The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  This prudent acquiescence did not altogether reassure Bruni. “I must advise you henceforth,” he told Poggio in reply, “to write upon such subjects in a more guarded manner.”

  What had happened to lead Poggio, ordinarily careful not to court real danger, to write so unguardedly to his friend? In part, the rashness might have been provoked by the trauma of what he had just seen: his letter is dated May 30, 1416, which is the day that Jerome was executed. Poggio was writing in the wake of witnessing something particularly horrible, as we know from the chronicler Richental who also recorded what happened. As the thirty-seven-year-old Jerome was led out of the city, to the spot where Hus was burned and where he too would meet his end, he repeated the creed and sang the litany. As had happened with Hus, no one would hear his confession; that sacrament was not granted to a heretic. When the fire was lit, Hus cried out and died quickly, but the same fate, according to Richental, was not granted to Jerome: “He lived much longer20 in the fire than Hus and shrieked terribly, for he was a stouter, stronger man, with a broad, thick, black beard.” Perhaps these terrible shrieks explain why Poggio could not any longer remain discreetly silent, why he felt compelled to testify to Jerome’s eloquence.

  Shortly before he was so unnerved by Jerome’s trial and execution, hoping to cure the rheumatism in his hands (a serious concern for a scribe), Poggio decided to visit the celebrated medicinal baths at Baden. It was not an altogether easy trip from Constance: first twenty-four miles on the Rhine by boat to Schaffhausen, where the pope had fled; then, because the river descended steeply at that point over cliffs and rocks, ten miles on foot to a castle called Kaiserstuhl. From this spot, Poggio saw the Rhine cascading in a waterfall, and the loud sound made him think of classical descriptions of the fall of the Nile.

  At the bathhouse in Baden, Poggio was amazed by what he saw: “Old women21 as well as younger ones,” he wrote to a friend in Florence, “going naked into the water before the eyes of men and displaying their private parts and their buttocks to the onlookers.” There was a sort of lattice between the men’s and women’s baths, but the separation was minimal: there were, he observed, “many low windows, through which the bathers can drink together and talk and see both ways and touch each other as is their usual custom.”

  Poggio refused to enter the baths himself, not, he insisted, from any undue modesty but because “it seemed to me ridiculous that a man from Italy, ignorant of their language, should sit in the water with a lot of women, completely speechless.” But he watched from the gallery that ran above the baths and described what he saw with the amazement that someone from Saudi Arabia might bring to an account of the beach scene at Nice.

  There were, he observed, bathing suits of some sort, but they concealed very little: “The men wear nothing but a leather apron, and the women put on linen shifts down to their knees, so cut on either side that they leave uncovered neck, bosom, arms, and shoulders.” What would cause a crisis in Poggio’s Italy and perhaps trigger violence seemed simply to be taken for granted in Baden: “Men watched their wives being handled by strangers and were not disturbed by it; they paid no attention and took it all in the best possible spirit.” They would have been at home in Plato’s Republic, he laughed, “where all property was held in common.”

  The rituals of social life at Baden seemed dreamlike to Poggio, as if they were conjuring up the vanished world of Jove and Danae. In some of the pools, there was singing and dancing, and some of the girls—“good looking and well-born and in manner and form like a goddess”—floated on the water while the music was playing: “They draw their clothes slightly behind them, floating along the top of the water, until you might think they were winged Venuses.” When men gaze down at them, Poggio explains, the girls have a custom to ask playfully for something. The men throw down pennies, especially to the prettiest, along with wreaths of flowers, and the girls catch them sometimes in their hands, sometimes in their clothes, which they spread wider. “I often threw pennies and garlands,” Poggio confessed.

  Confident, easy in themselves, and contented, these are people “for whom life is based on fun, who come together here so that they may enjoy the things for which they hunger.” There are almost a thousand of them at the baths, many drinking heavily, Poggio wrote, and yet there is no quarreling, bickering, or cursing. In the simple, playfully unselfconscious behavior before him, Poggio felt he was witnessing forms of pleasures and contentment that his culture had lost:

  We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment’s peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.

  He is describing the scenes at the baths, he tells his friend, “so that you may understand from a few examples what a great center of the Epicurean way of thinking this is.”

  With his contrasting vision of anxious, work-obsessed, overly disciplined Italians and happy-go-lucky, carefree Germans, Poggio believed he glimpsed for a moment the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. He knew perfectly well that this pursuit ran counter to Christian orthodoxy. But in Baden it was as if he found himself on the threshold of a mental world in which Christian rules no longer applied.

  In his reading, Poggio had frequently stood on that threshold. He never ceased to occupy himself with the pursuit of lost classical texts. Judging from a remark by Niccoli, he spent some of his time in Constance looking through library collections—there in the monastery of St. Mark he evidently found a copy of an ancient commentary22 on Virgil. In the early summer of 1415, probably just after his master had been formally deposed and he found himself definitively out of work, he made his way to Cluny, in France, where he found a codex with seven orations by Cicero, two of which had been unknown. He sent this precious manuscript to his friends in Florence and also made a copy in his own hand, inscribed with a remark deeply revealing of his mood:

  These seven orations23 by Marcus Tullius had through the fault of the times been lost to Italy. By repeated searches through the libraries of France and Germany, with the greatest diligence and care, Poggio the Florentine all alone brought them out of the sordid squalor in which they were hidden and back into the light, returning them to their pristine dignity and order and restoring them to the Latin muses.

  When he wrote these words, the world around Poggio was falling to pieces, but his response to chaos and fear was always to redouble his immersion in books. In the charmed circle of his bibliomania, he could rescue the imperiled legacy of the glorious past from the barbarians and return it to the rightful heirs.

  A year later, in the summer of 1416, in the wake of the execution of Jerome of Prague and shortly after the interlude at Baden, Poggio was once again out book-hunting, this time accompanied by two other Italian friends on a visit to the monastery of St. Gall, about twenty miles from Constance. It was not the architectural features of the great medieval abbey that drew the visitors; it was a library of which Poggio and his friends had heard extravagant rumors. They were not disappointed: a few months later Poggio wrote a triumphant letter to another friend back in Italy, announcing that he had located an astonishing cache of ancient books. The capstone of these was the complete text of Quintilian’s Institutes, the most important ancient Roman handbook on oratory and rhetoric. This work had been known to Poggio and his circle only in fragmentary form. To recover the whole of it seemed to them wildly exciting—“Oh wondrous treasure! Oh unexpected joy!” one of them exclaimed—because it gave them back a whole lost world, a world of public persuasion.

  It was the dream of persuading an audience through the eloquence and conviction of public words that had drawn Hus and Jerome of Prague to Constance. If Hus had been shouted down, Jerome, dragged from the miserable dungeon where he had been chained for 350 days, managed at least to make himself heard. For a modern reader, there is somethin
g almost absurd about Poggio’s admiration for Jerome’s “choice of words” and the effectiveness of his “peroration”—as if the quality of the prisoner’s Latin were the issue; but it was precisely the quality of the prisoner’s Latin that unsettled Poggio and made him doubt the validity of the charges against the heretic. For he could not, at least at this strange moment of limbo, disguise from himself the tension between the bureaucrat who worked for the sinister John XXIII and the humanist who longed for the freer, clearer air, as he imagined it, of the ancient Roman Republic. Poggio could find no real way to resolve this tension; instead, he plunged into the monastic library with its neglected treasures.

  “There is no question,” Poggio wrote, “that this glorious man, so elegant, so pure, so full of morals and wit, could not much longer have endured the filth of that prison, the squalor of the place, and the savage cruelty of his keepers.” These words were not a further lapse into the kind of imprudent admiration of the eloquent, doomed Jerome that alarmed Leonardo Bruni; they are Poggio’s description of the manuscript of Quintilian that he found at St. Gall:

  He was sad24 and dressed in mourning, as people are when doomed to death; his beard was dirty and his hair caked with mud, so that by his expression and appearance it was clear that he had been summoned to an undeserved punishment. He seemed to stretch out his hands and beg for the loyalty of the Roman people, to demand that he be saved from an unjust sentence.

  The scene he had witnessed in May appears still vivid in the humanist’s imagination as he searched through the monastery’s books. Jerome had protested that he had been kept “in filth and fetters, deprived of every comfort”; Quintilian was found “filthy with mold and dust.” Jerome had been confined, Poggio wrote to Leonardo Aretino, “in a dark dungeon, where it was impossible for him to read”; Quintilian, he indignantly wrote of the manuscript in the monastic library, was “in a sort of foul and gloomy dungeon … where not even men convicted of a capital offense would have been stuck away.” “A man worthy of eternal remembrance!” So Poggio rashly exclaimed about the heretic Jerome whom he could not lift a finger to save. A few months later in the monastery of St. Gall, he rescued another man worthy of eternal remembrance from the barbarians’ prison house.

  It is not clear how conscious the link was in Poggio’s mind between the imprisoned heretic and the imprisoned text. At once morally alert and deeply compromised in his professional life, he responded to books as if they were living, suffering human beings. “By Heaven,” he wrote of the Quintilian manuscript, “if we had not brought help, he would surely have perished the very next day.” Taking no chances, Poggio sat down and began copying the whole lengthy work in his beautiful hand. It took him fifty-four days to complete the task. “The one and only light25 of the Roman name, except for whom there was no one but Cicero and he likewise cut into pieces and scattered,” he wrote to Guarino of Verona, “has through our efforts been called back not only from exile but from almost complete destruction.”

  The expedition to the monastery was expensive, and Poggio was perennially short of money: such was the consequence of his decision not to take the profitable route of priesthood. Back in Constance his money worries deepened, as he found himself dangling, without work and without clear prospects. His deposed master, Baldassare Cossa, was desperately negotiating a quiet retirement for himself. After spending three years in prison, he eventually bought his release and was made a cardinal in Florence, where he died in 1419, his elegant tomb by Donatello erected in the baptistry of the Duomo. Another pope Poggio had earlier worked for, the deposed Gregory XII, died during this same period. The last thing he said was “I have not understood the world, and the world has not understood me.”

  It was high time for a prudent, highly trained bureaucrat, almost forty years old, to look out for himself and find some stable means of support. But Poggio did nothing of the kind. Instead, a few months after his return from St. Gall, he left Constance again, this time apparently without companions. His craving to discover and to liberate whatever noble beings were hidden in the prison house had evidently only intensified. He had no idea what he would find; he only knew that if it was something ancient and written in elegant Latin, then it was worth rescuing at all costs. The ignorant, indolent monks, he was convinced, were locking away traces of a civilization far greater than anything the world had known for more than a thousand years.

  Of course, all Poggio could hope to find were pieces of parchment, and not even very ancient ones. But for him these were not manuscripts but human voices. What emerged from the obscurity of the library was not a link in a long chain of texts, one copied from the other, but rather the thing itself, wearing borrowed garments, or even the author himself, wrapped in gravecloths and stumbling into the light.

  “We accept Aesculapius as belonging among the gods because he called back Hippolytus, as well as others from the underworld,” Francesco Barbaro wrote to Poggio after hearing of his discoveries;

  If people, nations,26 and provinces have dedicated shrines to him, what might I think ought to be done for you, if that custom had not already been forgotten? You have revived so many illustrious men and such wise men, who were dead for eternity, through whose minds and teachings not only we but our descendants will be able to live well and honourably.

  Books that had fallen out of circulation and were sitting in German libraries were thus transformed into wise men who had died and whose souls had been imprisoned in the underworld; Poggio, the cynical papal secretary in the service of the famously corrupt pope, was viewed by his friends as a culture hero, a magical healer who reassembled and reanimated the torn and mangled body of antiquity.

  Thus it was that in January 1417, Poggio found himself once again in a monastic library, probably Fulda. There he took from the shelf a long poem whose author he may have recalled seeing mentioned in Quintilian or in the chronicle compiled by St. Jerome: T. LUCRETI CARI DE RERUM NATURA.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE WAY THINGS ARE

  ON THE NATURE of Things is not an easy read. Totaling 7,400 lines, it is written in hexameters, the standard unrhymed six-beat lines in which Latin poets like Virgil and Ovid, imitating Homer’s Greek, cast their epic poetry. Divided into six untitled books, the poem yokes together moments of intense lyrical beauty, philosophical meditations on religion, pleasure, and death, and complex theories of the physical world, the evolution of human societies, the perils and joys of sex, and the nature of disease. The language is often knotty and difficult, the syntax complex, and the overall intellectual ambition astoundingly high.

  The difficulty would not in the least have fazed Poggio and his learned friends. They possessed wonderful Latin, rose eagerly to the challenge of solving textual riddles, and had often wandered with pleasure and interest through the still more impenetrable thickets of patristic theology. A quick glance at the first few pages of the manuscript would have sufficed to convince Poggio that he had discovered something remarkable.

  What he could not have grasped, without carefully reading through the work and absorbing its arguments, was that he was unleashing something that threatened his whole mental universe. Had he understood this threat, he might still have returned the poem to circulation: recovering the lost traces of the ancient world was his highest purpose in life, virtually the only principle uncontaminated by disillusionment and cynical laughter. But, as he did so, he might have uttered the words that Freud reputedly spoke to Jung, as they sailed into New York Harbor to receive the accolades of their American admirers: “Don’t they know we are bringing them the plague?”

  One simple name for the plague that Lucretius brought—a charge frequently leveled against him, when his poem began once again to be read—is atheism. But Lucretius was not in fact an atheist. He believed that the gods existed. But he also believed that, by virtue of being gods, they could not possibly be concerned with human beings or with anything that we do. Divinity by its very nature, he thought, must enjoy eternal life and peace
entirely untouched by any suffering or disturbance and indifferent to human actions.

  If it gives you pleasure to call the sea Neptune or to refer to grain and wine as Ceres and Bacchus, Lucretius wrote, you should feel free to do so, just as you can dub the round world the Mother of the Gods. And if, drawn by their solemn beauty, you choose to visit religious shrines, you will be doing yourself no harm, provided that you contemplate the images of the gods “in peace and tranquillity.” (6:78) But you should not think for a minute that you can either anger or propitiate any of these deities. The processions, the animal sacrifices, the frenzied dances, the drums and cymbals and pipes, the showers of snowy rose petals, the eunuch priests, the carved images of the infant god: all of these cultic practices, though compelling and impressive in their way, are fundamentally meaningless, since the gods they are meant to reach are entirely removed and separated from our world.

  It is possible to argue that, despite his profession of religious belief, Lucretius was some sort of atheist, a particularly sly one perhaps, since to almost all believers of almost all religious faiths in almost all times it has seemed pointless to worship a god without the hope of appeasing divine wrath or acquiring divine protection and favor. What is the use of a god who is uninterested in punishing or rewarding? Lucretius insisted that such hopes and anxieties are precisely a toxic form of superstition, combining in equal measure absurd arrogance and absurd fear. Imagining that the gods actually care about the fate of humans or about their ritual practices is, he observed, a particularly vulgar insult—as if divine beings depended for their happiness on our mumbled words or good behavior. But that insult is the least of the problems, since the gods quite literally could not care less. Nothing that we can do (or not do) could possibly interest them. The serious issue is that false beliefs and observances inevitably lead to human mischief.