The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.

He posited instead what he called a “swerve,”—Lucretius’ principal Latin word for it was clinamen—an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter. The reappearance of his poem was such a swerve, an unforeseen deviation from the direct trajectory—in this case, toward oblivion—on which that poem and its philosophy seemed to be traveling.

Wonder did not depend on gods and demons and the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live our lives.

This reads almost like Lucretius is agnostic or an atheist, but he instead believed in gods of nature that don’t have interest or need to interfere with humans. It’s also said he believed the gods therefore didn’t need religion and didn’t create it, that it was instead the creation of humans.

In short, it became possible—never easy, but possible—in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.

But to prize a person for some ineffable individuality or for many-sidedness or for intense curiosity was virtually unheard of. Indeed, curiosity was said by the Church to be a mortal sin. To indulge it was to risk an eternity in hell.

whom does this man serve?

His occupation was scriptor, that is, a skilled writer of official documents in the papal bureaucracy, and, through adroitness and cunning, he had risen to the coveted position of apostolic secretary.

The pope Poggio had served and before whom the faithful (and the less than faithful) had trembled was at that moment in the winter of 1417 sitting in an imperial prison in Heidelberg.

And Poggio was now a masterless man. To be masterless in the early fifteenth century was for most men an unenviable, even dangerous state. Villages and towns looked with suspicion on itinerants; vagrants were whipped and branded; and on lonely paths in a largely unpoliced world the unprotected were exceedingly vulnerable.

It is all the more striking that in this difficult period Poggio did not quickly find a new position or make haste to return to Italy. What he did instead was to go book-hunting.

Here is the Rule from the monasteries established in Egypt and throughout the Middle East by the late fourth-century Coptic saint Pachomius. When a candidate for admission to the monastery presents himself to the elders,

“He shall be compelled to read.” It was this compulsion that, through centuries of chaos, helped to salvage the achievements of ancient thought.

The monks were to read, whether they felt like it or not, and the Rule called for careful supervision:

Acediosus, sometimes translated as “apathetic,” refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John Cassian. The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read.

A refusal to read at the prescribed time—whether because of distraction, boredom, or despair—would thus be visited first by public criticism and then, if the refusal continued, by blows.

The high walls that hedged about the mental life of the monks—the imposition of silence, the prohibition of questioning, the punishing of debate with slaps or blows of the whip—were all meant to affirm unambiguously that these pious communities were the opposite of the philosophical academies of Greece or Rome, places that had thrived upon the spirit of contradiction and cultivated a restless, wide-ranging curiosity.

Poggio was almost uniquely suited to meet these challenges. He had been exceptionally well trained in the special skills needed to decipher old handwriting.

He was not himself a monk or a priest, but his long service in the papal curia or court had given him intimate, inside knowledge of the institutional structures of the Church, as well as personal acquaintance with many of its most powerful clerics, including a succession of popes.

Poggio also possessed considerable personal charm. He was a marvelous raconteur, a sly gossip, and an indefatigable teller of jokes, many of them off-color.

If Poggio sensed that he could impress his hosts with moral seriousness, he could have discoursed eloquently about the miseries of the human condition; if he thought he could win them over by making them laugh, he could have launched into one of his tales of foolish rustics, compliant housewives, and sexually rapacious priests.

Poggio possessed one further gift that set him apart from virtually all the other book-hunting humanists. He was a superbly well-trained scribe, with exceptionally fine handwriting, great powers of concentration, and a high degree of accuracy.

Poggio’s talent as a transcriber struck contemporaries as uncanny, all the more so because he worked so rapidly.

In 1417, then, Poggio the book hunter had a near-perfect conjunction of time, skills, and desire. All that he lacked was ready money.

Poggio and his companion, Bartolomeo de Aragazzi, had much in common.

Poggio did not like monks. He knew several impressive ones, men of great moral seriousness and learning. But on the whole he found them superstitious, ignorant, and hopelessly lazy. Monasteries, he thought, were the dumping grounds for those deemed unfit for life in the world.

For him copying manuscripts, which he did with unrivalled skill, was not an ascetic but rather an aesthetic undertaking, one by which he advanced his own personal reputation. But by virtue of that skill he was able to see at a glance—with either admiration or scorn—exactly what effort and ability had gone into the manuscript that lay before him.

scriptoria, workshops where monks would be trained to sit for long hours making copies. At first the copying was probably done in an improvised setting in the cloister, where,

In the greatest monasteries,

these were large rooms

In charge of the scriptorium was the person on whom Poggio and the other book hunters would have focused their most seductive blandishments: the monastery’s librarian.

he was responsible for providing all of the equipment that was required for the copying of the manuscripts:

Most books in the ancient world took the form of scrolls—like

but by the fourth century Christians had almost completely opted for a different format, the codex, from which our familiar books derive.

The finest parchment, the one that made life easier for scribes and must have figured in their sweetest dreams, was made of calfskin and called vellum. And the best of the lot was uterine vellum, from the skins of aborted calves.

An engaged reader, Poggio knew, was prone to alter his text in order to get it to make sense, but such alterations, over centuries, inevitably led to wholesale corruptions.

What had begun as an active campaign to forget—a pious attack on pagan ideas—had evolved into actual forgetting.

These strange, layered manuscripts—called palimpsests; from the Greek for “scraped again”—have served as the source of several major works from the ancient past that would not otherwise be known.

The monastery was a place of rules, but in the scriptorium there were rules within rules.

An elaborate gestural language was invented in order to facilitate such requests as were permitted.

many scholars have long thought that the likeliest candidate is the Benedictine Abbey of Fulda. That abbey, in a strategic area of central Germany, between the Rhône and the Vogelsberg Mountains, had the features that most excited the interest of a book hunter: it was ancient, it was rich, it had once possessed a great tradition of learning, and it was now in decline.

He opened an epic poem in some 14,000 lines on the wars between Rome and Carthage. Poggio might have recognized the name of the author, Silius Italicus,

He opened another long poem, this one by an author, Manilius, whose name the book hunter would certainly not have recognized, for it is not mentioned by any surviving ancient author.

An ancient literary critic who had flourished during Nero’s reign and had written notes and glosses on classical authors; another critic who quoted extensively from lost epics written in imitation of Homer;

Yet another manuscript was a discovery whose thrill might have been tinged for him with melancholy: a large fragment of a hitherto unknown history of the Roman Empire written by a high-ranking officer in the imperial army, Ammianus Marcellinus.

One of the manuscripts consisted of a long text written around 50 BCE by a poet and philosopher named Titus Lucretius Carus. The text’s title, De rerum natura—On the Nature of Things—was

What is not clear is whether he had any intimation at all that he was releasing a book that would help in time to dismantle his entire world.

“The poetry of Lucretius,” he wrote to his brother Quintus on February 11, 54 bce, “is, as you say in your letter, rich in brilliant genius, yet highly artistic.”

He had encountered a poem that conjoined “brilliant genius” in philosophy and science with unusual poetic power. The conjunction was as rare then as it is now.

The greatest Roman poet, Virgil, about fifteen years old when Lucretius died, was under the spell of On the Nature of Things. “Blessed is he who has succeeded in finding out the causes of things,” Virgil wrote in the Georgics, “and has trampled underfoot all fears and inexorable fate and the roar of greedy Acheron.”

Virgil’s great epic, the Aeneid, was a sustained attempt to construct an alternative to On the Nature of Things: