Quae conlata foris et commoda cumque venirent;
Partim quod fluxum pertusumque esse videbat,
Ut nulla posset ratione explerier umquam;
Partim quod taetro quasi conspurcare sapore
Omnia cernebat, quaecumque receperat, intus.[450]
The evils which vitiate our happiness are the cowardice which dares not accept the blessings of life, the weakness which repines at what is inevitable, the restless desires which cannot enjoy the present and crave for what is beyond their reach, the apathy and insensibility to natural enjoyment, which are the necessary consequence of luxurious indulgence. Thus the aim of his moral teaching was to purify the heart from superstition, from the fear of death, from the passions of ambition and of love, from all artificial pleasures and desires.
The greatest of these evils and the mainspring of all human misery is superstition. It is this which surrounds life with the gloom of death—
Omnia suffundens mortis nigrore.[451]
Against the arbitrary and cruel power, supposed to be exercised by the Gods, Lucretius proclaimed internecine war. The fear of this power is denounced, not as a restraint on natural inclination, but as a base and intolerable burden, degrading life, confounding all genuine feeling, corrupting our ideas of what is holiest and most divine. The pathetic story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia is told to enforce the antagonism between the exactions of religious belief and the most sacred human affections. Every line of the poem is indirectly a protest against the religious errors of antiquity. At occasional intervals this protest is directly uttered, sometimes with indignant irony, at other times with the profoundest pathos. The first feeling breaks forth in the passage at vi. 380, etc., where he argues against the fancies which attribute thunder to the capricious anger of the Gods. 'Why is it,' he asks, 'that the bolts pass over the guilty and often strike the innocent? Why are they idly spent on desert places? Is this done by the Gods merely in the way of practice and exercise for their arms? Why is it that Jupiter never hurls his bolts in a clear sky? Does he descend into the clouds in order that his aim may be surer? Why does he cast his bolts into the sea? What charge has he against the waves and the waste of waters?
Quid undas