Exerce imperia et ramos compesce fluentes.
In quascumque voces artes haud tarda sequentur[327].
This idea of the need of a struggle with Nature, latent under all the special precepts of the Georgics, is thus seen to arise out of the philosophical thought of Lucretius. But the lesson inculcated by Virgil is directly opposite to that state of quietism and pure contemplation in which Lucretius finds the ideal of human life. Virgil’s teaching is that best adapted to the strenuous temperament of his countrymen and to the general condition of men in all times. And it will be found that this idea of a hard struggle, ordained by Supreme Power, against adverse circumstances, in which man receives Divine guidance by prayer and patient interpretation of the will of Heaven, and through which he attains to a state of final rest, runs through the Aeneid as well as the Georgics. Virgil reaches a practical result opposed to that which Lucretius reaches, by subordinating the Lucretian conception of man’s relation to Nature to the Platonic belief in the supremacy of a Spiritual Will and in the moral dispensation under which man is placed. It is this belief which appears to underlie Virgil’s acceptance of the religious traditions of antiquity, which might have been expected to have received, for all educated minds, their death-blow at the hands of Lucretius.
The science of Lucretius, as distinct from his philosophy of Nature and human life, is also partly accepted by Virgil, and partly rejected in favour of the tenets of an opposite school. In such passages as i. 89–90,
Seu pluris calor ille vias et caeca relaxat
Spiramenta, novas veniat qua sucus in herbas[328], etc.,
i. 415–423,
Haud equidem credo, etc.,
iii. 242,
Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque, etc.,