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.  We may be certain that he was absolutely convinced of the truth of all he wrote.

So far Lucretius may be called a religious poet, in that with profound conviction and passionate utterance he denounced the wickedness of his age, and, like the Hebrew prophets, called on mankind to put away their false gods and degrading superstitions, and learn the true secret of guidance in this life.  It is only when we come to ask what that secret was, that we feel that this extraordinary man knew far too little of ordinary human nature to be either a religious reformer or an effective prophet:  as Sellar has said of him,[543] he had no sympathy with human activity.  His secret, the remedy for all the world’s evil and misery, was only a philosophical creed, which he had learnt from Epicurus and Democritus.  His profound belief in it is one of the most singular facts in literary history; no man ever put such poetic passion into a dogma, and no such imperious dogma was ever built upon a scientific theory of the universe.  He seems to have combined two Italian types of character, which never have been united before or since,—­that of the ecclesiastic, earnest and dogmatic, seeing human nature from a doctrinal platform, not working and thinking with it; and secondly the poetic type, of which Dante is the noblest example, perfectly clear and definite in inward and outward vision, and illuminating all that it touches with an indescribable glow of pure poetic imagination.

Lucretius’ secret then is knowledge,[544]—­not the dilettanteism of the day, but real scientific knowledge of a single philosophical attempt to explain the universe,—­the atomic theory of the Epicurean school.  Democritus and Epicurus are the only saviours,—­of this Lucretius never had the shadow of a doubt.  As the result of this knowledge, the whole supernatural and spiritual world of fancy vanishes, together with