Si non forte tuas legiones per loca campi, etc.-- have been noted[352] as a probable allusion to the position actually taken up by Julius Caesar outside of Rome in the opening months of the year 58 B.C. Some earlier lines of the same passage-- Certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate, Noctes atque dies niti praestante labore Ad summas emergere opes rerumque potiri,-- have a resemblance to words directly applied by Cicero to Caesar[353], and are certainly more applicable to him than to any other of the poet's contemporaries. The political reflexions in the poem, as for instance that at v. 1123, seem, in almost all cases, to be forced from him by the memory of the first civil war, or the vague dread of that which was impending. It is not from any effeminate recoil from danger, but rather from horror of the turbulence, disorder, and crimes against the sanctities of human life, involved in the strife of ambition, that Lucretius preaches the lessons of political quietism. And while his humanity of feeling makes him shrink from the prospect of evil days, like those which he well remembered, again awaiting his country, his capacity for pure and simple pleasures makes him equally shrink from the spectacle of prodigal luxury which Rome then presented in a degree never before witnessed in the world. Thus the first general impression of Lucretius which we form from his poem is that of one who, from a strong distaste to the life of action and social pleasure, deliberately chose the life of contemplation,--the 'fallentis semita vitae.' Some illustrations of his argument--as, for instance, a description of the state of mental tension produced by witnessing public games and spectacles for many days in succession[354], of the reflexion of the colours cast on the stage by the awnings of the theatre[355], of the works of art adorning the houses of the great[356], etc.--imply that he had not always been a stranger to the enjoyments of city life, and that they attracted him by a certain fascination of pomp and novelty. His pictures of the follies of the 'jeunesse dorée,' (at iv. 1121, etc.), and of sated luxury (at iii. 1060, etc.), show that he had been a witness of the conditions of life out of which they were engendered. At iv. 784, in speaking of the power of the mind to call up images, he specifies 'conventus hominum, pompam, convivia, pugnas.' But such illustrations are rare when compared with those which speak of a life passed in the open air, and of intimate familiarity with many aspects of Nature. The vivid minuteness with which outward things are described, as well as the occasional use of such words as _vidi_[357], show that though a few of the sights observed by him may have been drawn from the physics of Epicurus[358], the great mass of them had either been originally observed by himself or at least had been verified in his own experience. He was endowed not only with the poet's susceptibility