 1.635–920. Lucretius now turns polemical, attacking in sequence three Presocratic philosophers representing three rival physical systems as these had come to be classified in the Aristotelian tradition: monism, finite pluralism and infinite pluralism. Heraclitus, with his reduction of everything to fire, is the token monist; Empedocles, with his four elements, represents finite pluralism; and Anaxagoras, read through the lens of Aristotelian doxography as making all the ‘homoeomerous’ or ‘like-parted’ stuffs the elements, is treated as fundamentally sui generis. None of these thinkers had a significant, if indeed any, following in Lucretius’ day (even if Heraclitus had been accorded an honourable place in the prehistory of Stoicism). His choice of them as targets probably reflects his readiness to take over from Epicurus (most likely drawing on the latter’s On nature books 14 and 15, but see Montarese 2012 for a different view) the critiques which the school founder had felt it appropriate to launch in his own historical context.