Q 01/05

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

A) A snake bite

B) A head wound

C) A love potion

D) A marsh fever

Answer · why

C) A love potion

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 c...

Q 02/05

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

A) Olive oil

B) Honey

C) Sweet wine

D) Fig juice

Answer · why

B) Honey

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

Q 03/05

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

A) Carl Linnaeus

B) Gregor Mendel

C) Georges Cuvier

D) Charles Darwin

Answer · why

D) Charles Darwin

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

Q 04/05

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

A) John Adams

B) Thomas Jefferson

C) James Madison

D) John Quincy Adams

Answer · why

B) Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson kept the poem in Latin and in English, Italian and French translations. Another famous owner, the playwright Ben Jonson, left a copy ...

Q 05/05

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

A) They judge the dead

B) They made the atoms

C) They ignore mankind

D) They do not exist

Answer · why

C) They ignore mankind

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 fo...