Lucretius: On The Nature Of The Universe (Book 1) Quiz

Answer: Venus

This address to Venus by Lucretius requests of her to be "partner in [his] verses" in order to successfully convince Memmius of the philosophy he is expounding. Scholars have generally agreeed that Memmius is Gaius Memmius, a politician of Cicero's (and of course Lucretius') time, who is thought to have disliked Epicureanism.

Answer: No

He says that "[t]hings come into being without the aid of gods" and that "each thing gets its growth / And nourishment from its own material". He says that if fruits must begin as seeds and men must begin as babies, and require time to grow, they cannot have been generated from nothing or be the work of a divine being, whom he presumes would not require these things to take time to grow but would have them instead emerge fully grown. If things were generated from nothing, they would not have their specific origins or seasons - men could be sea-creatures, or flowers would bloom at the wrong times of year.

A mere fifteen lines later comes the blatant claim that "nothing can come from nothing".

Answer: Eventa (accidents)

He reasons that everything that exists is either a body or void, or one of these "accidents". ('Eventum' in Latin can more generally refer to something that has happened, whether by accident or otherwise, but Melville, the translator, chooses to use 'accidents', which is not necessarily wrong, but more specific than the word 'eventum' of itself need be.)

Lucretius says the rape of Helen and Troy's defeat in the war are 'accidents' that we should be careful of calling facts - they cannot happen only of themselves, nor are they made of that which void is made of, therefore we must conclude that they are of that third category which is separate from bodies or void.

Answer: Atomism

TOE, or the theory of everything, is a genuine philosophy, which attempts to answer the all-encompassing question of 'why?'. Heliocentrism is the theory that the planets revolve around the sun. Materialism is the theory that matter is the only thing that exists.

Atomism of sorts is thought to have begun in the 6th century BC in India, with Ancient Greece following a century later. Democritus and his mentor Leucippus formed an atom theory much like the scientific discovery of Dalton et al. Of course, we have since discovered that atoms are not the smallest unit of matter, despite its name coming from the Greek for "uncuttable": the presence of protons, electrons, and neutrons inside the atom, and even smaller still, quarks, disprove Lucretius' claim, but I think it's amazing enough that atoms were "discovered" as far back as the 6th century BC!

Answer: Heraclitus

Lucretius attacks Heraclitus not so much ad hominem but basically uses him as the token representative of material monism. Heraclitus, as you may have guessed from the link to Stoicism, was of the belief that everything arose from fire, and the world remains in constant flux and is dominated by change. Thales of Miletus is similarly a material monist, but his belief is that water is the origin of all things.

Lucretius maintains that some substance must be unchanging, or all would arise from nothing and descend into nothing, therefore Heraclitus' view of constant flux cannot be true.

Answer: Because it leaves nothing unchangeable.

If fire turns to air, which turns to water, which turns to earth, and then again in reverse, it means that none of the elements are perpetual, and it is their very changeability that Lucretius cannot support. It would lead to nothingness, since there would be no element that forever remains, and atoms cannot change state nor be completely nonexistent at any time.

Lucretius actually states that the four elements are actually inharmonious. He calls them "hostile" and "pure poison" to one another in the event of them coming together.

Just as sentences in a book are all ultimately made up of the same twenty-six letters (or twenty-three to Lucretius), so all things are ultimately made up of atoms, even though they seem to resemble new stuffs altogether. This he uses to suggest that the fire-air-water-earth theory could be the truth, made of atoms as they all are, therefore the origins of the world are not the elements, as Empedocles suggests, but ultimately all comes from atoms.

Answer: No

No theory that rejects the notion of atoms as the primal part of all objects can be supported by Lucretius! Again, small drops of blood or gold or bones or any object in the world are not atoms, therefore there must be more to the ultimate origins of everything. Anaxagoras also states that the world is made up of everything in different measures, so even if bones are made up of smaller bone pieces, everything else exists within the bone too, but since the element with the largest proportion within that object is bone, so bone is what is visible. Lucretius rejects this theory also, for who, he says, could claim that blood exists within stone or fire within mountains?

Answer: Honey

He uses the comparison of doctors' habits of smearing honey around the rim of a medicine bottle to trick children into believing they are ingesting a good-tasting drink; thus are his theories like the dank medicine, hard to take in and rather unwelcome to the reader, so he uses the Muses' medium, poetry, as the honey around the rim of the immense theory.

Answer: Everything would fall to the bottom.

Lucretius believes strongly in the infinity of the universe, for if it were finite, there would have be something outside it, and there can't be something that is not part of the universe. Matter is equally infinite as space, so there's an infinite number of atoms too.

Answer: They are fools.

Here Lucretius is specifically discussing northern and southern hemispheres; it is interesting to wonder whether he knows about the difference in night and day in eastern vs western hemispheres or whether he takes issue with the entire concept of time differences.

He links the concept with a belief that the earth is the centre of the universe, which is untrue, he says, because of course, a limitless universe can have no centre.