s 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 Darwi