred every year. As soon as the spring came, you get your crops in the ground and you go to war. Every male citizen was a warrior. This was an all-encompassing warrior culture. We know nothing like it. During the height of World War II, there was still only a small percentage of adult males who were in active military service and only a small percentage of those would be fighting on the front lines as infantry.

In Rome, everybody was enrolled in the legions, or what would become the legions. There were some wars where—these are real numbers—twenty percent of the adult male population died in one of these wars. This is incomprehensible to us. All-encompassing warrior culture. Every family would have a room or a wall set aside where the ancestors were worshipped and remembered. There'd be death masks taken, like wax masks made into plaster or plaster masks maybe made into metal, and there'd be a little description of who it was. During festivals and funerals these masks would be taken down and living males in the family would don the mask of their ancestors and parade around and remember what their family had accomplished in war. This is deep cosplay, remembering the past and great warriors. We know nothing of the sort.

With that as a backdrop, Lucretius doesn't want to look at the heroic exploits of Romans fighting the Phoenicians or barbarians from the north, those terrifying Germans. No, he's going to take you to the warfare psychologically at home. That's where he wants to have the fight.

BLAIR HODGES: With all that in mind, you say again Lucretius wants his audience to see understand that the way they are valorizing death is a facade, he says it actually shows how insecure they are about death. All their bluster in the face of death and the glory of war is to compensate for a deep fear about what death brings to them, as far as he’s concerned.

MIKE POPE: These are two sides of the same coin. One is the fear, perhaps, of the underworld, whatever that looks like. It's not that Romans were terribly afraid of hell, or Hades or whatever. They didn't have a highly developed concept of that. It existed for sure, most famously in the next generation of poets. We get it with Virgil in book six of the Aeneid. But there was definitely the idea that something happens in the next life.

But maybe more important is your memory, how you are recalled by those who come after. There's a terror of being found not worthy of that. There's a terror of being punished eternally, being conscious of the fact you failed to live up to the best. This is the worst possible thing. Men spend their lives acting out to fend off these fears or to forestall what might happen to them, and so they fight. They have to win statues, and they have to win honors. Everything in the face of this fear of death and the erasure that comes with it—or worse, erasure of what you did, and again, being conscious of that erasure and powerless to change it? Terrifying existence.

BLAIR HODGES: How does Lucretius connect this to masculinity? How is he using death to explore what Romans thought it meant to be a man? He's challenging that?

MIKE POPE: Lucretius, again, takes us right to the inner core of a man. He strips off the armor. We're not on a battlefield. We're at home, and we're concerned about dying. What he shows is when men are afraid, they act out. The fear of death promotes overconsumption. They want to have it all. They want to have all the fame. They want to have all the women, or all the boys, or all the men. They want to live so badly they just overconsume.

He gives us an extended example. He says, imagine if we gave Nature a voice and she came to an old man at a dinner, and the old man has just gorged himself, and Nature says to him, "Haven't you had enough? Just push back from the table. Anything more you have is more of the same, and if you eat any more you might be miserable anyway. Look what you've had, acknowledge that it's been good, and be done." But that's asking a lot from a culture that only consumes and wants more.

Lucretius is trying to convince the Roman man there is a limit to everything and acknowledging that limit is how you can come to accept death, but when you fight against it what you end up doing is poisoning the one brief life you have. You spend it trying to find the pleasure, trying to find something that fills this gaping void in your soul, which if you knew where to look, you could draw limits around it, make it much smaller, and deal with it.

But that’s a hard ask.

WOMB AND TOMB (42:37)

BLAIR HODGES: It's a hard ask back then, and it feels like a hard ask today. You mention the womb and the tomb, that the earth itself is both womb and the tomb. Talk about that visual because there's a gendered component to that as well.

MIKE POPE: I have to insert a little personal story here. As I was researching for this book and writing it, I read Lucretius a lot of times, but for whatever reason I had just missed this image. I'm reading along in this passage, and I come to it. In the course of two lines he goes from having Mother Earth being this great omniparents, the all-parent with a womb, and then also it'll be the sepulcher for everything that has ever lived.

That was so metal and so hardcore I was stunned at how hard it hit me. Mother Earth is the all-bearing womb, and it's also a tomb. This is not difficult for us to understand, we're all going to go back into Earth, but he sexualizes it. Though he does not eroticize it. What I mean is that if Earth bears us, there is a birthing canal, there's an opening, but that opening doesn't close. It stands there waiting to take us back in as a grave.

He then extends the metaphor. He says, "If you came out as a child, you go back in and now you're the penetrator." You're not the Roman penetrator of male sexual domination. You go back in and you penetrate and you're broken. You are a feminized penetrator. You go back in not to dominate, but to decompose.

Your entire body is composed of atoms—and this is the wordplay he uses throughout. He doesn't actually use the word atom, not the Greek word. He uses most commonly the word seminah, semen, seeds, or little bits of things. Your body is going to decompose and upon reentering the womb or the tomb of Earth, you're going to inseminate it, not by ejaculation but by decomposition. You are going to come apart and all your seeds are going to go back into the ground and something is going to come from this insemination, but it's not going to be you and it's not going to be your offspring and you will not be remembered. But life will go on, and you're not in it.

Again, a tough image to endure.

BLAIR HODGES: It's hardcore. You say he also makes each human into a type of Earth as well. He points out our bodies, all of them, are sites of taking stuff in and putting stuff out. We all eat, we all sh*t. We all consume, we all extrude. We all live, we all die. He's also drawing a parallel there between humans and the earth as well. Is that right?

MIKE POPE: He goes right to the most basic gross image of where do maggots come from? Any dead body lying on the ground, if you watch it long enough, maggots are going to come out of it. So that's what he does to the human body. You're going to live, oh Roman man, in all of your power and might, and then you will die and your corpse is going to get pregnant. He uses the word here, it's amazing. As your body swells, the gases inside your belly swell, you are going to look like a pregnant belly. But it's seething because you're not giving birth to anything but a bunch of maggots.

He takes death, this could be this honorable moment for a man, and he turns it into pregnancy. Not just pregnancy. Maggot pregnancy. Because this is what nature does. Take it, man.

BLAIR HODGES: It's really graphic. It seems like, according to your telling, there's a lot of potty humor in the book too. He's just definitely not above, I don't know if there are any direct fart jokes or not, but it seems there are plenty of opportunities to do some fart jokes.

MIKE POPE: If the joke isn't there, it's everywhere anyway. I've mentioned Catullus before, his exact contemporary. Catullus makes fart jokes incessantly. A fart joke is a sensuous moment. There's sound, there's smell, but there's also sight because there's a person who does it who might be embarrassed and then you have to look at them. It's an intimate exchange of material.

BLAIR HODGES: We get penetrated by farts when we're standing in the elevator next to that guy.

MIKE POPE: Don't quote me on that, but yes.

BECOMING A REAL MAN (47:13)

BLAIR HODGES: Alright, let's talk about this chapter. I don't know how to pronounce this exactly. Vir Recreandus. Is that close?

MIKE POPE: That's good ecclesial Latin. More classical Latin would be instead of the "v" sound, it's a "w" sound, so "Wir Recreandus." For listeners, you'll know this "vir" sound, not for our word "virtue" or "virtuosity," but in the German word, like "werguild" or "werewolf," that "were" there is the same as Latin "vir,"and it just means man.

BLAIR HODGES: Ok. Werewolf is man-wolf.

MIKE POPE: Yes. Vir reacreandus, a man to be reborn, a man to be recreated. I chose the word "vir" very specifically. In English, we don't disambiguate very well between man and adult human. If I say “There's a man,” that doesn't carry a lot of meaning, but for Romans there is a substantial difference between referring to someone as a "vir" versus an adult human without masculine status, and this would be homo.

It just so happens that when I say that, that sounds like I'm making some homophobic thing. No. Homo just means man, or adult person. A woman could be a homo, a man could be a homo. We know this from homo sapiens [pronounced sah-piens] or similar terms.

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks, Mike. But I say homo say-pee-ens. [laughter]

MIKE POPE: All good. I’m constantly over-pronouncing. This is the sad reality of the philologist.

The difference between vir and homo is not biological. Everyone has a biology. This is purely sociological. If you were born with biology, and this isn't taking into account the naturally occurring instances of intersex and so forth, but male anatomy, female anatomy—you are a homo by birth, one or the other, male or female. But you earn your masculine status as a vir.

How you earn it is through the things we've already discussed: warfare, political success, wealth, success in law courts, and so forth. You are granted the status of vir by the society around you. You can't really claim it for yourself. It's always a thing that's slippery and easily lost. You could be the ultimate warrior and be amazing, but if you're found out to enjoy being penetrated by a male you have lost your vir status.

Lucretius is going to have serious fun with this as well. He plays with it. When he first mentions his hero, Epicurus, in the first few lines of the poem he refers to him as a humble Graecus, Greek person. Even the word Graecus is feminizing for a Roman audience. The Greeks were the conquered people, they were Eastern, they were a little effeminate. Then he calls Epicurious a homo too, just a person. A Roman audience is like, "Oh, that's weird. He's calling his guy just a person, and then he will refer to other people as vir." As the poem goes on, he's messing with these denominations, and homos become virs and virs become homos, and by the end you're never sure who's doing what.

My argument is that by the end of the poem the categories have been blurred to the point where any homo is vir, and every vir is a homo, and there's not really a vir status anymore. If there is a vir status, it looks like this. It's the kind of person who, when they see others in pain and discomfort, help them. That's the new vir. The new homo, if there is going to be a distinction, is the kind of person who only watches out for themself and doesn't engage in social contracts for the good of others. That's the new homo. That's the undistinguished person with a penis.

BECOMING A GOOD MAN (51:11)

BLAIR HODGES: This is giving me Star-Belly Sneetch vibes. The Dr. Seuss story where the Sneetches have the “stars upon thars,” and they all get mixed up with the regular Sneeches because they're all obsessed with trying to be the elite. The story is just trying to make fun of that idea there should be an elite, it's trying to put people on a more even playing field.

You say this is one of Lucretius' biggest takeaways here because his readers might wonder what the purpose of life is, and what everything is, if his science is correct, if his philosophy is correct. What's the point if we're not supposed to get glory in war, or do all this and that? He's saying forget all of that. Recognize your weakness, recognize your softness, recognize we're all penetrated, and we all penetrate, and that sets us on this equal playing field. We can stop worrying about who has “stars upon thars” if we take that view.

MIKE POPE: That's right. And the way he drives this point home is the final scene of the poem. We don't know if the poem actually ends where we have an ending, there's different camps who think maybe we're missing fifty or one hundred lines. Maybe he didn't finish, maybe it got chopped off. We don't know. I'm of the camp that I think we are missing something, but we take what we have and we interpret from there.

The final lines of the poem, as we have them, are a retelling of a famous plague that struck Athens during the Peloponnesian War. During this plague, horrible things happen. This is something like the bubonic plague but worse. People are dying, there's heaps of corpses, people are suffering. Lucretius says those who could, tried to lock themselves up in their ivory tower retreat as though they could escape the plague. They ended up dying alone. Those who could, and helped others, when I say those who could, those who had the means. Those who had the means to help others, they went and helped because they heard the cries and saw the pain of others. Again, the sense perceptions. Same thing with the primeval people in childbirth. They go and they help, and many of them get sick and die also.

But these are the good people. The end.

I mean it literally closes just a few lines after this statement, and it's really understated.

If you finish the poem, you'll have realized, "Oh, if this is an epic poem, who are the heroes?" Well, it's not Arma virumque, arms and the man, arms and the vir. (This is Virgil's Aeneid.) No, no, it's just these, maybe they're virs, maybe they're homos. These are people who are able and who help others. And they die also, because that's what nature does to humans.

In the meantime, what is the good life is to take care of those around you, because it's a self-interested act. When you want to live in a secure position, you can't demand security, you can't compel security. You can earn security, and you earn it by being decent to others. This is how you disarm the world around you, and you bring people together in cooperation. And in the most exigent of circumstances, in an epidemic, the way you survive it is maybe by not surviving it, but you go and you help.

Because let's say you do survive it. Are you going to be known as one of those who locked himself away and you survived it like that? Or do you survive it in the act of helping others? This will be remembered. In your one brief life, are you going to be remembered as the coward, essentially, the homo, or are you going to remembered as the vir, the person who went out on the real battlefield of life and won honor for yourself by helping others? Lucretius implies it's that one. Those are the real heroes.

BLAIR HODGES: You suggest the Roman Empire itself might have turned out differently if Lucretius's message was heeded. Talk about how that might have played out, compared to what ended up happening to Rome. It seems like Lucretius’s ethic didn't prevail, and that led to more and more problems for Rome that eventually led to the downfall of that civilization.

MIKE POPE: I want to be a bit more specific. When Lucretius was writing this poem and thinking about it, these were the final years, really the final decade of what we know as the Republic. His contemporaries were Caesar, and Pompey, and Cicero, and Crassus, and so forth. These were the times where the Roman constitution was failing. Violence in the streets, corrupted elections, politicians being beaten and beating others, people marching on Rome at the head of armies. This was a disaster for the Republic. Lucretius is writing in this exact moment.

In his childhood, he probably witnessed it himself or heard the cries of a previous civil war where an army marched on Rome. This was Sola, who goes into Rome with an army, gathers a whole bunch of people and mass slaughters them. Thousands of people. He had seen what happens when societies fail. He's not writing in a fantasy mode, he's writing in reality. He is begging Romans.

Yes, he's making jokes. Yes, he's using sexual humor. But he is begging Romans to reconsider the way they're living right here and now. Because if this persists, it's not going to be an epidemic that destroys Rome, it's going to be civil discord. We are going to end up killing ourselves. This will all come to an end.

Now, could he have saved the Republic? Well, probably not. But maybe. If Caesar had drawn boundaries around what he wanted out of life, how many pleasures and how many honors he pursued, maybe he would not have marched on Rome. Maybe Pompey wouldn't have kept a more or less illegal command of troops. Maybe he could have set down his arms. I don't want to get too in the weeds here of Roman politics, but maybe other players would have been able to go into retirement and enjoy this life on their villa somewhere. Maybe they wouldn't have made so many enemies in Rome up and down the Italian peninsula on the borders, if they could have wanted less.

But these are "Desiderata" and they're not going to be fulfilled. The Roman Republic is going to come to an end. The Roman Civil War is going to continue on for another full generation, and the Empire is inevitable.

HISTORY REPEATING (57:55)

BLAIR HODGES: It's really hard not to draw direct parallels to things we're experiencing today.

MIKE POPE: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: What masculinity looks like, what civilization and war look like, the purpose of those things.

As a scholar of classics, some people might look at that kind of thing as vanity. “You can do that, it doesn't really matter.” But it seems the message you're taking from Lucretius and trying to communicate in your book is really relevant today. I imagine it was hard not to draw parallels with what you're experiencing today when you were writing this book.

MIKE POPE: Yes. I think I mentioned in a footnote somewhere that the bulk of the book was researched and written during an era where we see a resurgence of "strong men"—I use that term, specifically strong men—across global politics. This was before Russia invaded Ukraine. We are seeing a strong man play out strong man fantasies. I didn't see that coming, but that's what happened. Yes, it's hard not to take all this rather personally.

And it's not just me sitting and making judgments on the world around me. This is also my own stuff. I was raised in a certain culture in a certain time, where masculinity put certain demands on me, demands that ultimately end up being damaging, and it's taken my adult life to rethink what masculinity looks like for me. I'm not a finished product or anything, but I have had to do a lot of rethinking.

As I've done that rethinking internally, I've started to look at the world around me and I see so many of our problems are of overconsumption, the desire to control everything, whether it's an internet discussion, or global politics. It's impossible for me not to think about classics in the here and now. In fact, I wouldn't have written this book otherwise.

For me it was a deeply personal study situated in this time and place. Fifty years later if anyone reads the book, it'll feel out of place, like every book is. For me, Lucretius at this moment seemed to speak out in a way that the Aeneid or Lucan's Civil War, these other epic poems of the same type, have not spoken to me.

BLAIR HODGES: Maybe give us an example of something you've taken away in how you think about masculinity. You might have already mentioned it during the course of the interview, but something you got from Lucretius that you've rethought about what it means to be a man right now.

MIKE POPE: This is all personal, but I think this is a fine setting for that. The audience can't see me, but I don't look like a classicist. I have a shaved head and a big old mustache and I dress like a lumberjack. I like to live a vigorous life. I like to do tough things. I'm a powerlifter. I mountain bike. I mountain bike in the snow, I go all year round. I like to push myself to my limits. I really like feeling alive. This is a better version of an earlier version of me where I pushed myself because I wanted to be the strongest guy in the room. I wanted to walk in and be confident in my physical strength. This was a young man's thing.

What the constant study of Lucretius has done is it's turned me into a joke of myself. I'm able to laugh at myself now. It's helped me repurpose these inborn energies that I have—I have a lot of energy, I have big emotions, I have big appetites and desires. When I'm able to step back and make a joke of it, the joke creates a distance enough where I can think about the seriousness of what it means to be male, and to inhabit a large body. A large body which can enact a lot of violence, physical violence, or intellectually I could create a lot of havoc if I wanted to.

But the joke allows me to step back, the humor, and see that's not what I want. Doing all those things in a selfish way is against my own interests. For my own interests, life is better for me when I don't act out in a whatever traditional "masculine way." Nope. Living in a less masculine way—I don't want to use the word effeminate here, but a less masculine way actually ensures my own enjoyment of life. It's one of those “You gotta test it out to find out for yourself” things, but in the reverse of the saying, “Mess around and find out,” I've tested around and found out, and Lucretius is right. I don't want to be a traditional Roman vir, not at all.

REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES! (1:02:45)

BLAIR HODGES: That can be a masculinity. It could it be a proper masculinity for you.

That's Mike Pope, Associate professor of Classical Studies at Brigham Young University. We talked about his book Lucretius and the End of Masculinity. All right, this is the segment called Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises, Mike. It's our last question. You get to talk about something you would change about the book now that it's out, something that challenged you most in writing it, or something that surprised you most. I think you mentioned one of the surprises was the womb and tomb. That's pretty metal. That's a good one for that. But do you have any regrets or challenges we haven't mentioned so far?

MIKE POPE: I mentioned this earlier. So it's really hard to take everything into account. I was working with largely binary gender and sexuality because that's what most of ancient sources discuss. However, there is things beyond binary in ancient literature. I put those off to the side because I really wanted to bring out Lucretius playing with the binary to actually destroy the binary. If I would have done it again, I would have gone into a bit more discussion about how Lucretius also acknowledges nonbinary and how he works with that. But you can only do so much.

Another regret I have, and there's no way I can go back and change any of this, is that at this exact moment that I was writing my book, another scholar at another university was writing her book which came out within weeks of mine called The Crisis of Masculinity in the Age of Augustus. So the exact next generation, she was looking at the same questions. I wish I would have known she was working on this! We could have communicated and we could have had some important discussions and certainly it would have benefited my own thinking. I'm currently reading her book to write a review for it and it's amazing. I wish I would have known about it.

BLAIR HODGES: Awesome. For people that do want to hear more about that nonbinary stuff anciently, we do have an episode of Family Proclamations that goes into that more. That'll be a good companion one to this one. So check out other episodes of Family Proclamations where we go more into challenging binary thinking in ancient and classical times.

All right, Mike. This has been a lot of fun. I enjoyed reading the book a lot. I should let people know too, you and I have known each other for years and I consider you a great friend and have learned a lot from you.

MIKE POPE: Same.

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. I have learned a lot from you over the years, in part because I even took a class from you at Brigham Young University when I was employed there about this book. Thanks a ton for all your thinking on this and for sitting down and talking about it here.

MIKE POPE: Thanks, Blair. It's been really great. Not every scholar gets a chance to actually talk about something they do professionally, but also love on a personal level. This was a real privilege for me.

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you for listening to another episode, and special thanks to Camille Messick, my wonderful transcript editor. You can check out transcripts at familyproclamation.org. Thanks to David Ostler, who sponsored this first batch of transcripts. If you'd like to sponsor some transcripts, reach out and let me know. My email address is blair at firesidepod dot org.

I also want to hear from you if you're enjoying the show. I read all the reviews in Apple podcasts, like this one from jwstone2. Their five-star review says they “can't wait to see how the new series unfolds.”

Well, me too, jwstone. We are on this journey together. I'm glad to be along for the ride. There's much more to come on Family Proclamations.

Also did you know the number one way people hear about podcasts is through a friend? Your recommendation would mean a lot to me. Tell somebody about an episode and see what they think.

Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.

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Note: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.