Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses by Butler Shane. Purves Alex

Author:Butler, Shane.,Purves, Alex.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317547136
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Even though severed limbs and toes continue to twitch, and lopped off heads still maintain a semblance of life, Lucretius denies that there is any sensation of pain because of the swiftness of the trauma (mobilitate mali). It is unclear as to whether the staring eyes (oculos patentis) still briefly see until the remaining soul pours out, but it seems unlikely. At a number of other places in the poem this problem is addressed explicitly, and there is no question, as there was in Lucan’s text, of a severed nose, for example, continuing to smell for even a second: Lucretius assures us that once removed from the rest of our body, not any of our sense organs continues to work (3.551–3): “hands and eyes or noses, apart, and separate from us, cannot sense or even exist, but rot away in however short a time” (manus atque oculus naresve seorsum / secreta ab nobis nequeunt sentire neque esse, / sed tamen in parvo liquuntur tempore tabe). And we can compare with this, for example, another passage that comes just a few lines later (3.563–4): “It is obvious: an eye, torn out by the roots, and separate from the whole body, can see nothing by itself” (scilicet avolsus radicibus ut nequit ullam / dispicere ipse oculus rem seorsum corpore toto). For the Epicurean Lucretius, sensation is only possible as a joint function of body and the super-fine mixture of soul;22 and the bits of soul suffused through our sense organs do not survive the act of severing, but are dispersed instead, leaving what used to be seeing eyes, touching hands and smelling noses to rot, now nothing more than inanimate flesh.

The relevance this has for an individual’s senses after death (rather than just the death of individual senses) is perhaps already clear, but, in any event, Lucretius spells it out for us a little later in a passage castigating those well-worn depictions of sentient spirits in the underworld that Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations dubs “monstrosities of poets and painters”.23 Later still in book 3, Lucretius will argue that the sensuous horrors of the underworld – the sweating Sisyphus, thirsty Tantalus and the like – are all merely projections of the mental torments of our day-to-day life (cf. 3.978–1023), but at present his interest is, instead, on the impossibility of the dead enjoying or suffering from sense perception (3.624–33):

Moreover, if the nature of the soul is immortal, and sentient when separate from our body, it would have to be endowed, I think, with five senses. How else could we imagine ourselves wandering as shades in the Underworld? Thus painters and generations of writers have brought before us souls endowed with senses. But neither eyes nor noses nor hands can exist for bodiless souls, nor tongues nor ears: thus, souls cannot sense on their own nor even exist.

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