In the end Vergil’s poetry, like that of Lucretius, owed more to Epicureanism than modern critics—­too often obsessed by a misapplied odium philosophicum—­have been inclined to admit.  It is all too easy to compare this philosophy with other systems, past and present, and to prove its science inadequate, its implications unethical, and its attitude towards art banal.  But that is not a sound historical method of approach.  The student of Vergil should rather remember how great was the need of that age for some practical philosophy capable of lifting the mind out of the stupor in which a hybrid mythology had left it, and how, when Platonic idealism had been wrecked by the skeptics, and Stoicism with its hypothetical premises had repelled many students, Epicurean positivism came as a saving gospel of enlightenment.

The system, despite its inadequate first answers, employed a scientific method that gave the Romans faith in many of its results, just at a time when orthodox mythology had yielded before the first critical inspection.  As a preliminary system of illumination it proved invaluable.  Untrained in metaphysical processes of thought, ignorant of the tools of exact science, the Romans had as yet been granted no answers to their growing curiosity about nature except those offered by a hopelessly naive faith.  Stoicism had first been brought over by Greek teachers as a possible guide, but the Roman, now trained by his extraordinary career in world politics to think in terms of experience, could have but little patience with a metaphysical system that constantly took refuge in a faith in aprioristic logic which had already been successfully challenged by two centuries of skeptics.  The Epicurean at least kept his feet on the ground, appealed to the practical man’s faith in his own senses, and plausibly propped his hypotheses with analogous illustrations, oftentimes approaching very close to the cogent methods of a new inductive logic.  He rested his case at least on the processes of argumentation that the Roman daily applied in the law-courts and the Senate, and not upon flights of metaphysical reasoning.  He came with a gospel of illumination to a race eager for light, opening vistas into an infinity of worlds marvelously created by processes that the average man beheld in his daily walks.

It was this capacity of the Epicurean philosophy to free the imagination, to lift man out of a trivial mythology into a world of infinite visions, and to satisfy man’s curiosity regarding the universe with tangible answers[1] that especially attracted Romans of Vergil’s day to the new philosophy.  Their experience was not unlike that of numberless men of the last generation who first escaped from a puerile cosmology by way of popularized versions of Darwinism which the experts condemned as unscientific.

[Footnote 1:  It is not quite accurate to say that the Romans made a dogma of Epicurus’ ipse dixit which destroyed scientific open-mindedness.  Vergil uses Posidonius and Zeno as freely as the Stoic Seneca does Epicurus.]