40 THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



success ; mock debating contests were frequent, and 

 the periods of the future orators reverberated among 

 the seven hills of Rome. To him our schools are also 

 indebted for the method of teaching foreign languages 

 by declensions, conjugations, vocabularies, formal 

 rhetoric and annotations. He considered ethics the 

 most valuable part of philosophy. 



In fact, it would not be pressing our argument un- 

 duly to say that, so far as the minds of the Romans 

 turned to speculation, it was the tendency to practi- 

 cal philosophy Epicureanism or Stoicism that 

 was most characteristic. This was true even of Lu- 

 cretius (98-55 B.C.), author of the noble poem con- 

 cerning the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura). 

 In this work he writes under the inspiration of Greek 

 philosophy. His model was a poem by Empedocles 

 on Nature, the grand hexameters of which had fasci- 

 nated the Roman poet. The distinctive feature of the 

 work of Lucretius is the purpose, ethical rather than 

 speculative, to curb the ambition, passion, luxury of 

 those hard pagan times, and likewise to free the souls 

 of his countrymen from the fear of the gods and the 

 fear of death, and to replace superstition by peace of 

 mind and purity of heart. 



From the work on Physical Science ( Qucestionum 

 Naturalium, Libri Septem) of Seneca, the tutor of 

 Nero, we learn that the Romans made use of globes 

 filled with water as magnifiers, employed hothouses 

 in their highly developed horticulture, and observed 

 the refraction of colors by the prism. At the same 

 time the book contains interesting conjectures in 

 reference to the relation of earthquakes and vol- 

 canoes, and to the fact that comets travel in fixed 



