The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

    While I thought The Swerve was going to be all about Poggio Bracciolini, who discovered Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, it is actually much more about De Rerum Natura. Lucretius' book, published in the first century BC, is a scientific/philosophical text derived from the Epicurean field of philosophy. It asserts that everything is made of particles "atoms" from Greek, and that these elementary particles are eternal, infinite in number, but limited in shape and size. These particles move about in an infinite void, in a universe with no creator. But critically, their movements are not predetermined, but swerve. This swerve, or clinamen (or declinatio or inclinatio), is responsible for all life and creation, as the random, unpredictable movements of the atoms creates the capacity for all objects and living things. It is the source of free will as nature experiments with movements, sort of foreshadowing the theory of evolution. Lucretius asserted that the universe was not created for humans and that there was no soul outside of the body that could outlive the body, and no afterlife. He also included some Hobbesian ideas about human origins. Religions, for Lucretius, were cruel delusions, and superstitions at best. Rather than prayer, the better use of a person's time would be to seek pleasure and avoid delusion, as well as to try to learn the truth of the universe.

    What is ironic is that despite these ideas being so heretical to the Catholic Church, they were brought back into the world by Poggio, an apostolic secretary who worked personally for several Popes, discovering a ninth century copy of Lucretius in a monastery, likely in Fulda, Germany. The book gives you a real appreciation for how important book copying was and how difficult it was. Monks had to spend hours every day concentrating on writing on animal skin, vellum, and mistakes were costly. They even had a term, acediosus, which was a sort of illness in monastic communities in which a monk would find it impossible or difficult to read, and would try to distract himself with gossip, feeling that life was better somewhere else. Many students have dealt with this since. They enforced absolute silence, and when scribes wanted to ask for something they needed to use gestures. The scribes used twenty-six tiny pinholes on the ends of each sheet to fix the vellum steady for writing, and used score marks to form straight lines. Apparently Christian monks still copied classical works for centuries, but that copying declined between the sixth and eighth centuries, starting as an active campaign to attack pagan ideas, and then transforming into a true forgetting of those works.

    Reading this book was also significant for me since I think of it primarily as a book given to me by my grandmother many years ago, before she passed away in 2017. I read it way back when, but it was nice to re-read the book, and it brought back memories of her. She was intensely interested in the classics and read in Latin and Greek, and I think I got a lot of my love of history from her. I miss her.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Out of Aeschylus' 80 or 90 plays and Sophocles' 100, only seven of each have survived. Of those of Euripides and Aristophanes, the numbers are 18 out of 92 and 11 out of 43, respectively.
• "At the end of the fifth century CE, an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world's best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works that are now lost."