Omnis cum in tenebris praesertim vita laboret.[474]
The desire of power and station leads to the shame and misery of baffled hopes, of which the toil of Sisyphus is the type, and also to the guilt which deluges the world in blood, and violates the most sacred ties of Nature[475]. While failure in the struggle is degradation, success is often only the prelude to the most sudden downfall. Weary with bloodshed, and with forcing their way up the hostile and narrow road of ambition[476], men reach the summit of their hopes only to be hurled down by envy as by a thunderbolt[477]. They are slaves to ambition, merely because they cannot distinguish the true from the false, because they cannot judge of things as they really are, apart from the estimate which the world puts upon them—
Quandoquidem sapiunt alieno ex ore petuntque
Res ex auditis potius quam sensibus ipsis.[478]
The love of riches and of luxurious living, which had begun to corrupt the Roman character in the age of Lucilius, had increased to gigantic dimensions in the last age of the Republic. By no aspect of his age was Lucretius more repelled than by this. No doctrine is enforced in the poem with more sincerity of conviction than that of the happiness and dignity of plain and natural living, the vanity of all the appliances of wealth, and their inability to give real enjoyment either to body or mind. In a well-known passage at the beginning of the second book he adapts an ideal description from Homer's account of the palace of Alcinous to the costly magnificence and splendour of Roman banquets, with which he contrasts the pleasure of gratifying simple tastes, in fine weather, among the beauties of Nature—
Praesertim cum tempestas adridet et anni
Tempora conspergunt viridantis floribus herbas.[479]
With fervid sincerity he announces the truth that 'to the man who would govern his life by reason plain living and a contented spirit are great riches'—
Quod siquis vera vitam ratione gubernet,
Divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parce