The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began

by Stephen Greenblatt

Humans, Aristotle wrote, are social animals: to realize one’s nature as a human then was to participate in a group activity. And the activity of choice, for cultivated Romans, as for the Greeks before them, was discourse. There is, Cicero remarked at the beginning of a typical philosophical work, a wide diversity of opinion about the most important religious questions. “This has often struck me,”25 Cicero wrote, but it did so with especial force on one occasion, when the topic of the immortal gods was made the subject of a very searching and thorough discussion at the house of my friend Gaius Cotta. It was the Latin Festival, and I had come at Cotta’s express invitation to pay him a visit. I found him sitting in an alcove, engaged in debate with Gaius Velleius, a Member of the Senate, accounted by the Epicureans as their chief Roman adherent at the time. With them was Quintus Lucilius Balbus, who was so accomplished a student of Stoicism as to rank with the leading Greek exponents of that system. Cicero does not want to present his thoughts to his readers as a tract composed after solitary reflection; he wants to present them as an exchange of views among social and intellectual equals, a conversation in which he himself plays only a small part and in which there will be no clear victor. The end of this dialogue—a long work that would have filled several sizable papyrus rolls—is characteristically inconclusive: “Here the conversation ended,26 and we parted, Velleius thinki...