The Swerve

  2 On the Nature of Things 5:737–40. Venus’ “winged harbinger” is Cupid, whom Botticelli depicts blindfolded and aiming his winged arrow; Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, strews blossoms gathered in the folds of her exquisite dress; and Zephyr, the god of the fecundating west wind, is reaching for the nymph Chloris. On Lucretius’ influence on Botticelli, mediated by the humanist Poliziano, see Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s “Primavera” and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 36–49; Horst Bredekamp, Botticelli: Primavera. Florenz als Garten der Venus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag GmbH, 1988); and Aby Warburg’s seminal 1893 essay, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance,” in The Revival of Pagan Antiquity, ed. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), pp. 88–156.

  3 A total of 558 letters by Poggio, addressed to 172 different correspondents, survive. In a letter written in July 1417 congratulating Poggio on his discoveries, Francesco Barbaro refers to a letter about the journey of discovery that Poggio had sent to “our fine and learned friend Guarinus of Verona”—Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Nicolis, trans. Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 201. For Poggio’s letters, see Poggio Bracciolini, Lettere, ed. Helene Harth, 3 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1984).

  CHAPTER ONE: THE BOOK HUNTER

  1 On Poggio’s appearance, see Poggio Bracciolini 1380–1980: Nel VI centenario della nascita, Instituto Nazionale di Studi Sul Rinascimento, vol. 7 (Florence: Sansoni, 1982) and Un Toscano del ’400 Poggio Bracciolini, 1380–1459, ed. Patrizia Castelli (Terranuova Bracciolini: Administrazione Comunale, 1980). The principal biographical source is Ernst Walser, Poggius Florentinus: Leben und Werke (Hildesheim: George Olms, 1974).

  2 On curiosity as a sin and the complex process of rehabilitating it, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983; orig. German edn. 1966), pp. 229–453.

  3 Eustace J. Kitts, In the Days of the Councils: A Sketch of the Life and Times of Baldassare Cossa (Afterward Pope John the Twenty-Third) (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1908), p. 359.

  4 Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 54.

  5 Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 123–27.

  6 In 1416 he evidently tried, with the others in the curia, to secure a benefice for himself, but the grant was controversial and in the end was not awarded. Apparently, he could also have taken a position as Scriptor in the new papacy of Martin V, but he refused, regarding it as a demotion from his position as secretary—Walser, Poggius Florentinus, pp. 42ff.

  CHAPTER TWO: THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY

  1 Nicholas Mann, “The Origins of Humanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 11. On Poggio’s response to Petrarch, see Riccardo Fubini, Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla, Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 18 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003). On the development of Italian humanism, see John Addington Symonds, The Revival of Learning (New York: H. Holt, 1908; repr. 1960); Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948); Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Impact of Early Italian Humanism on Thought and Learning,” in Bernard S. Levy, ed. Developments in the Early Renaissance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972), pp. 120–57; Charles Trinkaus, The Scope of Renaissance Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983); Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth-and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Peter Burke, “The Spread of Italian Humanism,” in Anthony Goodman and Angus Mackay, eds., The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 1–22; Ronald G. Witt, “In the Footsteps of the Ancients”: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, ed. Heiko A. Oberman, vol. 74 (Leiden: Brill, 2000); and Riccardo, Fubini, L’Umanesimo Italiano e I Suoi Storici (Milan: Franco Angeli Storia, 2001).

  2 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (The Orator’s Education), ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library, 127 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 10.1, pp. 299ff. Though a complete (or nearly complete) copy of Quintilian was only found—by Poggio Bracciolini—in 1516, book X, with its lists of Greek and Roman writers, circulated throughout the Middle Ages. Quintilian remarks of Macer and Lucretius that “Each is elegant on his own subject, but the former is prosaic and the latter difficult,” p. 299.

  3 Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988). Estimates of literacy rates in earlier societies are notoriously unreliable. Kaster, citing the research of Richard Duncan-Jones, concludes: “the great majority of the empire’s inhabitants were illiterate in the classical languages.” The figures for the first three centuries CE suggest upwards of 70 percent illiteracy, though with many regional differences. There are similar figures in Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), though Haines-Eitzen has even lower literacy levels (10 percent perhaps). See also Robin Lane Fox, “Literacy and Power in Early Christianity,” in Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf, eds., Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  4 Cited in Fox, “Literacy and Power,” p. 147.

  5 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.

  6 John Cassian, The Institutes, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Newman Press, 2000), 10:2.

  7 The Rule of Benedict, 48:19–20. 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.

  8 Spiritum elationis: the translators render these words as “spirit of vanity” but I believe that “elation” or “exaltation” is the principal sense here.

  9 The Rule of Benedict, 38:5–7.

  10 Ibid., 38:8.

  11 Ibid., 38:9.

  12 Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago and London: American Library Association and the British Library: 1991), p. 324. The manuscript is in Barcelona.

  13 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. 47–62.

  14 Bartolomeo served as secretary in 1414; Poggio the following year—Partner, The Pope’s Men, pp. 218, 222.

  15 Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, pp. 208–9 (letter to Ambrogio Traversari).

  16 Ibid, p. 210.

  17 Eustace J. Kitts, In the Days of the Councils: A Sketch of the Life and Times of Baldassare Cossa (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1908), p. 69.

  18 Cited in W. M. Shepherd, The Life of Poggio Bracciolini (Liverpool: Longman et al., 1837), p. 168.

  19 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.

>   20 Ibid.

  21 Quoted in George Haven Putnam, Books and Their Makers During the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (New York: Hillary House, 1962; repr. of 1896–98 edn.) 1:61.

  22 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 scraped 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 Columbanus 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”—Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 151.

  23 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.

  24 In the context of the current book, the most intriguing comment comes in Rabanus’s prose preface to his fascinating collection of acrostic poems in praise of the Cross, composed in 810. Rabanus 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 Titus Lucretius non raro fecisse invenitur—“which is frequently found in Titus Lucretius.” Quoted in David Ganz, “Lucretius in the Carolingian Age: The Leiden Manuscripts and Their Carolingian Readers,” in Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel and Margaret M. Smith, eds., Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics: 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.

  25 Pliny the Younger, Letters, 3.7.

  26 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

  1 “Send me some piece by Lucretius or Ennius,” the highly cultivated emperor Antoninus Pius (86–161 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.)

  2 “Lucreti poemata, ut scribes, ita sunt, multis luminibus ingenii, multae tamen artis”—Cicero, Q.Fr. 2.10.3.

  3 Georgics, 2.490–92:

  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).

  4 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).

  5 Amores, 1.15.23–24. See Philip Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) esp. pp. 143–63, 173–207.

  6 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 sanctity 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 passionate, intelligent, and creative disciple.

  7 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.”

  8 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 assembled what they thought were clues to Lucretius’ life, but that most of those clues turn out to have been comments about other, unrelated people.

  9 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.

  10 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.

  11 Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books, pp. 83ff.

  12 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.

  13 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.

  14 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 principal interlocutors.

  15 Appointed to administer northern Italy (Gallia Transpadana), Pollio used his influence to save Virg
il’s property from confiscation.

  16 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 Trajanus—first established in the Forum of Trajan but afterwards removed to the Baths of Diocletian. See Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).