"The Swerve" is a magnificent scholarly celebration of Poggio's role in recovering this famous manuscript of Lucretius.
There are only two full-scale biographies of Poggio Bracciolini. The only English one is William Shepherd's The Life of Poggio Bracciolini (1837). [See my own Amazon review.] It shows its age. Some of the language can strike us as quaint. Many turns of phrase seem too long in coming to the point and flowery, in the 19th-century rhetorical style. On another hand, some formulations are sharp and strikingly concise. Long quotations in Latin (in the notes at the bottom of pages) are shown without translation. The lack of an initial table of contents and the lack of any kind of index are particularly irksome. In addition there are some errors in the text. For instance, Pope John XXIII is mislabeled XXII, following the renumbering of Gibbon, (as John XXI skipped the XX numbering, there had been no Pope John XX).
It is helpful to check details and dates against the superior biography by the German scholar Ernst Walser, Poggius Florentinus, Leben Und Werke (German Edition, Berlin, 1914; Reprints: Georg Olms,1974; Nabu Press, 2011), which remains by far the most complete biography to-date, with more recent, accurate, and detailed information than William Shepherd's, but unfortunately not translated into English.
Poggio was marked by the passion of his teachers for books and writing, inspired by the first generation of Italian humanists centered around Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), who had revived interest in the forgotten masterpieces of Livy and Cicero, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) and Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406).
Poggio joined the second generation of civic humanists forming around Salutati. Resolute in glorifying "studia humanitatis" (the study of "humanities", a phrase popularized by Leonardo Bruni), learning (studium), literacy (eloquentia), and erudition (eruditio) as the chief concern of man, Poggio ridiculed the folly of popes and princes, who spent their time in wars and ecclesiastical disputes instead of reviving the lost learning of antiquity.
[See Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, (Un. of Michigan Press, 1997).]
The literary passions of the learned Italians in the new Humanist Movement, which were to influence the future course of both Renaissance and Reformation, were epitomized in the activities and pursuits of this self-made man, who rose from the lowly position of scribe in the Roman Curia to the privileged role of apostolic secretary.
He became devoted to the revival of classical studies amid conflicts of popes and antipopes, cardinals and councils, in all of which he played an official part as first-row witness, chronicler and (often unsolicited) critic and adviser.
After John XXIII had been elected pope (later labeled antipope) by the dissident Council of Pisa (May 1410), he was deposed by the Council of Constance in May 1415, while Gregory XII abdicated in July 1415, as agreed with the Council to clear the way to a restoration of a unified papacy.
Poggio's duties had called him to the Council of Constance in 1414, following John XXIII. After John XXIII's termination, the papal office in Italy remained vacant for two years, which gave Poggio some forced leisure time in 1416-17.
He indulged in some welcome relaxation from the papal court environment.
In the spring of 1416 (sometime between March and May), Poggio visited the baths at the German spa of Baden. In a long letter to Nicolli, he reported his discovery of a "Epicurean" lifestyle -- one year before finding Lucretius -- where men and women bathe together, barely separated, in minimum clothing: "I have related enough to give you an idea what a numerous school of Epicureans is established in Baden. I think this must be the place where the first man was created, which the Hebrews call the garden of pleasure. If pleasure can make a man happy, this place is certainly possessed of every requisite for the promotion of felicity."
Poggio also persevered in his pursuit of manuscript hunting, exploring the libraries of Swiss and Swabian abbeys. His great manuscript finds date to this period, 1415-1417. The treasures he brought to light at Reichenau, Weingarten, and above all St. Gall, retrieved from the dust and abandon many lost masterpieces of Latin literature, and supplied scholars and students with the texts of authors whose works had hitherto been accessible only in fragmented or mutilated copies.
One of Poggio's finds that has become especially famous was, in January 1417, in a German monastery (never named by Poggio, but probably Fulda), the discovery of the only manuscript of Lucretius's "De Rerum Natura" known at the time. Poggio spotted the name, which he remembered as quoted by Cicero.
This was a Latin poem of 7,400 lines, divided into six books, giving a full description of the world as viewed by the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. It has been translated as "On the Nature of the Universe" (Oxford World's Classics).
The manuscript found by Poggio was not even preserved, but he sent the copy he had ordered to Niccolo Niccoli, who made a transcription in his beautiful book hand (the creator of italic script), which became the model for the more than fifty other copies circulating at the time. Poggio complained that Niccoli didn't return his original copy for 14 years! Later two 9th-century manuscripts were discovered, the O ("Oblongus", ca. 825) and Q ("Quadratus") codices, now kept at Leiden University. The book was first printed in 1473.
This miraculous discovery is the subject of Greenblatt's magnificent book "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" (Sept. 2011). The book details the sensational discovery of the old Lucretius manuscript by Poggio. It describes the strange materialistic Epicurean physics based on the atomism of Democritus -- the world is made only of atoms (irreducible, indestructible, non-divisibles), "the seeds of things", forming objects through the random collision due to the clinamen, the "swerve" -- and its ethics. Greenblatt analyzes the poem's subsequent impact on the development of the Renaissance, the Reformation and modern science.
The book won the 2011 National Book Award for Non-fiction, and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It was well received by the public, although many critics contended that Greenblatt's enthusiasm sounded hyperbolic, and doubted that the Lucretius manuscript had any immediate influence on the development of the European Weltanschauung.
[See for instance David Quint's review, "Humanism as Revolution", (The New Republic, Sept. 28, 2011), and Anthony Grafton's "The Most Charming Pagan", (The New York Review of Books, Dec. 8, 2011)]
Anthony Grafton remarked: The discovery can be seen as a miracle, since monks, "athletes of holiness" lived the opposite of Epicurus's model life. "The monasteries, in Greenblatt's account--a curious blend of 'Gibbonian irony and Sadean relish' --were not quiet, dignified centers for the performance of the liturgy and the copying of texts but 'theaters of pain.' Their inmates vied to torment themselves more effectively than their rivals, wielding everything from whips and chains to iron crosses fixed with nails into their bodies. In these houses of self-punishment, classical texts naturally aroused relatively little interest, and pleas for the pursuit of pleasure were stigmatized as especially evil. Only a swerve or two--the fact that a copy survived in a library that Poggio happened to explore--saved 'On the Nature of Things' from the extinction suffered by most of Epicurus' own works." However, concludes Grafton, "We never quite learn, in the end, how the world became modern...[But Greenblatt] has brought Lucretius a good many new readers, to judge from the fact that A.E. Stallings's wonderful Penguin translation of the poem is now Amazon's best-selling title under Poetry."
This discovery was enhanced by the translation from Greek into Latin of "The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius" (ca. 1430), including three full letters by Epicurus. This convergence introduced the philosophy of Epicurus to the mindset of the Italian humanists, and was noted essentially by philosophers and literary circles for its views on ethics and religion (understood in its original sense as the binding down power of beliefs) -- its proclaimed indifference of gods to human affairs, who didn't create the world either; its condemnation of superstitions; its ridiculing of the fear of death since the soul dies with the body; its dispelling the notion of founding morality on an illusory afterlife and its imagined terrors -- and its advocation of the pursuit of beauty and pleasure (happiness) and the avoidance of pain. In fact, the new philosophy was seen as liberating thinking from the Christian worldview of asceticism and preoccupation with angels and demons, and indulging the pleasure of knowledge, the natural curiosity for the workings of the real world and history.
[See the fundamental article by David Sedley, "Lucretius", (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, SEP, Aug. 2008) and Ronald G. Witt, The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy (Cambridge Un. Press, March 2012)]
Additional support came from a dialogue by Lorenzo Valla, "De Voluptate" ("On Pleasure", 1431) revised as "De Vero Bono" ("On the True Good", 1433), where Valla construed Epicurean "pleasure" as a component of Christian charity and beatitude, rejecting the classical association with Stoic virtue.
[See the excellent article by Lodi Nauta, "Lorenzo Valla", (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, SEP, 2009)]
The recovery of Lucretius's iconoclastic poem had to face the hostility of the Catholic Church. Jerome had already "reported" that Lucretius had died in madness from a "love philter". "The poet Titus Lucretius was born. Later he was turned mad by a love potion, but in the intervals in between the madness he composed some books, which Cicero afterwards edited. He killed himself when he was 44 years old." In Chronological Tables, (ed. A. Schoene, 171st Olympiad 96-93 BC, 171.3).
Epicurus's philosophy was labeled as "atheism" by the Catholic Church, which tried to suppress Lucretius's book.
After teaching Epicurean philosophy was banned in Florence in 1513, Machiavelli (1469-1527) made his own copy by hand, and 16th-century scholars used Lucretius covertly, his book fuelling an underground counterculture opposed to the medieval ideas of the "gothic" Dark Age. This was the key period of Italian humanists launching the recovery of reason and liberation from faith and superstition through reconnecting with the Greco-Roman texts, as well described by John Addington Symonds in Renaissance in Italy, Volume 2 (7 vol., 1875-86), Voltaire and David Hume. Thomas More made the pursuit of pleasure the focal point of his Utopia (1516). Lucretius was repeatedly quoted by Montaigne in his Essays (1580).
[See Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History). (Harvard Un. Press, 2010)
And Frederick Krantz, "Between Bruni and Machiavelli: History, Law, and Historicism in Poggio Bracciolini", in Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of H. G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge Un. Press, 1987), p. 119-152.]
This heralded the dramatic change of world focus that Greenblatt calls "the swerve" in Western civilization.
Greenblatt quotes one of Epicurus's disciples: Living with pleasure is impossible "without living prudently and honorably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic."
This basic philosophy of pleasure and the need for friends, (later termed "pursuit of happiness"), was the key to Epicurus.
It was grotesquely caricatured by Christian critics as unrestricted sensual indulgence. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), burnt at the stake as a "heretic" by the Inquisition (1600) had incorporated some of Lucretius's ideas into his own cosmology and pantheism.
[See Riccardo Fubini, Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla, (transl. Martha King, Duke Un. Press, 2003).]
Fuller recognition of Lucretius's physics -- its theory of atoms and the "swerve" -- by modern physicists did not happen until at least the 17th century with the atomism of Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), while Isaac Newton (1642-1727) also declared his support for atomism.
Lucretius's modern-sounding views on evolution (of geology, nature, and primitive human society) were not acknowledged by scientists until the 18th century, when Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Charles's grandfather, announced ideas of evolution in his poems "The Loves of the Plants" (1789) and "The Temple of Nature" (1803) . Thomas Jefferson owned eight editions of De Natura Rerum.
[See, Gordon Lindsay Campbell, "Lucretius on Creation & Evolution", (Oxford Un. Press, 2003)]
Whoever has read Lucretius cannot forget his description of the three methods of primitive man's love-making: woman's own desire, man's brutal force, or seduction with "pira lecta" (choice pears).
"Et Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum;
conciliabat enim vel mutua quamque cupido
vel violenta viri atque inpensa libido
ver pretium, glandes atque arbita vel pira lecta.
(Book V, 962-965)
And Venus used to join the bodies of lovers;
for either common desire attracted each woman
or the violent force of a man and his excessive lust
or a bribe, acorns and arbute-berries or choice pears.
[See Robert D. Brown, "Lucretius on Love and Sex", (Brill, 1987), in the series "Columbia Un. Studies in the Classical Tradition"]. The whole world of courtship in New York City remains driven by the sophisticated use of "pira lecta".
Ancient Greek materialist physics was the subject of Karl Marx's Ph.D. thesis. Karl Marx started working on the materialism and atheism of the Greek atomists under the guidance of Bruno Bauer at Bonn University. Marx presented his thesis, "The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature" to the more liberal Un. of Jena, which granted him his Ph.D. in April 1841. When Bauer was expelled, on express order of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, from his position as lecturer in theology in the spring of 1842 for his revolutionary ideas on the New Testament writings, Marx abandoned any hopes for an academic career.
Both Harvard philosopher George Santayana and French philosopher Henri Bergson were strongly influenced by Lucretius's ideas of evolution and ethics.
Greenblatt has paid an outstanding homage to Lucretius and Poggio Bracciolini, two great figures of the Western World's emancipation from the Middle Ages' obscurantist Christian worldview into a modern vision of humanism -- based on the retrieval of Greco-Roman texts, literacy, education, experimental knowledge, and centered on human aspirations -- bringing our horizon back from the celestial heaven of angels and demons down to earth, and the reality of what the ancient Greeks called polis, nature and our cosmos.
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What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.Highlighted by 342 Kindle readers- It is impossible to live pleasurably, Philodemus continued, “without living prudently and honourably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic.”Highlighted by 253 Kindle readers
- In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.Highlighted by 239 Kindle readers
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You've got to love Poggio Bracciolini ... and the 15th century version of whiteout
Read this book, it's great. You have to read the book the get the title of my review. It won't be a waste of your time. This book is exceptionally erudite, very accessible and also a fun read. How often do you find that? Almost never...but here it is. Greenblatt gets into the action immediately and drags you into a 15th century Silicon Valley soap opera starring an awesome, talented and somewhat absurd entrepreneur hero, Poggio Bracciolini. He sucks you into a chaotically changing world where the catholic church had numerous, all wildly corrupt competing, popes, folks who speak out being thrown into dungeons, burnt at the stake or merely silenced if they have powerful friends.I consider it a must read particularly if, like me, you've been educated in the sciences and quite possibly share the ultra-modern but narrow world view which current science education tends to promote i.e. learn about the leading edge of developments, rarely read original sources and never delve into the thinking, observation and politics that got us here. It's quite a fight from Lucretius to computational chemistry. And by no means an easy twenty two centuries. But you've got to love Poggio Bracciolini ... a good old entrepreneur ... and the 15th century version of whiteout: milk, cheese and lime.I was switched onto this book from a very unusual source, by watching a colleague's Nobel Lecture in December 2013: http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1979 - fast forward to 20:50 if the chemistry bores you.
Top reviews from other countries
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irene limon boyceReviewed in Mexico on October 8, 2021
Llegó a tiempo en buen estado
- Richard EllisReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2024
How Lucretius's On The Nature Of Things survived into the modern world
