The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

Of all the ancient masterpieces, this poem is one that should certainly have disappeared, finally and forever, in the company of the lost works that had inspired it. That it did not disappear, that it surfaced after many centuries and began once again to propagate its deeply subversive theses, is something one could be tempted to call a miracle. But the author of the poem in question did not believe in miracles. He thought that nothing could violate the laws of nature. 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. When it returned to full circulation after a millennium, much of what the work said about a universe formed out of the clash of atoms in an infinite void seemed absurd. But those very things that first were deemed both impious and nonsensical turned out to be the basis for the contemporary rational understanding of the entire world. What is at stake is not only the startling recognition of key elements of modernity in antiquity, though it is certainly worth reminding ourselves that Greek and Roman classics, largely displaced from our curriculum, have in fact definitively shaped modern consciousness. More surprising, perhaps, is the sense, driven home by every page of On the Na...

monastic rules did require reading, and that was enough to set in motion an extraordinary chain of consequences. Reading was not optional or desirable or recommended; in a community that took its obligations with deadly seriousness, reading was obligatory. And reading required books. Books that were opened again and again eventually fell apart, however carefully they were handled. Therefore, almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks repeatedly purchase or acquire books. In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed. But all trade with the papyrus makers of Egypt had long vanished, and in the absence of a commercial book market, the commercial industry for converting animal skins to writing surfaces had fallen into abeyance. Therefore, once again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks learn the laborious art of making parchment and salvaging existing parchment. Without wishing to emulate the pagan elites by placing books or writing at the center of society, without affirming the importance of rhetoric or grammar, without prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the principal readers, librarians, book preserv...

hopelessly lazy. Monasteries, he thought, were the dumping grounds for those deemed unfit

The Benedictine Rule had called for manual labor, as well as prayer and reading, and it was always assumed that this labor could include writing. The early founders of monastic orders did not regard copying manuscripts as an exalted activity; on the contrary, as they were highly aware, most of the copying in the ancient world had been done by educated slaves. The task was therefore inherently humiliating as well as tedious, a perfect combination for the ascetic project of disciplining the spirit.

Those who wrote unusually well—in fine, clear handwriting that the other monks could easily read and with painstaking accuracy in the transcription—came to be valued. In the “wergild” codes that in Germanic lands and in Ireland specified the payment of reparations for murder—200 shillings for killing a churl, 300 for a low-ranking cleric, 400 if the cleric was saying mass when he was attacked, and so forth—the loss of a scribe by violence was ranked equal to the loss of a bishop or an abbot.

Even the most celebrated monastic libraries of the Middle Ages were tiny in comparison with the libraries of antiquity or those that existed in Baghdad or Cairo. To assemble a modest number of books, in the long centuries before the invention of the printing press forever changed the equation, meant the eventual establishment of what were called 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, even if the cold sometimes stiffened the fingers, at least the light would be good. But in time special rooms were designated or built for the purpose. In the greatest monasteries, increasingly eager to amass prestigious collections of books, these were large rooms equipped with clear glass windows under which the monks, as many as thirty of them, sat at individual desks, sometimes partitioned off from one another.

Since papyrus was no longer available and paper did not come into general use until the fourteenth century, for more than a thousand years the chief writing material used for books was made from the skins of animals—cows, sheep, goats, and occasionally deer. These surfaces needed to be made smooth, and hence another tool that the monastic librarian distributed was pumice stone, to rub away the remaining animal hair along with any bumps or imperfections. The scribe to whom a poor-quality parchment had been given was in for a very disagreeable task, and in the margins of surviving monastic manuscripts there are occasional outbursts of distress: “The parchment is hairy” . . . “Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text” . . . “Thank God, it will soon be dark.” “Let the copyist be permitted to put an end to his labor,” a weary monk wrote beneath his name, the date, and the place where he worked; “Now I’ve written the whole thing,” wrote another. “For Christ’s sake give me a drink.”

Italian humanists, on the lookout for clues to lost ancient works, would have been alert to even fleeting references in the works of those celebrated authors whose writings had survived in significant quantities. Thus, though he strongly disagreed with its philosophical principles, Cicero—Poggio’s favorite Latin writer—conceded the marvelous power of On the Nature of Things. “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.” Cicero’s turn of phrase—especially that slightly odd word “yet”—registers his surprise: he was evidently struck by something unusual. 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.” Assuming that this is a subtle allusion to the title of Lucretius’ poem, the older poet in this account is a culture hero, someone who has heard the menacing roar of the underworld and triumphed over the superstitious fears that threaten to sap the human spirit.

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.

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.”

friends. The exchange itself, not its final conclusions, carries much of the meaning. The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views. “The one who engages in conversation,” Cicero wrote, “should not debar others from participating in it, as if he were entering upon a private monopoly; but, as in other things, so in a general conversation he should think it not unfair for each to have his turn.”

In constant motion, atoms collide with each other, Epicurus reasoned, and in certain circumstances, they form larger and larger bodies. The largest observable bodies—the sun and the moon—are made of atoms, just as are human beings and waterflies and grains of sand. There are no supercategories of matter; no hierarchy of elements. Heavenly bodies are not divine beings who shape our destiny for good or ill, nor do they move through the void under the guidance of gods: they are simply part of the natural order, enormous structures of atoms subject to the same principles of creation and destruction that govern everything that exists. And if the natural order is unimaginably vast and complex, it is nonetheless possible to understand something of its basic constitutive elements and its universal laws. Indeed, such understanding is one of human life’s deepest pleasures. This pleasure is perhaps the key to comprehending the powerful impact of Epicurus’ philosophy; it was as if he unlocked for his followers an inexhaustible source of gratification hidden within Democritus’ atoms. For us, the impact is rather difficult to grasp. For one thing, the pleasure seems too intellectual to reach more than a tiny number of specialists; for another, we have come to associate atoms far more with fear than with gratification. But though ancient philosophy was hardly a mass movement, Epicurus was offering something more than caviar to a handful of particle physicists. Indeed, eschewing the self-...

Followers of Epicurus responded by recalling the last days of the master, dying from an excruciating obstruction of the bladder but achieving serenity of spirit by recalling all of the pleasures he had experienced in his life. It is not clear that this model was easily imitable—“Who can hold a fire in his hand/By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?” as one of Shakespeare’s characters asks—but then it is not clear that any of the available alternatives, in a world without Demerol or morphine, was more successful at dealing with death agonies. What the Greek philosopher offered was not help in dying but help in living. Liberated from superstition, Epicurus taught, you would be free to pursue pleasure.

“Men suffer the worst evils for the sake of the most alien desires,” wrote his disciple Philodemus, in one of the books found in the library at Herculaneum, and “they neglect the most necessary appetites as if they were the most alien to nature.” What are these necessary appetites that lead to pleasure? 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.”

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. And these copies represent only a small portion of the works even of the most celebrated writers of antiquity. Of Aeschylus’ eighty or ninety plays and the roughly one hundred twenty by Sophocles, only seven each have survived; Euripides and Aristophanes did slightly better: eighteen of ninety-two plays by the former have come down to us; eleven of forty-three by the latter. These are the great success stories. Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace.

The Alexandrian library was not associated with a particular doctrine or philosophical school; its scope was the entire range of intellectual inquiry. It represented a global cosmopolitanism, a determination to assemble the accumulated knowledge of the whole world and to perfect and add to this knowledge.

Fantastic efforts were made not only to amass vast numbers of books but also to acquire or establish definitive editions. Alexandrian scholars were famously obsessed with the pursuit of textual accuracy. How was it possible to strip away the corruptions that inevitably seeped into books copied and recopied, for the most part by slaves, for centuries? Generations of dedicated scholars developed elaborate techniques of comparative analysis and painstaking commentary in pursuit of the master texts. They pursued as well access to the knowledge that lay beyond the boundaries of the Greek-speaking world. It is for this reason that an Alexandrian ruler, 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 significance of the destruction, as Palladas understood, extended beyond the loss of the single cult image. Whether on this occasion mayhem reached the library is unknown. But libraries, museums, and schools are fragile institutions; they cannot long survive violent assaults. A way of life was dying.

Greenblatt’s suggestion that early Christians were responsible for the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is puzzling. It’s not even clear whether the Library even continued to exist at this point; its prominence and influence had already been diminishing for centuries, and it may not have survived an invasion by other forces more than a century prior.

In March 415 the crowd, whipped into a frenzy by one of Cyril’s henchmen, erupted. Returning to her house, Hypatia was pulled from her chariot and taken to a church that was formerly a temple to the emperor. (The setting was no accident: it signified the transformation of paganism into the one true faith.) There, after she was stripped of her clothing, her skin was flayed off with broken bits of pottery. The mob then dragged her corpse outside the city walls and burned it. Their hero Cyril was eventually made a saint.

Here Greenblatt relies entirely upon a single ancient source, Damascius (writing well after the fact), a Neoplatonist philosopher antagonistic toward Christianity. The eyewitness testimony of Socrates Scholasticus never suggests any kind of involvement by Cyril.

“I much prefer that my own style be my own,” Petrarch wrote, “uncultivated and rude, but made to fit, as a garment, to the measure of my mind, rather than to someone else’s, which may be more elegant, ambitious, and adorned, but one that, deriving from a greater genius, continually slips off, unfitted to the humble proportions of my intellect.”

To prove its worth, Petrarch and Salutati both insisted, the whole enterprise of humanism had not merely to generate passable imitations of the classical style but to serve a larger ethical end. And to do so it needed to live fully and vibrantly in the present.

The Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana called this idea—the ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances—“the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.”

the poetic greatness of Lucretius’ work is not incidental to his visionary project, his attempt to wrest the truth away from illusion-mongers. Why should the tellers of fables, he thought, possess a monopoly on the means that humans have invented to express the pleasure and beauty of the world? Without those means, the world we inhabit runs the risk of seeming inhospitable, and for their comfort people will prefer to embrace fantasies, even if those fantasies are destructive. With the aid of poetry, however, the actual nature of things—an infinite number of indestructible particles swerving into one another, hooking together, coming to life, coming apart, reproducing, dying, recreating themselves, forming an astonishing, constantly changing universe—can be depicted in its true splendor.

When the manuscript of On the Nature of Things finally did reach him, Poggio evidently sent it off at once to Niccolò Niccoli, in Florence. Either because the scribe’s copy was crudely made or simply because he wanted a version for himself, Poggio’s friend undertook to transcribe it. This transcription in Niccoli’s elegant hand, together with the copy made by the German scribe, spawned dozens of further manuscript copies—more than fifty are known to survive—and were the sources of all fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century printed editions of Lucretius. Poggio’s discovery thus served as the crucial conduit through which the ancient poem, dormant for a thousand years, reentered circulation in the world.

in his book-hunting exploits in the early fifteenth century, Poggio had done something amazing. The texts he returned to circulation gave him a claim to a place of honor amidst his more famous Florentine contemporaries: Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Luca della Robbia, Masaccio, Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca. Unlike Brunelleschi’s massive cupola, the greatest dome constructed since classical antiquity, Lucretius’ great poem does not stand out against the sky. But its recovery permanently changed the landscape of the world.