The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

the philosopher seems to have lived a conspicuously simple and frugal life.

And he urged a comparable frugality on his students.

It is impossible to live pleasurably, Philodemus continued, “without living prudently and honourably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic.”

A philosophical claim that life’s ultimate goal is pleasure—even if that pleasure was defined in the most restrained and responsible terms—was a scandal, both for pagans and for their adversaries,

Two thousand years after Epicurus lived and taught, the sense of scandal was still felt intensely enough to generate the manic energy in travesties like Jonson’s.

one of the more legitimate charges against him was that his life was too quiet:

But perhaps Julius Caesar’s father-in-law—if Piso was indeed the villa’s owner—and some in his circle of friends were drawn to this philosophical school precisely because it offered an alternative to their stressful endeavors.

The key point, as Epicurus’ disciple Lucretius wrote in verses of unrivalled beauty, was to abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the cultivation of pleasure.

APART FROM THE charred papyrus fragments recovered in Herculaneum, there are no surviving contemporary manuscripts from the ancient Greek and Roman world. Everything that has reached us is a copy, most often very far removed in time, place, and culture from the original.

Scientists, historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and statesmen have left behind some of their achievements—the invention of trigonometry, for example, or the calculation of position by reference to latitude and longitude, or the rational analysis of political power—but their books are gone.

In this general vanishing, all the works of the brilliant founders of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus, and most of the works of their intellectual heir Epicurus, disappeared.

The actual material disappearance of the books was largely the effect of climate and pests.

Some protective measures, such as sprinkling cedar oil on the pages, were discovered to be effective in warding off damage, but it was widely recognized that the best way to preserve books from being eaten into oblivion was simply to use them and, when they finally wore out, to make more copies.

Somewhat more is known about the Roman book trade, where a distinction evolved between copyists (librari) and scribes (scribae). The librari generally were slaves or paid laborers who worked for booksellers. The booksellers set up advertisements on pillars and sold their wares in shops located in the Roman Forum. The scribae were free citizens; they worked as archivists, government bureaucrats, and personal secretaries.

Authors made nothing from the sale of their books; their profits derived from the wealthy patron to whom the work was dedicated.

but the business of producing and marketing books must have been a profitable one: there were bookshops not only in Rome but also in Brindisi, Carthage, Lyons, Reims, and other cities in the empire.

Over the course of centuries, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of copies, were made and sold.

Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.

Great Vanishing.

the greatest library in the ancient world, a library located not in Italy but in Alexandria,

the Museum, most of the intellectual inheritance of Greek, Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Jewish cultures had been assembled at enormous cost and carefully archived for research.

The level of achievement was staggering. The Alexandrian library was not associated with a particular doctrine or philosophical school; its scope was the entire range of intellectual inquiry.

Alexandrian scholars were famously obsessed with the pursuit of textual accuracy.

Ptolomey Philadelphus, is said to have undertaken the expensive and ambitious project of commissioning some seventy scholars to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The result—known as the Septuagint (after the Latin for “seventy”)—was for many early Christians their principal access to what they came to call the Old Testament.

The Museum was, as its name implies, a shrine dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses who embodied human creative achievement.

But libraries, museums, and schools are fragile institutions; they cannot long survive violent assaults. A way of life was dying.

traditional philosopher’s cloak, called a tribon,

The murder of Hypatia signified more than the end of one remarkable person; it effectively marked the downfall of Alexandrian intellectual life and was the death knell for the whole intellectual tradition that underlay the text that Poggio recovered so many centuries later. The Museum, with its dream of assembling all texts, all schools, all ideas, was no longer at the protected center of civil society.

Where did all the books go? the answer lies not only in the quick work of the soldiers’ flames and the long, slow, secret labor of the bookworm. It lies, symbolically at least, in the fate of Hypatia.

whenever Jerome turned from these literary delights to the Scriptures, the holy texts seemed crude and uncultivated. His love for the beauty and elegance of Latin was such that when he determined to learn Hebrew, he initially found the experience almost physically repellant:

There he lived for thirty-six years, studying, engaging in vehement theological controversies, and, most importantly, translating Hebrew Scriptures into Latin and revising the Latin translation of the New Testament. His achievement, the great Latin Bible translation known as the Vulgate, was in the sixteenth century declared by the Catholic Church to be “more authentic” than the original.

For many generations, learned Christians remained steeped, as Jerome was, in a culture whose values had been shaped by the pagan classics. Platonism contributed to Christianity its model of the soul; Aristotelianism its Prime Mover; Stoicism its model of Providence.

Seems like Christians appropriated the pagan ideas they at times condoned.

That mockery and the particular challenge it posed for early Christians set the stage for the subsequent disappearance of the whole Epicurean school of thought: Plato and Aristotle, pagans who believed in the immortality of the soul, could ultimately be accommodated by a triumphant Christianity; Epicureanism could not.

Epicurus did not deny the existence of gods. Rather, he thought that if the concept of divinity made any sense at all, the gods could not possibly be concerned with anything but their own pleasures.

Christians knew, moreover, that many pagans did not believe in the literal truth of their own myths and that there were some—Epicureans prominent among them—who called into question virtually all religious systems and promises.

Some critics pointed out with a derisory smile that many features of the Christian vision were stolen from much more ancient pagan stories:

But Christians replied that these ancient beliefs were all distorted reflections of the true Christian mysteries.

“pagans”: the word, which appeared in the late fourth century, is etymologically related to the word “peasant.”

The charge of doctrinal plagiarism was easier for Christians to deal with than the charge of absurdity.

It made some sense to argue with the former, but the latter were best simply silenced.

by the early fourth century, the task had become clear: the atomists had to disappear.

But Christians particularly found Epicureanism a noxious threat. If you grant Epicurus his claim that the soul is mortal, wrote Tertullian, the whole fabric of Christian morality unravels.

What had to be done was to refashion the account of the founder Epicurus so that he appeared no longer as an apostle of moderation in the service of reasonable pleasure but instead as a Falstaffian figure of riotous excess.

What had to be undertaken was the difficult project of making what appeared simply sane and natural—the ordinary impulses of all sentient creatures—seem like the enemy of the truth.

God cared about humans, just as a father cared about his wayward child. And the sign of that care, he wrote, was anger. God was enraged at man—that was the characteristic manifestation of His love—and wanted to smite him over and over again, with spectacular, unrelenting violence.

In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.

If Lucretius offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pleasure principle, Christianity offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pain principle.

Theology provided an answer deeper and more fundamental than this or that flawed individual or institution: humans were by nature corrupt.

Those cries were part of the payment, the atonement that would, if they were successful, enable them to recover in the afterlife the happiness that Adam and Eve had lost.

In monasteries and convents driven by the belief that redemption would only come through abasement, it is not surprising that forms of corporal punishment—virgarum verbera (hitting with rods), corporale supplicium (bodily punishment), ictus (blows), vapulatio (cudgeling), disciplina (whipping), and flagellatio—were routinely inflicted on community members who broke the rules.