It was a task on which Atticus might have given most valuable help from his large employment of educated slaves in the copying of manuscripts. Cicero's silence on the subject in the Letters to Atticus is fully explained by the fact that they were both in Rome during the greater part of the time between the death of Lucretius and the publication of his poem. Again, Cicero's strong opposition to the Epicurean doctrines was not incompatible with the closest friendship with many who professed them; and this opposition was not conspicuously declared till some years after this time. Lucretius would have sympathised with Cicero's political attitude, as he appears to commend Memmius for adopting a similar attitude in his Praetorship, and he must have known that Cicero was the man of widest literary culture then living. There is thus no great difficulty in supposing that the work of even so uncompromising a partisan as Lucretius should have been placed, either by his own request or by the wish of his friends, in the hands of one who was not attracted to it either by strong poetical or philosophical sympathy. The energetic kindliness of Cicero's nature, and his active interest in literature, would have prompted him not to decline the service if he were asked to render it. Thus, although on this point too our judgment may well be suspended, we may think with pleasure of the good-will and kindly offices of the most humane and energetic among Roman writers, as exercised in behalf of Lucretius after his untimely death.