had long ceased to believe in them.  It was fortunate indeed for Augustus that he found in the great poet of Mantua one who was in some sense a prophet as well as a poet, who could urge the Roman by an imaginative example to return to a living pietas,—­not merely to the old religious forms, but to the intelligent sense of duty to God and man which had built up his character and his empire.  In Cicero’s day there was also a great poet, he too in some sense a prophet; but Lucretius could only appeal to the Roman to shake off the slough of his old religion, and such an appeal was at the time both futile and dangerous.  Looking at the matter historically, and not theologically, we ought to sympathise with the attitude of Cicero and Scaevola towards the religion of the State.  It was based on a statesmanlike instinct; and had it been possible for that instinct to express itself practically in a positive policy like that of Augustus, instead of showing itself in philosophical treatises like the de Legibus, or on occasional moments of danger like that of the Bona Dea sacrilege, it is quite possible that much mischief might have been averted.  But in that generation no one had the shrewdness or experience of Augustus, and no one but Julius had the necessary free hand; and we may be almost sure that Julius, Pontifex Maximus though he was, was entirely unfitted by nature and experience to undertake a work that called for such delicate handling, such insight into the working of the ignorant Italian mind.

This attitude of inconsistency and compromise must seem to a modern unsatisfactory and strained, and he turns with relief to the courageous outspokenness of the great poem of Lucretius on the Nature of Things, of which the main object was to persuade the Romans to renounce for good all the mass of superstition, in which he included the religion of the State, by which their minds were kept in a prison of darkness, terror, and ignorance.  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.