 The impact of Theophrastus’ various writings cannot be exaggerated; his treatises were read and respected by subsequent generations of philosophers and others, whose works contain sometimes clear and sometimes latent signs of his influence. To start with the Hellenistic period, Epicurus took careful note of Theophrastus’ writings and seems to have made use both of his reports concerning the theories and arguments of previous philosophers as well as of his objections against them. In physics, in particular, it has been shown that Epicurus owes a direct and positive debt to Theophrastus’ exclusion of divine causes as well as to his principle of multiple explanation. It is noteworthy, however, that Theophrastus’ acceptance of multiple explanations differs from that of Epicurus; Theophrastus seems to have correlated different explanations with different forms of a phenomenon in our experience, whereas Epicurus claimed that any possible explanation will be true somewhere in the infinite Atomist universe (see Sedley 1998).