Note 37 — Chapter XI

But while by his silence on the subject of national glory and his ardent speculative enthusiasm Lucretius seems to be more of a Greek than of a Roman, yet no Roman writer possessed in larger measure the moral temper of the great Republic. He is a truer type of the strong character and commanding genius of his country than Virgil or Horace. He has the Roman conquering energy, the Roman reverence for the majesty of law, the Roman gift for introducing order into a confused world, the Roman power of impressing his authority on the minds of men. In his fortitude, his superiority to human weakness, his seriousness of spirit, his dignity of bearing, he seems to embody the great Roman qualities 'constantia' and 'gravitas.' If in the force and sincerity of his own nature he reminds us of the earliest Roman writer of genius, in these last qualities, the acquired and inherited virtues of his race, he reminds us of the last representative writer, whose tone is worthy of the 'Senatus populusque Romanus.' But Lucretius is much more than a type of the strong Roman qualities. He combines a poetic freshness of feeling, a love of simple living, an independence of the world, with a tenderness and breadth of sympathy, and a power of sounding into the depths of human sorrow, such as only a very few among the ancients—Homer, Sophocles, Virgil,—and not many among the poets or thinkers of the modern world have displayed. In no quality does he rise further above the standard of his age than in his absolute sincerity and his unswerving devotion to truth37. He combines in himself some of the rarest elements in the Greek and the Roman temperament,—the Greek ardour of speculation, the Roman's firm hold on reality. A poet of the age of Julius Caesar, he is animated by the spirit of an early Greek enquirer. He unites the speculative passion of the dawn of ancient science with the minute observation of its meridian; and he applies the imaginative conceptions formed in the first application of abstract thought to the universe to interpret the living beauty of the world.