LUCRETIUS AND EPICURUS. 433 



with his endless volumina in that Epicurean Hbrary, are we to 

 beheve that a Lucretius was content with a perusal of anything 

 short of the great dogmatic w^ork of the master ? It is not 

 likely. This, too, is made more probable by the substantial ele- 

 ments of controversial analysis or censure directed against other 

 schools, and particularly against the Stoics, although the latter 

 are never mentioned by name throughout the work of Lucre- 

 tius. These controversial elements certainly were not in them- 

 selves attractive to such Roman readers as were to be made 

 proselytes of the sect. Therefore, I do not see how the paral- 

 lels between the letter to Herodotus and between Lucretius, 

 elaborated by Ivo Bnins in his Lucrezstudien, Freiburg, Tuebin- 

 gen, 1884, prove anything in this respect. Nor am I convinced 

 of the main thesis of Bruns, that Lucretius, in the course of the 

 elaboration of his work, determined quietly to omit or remove 

 the treatment of the theory of cognition, to xavovixov, of the 

 system of Epicurus. 



Why should we assume that the treatment of the Kavcov was 

 an essential part of the 37 bb 7:=.pc (puaeco^ when, as we see in 

 Diogenes L. X., 27, there was a distinct volume Trepl x()crrj(noij 

 Tj havcov. . . . 



Lucretius essayed to show that this physical theory truly 

 emancipated the souls of men from fear of death and from all 

 the terrors with which the traditional mythology had invested 

 the Inferno, that it secured that peace of soul which in the Epi- 

 curean conception is essentially negative, freedom from all the 

 passions whether involved in the persuit of wealth, of sexual 

 indulgence [hence the appendix of book IV in L.,] or of political 

 preeminence. This is " purgare pectora " L. VI, 24. Now 

 books I-IV substantially present in sequence what Epicurus 

 called '^ yvrjOLOz, (puaioXoyia : [letter to Pythocles, Diog. L. 10, 85] . 

 But books V and VI of L. are apt to make at first the impres- 

 sion of a mass of unrelated or ill-related matter. As for book 

 V the very exordium 5 5 sqq. states distinctly a complex theme : 

 the creation of organic beings, persistence of created types, es- 

 sentially physical nature of mind : deception of man by visions. 

 My next theme [rationis ordo] : this organic universe is perish- 



