5] It is a purely self-regarding rule of life. It is not
even a social creed; neither family nor State seems to have any part
in it, much less the unfortunate in this life, the poor, and the
suffering. The poet never mentions slavery, or the crowded populations
of great cities. It might almost be called a creed of fatalism, in
which Natura plays much the same part as Fortuna did in the creed of
many less noble spirits of that age.[546] Nature fights on; we cannot
resist her, and cannot improve on her; it is better to acquiesce and
obey than to try and rule her.

Thus Lucretius' remedy fails utterly; it is that of an aristocratic
intellect, not of a saviour of mankind.[547] So far as we know, it was
entirely fruitless; like the constitution of Sulla his contemporary,
the doctrine of Lucretius roused no sense of loyalty in Roman or
Italian, because it was constructed with imperfect knowledge of the
Roman and Italian nature. But it was a noble effort of a noble mind;
and, apart from its literary greatness, it has incidentally a lasting
value for all students of religious history, as showing better than
anything else that has survived from that age the need of a real
consecration of morality by the life and example of a Divine man.

Thus while the Roman statesman found it necessary to maintain the ius
divinum without troubling himself to attempt to put any new life into
the details of the worship it prescribed, content to let much of it
sink into oblivion as no longer essential to the good government of
the State, the greatest poetical genius of the age was proclaiming in
trumpet tones that if a man would make good use of his life he must
abandon absolutely and without a scruple the old religious ideas of
the Graeco-Roman world. But there was another school of thought which
had long been occupied with these difficulties, and had reached
conclusions far better suited than the dogmatism of Lucretius to the
conservative character of the Roman mind, for it found a place for
the deities of the State, and therefore for the ius divinum, in a
philosophical system already widely accepted by educated men. This
school may be described as Stoic, though its theology was often
accepted by men who did not actually call themselves Stoics; for
example, by Cicero himself, who, as an adherent of the New Academy,
the school which repudiated dogmatism and occupied itself with
dialectic and criticism, was perfectly entitled to adopt the tenets