Each would put all things else aside and first Study to learn the nature of the world, Since 'tis our
state during eternal time, Not for one hour merely, that is in doubt, That state wherein mortals will
have to pass The whole time that awaits them after death.
The age of Epicurus was a weary age, and extinction could appear as a welcome rest from travail
of spirit. The last age of the Republic, on the contrary, was not, to most Romans, a time of
disillusionment: men of titanic energy were creating out of chaos a new order, which the
Macedonians had failed to do. But to the Roman aristocrat who stood aside from politics, and
cared nothing for the scramble for power and plunder, the course of events must have been
profoundly discouraging. When to this was added the affliction of recurrent insanity, it is not to be
wondered at that Lucretius accepted the hope of non-existence as a deliverance.
But the fear of death is so deeply rooted in instinct that the gospel of Epicurus could not, at any
time, make a wide popular appeal; it remained always the creed of a cultivated minority. Even
among philosophers, after the time of Augustus, it was, as a rule, rejected in favour of Stoicism. It
survived, it is true, though with diminishing vigour, for six hundred years after the death of
Epicurus; but as men became increasingly oppressed by the miseries of our terrestrial existence,
they demanded continually stronger medicine from philosophy or religion. The philosophers took
refuge, with few exceptions, in Neoplatonism; the uneducated turned to various Eastern
superstitions, and then, in continually increasing numbers, to Christianity, which, in its early form,
placed all good in the life beyond the grave, thus offering men a gospel which was the exact
opposite of that of Epicurus. Doctrines very similar to his, however, were revived by the French
philosophes at the end of the eighteenth century, and brought to England by Bentham and his
followers; this was done in conscious opposition to Christianity, which these men regarded as
hostilely as Epicurus regarded the religions of his day.