Despite the general scholarly consensus about Lucretius' debt to Empedocles as the father of the genre of cosmological didactic epic, there is a major disagreement regarding Lucretius' applause for his Presocratic predecessor's praeclara reperta (DRN 1.732).

PIERIDES III, Series Editors: Myrto Garani and David KonstanDespite the Romans' reputation for being disdainful of abstract speculation, Latin poetry from its very beginning was deeply permeated by Greek philosophy. Philosophical elements and commonplaces have been identified and appreciated in a wide range of writers, but the extent of the Greek philosophical influence, and in particular the impact of Pythagorean, Empedoclean, Epicurean and Stoic doctrines, on Latin verse has never been fully investigated. In this volume, an international group of scholars expert in Roman literature and the...