This is the story of a book which argues that everything in the world is made of matter; that human flourishing should be the goal of any rational society; and that not only is divine intervention in nature or history a myth, but that all religion is a masochistic self-deception the powerful use to control the credulous. Its author was not Richard Dawkins, Karl Marx, or Voltaire; but a Roman poet called Lucretius who lived in the first century BC.
Lucretius was a follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. His epic poem De rerum natura is a manifesto of Epicurean philosophy. This was not, as its ancient and Christian enemies said, a philosophy of hedonism. True human happiness for Epicurus was a serene state free from physical appetites and the fear of divine punishment. Escaping the torments of the flesh was easy: everything in moderation. As for the gods, Epicurus argued that everything is made of atoms and that human beings are physical objects like everything else in the universe. We have no souls separate from our bodies. Neither heaven nor hell awaits us, so we should have no anxiety about death. Plenty of people from Cicero to Philip Larkin have found this suggestion at least as horrifying as any other alternative, but Epicurus and Lucretius thought it freed people. A grovelling terror of offending the gods twisted human beings; it made them fearful and cruel and eternally childlike. Knowledge liberated.
Lucretius was an outstanding poet. The Latin of De rerum natura is difficult but beautiful, and it was among the most admired works of literature in the ancient world. But then it was lost and, apart from a few (hostile) references, memory of Lucretius faded away with the Roman Empire itself.
A thousand years later, in the 15th century, a remarkable group of Italian scholars set themselves the task of making history run backwards. They were intoxicated by the ancient world and dedicated to recreating as much of it as possible. They believed that its language and literature had been hopelessly ignored for centuries and that their task was to rediscover both. Literally. Thousands of manuscripts in monastic libraries had been unread for hundreds of years. One of these scholars was a Papal bureaucrat called Poggio Bracciolini and, in 1417, he found a forgotten copy of Lucretius’ masterpiece in a German monastery.
De rerum natura began to circulate in manuscript form almost immediately, and became an international best-seller when printed. Renaissance readers loved its Latin. More explosively, some of the era’s most daring thinkers found its ideas thrilling. Here, suddenly, was a sophisticated philosophical attack on almost everything authority and the Church stood for. Nobody, except the very foolhardy, could explicitly endorse Lucretius’ arguments. But a cluster of ideas which have come to dominate modernity had been dropped right into the midst of the Renaissance.
Stephen Greenblatt’s account of this history, in The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, focuses on three areas. He gives an introduction to Lucretius and ancient Epicureanism; he tells the fascinating story of Poggio Bracciolini and how he came to rediscover the poem; and he makes an impassioned plea for a certain idea of the Renaissance. We’ve got used to histories which downplay the originality of men like Poggio Bracciolini, or which stress how their ideas could be appropriated by the powerful to support their own interests. Greenblatt doesn’t confront these histories head-on, but asks us to concentrate on another aspect of the Renaissance which he thinks we’re in danger of forgetting. Greenblatt clearly believes that it was a special historical moment when old authorities were torn down, new wellsprings of knowledge opened up, and a new sort of human dignity and understanding became possible. He has chosen to write a book about Lucretius because he thinks these things should be celebrated for just the same reasons that Lucretius celebrated them, and because he thinks Lucretius’ poem helped to make them possible.
Further reading:
De rerum natura, translated by Alicia Stallings. A modern verse translation.
John Dryden, The Major Works. Dryden only translated a few extracts, but it’s hard to imagine them being bettered in English and a tragedy that he never did the whole lot. Dryden’s evocation of the longing ectasy of sexual intercouse is stunning.
The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. A collection of essays by leading scholars on classical Epicureanism, Lucretius, and the reception of De rerum natura in the modern world. A good first step for anyone who wants an in-depth understanding of Lucretius.
Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean and Aubrey Beardsley, Under the Hill. Epicureanism gained a new burst of subversive life in the late 19th century as a source of inspiration for the Aesthetes. Pater is their intellectual god-father, and Beardsley the naughtiest of all their schoolboys. Especially in this erotic fairytale which, delightful as it is, makes Epicureanism’s hedonistic tendencies all too obvious.
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