individual would alike suffer unless the gods
were properly propitiated; and that in order to keep them quiet and
comfortable the sense of duty to the gods must be kept alive even
among those who had long ceased to believe in them. It was fortunate
indeed for Augustus that he found in the great poet of Mantua one who
was in some sense a prophet as well as a poet, who could urge the
Roman by an imaginative example to return to a living pietas,--not
merely to the old religious forms, but to the intelligent sense of
duty to God and man which had built up his character and his empire.
In Cicero's day there was also a great poet, he too in some sense a
prophet; but Lucretius could only appeal to the Roman to shake off the
slough of his old religion, and such an appeal was at the time both
futile and dangerous. Looking at the matter historically, and not
theologically, we ought to sympathise with the attitude of Cicero
and Scaevola towards the religion of the State. It was based on a
statesmanlike instinct; and had it been possible for that instinct to
express itself practically in a positive policy like that of Augustus,
instead of showing itself in philosophical treatises like the _de
Legibus_, or on occasional moments of danger like that of the Bona Dea
sacrilege, it is quite possible that much mischief might have
been averted. But in that generation no one had the shrewdness or
experience of Augustus, and no one but Julius had the necessary free
hand; and we may be almost sure that Julius, Pontifex Maximus though
he was, was entirely unfitted by nature and experience to undertake
a work that called for such delicate handling, such insight into the
working of the ignorant Italian mind.

This attitude of inconsistency and compromise must seem to a modern
unsatisfactory and strained, and he turns with relief to the
courageous outspokenness of the great poem of Lucretius on the Nature
of Things, of which the main object was to persuade the Romans to
renounce for good all the mass of superstition, in which he included
the religion of the State, by which their minds were kept in a prison
of darkness, terror, and ignorance. Lucretius took no part whatever in
public life; he could afford to be in earnest; he felt no shadow of
responsibility for the welfare of the State as such. The Epicurean
tenets which he held so passionately had always ranked the individual
before the community, and suggested a life of individual quietism;
Lu