m totam occupaverunt). If this was
in the time of the Social and Civil Wars, of the proscriptions, of
increasing crime and self-seeking, we can well understand that the
doctrine was popular. We have a remarkable example of it in the life
of a public man of Cicero's own time, the object of the most envenomed
invective that he ever uttered.[182] We cannot believe a tithe of what
he says about this man, Calpurnius Piso, consul in 58; but in this
particular matter of the damage done him by Epicurean teaching we have
independent evidence which confirms it. Piso, then a young man, made
acquaintance with a Greek of this school of thought, learnt from him
that pleasure was the sole end of life, and failing to appreciate the
true meaning and bearing of the doctrine, fell into the trap. It was
a dangerous doctrine, Cicero says, for a youth of no remarkable
intelligence; and the tutor, instead of being the young man's guide to
virtue, was used by him as an authority for vice.[183] This Greek was
a certain Philodemus, a few of whose poems are preserved in the _Greek
Anthology_; and a glance at them will show at once how dangerous such
a man would be as the companion of a Roman youth. He may not himself
have been a bad man--Cicero indeed rather suggests the contrary,
calling him _vere humanus_--but the air about him was poisonous. In
his pupil, if we can trust in the smallest degree the picture drawn of
him by Cicero, we may see a specimen of the young men of the age whose
talents might have made them useful in the world, but for the strength
of the current that drew them into self-indulgence.

Not only the pursuit of pleasure, but its correlative, the avoidance
of work and duty, can be abundantly illustrated in this age; and this
too may have had a subtle connexion with Epicurean teaching, which had
always discouraged the individual from distraction in the service of
the State, as disturbing to the free development of his own virtue.
Sulla did much hard work, but made the serious blunder of retiring to
enjoy himself just when his new constitutional machinery needed the
most careful watching and tending. Lucullus, after showing a wonderful
capacity for work and a greater genius for war than perhaps any man of
his time, retired from public life as a millionaire and a quietist,
to enjoy the wealth that has become proverbial, and a luxury that is
astonishing, even if we make due allowance for the exaggeration of our
accounts of it. To