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Indignantly he turns away from the "hollow Hellenis" of his time, and professes himself with his whole soul and heart to be the scholar of the "chaste Greeks" as indeed even the sacred earnestness of Thucydides has found no unworthy echo in one of the best-known sections of this Roman poem. As E
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describes completely the religious standpoint of Lucretius, and not unjustly for that reason he himself terms his poem as it were the continuation of E
Once more - and for the last time - the poem of Lucretius is resonant with the whole poetic pride and the whole poetic earnestness of the sixth century, in which, amidst the images of the formidable Carthaginian and the glorious Scipiad, the imagination of the poet is more at home than in his own degenerate age[18]. To him too his own song "gracefully welling up out of rich feelin" sounds, as compared with the common poems, "like the brief song of the swan compared with the cry of the cran"; - with him too the heart swells, listening to the melodies of its own invention, with the hope of illustrious honours - just as E
It is a remarkable fatality, that this man of extraordinary talents, far superior in originality of poetic endowments to most if not to all his contemporaries, fell upon an age in which he felt himself strange and forlorn, and in consequence of this made the most singular mistake in the selection of a subject. The system of Epicurus, which converts the universe into a great vortex of atoms and undertakes to explain the origin and end of the world as well as all the problems of nature and of life in a purely mechanical way, was doubtless somewhat less silly than the conversion of myths into history which was attempted by Euhemerus and after him by E
The poet accordingly was zealous to overthrow the gods, as Brutus had overthrown the kings, and "to release nature from her stern lords". But it was not against the long ago enfeebled throne of Jovis that these flaming words were hurled; just like E
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 e