His outlook on life must have been very gloomy, if we are to trust certain quotations from Greek and Latin authors. To matters of mythology, descriptions of battles, and grandiose comparisons in Homer, Jefferson apparently paid no attention. He saw in the old poet a repository of ancient wisdom and the ancient philosophy of life. From him he collected verses in which he found expressed views on human destiny,--a courageous, stoic, yet disenchanted philosophy, summed up in two lines from Pope's translation: To labour is the lot of man below And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe. When he read from Cicero's "Tusculanae" he selected passages with a view to confirm the deistic and materialistic principles towards which he was leaning at the time: "All must die; if only there should be an end to misery in death. What is there agreeable in life, when we must reflect that, at some time or other we must die." This particular piece of reasoning seems to have struck Jefferson quite forcibly, for he repeated it again and again fifty years later in his letters to John Adams: "For if either the heart, or the blood, or the brains, is the soul, then certainly the soul, being corporeal, must perish with the rest of the body; if it is air, it will perhaps be dissolved; if it is fire, it will be extinguished."[16] It was then that he copied and evidently accepted the statement of Bolingbroke that "it is not true that Christ revealed an entire body of ethics, proved to be the law of nature." The "law of nature"--what was meant by the word? Was it the Epicurean maxim of Horace,--"enjoy to-day and put as little trust as possible in the morrow?" If such had been the conclusion reached by Jefferson he could have followed the line of least resistance and enjoyed the good things of life, the good wines of the Raleigh Tavern, the pretty girls and all the social dissipations of many of his contemporaries. Such would have been Jefferson's destiny, had he been born in the Old World. Had he been made of weaker stuff he would have become one of the fox-hunters, horse-racers and card-players of the Virginian gentry. But he was saved by his aristocratic pride and the stern teaching of the old Stoics. He was conscious that he was of good stock, and he had read in Euripides that "to be of the noble born gives a peculiar distinction clearly marked among men, and the noble name increases in lustre in those who are worthy."[17]