Professor Cripps
2-1-Q
Chapter 3
Student: Anthony Lacaprucia
2 – Offer 2 Specific Details from the chapter. For each, ID/quote and add 3-8 sentences of your own explanation
- “Looking back from this distance, with Lucretius’ masterpiece securely in hand, modern scholars have been able to identify a network of early medieval signs of the text’s existence a citation here. a catalogue entry there but most of these would have been invisible to the early fifteenth-century book hunters. They were groping in the dark, sensing perhaps a tiny gossamer filament but unable to track it to its source.” (2nd page of the chapter) I thought this passage was very interesting. I think it shows how significant the book “On the Nature of Things” really was. It was clearly a big influence for humanists and writers.
- “At first white and flexible, the papyrus would over time gradually get brittle and discolored—nothing lasts forever—but it was lightweight, convenient, relatively inexpensive, and surprisingly durable. Small landowners in Egypt had long realized that they could write their tax receipts on a scrap of papyrus and be reasonably confident that the record would be perfectly legible for years and even generations to come.” (third and fourth pages of the chapter) I also thought this part of the text was interesting. It is cool to see how papyrus was used as a form of paper in history. I don’t think this will have any real significance for the book but I still thought it was a cool detail.
1 – Make 1 Connection to Self, to World, or to Text – or Extend by offering a little detail about something mentioned in the text (some light research needed to Extend)
- “Romans, like the Greeks before them, easily grasped that this was the best writing material available, and they imported it in bulk from Egypt to meet their growing desire for record keeping, official documents, personal letters, and books. A roll of papyrus might last three hundred years” (fifth page of the chapter). I thought the papyrus thing was interesting enough to extend on it for my connection. Papyrus is mainly made of cellulose, which ages and deteriorates over time, becoming fragile and brittle as it’s broken down by hydrolysis (a reaction with water) and oxidation (a reaction with oxygen). However, because the egyptian environment was so dry it was able to last thousands of years.
Q – Give us a Good Question to chew on – 1-3 sentences
- What was Lucretius’ impact with “On the Nature of Things” on other literature?
