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Originally Posted by Synamon
...A question for those who have read On the Nature of Things, were there as many wild and wrong-headed ideas as there were right-thinking ideas? It seemed to me that Greenblatt cherry picked, and I'm curious if my impression is correct.
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Lucretius was frequently uncannily modern in the way he perceived reality, but he was just as frequently spectacularly wrong. I don't have access to my notes at this time, but I'll try later to point out some examples and give chapter and verse to back them up.
One example I can give off the top of my head of where he was very wrong was in the origin of species. He was right in his assumption that many species must have existed in the past that became extinct over time because they weren't adapted to the environment—here he sounds almost Darwinian in his thinking—but he believed that all these species, the successful as well as the unsuccessful, were created at a time when the earth was still young and capable of producing species via a method that sounds a lot like spontaneous generation. He seemed to have the idea in mind that species were fixed and unchangeable. The idea of descent with modification seemed foreign to his thinking.
No, I don't think Lucretius was the be-all end-all cause of the Renaissance, and in fact, to my mind his influence was far smaller than Greenblatt would have us believe, although I do think the case can be made that his influence upon the Enlightenment was quite substantial. Jefferson, to give just one example, famously referred to himself as an Epicurean.
Off-topic side note: I hate the iPad's autocorrect. If you see a "we're" where a "were" ought to be, or an "it's" where an "its" is called for, now you know why. 