And even when he admits and admires Brutus’ self-mastery, he attributes it to nature, and claims as good a philosophic discipline for himself. There is, however, a difference between them even in this point. Brutus is a Platonist with a Stoic tinge; Cassius is an Epicurean. That strikes us at first as strange, that the theory which identified pleasure with virtue should be the creed of this splenetic solitary: but it is quite in character. Epicureanism appealed to some of the noblest minds of Rome, not as a cult of enjoyment, but as a doctrine that freed them from the bonds of superstition and the degrading fear of death. This was the spirit of Lucretius, the poet of the sect:
Artis
Religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo:
and one grand motif of his poem is the thought that this death, the dread of which makes the meanness of life, is the end of all consciousness, a refuge rather than an evil: “What ails thee so, O mortal, to let thyself loose in too feeble grievings? Why weep and wail at death?... Why not rather make an end of life and labour?” And these are the reasons that Cassius is an Epicurean. At the end, when his philosophy breaks down, he says:
You know that I held Epicurus strong
And his opinion: now I change my mind,
And partly credit things that do presage.
(V. i. 77.)
He has hitherto discredited them. And we seem to hear Lucretius in his noble utterance:
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,