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At the beginning of the Christian era, the cultured Romans were stoics or epicureans. The poet Lucretius was an epicurean who regarded the belief in the gods as a product of the terrors of primitive man and recommended that the mind should be emancipated from the fear of the gods and argued against the immortality of the soul. Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius were stoics.
Who would now think of going back for his science to Plato's "Timaeus," or would accept the description of the physical world contained in the works of Aristotle? What chemist or physicist need busy himself with the doctrine of atoms and their clashings presented in the magnificent poem of Lucretius?
Creech had a party formed for him, who ventured to prefer him to Mr. Dryden, in point of genius. Mr. Dryden himself highly commended his Lucretius, and in his preface to the second volume of Poetical Miscellanies thus characterises it. 'I now call to mind what I owe to the ingenious, and learned translator of Lucretius.
Thus he stands altogether aloof from the fashionable standard of his day, a solitary beacon pointing to landmarks once well known, but now crumbling into decay. Lucretius is the only Roman in whom the love of speculative truth prevails over every other feeling.
In the end Vergil's poetry, like that of Lucretius, owed more to Epicureanism than modern critics too often obsessed by a misapplied odium philosophicum have been inclined to admit. It is all too easy to compare this philosophy with other systems, past and present, and to prove its science inadequate, its implications unethical, and its attitude towards art banal.
Internal evidence proves the poem to be a work of the period between 54 and 44, which admirably suits Vergilian claims. Its close dependence upon Lucretius gives the first date, its mention of the "Medea" of the artist Timomachus as being overseas, a work which was brought to Rome between 46 and 44, gives the second.
The passage is rather fitted for a despairing mood of Arthur, in the Idylls, than for the wife of the city clerk ruined by a pious rogue. The Lucretius, later published, is beyond praise as a masterly study of the great Roman sceptic, whose heart is at eternal odds with his Epicurean creed.
VII. Lucretius Vespillo and Minutius Rufus were at Oricum, with eighteen Asiatic ships, which were given into their charge by the orders of Decimus Laelius: Marcus Bibulus at Corcyra, with a hundred and ten ships.
On coming on deck this morning, found the wind had come out nearly dead ahead, and the ship barely heading her course under a topsail breeze, with her yards braced sharp. It is a pretty sight, or rather Would be a pleasant thing, as the Epicurean Lucretius expresses it, "to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed at sea."
When the senate received information of these things, by a letter from Spurius Lucretius, they were filled with the most intense anxiety, lest the joy they had experienced on the destruction of Hasdrubal and his army, two years before, should be rendered vain by another war's springing up in the same quarter, equal in magnitude, but under a new leader.
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