Lucretius Sentence Examples

Lucretius regards the primitive atoms (first beginnings or first bodies) as seeds out of which individual things are developed.

Lucretius thus recognizes the whole range of existence to which the doctrine of evolution may be applied.

There is also found that love of alliteration which is a marked feature in all the older Latin poets down even to Lucretius.

Jerome followed, often carelessly, the accounts contained in the lost work of Suetonius De Viris Illustribus, written about two centuries after the death of Lucretius; and, although it is likely that Suetonius used the information transmitted by earlier grammarians, there is nothing to guide us to the original sources.

Donatus states in his life of Virgil, a work also based on the lost work of Suetonius, that Lucretius died on the same day on which Virgil assumed the toga virilis, that is, in the seventeenth year of Virgil's life, and on the very day on which he was born, and adds that the consuls were the same, that is Cn.

The statements cannot be perfectly reconciled; but we may say with certainty that Lucretius was born between 98 and 95 B.C., and died in 55 or 54.

Cicero, by his professed antagonism to the doctrines of Epicurus, by his inadequate appreciation of Lucretius himself and by the indifference which he shows to other contemporary poets, seems to have been neither fitted for the task of correcting the unfinished work of a writer whose genius was so distinct from his own, nor likely to have cordially undertaken such a task.

From the absence of any claim on the part of any other district of Italy to the honour of having given birth to Lucretius it is inferred that he was of purely Roman origin.

It may well be assumed that Lucretius was a member of the Roman aristocracy, belonging either to a senatorian or to one of the great equestrian families.

A new taste for philosophy had developed among members of the governing class during the youth of Lucretius, and eminent Greek teachers of the Epicurean sect settled at Rome at the same time, and lived on terms of intimacy with them.

The fragments of the old tragedian Pacuvius and of the satirist Lucilius show that Lucretius had made use of their expressions and materials.

The peculiarity of the poem of Lucretius, that which makes it unique in literature, is that it is a reasoned system of philosophy, written in verse.

On both of these grounds he had a greater attraction to Lucretius.

But Lucretius, if less original as a thinker, was probably a much greater poet than Empedocles.

Although the title of the poem implies that it is a treatise on the "whole nature of things," the aim of Lucretius is to treat only those branches of science which are necessary to clear the mind from the fear of the gods and the terrors of a future state.

But the chief value of Lucretius as a thinker lies in his firm grasp of speculative ideas, and in his application of them to the interpretation of human life and nature.

Nothing can be more unlike the religious and moral attitude of Lucretius than the old popular conception of him as an atheist and a preacher of the doctrine of pleasure.

The supposed "atheism" of Lucretius proceeds from a more deeply reverential spirit than that of the majority of professed believers in all times.

It has been doubted whether Cicero,' in his short criticism in the letter already referred to, concedes to Lucretius both the gifts of genius and the accomplishment of art or only one of them.

Yet he could not have been insensible to the immense superiority in rhythmical smoothness which the hexameter of Lucretius has over that of Ennius and Lucilius.

The philosophy of Lucretius has been much studied in recent times.

The noble poem Lucretius, one of the greatest of Tennyson's versified monographs, appeared in May 1868, and in this year The Holy Grail was at last finished; it was published in 1869, together with three other idyls belonging to the Arthurian epic, and various miscellaneous lyrics, besides Lucretius.

The five chief representatives of this age who still hold their rank among the great classical writers are Cicero, Caesar and Sallust in prose, Lucretius and Catullus in verse.

The powerful poetical force which for half a century continued to be the strongest force in literature, and Lucretius.

Lucretius Carus (96-55) were entire seclusion from public life and absorption in the ideal pleasures of contemplation and artistic production.

While the imaginative and emotional side of Roman poetry was so powerfully represented by Lucretius, attention was directed to its artistic side by a younger genera tion, who moulded themselves in a great degree on Alexandrian models.

The Latin hexameter, which in Ennius and Lucretius was the organ of the more dignified and majestic emotions, became in his hands the most perfect measure in which the softer and more luxurious sentiment of nature has been expressed.

Propertius is a less accomplished artist and a less equably pleasing writer than either Tibullus or Ovid, but he shows more power of dealing gravely with a great or tragic situation than either of them, and his diction and rhythm give frequent proof of a concentrated force of conception and a corresponding movement of imaginative feeling which remind us of Lucretius.

The great sources of Greek poetry were no longer regarded, as they were by Lucretius and Virgil, as sacred, untasted springs, to be approached in a spirit of enthusiasm tempered with reverence.

He brought out editions of various Greek and Latin authors - Longinus, Anacreon and Sappho, Virgil, Horace, Lucretius and many others.

He owed something to Lucretius, something to the Stoic nature-pantheism, something to Anaxagoras, to Heraclitus, to the Pythagoreans, and to the Neoplatonists, who were partially known to him; above all, he was a profound student of Nicolas of Cusa, who was indeed a speculative Copernicus.

The arguments of the atomists, and their replies to the objections of Anaxagoras, are to be found in Lucretius.

If it were not so, Lucretius tells us, there could be no motion, for the atom which gives way first must have some empty place to move into.

It is pretty clear that the common accounts of the Renaissance and of the revival of learning grossly exaggerate the influence of the writers of Greece and Rome, for they produced no obvious rationalistic movement, as would have been the case had Plato and Cicero, Lucretius and Lucian, been taken really seriously.

So far too as the Romans were capable of taking interest in speculative questions, the tragic poets contributed to stimulate curiosity on such subjects, and they anticipated Lucretius in using the conclusions of speculative philosophy as well as of common sense to assail some of the prevailing forms of superstition.

A second expedition to that monastery and to others in the neighbourhood led to the recovery of Lucretius, Manilius, Silius Italicus and Ammianus Marcellinus, while the Silvae of Statius were recovered shortly afterwards.

Hence the determination of the paging of the archetype (as was done for the archetype of Lucretius by Lachmann) has more than a merely antiquarian value.

But the greatest of its Roman names was Lucretius, whose De rerum natura embodies the main teaching of Epicurus with great exactness, and with a beauty which the subject seemed scarcely to allow.

Lucretius is a proof, if any were needed, that Epicureanism is compatible with nobility of soul.

But the work which gained him his reputation as the Homer of Rome, and which called forth the admiration of Cicero and Lucretius and frequent imitation from Virgil, was the Annales, a long narrative poem in eighteen books, containing the record of the national story from mythical times to his own.

The occasional references to Roman history in Lucretius are evidently reminiscences of the Annales.

He was much influenced by Lucretius and had read Plato.

The sources of the Aetna are Posidonius of Apamea, and perhaps the pseudoAristotelian De Mundo, while there are many reminiscences of Lucretius.

The Romans at this time had no manuals of philosophy or any philosophical writings in Latin apart from the poem of Lucretius and some unskilful productions by obscure Epicureans.

Some reading between the lines of Lucretius has led the " logic " of Epicurus to have an effect on the modern world, but scarcely because of its deserts.

In the case of Epicureanism we can happily judge of the tyranny of the literal tradition by a comparison of Lucretius with the recorded doctrine of the master.

Physical science remains dialectical, and a physical experiment is as rare in the age of Lucretius as in that of Empedocles.

His grand but obscure hexameters, after the example of Parmenides, delighted Lucretius.

Of the former kind were Homer, Lucretius, Burns, Scott; of the latter were Euripides, Dryden, Milton.

He has little, if anything at all, of the high imaginative mood - the mood of reverence and noble admiration - which made Ennius, Lucretius and Virgil the truest poetical representatives of the genius of Rome.

It is doubtful whether, as has often been supposed, Varro wrote a philosophical poem somewhat in the style of Lucretius; if so, it should rather be classed with the prose technical treatises.

The author, however, shows an acquaintance with Latin poets - Horace, Virgil, Lucretius.

His taste for the greater Latin authors, particularly Lucretius, was never lost, and he acquired at school an unusual facility in Latin composition.

The Roman poet Lucretius (De Rerum Natura) was an eloquent exponent of this theory, but throughout the middle ages, indeed until the 17th century, it was eclipsed by the prestige of Aristotle.

But modern discoveries in radioactivity 2 are in favour of the existence of the atom, although they lead to the belief that the atom is not so eternal and unchangeable a thing as Dalton and his predecessors imagined, and in fact, that the atom itself may be subject to that eternal law of growth and decay of which Lucretius speaks.

But the insistence with which Lucretius returns to the subject, and the horror with which he recalls the effects of such abnormal phenomena, suggest that he himself may have been liable to such hallucinations, which are said to be consistent with perfect sanity, though they may be the precursors either of madness or of a state of despair and melancholy.

The inference that Lucretius belonged to this class is confirmed by the tone in which he addresses Gaius Memmius, a man of an eminent senatorian family, to whom the poem is dedicated.

And no reader of Lucretius can doubt that he attached the greatest importance to artistic execution, and that he took a great pleasure, not only in " the long roll of his hexameter," but also in producing the effects of alliteration, assonance, &c., which are so marked a peculiarity in the style of Plautus and the earlier Roman poets.

Yet, apart altogether from its independent value, by his speculative power and enthusiasm, by his revelation of the life and spectacle of nature, by the fresh creativeness of his diction and the elevated movement of his rhythm, Lucretius exercised a more powerful influence than any other on the art of his more perfect successors.

The pathos of natural affection is occasionally recognized in Statius and more rarely in Martial,' but it has not the depth of tenderness found in Lucretius and Virgil.

The preface treats of Greek sciences, geometry, the discovery of specific gravity by Archimedes, and other discoveries of the Greeks, and of Romans of his time who have vied with the Greeks -- Lucretius in his poem De Rerum Natura, Cicero in rhetoric, and Varro in philology, as shown by his De Lingua Latina.