the poem that almost disappeared forever, dispersed into random atoms, but that somehow managed to survive. It survived because a succession of people, in a range of places and times and for reasons that seem largely accidental, encountered the material object—the papyrus or parchment or paper, with its inky marks attributed to Titus Lucretius Carus—and then sat down to make material copies of their own. Sitting in the room with her children, counting the syllables of translated verses on the threads of her canvas, the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson was serving in effect as one of the transmitters of
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