ated
imprecation of Persius upon tyrants for her own, as though to her
alone belonged the secret of the soul-tormenting sense of guilt. Yet
it is certain that we owe to the Romans that conception of sin
bearing its own fruit of torment which the Latin Fathers--Augustine
and Tertullian--imposed with such terrific force upon the mediaeval
consciousness. There is no need to conclude that Persius was a
Christian because he wrote--

Magne pater divum, saevos punire tyrannos, etc.,

when we know that he had before his eyes that passage in the third
book of the 'De Rerum Natura,' (978-1023) which reduces the myths of
Tityos and Sisyphus and Cerberus and the Furies to facts of the
human soul:--

sed metus in vita poenarum pro male factis
est insignibus insignis, scelerisque luella,
carcer et horribilis de saxo iactu' deorsum,
verbera carnifices robur pix lammina taedae;
quae tamen etsi absunt, at mens sibi conscia facti
praemetuens adhibet stimulos terretque flagellis
nec videt interea qui terminus esse malorum
possit nec quae sit poenarum denique finis
atque eadem metuit magis haec ne in morte gravescant.

The Greeks, by personifying those secret terrors, had removed them
into a region of existences separate from man. They became dread
goddesses, who might to some extent be propitiated by exorcisms or
expiatory rites. This was in strict accordance with the mythopoeic
and artistic quality of the Greek intellect. The stern and somewhat
prosaic rectitude of the Roman broke through such figments of the
fancy, and exposed the sore places of the soul itself. The theory of
the Conscience, moreover, is part of the Lucretian polemic against
false notions of the gods and the pernicious belief in hell.

Positivism and Realism were qualities of Roman as distinguished from
Greek culture. There was no self-delusion in Lucretius--no attempt,
however unconscious, to compromise unpalatable truth, or to invest
philosophy with the charm of myth. A hundred illustrations might be
chosen to prove his method of setting forth thought with unadorned
simplicity. These, however, are familiar to any one who has but
opened the 'De Rerum Natura.' It is more profitable to trace this
Roman ruggedness in the poet's treatment of the subject which more
than any other seems to have preoccupied his intellect and
fascinated his imagination--that is Death. His poem has been called
by a great critic the 'poem of Death.' Shakspere's line-