As the charred fragments of Philodemus’ rolls are published one by one, we begin to realize that the students of Vergil have failed to appreciate the influences which must have reached the young poet in these years of his life in a Greek city in daily communion with oriental philosophers like Philodemus and Siro.  After the death of Phaedrus these men were doubtless the leaders of their sect; at least Asconius calls the former illa aetate nobilissimus (In Pis. 68).  Cicero represents them as homines doctissimos as early as 60 B.C., and though in his tirade against Piso—­ten years before Vergil’s adhesion to the school—­he must needs cast some slurs at Piso’s teacher, he is careful to compliment both his learning and his poetry.  Indeed there seems to be not a little direct use of Philodemus’ works in Cicero’s De finibus and the De natura deorum written many years later.  In any case, at least Catullus, Horace, and Ovid made free to paraphrase some of his epigrams.  And these verses may well guard us against assuming that the man who could draw to his lectures and companionship some of the brightest spirits of the day is adequately represented by the crabbed controversial essays that his library has produced.  These essays follow a standard type and do not necessarily reveal the actual man.  Even these, however, disclose a man not wholly confined to the ipsa verba of Epicurus, for they show more interest in rhetorical precepts than was displayed by the founder of the school; they are more sympathetic toward the average man’s religion, and not a little concerned about the affairs of state.  All this indicates a healthy reaction that more than one philosopher underwent in coming in contact with Roman men of the world, but it also doubtless reflects the tendencies of the Syrian branch of the school from which he sprang; for the Syrian group had had to cast off some of its traditional fanaticism and acquire a few social graces and a modicum of worldly wisdom in its long contact with the magnificent Seleucid court.

Philodemus was himself a native of Gadara, that unfortunate Macedonian colony just east of the Sea of Galilee, which was subjected to Jewish rule in the early youth of our philosopher.  He studied with Zeno of Sidon, to whom Cicero also listened in 78, a masterful teacher whose followers and pupils, Demetrius, Phaedrus, Patro, probably also Siro, and of course Philodemus, captured a large part of the most influential Romans for the sect.[2]

[Footnote 2:  Italiam totam occupaverunt.  Cic. Tusc.  IV, 7.]

How Philodemus taught his rich Roman patrons and pupils to value not only his creed but the whole line of masters from Epicurus we may learn from the Herculanean villa where his own library was found, for it contained a veritable museum of Epicurean worthies down to Zeno, perhaps not excluding the teacher himself, if we could but identify his portrait.[3]