But it is nevertheless true that Lucretius was a great religious poet.
He was a prophet, in deadly earnest, calling men to renounce their
errors both of thought and conduct. He saw around him a world full of
wickedness and folly; a world of vanity, vexation, fear, ambition,
cruelty, and lust. He saw men fearing death and fearing the gods;
overvaluing life, yet weary of it; unable to use it well, because
steeped in ignorance of the wonderful working of Nature.[539] He saw
them, as we have already seen them, the helpless victims of ambition
and avarice, ever, like Sisyphus, rolling the stone uphill and never
reaching the summit.[540] Of cruelty and bloodshed in civil strife
that age had seen enough, and on this too the poet dwells with bitter
emphasis;[541] on the unwholesome luxury and restlessness of the
upper classes,[542] and on their unrestrained indulgence of bodily
appetites. In his magnificent scorn he probably exaggerated the evils
of his day, yet we have seen enough in previous chapters to suggest
that he was not a mere pessimist; there is no trace in his poem of
cynicism, or of a soured temperament.
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