Lucretius took no part whatever in public life; he could afford to be in earnest; he felt no shadow of responsibility for the welfare of the State as such.

The Epicurean tenets which he held so passionately had always ranked the individual before the community, and suggested a life of individual quietism; Lucretius in his study could contemplate the "rerum natura" without troubling himself about the "natura hominum" as it existed in the Italy of his day.

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,"-- so wrote of him his great successor and admirer, yet added, with a tinge of pathos which touches us even now, "Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes." Even at the present day an uncompromising unbeliever may be touched by the simple worship, half pagan though it may seem to him, of a village in the Apennines; but in the eyes of Lucretius all worship seemed prompted by fear and based on ignorance of natural law.
Virgil's tender and sympathetic soul went out to the peasant as he prayed to his gods for plenty or prosperity, as it went out to all living creatures in trouble or in joy.
But it is nevertheless true that Lucretius was a great religious poet.
He was a prophet, in deadly earnest, calling men to renounce their errors both of thought and conduct.

He saw around him a world full of wickedness and folly; a world of vanity, vexation, fear, ambition, cruelty, and lust.

He saw men fearing death and fearing the gods; overvaluing life, yet weary of it; unable to use it well, because steeped in ignorance of the wonderful working of Nature.[539] He saw them, as we have already seen them, the helpless victims of ambition and avarice, ever, like Sisyphus, rolling the stone uphill and never reaching the summit.[540] Of cruelty and bloodshed in civil strife that age had seen enough, and on this too the poet dwells with bitter emphasis;[541] on the unwholesome luxury and restlessness of the upper classes,[542] and on their unrestrained indulgence of bodily appetites.