The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Part 8

24 "they shall give him twenty": Cited in Fox, "Literacy and Power," p. 147.

25 "Above all, one or two seniors": The Rule does include a provision for those who simply cannot abide reading: "If anyone is so remiss and indolent that he is unwilling or unable to study or to read, he is to be given some work in order that he may not be idle"-The Rule of Benedict, trans. by Monks of Glenstal Abbey (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1982), 48:223.

26 "He looks about anxiously": John Ca.s.sian, The Inst.i.tutes, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Newman Press, 2000), 10:2.

26 "If such a monk": The Rule of Benedict, 48:1920. I have amended the translation given, "as a warning to others," to capture what I take to be the actual sense of the Latin: ut ceteri timeant.

27 "the feeling of elation": Spiritum elationis: the translators render these words as "spirit of vanity" but I believe that "elation" or "exaltation" is the princ.i.p.al sense here.

27 "Let there be": The Rule of Benedict, 38:57.

27 "No one should presume": Ibid., 38:8.

27 "The superior": Ibid., 38:9.

30 "For him that stealeth": Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago and London: American Library a.s.sociation and the British Library: 1991), p. 324. The ma.n.u.script is in Barcelona.

32 the beautiful handwriting: On the larger context of Poggio's handwriting, see Berthold L. Ullman, The Origin and Development of Humanistic Script (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960). For a valuable introduction, see Martin Davies, "Humanism in Script and Print in the Fifteenth Century," in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, pp. 4762.

34 to serve as apostolic secretaries: Bartolomeo served as secretary in 1414; Poggio the following year-Partner, The Pope's Men, pp. 218, 222.

34 "I hate all boastful conversation": Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, pp. 2089 (letter to Ambrogio Traversari).

35 "I shall set out": Ibid, p. 210.

36 he was brought to the armory: Eustace J. Kitts, In the Days of the Councils: A Sketch of the Life and Times of Balda.s.sare Cossa (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1908), p. 69.

37 "I cannot find that they do anything": Cited in W. M. Shepherd, The Life of Poggio Bracciolini (Liverpool: Longman et al., 1837), p. 168.

40 "The parchment is hairy": Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books, p. 224. The scribe in question actually used "vellum," not parchment, but it must have been a particularly miserable vellum.

40 "Now I've written": Ibid.

41 "Vouchsafe, O Lord": Quoted in George Haven Putnam, Books and Their Makers During the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (New York: Hillary House, 1962; repr. of 189698 edn.) 1:61.

43 Working with knives: The great monastery at Bobbio, in the north of Italy, had a celebrated library: a catalogue drawn up at the end of the ninth century includes many rare ancient texts, including a copy of Lucretius. But most of these have disappeared, presumably sc.r.a.ped away to make room for the gospels and psalters that served the community. Bernhard Bischhoff writes: "Many ancient texts were buried when their codices were palimsested at Bobbio, which had abandoned the rule of Columba.n.u.s for the rule of Benedict. A catalogue from the end of the ninth century informs us that Bobbio possessed at that time one of the most extensive libraries in the West, including many grammatical treatises as well as rare poetical works. The sole copy of Septimius Serenus' De runalibus, an elaborate poem from the age of Hadrian, was lost. Copies of Lucretius and Valerius Flaccus seem to have disappeared without Italian copies having been made. Poggio eventually discovered these works in Germany"-Ma.n.u.scripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 151.

44 Abbey of Fulda: A strong alternative candidate is the Abbey of Murbach, in southern Alsace. By the middle of the ninth century, Murbach, founded in 727, had become an important center of scholarship and is known to have possessed a copy of Lucretius. The challenge facing Poggio would have been roughly the same in any monastic library he approached.

47 Raba.n.u.s, who as a young man: In the context of the current book, the most intriguing comment comes in Raba.n.u.s's prose preface to his fascinating collection of acrostic poems in praise of the Cross, composed in 810. Raba.n.u.s writes that his poems include the rhetorical figure of synalpha, the contraction of two syllables into one. This is a figure, he explains, Quod et t.i.tus Lucretius non raro fecisse invenitur-"which is frequently found in t.i.tus Lucretius." Quoted in David Ganz, "Lucretius in the Carolingian Age: The Leiden Ma.n.u.scripts and Their Carolingian Readers," in Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel and Margaret M. Smith, eds., Medieval Ma.n.u.scripts of the Latin Cla.s.sics: Production and Use, Proceedings of the Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Leiden, 1993 (Los Altos Hills, CA: Anderson-Lovelace, 1996), 99.

48 "obliterated by the praiseworthy use": Pliny the Younger, Letters, 3.7.

50 neither he nor anyone in his circle: The humanists might have picked up shadowy signs of the poem's continued existence. Macrobius, in the early fifth century ce, quotes a few lines in his Saturnalia (see George Hadzsits, Lucretius and His Influence [New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1935]), as does Isidore of Seville's vast Etymologiae in the early seventh century. Other moments in which the work surfaced briefly will be mentioned below, but it would have been rash for anyone in the early fifteenth century to believe that the entire poem would be found.

CHAPTER THREE: IN SEARCH OF LUCRETIUS.

51 and it continued to be read: "Send me some piece by Lucretius or Ennius," the highly cultivated emperor Antoninus Pius (86161 ce) wrote to a friend; "something harmonious, powerful, and expressive of the state of the spirit." (Apart from fragments, Ennius, the greatest early Roman poet, has never been recovered.) 51 "The poetry of Lucretius": "Lucreti poemata, ut scribes, ita sunt, multis luminibus ingenii, multae tamen artis"-Cicero, Q.Fr. 2.10.3.

51 "Blessed is he": Georgics, 2.49092: Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari.

Acheron, a river of the underworld, is used by Virgil and Lucretius as a symbol of the whole realm of the afterlife. For Lucretius' presence in the Georgics, see especially Monica Gale, Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius, and the Didactic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

52 But Virgil did not mention: The author of the Aeneid, with his somber sense of the burden of imperial power and the stern necessity of renouncing pleasures, was clearly more skeptical than he had been in the Georgics about anyone's ability to grasp with serene clarity the hidden forces of the universe. But Lucretius' vision and the tough elegance of his poetry are present throughout Virgil's epic, if only as glimpses of an achieved security that now constantly and forever eludes the poet and his hero. On the deep presence of Lucretius in the Aeneid (and in other works of Virgil, as well as those of Ovid and Horace), see Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History, The Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

52 "The verses of sublime Lucretius": Amores, 1.15.2324. See Philip Hardie, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) esp. pp. 14363, 173207.

53 Memmius had a relatively successful: Son-in-law for a time of the merciless patrician dictator Sulla, Memmius' political career came to an end in 54 bce, when, as a candidate for the office of consul, he was forced to disclose his involvement in a financial scandal that lost him the crucial support of Julius Caesar. As an orator, in Cicero's view, Memmius was lazy. He was, Cicero conceded, extremely well read, though more in Greek than in Latin literature. Perhaps this immersion in Greek culture helps to explain why, after his political fortunes fell, Memmius moved to Athens, where he apparently bought land on which stood the ruins of the house of the philosopher Epicurus, who died more than two hundred years earlier. In 51 bce, Cicero wrote a letter to Memmius in which he asked him as a personal favor to give these ruins to "Patro the Epicurean." (The ruins were evidently threatened by a building project that Memmius had in mind.) Patro pleads, Cicero reports, "that he owes a responsibility to his office and duty, to the sanct.i.ty of testaments, to the prestige of Epicurus' name . . . to the abode, domicile, and memorials of great men"-Letter 63 (13:1) in Cicero's Letters to Friends (Loeb edn.), 1:271. With Epicurus, we close the circle back to Lucretius, for Lucretius was Epicurus' most pa.s.sionate, intelligent, and creative disciple.

53 These lurid details: On the creation of the legend, see esp. Luciano Canfora's Vita di Lucrezio (Palermo: Sellerio, 1993). The greatest evocation of it is Tennyson's "Lucretius."

54 Lucretius remains almost: Canfora's fascinating Vita di Lucrezio is not a biography in any conventional sense, but rather a brilliant exercise in dismantling the mythic narrative launched by Jerome. In a work in progress, Ada Palmer shows that Renaissance scholars a.s.sembled what they thought were clues to Lucretius' life, but that most of those clues turn out to have been comments about other, unrelated people.

55 "This man": Johann Joachim Winkelmann, cited in David Sider, The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005). Winkelmann's colorful phrase is an Italian proverb.

55 "about half a palm long": Camillo Paderni, director of the Museum Herculanense in the Royal Palace at Portici, in a letter written on February 25, 1755, quoted in Sider, The Library, p. 22.

56 Rolls of papyrus: Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books, pp. 83ff.

57 The room unearthed: At this point, by rare good fortune, the investigation of the site was under the supervision of a Swiss army engineer, Karl Weber, who took a more responsible and scholarly interest in what lay underground.

59 It prided itself on being: This way of viewing themselves had a long life. When Scipio sacked Carthage in 146 bce, the library collections of that great North African city fell into his hands, along with all the other plunder. He wrote to the Senate and asked what to do with the books now in his possession. Answer came back that a single book, a treatise on agriculture, was worth returning to be translated into Latin; the rest of the books, the senators wrote, Scipio should distribute as gifts to the petty kings of Africa-Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 18:5.

60 the captive monarch's library: The seizing of Greek libraries as spoils became a fairly common practice, though rarely as the conqueror's sole prize. In 67 bce, Lucullus, an ally of Sulla, brought home from his eastern conquests a very valuable library, along with other riches, and in retirement he devoted himself to the study of Greek literature and philosophy. At his villa and gardens in Rome and in Tusculum, near Naples, Lucullus was the generous patron of Greek intellectuals and poets, and he figures in Cicero's dialogue Academica as one of the princ.i.p.al interlocutors.

61 Rome's first public library: Appointed to administer northern Italy (Gallia Transpadana), Pollio used his influence to save Virgil's property from confiscation.

61 The library established by Pollio: Augustus' two libraries were known as the Octavian and the Palatine. The former, founded in honor of his sister (33 bc), was situated in the Porticus Octaviae and combined a magnificent promenade on the lower story with the reading room and book collection on the upper. The other library, attached to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill, seems to have had two separately administered departments, a Greek and a Latin one. Both libraries were subsequently destroyed by fire. Augustus' successors maintained the tradition of establishing libraries: Tiberius founded the Tiberian Library in his house on the Palatine (according to Suetonius, he caused the writings and images of his favorite Greek poets to be placed in the public libraries). Vespasian established a library in the Temple of Peace erected after the burning of the city under Nero. Domitian restored the libraries after the same fire, even sending to Alexandria for copies. The most important imperial library was the Ulpian Library, created by Ulpius Traja.n.u.s-first established in the Forum of Trajan but afterwards removed to the Baths of Diocletian. See Lionel Ca.s.son, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

62 Many other cities: Among them: Athens, Cyprus, Como, Milan, Smyrna, Patrae, Tibur-from which books could even be borrowed. But see the inscription found in the Agora of Athens, on the wall of the Library of Pantainos (200 ce): "No book shall be removed, since we have sworn thus. Opening hours are from six in the morning until noon" (quoted in Sider, The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, p. 43).

62 throughout their territories the Romans: Clarence E. Boyd, Public Libraries and Literary Culture in Ancient Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915), pp. 2324.

63 houses of cultivated men and women: Cf. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of h.e.l.lenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

63 At the games in the Colosseum: Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 237.

64 "De rerum natura has been rediscovered": Knut Kleve, "Lucretius in Herculaneum," in Croniche Ercolanesi 19 (1989), p. 5.

65 "amid his tipsy": In Pisonem ("Against Piso"), in Cicero, Orations, trans. N. H. Watts, Loeb Cla.s.sical Library, vol. 252 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 167 ("in suorum Gaecorum foetore atque vino").

66 "Tomorrow, friend Piso": The Epigrams of Philodemos, ed. and trans. David Sider (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 152.

67 Staring up idly: Though there had been a serious recent earthquake, the last major eruption had taken place in 1200 bce, so the source of queasiness, if there was one, was not the volcano.

69 "This has often struck me": Cicero, De natura deorum ("On the Nature of the G.o.ds"), trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Cla.s.sical Library, 268 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 1.6, pp. 1719.

70 "Here the conversation ended": Ibid., p. 383.

70 "The one who engages": Cicero, De officiis ("On Duties"), trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Cla.s.sical Library, 30. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 1.37, p. 137.

72 When "human life": As I will discuss below, the word translated here as "superst.i.tition" is in Latin religio, that is, "religion."

72 Epicurus: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols., Loeb Cla.s.sical Library, 18485 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 2:53133.

75 Epicurus' philosophy: Epicurus' epilogismos was a term frequently used to suggest "reasoning based on empirical data," but according to Michael Schofield, it conveys "our everyday procedures of a.s.sessment and appraisal"-Schofield, in Rationality in Greek Thought, ed. Michael Frede and Gisele Striker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Schofield suggests that these procedures are linked to a famous pa.s.sage by Epicurus on time: "We must not adopt special expressions for it, supposing that this will be an improvement; we must use just the existing ones," p. 222. The thinking that Epicurus urged upon his followers was "a perfectly ordinary kind of activity available to all, not a special intellectual accomplishment restricted to, for example, mathematicians or dialecticians," p. 235.

76 "Do you suppose": Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes ("Tusculan Disputations"), trans. J. E. King. Loeb Cla.s.sical Library, 141 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 1.6.10.