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  • The Epicure in Surinam:Lucretian Reception and Skepticism in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko
  • Sarah-Gray Lesley

Aphra Behn was unapologetic in her support of Epicureanism. This is particularly evident in her poem, "To the Unknown Daphnis" (1683), one of several prefatory paeans to Thomas Creech in the second edition of his translation of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura. Creech was the first to publish a complete English translation of the Roman didactic epic in 1682, and Behn's poem praises Creech for making the Latin text readable to those who did not receive a classical education. This group includes, notably, Behn and a vast majority of seventeenth-century women. However, Behn is excited not only by the increased classical accessibility for her and her fellow female readers, but also by the heterodoxy within De Rerum Natura itself. "To the Unknown Daphnis" makes explicit that Behn finds in Lucretius classical support for her career-long commitment to intellectual freedom, skepticism, and libertine anti-religion.1

Behn, of course, was not the first to mobilize Epicureanism as a tool for thinking about the world outside of the theocratic standard. Epicureanism engenders skepticism within its followers by way of its materialist principles.2 At the center of the Epicurean universe are atoms—the smallest possible unit of matter from which all things are made. These atoms' movement through and structure within vacuums order the world in which we live. The universe is infinite in size, and other worlds like or unlike ours can and do exist. This unlimited universe is not guided by divine force. Though extant, the gods are entirely removed from the lives of those on earth(s), so they enact neither good will nor wrath, neither providence nor ultimate judgment, upon mortals. If the gods were to involve themselves with the troubles of humans, they would no longer be perfect, because perfection, for the Epicure, is ataraxia, a state of complete peace about one's life [End Page 75] and, especially, one's mortality. In ataraxia, one accepts that they are made exclusively of the materials of the world—atoms. This includes one's soul3 (anima), which is atomic and part of the body; thus, it dies with the body. It follows then that there is no afterlife that humans can either fear or look forward to. For Lucretius and Epicurus, this denial of immortality enables humans to escape the constraints of religion—religion being an institution which is merely a vehicle of fear designed to control people. The purpose of an Epicurean life then is not to appease the moral guidelines of an unseen god, but rather to live a life of mental peace, bodily health, and intellectual fellowship. Given this context, it is hardly surprising that a full English translation of De Rerum Natura was kept from print for nearly 250 years after Poggio Bracciolini's 1417 rediscovery of the text.

For reasons such as these, Creech appears quite apologetic and uncomfortable with his position as Lucretius's translator. His marginalia and prefatory material work to distance him from certain beliefs held by his classical subject, while Behn's "To the Unknown Daphnis" highlights the same bristly elements and writes them honorable. Creech, or his publisher Jacob Tonson, identified the controversy innate in Behn's brazen promotion of Epicurean materialism at its most heterodox and censured her poem in its 1683 print. Evidence that Behn's paean was in fact edited against her wishes is found in two of her later poems. In 1685, Behn published "A Letter to Mr. Creech," a Hudibrastic satire which accuses Creech of betrayal regarding a "scrap of Nonsense" which had been "left at the Tonsons" (4–5). This "scrap", she alleges, has been marred by Creech's intervention; she complains that his "Scribling Fist was out of joynt / And ev'ry Limb made great complaint" (41–42). Just a year before, Behn published her second edition of "To the Unknown Daphnis" (1684) with significant changes in her collection, Poems Upon Several Occasions. Behn's explicit identification of editorial betrayal in "A Letter to Mr. Creech" suggests that the second edition of "To the Unknown Daphnis" was a correction, rather than a...

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