established it over the whole of Italy (Italiam totam occupaverunt).  If this was in the time of the Social and Civil Wars, of the proscriptions, of increasing crime and self-seeking, we can well understand that the doctrine was popular.  We have a remarkable example of it in the life of a public man of Cicero’s own time, the object of the most envenomed invective that he ever uttered.[182] We cannot believe a tithe of what he says about this man, Calpurnius Piso, consul in 58; but in this particular matter of the damage done him by Epicurean teaching we have independent evidence which confirms it.  Piso, then a young man, made acquaintance with a Greek of this school of thought, learnt from him that pleasure was the sole end of life, and failing to appreciate the true meaning and bearing of the doctrine, fell into the trap.  It was a dangerous doctrine, Cicero says, for a youth of no remarkable intelligence; and the tutor, instead of being the young man’s guide to virtue, was used by him as an authority for vice.[183] This Greek was a certain Philodemus, a few of whose poems are preserved in the Greek Anthology; and a glance at them will show at once how dangerous such a man would be as the companion of a Roman youth.  He may not himself have been a bad man—­Cicero indeed rather suggests the contrary, calling him vere humanus—­but the air about him was poisonous.  In his pupil, if we can trust in the smallest degree the picture drawn of him by Cicero, we may see a specimen of the young men of the age whose talents might have made them useful in the world, but for the strength of the current that drew them into self-indulgence.

Not only the pursuit of pleasure, but its correlative, the avoidance of work and duty, can be abundantly illustrated in this age; and this too may have had a subtle connexion with Epicurean teaching, which had always discouraged the individual from distraction in the service of the State, as disturbing to the free development of his own virtue.  Sulla did much hard work, but made the serious blunder of retiring to enjoy himself just when his new constitutional machinery needed the most careful watching and tending.  Lucullus, after showing a wonderful capacity for work and a greater genius for war than perhaps any man of his time, retired from public life as a millionaire and a quietist, to enjoy the wealth that has become proverbial, and a luxury that is astonishing, even if we make due allowance for the exaggeration of our accounts of it.  To his library we have already been introduced; those who would see him in his banqueting-hall, or rather one of the many in his palace, may turn to the fortieth chapter of Plutarch’s most interesting Life of him, and read the story there told of the dinner he gave to Cicero and Pompeius in the “Apollo” dining-room.[184]