The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

But it is nonetheless possible to have a powerful experience of a work of art even in a modest translation, let alone a brilliant one.

What Poggio and other Italian humanists probably did notice, however, were the words of Ovid, words that were enough to send any book hunter scurrying through the catalogs of monastic libraries: “The verses of sublime Lucretius are destined to perish only when a single day will consign the world to destruction.”

Gustave Flaubert: “Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.”

“Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city.”

After the downfall of the Serapeon, a pagan poet, Palladas, expressed his mood of devastation: Is it not true that we are dead, and living only in appearance, We Hellenes, fallen on disaster, Likening life to a dream, since we remain alive while Our way of life is dead and gone?

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

Believers in Jupiter, Minerva, and Mars did not think of themselves as “pagans”: the word, which appeared in the late fourth century, is etymologically related to the word “peasant.” It is an insult, then, a sign that the laughter at rustic ignorance had decisively reversed direction.

For Epicurus, human suffering is always finite: “if it is slight, he [Epicurus] says, you may despise it, if it is great it will not be long.”

“Your Poggio,” he wrote, “is content with very little and you shall see this for yourself; sometimes I am free for reading, free from all care about public affairs which I leave to my superiors. I live free as much as I can.” Freedom here has nothing to do with political liberty or a notion of rights or the license to say whatever he wished or the ability to go wherever he chose. It is rather the experience of withdrawing inwardly from the press of the world—in which he himself was so ambitiously engaged—and ensphering himself in a space apart. For Poggio, that experience was what it meant to immerse himself in an ancient book: “I am free for reading.”

Humans are not unique.

Mourners, Lucretius wrote, always wring their hands in anguish and say, “Never again will your dear children race for the prize of your first kisses and touch your heart with pleasure too profound for words.” (3.895–98) But they do not go on to add, “You will not care, because you will not exist.”

On the contrary, grasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness.

Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and that they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives that they have.

According to my Epicurus . . . nothing remains after the dissolution of the living being, and in the term “living being” he included man just as much as he did the lion, the wolf, the dog, and all other things that breathe. With all this I agree. They eat, we eat; they drink, we drink; they sleep, and so do we. They engender, conceive, give birth, and nourish their young in no way different from ours. They possess some part of reason and memory, some more than others, and we a little more than they. We are like them in almost everything; finally, they die and we die—both of us completely.

Thus, for example, in 1484 the Florentine poet Luigi Pulci was denied Christian burial for denying miracles and describing the soul as “no more than a pine nut in hot white bread.”

Urging those whose sexual passion is too powerful to “disperse it,” Montaigne in “Of Diversion” quotes Lucretius’ scabrous advice—“Eject the gathered sperm in anything at all”—and then adds, “I have often tried it with profit.”

There are moments, rare and powerful, in which a writer, long vanished from the face of the earth, seems to stand in your presence and speak to you directly, as if he bore a message meant for you above all others.