432 SIHLER. 



fearless and uncompromising attack on the Etruscan religion of 

 his country is not sounded by the pensioner of Maecenas, and 

 the poet who composed for the princeps the Carmen Saeculare 

 and supported distinctly the social and religious reforms so dear 

 to Augustus (recorded too as the latter's dearest aspirations in 

 the Monumentum Ancyranum) could not well make a propa- 

 ganda — for Epicureanism. It is different with Lucretius. His 

 tremendous earnestness is coupled with a humility and rever- 

 ence for the person and doctrine of Epicurus which I need not 

 substantiate here in detail, I, 66-79, m> ^ ^^% ^^*^ particularly 

 III, 1042 



ipse Epicurus obit decurso lumine vitse 



qui genus humanum ingenio superavit et omnis 



restincsit, Stellas exortus ut setherius sol . . . 



and the much quoted lines V, 8, sq. 



deus ille fuit, deus, inclyte Memmi 

 qui princeps vitae rationem invenit earn quae 

 nunc appellatur sapientia . . . 



As to the Greek sources of Lucretius : was there anything be- 

 side Epicurus himself? If so, what ? If not, which writings 

 of E. ? Then too : did he base it all on the 37 bb. of E. T,zp\ 

 (fuaeco;;} The exhaustive grouping of every shred of Epicu- 

 rean doctrine by H. Usener, of Bonn, in his Epicurea, Leipzig, 

 1887, with the critical edition of the text of book X, of Diog- 

 enes Laertius is a monument of erudition . . . still, inasmuch 

 as Epicurus' doctrine is stated there with very great conciseness 

 as a summary digest for the conning of confirmed disciples and 

 not with explicit clearness nor argumentative breadth, the temp- 

 tation has always been great for students of the subject to make 

 Epicurus' letter to Herodotus a ** source" of L. 



The exact mode in which Lucretius used the main work the 

 37 bb. TZEfH (puaeco^ will probably never be known, inasmuch as, 

 although there were three complete copies of Ep. 7:e(n ipuazcoq, 

 in the villa of Piso at Herculaneum, the deciphered fragments 

 from the carbonized rolls are entirely too scanty to permit in- 

 ferences ; if Philodemus, a second-rate writer, was represented 



