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Poggio sends a crude copy of On the Nature of Things to his friend Niccoli, who makes a proper copy. Eventually this new copy “spawned dozens of further manuscript copies—more than fifty are known to survive—and were the sources of all fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century printed editions of Lucretius” (204). The original medieval version stays in the monastery, where finally it is completely lost, perhaps from fire, neglect, sabotage, or simple reuse of its parchment. Three ninth-century versions of the work, two complete and one partial, are later discovered and survive today in European collections.
The papal throne remains vacant until 1418, when a new pope, Martin V, is chosen, but he makes no offer to Poggio, who decides “to make a very surprising and risky career move” (206) and accepts a post as secretary to Henry Beaufort, the uncle of England’s King Henry V and bishop of Winchester. Poggio hopes to find a wealth of ancient manuscripts in the monasteries of England, but after four years there, he is sorely disappointed.
“His letters back to Italy were a litany of complaints. There was plague; the weather was miserable”; he has little to do and is poorly paid; “the truly terrible news was that the libraries—at least the ones he visited—were from Poggio’s point of view almost completely uninteresting” (207). In 1422 he wangles a secretarial position back at the Vatican. There, he cajoles Niccoli for several years to loan him the Lucretius poem; it arrives sometime after 1429, is finally copied, and thereafter “slowly made its way once again into the hands of readers, about a thousand years after it had dropped out of sight” (209).
At the Vatican, Poggio is busy and prosperous, yet “he managed to find time to translate ancient texts from Greek to Latin, to make copies of old manuscripts, and to write moral essays, philosophical reflections, rhetorical treatises, diatribes, and funeral orations” (210). With his mistress, Poggio sires 12 sons and two daughters; church fathers “reproached him for the irregularity of his life” (210), but Poggio manages to sidestep penalties, especially as so many clerics also have children out of wedlock.
With his newfound wealth, Poggio collects antiquities and acquires land in his home town of Terranuova, where he plans to build an estate styled after the classical Greeks and Romans. “Academy, garden, gymnasium: Poggio was recreating, at least in his fantasy, the world of the ancient Greek philosophers” (211). He becomes apostolic secretary to the next pope, Eugenius IV, is captured during an uprising against the pope and must ransom his freedom, but recovers and, in his mid-fifties, marries the 18-year-old daughter of the prominent Buondelmonti family. They are happy together and raise five sons and a daughter.
In 1447, Poggio retains his position with the new pope, Nicholas V. “This was the eighth pope whom he had served in this capacity, and Poggio, now in his later sixties, may have been growing weary” (214). The new pope encourages Poggio and other humanist scholars, but he also chooses Poggio’s enemy, Lorenzo Valla, as apostolic co-secretary, which touches off “a vitriolic public quarrel, mingling snide comments about each other’s mistakes in Latin with still nastier remarks about hygiene, sex, and family” (215).
Poggio is by now famous, widely respected, and well connected in Florence; when he tells the city fathers he wants to retire to their suburbs, the Florentines pass a bill that frees him and his family of all tax obligations. They also elect him city chancellor, lately a ceremonial but hugely prestigious position held, since Salutati, always by a scholar.
During his five-year reign, Poggio writes on diverse topics, from The Wretchedness of the Human Condition to a “highly partisan History of Florence from the mid-fourteenth century to his own time” (217), as well as a translation of the ancient Greek comedy The Ass. Poggio resigns the chancellorship in 1458; he dies the following year.
Today, aside from the renaming of his home town “Terranuova Bracciolini,” Poggio is largely forgotten, his tomb long gone, his memorial statue moved from in front of the city cathedral inside, where today it represents one of the 12 apostles. A new statue is commissioned on the 500th anniversary of his death in 1959 and stands in the town square. “But few of those who pass through, on their way to the nearby fashion factory outlets, can have any idea who is being commemorated” (218).
Despite his own relative obscurity today, Poggio’s greatest rescue from oblivion, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, “permanently changed the landscape of the world” (218).
During the 1490s, the friar Savonarola becomes ruler of Florence. Strictly conservative, he encourages the public to bring forth their frivolous possessions: “sinful objects—mirrors, cosmetics, seductive clothing, songbooks, musical instruments, playing cards and other gambling paraphernalia, sculptures and paintings of pagan subjects, the works of ancient poets” (219). These are collected into a huge pile and torched in “the Bonfire of the Vanities” (219).
Savonarola preaches against Epicurean beliefs, ridiculing the notion of atoms and the idea that souls die with the body. Not long after, Savonarola is overthrown, hanged, and burned. As yet, no one dares to defend publicly the Epicurean beliefs. “But these subversive, Lucretian thoughts percolated and surfaced wherever the Renaissance imagination was at its most alive and intense” (220).
Machiavelli, author of The Prince, quietly copies Lucretius’ Epicurean poem; today it resides in the Vatican, but in Machiavelli’s time it is kept under wraps. Even Poggio and his friends “could borrow elegant diction and turns of phrase from a wide range of pagan texts, but at the same time hold themselves aloof from their most dangerous ideas” (221).
Poggio’s enemy, Valla, writes a dialogue concerning the good life, On Pleasure, and Poggio accuses him of heresy. But Valla points out that, at the work’s end, “it is not Epicureanism but rather Christian orthodoxy, voiced by the monk Antonio Raudense, that is declared the clear victor” (222). Whether Valla is merely trying to lance the boil of Epicurean heresy or secretly trying to promote it remains unknown. “Which is it: subversion or containment?” (224); historians can only shrug.
In 1516, Lucretius is banned in Florentine schools. The book, however, is being printed and distributed widely in Italy and elsewhere. The Vatican is of two minds about whether to suppress the poem and cannot bring itself to ban it altogether.
English statesman More, who calls himself a “Christian humanist” (228), writes Utopia, which describes an imaginary land somewhere in the Americas where Epicurean ideals prevail. More believes “that Epicurus’ philosophy would liberate all of mankind from its abject misery” (230). Ironically, however, in More's idealized world, punishment would be meted out “on anyone who denies the existence of divine providence or of the afterlife” (231). More believes that the public must fear God and the afterlife or society will careen out of control.
Bruno goes much further. The brilliant priest believes that the stars are actually suns like our own, around which planets revolve, and that the Earth is merely one such planet revolving about its own sun, as Copernicus has proposed. This insults the church hierarchy, which considers itself to be at the center of the universe.
The priest also ridicules the churchly belief that the Deity pays attention to all matters, having the god Mercury describe at great length his duties for a single morning:
That Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl the hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won’t burn her scalp [...] a cuckoo shall be heard from La Starza, cuckooing twelve times, no more and no fewer, whereupon it shall leave and fly to the ruins of Castle Cicala for eleven minutes [...] That the skirt Mastro Danese is cutting on his board shall come out crooked. That twelve bedbugs shall leave the slats of Costantino’s bed and head toward the pillow: seven large ones, four small, and one middle-sized (234).
Bruno takes big risks because “to mock Jesus’ claim that the hairs on one’s head are all numbered risked provoking an unpleasant visit from the thought police” (236). Bruno’s sympathies lie with the Epicureans and their belief that the universe runs itself without the aid of gods. “‘The world is fine as it is,’ he wrote, sweeping away as if they were so many cobwebs innumerable sermons on anguish, guilt, and repentance” (237). Trouble lies ahead for Bruno.
Instead of modifying his beliefs to better comport with those demanded of him by the church hierarchy, Bruno asserts “that the Bible was a better guide to morality than to charting the heavens” (238). In 1591, during a return trip to Italy, Bruno is arrested and jailed. For eight years he is threatened by the Inquisition, yet he persists in challenging its authority. In 1600 he is found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake.
Despite all attempts to squelch it, Lucretius’ poem grows in influence, affecting poet Edmund Spenser and philosophers Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Isaac Newton manages to meld Epicurean philosophy with faith when he professes a belief in atoms as well as a God who creates them. Still, the damage has been done: “Lucretius’ materialism helped to generate and support the skepticism of the likes of Dryden and Voltaire and the programmatic, devastating disbelief expressed in Diderot, Hume, and many other Enlightenment figures” (261).
Lucretius’ descriptions of nature have, in many ways, been vindicated by modern science. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution validates the Epicurean notion of the development of animals; Einstein’s theories uphold the concept of atomic particles.
Thomas Jefferson is a big fan of Lucretius, owning five Latin editions and three translations. He writes famously of the right to “the pursuit of Happiness”: “The atoms of Lucretius had left their traces on the Declaration of Independence” (263).
The mere presence of the rediscovered poem On the Nature of Things ignites flames of inspiration that spread faster than the church can put them out. Over a span of two centuries, many of the most famous artists and scientists of the age betray the influence of the poem in their work. It’s bad enough to have to execute a cleric for the heresy of advocating Epicurean ideas; it’s another thing entirely to try to expunge those ideas from the wildly popular plays of Shakespeare, the poems of Spenser, or the thinking of such thought leaders as More and Bacon.
The modern notion of “memes”—ideas that behave like thought viruses, infecting all who come into contact with them—is an apt description of what happens to the beliefs enshrined in Lucretius’ work as they spread from artist to artist and philosopher to philosopher in the centuries following the seductive poem’s reintroduction.
Greenblatt’s litany of famous names whose work Lucretius influences is meant to show how greatly a single manuscript has altered our culture. It also is meant to show us that many of our most cherished ideals, from the scientific method to the pursuit of happiness, descend from principles espoused in On the Nature of Things. In effect, we in the West are Epicureans without knowing it.
One of the charming “swerves” in the story is that Poggio, famous in his own time, is almost completely forgotten today, whereas the Lucretian poem he resurrects, which suffers near-oblivion for centuries, becomes one of the most influential works in history. It’s as if Poggio’s renown is absorbed by the poem and then magnified. Poggio, were he to witness today the enormous results of his efforts, might nod to himself and say, “My work is complete.”