The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  The ugliness of these quarrels must have intensified the dream of retirement that Poggio had been toying with since he had purchased the house in Terranuova and begun to collect ancient fragments. And the retirement project was not only his private fantasy; he was at this point in his life famous enough as a book hunter, scholar, writer, and papal official to command the attention of a broader public. He had carefully cultivated friends in Florence, marrying into an important family and allying himself with the interests of the Medici. Though he had lived and worked in Rome for most of his adult life, the Florentines were happy to claim him as one of their own. The Tuscan government passed a public revenue bill in his favor, noting that he had declared his intention eventually to retire to his native land and to dedicate the remainder of his time on earth to study. Whereas his literary pursuits would not permit him to acquire the wealth that came to those engaged in commerce, the bill declared, he and his children should thenceforth be exempted from the payment of all public taxes.

  In April 1453, Carlo Marsuppini, the chancellor of Florence, died. Marsuppini was an accomplished humanist; at the time of his death, he was translating the Iliad into Latin. The office was no longer the actual locus of state power: the consolidation of Medici power had reduced the political significance of the chancellorship. Many years had passed since Salutati’s command of classical rhetoric had seemed critical to the survival of the republic. But the pattern had been set for the Florentine post to be held by a distinguished scholar, including two terms by Poggio’s old friend, the immensely gifted historian Leonardo Bruni.

  The remuneration was generous and the prestige high. Florence conferred upon its humanist chancellors all the marks of respect and honor that the buoyant, self-loving city felt were its own due. Chancellors who died in office were honored with elaborate state funerals, surpassing those of any other citizen of the republic. When Poggio, seventy-three years old, was offered the vacant position, he accepted. For more than fifty years, he had worked at the court of an absolute monarch; now he would return as the titular leader of a city that prided itself on its history of civic freedom.

  Poggio served as chancellor of Florence for five years. The chancellorship evidently did not function entirely smoothly under his leadership; he seems to have neglected the lesser duties of the office. But he attended to his symbolic role, and he made time to work on the literary projects he had pledged himself to pursue. In the first of these projects, a somber two-volume dialogue on The Wretchedness of the Human Condition, the conversation moves from a specific disaster—the fall of Constantinople to the Turks—to a general review of the catastrophes that befall virtually all men and women of every class and profession and in all times. One of the interlocutors, Cosimo de’ Medici, suggests that an exception might be made for popes and princes of the Church who certainly seem to live lives of extraordinary luxury and ease. Speaking in his own voice, Poggio replies: “I am a witness13 (and I lived with them for fifty years) that I have found no one who seemed in any way happy to himself, who did not bemoan that life as harmful, disquieting, anxious, oppressed with many cares.”

  The unremitting gloominess of the dialogue could make it seem that Poggio had entirely succumbed to late-life melancholy, but the second of the works of this period, presented to the same Cosimo de’ Medici, suggests otherwise. Drawing on the Greek he had first learned more than a half century earlier, Poggio translated (into Latin) Lucian of Samosta’s richly comic novel The Ass, a magical tale of witchcraft and metamorphosis. And for his third enterprise, moving in still a different direction, he undertook to write an ambitious, highly partisan History of Florence from the mid-fourteenth century to his own time. The remarkable range of the three projects—the first seemingly suitable for a medieval ascetic, the second for a Renaissance humanist, the third for a patriotic civic historian—suggests the complexity both of Poggio’s own character and of the city he represented. To the Florentine citizens of the fifteenth century the distinct strains seemed closely bound together, parts of a single, complex cultural whole.

  In April 1458, shortly after his seventy-eighth birthday, Poggio resigned, declaring that he wished to pursue his studies and writing as a private citizen. His death followed eighteen months later, on October 30, 1459. Since he had resigned his office, the Florentine government could not give him a grand state funeral, but they buried him with appropriate ceremony in the Church of Santa Croce and hung his portrait, by Antonio Pollaiolo, in one of the city’s public halls. The city also commissioned a statue of him, which was erected in front of Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. When in 1560, a century later, the Duomo’s facade was refashioned, the statue was moved to a different part of the building and now serves as one of a sculpted group of the twelve apostles. It is, I suppose, an honor for the likeness of any pious Christian to function in this way, but I do not imagine that Poggio would have been entirely pleased. He was always determined to receive appropriate public recognition.

  Much of the recognition by now has vanished. His tomb in Santa Croce has disappeared, displaced by those of other celebrities. To be sure, the town where he was born has been renamed Terranuova Bracciolini, in honor of its native son, and in 1959, on the five hundredth anniversary of his death, his statue was erected in the leafy town square. But few of those who pass through, on their way to the nearby fashion factory outlets, can have any idea who is being commemorated.

  Nonetheless, 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.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SWERVES

  MORE THAN FIFTY manuscripts of De rerum natura from the fifteenth century survive today—a startlingly large number, though there must have been many more. Once Gutenberg’s clever technology was commercially established, printed editions quickly followed. The editions were routinely prefaced with warnings and disavowals.

  As the fifteenth century neared its end, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola ruled Florence for several years as a strict “Christian republic.” Savonarola’s passionate, charismatic preaching had provoked large numbers of Florentines, the elite as well as the masses, into a short-lived but feverishly intense mood of repentance. Sodomy was prosecuted as a capital crime; bankers and merchant princes were attacked for their extravagant luxuries and their indifference to the poor; gambling was suppressed, along with dancing and singing and other forms of worldly pleasure. The most memorable event of Savonarola’s turbulent years was the famous “Bonfire of the Vanities,” when the friar’s ardent followers went through the streets collecting sinful objects—mirrors, cosmetics, seductive clothing, songbooks, musical instruments, playing cards and other gambling paraphernalia, sculptures and paintings of pagan subjects, the works of ancient poets—and threw them onto an enormous blazing pyre in the Piazza della Signoria.

  After a while, the city tired of its puritanical frenzy, and on May 23, 1498, Savonarola himself was hanged in chains, alongside two of his key associates, and burned to ashes on the spot where he had staged his cultural bonfire. But when his power was at its height and his words still filled the citizenry with pious fear and loathing, he devoted a series of his Lenten sermons to attacking ancient philosophers, singling out one group in particular for special ridicule. “Listen women,”1 he preached to the crowd, “They say that this world was made of atoms, that is, those tiniest of particles that fly through the air.” No doubt savoring the absurdity, he encouraged his listeners to express their derision out loud: “Now laugh, women, at the studies of t
hese learned men.”

  By the 1490s, then, some sixty or seventy years after Lucretius’ poem was returned to circulation, atomism was sufficiently present in Florence to make it worth ridiculing. Its presence did not mean that its positions were openly embraced as true. No prudent person stepped forward and said, “I think that the world is only atoms and void; that, in body and soul, we are only fantastically complex structures of atoms linked for a time and destined one day to come apart.” No respectable citizen openly said, “The soul dies with the body. There is no judgment after death. The universe was not created for us by divine power, and the whole notion of the afterlife is a superstitious fantasy.” No one who wished to live in peace stood up in public and said, “The preachers who tell us to live in fear and trembling are lying. God has no interest in our actions, and though nature is beautiful and intricate, there is no evidence of an underlying intelligent design. What should matter to us is the pursuit of pleasure, for pleasure is the highest goal of existence.” No one said, “Death is nothing to us and no concern of ours.” But these subversive, Lucretian thoughts percolated and surfaced wherever the Renaissance imagination was at its most alive and intense.

  At the very time that Savonarola was urging his listeners to mock the foolish atomists, a young Florentine civil servant was quietly copying out for himself the whole of On the Nature of Things. Though its influence may be detected, he did not once mention the work directly in the famous books he went on to write. He was too cunning for that. But the handwriting was conclusively identified in 1961: the copy was made by Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s copy of Lucretius2 is preserved in the Vatican Library, MS Rossi 884. What better place for the progeny of Poggio, the apostolic secretary? In the wake of Poggio’s friend, the humanist pope Nicholas V, classical texts had a place of honor in the Vatican Library.

  Still, Savonarola’s warnings corresponded to authentic concerns: the set of convictions articulated with such poetic power in Lucretius’ poem was virtually a textbook—or, better still, an inquisitor’s—definition of atheism. Its eruption into Renaissance intellectual life elicited an array of anxious responses precisely from those most powerfully responsive to it. One such response was that of the great mid-fifteenth-century Florentine Marsilio Ficino. In his twenties, Ficino3 was deeply shaken by On the Nature of Things and undertook to write a learned commentary on the poet he called “our brilliant Lucretius.” But, coming to his senses—that is, returning to his faith—Ficino burned this commentary. He attacked those he called the “Lucretiani” and spent much of his life adapting Plato to construct an ingenious philosophical defense of Christianity. A second response was to separate Lucretius’ poetic style from his ideas. This separation seems to have been Poggio’s own tactic: he took pride in his discovery, as in the others he made, but he never associated himself or even grappled openly with Lucretian thought. In their Latin compositions Poggio and close friends like Niccoli could borrow elegant diction and turns of phrase from a wide range of pagan texts, but at the same time hold themselves aloof from their most dangerous ideas. Indeed, later in his career Poggio did not hesitate to accuse his bitter rival, Lorenzo Valla, of a heretical adherence4 to Lucretius’ master, Epicurus. It is one thing to enjoy wine,5 Poggio wrote, but quite another to sing its praises, as he claims Valla did, in the service of Epicureanism. Valla even went beyond Epicurus himself, Poggio adds, in attacking virginity and praising prostitution. “The stains of your sacrilegious speech will not be cleansed by means of words” Poggio added ominously, “but with fire, from which I hope you will not escape.”

  One might have expected Valla simply to turn the charge around and point out that it was after all Poggio who returned Lucretius to circulation. That Valla failed to do so suggests that Poggio had been successful in keeping a discreet distance from the implications of his own discovery. But it may suggest as well how limited the early circulation of On the Nature of Things was. When, in the early 1430s, in a work called On Pleasure (De voluptate), Valla was penning the praises of drink and sex that Poggio professed to find so shocking, the manuscript of Lucretius’ poem6 was still being guarded by Niccoli. The fact of its existence, which had been gleefully announced in letters among the humanists, may have helped to stimulate a resurgent interest in Epicureanism, but Valla probably had to rely on other sources and on his own fertile imagination to construct his praise of pleasure.

  Interest in a pagan philosophy radically at odds with fundamental Christian principles had its risks, as Poggio’s attack suggests. Valla’s reply to this attack allows us to glimpse a third type of response to the Epicurean ferment of the fifteenth century. The strategy is what might be called “dialogical disavowal.” The ideas Poggio condemns were present in On Pleasure, Valla conceded, but they were not his own ideas but rather those of a spokesman for Epicureanism7 in a literary dialogue. At the dialogue’s end, it is not Epicureanism but rather Christian orthodoxy, voiced by the monk Antonio Raudense, that is declared the clear victor: “When Antonio Raudense8 had thus concluded his speech, we did not get up immediately. We were caught in immense admiration for such pious and religious words.”

  And yet. At the center of his dialogue, Valla constructs a remarkably vigorous and sustained defense of key Epicurean principles: the wisdom of withdrawing from competitive striving into the tranquil garden of philosophy (“From the shore you shall laugh in safety at the waves, or rather at those who are wave-tossed”), the primacy of bodily pleasure, the advantages of moderation, the perverse unnaturalness of sexual abstinence, the denial of any afterlife. “It is plain,”9 the Epicurean states, “that there are no rewards for the dead, certainly there are no punishments either.” And lest this formulation allow an ambiguity, still setting human souls apart from all other created things, he returns to the point to render it unequivocal:

  According to my Epicurus … nothing remains after the dissolution of the living being, and in the term “living being” he included man just as much as he did the lion, the wolf, the dog, and all other things that breathe. With all this I agree. They eat, we eat; they drink, we drink; they sleep, and so do we. They engender, conceive, give birth, and nourish their young in no way different from ours. They possess some part of reason and memory, some more than others, and we a little more than they. We are like them in almost everything; finally, they die and we die—both of us completely.

  If we grasp this end clearly—“finally, they die and we die—both of us completely”—then our determination should be equally clear: “Therefore,10 for as long as possible (would that it were longer!) let us not allow those bodily pleasures to slip away that cannot be doubted and cannot be recovered in another life.”

  It is possible to argue that Valla wrote these words only to show them crushed by the sober admonitions of the monkish Raudense:

  If you were to see11 the form of any angel next to your beloved, the beloved would seem so horrible and uncouth that you would turn away from her as from the countenance of a cadaver and direct all your attention to the angel’s beauty—a beauty, I say, that does not inflame but extinguishes lust, and infuses a most sanctified religious awe.

  If this interpretation is true, then On Pleasure is an attempt to contain subversion.12 Aware that he and his contemporaries had been exposed to the toxic allure of Lucretius, Valla decided not to suppress the contamination, as Ficino had tried to do, but to lance the imposthume by exposing Epicurean arguments to the purifying air of Christian faith.

  But Valla’s enemy Poggio reached the opposite conclusion: the Christian framework and the dialogic form of On Pleasure was, in his view, only a convenient cover to permit Valla to make public his scandalous and subversive assault on Christian doctrine. And if Poggio’s venomous hatred calls this interpretation in question, Valla’s celebrated proof of the fraudulence of the so-called “Donation of Constantine” suggests that he was by no means a safely orthodox thinker. On Pleasure would, from this perspective, be a comparably radical and subversive text, w
earing a fig leaf designed to give its author, a priest who continued to jockey for the post of apostolic secretary that he eventually obtained, some protection.

  How can the conflict between these two sharply opposed interpretations be resolved? Which is it: subversion or containment? It is exceedingly unlikely that at this distance anyone will discover the evidence that might definitively answer this question—if such evidence ever existed. The question itself implies13 a programmatic certainty and clarity that may bear little relation to the actual situation of intellectuals in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A very small number of people may have fully embraced radical Epicureanism, as far as they understood it, in its entirety. Thus, for example, in 1484 the Florentine poet Luigi Pulci was denied Christian burial for denying miracles and describing the soul as “no more than a pine nut14 in hot white bread.” But for many of the most daring speculative minds of the Renaissance, the ideas that surged up in 1417, with the recovery of Lucretius’ poem and the renewed interest in Epicureanism, did not constitute a fully formed philosophical or ideological system. Couched in its beautiful, seductive poetry, the Lucretian vision was a profound intellectual and creative challenge.

  What mattered was not adherence but mobility—the renewed mobility of a poem that had been resting untouched in one or at most two monastic libraries for many centuries, the mobility of Epicurean arguments that had been silenced first by hostile pagans and then by hostile Christians, the mobility of daydreams, half-formed speculations, whispered doubts, dangerous thoughts.

  Poggio may have distanced himself from the content of On the Nature of Things, but he took the crucial first step in pulling the poem off the shelf, having it copied, and sending the copy to his friends in Florence. Once it began to circulate again, the difficulty was not in reading the poem (provided, of course, one had adequate Latin) but in discussing its content openly or taking its ideas seriously. Valla found a way to take one central Epicurean argument—the praise of pleasure as the ultimate good—and give it sympathetic articulation in a dialogue. That argument is detached from the full philosophical structure that gave it its original weight and finally repudiated. But the dialogue’s Epicurean speaks in defense of pleasure with an energy, subtlety, and persuasiveness that had not been heard for more than a millennium.