Stephen Greenblatt

This book is subtitled “How the Renaissance Began”, which is a heck of a stretch. Setting that aside, this is an absolutely fascinating history of the re-discovery in the early 1400s of a long-lost work from antiquity, and about the life and times of its discoverer. Whether this work really helped trigger the Renaissance is another matter, but it certainly contributed.

The work was Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”), and it was written some time in the first century BC. Only a very few copies (literally copies which had been made and remade by scribes in monasteries over the centuries) survived until the 15th Century.

One of those copies was found by a remarkable man, Poggio Bracciolini. A great deal of The Swerve is about this man and his life, who acted as principal secretary to a series of Popes over a period of 50 years.

Lucretius was a follower of the philosopher Epicurius, who lived two centuries earlier, and his poem De Rerum Natura is perhaps the most beautiful expression of the Epicurian philosophy.

Among the many radical thoughts which Lucretius expressed were (as set out by Greenblatt in The Swerve):

• Everything is made of tiny invisible particles.

• These particles are indivisible and eternal.

• The particles are infinite in number but come in a limited number of shapes and sizes.

• All particles are in motion in an infinite void.

• The universe has no creator or designer.

• Nature ceaselessly experiments with different shapes and configurations of animals.

• The universe was not created for humans.

• Humans are not unique. We’re similar to other animals.

• Human society did not begin in a Golden Age from which it has declined, but in a battle for survival.

• There is no afterlife.

• Death is nothing to us, because experience ceases.

• All religions are delusions.

That these ideas are remarkably modern, even though set out more than 2,000 years ago by a Roman citizen, should be obvious. What is also obvious is how subversive they were to the mediaeval scholars reading them, contradicting the prevailing Judeo-Christian view of the world.

That nevertheless these ideas were able to spread in those times once Lucretius’ poem was rediscovered is perhaps even more remarkable.

There’s much, much more in The Swerve. A really excellent and fascinating book. A candidate for my best read of the year so far, competing with The Vital Question and A God in Ruins.

I’m glad I unearthed it in a second-hand bookshop in Bendigo, at least faintly mirroring the unearthing of De Rerum Natura in the library of a mediaeval monastery by Poggio Bracciolini.… (meer)

Going into this book, I suspected that I would not find the author's conclusion (that Lucretius' poetic explication of Epicurean philosophy, On the Nature of Things was a keystone of modern materialistic thought) compelling. And that suspicion was correct. But the book was enjoyable, nonetheless.
[Audiobook Note: The reader, Edoardo Ballerini, was great. He deftly handled all the Latin, Italian, German and French text. (Although I do have one quibble. Like most English-speakers, he put the emphasis on Epicurus' name on the 3rd syllable, instead of the 2nd where it belongs.)]… (meer)