ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Lucretius' testimony in order to see whether it is compatible with my account of Epicurus' conception of a causally efficacious self. It accounts the discrepancy – and its possible solutions – between Epicurus' and Lucretius' accounts of atomic collisions. The chapter examines how Lucretius' arguments for the swerve fit into the larger context of his discussion of atomic motion. Lucretius offers us three reasons in DRN II 216–93: a cosmogonical, an anti-determinist and an anti-fatalist. David Sedley thinks that the Letter to Herodotus, an epitome of Epicurus' physics, was a comparatively early work, and possibly only a partial epitome of the first thirteen books of Epicurus' On Nature, which consisted of thirty-seven books. Epicurus' conception of the different functional roles of his epitomes, explicit in the introduction, strengthens the distinction between the different audiences of the different summaries.
