"Lucretius" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Duncan are compliments of a rare strain, and to a man still unsuccessful must have been precious indeed. There was yet a third of the same kind in store for him; and when Munro himself owned that he had found instruction in the paper on Lucretius, we may say that Fleeming had been crowned ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he had studied and comprehended them with the minutest accuracy; by which means he acquired an equal authority in the Senate with those who had served the office of consul, and though he made no figure in a public debate, he was a serviceable veteran in any suit of a private nature. Q. Lucretius Vispillo was an acute Speaker, and a good Civilian in the same kind of causes: but Osella was better qualified for a public harangue, than to conduct a judicial process. T. Annius Velina was likewise a man of sense, ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the nervous system by such potions frequently proved fatal. Such, according to Eusebius, was the fate of the poet Lucretius, who, having been driven to madness by an amatory potion, and having, during the intervals of his insanity, composed several books, which were afterwards corrected by Cicero, died by his own hand, in the 44th year of his age.[97] It ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... the complex and luxurious civilization of Rome, as an illustration of the principle enunciated by Professer Raleigh, that 'literature has constantly the double tendency to negative the life around it, as well as to reproduce it.' Having inspired Ovid and Vergil, and been recognized by Lucretius, it passed as a literary legacy to Boethius, Dante, and Jean de Meung; it was incorporated by Frezzi in his strange allegorical composition the Quadriregio, and was thrice handled by Chaucer; it was dealt with humorously by Cervantes in Don Quixote, and became ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... latter had demanded the sacrifice of a head. "You shall have a cabbage," said the king. "I mean something human." "Some hairs then." "No, I want something alive." "We will give you a pretty little fish." Jupiter laughed and yielded. That was much later, after Lucretius, in putting Epicurus into verse, had declared religion to be the mother of sin. By that time Fear and Pallor had struck terror into the very marrow of barbarian bones. Fright was a god more serviceable than Zeus. With him Rome conquered the world. Yet in the conquest ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... sage LUCRETIUS wrote of yore, To watch a storm-tossed vessel from the shore, Or safely placed, when hosts in conflict close, To view the battle as it ebbs and flows; But he, poor ancient, never knew the rare Delight afforded by an easy-chair, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... the late Republic, the Rome of Cicero, was 'enlightened,' as was the Greece of Lucian; that is the educated classes were enlightened. Yet Lucretius, writing only for the educated classes, feels obliged to combat the belief in ghosts and the kind of Calvinism which, but for his poem, we should not know to have been widely prevalent. Lucian, too, mocks frequently at educated belief in just ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... excellent illustration of this practice. The legend is: 'ChrIstVs DVX ergo trIVMphVs.' Take the capitalized letters or numerals from the words, and arrange them in their proper order, and you have 1627, the year in which the coin was struck. Upon a coin of Trio Lucretius, a member of the Lucretia gens, who would have remained unknown to this day but for his coin, a case of punning by means of types occurs. The obverse has the head of Apollo; the reverse, the crescent moon and seven stars, or rather triones—the constellation of the Ursa Major. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... afford a clew to many puzzling phenomena in the theory of dreams. This peculiarity of the organ of touch, as also that it is confined to no particular organ, but is diffused over the whole person of the man, is noticed by Lucretius:— ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... book which perhaps above all others has molded the mind of India in more recent days is the Bhagavad Gita, or Song of the Holy One. It is written in stately and harmonious verse, and has achieved the same task for Indian philosophy as Lucretius did for ancient Epicureanism.[20] It is eclectic, and succeeds, in a sort of way, in forcing the leading systems of Indian ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... would neither wish that my Mistress, nor my Fortune, should be a Bona Roba, as Homer uses to describe his Beauties, like a daughter of great Jupiter for the stateliness and largeness of her Person, but as Lucretius says: ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... truly painful fact about the world now tolerably well established by ample experience and ample records, it is that an intellectual and indolent happiness is wholly denied to the children of men. That most valuable author, Lucretius, who has supplied us and others with an almost inexhaustible supply of metaphors on this topic, ever dwells on the life of his gods with a sad and melancholy feeling that no such life was possible on ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... correspondence of Franklin, attributes it to the same origin.[11] But there are other places where its origin is traced with more precision. One of the correspondents of "Notes and Queries" says that he has read, but does not remember where, "that this line was immediately taken from one in the 'Anti-Lucretius' of Cardinal Polignac."[12] Another correspondent shows the intermediate authority.[13] My own notes were originally made without any knowledge of these studies, which, while fixing its literary origin, fail to exhibit the true ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... vice versa); both are one. Our monistic view of the world belongs, therefore, to that group of philosophical systems which from other points of view have been designated also as mechanical or as pantheistic. However differently expressed in the philosophical systems of an Empedocles or a Lucretius, a Spinoza or a Giordano Bruno, a Lamarck or a David Strauss, the fundamental thought common to them all is ever that of the oneness of the cosmos, of the indissoluble connection between energy and matter, between mind and embodiment—or, as we may also say, between God ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... especially in demanding more time than the physicist could grant for the age of the habitable world. Darwin himself confessed that some of his arguments were convincing; and Munro, the scholar, complimented him for his paper on Lucretius and the Atomic Theory.' In 1878 he constructed a phonograph from the newspaper reports of this new invention, and lectured on it at a bazaar in Edinburgh, then employed it to study the nature of vowel and consonantal sounds. An interesting ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... species of compound bodies, and that the peculiar form of the primary particles of which any body is composed is the same with the qualities of the compound body itself. This was the celebrated doctrine of Homoeomeria, of which Lucretius furnishes a luminous account in his philosophic ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... General Paoli to repeat one of the introductory stanzas of the first book of Tasso's Jerusalem, which he did, and then Johnson found fault with the simile of sweetening the edges of a cup for a child, being transferred from Lucretius into an epick poem[981]. The General said he did not imagine Homer's poetry was so ancient as is supposed, because he ascribes to a Greek colony circumstances of refinement not found in Greece itself at a later period, when Thucydides wrote. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... or Mud. Anaximander took up the theory and carried it out in true Darwinian style, alleging that the first men sprang from the ground watered by the sea, and that they had spines like sea urchins; evidently deriving them from the Radiates. Lucretius still further developed the theory in a poem in six books. The spread of Christianity, however, hindered the spread of the doctrine, as Mr. Tyndall feelingly laments, until the Saracens overspread the East, when some of them, it seems, favored it. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Lucretius does not hesitate to say that nature has degenerated (lib. II. v. 1159). Antiquity is full of eulogies of another more remote antiquity. Horace combats this prejudice with as much finesse as force in his beautiful Epistle to Augustus ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... the horses were flattening their ears, and otherwise resenting the incongruity. Meantime a fourth figure, a colossal young Kafir woman, looked on superior with folded arms, like a sable Juno looking down with that absolute composure upon the struggles of man and other animals, which Lucretius and his master Epicurus assigned to the Divine nature. Without jesting, the grandeur, majesty, and repose of this figure were unsurpassable in nature, and such as have vanished from sculpture ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... perpetually interchangeable; and, therefore, appeareth to be good in itself simply, without fallacy or accident. Neither is that pleasure of small efficacy and contentment to the mind of man, which the poet Lucretius ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... which interests us. The Supreme Being, in spite of the potency which his supposed place as latest evolved out of the ghost-world should naturally give him, is neglected, either as half forgotten, or for philosophical reasons. For these reasons Epicurus and Lucretius make their gods otiosi, unconcerned, and the Wayao, with their universal collective spirit, are ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... all, the choice must have cost you a weary pain. I have brought only misery to you, and you have brought only misery to me—and this is the fruit of love's battle with religion. Do you remember the story of Iphigenia in Lucretius and that resounding line, "So much of ill religion could persuade"? Do you know Landor's telling of that story, "O father! I am young and very happy"? And so, our story has been made one with the long tragedy of life and of the ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... as to the cause of these phenomena, were provided with a ready and a plausible answer. It did not enter their minds even to doubt that these low forms of life were generated in the matters in which they made their appearance. Lucretius, who had drunk deeper of the scientific spirit than any poet of ancient or modern times except Goethe, intends to speak as a philosopher, rather than as a poet, when he writes that "with good reason the earth has gotten the name of mother, since all things are ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... paid a price high enough to the Cardinal de Polignac, he would have betrayed them all. He is now consoling himself in his Abbey with translating Lucretius. ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... that part of the system of Lucretius, in which he describes man emerging from barbarity, acquiring the use of language, and the knowledge of various useful and polite arts, is comprised in a few lines of a satire of Horace, lib. i. sat. iii. v. 97. It has been ingeniously paraphrased ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... him Cicero and Livy, which latter two I found less arresting; then came Lucretius, and his De Rerum Naturae proved a succulent dish ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... not despise the fame of Tyrteus. If men were to yield to the thought of imagining none capable of exceeding such eminent persons as went before them, then they even who are deemed excellent would not have been so. Vergil would not have excelled Lucretius and Macer; nor Cicero, Crassus and Hortensius; and no one for the future would pretend to any advantage ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... Doat with Copernicus, or darkling stray With Newton, Ptolemy, or Tycho Brahe! To you I sing not, for I sing of truth, Primeval systems, and creation's youth; Such as of old, with magic wisdom fraught, Inspired LUCRETIUS ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... themselves are placed before our eyes. A tempest that would swallow up an entire fleet would be, seen from shore, a spectacle as attractive to our imagination as it would be shocking to our heart. It would be difficult to believe with Lucretius that this natural pleasure results from a comparison between our own safety and the danger of which we are witnesses. See what a crowd accompanies a criminal to the scene of his punishment! This phenomenon cannot be explained either by the pleasure of satisfying our love of justice, nor the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... to find that the scepticism, which we attribute to young men in our own day, existed then (compare Republic); that the Epicureanism expressed in the line of Horace (borrowed from Lucretius)— ...
— Laws • Plato
... report from America, listening too with passionate fears or hopes, as the case might be, to the whispers not yet audible to the world which passed from lip to lip of the statesmen who were watching the course of events from the other side of the Atlantic with the sweet complacency of the looker-on of Lucretius; too often rejoicing in the storm that threatened wreck to institutions and an organization which they felt to be a standing menace to the established order of things in their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... climbing the terraced heights of wisdom, looks down upon the fools: free from sorrow he looks upon the sorrowing crowd, as one that stands on a mountain looks down upon them that stand upon the plain." This reminds us of Lucretius, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... belong? Who were his literary progenitors? Lucretius, Horace and Donne, at any rate, had a considerable share in moulding his thought and fashioning the form of his verse. The unrhymed line, so often but by no means uniformly resounding with a suspended clangour that is not caught up by the following stanza ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Dann. Named for Lucretius Epicuraeus, a contemporary of Cicero. List. ab authore cui ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... particular class of minds. Among these George Eliot will stand as one of the foremost and one of those most worthy of homage. As the poet of positivism, she will long delight those in sympathy with her teachings. It would be extravagant praise to call her a second Lucretius, and yet that which has given the Roman author his place among poets will also give George Eliot rank in the same company. With all his merits as a poet, it has not been his poetic power, or his love of nature, or his worth as an interpreter ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... whorish, And strumpets flatter, shall Menander flourish. Rude Ennius, and Plautus[225] full of wit, Are both in Fame's eternal legend writ. 20 What age of Varro's name shall not be told, And Jason's Argo,[226] and the fleece of gold? Lofty Lucretius shall live that hour, That nature shall dissolve this earthly bower. AEneas' war and Tityrus shall be read, While Rome of all the conquered[227] world is head. Till Cupid's bow, and fiery shafts be broken, Thy verses, sweet Tibullus, shall be spoken. And ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... faith which has conquered by the blood and agony of saints and martyrs. The violent invective is like a red streak across the canvas of a picturesque and highly imaginative composition. Yet if he had been reminded that Lucretius, standing in the midst of paganism, sternly denounced the evils and cruelties of religion, Mr. Swinburne would probably have replied that the Roman poet, could he have been born again fourteen or fifteen centuries later in his native country, would have found these ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Seneca, Antoninus. Then I must master other things: the Fathers thoroughly; Bede and ecclesiastical history generally; a smattering of Hebrew—I only know the ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... decisively rejected. With the Epicureans he had absolutely no sympathy. Up to this time these schools and their teachings were known to the Romans only through the medium of the Greek. The only Latin philosophical literature was Epicurean, and, excepting the poem of Lucretius (De Rerum Natura), scarcely famous as yet, consisted entirely of books rudely ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... design of refuting the arguments of the sceptics which Bayle had been renewing in his dictionary; but his public occupations hindered him. Two exiles at length fortunately gave him the leisure; and the Anti-Lucretius is the fruit of the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the error, very pardonable in a lady, of overrating Addison's classical attainments. In one department of learning, indeed, his proficiency was such as it is hardly possible to overrate. His knowledge of the Latin poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down to Claudian and Prudentius, was singularly exact and profound. He understood them thoroughly, entered into their spirit, and had the finest and most discriminating perception of all their peculiarities of style and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in 50-49, appointed Caesar's successor in Gaul, defended Marseilles against him, and eventually fell in the battle of Pharsalia. P. Nigidius Figulus supported Cicero during the Catiline conspiracy. Gaius Memmius, aedile B.C. 60 (see p. 51). Lucretius dedicated his poem to him. L. Cornelius Lentulus Crus, consul B.C. 49, accused Clodius in B.C. 61, murdered in Africa ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... If we except Lucretius and Statius, I know no Latin poet, ancient or modern, who has equalled Casimir in boldness of conception, opulence of fancy, or beauty of versification. The Odes of this illustrious Jesuit were translated into English about 150 years ago, by a G. Hils, I think. [1] I never saw the translation. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... reasoners like Cleante in "Tartuffe," Ariste in "Les Femmes Savantes," Chrysale in "L'Ecole des Femmes," etc. See the discussion between the two brothers in "Le Festin de Pierre," III. 5; the discourse of Ergaste in "L'Ecole des Maris"; that of Eliante, imitated from Lucretius in the "Misanthrope," II. 5; the portraiture, by Dorine in "Tartuffe," I. 1.—The portrait of the hypocrite, by Don Juan in "Le Festin de Pierre," ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the primitive form, and the diversity of language The Hebrew answer to these questions The legend of the Tower of Babel The real reason for the building of towers by the Chaldeans and the causes of their ruin Other legends of a confusion of tongues Influence upon Christendom of the Hebrew legends Lucretius's theory of the origin of language The teachings of the Church fathers on this subject The controversy as to the divine origin of the Hebrew vowel points Attitude of the reformers toward this question Of Catholic scholars.—Marini ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the Kumara-sambhava and other Sanscrit poems, and then the well-known passage in Lucretius about dreams, and then a pathetic account of the visions called up within him by the sensation caused by the lacerations of the facets of the cherished amulet upon his bosom—visions something akin, as I imagine, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction — the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund. Singularly enough, not one of Adams's many schools of education had ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... combination, harmony, and organization, and thus may account for the origin of the system which they sustain and renew. This type of atheism has its most authentic exposition in the "De Rerum Natura" of Lucretius. He does not, in so many words, deny the being of the gods,—he, indeed, speaks of them as leading restful lives, withdrawn from all care of mortal affairs; but he so scoffs at all practical recognition of them, and so jeers ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... though he be from us, Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus; Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach; Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach; Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home; Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech; Coleridge, his locks ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... Cicero, and he refutes Torquatus. It seems to us, however, that poor Epicurus is but badly treated—as has been generally the case in the prose works which have come down to us. We have, indeed, the poem of Lucretius, and it is admitted that it contains fine passages. But I was always told when young that the writing of it had led him to commit suicide—a deed on his part which seems to have been painted in black colors, though Cato and Brutus, the Stoics, did the same thing very ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... of these great problems are perceived here and there among the ancients as well as the moderns, from Lucretius and Plutarch down to Kepler, Bouillaud, and Borelli. It is to Newton, however, that we must award the merit of their solution. This great man, like several of his predecessors, conceived the celestial ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... more known to motorists than to philosophers. The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand he displayed his ability in "the humanities" by the publication of an excellent edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical study of the text and the philosophy of the poet (1884), a work whose repeated editions are sufficient evidence of its useful place in the promotion of classical study among the youth of France. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... a nation.' But there were many peoples in her father's kingdom, and when she was Queen they must all love her. True, she began with the tongue of the conquerors, not the conquered. So it happened that we first learned Lucretius, who reproduces in verse the doctrines of Epicurus. My father was our teacher, and the second year she read Lucretius as if it were a Greek book. She had only half known Egyptian; now she speedily acquired it. During our stay at Philae she found a troglodyte who was induced ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Noel chose for dropping them. Why he was fingering them where they lay on the mantelpiece the author does not know, and never will know. There is something about 'previously demented' in some Latin chap—Virgil or Lucretius—that seems to hit the nail on the head. The keys fell on the cracked hearthstone with a clang that Oswald, at any ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... consolation and guidance, and to those searching after truth. Addressed, as the LETTERS were, to a lady suffering from religious falsehoods and terrors, the object of the writer is set forth in the motto from Lucretius which he placed on the title page, and which may thus ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... for heroic, lyric, dramatic, elegiac, and indeed all sorts of poetry in the persons of Virgil, Horace, Varius, Ovid, and many others, especially if we take into that century the latter end of the commonwealth, wherein we find Varro, Lucretius, and Catullus; and at the same time lived Cicero and Sallust and Caesar. A famous age in modern times for learning in every kind was that of Lorenzo de Medici and his son Leo the Tenth, wherein painting was revived, and poetry flourished, and ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... dentesque fuerunt Et lapides et item silvarum fragmina rami, Et flamma atque ignes, postquam sunt cognita primum. Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta. Et prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus, etc. Lucretius, v. 1283. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... Idyl IV. The sturdy reaper, Milon, as he levels the swathes of corn, derides his languid and love-worn companion, Buttus. The latter defends his gipsy love in verses which have been the keynote of much later poetry, and which echo in the fourth book of Lucretius, and in the Misanthrope of Moliere. Milon replies with the song of Lityerses—a string, apparently, of popular rural couplets, such as Theocritus may have heard chanted in ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... way. Pliny, in his Natural History, affirms that death is an everlasting sleep.56 The whole great sect of the Epicureans united in supporting that belief by the combined force of ridicule and argument. Their views are the most fully and ably defended by the consummate Lucretius, in his masterly poem on the "Nature of Things." Horace,57 Juvenal,58 Persius,59 concur in scouting at the tales which once, when recited on the stage, had made vast audiences perceptibly tremble.60 And Cicero asks, "What old woman is so insane as ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... plurality of worlds. More filled space, not with the infinite void of the Atomists, but with the Divine, ever active immanence. More, in fact, in an early philosophic work, An Antidote against Atheisme (1652), and again in Divine Dialogues (1668), refutes Lucretius by asserting the usefulness of all created things in God's Providence and the essential design in Nature. His reference in Democritus Platonissans (st. 20) is typical: "though I detest the sect/ of ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... Canadian rapids, on the edge of West Indian swamps, his Virgil had been an inestimable solace to him. To extremely devout persons, there is something objectionable in most of the great writers of antiquity. Horace, Lucretius, Terence, Catullus, Juvenal,—in each there is one quality or another definitely repulsive to a reader who is determined to know nothing but Christ and him crucified. From time immemorial, however, it has been recognized in the Christian church that this objection ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... Lucretius are several stores. That next door but one appears to have belonged to a chemist or color-maker. On the right of the atrium is a triple furnace, constructed for the reception of three large cauldrons at different ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Lucretius' irreligion is too strong For early stomachs, to prove wholesome food; I can't help thinking Juvenal was wrong, Although no doubt his real intent was good, For speaking out so plainly in his song, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... carmina Gallo? Here (by the way) by Gallus mean I Not Sheridan, but friend Delany. Begin, my Muse! First from our bowers We sally forth at different hours; At seven the Dean, in night-gown drest, Goes round the house to wake the rest; At nine, grave Nim and George facetious, Go to the Dean, to read Lucretius;[2] At ten my lady comes and hectors And kisses George, and ends our lectures; And when she has him by the neck fast, Hauls him, and scolds us, down to breakfast. We squander there an hour or more, And then all hands, boys, to the oar; All, heteroclite Dan except, Who never time nor order kept, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... it is wicked to point at the stars, though why he cannot tell. But the Pitris are not stars only, nor do they content themselves with idly looking down on the affairs of men, after the fashion of the laissez-faire divinities of Lucretius. They are, on the contrary, very busy with the weather; they send rain, thunder, and lightning; and they especially delight in rushing over the housetops in a great gale of wind, led on by their chief, the ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... His time was taken up by the Jewish people. And yet Rome conquered the world, and even conquered God's chosen people. The people that had the bible were defeated by the people who had not. How was it possible for Lucretius to get along without the bible? How did the great and glorious of that empire? And what shall we say of Greece? No bible. Compare Athens with Jerusalem. From Athens comes the beauty and intellectual grace of the world. Compare the mythology of Greece with the mythology ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... because they were sacred; because, like most practical men, he was religious, and his gods must go with him. They filled his literature: for why? He believed himself to be sprung from their loins. Where would Latin literature be, for example, if you could cut Venus out of it? Consider Lucretius' ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... have had no lunch again. Do you know, I begin to hate Lucretius. He always makes you ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... rare stoicism, self-defence, and wisdom in one so young, he actually sat down to read hard for his first class. Now, to do this, he wanted the Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric of Aristotle, certain dialogues of Plato, the Comedies of Aristophanes, the first-class Historians, Demosthenes, Lucretius, a Greek Testament, Wheeler's Analysis, Prideaux, Horne, and several books of reference sacred and profane. But he could not get these books without Dr. Wycherley, and unfortunately he had cut that worthy ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... good to refer the matter of rebuilding to general deliberation, and himself spoke largely and earnestly in behalf of his country, as also may others. At last, calling to Lucius Lucretius, whose place it was to speak first, he commanded him to give his sentence, and the rest as they followed, in order. Silence being made, and Lucretius just about to begin, by chance a centurion, passing by outside with his company of the day-guard, called out with a loud voice to ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... that he was his son, which would have been finely terrible, was he not his nephew, his cousin? These are questions which I do not pretend to answer. For the sake of human nature, I could wish Lorenzo to have been only the creation of the poet's fancy: like the Quintus of Anti Lucretius, "quo nomine," says Polignac, "quemvis Atheum intellige." That this was the case many expressions in the "Night Thoughts" would seem to prove, did not a passage in "Night Eight" appear to show that he had somebody ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... is more fire of poetry than in any of mine. You excelled in the pathetic, which I never approached. I will also allow that you hit the manner of Horace and the sly delicacy of his wit more exactly than I, or than any other man who has written since his time. Nor could I, nor did even Lucretius himself, make philosophy so poetical, and embellish it with such charms as you have given to that of Plato, or (to speak more properly) of some of his modern disciples, in your ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... Humanity as starting upon a wrong track, and drifting ever farther from the path of its peace, had charmed the melancholy or the despair of Virgil and his great master in verse and speculation, Titus Lucretius. ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... been considerably quickened under the influence of modern discoveries. These reach back to the most remote antiquity, and to follow their development we should have to write the history of human thought which they have always accompanied since the time of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. The first observers who noticed that the volume of a body could be diminished by compression or cold, or augmented by heat, and who saw a soluble solid body mix completely with the water which dissolved ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... that he should nominate as dictator Marcus Valerius Messala, who then commanded the fleet in Sicily; but the fathers denied that a person could be appointed dictator who was not in the Roman territory, and this was limited by Italy. Marcus Lucretius, a plebeian tribune, having taken the sense of the senate upon the question, it was decreed, "that the consul before he quitted the city, should put the question to the people, as to whom they wished ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... quaestors of the same year, do not appear in the inscriptions of Praeneste except here, and it is impossible to say more than that Sertorius is a good Roman name, and Caleius a good north Italian one.[258] C. Salvius and T. Lucretius, duovirs for the next year, the recurrence of Salvius in another inscription,[259] L. Curtius and C. Vibius, the aediles,—Statiolenus and C. Cassius, the quaestors, show the same phenomenon, for it ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... Turpiculo naso. The kind of nose alluded to is such as sheep or goats have. Cf. Lucretius, lib. iv. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... felt the full thunder of the psalm of life as they had never heard it before; MacIan felt God the Father, benignant in all His energies, and Turnbull that ultimate anonymous energy, that Natura Naturans, which is the whole theme of Lucretius. It was down this clamorous ladder of life that they ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Roman in second century B.C. in regard to (1) his idea of God, (2) his sense of Duty. No help from Epicurism, which provided no religious sanction for conduct; Lucretius, and Epicurean idea of the Divine. Arrival of Stoicism at Rome; Panaetius and the Scipionic circle. Character of Scipio. The religious side of Stoicism; it teaches a new doctrine of the relation of man to God. Stoic idea of God as Reason, and as pervading the universe; adjustment of ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... flatter, shall Menander flourish. Ennius, though rude, and Accius's high-rear'd strain, A fresh applause in every age shall gain, Of Varro's name, what ear shall not be told, Of Jason's Argo and the fleece of gold? Then shall Lucretius' lofty numbers die, When earth and seas in fire and flame shall fry. Tityrus, Tillage, AEnee shall be read, Whilst Rome of all the conquered world is head! Till Cupid's fires be out, and his bow broken, Thy verses, neat Tibullus, shall be spoken. Our Gallus shall be known from east ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... result to English poetry of the academic attempts, towards the end of the sixteenth century, to write classical verse in English. It could be pointed out triumphantly that all the splendid poetry of classical antiquity—Homer and Lucretius and Virgil, Sappho and Catullus and Horace and Ovid—had been independent of rime; and whatever might be the disagreement on quantitative feet in English, it was impossible to deny that English could successfully copy this element of the great classical verse and recover, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... They were entirely outside the world, a fact to which Epicurus gave expression by placing them in the empty spaces between the infinite number of spherical worlds which he assumed. There his gods lived in bliss like ideal Epicureans. Lucretius, the only poet of this school, extolled them in splendid verse whose motif he borrowed from Homer's description of Olympus. In this way Epicurus also managed to uphold public worship itself. It could not, of course, have any practical aim, but it was justified as an expression of the respect man ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... a kind of figs.) [10] This, Cicero says, was taken as an omen; for it sounded like "Cave ne eas," which must therefore have been pronounced Cau' n' eas. Conversely, in poetry, the vowel v sometimes strengthens into consonant v. Thus in Plautus, Lucretius, and even in Vergil and Statius, this happens in such words as puella, suo, genua, larua, and tenuis. Finally, the fact that both sounds of v are represented by the same character, is evidence that those ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck
... to shut their eyes against this glaring difficulty, that strikes at the very foundation of their whole system, have, for a last shift, invented what Lucretius calls clinamen—by which is meant a motion somewhat declining or bending from the straight line, and which gives atoms the occasion to meet and encounter. Thus they turn and wind them at pleasure, according as they fancy best for their purpose. ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... mighty Rome!" intending by the first either himself or Lucretius. The words of Cicero were the secret honey on which the imagination of Virgil fed for many a year; for in one of his latest productions, the twelfth book of the AEneid, he applies these very words to Ascanius. ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... the dogma of immortality and eternal repose. They thought little of bodily cares and ills. In Greece and Rome there was always an apology for suicide and death in the books of the philosophers. "Nil igitur mors est, ad nos neque pertinet hilum; quando quidem natura animi mortalis habetur!" cries Lucretius. With the advent of Christianity, condemning as it did the barbarous customs of self-mutilation and self-murder, these practices seem to disappear gradually; but stoicism and indifference to pain were exhibited in martyrdom. Toward ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... unexpectedly enough, the most dangerous. It is not only, with him, that the wards are oiled, it is also that the key turns loosely. This is true of much of the beautiful "Idylls," but not of their best passages, nor of such magnificent heroic verse as that of the close of "A Vision of Sin," or of "Lucretius." As to the question of ease, we cannot have a better maxim than Coventry Patmore's saying that poetry "should confess, but not suffer from, its difficulties." And we could hardly find a more curious example of the present love of verse ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... lass at us Shall smile if we own that we cannot read Tacitus. No admirer shall ever now weathe with begonias The bust of Suetonius. And so, if you follow me, We'll have to cut Ptolemy. Besides, it would just be considered facetious To look at Lucretius. And you can Not go in Society if 'you read Lucan, And we cannot have any fun ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... not yet come, for Italy is a sunny land where clear air makes clear minds, blandly or keenly observant of the world, and never impelled by onset of outer mists and darkness to tend a flickering light within themselves. There was melancholy, high and stately, such as Lucretius knew, when he went lonely among the homesteads or along the shore; but it was too exalted to be one with diffidence, for he who will hold the sum of things in his thoughts walks on clouds above the heads of men, free of all misgiving. Perhaps beyond the Alps, in some ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... teach us, man's "very existence is an accident, his story a brief and discreditable episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets"?—and shall such a one, member of such a race, dream of prolonging his atomic existence world without end? As Lucretius asked:— ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... settled all these matters, he nominated Lucretius, the father of Lucretia, as his colleague, and gave up the fasces to him as a mark of respect, because he was the elder man. This custom, that the elder of the two consuls has the fasces carried before him, remains to this day. As Lucretius ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... first five books of Livy (to which from my love of the subject I voluntarily added, in my hours of leisure, the remainder of the first decade); all Sallust; a considerable part of Ovid's Metamorphoses; some plays of Terence; two or three books of Lucretius; several of the Orations of Cicero, and of his writings on oratory; also his letters to Atticus, my father taking the trouble to translate to me from the French the historical explanations in Mingault's notes. In Greek I read the Iliad and Odyssey ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... writes with sustained enthusiasm. But he was not fully appreciated by his countrymen, although no other poet has so fully brought out the power of the Latin language. Professor Ramsay, [Footnote: The translation of Lucretius into English was made by I. M. Goode, Evelyn, and Drummond.] while alluding to the melancholy tenderness of Tibullus, the exquisite ingenuity of Ovid, the inimitable felicity and taste of Horace, the gentleness and splendor of Virgil, and the vehement declamation of Juvenal, thinks that, had the ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Things" is an effort to dispel superstitious fear by inculcating the Epicurean doctrine that the world is self-made through the movement and concussion of atoms, and that the gods leave it to care for itself. A contemporary of Lucretius, and a poet of equal merit, but in an altogether different vein, is Catullus. He is chiefly noted for his lyrics. Virgil (70-19 B.C.), in the Aeneid, has produced a genuine Roman epic, although his dependence on Homer ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... say, Epicureanism. The writings of Epicurus were no longer preserved, and even at the close of the classical age a more or less one-sided conception had been formed of his philosophy. Nevertheless, that phase of Epicureanism which can be studied in Lucretius, and especially in Cicero, is quite sufficient to make men familiar with a godless universe. To what extent his teaching was actually understood, and whether the name of the problematic Greek sage was not rather a catchword for the multitude, it is hard to say. It is probable ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... been packed with yawns. It is the malediction of mortals to want what they lack until they get it, when they want it no more. Epicurus said that or, if he did not, Lucretius said it for him. 'Surgit amari aliquid.' But here I am running into quotations when the only ones that interest anybody are those in the Street. Conditions here are revolting. Nowhere at any time has there ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... injury. The praise given it by Addison (Spectator, 339) is too well known to be transcribed; but some notice is due to the testimony of Dennis, who calls it a "philosophical poem, which has equalled that of 'Lucretius' in the beauty of its versification, and infinitely surpassed it in the solidity and ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... views of life, how again the labour spent during their progress on lyrical composition, with perhaps the increasing influence over his taste of Virgil's poetry, have trained his ear, mellowed and refined his style. "The Epistles of Horace," says Dean Milman, "are, with the Poem of Lucretius, the Georgics of Virgil, and perhaps the Satires of Juvenal, the most perfect and most original ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... share the common belief, he proceeds with good success to carry the war into the country of those who profess that belief, and defend it as the safeguard of society. We need not go through his positions. They are substantially those which are familiar to everybody who has read the Third Book of Lucretius's poem, and remembers those magnificent passages which are not more admirable in their philosophy than they are noble and moving in ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Athens. But here the plague, a calamity more dreadful than war, attacked them and swept away multitudes. This plague, which not only devastated Athens, but other Grecian cities also, is described at considerable length, with a harrowing minuteness of detail, by the Latin poet LUCRETIUS. His description is based upon the account given by Thucydides. We give here only the beginning and the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... in their content alone. It is quite a different question, therefore, whether one may derive a satisfactory pleasure and benefit from a translation of the Agamemnon of AEschylus or Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, of Lucretius or Tacitus, to say nothing of such books as Aristotle's Constitution ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... intermediaries, ancient if they be compared with our own age, but modern if we think of the foundations of learning, and these men we consider the most learned. What would Virgil, the chief poet among the Latins, have achieved, if he had not despoiled Theocritus, Lucretius, and Homer, and had not ploughed with their heifer? What, unless again and again he had read somewhat of Parthenius and Pindar, whose eloquence he could by no means imitate? What could Sallust, Tully, Boethius, Macrobius, Lactantius, Martianus, ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... them behind which there was no angry force to be appeased, no intercessory pity to be won? Were not gems medicinal, though they only pressed the finger? Were not all things charged with occult virtues? Lucretius might be right—he was an ancient, and a great poet; Luigi Pulci, too, who was suspected of not believing anything from the roof upward (dal tetto in su), had very much the air of being right over the supper-table, when the wine and jests were circulating ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... poet's deity is likely always to be as disastrous as was that of Lucretius, as Mrs. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand. But it may be confidently asserted that he knows much more about them; that he thinks them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of them—through poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays and what not—he has in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... or Tennyson. Apart from his idylls and his elegies, Chenier also experimented from early youth in didactic and philosophic verse, and when he commenced his Hermes in 1783 his ambition was to condense the Encyclopedie of Diderot into a poem somewhat after the manner of Lucretius. This poem was to treat of man's position in the Universe, first in an isolated state, and then in society. It remains fragmentary, and though some of the fragments are fine, its attempt at scientific ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... the most part to some sterner and more overwhelming conception of the sum of things. "Lord, what is man that Thou art mindful of him?" is the cry of Hebrew piety as well as of modern science; and the "majestas cognita rerum,"—the recognized majesty of the universe—teaches Lucretius only the indifference of gods and ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... bodies were continually throwing off certain images like themselves, which subtile emanations, striking on our bodily organs, gave rise to our sensations. Epicurus borrowed the idea from him, and incorporated it into the famous system, of which Lucretius has given us the most popular version. Those who are curious on the matter will find the poet's description at the beginning of his fourth book. Forms, effigies, membranes, or films, are the nearest representatives of the terms applied to these effluences. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... speculation was exercised by Xenophanes of Colophon. Driven by the Persian invasion of 546 B.C. to earn his living as a wandering minstrel, he developed the ideas of Anaximander, and founded the school of great philosophic poets, to which Parmenides, Empedocles and Lucretius belong. He is the grand monotheist, and he has published his doctrines ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... projectus ab undis, Navita) nudus humi jacet infans indigus omni Vitali auxilio, - Vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut aequum est, Cui tantum in vita restat transire malorum. LUCRETIUS, De ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... treated very differently, and yet very properly, in both these respects. Should the poet make syllogisms in verse, or pursue a long process of reasoning in the didactic style, he would be sure to tire his reader on the whole, like Lucretius, though he reasoned better than the Roman, and put into some parts of his work the same poetical fire. He may write, as you have begun to do, on philosophical subjects, but he must write in his own character. He must contract, ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... into the nineteenth and twentieth legions. Some authors state that very efficient auxiliaries were sent out of Spain also to Marcus Livius by Publius Scipio; namely, eight thousand Spaniards and Gauls, two thousand legionary soldiers, a thousand horse of Numidians and Spaniards together. That Marcus Lucretius brought these forces in ships, and that Caius Mamilius sent as many as four thousand bowmen and ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... not to discover the fondness of Lucretius, an earlier writer, for a garret, in his description of the lofty towers of serene learning, and of the pleasure with which a wise man looks down upon the confused and erratick state of the world moving ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... understood, nevertheless, as most of those who read these pages will be aware, that he ever lost his sensibility to those ever-living effusions of genius which the ancient languages preserve. He loved AEschylus and Sophocles (to Euripides he hardly did justice), Lucretius and Virgil; if he did not seem so much drawn towards Homer as might at first be expected, this may probably be accounted for by his increasing taste for ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... incomparable collection of facts. We would fain emulate his scholarship, his width and his power of exposition, but to us he speaks no more with philosophical authority. We read his scheme of evolution as we would those of Lucretius or Lamarck, delighting in their simplicity and their courage" (M., p. 9). "Naturally, we turn aside from generalities. It is no time to discuss the origin of the Mollusca or of Dicotyledons, while we are not even sure how it came to pass that Primula ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... of objects; and you will see 'oesypum,' the ointment of the fleece, trickling down and flowing upon her heated bosom. These drugs, Phineus, smell like thy tables; not once alone has sickness been caused by this to my stomach." Lucretius also, in his Fourth Book, l. 1168, speaks of a female who "covers herself with noxious odors, and whom her female attendants fly from to a distance, and chuckle by stealth." See also the Mostellaria of Plautus, Act I., Scene 3, l. 135, where Philematium ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... perpetual changes of arrangement, yet they present other phases of thought, apparently irreconcileable with the doctrine that there is nothing other than God. Thus he teaches that there are four elements—earth, air, water and fire—out of which all things are generated. He also anticipates Lucretius in his pessimistic view of humanity's lot; and insists on the apparently independent existence of a principle of discord or strife in the Universe. It would be a forced interpretation to suppose him to have set forth precociously the Darwinian ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... up; thus 'clepta', 'zamia' ({Greek: ze:mia}), 'danista', 'harpagare', 'apolactizare', 'nauclerus', 'strategus', 'morologus', 'phylaca', 'malacus', 'sycophantia', 'euscheme' ({Greek: eusche:mo:s}), 'dulice' ({Greek: douliko:s}), [so 'scymnus' by Lucretius], none of which, I believe, are employed except by him; 'mastigias' and 'techna' appear also in Terence. Yet only experience could show that they were superfluous; and at the epoch of Latin literature in which Plautus ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... notions, as the logicians call them) has been founded on the conjunction of two natures, which have a real separate being. So hippocentaurs were imaged, by joining the natures of a man and horse together; as Lucretius tells us, who has used this word of image oftener than ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... meet with Braggadochio and Trompart, with the discomfiture of Malecasta, with the conjugal troubles of Malbecco and Helenore, with the imitation from Ariosto of the Squire of Dames. He puts into verse a poetical physiology of the human body; he translates Lucretius, and speculates on the origin of human souls; he speculates, too, on social justice, and composes an argumentative refutation of the Anabaptist theories of right and equality among men. As the poem proceeds, he seems to feel himself ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... of all the atmospheres. The semi-materialistic idealism of Milton was a gross and clumsy medium compared to the imponderable ether of "The Over-soul" and the unimaginable vacuum of "Brahma." He followed in the shining and daring track of the Graius homo of Lucretius: ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... Lepidus, Triumvir Leptis Lesbos Letter-writing Lex de Repetundis Licinian Rogations Licinius Liger Lights Liguria Lilybaeum Lipara Islands Liris, R. Literature Livia Livilla Livius Locri Longinus Luca Lucan Lucania Luceres Luceria Lucilius Lucretia Lucretius Lucullus ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... Romantic period Casimire's fame was again revived. While still a young man, Coleridge planned a complete translation of Casimire's odes, but never finished more than the ode "Ad Lyram." It was also Coleridge who said that with the exception of Lucretius and Statius he knew no Latin poet, ancient or modern, who could be said to equal Casimire in boldness of conception, opulence of fancy, or beauty of versification.[8] A knowledge of the themes and techniques of this ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... suddenly starting up and striding over the earth—"the land as a garden of Eden before him, and behind him a desolate wilderness?" We have most of us read of such frightful visitations in Thucydides, in Ovid, in Virgil, in Lucretius, not to mention the moderns; but if any of us were to write down the sum and substance of his knowledge, and attempt to discover from any trustworthy evidence the nature, the course, and the intensity of any great plague that has ever proved a real scourge upon any large section of the human ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... version of a French romance based on Vergil's epic. Of the Roman historians, orators, and moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was an almost entire ignorance, as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius, Juvenal, and Catullus. The gradual rediscovery of the remains of ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century, and largely in Italy, worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe. MSS. were brought ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... You—to be sure, what can you know of our father? I knew him; I have been present when he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred. Lucretius was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist lay by his pillow and was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... purpose required. He may be compared to a clever landscape-gardener, who gives depth and richness to narrow and confined premises by ingenuity and skill in the disposition of his trees and walks. Terence and Lucretius had cultivated simplicity; Cotta, Brutus, and Calvus had attempted strength; but Cicero rather made a language than a style; yet not so much by the invention as by the combination of words. Some ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... year, with Figulus and Lucius Caesar in office, notable events were few, but worthy of remembrance in view of the contradictions in human affairs. For the man[16] who had slain Lucretius at the instance of Sulla and another[17] who had murdered many of the persons proscribed by him were tried for the slaughter and punished,—Julius Caesar being most instrumental in bringing this about. Thus the changes of affairs often render those ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... lady's honour, Lucretia, in melancholy distress at so dreadful a misfortune, despatches the same messenger to Rome to her father, and to Ardea to her husband, that they would come each with one trusty friend; that it was necessary to do so, and that quickly.[64] Sp. Lucretius comes with P. Valerius, the son of Volesus, Collatinus with L. Junius Brutus, with whom, as he was returning to Rome, he happened to be met by his wife's messenger. They find Lucretia sitting in her chamber in sorrowful dejection. On the arrival of her friends the tears burst from ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... William Thomson's pregnant hypothesis is that the absolute hardness which has been attributed to material atoms from the time of Lucretius downward may be dispensed with. Somewhat in the same way that a loosely suspended chain becomes rigid with rapid rotation, the hardness and elasticity of the vortex-atom are explained as due to the swift rotary motion of a soft and ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... to several others: and, in these, leaving out the directly satirical Parts. Satires III and X, like Horace's Poems, are prostituted by Parliamentary and vulgar use, and should lie by for a while. One sees Lucretius, I think, in many parts; but Juvenal can't rise to Lucretius, who is, after all, the true sublime Satirist of poor Man, and of something deeper than his Corruptions and Vices: and he looks on all, too, with 'a Countenance more in Sorrow than in Anger.' By the ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... where we see him laboring to heave the stone that lies on his shoulders up against the side of a steep mountain, and which always rolls precipitately down again before he can get it to rest upon the top. Lucretius makes him only an emblem of the ambitious; as Horace too seems to make Tant{)a}lus only an emblem ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... one of the greatest of Roman satirists. The later satirists of the corrupt imperial era were his imitators. Besides Lucilius, there appeared during the later republican era only two other poets of distinguished merit, Lucretius and Catullus. Lucretius (95-51 B.C.) was an evolutionist, and in his great poem, On the Nature of Things, we find anticipated many of ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... birth of the new cosmogony, he believed himself to be still in trammels of the old) was by temperament far more in touch with the new cosmogony than was Tennyson, who studied evolution more ardently than any poet since Lucretius. While Wordsworth, notwithstanding a conventional phrase here and there, had an apprehension of Nature without the ever-present idea of the Power behind her, Spinosa himself was not so “God-intoxicated” a man as Tennyson. His son sets the question at rest ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... which when we have naturalized all Greece and Rome, we shall be so much richer than they by so many original productions as we have of our own."[374] Seemingly there was an attempt to naturalize "all Greece and Rome." Anacreon, Pindar, Apollonius Rhodius, Lucretius, Tibullus, Statius, Juvenal, Persius, Ovid, Lucan, are names taken almost at random from the list of seventeenth and eighteenth-century translations. Criticism, however, was ready to concern itself with the translation ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... 35 Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus, the father of Lucretia, was made consul as the colleague of Valerius Publicola, in the place of Brutus, who had been slain in battle by Aruns, one of the sons ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... drops distil.—Ver. 500. He alludes to the manner in which frankincense is produced, it exuding from the bark of the tree in drops; this gum, Pliny the Elder and Lucretius call by the name of 'stacta,' or 'stacte.' The ancients ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the subject of our narrative. What a mystery is the soul of man! Here was Charles, busy with Aristotle and Euripides, Thucydides and Lucretius, yet all the while growing towards the Church, "to the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ." His mother had said to him that he could not escape his destiny; it was true, though it was to be fulfilled in ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... first musical melodrama produced on the English stage (Covent Garden, November 13, 1802). He was for some time assistant editor of the 'Morning Post', and Parliamentary reporter for the 'London Courant'; wrote on musical subjects, taught languages and music, and translated Lucretius into rhymed verse (1813).] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... Eclogues, Ovid's Elegies, Odes of Horace, London 1864. He translated likewise the Epistle of Phaedra to Hyppolitus, printed in the Translation of Ovid's Epistles, by several hands. He wrote the Prologue to Mrs. Bhon's City Heiress. Prefixed to Creechis Lucretius, there is a copy of verses written by Mr. Otway, in praise ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... that you attribute to science what in many cases has been the result of accident. The processes of most of the useful arts, which you call chemical, have been invented and improved without any refined views, without any general system of knowledge. Lucretius attributes to accident the discovery of the fusion of the metals; a person in touching a shell-fish observes that it emits a purple liquid as a dye, hence the Tyrian purple; clay is observed to harden in the fire, and hence the invention of bricks, which could hardly fail ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... (February). He confesses that I have made the principle of the Trinity, and the national blessing of the Episcopacy and the Liturgy, clear to him. I have never seen him, but he seems to me a deep thinker. I am again in correspondence with Bernays, who promises to work at Lucretius with all diligence. I think he has more leisure, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... Drury Lane, one Easter night, When the gay gods too blest to be polite Gods at their ease, like those of learned Lucretius, Laught, whistled, groaned, uproariously facetious— A well-drest member of the middle gallery, Whose "ears polite" disdained such low canaillerie, Rose in his place—so grand, you'd almost swear Lord Winchelsea ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al |
