The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Poggio may not have had time, in the gathering darkness of the monastic library, and under the wary eyes of the abbot or his librarian, to do more than read the opening lines. But he would have seen immediately that Lucretius’ Latin verses were astonishingly beautiful. Ordering his scribe to make a copy, he hurried to liberate it from the monastery. What is not clear is whether he had any intimation at all that he was releasing a book that would help in time to dismantle his entire world.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IN SEARCH OF LUCRETIUS

  SOME FOURTEEN HUNDRED and fifty years before Poggio set out to see what he could find, Lucretius’ contemporaries had read his poem, and it continued to be read1 for several centuries after its publication. 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,”2 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.

  Cicero and his brother were not alone in grasping that Lucretius had accomplished a near-perfect integration of intellectual distinction and aesthetic mastery. The greatest Roman poet, Virgil, about fifteen years old when Lucretius died, was under the spell of On the Nature of Things. “Blessed is he3 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. But Virgil did not mention4 his hero by name, and, though he had certainly read the Georgics, Poggio was unlikely to have picked up the allusion before he had actually read Lucretius. Still less would Poggio have been able to grasp the extent to which 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 Lucretius5 are destined to perish only when a single day will consign the world to destruction.”

  It is all the more striking then that Lucretius’ verses did almost perish—the survival of his work hung by slenderest of threads—and that virtually nothing about his actual identity is reliably known. Many of the major poets and philosophers of ancient Rome had been celebrities in their own time, the objects of gossip which eager book hunters centuries later pored over for clues. But in the case of Lucretius there were almost no biographical traces. The poet must have been a very private person, living his life in the shadows, and he does not seem to have written anything apart from his one great work. That work, difficult and challenging, was hardly the kind of popular success that got diffused in so many copies that significant fragments of it were assured of surviving into the Middle Ages. Looking back from this distance, with Lucretius’ masterpiece securely in hand, modern scholars have been able to identify a network of early medieval signs of the text’s existence—a citation here, a catalogue entry there—but most of these would have been invisible to the early fifteenth-century book hunters. They were groping in the dark, sensing perhaps a tiny gossamer filament but unable to track it to its source. And following in their wake, after almost six hundred years of work by classicists, historians, and archaeologists, we know almost nothing more than they did about the identity of the author.

  The Lucretii were an old, distinguished Roman clan—as Poggio may have known—but since slaves, when freed, often took the name of the family that had owned them, the author was not necessarily an aristocrat. Still, an aristocratic lineage was plausible, for the simple reason that Lucretius addressed his poem, in terms of easy intimacy, to a nobleman, Gaius Memmius. That name Poggio might have encountered in his wide reading, for Memmius had a relatively successful6 political career, was a patron of celebrated writers, including the love poet Catullus, and was himself reputed to be a poet (an obscene one, according to Ovid). He was also an orator, as Cicero noted somewhat grudgingly, “of the subtle, ingenious type.” But the question remained, who was Lucretius?

  The answer, for Poggio and his circle, would have come almost completely from a brief biographical sketch that the great Church Father St. Jerome (c. 340–420 CE) added to an earlier chronicle. In 94 BCE, Jerome noted that “Titus Lucretius, poet, is born. After a love-philtre had turned him mad, and he had written, in the intervals of his insanity, several books which Cicero revised, he killed himself by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of his age.” These lurid details7 have shaped all subsequent representations of Lucretius, including a celebrated Victorian poem in which Tennyson imagined the voice of the mad, suicidal philosopher tormented by erotic fantasies.

  Modern classical scholarship suggests that every one of Jerome’s biographical claims should be taken with a heavy dose of skepticism. They were recorded—or invented—centuries after Lucretius’ death by a Christian polemicist who had an interest in telling cautionary tales about pagan philosophers. However, since no good fifteenth-century Christian would have been likely to doubt the saint’s account, Poggio must have thought that the poem that he had found and was returning to circulation was tainted by its pagan author’s madness and suicide. But the humanist book hunter was part of a generation passionately eager to unearth ancient texts, even by those whose lives epitomized moral confusion and mortal sin. And the thought that Cicero himself had revised the books would have sufficed to quiet any lingering reservations.

  In the more than sixteen hundred years that have elapsed since the fourth-century chronicle entry, no further biographical information has turned up, either to confirm or disprove Jerome’s story of the love potion and its tragic aftermath. As a person, Lucretius remains almost8 as little known as he was when Poggio recovered his poem in 1417. Given the extravagance of Ovid’s praise of “the verse of sublime Lucretius” and the other signs of the poem’s influence, it remains a mystery that so little was said directly about him by his contemporaries and near contemporaries. But archaeological disoveries, made long after Poggio’s death, have helped us to get eerily close to the world in which On the Nature of Things was first read, and perhaps to the poet himself.

  The discoveries were made possible by a famous ancient disaster. On August 24, 79 CE, the massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius completely destroyed not only Pompeii but also the small seaside resort of Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples. Buried under some sixty-five feet of volcanic debris hardened to the density of concrete, this site, where wealthy Romans had once vacationed in their elegant, colonnaded villas, was forgotten until the early eighteenth century, when workmen, digging a well, uncovered some marble statues. An Austrian officer—for Naples at the time was under the control of Austria—took over, and excavators began digging shafts through the thick crust.

  The explorations, which continued when Naples passed into Bourbon hands, were extremely crude, less an archaeological investigation than a prolonged smash-and-grab. The official in charge for more than a decade was a Spanish army engineer, Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre, who seemed to treat the site as an ossified garbage dump in which loot had unaccoun
tably been buried. (“This man,”9 remarked a contemporary, dismayed at the wanton damage, “knew as much of antiquities as the moon does of lobsters.”) The diggers burrowed away in search of statues, gems, precious marbles, and other more or less familiar treasures, which they found in abundance and delivered in jumbled heaps to their royal masters.

  In 1750, under a new director, the explorers became somewhat more careful about what they were doing. Three years later, tunneling through the remains of one of the villas, they came across something baffling: the ruins of a room graced with a mosaic floor and filled with innumerable objects “about half a palm long,10 and round,” as one of them wrote, “which appeared like roots of wood, all black, and seeming to be only of one piece.” At first they thought they had come on a cache of charcoal briquettes, some of which they burned to dissipate the early morning chill. Others thought that the peculiar fragments might have been rolls of burned cloth or fishing nets. Then one of these objects, chancing to fall on the ground, broke open. The unexpected sight of letters inside what had looked like a charred root made the explorers realize what they were looking at: books. They had stumbled on the remains of a private library.

  The volumes that Romans piled up in their libraries were smaller than most modern books: they were for the most part written on scrolls of papyrus.11 (The word “volume” comes from volumen, the Latin word for a thing that is rolled or wound up.) Rolls of papyrus—the plant from which we get our word “paper”—were produced from tall reeds that grew in the marshy delta region of the Nile in Lower Egypt. The reeds were harvested; their stalks cut open and sliced into very thin strips. The strips were laid side by side, slightly overlapping one another; another layer was placed on top, at right angles to the one below; and then the sheet was gently pounded with a mallet. The natural sap that was released allowed the fibers to adhere smoothly to each other, and the individual sheets were then glued into rolls. (The first sheet, on which the contents of the roll could be noted, was called in Greek the protokollon, literally, “first glued”—the origin of our word “protocol.”) Wooden sticks, attached to one or both of the ends of the roll and slightly projecting from the top and bottom edges, made it easier to scroll through as one read along: to read a book in the ancient world was to unwind it. The Romans called such a stick the umbilicus, and to read a book cover-to-cover was “to unroll to the umbilicus.”

  At first white and flexible, the papyrus would over time gradually get brittle and discolored—nothing lasts forever—but it was lightweight, convenient, relatively inexpensive, and surprisingly durable. Small landowners in Egypt had long realized that they could write their tax receipts on a scrap of papyrus and be reasonably confident that the record would be perfectly legible for years and even generations to come. Priests could use this medium to record the precise language for supplicating the gods; poets could lay claim to the symbolic immortality they dreamed of in their art; philosophers could convey their thoughts to disciples yet unborn. Romans, like the Greeks before them, easily grasped that this was the best writing material available, and they imported it in bulk from Egypt to meet their growing desire for record keeping, official documents, personal letters, and books. A roll of papyrus might last three hundred years.

  The room unearthed12 in Herculaneum had once been lined with inlaid wooden shelves; at its center were the traces of what had been a large, freestanding, rectangular bookcase. Scattered about were the carbonized remains—so fragile that they fell apart at the touch—of the erasable waxed tablets on which readers once took notes (a bit like the Mystic Writing Pads with which children play today). The shelves had been piled high with papyrus rolls. Some of the rolls, perhaps the more valuable ones, were wrapped about with tree bark and covered with pieces of wood at each end. In another part of the villa, other rolls, now fused into a single mass by the volcanic ash, seemed to have been hastily bundled together in a wooden box, as if someone on the terrible August day had for a brief, wild moment thought to carry some particularly valued books away from the holocaust. Altogether—even with the irrevocable loss of the many that were trashed before it was understood what they were—some eleven hundred books were eventually recovered.

  Many of the rolls in what became known as the Villa of the Papyri had been crushed by falling debris and the weight of the heavy mud; all had been carbonized by the volcanic lava, ash, and gas. But what had blackened these books had also preserved them from further decay. For centuries they had in effect been sealed in an airtight container. (Even today only one small segment of the villa has been exposed to view, and a substantial portion remains unexcavated.) The discoverers, however, were disappointed: they could barely make out anything written on the charcoal-like rolls. And when again and again they tried to unwind them, the rolls inevitably crumbled into fragments.

  Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of books were destroyed in these attempts. But eventually a number of the rolls that had been cut open were found to contain near the center some readable portions. At this point—after two years of more or less destructive and fruitless effort—a learned Neapolitan priest who had been working in the Vatican Library in Rome, Father Antonio Piaggio, was called in. Taking issue with the prevailing method of investigation—simply scraping off the charred outer layers of the rolls until some words could be discerned—he invented an ingenious device, a machine that would delicately and slowly unroll the carbonized papyrus scrolls, disclosing much more readable material than anyone had imagined to have survived.

  Those who read the recovered texts, carefully flattened and glued onto strips, found that the villa’s library (or at least the portion of it that they had found) was a specialized one, many of the rolls being tracts in Greek by a philosopher named Philodemus. The researchers were disappointed—they had been hoping to find lost works by the likes of Sophocles and Virgil—but what they had so implausibly snatched from oblivion has an important bearing on the discovery made centuries earlier by Poggio. For Philodemus, who taught in Rome from about 75 to about 40 BCE, was Lucretius’ exact contemporary and a follower of the school of thought most perfectly represented in On the Nature of Things.

  Why were the works of a minor Greek philosopher in the library of the elegant seaside retreat? And why, for that matter, did a vacation house have an extensive library at all? Philodemus, a pedagogue paid to give lessons and deliver lectures, was certainly not the master of the Villa of the Papyri. But the presence of a substantial selection of his works probably provides a clue to the owner’s interests and illuminates the moment that brought forth Lucretius’ poem. That moment was the culmination of a lengthy process that braided together Greek and Roman high culture.

  The two cultures had not always been comfortably intertwined. Among the Greeks, Romans had long held the reputation of tough, disciplined people, with a gift for survival and a hunger for conquest. But they were also regarded as barbarians—“refined barbarians,” in the moderate view of the Alexandrian scientist Eratosthenes, crude and dangerous barbarians in the view of many others. When their independent city-states were still flourishing, Greek intellectuals collected some arcane lore about the Romans, as they did about the Carthaginians and Indians, but they did not find anything in Roman cultural life worthy of their notice.

  The Romans of the early republic might not altogether have disagreed with this assessment. Rome had traditionally been wary of poets and philosophers. It prided itself on being13 a city of virtue and action, not of flowery words, intellectual speculation, and books. But even as Rome’s legions steadily established military dominance over Greece, Greek culture just as steadily began to colonize the minds of the conquerors. Skeptical as ever of effete intellectuals and priding themselves on their practical intelligence, Romans nonetheless acknowledged with growing enthusiasm the achievements of Greek philosophers, scientists, writers, and artists. They made fun of what they took to be the defects of the Greek character, mocking what they saw as its loquaciousness, its taste for philosophizing, and its f
oppishness. But ambitious Roman families sent their sons to study at the philosophical academies for which Athens was famous, and Greek intellectuals like Philodemus were brought to Rome and paid handsome salaries to teach.

  It was never quite respectable for a Roman aristocrat to admit to a boundlessly ardent Hellenism. Sophisticated Romans found it desirable to downplay a mastery of Greek language and a connoisseur’s grasp of Greek art. Yet Roman temples and public spaces were graced with splendid statues stolen from the conquered cities of the Greek mainland and the Peloponnese, while battle-hardened Roman generals adorned their villas with precious Greek vases and sculptures.

  The survival of stone and fired clay makes it easy for us to register the pervasive presence in Rome of Greek artifacts, but it was books that carried the full weight of cultural influence. In keeping with the city’s martial character, the first great collections were brought there as spoils of war. In 167 BCE the Roman general Aemilius Paulus routed King Perseus of Macedon and put an end to a dynasty that had descended from Alexander the Great and his father Philip. Perseus and his three sons were sent in chains to be paraded through the streets of Rome behind the triumphal chariot. In the tradition of national kleptocracy, Aemilius Paulus shipped back enormous plunder to deposit in the Roman treasury. But for himself and his children the conqueror reserved only a single prize: the captive monarch’s library.14 The gesture was evidence, of course, of the aristocratic general’s personal fortune, but it was also a spectacular signal of the value of Greek books and the culture these books embodied.

  Others followed in Aemilius Paulus’ wake. It became increasingly fashionable for wealthy Romans to amass large private libraries in their town houses and country villas. (There were no bookshops in the early years in Rome, but, in addition to the collections seized as booty, books could be purchased from dealers in southern Italy and Sicily where the Greeks had founded such cities as Naples, Tarentum, and Syracuse.) The grammarian Tyrannion is reputed to have had 30,000 volumes; Serenus Sammonicus, a physician who was an expert on the use of the magical formula “Abracadabra” to ward off illness, had more than 60,000. Rome had caught the Greek fever for books.