40 Fun Facts About Lucretius

A fourth-century Christian chronicle claims that what drove the Roman poet Lucretius mad?

A love potion, the chronicle says, left him writing only between fits of insanity before he took his own life. Most scholars now dismiss the tale as confusion or anti-Epicurean bias.

In a famous simile, Lucretius likens his poetry to what, smeared on the rim of a medicine cup?

Honey on the rim tricks a child into drinking bitter wormwood, just as verse helps readers swallow hard philosophy. Epicurus himself had warned his followers against writing poetry.

Lucretius wrote of ill-adapted creatures dying out, an idea often likened to whose later theory?

Charles Darwin claimed he had never read the poem, yet its account of survival and extinction was common knowledge among evolutionary thinkers from Lamarck onwards.

Which US president owned at least five Latin editions of Lucretius and called himself an Epicurean?

Thomas Jefferson kept the poem in Latin and in English, Italian and French translations. Another famous owner, the playwright Ben Jonson, left a copy that is now held at Harvard.

Although his poem opens with a hymn to a goddess, what does Lucretius teach about the gods?

They ignore mankind, living in perfect peace and taking no part in running the world. Later Christian readers still treated the poem as a manifesto for atheism.

Lucretius pointed to which everyday sight as a picture of invisible atoms in constant motion?

Dust dancing in a sunbeam, he argued, is knocked about by unseen particles. Physicists now call that kind of jitter Brownian motion, though air currents move most of the dust we can see.

Stephen Greenblatt's Pulitzer-winning book on Lucretius is named after which motion of atoms?

The Swerve is the slight, random sideways shift that lets falling atoms collide and build a world. Lucretius also used it to explain how living creatures can have free will.

Lucretius is credited with first proposing that early tools followed which order of materials?

Stone, then bronze, then iron became archaeology's three-age system, formalised by C. J. Thomsen in the 1830s. Lucretius guessed that smelting was first discovered by accident, perhaps in a forest fire.

Lucretius opens his poem with a hymn asking which goddess to charm the war god Mars into peace?

Venus is hailed as mother of the Romans and of the whole natural world. The prayer is a puzzle, since the poem goes on to argue that the gods never answer prayers.

Lucretius taught that the universe contains only two basic ingredients, atoms and what else?

Void, meaning empty space, gives atoms room to move and collide. Lucretius held that both the atoms and the space around them are infinite.

Epicurus, the Greek thinker Lucretius revered, taught his followers at a school known by what name?

The Garden took its name from the plot Epicurus owned, about halfway between two rival schools. Unusually for Athens, its community included women and slaves.

Following his master Epicurus, Lucretius treats which of these as the chief good in human life?

Pleasure, for Epicureans, meant modest living without pain or fear, not feasting. Epicurus and his followers were known for eating simple meals.

Lucretius's poem ends abruptly while describing which disaster in Athens during the Peloponnesian War?

A plague closes the poem so suddenly that many think Lucretius died before he could finish. He had also promised to describe at length where the gods dwell, and never does.

The crater Lucretius, beside the vast walled plain Hertzsprung, is found on which body of the Solar System?

The Moon carries the crater on its far side, so it is always turned away from us. A chain of smaller craters trailing off from it is named Catena Lucretius as well.

Charred papyrus scraps claimed as the oldest copy of Lucretius were unearthed in which ancient town?

Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri held an Epicurean library carbonised by Vesuvius. Sixteen tiny fragments published in 1989 were claimed for Lucretius, though some scholars doubt it.

Which Florentine political writer copied out Lucretius's poem by hand early in his life?

Niccolò Machiavelli made the copy long before he wrote The Prince. The scholar Leo Strauss argued that he may have counted Lucretius among his own influences.

Which Italian friar, burned at the stake in 1600, took his idea of an endless cosmos partly from Lucretius?

Giordano Bruno pictured an unbounded cosmos filled with countless suns and planets. His thinking owed at least as much to mysticism as it did to Lucretian atoms.

Which Italian book hunter and papal secretary found a lost copy of Lucretius's poem in 1417?

Poggio Bracciolini's own find later vanished, but a copy made by a friend survives in Florence's Laurentian Library. He also recovered lost works by Vitruvius and Quintilian.

Epicurus, Lucretius's master, built on the atomic theory of which Greek known as the laughing philosopher?

Democritus of Abdera was said to laugh at the empty ambition of human beings. He is remembered chiefly for formulating an atomic theory of the universe.

Which Roman statesman praised the brilliance of Lucretius's verse in a letter to his brother Quintus?

Cicero's letter of February 54 BC is the earliest surviving mention of Lucretius. A later story that he also edited the poem is doubted by most scholars.

An ancient biography claims Lucretius died on the very day which younger Roman poet came of age?

Virgil is said to have put on the toga of manhood that very day, a coincidence that reads like a passing of the poetic torch. The dates in the story do not quite add up.

To show the universe has no edge, Lucretius imagines a man at its outer limit doing what?

Throwing a javelin settles it either way: if it flies on, there is more space ahead, and if it stops, something out there blocked it. The puzzle was aimed at Aristotle's finite cosmos.

Lucretius's claim that death is no worse than the ages before our birth is known as what?

The symmetry argument treats the endless time before birth as a mirror showing what follows death. Since the first never troubled us, Lucretius reasons, the second should not either.

Lucretius attacks religion with the tale of which princess, sacrificed by her father Agamemnon?

Iphigenia dies at the altar in the poem's telling so that the Greek fleet can sail for Troy. In other versions of the myth the goddess Artemis rescues her at the last moment.

Lucretius reads which tormented figure of Greek myth as a politician forever chasing office and failing?

Sisyphus and his boulder stand for the candidate who keeps seeking power and keeps being defeated. Lucretius calls the quest itself an empty thing.

Book 5 of Lucretius's poem claims Epicurus did more for humanity than which monster-slaying hero of myth?

Hercules and his twelve labours, the poet argues, did less good than one philosopher's ideas. Book 3 likewise hails Epicurus as the glory of the Greeks.

Which French writer heavily annotated his copy of Lucretius and quoted the poem throughout his famous Essays?

Montaigne's copy, a 1563 Paris edition crowded with his own notes, has been fully digitised by Cambridge. He ranked Lucretius among his four top poets.

Lucretius hoped his poem would bring readers to ataraxia, a Greek word for which state?

Untroubled calm, free of distress and worry, was a goal that Epicureans, Stoics and Pyrrhonists all chased by different routes. It was also the ideal frame for soldiers entering battle.

How does Lucretius explain the way human sight works in Book 4 of his poem?

Objects shed thin films of atoms in every direction, he says, each keeping the shape of the thing it left. Lucretius named these films simulacra, his Latin for the Greek eidola.

Lucretius wrote his poem of some 7,400 lines in which metre, the one used for Homer's epics?

Dactylic hexameter had been fitted to Latin by the earlier poet Ennius, and Lucretius helped make it feel natural in the language. He spread his lines across six untitled books.

Lucretius dedicated his poem to which Roman politician, who later went into exile in Greece?

Gaius Memmius proved an awkward pupil: once in exile he bought the ruins of Epicurus's house in Athens and won permission to build over them.

Lucretius praises which Sicilian philosopher-poet of the four elements even while rejecting his physics?

Empedocles of Acragas set out his philosophy in verse, and Lucretius borrowed so much from him that scholars say he was casting himself as a Roman Empedocles.

Which French comic playwright made a verse translation of Lucretius that has not survived?

Molière's version is lost, but the poem kept drawing translators in his century: the English diarist John Evelyn put its first book into English.

Which Roman poet, later exiled to the Black Sea, wrote that Lucretius's verses would die only with the world?

Ovid pays the tribute in his Amores, where he calls Lucretius sublime. A later poet, Statius, praised him as learned.

At the end of Book 1, Lucretius mocks which idea that Greek thinkers had long since established?

A spherical Earth struck him as absurd because it would leave animals walking upside down beneath us. An infinite universe, he reasoned, has no centre for heavy bodies to fall towards.

Which Victorian Poet Laureate published a dramatic poem titled Lucretius in 1868?

Alfred Tennyson built the poem around a wife named Lucilia, a figure that no ancient account of the poet's life mentions.

The oldest surviving manuscript of Lucretius was probably copied at a monastery tied to which emperor's court?

Charlemagne's era produced the copy scholars call the Codex Oblongus, or simply O. Two other ninth-century manuscripts survive, and then none until the 1400s.

George Santayana's book Three Philosophical Poets sets Lucretius beside Dante and which German writer?

Goethe completed the trio, but Santayana had reservations about Lucretius: he admired the poet's physics more than his spiritual musings, which he called fumbling, timid and sad.

Lucretius's poem De rerum natura is usually known in English by which title?

On the Nature of Things is the usual English title, though some translators prefer On the Nature of the Universe. It is the only work by Lucretius known to exist.

Lucretius was young when Rome fell under which dictator, notorious for his proscription death lists?

Sulla became dictator in 82 BC after marching on Rome and starting a civil war. That violent backdrop helps explain why Epicurus's advice to stay out of politics appealed to Lucretius.