section_path: History of evolutionary thought/Classical antiquity
section_name: Classical antiquity
paragraph_text: Classical antiquity
  
  The proposal that one type of organism could descend from another type goes back to some of the first pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, such as Anaximander and Empedocles. Such proposals survived into Roman times. The poet and philosopher Lucretius followed Empedocles in his masterwork De rerum natura (lit. ' On the Nature of Things ').