After all then, Lucretius is reduced to ordinary moral suasion, and finds no new power or sanction that could keep erring human nature in the right path.

And we must sadly allow that no real moral end is enunciated by him; his ideal seems to be quietism in this life, and annihilation afterwards.[545] It is a purely self-regarding rule of life.

It is not even a social creed; neither family nor State seems to have any part in it, much less the unfortunate in this life, the poor, and the suffering.

The poet never mentions slavery, or the crowded populations of great cities.

It might almost be called a creed of fatalism, in which Natura plays much the same part as Fortuna did in the creed of many less noble spirits of that age.[546] Nature fights on; we cannot resist her, and cannot improve on her; it is better to acquiesce and obey than to try and rule her.
Thus Lucretius' remedy fails utterly; it is that of an aristocratic intellect, not of a saviour of mankind.[547] So far as we know, it was entirely fruitless; like the constitution of Sulla his contemporary, the doctrine of Lucretius roused no sense of loyalty in Roman or Italian, because it was constructed with imperfect knowledge of the Roman and Italian nature.