Obviously this was a system which, by enlarging man’s mental horizon and sympathies, could create new values for aesthetic use.  Like the crude evolutionistic hypotheses in Rousseau’s day, it gave one a more soundly based sympathy for one’s fellows—­since evolution was not yet “red in tooth and claw.”  If nature was to be trusted, why not man’s nature?  Why curse the body, any man’s body, as the root-ground of sin?  Were not the instincts a part of man?  Might not the scientific view prove that the passions so far from being diseases, conditioned the very life and survival of the race?  Perhaps the evils of excess, called sin, were after all due to defects in social and political institutions that had applied incorrect regulative principles, or to the selfishly imposed religious fears which had driven the healthy instincts into tantrums.  Rid man of these erroneous fears and of a political system begot for purposes of exploitation and see whether by returning to an age of primitive innocence he cannot prove that nature is trustworthy.[2]

[Footnote 2:  Lucretius, III, 37-93; II, 23-39; V, 1105-1135.]

There is in this philosophy then a basis for a large humanitarianism, dangerous perhaps in its implications.  And yet it could hardly have been more perilous than the Roman orthodox religion which insisted only upon formal correctness, seldom upon ethical decorum, or than Stoicism with its categorical imperative, which could restrain only those who were already convinced.  The Stoic pretence of appealing to a natural law could be proved illogical at first examination, when driven to admit that “nature” must be explained by a question-begging definition before its rule could be applied.

Indeed the Romans of Vergil’s day had not been accustomed to look for ethical sanctions in religion or creed.  Morality had always been for them a matter of family custom, parental teaching of the rules of decorum, legal doctrine regarding the universality of aequitas, and, more than they knew, of puritanic instincts inherited from a well-sifted stock.  It probably did not occur to Lucretius and Vergil to ask whether this new philosophy encouraged a higher or a lower ethical standard.  Cicero, as statesman, does; but the question had doubtless come to him first out of the literature of the Academy which he was wont to read.  Despite their creed, Lucretius and Vergil are indeed Rome’s foremost apostles of Righteousness; and if anyone had pressed home the charge of possible moral weakness in their system they might well have pointed to the exemplary life of Epicurus and many of his followers.  To the Romans this philosophy brought a creed of wide sympathies with none of the “lust for sensation” that accompanied its return in the days of Rousseau and “Werther.”  Had not the old Roman stock, sound in marrow and clear of eye, been shattered by wars and thinned out by emigration, only to be displaced by a more nervous and impulsive people that had come in by the slave trade, Roman civilization would hardly have suffered from the application of the doctrines of Epicurus.