revisit,
hoc se quisque modo fugit (at quem scilicet, ut fit,
effugere haut potis est, ingratis haeret) et odit
propterea, morbi quia causam non tenet aeger;
quam bene si videat, iam rebus quisque relictis
naturam primum studeat cognoscere rerum,
temporis aeterni quoniam, non unius horae,
ambigitur status, in quo sit mortalibus omnis
aetas, post mortem quae restat cumque manenda.

Virgil would not have written these lines. A Greek poet could not
have conceived them: unless we imagine to ourselves what AEschylus or
Pindar, oppressed by long illness, and forgetful of the gods, might
possibly have felt. In its sense of spiritual vacancy, when the
world and all its uses have become flat, stale, unprofitable, and
the sentient soul oscillates like a pendulum between weariful
extremes, seeking repose in restless movement, and hurling the ruins
of a life into the gulf of its exhausted cravings, we perceive
already the symptoms of that unnamed malady which was the plague of
imperial Rome. The tyrants and the suicides of the Empire expand
before our eyes a pageant of their lassitude, relieved in vain by
festivals of blood and orgies of unutterable lust. It is not that
_ennui_ was a specially Roman disease. Under certain conditions it
is sure to afflict all overtaxed civilisation; and for the modern
world no one has expressed its nature better than the slight and
feminine De Musset.[1] Indeed, the Latin language has no one phrase
denoting Ennui;--_livor_ and _fastidium_, and even _taedium vitae_,
meaning something more specific and less all-pervasive as a moral
agency. This in itself is significant, since it shows the
unconsciousness of the race at large, and renders the intuition of
Lucretius all the more remarkable. But in Rome there were the
conditions favourable to its development--imperfect culture,
vehement passions unabsorbed by commerce or by political life, the
habituation to extravagant excitement in war and in the circus, and
the fermentation of an age foredestined to give birth to new
religious creeds. When the infinite but ill-assured power of the
Empire was conferred on semi-madmen, Ennui in Rome assumed colossal
proportions. Its victims sought for palliatives in cruelty and crime
elsewhere unknown, except perhaps in Oriental courts. Lucretius, in
the last days of the Republic, had discovered its deep significance
for human nature. To all the pictures of Tacitus it forms a solemn
tragic background