In versifying the philosophical system of Epicurus, Lucretius appears to have taken Empedocles as his model. All the old Grecian bards of whom we have any account prior to Homer, as Orpheus, Linus, and Musæus, are said to have written poems on the driest and most difficult philosophical questions, particularly the generation of the world. The ancients evidently considered philosophical poetry as of the highest kind, and its themes are invariably placed in the mouths of their divinest songsters(446). Whether Lucretius may have been indebted to any such ancient poems, still extant in his age, or to the subsequent productions of Palæphatus the Athenian, Antiochus, or Eratosthenes, who, as Suidas informs us, wrote poems on the structure of the world, it is impossible now to determine; but he seems to have considerably availed himself of the work of Empedocles. The poem of that sumptuous, accomplished, and arrogant philosopher, entitled Περι φυσεως, and inscribed to his pupil Pausanias, was chiefly illustrative of the Pythagorean philosophy, in which he had been initiated. Aristotle speaks on the subject of the merits of Empedocles in a manner which does not seem to be perfectly consistent(447); but we know that his poem was sufficiently celebrated to be publicly recited at the Olympic games, along with the works of Homer. Only a few fragments of his writings remain; from which, perhaps, it would be as unfair to judge him, as to estimate Lucretius by extracts from the physical portions of his poem. Those who have collected the detached fragments of his production(448), think that it had been divided into three books; the first treating of the elements and universe,—the second of animals and man,—the third of the soul, as also of the nature and worship of the gods. His philosophical system was different from that of Lucretius; but he had discussed almost all the subjects on which the Roman bard afterwards expatiated. In particular, Lucretius appears to have derived from his predecessor his notion of the original generation of man from the teeming earth,—the production, at the beginning of the world, of a variety of defective monsters, which were not allowed to multiply their kinds,—the distribution of animals according to the prevalence of one or other of the four elements over the rest in their composition,—the vicissitudes of matter between life and inanimate substance,—and the leading doctrine, “mortem nihil ad nos pertinere,” because absolute insensibility is the consequence of dissolution(449).