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;
Lucretius in his study could contemplate the "rerum natura" without
troubling himself about the "natura hominum" as it existed in the
Italy of his day. "Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,"--so
wrote of him his great successor and admirer, yet added, with a tinge
of pathos which touches us even now, "Fortunatus et ille deos qui
novit agrestes." Even at the present day an uncompromising unbeliever
may be touched by the simple worship, half pagan though it may seem to
him, of a village in the Apennines; but in the eyes of Lucretius all
worship seemed prompted by fear and based on ignorance of natural law.
Virgil's tender and sympathetic soul went out to the peasant as he
prayed to his gods for plenty or prosperity, as it went out to all
living creatures in trouble or in joy.
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