The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

106 THE STOIC CREED
tion from other writers, but filled simply with his own
sentiments
(</>coi/cu)," thereby he
differing", adds, from
the Stoic Chrysippus, whose writings were overloaded
with quotations from other authors.
But he suffered
the fate of most of the others his works are lost.
We have, indeed, three letters of his and some frag
ments of his writings preserved by Diogenes Laertius ;
we have also the papyri discovered more than a century
ago at Herculaneum and we
;
have copious accounts of
Epicureanism in Cicero (e.g., in De Naturd Deorum
and De Finibtis, etc.). But the master himself must
be studied either in
the criticism and partial
the writings of his followers, or in
accounts of subsequent philo
sophers (Greek and Latin), who were, to say the least
of not it, always particularly sympathetic. We are
fortunate, however, in possessing the philosophical
masterpiece of a great Roman poet, who was, first
and foremost, a follower of Epicurus the famous
didactic poem of Lucretius (95-52 B.C.), entitled
De Rerum Naturfr ("On
the Nature of Things"),
in which the cosmology and general system
of the
Epicureans are worked out with considerable fulness
and with great enthusiasm, and in which the strength
of personal conviction aids the poetic imagination
and adds force to the felicitous diction, so that the
picture becomes at once vivid, fascinating, and im
pressive.
Thrown thus, to such a large extent, on Lucretius,
we naturally raise the question, whether it is safe to
trust him, as substantially reproducing the doctrine of
Epicurus.