neral, in which and for which the poet wrote, suggested his poem.
It was composed in that hopeless time when the rule of the oligarchy
had been overthrown and that of Caesar had not yet been established,
in the sultry years during which the outbreak of the civil war
was awaited with long and painful suspense. If we seem to perceive
in its unequal and restless utterance that the poet daily
expected to see the wild tumult of revolution break forth
over himself and his work, we must not with reference to his view
of men and things forget amidst what men, and in prospect
of what things, that view had its origin. In the Hellas of the epoch
before Alexander it was a current saying, and one profoundly felt
by all the best men, that the best thing of all was not to be born,
and the next best to die. Of all views of the world possible
to a tender and poetically organized mind in the kindred Caesarian age
this was the noblest and the most ennobling, that it is a benefit
for man to be released from a belief in the immortality of the soul
and thereby from the evil dread of death and of the gods
which malignantly steals over men like terror creeping over children
in a dark room; that, as the sleep of the night is more refreshing
than the trouble of the day, so death, eternal repose
from all hope and fear, is better than life, as indeed the gods
of the poet themselves are nothing, and have nothing, but an eternal
blessed rest; that the pains of hell torment man, not after life,
but during its course, in the wild and unruly passions
of his throbbing heart; that the task of man is to attune his soul
to equanimity, to esteem the purple no higher than the warm dress
worn at home, rather to remain in the ranks of those that obey
than to press into the confused crowd of candidates for the office
of ruler, rather to lie on the grass beside the brook than to take part
under the golden ceiling of the rich in emptying his countless dishes.
This philosophico-practical tendency is the true ideal essence
of the Lucretian poem and is only overlaid, not choked,
by all the dreariness of its physical demonstrations. Essentially
on this rests its comparative wisdom and truth. The man who
with a reverence for his great predecessors and a vehement zeal,
to which this century elsewhere knew no parallel, preached such doctrine
and embellished it with the charm of art, may be termed at once
a good citizen and a great poet. The didactic poem concern