Omnia suffundens mortis nigrore[5].
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
Arguit et liquidam molem camposque natantis[6]?
Why is it that he often destroys and disfigures his own temples and images?'
Elsewhere, however, he is moved by a feeling deeper than scorn,—a feeling of true reverence, springing from a high ideal of the attitude which it became man to maintain in presence of a superior nature. There is no passage in the poem in which he speaks more from the depths of his heart than in the lines—
O genus infelix humanum, talia divis
Cum tribuit facta atque iras adiunxit acerbas!
Quantos tum gemitus ipsi sibi, quantaque nobis
Volnera, quas lacrimas peperere minoribu' nostris!