The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing.

Poggio Bracciolini was a book hunter, perhaps the greatest in an age obsessed with ferreting out and recovering the heritage of the ancient world.

Virgil’s great epic, the Aeneid, was a sustained attempt to construct an alternative to On the Nature of Things: pious, where Lucretius was skeptical; militantly patriotic, where Lucretius counseled pacifism; soberly renunciatory, where Lucretius embraced the pursuit of pleasure.

On the Nature of Things is the work of a disciple who is transmitting ideas that had been developed centuries earlier. Epicurus, Lucretius’ philosophical messiah, was born toward the end of 342 BCE on the Aegean island of Samos where his father, a poor Athenian schoolmaster, had gone as a colonist. Many Greek philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, came from wealthy families and prided themselves on their distinguished ancestry. Epicurus decidedly had no comparable claims. His philosophical enemies, basking in their social superiority, made much of the modesty of his background. He assisted his father in his school for a pittance, they sneered, and used to go round with his mother to cottages to read charms. One of his brothers, they added, was a pander and lived with a prostitute. This was not a philosopher with whom respectable people should associate themselves. That Lucretius and many others did more than simply associate themselves with Epicurus—that they celebrated him as godlike in his wisdom and courage—depended not on his social credentials but upon what they took to be the saving power of his vision.

The notion of atoms, which originated in the fifth century BCE with Leucippus of Abdera and his prize student Democritus, was only a dazzling speculation;