CONTENTS

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Stephen Greenblatt

Edited by Stephen Greenblatt

Dedication

Title Page

Preface

CHAPTER ONE: The Book Hunter

CHAPTER TWO: The Moment ofDiscovery

CHAPTER THREE: In Search ofLucretius

CHAPTER FOUR: The Teeth ofTime

CHAPTER FIVE: Birth and Rebirth

CHAPTER SIX: In the Lie Factory

CHAPTER SEVEN: A Pit to Catch

Foxes

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Way ThingsAre

CHAPTER NINE: The Return

CHAPTER TEN: Swerves

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Afterlives

Picture Section

Photograph Credits

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

Copyright

About the Book

One of the world’s most celebratedscholars, Stephen Greenblatt has craftedboth an innovative work of history and athrilling story of discovery, in which onemanuscript, plucked from a thousandyears of neglect, changed the course ofhuman thought and made possible theworld as we know it.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short,genial, cannily alert man in his late 30stook a very old manuscript off a libraryshelf, saw with excitement what he had

discovered, and ordered that it becopied. The book was the last survivingmanuscript of an ancient Romanphilosophical epic, “On the Nature ofThings,” by Lucretius – a thrillinglybeautiful poem of the most dangerousideas: that the universe functionedwithout the aid of gods, that religious fearwas damaging to human life, and thatmatter was made up of very smallparticles in eternal motion.

The copying and translation of thisancient book, the greatest discovery ofthe greatest book-hunter of his age,fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artistssuch as Botticelli and thinkers such asGiordano Bruno; shaped the thought ofGalileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein;and had revolutionary influence onwriters from Montaigne to Thomas

Jefferson.

About the Author

Stephen Greenblatt is the John CoganUniversity Professor of the Humanities atHarvard University and is the founder ofthe school of literary criticism known asNew Historicism. As visiting professorand lecturer at universities in England,Australia, the United States andelsewhere throughout the world, he hasdelivered such distinguished series oflectures as the Clarendon Lectures atOxford and the University PublicLectures at Princeton. He has receivedtwo Guggenheim Fellowships and has

been President of the Modern LanguageAssociation. Professor Greenblatt is theauthor and co-author of nine books andthe editor of ten others, including TheNorton Anthology of English Literature(7th edition) and The NortonShakespeare.

ALSO BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT

Shakespeare’s Freedom

Will in the World: How Shakespeare

Became Shakespeare

Hamlet in Purgatory

Practicing New Historicism (with

Catherine Gallagher)

Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder

of the New World

Learning to Curse: Essays in Early

Modern Culture

Shakespearean Negotiations:

The Circulation of Social Energy inRenaissance England

Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From

More to Shakespeare

Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance

Man and His Roles

Three Modern Satirists: Waugh,

Orwell, and Huxley

EDITED BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT

Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto

The Norton Anthology of English

Literature (general editor)

The Norton Shakespeare (general

editor)

New World Encounters

Redrawing the Boundaries: TheTransformation of English and

American Literary Studies

Representing the English

Renaissance

Allegory and Representation

To Abigail and Alexa

PREFACE

WHEN I WAS a student, I used to go atthe end of the school year to the YaleCoop to see what I could find to readover the summer. I had very little pocketmoney, but the bookstore would routinelysell its unwanted titles for ridiculouslysmall sums. They would be jumbledtogether in bins through which I would

rummage, with nothing much in mind,waiting for something to catch my eye.On one of my forays, I was struck by anextremely odd paperback cover, a detailfrom a painting by the surrealist MaxErnst. Under a crescent moon, highabove the earth, two pairs of legs—thebodies were missing—were engaged inwhat appeared to be an act of celestialcoition. The book—a prose translation ofLucretius’ two-thousand-year-old poemOn the Nature of Things (De rerumnatura)—was marked down to ten cents,and I bought it, I confess, as much for thecover as for the classical account of thematerial universe.

Ancient physics is not a particularlypromising subject for vacation reading,but sometime over the summer I idlypicked up the book and began to read. Iimmediately encountered ample

justification for the erotic cover. Lucretiusbegins with an ardent hymn to Venus,the goddess of love, whose coming inthe spring has scattered the clouds,flooded the sky with light, and filled theentire world with frenzied sexual desire:

First, goddess1, the birds of the air,pierced to the heart with yourpowerful shafts, signal your entry.Next wild creatures and cattlebound over rich pastures and swimrushing rivers: so surely are they allcaptivated by your charm, andeagerly follow your lead. Then youinject seductive love into the heartof every creature that lives in theseas and mountains and rivertorrents and bird-haunted thickets,implanting in it the passionate urge

to reproduce its kind.

Startled by the intensity of thisopening, I continued on, past a vision ofMars asleep on Venus’ lap—“vanquished by the never-healingwound of love, throwing back hishandsome neck and gazing up at you”; aprayer for peace; a tribute to the wisdomof the philosopher Epicurus; and aresolute condemnation of superstitiousfears. When I reached the beginning of alengthy exposition of philosophical firstprinciples, I fully expected to loseinterest: no one had assigned the book tome, my only object was pleasure, and Ihad already gotten far more than my tencents’ worth. But to my surprise, Icontinued to find the book thrilling.

It was not Lucretius’ exquisitelanguage to which I was responding.

Later I worked through De rerum naturain its original Latin hexameters, and Icame to understand something of its richverbal texture, its subtle rhythms, and thecunning precision and poignancy of itsimagery. But my first encounter was inMartin Ferguson Smith’s workmanlikeEnglish prose—clear and unfussy, buthardly remarkable. No, it was somethingelse that reached me, something thatlived and moved within the sentences formore than 200 densely packed pages. Iam committed by trade to urging peopleto attend carefully to the verbal surfacesof what they read. Much of the pleasureand interest of poetry depends on suchattention. But it is nonetheless possibleto have a powerful experience of a workof art even in a modest translation, letalone a brilliant one. That is, after all,how most of the literate world has

encountered Genesis or the Iliad orHamlet, and, though it is certainlypreferable to read these works in theiroriginal languages, it is misguided toinsist that there is no real access to themotherwise.

I can, in any case, testify that, evenin a prose translation, On the Nature ofThings struck a very deep chord withinme. Its power depended to some extenton personal circumstances—art alwayspenetrates the particular fissures in one’spsychic life. The core of Lucretius’ poemis a profound, therapeutic meditation onthe fear of death, and that fear dominatedmy entire childhood. It was not fear of myown death that so troubled me; I had theordinary, healthy child’s intimation ofimmortality. It was rather my mother’sabsolute certainty that she was destinedfor an early death.

My mother was not afraid of theafterlife: like most Jews she had only avague and hazy sense of what might liebeyond the grave, and she gave it verylittle thought. It was death itself—simplyceasing to be—that terrified her. For asfar back as I can remember, she broodedobsessively on the imminence of herend, invoking it again and again,especially at moments of parting. My lifewas full of extended, operatic scenes offarewell. When she went with my fatherfrom Boston to New York for theweekend, when I went off to summercamp, even—when things wereespecially hard for her—when I simplyleft the house for school, she clung tightlyto me, speaking of her fragility and of thedistinct possibility that I would never seeher again. If we walked somewheretogether, she would frequently come to a

halt, as if she were about to keel over.Sometimes she would show me a veinpulsing in her neck and, taking my finger,make me feel it for myself, the sign of herheart dangerously racing.

She must have been only in herlate thirties when my own memories ofher fears begin, and those fears evidentlywent back much further in time. Theyseem to have taken root about a decadebefore my birth, when her younger sister,only sixteen years old, died of strepthroat. This event—one all too familiar inthe world before the introduction ofpenicillin—was still for my mother anopen wound: she spoke of it constantly,weeping quietly, and making me readand reread the poignant letters that theteenaged girl had written through thecourse of her fatal illness.

I understood early on that my

mother’s “heart”—the palpitations thatbrought her and everyone around her toa halt—was a life strategy. It was asymbolic means to identify with andmourn her dead sister. It was a way toexpress both anger—“you see how upsetyou have made me”—and love—“yousee how I am still doing everything foryou, even though my heart is about tobreak.” It was an acting-out, a rehearsal,of the extinction that she feared. It wasabove all a way to compel attention anddemand love. But this understanding didnot make its effect upon my childhoodsignificantly less intense: I loved mymother and dreaded losing her. I had noresources to untangle psychologicalstrategy and dangerous symptom. (I don’timagine that she did either.) And as achild I had no means to gauge theweirdness of this constant harping on

impending death and this freighting ofevery farewell with finality. Only now thatI have raised a family of my own do Iunderstand how dire the compulsionmust have been that led a loving parent—and she was loving—to lay such aheavy emotional burden on her children.Every day brought a renewal of the darkcertainty that her end was very near.

As it turned out, my mother lived toa month shy of her ninetieth birthday.She was still only in her fifties when Iencountered On the Nature of Things forthe first time. By then my dread of herdying had become entwined with apainful perception that she had blightedmuch of her life—and cast a shadow onmy own—in the service of her obsessivefear. Lucretius’ words therefore rang outwith a terrible clarity: “Death is nothing tous.” To spend your existence in the grip

of anxiety about death, he wrote, is merefolly. It is a sure way to let your life slipfrom you incomplete and unenjoyed. Hegave voice as well to a thought I had notyet quite allowed myself, even inwardly,to articulate: to inflict this anxiety onothers is manipulative and cruel.

Such was, in my case, the poem’spersonal point of entry, the immediatesource of its power over me. But thatpower was not only a consequence ofmy peculiar life history. On the Nature ofThings struck me as an astonishinglyconvincing account of the way thingsactually are. To be sure, I easily graspedthat many features of this ancientaccount now seem absurd. What elsewould we expect? How accurate will ouraccount of the universe seem twothousand years from now? Lucretiusbelieved that the sun circled around the

earth, and he argued that the sun’s heatand size could hardly be much greaterthan are perceived by our senses. Hethought that worms were spontaneouslygenerated from the wet soil, explainedlightning as seeds of fire expelled fromhollow clouds, and pictured the earth asa menopausal mother exhausted by theeffort of so much breeding. But at thecore of the poem lay key principles of amodern understanding of the world.

The stuff of the universe, Lucretiusproposed, is an infinite number of atomsmoving randomly through space, likedust motes in a sunbeam, colliding,hooking together, forming complexstructures, breaking apart again, in aceaseless process of creation anddestruction. There is no escape from thisprocess. When you look up at the nightsky and, feeling unaccountably moved,

marvel at the numberless stars, you arenot seeing the handiwork of the gods or acrystalline sphere detached from ourtransient world. You are seeing the samematerial world of which you are a partand from whose elements you are made.There is no master plan, no divinearchitect, no intelligent design. All things,including the species to which youbelong, have evolved over vast stretchesof time. The evolution is random, thoughin the case of living organisms it involvesa principle of natural selection. That is,species that are suited to survive and toreproduce successfully endure, at leastfor a time; those that are not so wellsuited die off quickly. But nothing—fromour own species to the planet on whichwe live to the sun that lights our days—lasts forever. Only the atoms areimmortal.

In a universe so constituted,Lucretius argued, there is no reason tothink that the earth or its inhabitantsoccupy a central place, no reason to sethumans apart from all other animals, nohope of bribing or appeasing the gods,no place for religious fanaticism, no callfor ascetic self-denial, no justification fordreams of limitless power or perfectsecurity, no rationale for wars ofconquest or self-aggrandizement, nopossibility of triumphing over nature, noescape from the constant making andunmaking and remaking of forms. On theother side of anger at those who eitherpeddled false visions of security orincited irrational fears of death, Lucretiusoffered a feeling of liberation and thepower to stare down what had onceseemed so menacing. What humanbeings can and should do, he wrote, is to

conquer their fears, accept the fact thatthey themselves and all the things theyencounter are transitory, and embracethe beauty and the pleasure of the world.

I marveled—I continue to marvel—that these perceptions were fullyarticulated in a work written more thantwo thousand years ago. The linebetween this work and modernity is notdirect: nothing is ever so simple. Therewere innumerable forgettings,disappearances, recoveries, dismissals,distortions, challenges, transformations,and renewed forgettings. And yet thevital connection is there. Hidden behindthe worldview I recognize as my own isan ancient poem, a poem once lost,apparently irrevocably, and then found.

It is not surprising that thephilosophical tradition from whichLucretius’ poem derived, so incompatible

with the cult of the gods and the cult ofthe state, struck some, even in thetolerant culture of the classicalMediterranean, as scandalous. Theadherents of this tradition were onoccasion dismissed as mad or impiousor simply stupid. And with the rise ofChristianity, their texts were attacked,ridiculed, burned, or—most devastating—ignored and eventually forgotten. Whatis astonishing is that one magnificentarticulation of the whole philosophy—thepoem whose recovery is the subject ofthis book—should have survived. Apartfrom a few odds and ends andsecondhand reports, all that was left ofthe whole rich tradition was contained inthat single work. A random fire, an act ofvandalism, a decision to snuff out the lasttrace of views judged to be heretical, andthe course of modernity would have been

different.Of all the ancient masterpieces,

this poem is one that should certainlyhave disappeared, finally and forever, inthe company of the lost works that hadinspired it. That it did not disappear, thatit surfaced after many centuries andbegan once again to propagate itsdeeply subversive theses, is somethingone could be tempted to call a miracle.But the author of the poem in questiondid not believe in miracles. He thoughtthat nothing could violate the laws ofnature. He posited instead what hecalled a “swerve,”—Lucretius’ prinicipalLatin word for it was clinamen—anunexpected, unpredictable movement ofmatter. The reappearance of his poemwas such a swerve, an unforeseendeviation from the direct trajectory—inthis case, toward oblivion—on which that

poem and its philosophy seemed to betraveling.

When it returned to full circulationafter a millennium, much of what thework said about a universe formed out ofthe clash of atoms in an infinite voidseemed absurd. But those very thingsthat first were deemed both impious andnonsensical turned out to be the basis forthe contemporary rational understandingof the entire world. What is at stake is notonly the startling recognition of keyelements of modernity in antiquity,though it is certainly worth remindingourselves that Greek and Romanclassics, largely displaced from ourcurriculum, have in fact definitivelyshaped modern consciousness. Moresurprising, perhaps, is the sense, drivenhome by every page of On the Nature ofThings, that the scientific vision of the

world—a vision of atoms randomlymoving in an infinite universe—was in itsorigins imbued with a poet’s sense ofwonder. Wonder did not depend on godsand demons and the dream of anafterlife; in Lucretius it welled up out of arecognition that we are made of the samematter as the stars and the oceans andall things else. And this recognition wasthe basis for the way he thought weshould live our lives.

In my view, and by no means minealone, the culture in the wake of antiquitythat best epitomized the Lucretianembrace of beauty and pleasure andpropelled it forward as a legitimate andworthy human pursuit was that of theRenaissance. The pursuit was notrestricted to the arts. It shaped the dressand the etiquette of courtiers; thelanguage of the liturgy; the design and

decoration of everyday objects. Itsuffused Leonardo da Vinci’s scientificand technological explorations, Galileo’svivid dialogues on astronomy, FrancisBacon’s ambitious research projects,and Richard Hooker’s theology. It wasvirtually a reflex, so that works that wereseemingly far away from any aestheticambition at all—Machiavelli’s analysis ofpolitical strategy, Walter Ralegh’sdescription of Guiana, or Robert Burton’sencyclopedic account of mental illness—were crafted in such a way as to producethe most intense pleasure. But the arts ofthe Renaissance—painting, sculpture,music, architecture, and literature—werethe supreme manifestations of the pursuitof beauty.

My own particular love was and isfor Shakespeare, but Shakespeare’sachievement seemed to me only one

spectacular facet of a larger culturalmovement that included Alberti,Michelangelo, and Raphael, Ariosto,Montaigne, and Cervantes, along withdozens of other artists and writers. Thatmovement had many intertwining andoften conflicting aspects, but coursingthrough all of them there was a gloriousaffirmation of vitality. The affirmationextends even to those many works ofRenaissance art in which death seems totriumph. Hence the grave at the close ofRomeo and Juliet does not so muchswallow up the lovers as launch theminto the future as the embodiments oflove. In the enraptured audiences thathave flocked to the play for more thanfour hundred years, Juliet in effect getsher wish that after death, night shouldtake Romeo

and cut him

out in little starsAnd he will make

the face of heaven so fineThat all the world

will be in love with night.

(III.ii.22–24)

A comparably capacious embrace ofbeauty and pleasure—an embrace thatsomehow extends to death as well aslife, to dissolution as well as creation—characterizes Montaigne’s restlessreflections on matter in motion,Cervantes’s chronicle of his mad knight,Michelangelo’s depiction of flayed skin,Leonardo’s sketches of whirlpools,

Caravaggio’s loving attention to the dirtysoles of Christ’s feet.

Something happened in theRenaissance, something that surged upagainst the constraints that centuries hadconstructed around curiosity, desire,individuality, sustained attention to thematerial world, the claims of the body.The cultural shift is notoriously difficult todefine, and its significance has beenfiercely contested. But it can be intuitedeasily enough when you look in Siena atDuccio’s painting of the enthronedVirgin, the Maestà, and then in Florenceat Botticelli’s Primavera, a painting that,not coincidentally, was influenced by Onthe Nature of Things. In the principalpanel of Duccio’s magnificent altarpiece(ca. 1310), the adoration of the angels,saints, and martyrs is focused on aserene center, the heavily robed Mother

of God and her child absorbed in solemncontemplation. In the Primavera (ca.1482), the ancient gods of the springappear together in a verdant wood, allintently engaged in the complex,rhythmic choreography of renewednatural fecundity evoked in Lucretius’poem; “Spring comes2 and Venus,preceded by Venus’ winged harbinger,and mother Flora, following hard on theheels of Zephyr, prepares the way forthem, strewing all their path with aprofusion of exquisite hues and scents.”The key to the shift lies not only in theintense, deeply informed revival ofinterest in the pagan deities and the richmeanings that once attached to them. Itlies also in the whole vision of a world inmotion, a world not rendered insignificantbut made more beautiful by its

transience, its erotic energy, and itsceaseless change.

Though most evident in works ofart, the change from one way ofperceiving and living in the world toanother was not restricted to aesthetics: ithelps to account for the intellectualdaring of Copernicus and Vesalius,Giordano Bruno and William Harvey,Hobbes and Spinoza. The transformationwas not sudden or once-for-all, but itbecame increasingly possible to turnaway from a preoccupation with angelsand demons and immaterial causes andto focus instead on things in this world; tounderstand that humans are made of thesame stuff as everything else and arepart of the natural order; to conductexperiments without fearing that one isinfringing on God’s jealously guardedsecrets; to question authorities and

challenge received doctrines; tolegitimate the pursuit of pleasure and theavoidance of pain; to imagine that thereare other worlds beside the one that weinhabit; to entertain the thought that thesun is only one star in an infiniteuniverse; to live an ethical life withoutreference to postmortem rewards andpunishments; to contemplate withouttrembling the death of the soul. In short, itbecame possible—never easy, butpossible—in the poet Auden’s phrase tofind the mortal world enough.

There is no single explanation forthe emergence of the Renaissance andthe release of the forces that haveshaped our own world. But I have tried inthis book to tell a little known butexemplary Renaissance story, the storyof Poggio Bracciolini’s recovery of Onthe Nature of Things. The recovery has

the virtue of being true to the term that weuse to gesture toward the cultural shift atthe origins of modern life and thought: are-naissance, a rebirth, of antiquity. Onepoem by itself was certainly notresponsible for an entire intellectual,moral, and social transformation—nosingle work was, let alone one that forcenturies could not without danger bespoken about freely in public. But thisparticular ancient book, suddenlyreturning to view, made a difference.

This is a story then of how theworld swerved in a new direction. Theagent of change was not a revolution, animplacable army at the gates, or landfallon an unknown continent. For events ofthis magnitude, historians and artistshave given the popular imaginationmemorable images: the fall of theBastille, the Sack of Rome, or the

moment when the ragged seamen fromthe Spanish ships planted their flag inthe New World. These emblems ofworld-historic change can be deceptive—the Bastille had almost no prisoners;Attila’s army quickly withdrew from theimperial capital; and, in the Americas, thetruly fateful action was not the unfurlingof a banner but the first time that an illand infectious Spanish sailor,surrounded by wondering natives,sneezed or coughed. Still, we can insuch cases at least cling to the vividsymbol. But the epochal change withwhich this book is concerned—though ithas affected all of our lives—is not soeasily associated with a dramatic image.

When it occurred, nearly sixhundred years ago, the key moment wasmuffled and almost invisible, tuckedaway behind walls in a remote place.

There were no heroic gestures, noobservers keenly recording the greatevent for posterity, no signs in heaven oron earth that everything had changedforever. A short, genial, cannily alert manin his late thirties reached out one day,took a very old manuscript off a libraryshelf, saw with excitement what he haddiscovered, and ordered that it becopied. That was all; but it was enough.

The finder of the manuscript couldnot, of course, have fully grasped theimplications of its vision or anticipated itsinfluence, which took centuries to unfold.Indeed, if he had had an intimation of theforces he was unleashing, he might havethought twice about drawing soexplosive a work out of the darkness inwhich it slept. The work that the manheld in his hands had been laboriouslycopied by hand for centuries, but it had

long rested uncirculated and perhapsuncomprehended even by the solitarysouls who copied it. For manygenerations, no one spoke of it at all.Between the fourth and the ninthcenturies, it was cited fleetingly in lists ofgrammatical and lexicographicalexamples, that is, as a quarry of correctLatin usage. In the seventh centuryIsidore of Seville, compiling a vastencyclopedia, used it as an authority onmeteorology. It surfaced again briefly, inthe time of Charlemagne, when therewas a crucial burst of interest in ancientbooks and a scholarly Irish monk namedDungal carefully corrected a copy. But,neither debated nor disseminated, aftereach of these fugitive appearances itseemed to sink again beneath thewaves. Then, after lying dormant andforgotten for more than a thousand years,

it returned to circulation.The person responsible for this

momentous return, Poggio Bracciolini,was an avid letter writer.3 He penned anaccount of the event to a friend back inhis native Italy, but the letter has beenlost. Still, it is possible, on the basis ofother letters, both his own and those ofhis circle, to reconstruct how it cameabout. For though this particularmanuscript would turn out from ourperspective to be his greatest find, it wasby no means his only one, and it was noaccident. Poggio Bracciolini was a bookhunter, perhaps the greatest in an ageobsessed with ferreting out andrecovering the heritage of the ancientworld.

The finding of a lost book does notordinarily figure as a thrilling event, but

behind that one moment was the arrestand imprisonment of a pope, the burningof heretics, and a great culturewideexplosion of interest in pagan antiquity.The act of discovery fulfilled the life’spassion of a brilliant book hunter. Andthat book hunter, without ever intendingor realizing it, became a midwife tomodernity.

CHAPTER ONE

THE BOOK HUNTER

IN THE WINTER of 1417, PoggioBracciolini rode through the wooded hillsand valleys of southern Germany towardhis distant destination, a monasteryreputed to have a cache of oldmanuscripts. As must have beenimmediately apparent to the villagerslooking out at him from the doors of theirhuts, the man was a stranger. Slight ofbuild1 and clean-shaven, he wouldprobably have been modestly dressed ina well-made but simple tunic and cloak.That he was not country-bred was clear,

and yet he did not resemble any of thecity and court dwellers whom the localswould have been accustomed to glimpsefrom time to time. Unarmed andunprotected by a clanging suit of armor,he was certainly not a Teutonic knight—one stout blow from a raw-boned yokel’sclub would have easily felled him.Though he did not seem to be poor, hehad none of the familiar signs of wealthand status: he was not a courtier, withgorgeous clothes and perfumed hairworn in long lovelocks, nor was he anobleman out hunting and hawking. And,as was plain from his clothes and the cutof his hair, he was not a priest or a monk.

Southern Germany at the time wasprosperous. The catastrophic ThirtyYears’ War that would ravage thecountryside and shatter whole cities inthe region lay far in the future, as did the

horrors of our own time that destroyedmuch of what had survived from thisperiod. In addition to knights, courtiers,and nobles, other men of substancebusily traveled the rutted, hard-packedroads. Ravensburg, near Constance,was involved in the linen trade and hadrecently begun to produce paper. Ulm,on the left bank of the Danube, was aflourishing center of manufacture andcommerce, as were Heidenheim, Aalen,beautiful Rothenburg ob der Tauber, andstill more beautiful Würzburg. Burghers,wool brokers, leather and clothmerchants, vintners and brewers,craftsmen and their apprentices, as wellas diplomats, bankers, and tax collectors,all were familiar sights. But Poggio stilldid not fit.

There were less prosperous figurestoo—journeymen, tinkers, knife-

sharpeners, and others whose tradeskept them on the move; pilgrims on theirway to shrines where they could worshipin the presence of a fragment of a saint’sbone or a drop of sacred blood; jugglers,fortune-tellers, hawkers, acrobats andmimes traveling from village to village;runaways, vagabonds, and petty thieves.And there were the Jews, with theconical hats and the yellow badges thatthe Christian authorities forced them towear, so that they could be easilyidentified as objects of contempt andhatred. Poggio was certainly none ofthese.

To those who watched him pass,he must in fact have been a bafflingfigure. Most people at the time signaledtheir identities, their place in thehierarchical social system, in visiblesigns that everyone could read, like the

indelible stains on a dyer’s hands.Poggio was barely legible. An isolatedindividual, considered outside thestructures of family and occupation,made very little sense. What matteredwas what you belonged to or even whomyou belonged to. The little coupletAlexander Pope mockingly wrote in theeighteenth century, to put on one of thequeen’s little pugs, could have applied inearnest in the world that Poggioinhabited:

I am his Highness’dog at Kew;

Pray tell me, sir,whose dog are you? The household, the kinship network, theguild, the corporation—these were thebuilding blocks of personhood.

Independence and self-reliance had nocultural purchase; indeed, they couldscarcely be conceived, let alone prized.Identity came with a precise, well-understood place in a chain of commandand obedience.

To attempt to break the chain wasfolly. An impertinent gesture—a refusal tobow or kneel or uncover one’s head tothe appropriate person—could lead toone’s nose being slit or one’s neckbroken. And what, after all, was thepoint? It was not as if there were anycoherent alternatives, certainly not onearticulated by the Church or the court orthe town oligarchs. The best course washumbly to accept the identity to whichdestiny assigned you: the ploughmanneeded only to know how to plough, theweaver to weave, the monk to pray. Itwas possible, of course, to be better or

worse at any of these things; the societyin which Poggio found himselfacknowledged and, to a considerabledegree, rewarded unusual skill. But toprize a person for some ineffableindividuality or for many-sidedness or forintense curiosity was virtually unheard of.Indeed, curiosity was said2 by theChurch to be a mortal sin. To indulge itwas to risk an eternity in hell.

Who was Poggio, then? Why didhe not proclaim his identity on his back,the way decent folks were accustomed todo? He wore no insignia and carried nobundles of merchandise. He had the self-assured air of someone accustomed tothe society of the great, but he himselfwas evidently a figure of no greatconsequence. Everyone knew what suchan important person looked like, for this

was a society of retainers and armedguards and liveried servants. Thestranger, simply attired, rode in thecompany of a single companion. Whenthey paused at inns, the companion, whoappeared to be an assistant or servant,did the ordering; when the master spoke,it became clear that he knew little or noGerman and that his native languagewas Italian.

If he had tried to explain to aninquisitive person what he was up to, themystery of his identity would only havedeepened. In a culture with very limitedliteracy, to be interested in books wasalready an oddity. And how could Poggiohave accounted for the still odder natureof his particular interests? He was not insearch of books of hours or missals orhymnals whose exquisite illuminationsand splendid bindings made manifest

their value even to the illiterate. Thesebooks, some of them jewel-encrustedand edged with gold, were often lockedin special boxes or chained to lecternsand shelves, so that light-fingeredreaders could not make off with them. Butthey held no special appeal for Poggio.Nor was he drawn to the theological,medical, or legal tomes that were theprestigious tools of the professionalelites. Such books had a power toimpress and intimidate even those whocould not read them. They had a socialmagic, of the kind associated for the mostpart with unpleasant events: a lawsuit, apainful swelling in the groin, anaccusation of witchcraft or heresy. Anordinary person would have grasped thatvolumes of this kind had teeth and clawsand hence have understood why a cleverperson might hunt them. But here again

Poggio’s indifference was baffling.The stranger was going to a

monastery, but he was not a priest or atheologian or an inquisitor, and he wasnot looking for prayer books. He wasafter old manuscripts, many of themmoldy, worm-eaten, and all butindecipherable even to the best-trainedreaders. If the sheets of parchment onwhich such books were written were stillintact, they had a certain cash value,since they could be carefully scrapedclean with knives, smoothed with talcumpowder, and written over anew. ButPoggio was not in the parchment-buyingbusiness, and he actually loathed thosewho scratched off the old letters. Hewanted to see what was written on them,even if the writing was crabbed anddifficult, and he was most interested inmanuscripts that were four or five

hundred years old, going back then tothe tenth century or even earlier.

To all but a handful of people inGermany, this quest, had Poggio tried toarticulate it, would have seemed weird.And it would have seemed weirder still ifPoggio had gone on to explain that hewas not in fact at all interested in whatwas written four or five hundred yearsago. He despised that time and regardedit as a sink of superstition and ignorance.What he really hoped to find were wordsthat had nothing to do with the moment inwhich they were written down on the oldparchment, words that were in the bestpossible case uncontaminated by themental universe of the lowly scribe whocopied them. That scribe, Poggio hoped,was dutifully and accurately copying astill older parchment, one made by yetanother scribe whose humble life was

equally of no particular consequence tothe book hunter except insofar as it leftbehind this trace. If the nearly miraculousrun of good fortune held, the earliermanuscript, long vanished into dust, wasin turn a faithful copy of a more ancientmanuscript, and that manuscript a copyof yet another. Now at last for Poggio thequarry became exciting, and the hunter’sheart in his breast beat faster. The trailwas leading him back to Rome, not thecontemporary Rome of the corrupt papalcourt, intrigues, political debility, andperiodic outbreaks of bubonic plague,but the Rome of the Forum and theSenate House and a Latin languagewhose crystalline beauty filled him withwonder and the longing for a lost world.

What could any of this mean toanyone who had his feet on the groundin southern Germany in 1417? Listening

to Poggio, a superstitious man mighthave suspected a particular type ofsorcery, bibliomancy; a moresophisticated man might have diagnoseda psychological obsession, bibliomania;a pious man might have wondered whyany sound soul would feel a passionateattraction for the time before the Saviourbrought the promise of redemption to thebenighted pagans. And all would haveasked the obvious question: whom doesthis man serve?

Poggio himself might have beenhard-pressed for an answer. He had untilrecently served the pope, as he hadserved a succession of earlier Romanpontiffs. His occupation was scriptor, thatis, a skilled writer of official documents inthe papal bureaucracy, and, throughadroitness and cunning, he had risen tothe coveted position of apostolic

secretary. He was on hand then to writedown the pope’s words, record hissovereign decisions, craft in elegantLatin his extensive internationalcorrespondence. In a formal court setting,in which physical proximity to theabsolute ruler was a key asset, Poggiowas a man of importance. He listenedwhile the pope whispered something inhis ear; he whispered something back;he knew the meaning of the pope’ssmiles and frowns. He had access, asthe very word “secretary” suggests, to thepope’s secrets. And this pope had agreat many secrets.

But at the time that Poggio wasriding off in search of ancientmanuscripts, he was no longer apostolicsecretary. He had not displeased hismaster, the pope, and that master wasstill alive. But everything had changed.

The pope Poggio had served and beforewhom the faithful (and the less thanfaithful) had trembled was at that momentin the winter of 1417 sitting in an imperialprison in Heidelberg. Stripped of his title,his name, his power, and his dignity, hehad been publicly disgraced,condemned by the princes of his ownchurch. The “holy and infallible” GeneralCouncil of Constance declared that byhis “detestable and unseemly life”3 hehad brought scandal on the Church andon Christendom, and that he was unfit toremain in his exalted office. Accordingly,the council released all believers fromfidelity and obedience to him; indeed, itwas now forbidden to call him pope or toobey him. In the long history of theChurch, with its impressive share ofscandals, little like this had happened

before—and nothing like it hashappened since.

The deposed pope was not there inperson, but Poggio, his erstwhileapostolic secretary, may have beenpresent when the archbishop of Rigahanded the papal seal to a goldsmith,who solemnly broke it in pieces, alongwith the papal arms. All of the ex-pope’sservants were formally dismissed, andhis correspondence—thecorrespondence that Poggio had beeninstrumental in managing—was officiallyterminated. The pope who had calledhimself John XXIII no longer existed; theman who had borne that title was nowonce again what he had beenchristened, Baldassare Cossa. AndPoggio was now a masterless man.

To be masterless in the earlyfifteenth century was for most men an

unenviable, even dangerous state.Villages and towns looked withsuspicion on itinerants; vagrants werewhipped and branded; and on lonelypaths in a largely unpoliced world theunprotected were exceedinglyvulnerable. Of course, Poggio was hardlya vagrant. Sophisticated and highlyskilled, he had long moved in the circlesof the great. The armed guards at theVatican and the Castel St. Angelo let himpass through the gates without a word ofinquiry, and important suitors to the papalcourt tried to catch his eye. He had directaccess to an absolute ruler, the wealthyand cunning master of enormousterritories, who also claimed to be thespiritual master of all of WesternChristendom. In the private chambers ofpalaces, as in the papal court itself, theapostolic secretary Poggio was a familiar

presence, exchanging jokes withbejeweled cardinals, chatting withambassadors, and drinking fine winefrom cups of crystal and gold. In Florencehe had been befriended by some of themost powerful figures in the Signoria, thecity’s ruling body, and he had adistinguished circle of friends.

But Poggio was not in Rome orFlorence. He was in Germany, and thepope he had followed to the city ofConstance was in prison. The enemiesof John XXIII had triumphed and werenow in control. Doors that had once beenopen to Poggio were firmly shut. Andsuitors eager for a favor—a dispensation,a legal ruling, a lucrative position forthemselves or their relatives—who hadpaid court to the secretary as a means topay court to his master were all lookingelsewhere. Poggio’s income abruptly

ceased.That income had been

considerable. Scriptors received no fixedstipend, but they were permitted tocharge fees for executing documents andobtaining what were called “concessionsof grace,” that is, legal favors in mattersthat required some technical correctionor exception granted orally or in writingby the pope. And, of course, there wereother, less official fees that wouldprivately flow to someone who had thepope’s ear. In the mid-fifteenth century,the income for a secretary was 250 to300 florins annually, and anentrepreneurial spirit could make muchmore. At the end of a twelve-year periodin this office, Poggio’s colleague Georgeof Trebizond had salted4 away over4,000 florins in Roman banks, along with

handsome investments in real estate.In his letters to friends Poggio

claimed throughout his life that he wasneither ambitious nor greedy. He wrote acelebrated essay attacking avarice asone of the most hateful of human vices,and he excoriated the greed ofhypocritical monks, unscrupulousprinces, and grasping merchants. Itwould be foolish, of course, to take suchprofessions at face value: there is ampleevidence from later in his career, whenhe managed to return to the papal court,that Poggio used his office to makemoney hand over fist. By the 1450s5,along with a family palazzo and acountry estate, he had managed toacquire several farms, nineteen separatepieces of land, and two houses inFlorence, and he had also made very

large deposits in banking and businesshouses.

But this prosperity lay decades inthe future. An official inventory (called acatasto) compiled in 1427 by tax officialsindicated that Poggio had fairly modestmeans. And a decade earlier, at the timethat John XXIII was deposed, he almostcertainly had far less. Indeed, his lateracquisitiveness may have been areaction to the memory of those longmonths, stretching into several leanyears, when he found himself in astrange land without a position or anincome and with very few resources onwhich to fall back. In the winter of 1417,when he rode through the South Germancountryside, Poggio had little or no ideawhere his next florins would come from.

It is all the more striking that in this

difficult period6 Poggio did not quicklyfind a new position or make haste toreturn to Italy. What he did instead was togo book-hunting.

CHAPTER TWO

THE MOMENT OFDISCOVERY

ITALIANS HAD BEEN book-hunting forthe better part of a century, ever since thepoet and scholar Petrarch brought glory1on himself in the 1330s by piecingtogether Livy’s monumental History ofRome and finding forgotten masterpiecesby Cicero, Propertius, and others.Petrarch’s achievement had inspiredothers to seek out lost classics that hadbeen lying unread, often for centuries.The recovered texts were copied, edited,

commented upon, and eagerlyexchanged, conferring distinction onthose who had found them and formingthe basis for what became known as the“study of the humanities.”

The “humanists,” as those whowere devoted to this study were called,knew from carefully poring over the textsthat had survived from classical Romethat many once famous books or parts ofbooks were still missing. Occasionally,the ancient authors whom Poggio andhis fellow humanists eagerly read gavetantalizing quotations from these books,often accompanying extravagant praiseor vituperative attacks. Alongsidediscussions of Virgil and Ovid, forexample, the Roman rhetoricianQuintilian remarked that “Macer andLucretius are certainly2 worth reading,”

and went on to discuss Varro of Atax,Cornelius Severus, Saleius Bassus,Gaius Rabirius, Albinovanus Pedo,Marcus Furius Bibaculus, Lucius Accius,Marcus Pacuvius, and others whoseworks he greatly admired. The humanistsknew that some of these missing workswere likely to have been lost forever—asit turned out, with the exception ofLucretius, all of the authors justmentioned have been lost—but theysuspected that others, perhaps manyothers, were hidden away in dark places,not only in Italy but across the Alps. Afterall, Petrarch had found the manuscript ofCicero’s Pro Archia in Liège, in Belgium,and the Propertius manuscript in Paris.

The prime hunting grounds forPoggio and his fellow book hunters werethe libraries of old monasteries, and forgood reason: for long centuries

monasteries had been virtually the onlyinstitutions that cared about books. Evenin the stable and prosperous times of theRoman Empire, literacy rates, by ourstandards3 at least, were not high. As theempire crumbled, as cities decayed,trade declined, and the increasinglyanxious populace scanned the horizonfor barbarian armies, the whole Romansystem of elementary and highereducation fell apart. What began asdownsizing went on to wholesaleabandonment. Schools closed, librariesand academies shut their doors,professional grammarians and teachersof rhetoric found themselves out of work.There were more important things toworry about than the fate of books.

But all monks were expected toknow how to read. In a world

increasingly dominated by illiteratewarlords, that expectation, formulatedearly in the history of monasticism, wasof incalculable importance. Here is theRule from the monasteries established inEgypt and throughout the Middle East bythe late fourth-century Coptic saintPachomius. When a candidate foradmission to the monastery presentshimself to the elders,

they shall give him twenty4 Psalmsor two of the Apostles’ epistles orsome other part of Scripture. And ifh e is illiterate he shall go at thefirst, third and sixth hours tosomeone who can teach and hasbeen appointed for him. He shallstand before him and learn verystudiously and with all gratitude.

The fundamentals of a syllable, theverbs and nouns shall be writtenfor him and even if he does notwant to, he shall be compelled toread. (Rule 139)

“He shall be compelled to read.” It wasthis compulsion that, through centuries ofchaos, helped to salvage theachievements of ancient thought.

Though in the most influential of allthe monastic rules, written in the sixthcentury, St. Benedict did not similarlyspecify an explicit literacy requirement,he provided the equivalent of one byincluding a period each day for reading—“prayerful reading,” as he put it—aswell as manual labor. “Idleness is theenemy of the soul,” the saint wrote, andhe made certain that the hours would befilled up. Monks would be permitted to

read at certain other times as well,though such voluntary reading wouldhave to be conducted in strict silence. (InBenedict’s time, as throughout antiquity,reading was ordinarily performedaudibly.) But about the prescribedreading times there was nothingvoluntary.

The monks were to read, whetherthey felt like it or not, and the Rule calledfor careful supervision:

Above all, one or two seniors5must surely be deputed to makethe rounds of the monastery whilethe brothers are reading. Their dutyis to see that no brother is soacediosus as to waste time orengage in idle talk to the neglect ofhis reading, and so not only harm

himself but also distract others.(49:17–18)

Acediosus, sometimes translated as“apathetic,” refers to an illness, specific tomonastic communities, which hadalready been brilliantly diagnosed in thelate fourth century by the Desert FatherJohn Cassian. The monk in the grip ofacedia would find it difficult or impossibleto read. Looking away from his book, hemight try to distract himself with gossipbut would more likely glance in disgust athis surroundings and at his fellowmonks. He would feel that things werebetter somewhere else, that he waswasting his life, that everything was staleand pointless, that he was suffocating.

He looks about anxiously6 this way

and that, and sighs that none of thebrethren come to see him, andoften goes in and out of his cell,and frequently gazes up at the sun,as if it was too slow in setting, andso a kind of unreasonableconfusion of mind takespossession of him like some fouldarkness.

Such a monk—and there were evidentlymany of them—had succumbed to whatwe would call a clinical state ofdepression.

Cassian called the disease “thenoonday demon,” and the BenedictineRule set a careful watch, especially atreading times, to detect anyonemanifesting its symptoms.

If such a monk7 is found—Godforbid—he should be reproved afirst and a second time. If he doesnot amend, he must be subjectedto the punishment of the rule sothat the others may have fear.

A refusal to read at the prescribed time—whether because of distraction, boredom,or despair—would thus be visited first bypublic criticism and then, if the refusalcontinued, by blows. The symptoms ofpsychic pain would be driven out byphysical pain. And, suitably chastened,the distressed monk would return—inprinciple at least—to his “prayerfulreading.”

There was yet another time inwhich the Benedictine Rule called forreading: every day at meals one of the

brothers was assigned, on a weeklybasis, to read aloud. Benedict was wellaware that for at least certain of themonks this assignment would occasionpride, and he therefore tried to suppressthe sensation as best he could: “Let theincoming reader ask all to pray for him sothat God may shield him from the feelingof elation.”8 He was aware too that forothers the readings would be anoccasion for mockery or simply for chat,and here too the Rule made carefulprovision: “Let there be9 completesilence. No whispering, no speaking—only the reader’s voice should be heardthere.” But, above all, he wanted toprevent these readings from provokingdiscussion or debate: “No one shouldpresume10 to ask a question about thereading or about anything else, lest

occasion be given.”“Lest occasion be given”: the

phrase, in a text normally quite clear, isoddly vague. Occasion to whom or forwhat? Modern editors sometimes insertthe phrase “to the devil” and that indeedmay be what is implied here. But whyshould the Prince of Darkness be excitedby a question about the reading? Theanswer must be that any question,however innocuous, could raise theprospect of a discussion, a discussionthat would imply that religious doctrineswere open to inquiry and argument.

Benedict did not absolutely prohibitcommentary on the sacred texts thatwere read aloud, but he wanted to restrictits source: “The superior,”11 the Ruleallows, “may wish to say a few words ofinstruction.” Those words were not to be

questioned or contradicted, and indeedall contention was in principle to besuppressed. As the listing ofpunishments in the influential rule of theIrish monk Columbanus (born in the yearBenedict died) makes clear, livelydebate, intellectual or otherwise, wasforbidden. To the monk who has dared tocontradict a fellow monk with such wordsas “It is not as you say,” there is a heavypenalty: “an imposition of silence or fiftyblows.” The high walls that hedged aboutthe mental life of the monks—theimposition of silence, the prohibition ofquestioning, the punishing of debate withslaps or blows of the whip—were allmeant to affirm unambiguously that thesepious communities were the opposite ofthe philosophical academies of Greeceor Rome, places that had thrived uponthe spirit of contradiction and cultivated a

restless, wide-ranging curiosity.All the same, monastic rules did

require reading, and that was enough toset in motion an extraordinary chain ofconsequences. Reading was notoptional or desirable or recommended; ina community that took its obligations withdeadly seriousness, reading wasobligatory. And reading required books.Books that were opened again and againeventually fell apart, however carefullythey were handled. Therefore, almostinadvertently, monastic rulesnecessitated that monks repeatedlypurchase or acquire books. In the courseof the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still moremiserable aftermath, the last commercialworkshops of book production folded,and the vestiges of the book market fellapart. Therefore, again almost

inadvertently, monastic rulesnecessitated that monks carefullypreserve and copy those books that theyalready possessed. But all trade with thepapyrus makers of Egypt had longvanished, and in the absence of acommercial book market, the commercialindustry for converting animal skins towriting surfaces had fallen intoabeyance. Therefore, once again almostinadvertently, monastic rulesnecessitated that monks learn thelaborious art of making parchment andsalvaging existing parchment. Withoutwishing to emulate the pagan elites byplacing books or writing at the center ofsociety, without affirming the importanceof rhetoric or grammar, without prizingeither learning or debate, monksnonetheless became the principalreaders, librarians, book preservers, and

book producers of the Western world.

Poggio and the other humanists on thetrail of lost classics knew all this. Havingalready sifted through many of themonastic libraries in Italy and havingfollowed Petrarch’s lead in France, theyalso knew that the great, unchartedterritories were Switzerland andGermany. But many of those monasterieswere extremely difficult to reach—theirfounders had built them in deliberatelyremote places, in order to withdraw fromthe temptations, distractions, anddangers of the world. And once an eagerhumanist, having endured thediscomforts and risks of travel, managed

to reach the distant monasteries, whatthen? The number of scholars who knewwhat to look for and who were competentto recognize what they had come to find,if they had the good fortune to stumbleacross it, was extremely small. Therewas, moreover, a problem of access: toget through the door a scholar wouldhave to be able to persuade a skepticalabbot and a still more skeptical monasticlibrarian that he had a legitimate reasonto be there. Access to the library wasordinarily denied to any outsider.Petrarch was a cleric; he could at leastmake his appeal from within the largeinstitutional community of the Church.Many of the humanists by contrast werelaymen and would have arousedimmediate suspicion.

This daunting list did not exhaustthe problems. For if a book hunter

reached a monastery, got past theheavily barred door, entered the library,and actually found something interesting,he would still need to do something withthe manuscript he had found.

Books were scarce and valuable.They conferred prestige on themonastery that possessed them, and themonks were not inclined to let them outof their sight, particularly if they had anyprior experience with light-fingeredItalian humanists. On occasionmonasteries tried to secure theirpossession by freighting their preciousmanuscripts with curses. “For him thatstealeth,12 or borroweth and returnethnot, this book from its owner,” one ofthese curses runs,

let it change into a serpent in his

hand and rend him. Let him bestruck with palsy, and all hismembers blasted. Let him languishin pain crying aloud for mercy, andlet there be no surcease to hisagony till he sing in dissolution. Letbookworms gnaw his entrails intoken of the Worm that dieth not,and when at last he goeth to hisfinal punishment, let the flames ofHell consume him forever.

Even a worldly skeptic, with a strongcraving for what he had in his hands,might have hesitated before slippingsuch a book into his cloak.

If the monks were poor or perhapssimply venal, they could be offered somemoney to part with their books, but thevery interest showed by a stranger wouldinevitably make the price soar. It was

always possible to ask the abbot to allowa manuscript to be carried off, with asolemn promise that it would be shortlyreturned. But though exceptionallytrusting or naive abbots existed, theywere few and far between. There was noway to compel assent, and if the answerwas no, the whole venture was a deadloss. As a last resort, one could alwaysdefy curses and try theft, of course, butmonastic communities were cultures ofsurveillance. Visitors would be watchedparticularly carefully, the gates were shutand locked at night, and some of thebrothers were stout churls who would notscruple to beat an apprehended thief towithin an inch of his life.

Poggio was almost uniquely suitedto meet these challenges. He had beenexceptionally well trained in the specialskills needed to decipher old

handwriting. He was a wonderfully giftedLatinist, with a particularly acute eye forthe telltale diction, rhetorical devices,and grammatical structures of classicalLatin. He had read widely and attentivelyin the literature of antiquity and hadcommitted to his capacious memory thedozens of clues that hinted at the identityof particular authors or works that hadbeen lost. He was not himself a monk ora priest, but his long service in the papalcuria or court had given him intimate,inside knowledge of the institutionalstructures of the Church, as well aspersonal acquaintance with many of itsmost powerful clerics, including asuccession of popes.

If even these exalted connectionsshould prove insufficient to get himthrough the locked doors that led to aremote abbey’s library, Poggio also

possessed considerable personal charm.He was a marvelous raconteur, a slygossip, and an indefatigable teller ofjokes, many of them off-color. He couldnot, to be sure, converse with theGerman monks in their native language.Though he had lived for more than threeyears in a German-speaking city, by hisown account he had learned no German.For so gifted a linguist, this ignoranceseems to have been willed: German wasthe language of the barbarians, andPoggio evidently had no interest inacquiring it. In Constance he probablycocooned himself almost entirely in aLatin- and Italian-speaking social world.

But if a failure to speak Germanmust have been vexing on the road, atinns or other way stations, it would nothave posed a serious problem oncePoggio had arrived at his destination.

The abbot, the librarian, and many othermembers of the monastic communitywould have spoken Latin. They wouldnot in all likelihood have possessed theelegant classical Latin that Poggio hadpainstakingly mastered but rather, tojudge from the many vigorouscontemporary literary works that survive,a vital, fluent, highly flexible Latin thatcould swoop effortlessly from the subtlestof scholastic distinctions to the earthiestof obscenities. If Poggio sensed that hecould impress his hosts with moralseriousness, he could have discoursedeloquently about the miseries of thehuman condition; if he thought he couldwin them over by making them laugh, hecould have launched into one of his talesof foolish rustics, compliant housewives,and sexually rapacious priests.

Poggio possessed one further gift

that set him apart from virtually all theother book-hunting humanists. He was asuperbly well-trained scribe, withexceptionally fine handwriting, greatpowers of concentration, and a highdegree of accuracy. It is difficult for us, atthis distance, to take in the significanceof such qualities: our technologies forproducing transcriptions, facsimiles, andcopies have almost entirely erased whatwas once an important personalachievement. That importance began todecline, though not at all precipitously,even in Poggio’s own lifetime, for by the1430s a German entrepreneur, JohannGutenberg, began experimenting with anew invention, movable type, whichwould revolutionize the reproduction andtransmission of texts. By the century’send printers, especially the great Aldusin Venice, would print Latin texts in a

typeface whose clarity and eleganceremain unrivalled after five centuries.That typeface was based on the beautifulhandwriting13 of Poggio and hishumanist friends. What Poggio did byhand to produce a single copy wouldsoon be done mechanically to producehundreds.

But this achievement lay in thefuture, and, in any case, the printers whoset the books in type still depended onaccurate, readable, handwrittentranscriptions, often of manuscripts thatwere illegible to all but a few. Poggio’stalent as a transcriber struckcontemporaries as uncanny, all the moreso because he worked so rapidly. Whatthis meant was that he could not onlyinveigle his way into the monastery andnose out the precious manuscripts of lost

works, but also that he could borrowthem, copy them quickly, and send theresults back to humanists waiting eagerlyat home in Italy. If borrowing provedimpossible—that is, if the librarianrefused to lend a particular manuscript—Poggio could copy it on the spot, or, ifnecessary, could entrust the task to ascribe whom he had personally trainedup to at least a minimal level ofcompetence.

In 1417, then, Poggio the book hunterhad a near-perfect conjunction of time,skills, and desire. All that he lacked wasready money. Traveling, even frugally,was expensive. There were costs for

renting a horse; fees for crossing rivers orriding on toll roads; charges, little morethan extortion, by surly customs officialsand agents of petty lordlings; gratuities toguides through difficult passes; and, ofcourse, bills for food and lodging andstabling at inns. He also needed moneyto pay an assistant scribe, and toprovide, if necessary, the incentive toinduce a reluctant monastery to lend itstreasure.

Even if he had banked some fundsfrom his years in the papal bureaucracy,Poggio is very unlikely to have been ableto pay these costs on his own. In suchcircumstances, the inveterate letter writerwould have had recourse to his pen. It isprobable that he wrote to wealthy friendsat home who shared his passion andexplained to them that circumstanceshad suddenly given him the opportunity

about which they had only dreamed. Ingood health, untrammeled by work orfamily, obliged to no one, at liberty tocome and go as he chose, he wasprepared to embark on a serious searchfor the lost treasures that meant most tothem—the heritage of the ancient world.

Such support, whether it came froma single rich patron or from a group offellow humanists, helps to account for thefact that in January 1417, Poggio washeading toward the destination where hewould make his discovery. The supportmust have been considerable, for thiswas not his only book-hunting expeditionthat winter. It followed directly on anothertrip, to the venerable monastery of St.Gall, not far from the city of Constance,and that trip was itself a return visit. Thepreceding year at St. Gall, in thecompany of two Italian friends, Poggio

had made a series of important finds.Thinking that they might have overlookedother treasures, he and one of the friendswent back.

Poggio and his companion,Bartolomeo de Aragazzi, had much incommon. Both hailed from Tuscany,Poggio from the modest town ofTerranuova near Arezzo, Bartolomeofrom the beautiful hilltop city ofMontepulciano. Both had gone to Romeand had acquired positions as scriptorsin the papal curia. Both had come toConstance to serve as apostolicsecretaries14 in the disastrouspontificate of John XXIII and,consequently, both found themselves, inthe wake of the pope’s downfall, withtime on their hands. And both wereardent humanists, eager to use their

skills in reading and copying to recoverthe lost texts of antiquity.

They were close friends, workingand traveling together and sharing thesame ambition, but they were also rivals,competitors in the pursuit of the fame thatcame with discovery. “I hate all boastfulconversation,15 all flattery, allexaggeration,” Bartolomeo wrote to animportant patron in Italy; “May I be keptfrom taking pride in dreams of self-exaltation or vainglory.” The letter, datedJanuary 19, 1417, was written from St.Gall, and it goes on to mention a few ofthe notable discoveries he had made inwhat he calls the “prison” in which theywere penned. He could not, he added,hope to describe all the volumes he hadfound, “for a day would hardly besufficient to list them all.” Tellingly, he

does not so much as mention the nameof his traveling companion, PoggioBracciolini.

The problem was thatBartolomeo’s finds were simply not verythrilling. He had dredged up a copy of abook by Flavius Vegetius Renatus on theancient Roman army—a book, he wroteimplausibly, that will “do us good, if weever use him sometimes in camp or moregloriously on a crusade”—and a smalldictionary or word list by PompeiusFestus. Not only were both booksexceedingly minor but also, asBartolomeo himself must have known,both were already available in Italy, so infact neither was actually a discovery.

In late January, having failed to layhands on the great treasures they hadhoped to uncover and perhaps feelingthe burden of their competitiveness, the

friends went their separate ways. Poggioevidently headed north, probablyaccompanied by a German scribe whomhe was training. Bartolomeo seems tohave gone off by himself. “I shall setout16 for another monastery of theHermits deep in the Alps,” he wrote to hisItalian correspondent. He planned thento go on to still more remote monasteries.The places were extremely difficult toreach, especially in winter—“the way isrough and broken, for there is noapproach to them except through theprecipices of the Alps and through riversand forests”—but he reminded himselfthat “the path of virtue is very full of toiland peril.” In these monastic libraries,rumors had it, a vast trove of ancientbooks was buried. “I shall try to urge thispoor little body to undertake the effort of

rescuing them and not to flinch at thedifficulties of their location, at thediscomforts and at the increasing cold ofthe Alps.”

It is easy enough to smile at suchclaims of hardship—trained as a lawyer,Bartolomeo was certainly calculating arhetorical effect—but in fact he fell illshortly after he left St. Gall and wasforced to return to Constance, where ittook him months to recuperate. Poggio,on the road north, would not have knownthat, since Bartolomeo had dropped outof the hunt, he was now searching alone.

Poggio did not like monks. He knewseveral impressive ones, men of great

moral seriousness and learning. But onthe whole he found them superstitious,ignorant, and hopelessly lazy.Monasteries, he thought, were thedumping grounds for those deemed unfitfor life in the world. Noblemen fobbed offthe sons they judged to be weaklings,misfits, or good-for-nothings; merchantssent their dim-witted or paralytic childrenthere; peasants got rid of extra mouthsthey could not feed. The hardiest of theinmates could at least do someproductive labor in the monasterygardens and the adjacent fields, asmonks in earlier, most austere times haddone, but for the most part, Poggiothought, they were a pack of idlers.Behind the thick walls of the cloisters, theparasites would mumble their prayersand live off the income generated bythose who farmed the monastery’s

extensive landholdings. The Church wasa landlord, wealthier than the greatestnobles in the realm, and it possessed theworldly power to enforce its rents and allits other rights and privileges. When thenewly elected bishop of Hildesheim, inthe north of Germany, asked to see thediocesan library, he was brought to thearmory17 and shown the pikes andbattleaxes hanging on the walls; these,he was informed, were the books withwhich the rights of the bishopric hadbeen won and must be defended. Theinhabitants of wealthy monasteries mightnot have to call upon these weaponsvery frequently, but, as they sat in the dimlight and contemplated their revenues,they knew—and their tenants knew—thatbrute force was available.

With his friends in the curia Poggio

shared jokes about the venality, stupidity,and sexual appetite of monks. And theirclaims to piety left him unimpressed: “Icannot find that they do anything18 butsing like grasshoppers,” he wrote, “and Icannot help thinking they are too liberallypaid for the mere exercise of their lungs.”Even the hard work of monastic spiritualdiscipline seemed paltry to him, when setagainst the real hard work he observedin the fields: “They extol their labors as akind of Herculean task, because they risein the night to chant the praises of God.This is no doubt an extraordinary proof ofmerit, that they sit up to exercisethemselves in psalmody. What wouldthey say if they rose to go to the plough,like farmers, exposed to the wind andrain, with bare feet, and with their bodiesthinly clad?” Their whole enterprise

seemed to him an exercise in hypocrisy.But, of course, as he approached

his targeted monastery, Poggio wouldhave buried these views in his breast. Hemay have despised monastic life, but heunderstood it well. He knew preciselywhere in the monastery he needed to goand what ingratiating words he had tospeak to gain access to the things hemost wanted to see. Above all, he knewexactly how the things he sought hadbeen produced. Though he ridiculedwhat he regarded as monastic sloth, heknew that whatever he hoped to findexisted only because of centuries ofinstitutional commitment and long,painstaking human labor.

The Benedictine Rule had calledfor manual labor, as well as prayer andreading, and it was always assumed thatthis labor could include writing. The early

founders of monastic orders did notregard copying manuscripts as anexalted activity; on the contrary, as theywere highly aware, most of the copyingin the ancient world had been done byeducated slaves. The task was thereforeinherently humiliating as well as tedious,a perfect combination for the asceticproject of disciplining the spirit. Poggiohad no sympathy with such spiritualdiscipline; competitive and ambitious, hisspirit longed to shine in the light of theworld, not to shrink from its gaze. For himcopying manuscripts, which he did withunrivalled skill, was not an ascetic butrather an aesthetic undertaking, one bywhich he advanced his own personalreputation. But by virtue of that skill hewas able to see at a glance—with eitheradmiration or scorn—exactly what effortand ability had gone into the manuscript

that lay before him.Not every monk was equally adept

at copying, just as not every monk wasequally adept at the hard farm labor onwhich the survival of the earlycommunities depended. The earlyregulations already envisaged a divisionof labor, as in the Rule of St. Ferreol(530–581), a French Benedictine: “Hewho does not turn up the earth with theplough ought to write the parchment withhis fingers.” (The reverse, of course, wasalso true: he who could not writeparchment with his fingers was assignedto the plough.) Those who wroteunusually well—in fine, clear handwritingthat the other monks could easily readand with painstaking accuracy in thetranscription—came to be valued. In the“wergild” codes that in Germanic landsand in Ireland specified the payment of

reparations for murder—200 shillings forkilling a churl, 300 for a low-rankingcleric, 400 if the cleric was saying masswhen he was attacked, and so forth—theloss of a scribe by violence was rankedequal to the loss of a bishop or an abbot.

The high price, at a time when lifewas cheap, suggests both how importantand how difficult it was for monasteries toobtain the books that they needed inorder to enforce the reading rule. Eventhe most celebrated monastic libraries ofthe Middle Ages were tiny in comparisonwith the libraries of antiquity or those thatexisted in Baghdad or Cairo. Toassemble a modest number of books, inthe long centuries before the invention ofthe printing press forever changed thee q u a t i o n , meant the eventualestablishment of what were calledscriptoria, workshops where monks

would be trained to sit for long hoursmaking copies. At first the copying wasprobably done in an improvised setting inthe cloister, where, even if the coldsometimes stiffened the fingers, at leastthe light would be good. But in timespecial rooms were designated or builtfor the purpose. In the greatestmonasteries, increasingly eager toamass prestigious collections of books,these were large rooms equipped withclear glass windows under which themonks, as many as thirty of them, sat atindividual desks, sometimes partitionedoff from one another.

In charge of the scriptorium was theperson on whom Poggio and the otherbook hunters would have focused theirmost seductive blandishments: themonastery’s librarian. This importantfigure would have been accustomed to

extravagant courtship, for he wasresponsible for providing all of theequipment that was required for thecopying of the manuscripts: pens, ink,and penknives whose precise merits ordefects would become overwhelminglyobvious to the laboring scribe after a fewhours at the day’s task. The librariancould, if he wished, make a scribe’s lifemiserable or, alternatively, provide afavorite with particularly fine tools. Thosetools also included rulers, awls (to maketiny holes for ruling the lines evenly),fine-pointed metal pens for drawing thelines, reading frames to hold the book tobe copied, weights to keep the pagesfrom turning. For manuscripts that wereto be illuminated, there were still otherspecialized tools and materials.

Most books in the ancient worldtook the form of scrolls—like the Torah

scrolls that Jews use in their services tothis day—but by the fourth centuryChristians had almost completely optedfor a different format, the codex, fromwhich our familiar books derive. Thecodex has the huge advantage of beingfar easier for readers to find their wayabout in: the text can be convenientlypaginated and indexed, and the pagescan be turned quickly to the desiredplace. Not until the invention of thecomputer, with its superior searchfunctions, could a serious challenge bemounted to the codex’s magnificentlysimple and flexible format. Only nowhave we begun once again to speak of“scrolling” through a text.

Since papyrus was no longeravailable and paper did not come intogeneral use until the fourteenth century,for more than a thousand years the chief

writing material used for books wasmade from the skins of animals—cows,sheep, goats, and occasionally deer.These surfaces needed to be madesmooth, and hence another tool that themonastic librarian distributed waspumice stone, to rub away the remaininganimal hair along with any bumps orimperfections. The scribe to whom apoor-quality parchment had been givenwas in for a very disagreeable task, andin the margins of surviving monasticmanuscripts there are occasionaloutbursts of distress: “The parchment ishairy”19 … “Thin ink, bad parchment,difficult text” … “Thank God, it will soonbe dark.” “Let the copyist be permitted toput an end to his labor,” a weary monkwrote beneath his name, the date, andthe place where he worked; “Now I’ve

written20 the whole thing,” wrote another.“For Christ’s sake give me a drink.”

The finest parchment, the one thatmade life easier for scribes and musthave figured in their sweetest dreams,was made of calfskin and called vellum.And the best of the lot was uterinevellum, from the skins of aborted calves.Brilliantly white, smooth, and durable,these skins were reserved for the mostprecious books, ones graced withelaborate, gemlike miniatures andoccasionally encased in coversencrusted with actual gems. The librariesof the world still preserve a reasonablenumber of these remarkable objects, theachievement of scribes who lived sevenor eight hundred years ago and laboredfor untold hours to create somethingbeautiful.

Good scribes were exempted from

Good scribes were exempted fromcertain times of collective prayer, in orderto maximize the hours of daylight in thescriptorium. And they did not have towork at night: because of an entirelyjustifiable fear of fire, all candlelight wasforbidden. But for the time—about sixhours a day—that they actually spent attheir desks, their lives belonged entirelyto their books. It was possible, in certainmonasteries at least, to hope that monkswould understand what they werecopying: “Vouchsafe, O Lord,21 to blessthis workroom of Thy servants,” declaredthe dedication of one scriptorium, “that allwhich they write therein may becomprehended by their intelligence andrealized in their works.” But the actualinterest of the scribes in the books theycopied (or their distaste for those books)was strictly irrelevant. Indeed, insofar as

the copying was a form of discipline—anexercise in humility and a willingembrace of pain—distaste or simpleincomprehension might be preferable toengagement. Curiosity was to beavoided at all costs.

The complete subordination of themonastic scribe to the text—the erasure,in the interest of crushing the monk’sspirit, of his intellect and sensibility—could not have been further fromPoggio’s own avid curiosity and egotism.But he understood that his passionatehope of recovering reasonably accuratetraces of the ancient past dependedheavily on this subordination. Anengaged reader, Poggio knew, wasprone to alter his text in order to get it tomake sense, but such alterations, overcenturies, inevitably led to wholesalecorruptions. It was better that monastic

scribes had been forced to copyeverything exactly at it appeared beforetheir eyes, even those things that madeno sense at all.

A sheet with a cutout windowgenerally covered the page of themanuscript being copied, so that themonk had to focus on one line at a time.And monks were strictly forbidden tochange what they thought were mistakesin the texts they were copying. Theycould correct only their own slips of thepen by carefully scraping off the ink witha razor and repairing the spot with amixture of milk, cheese, and lime, themedieval version of our own product forwhiting out mistakes. There was nocrumpling up the page and startingafresh. Though the skins of sheep andgoats were plentiful, the process ofproducing parchment from them was

laborious. Good parchment was far toovaluable and scarce to be discarded.This value helps to account for the factthat monasteries collected ancientmanuscripts in the first place and did notconsign them to the rubbish.

To be sure, there were a certainnumber of abbots and of monasticlibrarians who treasured not only theparchment but also the pagan workswritten on them. Steeped in classicalliterature, some believed that they couldrifle its treasures without contamination,the way the ancient Hebrews had beenpermitted by God to steal the riches ofthe Egyptians. But over the generations,as a substantial Christian literature wascreated, it became less easy to makesuch an argument. Fewer and fewermonks were inclined, in any case, tomake it. Between the sixth century and

the middle of the eighth century, Greekand Latin classics virtually ceased to becopied at all. What had begun as anactive campaign to forget—a pious attackon pagan ideas—had evolved into actualforgetting. The ancient poems,philosophical treatises, and politicalspeeches, at one time so threatening andso alluring, were no longer in anyone’smind, let alone on anyone’s lips. Theyhad been reduced to the condition ofmute things, sheets of parchment,stitched together, covered with unreadwords.

Only the remarkable durability ofthe parchment used in these codiceskept the ideas of the ancients alive at all,and, as the humanist book hunters knew,even strong material was no guaranteeof survival. Working with knives,22

brushes, and rags, monks often carefullywashed away the old writings—Virgil,Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Lucretius—andwrote in their place the texts that theywere instructed by their superiors tocopy. The task must have been atiresome one, and, for the very rarescribe who actually cared about the workhe was erasing, an excruciating one.

If the original ink proved tenacious,it could still be possible to make out thetraces of the texts that were written over:a unique fourth-century copy of Cicero’sOn the Republic remained visiblebeneath a seventh-century copy of St.Augustine’s meditation on the Psalms;the sole surviving copy of Seneca’s bookon friendship was deciphered beneathan Old Testament inscribed in the latesixth century. These strange, layeredmanuscripts—called palimpsests; from

the Greek for “scraped again”—haveserved as the source of several majorworks from the ancient past that wouldnot otherwise be known. But no medievalmonk would have been encouraged toread, as it were, between the lines.

The monastery was a place ofrules, but in the scriptorium there wererules within rules. Access was denied toall non-scribes. Absolute silencereigned. Scribes were not allowed tochoose the particular books that theycopied or to break the dead silence byrequesting aloud from the librarian suchbooks as they might wish to consult inorder to complete the task that had beenassigned them. An elaborate gesturallanguage was invented in order tofacilitate such requests as werepermitted. If a scribe wanted to consult a

psalter, he made the general sign for abook—extending his hands and turningover imaginary pages—and then, byputting his hands on his head in theshape of a crown, the specific sign for thepsalms of King David. If he was askingfor a pagan book, he began, after makingthe general sign, to scratch behind hisear, like a dog scratching his fleas. And ifhe wished to have what the Churchregarded as a particularly offensive ordangerous pagan book, he could put twofingers into his mouth, as if he weregagging.

Poggio was a layman, part of a verydifferent world. His precise destination in

1417, after he parted ways withBartolomeo, is not known—perhaps likea prospector hiding the location of hismine, he deliberately withheld its namefrom his letters. There were dozens ofmonasteries to which he might havegone in the hope of turning up somethingremarkable, but many scholars have longthought that the likeliest candidate is theBenedictine Abbey of Fulda.23 Thatabbey, in a strategic area of centralGermany, between the Rhône and theVogelsberg Mountains, had the featuresthat most excited the interest of a bookhunter: it was ancient, it was rich, it hadonce possessed a great tradition oflearning, and it was now in decline.

If it was Fulda that he approached,Poggio could not afford to seemoverbearing. Founded in the eighth

century by a disciple of the Apostle ofGermany, St. Boniface, the abbey wasunusually independent. Its abbot was aprince of the Holy Roman Empire: whenhe walked in procession, an armor-cladknight carried the imperial banner beforehim, and he had the privilege of sitting atthe left hand of the emperor himself.Many of the monks were German nobles—men who would have had a very clearsense of the respect that was due tothem. If the monastery had lost some ofthe prestige it once enjoyed and hadbeen forced in the not too distant past topart with some of its immense territories,it nonetheless was a force to reckon with.With his modest birth and very limitedmeans, Poggio, the former apostolicsecretary of a disgraced and deposedpope, had few cards to play.

Rehearsing in his mind his little

speech of introduction, Poggio wouldhave dismounted and walked up thetree-lined avenue toward the abbey’ssingle, heavy gate. From the outsideFulda resembled a fortress; indeed, inthe preceding century, in a bitter disputewith the burghers of the adjacent city, ithad been violently attacked. Inside, likemost monasteries, it was strikingly self-sufficient. By January the extensivevegetable, flower, and botanical gardenswere in their winter sleep, but the monkswould have carefully harvested whatthey could store for the long, darkmonths, taking special care to gather themedicinal herbs that would be used inthe infirmary and the communal bath.The granaries at this point in the winterwould have still been reasonably full,and there would have been ample strawand oats for the horses and donkeys in

the stables. Looking around, Poggiowould have taken in the chicken coops,the covered yard for sheep, the cowshedwith its smell of manure and fresh milk,and the large pigsties. He might have felta pang for the olives and the wine ofTuscany, but he knew that he would notgo hungry. Past the mills and the oilpress, past the great basilica and itsadjacent cloister, past the houses for thenovices, the dormitory, the servants’quarters, and the pilgrims’ hospice wherehe and his assistant would be lodged,Poggio would have been led to theabbot’s house to meet the ruler of thislittle kingdom.

In 1417, if Fulda was indeedPoggio’s destination, that ruler wasJohann von Merlau. After greeting himhumbly, explaining something abouthimself, and presenting a letter of

recommendation from a well-knowncardinal, Poggio would almost certainlyhave begun by expressing his interest inglimpsing the precious relics of St.Boniface and saying a prayer in theirholy presence. His life, after all, was fullof such observances: bureaucrats in thepapal court routinely began and endedtheir days with prayers. And if nothing inhis letters suggests a particular interestin relics or the intervention of saints orthe rituals employed to reduce the soul’spainful time in Purgatory, Poggiononetheless would have known uponwhat possessions Fulda most prideditself.

The visitor would then as a specialfavor have been led into the basilica. Ifhe had not already taken it in, Poggiowould certainly have realized, as heentered the transept and walked down

the stairs into the dark, vaulted crypt, thatFulda’s pilgrimage church seemedstrangely familiar: it was directly modeledafter Rome’s fourth-century Basilica ofSt. Peter’s. (The vast St. Peter’s in Rometoday was built long after Poggio’sdeath.) There by candlelight, enshrinedin a rich setting of gold, crystal, andjewels, he would have seen the bones ofthe saint, massacred in 754 by theFrisians he was struggling to convert.

When he and his hosts emergedonce again into the light and when hedeemed that he had reached theappropriate moment, Poggio would havenudged the conversation toward hisactual purpose in coming. He could havedone so by initiating a discussion of oneof Fulda’s most celebrated figures,Rabanus Maurus, who had served asabbot for two decades, from 822 to 842.

Rabanus Maurus was a prolific author ofbiblical commentaries, doctrinaltreatises, pedagogical guides, scholarlycompendia, and a series of fantasticallybeautiful poems in cipher. Most of theseworks Poggio could easily have seen inthe Vatican Library, along with the vasttome for which Rabanus was bestknown: a work of stupefying eruditionand dullness that attempted to bringtogether in its twenty-two books all ofhuman knowledge. Its title was De rerumnaturis—“On the Natures of Things”—butcontemporaries, acknowledging thescope of its ambition, called it “On theUniverse.”

The works of the ninth-centurymonk epitomized the heavy, ploddingstyle that Poggio and his fellowhumanists despised. But he alsorecognized that Rabanus Maurus was an

immensely learned man, steeped inpagan as well as Christian literature, andthat he had transformed Fulda’smonastic school into the most importantin Germany. As all schools do, the one atFulda needed books, and Rabanus hadmet the need by greatly enriching themonastic library. Rabanus, who as ayoung man24 had studied with Alcuin,the greatest scholar of the age ofCharlemagne, knew where to get hishands on important manuscripts. He hadthem brought to Fulda, where he traineda large cohort of scribes to copy them.And so he had built what was for the timea stupendous collection.

That time, some six hundred yearsbefore Poggio, was from the bookhunter’s perspective highly propitious. Itwas far enough into the past to hold out

the possibility of a link to a more distantpast. And the gradual decline over thecenturies in the monastery’s intellectualseriousness only intensified theexcitement. Who knew what was sittingon those shelves, untouched perhaps forcenturies? Tattered manuscripts that hadchanced to survive the long nightmare ofchaos and destruction, in the wake of thefall of the Roman Empire, might wellhave found their way to remote Fulda.Rabanus’s monks could have made thescratching or gagging sign for paganbooks to copy, and those copies, havingfallen into oblivion, would be awaitingthe humanist’s revivifying touch.

Such, in any case, was Poggio’sardent hope, in Fulda or wherever hefound himself, and his pulse must havequickened when at last he would havebeen led by the monastery’s chief

librarian into a large vaulted room andshown a volume attached by a chain tothe librarian’s own desk. The volumewas a catalogue, and as he pored overits pages, Poggio pointed—for the rule ofsilence in the library was strictlyobserved—to the books he wanted tosee.

Genuine interest, as well as asense of discretion, might have dictatedthat Poggio request first to see unfamiliarworks by one of the greatest ChurchFathers, Tertullian. Then, as themanuscripts were brought to his desk, heplunged, with what must have beenincreasing excitement, into a series ofancient Roman authors whose workswere utterly unknown to him and to anyof his fellow humanists. Though Poggiodid not reveal precisely where he went,he did reveal—indeed, he trumpeted—

what he had found. For what all bookhunters dreamed of was actuallyhappening.

He opened an epic poem in some14,000 lines on the wars between Romeand Carthage. Poggio might haverecognized the name of the author, SiliusItalicus, though until this moment none ofhis works had surfaced. A cannypolitician and a wily, unscrupulousorator, who served as a tool in asuccession of show trials, Silius hadmanaged to survive the murderousreigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.In retirement, the younger Pliny hadwritten with urbane irony, he “obliteratedby the praiseworthy use25 he made ofleisure the stain he had incurred throughhis active exertions in former days.” NowPoggio and his friends would be able to

savor one of the fruits of this leisure.He opened another long poem, this

one by an author, Manilius, whose namethe book hunter would certainly not haverecognized, for it is not mentioned by anysurviving ancient author. Poggio saw atonce that it was a learned work onastronomy, and he would have beenable to tell from the style and from thepoet’s own allusions that it had beenwritten at the very beginning of theempire, during the reigns of Augustusand Tiberius.

More ghosts surged up from theRoman past. An ancient literary criticwho had flourished during Nero’s reignand had written notes and glosses onclassical authors; another critic whoquoted extensively from lost epics writtenin imitation of Homer; a grammarian whowrote a treatise on spelling that Poggio

knew his Latin-obsessed friends inFlorence would find thrilling. Yet anothermanuscript was a discovery whose thrillmight have been tinged for him withmelancholy: a large fragment of ahitherto unknown history of the RomanEmpire written by a high-ranking officerin the imperial army, AmmianusMarcellinus. The melancholy would havearisen not only from the fact that the firstthirteen of the original thirty-one bookswere missing from the manuscriptPoggio copied by hand—and these lostbooks have never been found—but alsofrom the fact that the work was written onthe eve of the empire’s collapse. Aclearheaded, thoughtful, and unusuallyimpartial historian, Ammianus seems tohave sensed the impending end. Hisdescription of a world exhausted bycrushing taxes, the financial ruin of large

segments of the population, and thedangerous decline in the army’s moralevividly conjured up the conditions thatmade it possible, some twenty years afterhis death, for the Goths to sack Rome.

Even the smallest of the finds thatPoggio was making was highlysignificant—for anything at all to surfaceafter so long seemed miraculous—butthey were all eclipsed, from our ownperspective if not immediately, by thediscovery of a work still more ancientthan any of the others that he had found.One of the manuscripts consisted of along text written around 50 BCE by apoet and philosopher named TitusLucretius Carus. The text’s title, Dererum natura—On the Nature of Things—was strikingly similar to the title ofRabanus Maurus’s celebratedencyclopedia, De rerum naturis. But

where the monk’s work was dull andconventional, Lucretius’ work wasdangerously radical.

Poggio would almost certainlyhave recognized the name Lucretiusfrom Ovid, Cicero, and other ancientsources he had painstakingly pored over,in the company of his humanist friends,but neither he nor anyone in his circle26had encountered more than a scrap ortwo of his actual writing, which had, asfar as anyone knew, been lost forever.

Poggio may not have had time, inthe gathering darkness of the monasticlibrary, and under the wary eyes of theabbot or his librarian, to do more thanread the opening lines. But he wouldhave seen immediately that Lucretius’Latin verses were astonishinglybeautiful. Ordering his scribe to make a

copy, he hurried to liberate it from themonastery. What is not clear is whetherhe had any intimation at all that he wasreleasing a book that would help in timeto dismantle his entire world.

CHAPTER THREE

IN SEARCH OF LUCRETIUS

SOME FOURTEEN HUNDRED and fiftyyears before Poggio set out to see whathe could find, Lucretius’ contemporarieshad read his poem, and it continued tobe read1 for several centuries after itspublication. Italian humanists, on thelookout for clues to lost ancient works,would have been alert to even fleetingreferences in the works of thosecelebrated authors whose writings hadsurvived in significant quantities. Thus,though he strongly disagreed with itsphilosophical principles, Cicero—

Poggio’s favorite Latin writer—concededthe marvelous power of On the Nature ofThings. “The poetry of Lucretius,”2 hewrote to his brother Quintus on February11, 54 BCE, “is, as you say in your letter,rich in brilliant genius, yet highly artistic.”Cicero’s turn of phrase—especially thatslightly odd word “yet”—registers hissurprise: he was evidently struck bysomething unusual. He had encountereda poem that conjoined “brilliant genius”in philosophy and science with unusualpoetic power. The conjunction was asrare then as it is now.

Cicero and his brother were notalone in grasping that Lucretius hadaccomplished a near-perfect integrationof intellectual distinction and aestheticmastery. The greatest Roman poet,Virgil, about fifteen years old when

Lucretius died, was under the spell of Onthe Nature of Things. “Blessed is he3who has succeeded in finding out thecauses of things,” Virgil wrote in theGeorgics, “and has trampled underfootall fears and inexorable fate and the roarof greedy Acheron.” Assuming that this isa subtle allusion to the title of Lucretius’poem, the older poet in this account is aculture hero, someone who has heardthe menacing roar of the underworld andtriumphed over the superstitious fearsthat threaten to sap the human spirit. ButVirgil did not mention4 his hero by name,and, though he had certainly read theGeorgics, Poggio was unlikely to havepicked up the allusion before he hadactually read Lucretius. Still less wouldPoggio have been able to grasp theextent to which Virgil’s great epic, the

Aeneid, was a sustained attempt toconstruct an alternative to On the Natureof Things: pious, where Lucretius wasskeptical; militantly patriotic, whereLucretius counseled pacifism; soberlyrenunciatory, where Lucretius embracedthe pursuit of pleasure.

What Poggio and other Italianhumanists probably did notice, however,were the words of Ovid, words that wereenough to send any book hunterscurrying through the catalogs ofmonastic libraries: “The verses ofsublime Lucretius5 are destined to perishonly when a single day will consign theworld to destruction.”

It is all the more striking then thatLucretius’ verses did almost perish—thesurvival of his work hung by slenderest ofthreads—and that virtually nothing about

his actual identity is reliably known.Many of the major poets andphilosophers of ancient Rome had beencelebrities in their own time, the objectsof gossip which eager book hunterscenturies later pored over for clues. Butin the case of Lucretius there werealmost no biographical traces. The poetmust have been a very private person,living his life in the shadows, and hedoes not seem to have written anythingapart from his one great work. That work,difficult and challenging, was hardly thekind of popular success that got diffusedin so many copies that significantfragments of it were assured of survivinginto the Middle Ages. Looking back fromthis distance, with Lucretius’ masterpiecesecurely in hand, modern scholars havebeen able to identify a network of earlymedieval signs of the text’s existence—a

citation here, a catalogue entry there—but most of these would have beeninvisible to the early fifteenth-centurybook hunters. They were groping in thedark, sensing perhaps a tiny gossamerfilament but unable to track it to itssource. And following in their wake, afteralmost six hundred years of work byclassicists, historians, andarchaeologists, we know almost nothingmore than they did about the identity ofthe author.

The Lucretii were an old,distinguished Roman clan—as Poggiomay have known—but since slaves,when freed, often took the name of thefamily that had owned them, the authorwas not necessarily an aristocrat. Still,an aristocratic lineage was plausible, forthe simple reason that Lucretiusaddressed his poem, in terms of easy

intimacy, to a nobleman, GaiusMemmius. That name Poggio might haveencountered in his wide reading, forMemmius had a relatively successful6political career, was a patron ofcelebrated writers, including the lovepoet Catullus, and was himself reputedto be a poet (an obscene one, accordingto Ovid). He was also an orator, asCicero noted somewhat grudgingly, “ofthe subtle, ingenious type.” But thequestion remained, who was Lucretius?

The answer, for Poggio and hiscircle, would have come almostcompletely from a brief biographicalsketch that the great Church Father St.Jerome (c. 340–420 CE) added to anearlier chronicle. In 94 BCE, Jeromenoted that “Titus Lucretius, poet, is born.After a love-philtre had turned him mad,

and he had written, in the intervals of hisinsanity, several books which Cicerorevised, he killed himself by his ownhand in the forty-fourth year of his age.”These lurid details7 have shaped allsubsequent representations of Lucretius,including a celebrated Victorian poem inwhich Tennyson imagined the voice ofthe mad, suicidal philosopher tormentedby erotic fantasies.

Modern classical scholarshipsuggests that every one of Jerome’sbiographical claims should be taken witha heavy dose of skepticism. They wererecorded—or invented—centuries afterLucretius’ death by a Christian polemicistwho had an interest in telling cautionarytales about pagan philosophers.However, since no good fifteenth-centuryChristian would have been likely to

doubt the saint’s account, Poggio musthave thought that the poem that he hadfound and was returning to circulationwas tainted by its pagan author’smadness and suicide. But the humanistbook hunter was part of a generationpassionately eager to unearth ancienttexts, even by those whose livesepitomized moral confusion and mortalsin. And the thought that Cicero himselfhad revised the books would havesufficed to quiet any lingeringreservations.

In the more than sixteen hundredyears that have elapsed since the fourth-century chronicle entry, no furtherbiographical information has turned up,either to confirm or disprove Jerome’sstory of the love potion and its tragicaftermath. As a person, Lucretius

remains almost8 as little known as hewas when Poggio recovered his poem in1417. Given the extravagance of Ovid’spraise of “the verse of sublime Lucretius”and the other signs of the poem’sinfluence, it remains a mystery that solittle was said directly about him by hiscontemporaries and nearcontemporaries. But archaeologicaldisoveries, made long after Poggio’sdeath, have helped us to get eerily closeto the world in which On the Nature ofThings was first read, and perhaps to thepoet himself.

The discoveries were madepossible by a famous ancient disaster.On August 24, 79 CE, the massiveeruption of Mount Vesuvius completelydestroyed not only Pompeii but also thesmall seaside resort of Herculaneum onthe Bay of Naples. Buried under some

the Bay of Naples. Buried under somesixty-five feet of volcanic debrishardened to the density of concrete, thissite, where wealthy Romans had oncevacationed in their elegant, colonnadedvillas, was forgotten until the earlyeighteenth century, when workmen,digging a well, uncovered some marblestatues. An Austrian officer—for Naplesat the time was under the control ofAustria—took over, and excavatorsbegan digging shafts through the thickcrust.

The explorations, which continuedwhen Naples passed into Bourbonhands, were extremely crude, less anarchaeological investigation than aprolonged smash-and-grab. The officialin charge for more than a decade was aSpanish army engineer, Roque Joaquinde Alcubierre, who seemed to treat thesite as an ossified garbage dump in

which loot had unaccountably beenburied. (“This man,”9 remarked acontemporary, dismayed at the wantondamage, “knew as much of antiquities asthe moon does of lobsters.”) The diggersburrowed away in search of statues,gems, precious marbles, and other moreor less familiar treasures, which theyfound in abundance and delivered injumbled heaps to their royal masters.

In 1750, under a new director, theexplorers became somewhat morecareful about what they were doing.Three years later, tunneling through theremains of one of the villas, they cameacross something baffling: the ruins of aroom graced with a mosaic floor andfilled with innumerable objects “abouthalf a palm long,10 and round,” as one ofthem wrote, “which appeared like roots of

wood, all black, and seeming to be onlyof one piece.” At first they thought theyhad come on a cache of charcoalbriquettes, some of which they burned todissipate the early morning chill. Othersthought that the peculiar fragments mighthave been rolls of burned cloth or fishingnets. Then one of these objects,chancing to fall on the ground, brokeopen. The unexpected sight of lettersinside what had looked like a charredroot made the explorers realize what theywere looking at: books. They hadstumbled on the remains of a privatelibrary.

The volumes that Romans piled upin their libraries were smaller than mostmodern books: they were for the mostpart written on scrolls of papyrus.11 (Theword “volume” comes from volumen, the

Latin word for a thing that is rolled orwound up.) Rolls of papyrus—the plantfrom which we get our word “paper”—were produced from tall reeds that grewin the marshy delta region of the Nile inLower Egypt. The reeds were harvested;their stalks cut open and sliced into verythin strips. The strips were laid side byside, slightly overlapping one another;another layer was placed on top, at rightangles to the one below; and then thesheet was gently pounded with a mallet.The natural sap that was releasedallowed the fibers to adhere smoothly toeach other, and the individual sheetswere then glued into rolls. (The firstsheet, on which the contents of the rollcould be noted, was called in Greek theprotokollon, literally, “first glued”—theorigin of our word “protocol.”) Woodensticks, attached to one or both of the

ends of the roll and slightly projectingfrom the top and bottom edges, made iteasier to scroll through as one readalong: to read a book in the ancient worldwas to unwind it. The Romans calledsuch a stick the umbilicus, and to read abook cover-to-cover was “to unroll to theumbilicus.”

At first white and flexible, thepapyrus would over time gradually getbrittle and discolored—nothing lastsforever—but it was lightweight,convenient, relatively inexpensive, andsurprisingly durable. Small landownersin Egypt had long realized that theycould write their tax receipts on a scrapof papyrus and be reasonably confidentthat the record would be perfectly legiblefor years and even generations to come.Priests could use this medium to recordthe precise language for supplicating the

gods; poets could lay claim to thesymbolic immortality they dreamed of intheir art; philosophers could convey theirthoughts to disciples yet unborn.Romans, like the Greeks before them,easily grasped that this was the bestwriting material available, and theyimported it in bulk from Egypt to meettheir growing desire for record keeping,official documents, personal letters, andbooks. A roll of papyrus might last threehundred years.

The room unearthed12 inHerculaneum had once been lined withinlaid wooden shelves; at its center werethe traces of what had been a large,freestanding, rectangular bookcase.Scattered about were the carbonizedremains—so fragile that they fell apart atthe touch—of the erasable waxed tablets

on which readers once took notes (a bitlike the Mystic Writing Pads with whichchildren play today). The shelves hadbeen piled high with papyrus rolls. Someof the rolls, perhaps the more valuableones, were wrapped about with tree barkand covered with pieces of wood at eachend. In another part of the villa, otherrolls, now fused into a single mass by thevolcanic ash, seemed to have beenhastily bundled together in a woodenbox, as if someone on the terrible Augustday had for a brief, wild moment thoughtto carry some particularly valued booksaway from the holocaust. Altogether—even with the irrevocable loss of themany that were trashed before it wasunderstood what they were—someeleven hundred books were eventuallyrecovered.

Many of the rolls in what became

known as the Villa of the Papyri hadbeen crushed by falling debris and theweight of the heavy mud; all had beencarbonized by the volcanic lava, ash,and gas. But what had blackened thesebooks had also preserved them fromfurther decay. For centuries they had ineffect been sealed in an airtightcontainer. (Even today only one smallsegment of the villa has been exposed toview, and a substantial portion remainsunexcavated.) The discoverers, however,were disappointed: they could barelymake out anything written on thecharcoal-like rolls. And when again andagain they tried to unwind them, the rollsinevitably crumbled into fragments.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, ofbooks were destroyed in these attempts.But eventually a number of the rolls thathad been cut open were found to contain

near the center some readable portions.At this point—after two years of more orless destructive and fruitless effort—alearned Neapolitan priest who had beenworking in the Vatican Library in Rome,Father Antonio Piaggio, was called in.Taking issue with the prevailing methodof investigation—simply scraping off thecharred outer layers of the rolls untilsome words could be discerned—heinvented an ingenious device, a machinethat would delicately and slowly unrollthe carbonized papyrus scrolls,disclosing much more readable materialthan anyone had imagined to havesurvived.

Those who read the recoveredtexts, carefully flattened and glued ontostrips, found that the villa’s library (or atleast the portion of it that they had found)was a specialized one, many of the rolls

being tracts in Greek by a philosophernamed Philodemus. The researcherswere disappointed—they had beenhoping to find lost works by the likes ofSophocles and Virgil—but what they hadso implausibly snatched from oblivionhas an important bearing on thediscovery made centuries earlier byPoggio. For Philodemus, who taught inRome from about 75 to about 40 BCE,was Lucretius’ exact contemporary and afollower of the school of thought mostperfectly represented in On the Nature ofThings.

Why were the works of a minorGreek philosopher in the library of theelegant seaside retreat? And why, forthat matter, did a vacation house have anextensive library at all? Philodemus, apedagogue paid to give lessons anddeliver lectures, was certainly not the

master of the Villa of the Papyri. But thepresence of a substantial selection of hisworks probably provides a clue to theowner’s interests and illuminates themoment that brought forth Lucretius’poem. That moment was the culminationof a lengthy process that braidedtogether Greek and Roman high culture.

The two cultures had not alwaysbeen comfortably intertwined. Among theGreeks, Romans had long held thereputation of tough, disciplined people,with a gift for survival and a hunger forconquest. But they were also regardedas barbarians—“refined barbarians,” inthe moderate view of the Alexandrianscientist Eratosthenes, crude anddangerous barbarians in the view ofmany others. When their independentcity-states were still flourishing, Greekintellectuals collected some arcane lore

about the Romans, as they did about theCarthaginians and Indians, but they didnot find anything in Roman cultural lifeworthy of their notice.

The Romans of the early republicmight not altogether have disagreed withthis assessment. Rome had traditionallybeen wary of poets and philosophers. Itprided itself on being13 a city of virtueand action, not of flowery words,intellectual speculation, and books. Buteven as Rome’s legions steadilyestablished military dominance overGreece, Greek culture just as steadilybegan to colonize the minds of theconquerors. Skeptical as ever of effeteintellectuals and priding themselves ontheir practical intelligence, Romansnonetheless acknowledged with growingenthusiasm the achievements of Greek

philosophers, scientists, writers, andartists. They made fun of what they tookto be the defects of the Greek character,mocking what they saw as itsloquaciousness, its taste forphilosophizing, and its foppishness. Butambitious Roman families sent their sonsto study at the philosophical academiesfor which Athens was famous, and Greekintellectuals like Philodemus werebrought to Rome and paid handsomesalaries to teach.

It was never quite respectable for aRoman aristocrat to admit to aboundlessly ardent Hellenism.Sophisticated Romans found it desirableto downplay a mastery of Greeklanguage and a connoisseur’s grasp ofGreek art. Yet Roman temples and publicspaces were graced with splendidstatues stolen from the conquered cities

of the Greek mainland and thePeloponnese, while battle-hardenedRoman generals adorned their villas withprecious Greek vases and sculptures.

The survival of stone and fired claymakes it easy for us to register thepervasive presence in Rome of Greekartifacts, but it was books that carried thefull weight of cultural influence. Inkeeping with the city’s martial character,the first great collections were broughtthere as spoils of war. In 167 BCE theRoman general Aemilius Paulus routedKing Perseus of Macedon and put anend to a dynasty that had descendedfrom Alexander the Great and his fatherPhilip. Perseus and his three sons weresent in chains to be paraded through thestreets of Rome behind the triumphalchariot. In the tradition of nationalkleptocracy, Aemilius Paulus shipped

back enormous plunder to deposit in theRoman treasury. But for himself and hischildren the conqueror reserved only asingle prize: the captive monarch’slibrary.14 The gesture was evidence, ofcourse, of the aristocratic general’spersonal fortune, but it was also aspectacular signal of the value of Greekbooks and the culture these booksembodied.

Others followed in AemiliusPaulus’ wake. It became increasinglyfashionable for wealthy Romans toamass large private libraries in their townhouses and country villas. (There wereno bookshops in the early years inRome, but, in addition to the collectionsseized as booty, books could bepurchased from dealers in southern Italyand Sicily where the Greeks had

founded such cities as Naples,Tarentum, and Syracuse.) Thegrammarian Tyrannion is reputed to havehad 30,000 volumes; SerenusSammonicus, a physician who was anexpert on the use of the magical formula“Abracadabra” to ward off illness, hadmore than 60,000. Rome had caught theGreek fever for books.

Lucretius lived his life in a cultureof wealthy private book collectors, andthe society into which he launched hispoem was poised to expand the circle ofreading to a larger public. In 40 BCE, adecade after Lucretius’ death, Rome’sfirst public library15 was established by afriend of the poet Virgil, Asinius Pollio.The idea seems to have originated withJulius Caesar, who admired the publiclibraries he had seen in Greece, Asia

Minor, and Egypt, and determined tobestow such an institution upon theRoman people. But Caesar wasassassinated before he could carry outthe plan, and it took Pollio, who hadsided with Caesar against Pompey andthen with Mark Antony against Brutus, todo so. A skillful military commander,canny (or extremely lucky) in his choiceof allies, Pollio was also a man of broadliterary interests. Apart from a fewfragments of his speeches, all of hiswritings are now lost, but he composedtragedies—worthy of Sophocles,according to Virgil—histories, and literarycriticism, and he was one of the firstRoman authors to recite his writings toan audience of his friends.

The library established by Pollio16was built on the Aventine Hill and paid

for, in the typical Roman way, by wealthseized from the conquered—in this case,from a people on the Adriatic coast whohad made the mistake of backing Brutusagainst Antony. Shortly afterwards, theemperor Augustus founded two morepublic libraries, and many subsequentemperors followed in his wake.(Altogether, by the fourth century CE,there were twenty-eight public libraries inRome.) The structures, all of which havebeen destroyed, evidently followed thesame general pattern, one that would befamiliar to us. There was a large readingroom adjoining smaller rooms in whichthe collections were stored in numberedbookcases. The reading room, eitherrectangular or semicircular in shape andsometimes lit through a circular openingin the roof, was adorned with busts orlife-sized statues of celebrated writers:

Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, amongothers. The statues functioned, as theydo for us, as an honorific, a gesturetoward the canon of writers whom everycivilized person should know. But inRome they may have had an additionalsignificance, akin to the masks ofancestors that Romans traditionally keptin their houses and that they donned oncommemorative occasions. That is, theywere signs of access to the spirits of thedead, symbols of the spirits that thebooks enabled readers to conjure up.

Many other cities17 of the ancientworld came to boast public collections,endowed by tax revenues or by the giftsof wealthy, civic-minded donors. Greeklibraries had had few amenities, butthroughout their territories the Romans18designed comfortable chairs and tables

where readers could sit and slowlyunfold the papyrus, the left hand rollingup each column after it was read. Thegreat architect Vitruvius—one of theancient writers whose work Poggiorecovered—advised that libraries shouldface toward the east, to catch themorning light and reduce the humiditythat might damage books. Excavations atPompeii and elsewhere have uncoveredthe plaques honoring the donors, alongwith statuary, writing tables, shelves tostore papyrus rolls, numbered bookcasesto hold the bound parchment volumes orcodices that gradually began tosupplement the rolls, and even graffitiscribbled on the walls. The resemblanceto the design of public libraries in ourown society is no accident: our sensethat a library is a public good and ouridea of what such a place should look

like derive precisely from a modelcreated in Rome several thousand yearsago.

Through the massive extent of theRoman world, whether on the banks ofthe Rhône in Gaul or near the grove andTemple of Daphne in the province ofSyria, on the island of Cos, near Rhodes,or in Dyrrhkhion in what is now Albania,t h e houses of cultivated men andwomen19 had rooms set aside for quietreading. Papyrus rolls were carefullyindexed, labeled (with a protruding tagcalled in Greek a sillybos), and stackedon shelves or stored in leather baskets.Even in the elaborate bath complexesthat Romans loved, reading rooms,decorated with busts of Greek and Latinauthors, were carefully designed to makeit possible for educated Romans to

combine care for the body with care forthe mind. By the first century CE therewere distinctive signs of the emergenceof what we think of as a “literary culture.”At the games in the Colosseum20 oneday, the historian Tacitus had aconversation on literature with a perfectstranger who turned out to have read hisworks. Culture was no longer located inclose-knit circles of friends andacquaintances; Tacitus wasencountering his “public” in the form ofsomeone who had bought his book at astall in the Forum or read it in a library.This broad commitment to reading, withits roots in the everyday lives of theRoman elite over many generations,explains why a pleasure palace like theVilla of the Papyri had a well-stockedlibrary.

In the 1980s, modern archaeologistsresumed serious work on the buried villa,in the hopes of gaining a betterunderstanding of the whole style of lifeexpressed in its design, a design vividlyevoked in the architecture of the GettyMuseum in Malibu, California, wheresome of the statues and other treasuresfound at Herculaneum now reside. Thebulk of the marble and bronzemasterpieces—images of gods andgoddesses, portrait busts ofphilosophers, orators, poets, andplaywrights; a graceful young athlete; awild boar in mid-leap; a drunken satyr; asleeping satyr; and a startlingly obscene

Pan and goat in flagrante delicto—arenow in the National Museum in Naples.

The renewed exploration got off toa slow start: the rich volcanic soilcovering the site was used to growcarnations, and the owners wereunderstandably reluctant to permitexcavators to disrupt their business. Butafter lengthy negotiations, researcherswere permitted to descend the shafts andapproach the villa in small gondolalikecraft that could glide safely throughtunnels that had been bored through theruins. In these eerie conditions, theysucceeded in mapping the villa’s layoutmore accurately than ever before,charting the precise dimensions of theatrium, the square and rectangularperistyles, and other structures, andlocating as they did so such features as alarge mosaic floor and an unusual

double column. Traces of vine shootsand leaves enabled them to determinethe precise site of the garden wheresome two thousand years ago thewealthy proprietor and his cultivatedfriends once came together.

It is, of course, impossible at thisgreat distance in time to know exactlywhat these particular people talkedabout, during the long sunlit afternoonsin the colonnaded garden atHerculaneum, but an intriguing furtherclue turned up, also in the 1980s.Scholars, this time above ground, wereat work once again on the blackenedpapyri that had been discovered by theeighteenth-century treasure hunters.These scrolls, hardened into lumps, hadresisted the early attempts to open themand had sat for more than two centuriesin the National Library of Naples. In

1987, using new techniques, TommasoStarace managed to open two badlypreserved papyri. He mounted thelegible fragments from these books—unread since the ancient volcaniceruption—on Japanese paper, micro-photographed them, and undertook todecipher the contents. Two years laterKnut Kleve, a distinguished Norwegianpapyrologist (as those who specialize indeciphering papyri are called), made anannouncement: “De rerum natura hasbeen rediscovered21 in Herculaneum,235 years after the papyri were found.”

The world at large understandablytook this announcement in stride—that is,ignored it altogether—and even scholarsinterested in ancient culture may beforgiven for giving the news, buried involume 19 of the massive Italian

Chronicles of Herculaneum, little or noattention. What Kleve and his colleagueshad found were only sixteen minusculefragments—little more than words orparts of words—that, under closeanalysis, could be shown to come frombooks 1, 3, 4, and 5 of the six-book-longLatin poem. Forlorn pieces from anenormous jigsaw puzzle, the fragmentsby themselves are virtually meaningless.But their range suggests that the wholeof De rerum natura was in the library, andthe presence of that poem in the Villa ofthe Papyri is tantalizing.

The discoveries at Herculaneumenable us to glimpse the social circleswhere the poem that Poggio found in themonastic library had originally circulated.In the monastic library, among themissals, confessional manuals, andtheological tomes, Lucretius’ work was

an uncanny stranger, a relic that hadfloated ashore from distant shipwreck. InHerculaneum, it was a native. Thecontents of the surviving rolls suggestthat the villa’s collection focusedprecisely on the school of thought ofw h i ch De rerum natura is the mostremarkable surviving expression.

Though the identity of the villa’sowner during Lucretius’ lifetime isunknown, the strongest candidate isLucius Calpurnius Piso. This powerfulpolitician, who had served for a time asgovernor of the province of Macedoniaand was, among other things, JuliusCaesar’s father-in-law, had an interest inGreek philosophy. Cicero, a politicalenemy, pictured Piso singing obsceneditties and lolling naked “amid histipsy22 and malodorous Greeks”; but,

judging from the contents of the library,the guests during the afternoons inHerculaneum were likely to have beendevoted to more refined pursuits.

Piso is known to have had apersonal acquaintance with Philodemus.In an epigram discovered in one of hisbooks in the charred library, thephilosopher invites Piso to join him in hisown modest home to celebrate a“Twentieth”—a monthly feast observed inhonor of Epicurus, born on the twentiethof the Greek month of Gamelion:

Tomorrow, friend Piso, 23 yourmusical comrade drags youto his modest

digs at three in the afternoon,feeding you at your annual visit

to the Twentieth. If you will

miss uddersand Bromian wine mis en

bouteilles in Chios,yet you will see faithful

comrades, yet you will hearthings far sweeter

than the land of the Phaeacians.And if you ever turn your eye our

way too, Piso, instead of amodest

Twentieth we shall lead a richerone.

The closing lines morph into an

appeal for money or perhaps express thehope that Philodemus will himself beinvited to an afternoon of philosophicalconversation and expensive wine atPiso’s grand villa. Half-reclining oncouches, under the shade of trellisedvines and silken canopies, the privileged

men and women who were Piso’s guests—for it is entirely possible that somewomen participated in the conversationas well—had much to think about. Romehad been afflicted for years by politicaland social unrest, culminating in severalvicious civil wars, and though theviolence had abated, the threats to peaceand stability were by no means safelypast. Ambitious generals relentlesslyjockeyed for position; murmuring troopshad to be paid in cash and land; theprovinces were restive, and rumors oftrouble in Egypt had already causedgrain prices to soar.

But cosseted by slaves, in thecomfort and security of the elegant villa,the proprietor and his guests had thetemporary luxury of regarding thesemenaces as relatively remote, remoteenough at least to allow them to pursue

civilized conversations. Staring up idly24at the plumes of smoke rising fromnearby Vesuvius, they may well have feltsome queasiness about the future, butthey were an elite, living at the center ofthe world’s greatest power, and one oftheir most cherished privileges was thecultivation of the life of the mind.

Romans of the late republic wereremarkably tenacious about thisprivilege, which they clung to incircumstances that would have madeothers quail and run for cover. For them itseemed to function as a sign that theirworld was still intact or at least that theywere secure in their innermost lives. Likea man who, hearing the distant sound ofsirens in the street, sits down at theBechstein to play a Beethoven sonata,the men and women in the gardenaffirmed their urbane security by

affirmed their urbane security byimmersing themselves in speculativedialogue.

In the years leading up to theassassination of Julius Caesar,philosophical speculation was hardly theonly available response to social stress.Religious cults originating in far-offplaces like Persia, Syria, and Palestinebegan to make their way to the capital,where they aroused wild fears andexpectations, particularly among theplebs. A handful of the elite—those moreinsecure or simply curious—may haveattended with something other thancontempt to the prophecies from the east,prophecies of a saviour born of obscureparentage who would be brought low,suffer terribly, and yet ultimately triumph.But most would have regarded suchtales as the over-heated fantasies of asect of stiff-necked Jews.

Those of a pious disposition wouldfar more likely have gone as supplicantsto the temples and chapels to the godsthat dotted the fertile landscape. It was, inany case, a world in which natureseemed saturated with the presence ofthe divine, on mountaintops and springs,in the thermal vents that spewed smokefrom a mysterious realm under the earth,in ancient groves of trees on whosebranches the faithful hung colorful cloths.But though the villa in Herculaneum wasin close proximity to this intense religiouslife, it is unlikely that many of those withthe sophisticated intellectual tastesreflected in the library joined processionsof pious supplicants. Judging from thecontents of the charred papyrus scrolls,the villa’s inhabitants seem to haveturned not to ritual but to conversationabout the meaning of life.

Ancient Greeks and Romans didnot share our idealization of isolatedgeniuses, working alone to think throughthe knottiest problems. Such scenes—Descartes in his secret retreat, callingeverything into question, or theexcommunicated Spinoza quietlyreasoning to himself while grindinglenses—would eventually become ourdominant emblem of the life of the mind.But this vision of proper intellectualpursuits rested on a profound shift incultural prestige, one that began with theearly Christian hermits who deliberatelywithdrew from whatever it was thatpagans valued: St. Anthony (250–356) inthe desert or St. Symeon Stylites (390–459) perched on his column. Suchfigures, modern scholars have shown,characteristically had in fact bands offollowers, and though they lived apart,

they often played a significant role in thelife of large communities. But thedominant cultural image that theyfashioned—or that came to be fashionedaround them—was of radical isolation.

Not so the Greeks and Romans. Asthinking and writing generally requirequiet and a minimum of distraction, theirpoets and philosophers must haveperiodically pulled away from the noiseand business of the world in order toaccomplish what they did. But the imagethat they projected was social. Poetsdepicted themselves as shepherdssinging to other shepherds; philosophersdepicted themselves engaged in longconversations, often stretching out overseveral days. The pulling away from thedistractions of the everyday world wasfigured not as a retreat to the solitary cellbut as a quiet exchange of words among

friends in a garden.Humans, Aristotle wrote, are social

animals: to realize one’s nature as ahuman then was to participate in a groupactivity. And the activity of choice, forcultivated Romans, as for the Greeksbefore them, was discourse. There is,Cicero remarked at the beginning of atypical philosophical work, a widediversity of opinion about the mostimportant religious questions. “This hasoften struck me,”25 Cicero wrote,

but it did so with especial force onone occasion, when the topic of theimmortal gods was made thesubject of a very searching andthorough discussion at the houseof my friend Gaius Cotta.

It was the Latin Festival, and I

had come at Cotta’s expressinvitation to pay him a visit. I foundhim sitting in an alcove, engaged indebate with Gaius Velleius, aMember of the Senate, accountedby the Epicureans as their chiefRoman adherent at the time. Withthem was Quintus Lucilius Balbus,who was so accomplished astudent of Stoicism as to rank withthe leading Greek exponents ofthat system.

Cicero does not want to present histhoughts to his readers as a tractcomposed after solitary reflection; hewants to present them as an exchange ofviews among social and intellectualequals, a conversation in which hehimself plays only a small part and inwhich there will be no clear victor.

The end of this dialogue—a longwork that would have filled severalsizable papyrus rolls—ischaracteristically inconclusive: “Here theconversation ended,26 and we parted,Velleius thinking Cotta’s discourse to bethe truer, while I felt that that of Balbusapproximated more nearly to asemblance of the truth.” Theinconclusiveness is not intellectualmodesty—Cicero was not a modest man—but a strategy of civilized opennessamong friends. The exchange itself, notits final conclusions, carries much of themeaning. The discussion itself is whatmost matters, the fact that we can reasontogether easily, with a blend of wit andseriousness, never descending intogossip or slander and always allowingroom for alternative views. “The one who

engages27 in conversation,” Cicerowrote, “should not debar others fromparticipating in it, as if he were enteringupon a private monopoly; but, as in otherthings, so in a general conversation heshould think it not unfair for each to havehis turn.”

The dialogues Cicero and otherswrote were not transcriptions of realexchanges, though the characters inthem were real, but they were idealizedversions of conversations thatundoubtedly occurred in places like thevilla in Herculaneum. The conversationsin that particular setting, to judge from thetopics of the charred books found in theburied library, touched on music,painting, poetry, the art of publicspeaking, and other subjects of perennialinterest to cultivated Greeks andRomans. They are likely to have turned

Romans. They are likely to have turnedas well to more troubling scientific,ethical, and philosophical questions:What is the cause of thunder orearthquakes or eclipses—are they signsfrom the gods, as some claim, or do theyhave an origin in nature? How we canunderstand the world we inhabit? Whatgoals should we be pursuing in ourlives? Does it make sense to devoteone’s life to the pursuit of power? Howare good and evil to be defined? Whathappens to us when we die?

That the villa’s powerful owner andhis friends took pleasure in grapplingwith such questions and were willing todevote significant periods of their verybusy lives to teasing out possibleanswers reflects their conception of anexistence appropriate for people of theireducation, class, and status. It reflects aswell something extraordinary about the

mental or spiritual world they inhabited,something noted in one of his letters bythe French novelist Gustave Flaubert:“Just when the gods had ceased to be,and the Christ had not yet come, therewas a unique moment in history,between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius,when man stood alone.” No doubt onecould quibble with this claim. For manyRomans at least, the gods had notactually ceased to be—even theEpicureans, sometimes reputed to beatheists, thought that gods existed,though at a far remove from the affairs ofmortals—and the “unique moment” towhich Flaubert gestures, from Cicero(106–43 BCE) to Marcus Aurelius (121–1 8 0 CE), may have been longer orshorter than the time frame he suggests.But the core perception is eloquentlyborne out by Cicero’s dialogues and by

the works found in the library ofHerculaneum. Many of the early readersof those works evidently lacked a fixedrepertory of beliefs and practicesreinforced by what was said to be thedivine will. They were men and womenwhose lives were unusually free of thedictates of the gods (or their priests).Standing alone, as Flaubert puts it, theyfound themselves in the peculiar positionof choosing among sharply divergentvisions of the nature of things andcompeting strategies for living.

The charred fragments in thelibrary give us a glimpse of how thevilla’s residents made this choice, whomthey wished to read, what they are likelyto have discussed, whom they mighthave summoned to enter into theconversation. And here the Norwegianpapyrologist’s tiny fragments become

deeply resonant. Lucretius was acontemporary of Philodemus and, moreimportant, of Philodemus’ patron, whomay, when he invited friends to join himfor an afternoon on the verdant slopes ofthe volcano, have shared with thempassages from On the Nature of Things.Indeed, the wealthy patron withphilosophical interests could havewished to meet the author in person. Itwould have been a small matter to senda few slaves and a litter to carry Lucretiusto Herculaneum to join the guests. Andtherefore it is even remotely possiblethat, reclining on a couch, Lucretiushimself read aloud from the verymanuscript whose fragments survive.

If Lucretius had participated in theconversations at the villa, it is clearenough what he would have said. Hisown conclusions would not have been

inconclusive or tinged with skepticism, inthe manner of Cicero. The answers to allof their questions, he passionatelyargued, were to be found in the work of aman whose portrait bust and writingsgraced the villa’s library, the philosopherEpicurus28.

It was only Epicurus, Lucretiuswrote, who could cure the miserablecondition of the man who, bored to deathat home, rushes off frantically to hiscountry villa only to find that he is just asoppressed in spirit. Indeed, in Lucretius’view, Epicurus, who had died more thantwo centuries earlier, was nothing lessthan the saviour. When “human life29 laygroveling ignominiously in the dust,crushed beneath the grinding weight ofsuperstition,” Lucretius wrote, onesupremely brave man arose and became

“the first who ventured to confront itboldly.” (1.62ff.) This hero—one strikinglyat odds with a Roman culture thattraditionally prided itself on toughness,pragmatism, and military virtue—was aGreek who triumphed not through theforce of arms but through the power ofintellect.

On the Nature of Things is the work of adisciple who is transmitting ideas thathad been developed centuries earlier.Epicurus, Lucretius’ philosophicalmessiah, was born toward the end of 342BCE on the Aegean island of Samoswhere his father, a poor Athenianschoolmaster, had gone as a colonist.

Many Greek philosophers, includingPlato and Aristotle, came from wealthyfamilies and prided themselves on theirdistinguished ancestry. Epicurusdecidedly had no comparable claims.His philosophical enemies, basking intheir social superiority, made much of themodesty of his background. He assistedhis father in his school for a pittance, theysneered, and used to go round with hismother to cottages to read charms. Oneof his brothers, they added, was a panderand lived with a prostitute. This was not aphilosopher with whom respectablepeople should associate themselves.

That Lucretius and many others didmore than simply associate themselveswith Epicurus—that they celebrated himas godlike in his wisdom and courage—depended not on his social credentialsbut upon what they took to be the saving

power of his vision. The core of thisvision may be traced back to a singleincandescent idea: that everything thathas ever existed and everything that willever exist is put together out ofindestructible building blocks, irreduciblysmall in size, unimaginably vast innumber. The Greeks had a word forthese invisible building blocks, thingsthat, as they conceived them, could notbe divided any further: atoms.

The notion of atoms, whichoriginated in the fifth century BCE withLeucippus of Abdera and his prizestudent Democritus, was only a dazzlingspeculation; there was no way to get anyempirical proof and wouldn’t be for morethan two thousand years. Otherphilosophers had competing theories:the core matter of the universe, theyargued, was fire or water or air or earth,

or some combination of these. Otherssuggested that if you could perceive thesmallest particle of a man, you would findan infinitesimally tiny man; and similarlyfor a horse, a droplet of water, or a bladeof grass. Others again proposed that theintricate order in the universe wasevidence of an invisible mind or spiritthat carefully put the pieces togetheraccording to a preconceived plan.Democritus’ conception of an infinitenumber of atoms that have no qualitiesexcept size, figure, and weight—particlesthen that are not miniature versions ofwhat we see but rather form what we seeby combining with each other in aninexhaustible variety of shapes—was afantastically daring solution to a problemthat engaged the great intellects of hisworld.

It took many generations to think

through the implications of this solution.(We have by no means yet thoughtthrough them all.) Epicurus began hisefforts to do so at the age of twelve, whento his disgust his teachers could notexplain to him the meaning of chaos.Democritus’ old idea of atoms seemed tohim the most promising clue, and he setto work to follow it wherever it would takehim. By the age of thirty-two he wasready to found a school. There, in agarden in Athens, Epicurus constructed awhole account of the universe and aphilosophy of human life.

In constant motion, atoms collidewith each other, Epicurus reasoned, andin certain circumstances, they form largerand larger bodies. The largestobservable bodies—the sun and themoon—are made of atoms, just as arehuman beings and water-flies and grains

of sand. There are no supercategories ofmatter; no hierarchy of elements.Heavenly bodies are not divine beingswho shape our destiny for good or ill, nordo they move through the void under theguidance of gods: they are simply part ofthe natural order, enormous structures ofatoms subject to the same principles ofcreation and destruction that governeverything that exists. And if the naturalorder is unimaginably vast and complex,it is nonetheless possible to understandsomething of its basic constitutiveelements and its universal laws. Indeed,such understanding is one of humanlife’s deepest pleasures.

This pleasure is perhaps the key tocomprehending the powerful impact ofEpicurus’ philosophy;30 it was as if heunlocked for his followers an

inexhaustible source of gratificationhidden within Democritus’ atoms. For us,the impact is rather difficult to grasp. Forone thing, the pleasure seems toointellectual to reach more than a tinynumber of specialists; for another, wehave come to associate atoms far morewith fear than with gratification. Butthough ancient philosophy was hardly amass movement, Epicurus was offeringsomething more than caviar to a handfulof particle physicists. Indeed, eschewingthe self-enclosed, specialized languageof an inner circle of adepts, he insistedon using ordinary language, onaddressing the widest circle of listeners,even on proselytizing. And theenlightenment he offered did not requiresustained scientific inquiry. You did notneed a detailed grasp of the actual lawsof the physical universe; you needed

only to comprehend that there is ahidden natural explanation for everythingthat alarms or eludes you. Thatexplanation will inevitably lead you backto atoms. If you can hold on to and repeatto yourself the simplest fact of existence—atoms and void and nothing else,atoms and void and nothing else, atomsand void and nothing else—your life willchange. You will no longer fear Jove’swrath, whenever you hear a peal ofthunder, or suspect that someone hasoffended Apollo, whenever there is anoutbreak of influenza. And you will befreed from a terrible affliction—whatHamlet, many centuries later, describedas “the dread of something afterdeath,/The undiscovered country fromwhose bourn/No traveller returns.”

The affliction—the fear of somehorrendous punishment waiting for one

in a realm beyond the grave—no longerweighs heavily on most modern men andwomen, but it evidently did in the ancientAthens of Epicurus and the ancientRome of Lucretius, and it did as well inthe Christian world inhabited by Poggio.Certainly Poggio would have seenimages of such horrors, lovingly carvedon the tympanum above the doors tochurches or painted on their inner walls.And those horrors were in turn modeledon accounts of the afterlife fashioned inthe pagan imagination. To be sure, noteveryone in any of these periods, paganor Christian, believed in such accounts.Aren’t you terrified, one of the charactersin a dialogue by Cicero asks, by theunderworld, with its terrible three-headeddog, its black river, its hideouspunishments? “Do you suppose31 me so

crazy as to believe such tales?” hiscompanion replies. Fear of death is notabout the fate of Sisyphus and Tantalus:“Where is the crone so silly as to beafraid” of such scare stories? It is aboutthe dread of suffering and the dread ofperishing, and it is difficult tounderstand,32 Cicero wrote, why theEpicureans think that they are offeringany palliative. To be told that oneperishes completely and forever, soul aswell as body, is hardly a robustconsolation.

Followers of Epicurus respondedby recalling the last days of the master,dying from an excruciating obstruction ofthe bladder but achieving serenity ofspirit by recalling all of the pleasures hehad experienced in his life. It is not clearthat this model was easily imitable

—“Who can hold a fire in his hand/Bythinking on the frosty Caucasus?” as oneof Shakespeare’s characters asks—butthen it is not clear that any of theavailable alternatives, in a world withoutDemerol or morphine, was moresuccessful at dealing with death agonies.What the Greek philosopher offered wasnot help in dying but help in living.Liberated from superstition, Epicurustaught, you would be free to pursuepleasure.

Epicurus’ enemies seized upon hiscelebration of pleasure and inventedmalicious stories of his debauchery,stories heightened by his unusualinclusion of women as well as menamong his followers. He “vomited twice aday33 from over-indulgence,” went oneof these stories, and spent a fortune on

his feasting. In reality, the philosopherseems to have lived a conspicuouslysimple and frugal life. “Send me a pot ofcheese,” he wrote once to a friend, “that,when I like, I may fare sumptuously.” Somuch for the alleged abundance of histable. And he urged a comparablefrugality on his students. The mottocarved over the door to Epicurus’ gardenurged the stranger to linger, for “here ourhighest good is pleasure.” But accordingto the philosopher Seneca, who quotesthese words in a famous letter thatPoggio and his friends knew andadmired, the passerby who entered34would be served a simple meal of barleygruel and water. “When we say, then,35that pleasure is the goal,” Epicurus wrotein one of his few surviving letters, “we donot mean the pleasures of the prodigal or

the pleasures of sensuality.” The feverishattempt to satisfy certain appetites—“anunbroken succession of drinking boutsand of revelry … sexual love … theenjoyment of the fish and otherdelicacies of a luxurious table”—cannotlead to the peace of mind that is the keyto enduring pleasure.

“Men suffer the worst evils36 for thesake of the most alien desires,” wrote hisdisciple Philodemus, in one of the booksfound in the library at Herculaneum, and“they neglect the most necessaryappetites as if they were the most alien tonature.” What are these necessaryappetites that lead to pleasure? It isimpossible to live pleasurably,Philodemus continued, “without livingprudently and honourably and justly, andalso without living courageously and

temperately and magnanimously, andwithout making friends, and withoutbeing philanthropic.”

This is the voice of an authenticfollower of Epicurus, a voice recovered inmodern times from a volcano-blackenedpapyrus roll. But it is hardly the voice thatanyone familiar with the term“Epicureanism” would ever expect. Inone of his memorable satiricalgrotesques, Shakespeare’scontemporary Ben Jonson perfectlydepicted the spirit in which Epicurus’philosophy was for long centuries widelyunderstood. “I’ll have all mybeds37blown up, not stuffed,” Jonson’scharacter declares. “Down is too hard.”

My meat shall all come in in Indianshells,

Dishes of agate, set in gold, andstudded,With emeralds, sapphires,hyacinths, and rubies….My foot-boy shall eat pheasants,calvered salmons,Knots, godwits, lampreys. I myselfwill haveThe beards of barbels servedinstead of salads;Oiled mushrooms; and the swellingunctuous papsOf a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off,Drest with an exquisite andpoignant sauce;For which, I’ll say unto my cook,“There’s gold,Go forth and be a knight.”

The name Jonson gave to this madpleasure seeker is Sir Epicure Mammon.

A philosophical claim that life’sultimate goal is pleasure—even if thatpleasure was defined in the mostrestrained and responsible terms—was ascandal, both for pagans and for theiradversaries, the Jews and later theChristians. Pleasure as the highestgood? What about worshipping the godsand ancestors? Serving the family, thecity, and the state? Scrupulouslyobserving the laws and commandments?Pursuing virtue or a vision of the divine?These competing claims inevitablyentailed forms of ascetic self-denial, self-sacrifice, even self-loathing. None wascompatible with the pursuit of pleasureas the highest good. Two thousand yearsafter Epicurus lived and taught, thesense of scandal was still felt intenselyenough to generate the manic energy intravesties like Jonson’s.

Behind such travesties lay a half-hidden fear that to maximize pleasureand to avoid pain were in fact appealinggoals and might plausibly serve as therational organizing principles of humanlife. If they succeeded in doing so, awhole set of time-honored alternativeprinciples—sacrifice, ambition, socialstatus, discipline, piety—would bechallenged, along with the institutionsthat such principles served. To push theEpicurean pursuit of pleasure towardgrotesque sensual self-indulgence—depicted as the single-minded pursuit ofsex or power or money or even (as inJonson) extravagant, absurdly expensivefood—helped to ward off the challenge.

In his secluded garden in Athens,the real Epicurus, dining on cheese,bread, and water, lived a quiet life.Indeed, one of the more legitimate

charges against him was that his life wastoo quiet: he counseled his followersagainst a full, robust engagement in theaffairs of the city. “Some men havesought38 to become famous andrenowned,” he wrote, “thinking that thusthey would make themselves secureagainst their fellow-men.” If securityactually came with fame and renown,then the person who sought themattained a “natural good.” But if fameactually brought heightened insecurity,as it did in most cases, then such anachievement was not worth pursuing.From this perspective, Epicurus’ criticsobserved, it would be difficult to justifymost of the restless striving and risktaking that leads to a city’s greatness.

Such a criticism of Epicureanquietism may well have been voiced in

the sun-drenched garden ofHerculaneum: the guests at the Villa ofthe Papyri, after all, would probably haveincluded their share of those who soughtfame and renown at the center of thegreatest city in the Western world. Butperhaps Julius Caesar’s father-in-law—ifPiso was indeed the villa’s owner—andsome in his circle of friends were drawnto this philosophical school preciselybecause it offered an alternative to theirstressful endeavors. Rome’s enemieswere falling before the might of itslegions, but it did not take propheticpowers to perceive ominous signs for thefuture of the republic. And even for thosemost safely situated, it was difficult togainsay one of Epicurus’ celebratedaphorisms: “Against other things39 it ispossible to obtain security, but when it

comes to death we human beings all livein an unwalled city” The key point, asEpicurus’ disciple Lucretius wrote inverses of unrivalled beauty, was toabandon the anxious and doomedattempt to build higher and higher wallsand to turn instead toward the cultivationof pleasure.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE TEETH OF TIME

APART FROM THE charred papyrusfragments recovered in Herculaneum,there are no surviving contemporarymanuscripts from the ancient Greek andRoman world. Everything that hasreached us is a copy, most often very farremoved in time, place, and culture fromthe original. And these copies representonly a small portion of the works even ofthe most celebrated writers of antiquity.Of Aeschylus’ eighty or ninety plays andthe roughly one hundred twenty bySophocles, only seven each have

survived; Euripides and Aristophanes didslightly better: eighteen of ninety-twoplays by the former have come down tous; eleven of forty-three by the latter.

These are the great successstories. Virtually the entire output of manyother writers, famous in antiquity, hasdisappeared without a trace. Scientists,historians, mathematicians,philosophers, and statesmen have leftbehind some of their achievements—theinvention of trigonometry, for example, orthe calculation of position by reference tolatitude and longitude, or the rationalanalysis of political power—but theirbooks are gone. The indefatigablescholar Didymus of Alexandria1 earnedthe nickname Bronze-Ass (literally,“Brazen-Bowelled”) for having what ittook to write more than 3,500 books;

apart from a few fragments, all havevanished. At the end of the fifth centuryCE an ambitious literary editor2 knownas Stobaeus compiled an anthology ofprose and poetry by the ancient world’sbest authors: out of 1,430 quotations,1,115 are from works that are now lost.

In this general vanishing, all theworks of the brilliant founders ofatomism, Leucippus and Democritus,and most of the works of their intellectualheir Epicurus, disappeared. Epicurushad been extraordinarily prolific.3 Heand his principal philosophical opponent,the Stoic Chrysippus, wrote betweenthem, it was said, more than a thousandbooks. Even if this figure is exaggeratedor if it counts as books what we wouldregard as essays and letters, the writtenrecord was clearly massive. That record

no longer exists. Apart from three lettersquoted by an ancient historian ofphilosophy, Diogenes Laertius, alongwith a list of forty maxims, almost nothingby Epicurus has survived. Modernscholarship, since the nineteenthcentury, has only been able to add somefragments. Some of these were culledfrom the blackened papyrus rolls found atHerculaneum; others were painstakinglyrecovered from the broken pieces of anancient wall. On that wall,4 discovered inthe town of Oenoanda, in the ruggedmountains in southwest Turkey, an oldman, in the early years of the secondcentury CE, had had his distinctlyEpicurean philosophy of life—“a fineanthem to celebrate the fullness ofpleasure”—chiseled in stone. But wheredid all the books go?

The actual material disappearanceof the books was largely the effect ofclimate and pests. Though papyrus andparchment were impressively long-lived(far more so than either our cheap paperor computerized data), books inevitablydeteriorated over the centuries, even ifthey managed to escape the ravages offire and flood. The ink was a mixture ofsoot (from burnt lamp wicks), water, andtree gum: that made it cheap andagreeably easy to read, but also water-soluble. (A scribe who made a mistakecould erase it with a sponge.) A spilledglass of wine or a heavy downpour, andthe text disappeared. And that was onlythe most common threat. Rolling andunrolling the scrolls or poring over thecodices, touching them, dropping them,coughing on them, allowing them to bescorched by fire from the candles, or

simply reading them over and overeventually destroyed them.

Carefully sequestering books fromexcessive use was of little help, for theythen became the objects not ofintellectual hunger but of a more literalappetite. Tiny animals, Aristotle noted,may be detected in such things asclothes, woolen blankets, and creamcheese. “Others are found,”5 heobserved, “in books, some of themsimilar to those found in clothes, otherslike tailless scorpions, very smallindeed.” Almost two thousand years lateri n Micrographia (1655), the scientistRobert Hooke reported with fascinationwhat he saw when he examined one ofthese creatures under that remarkablenew invention, the microscope:

a small white silver-shining6 Wormor Moth, which I found muchconversant among books andpapers, and is supposed to be thatwhich corrodes and eats holesthrough the leaves and covers. Itshead appears big and blunt, and itsbody tapers from it towards the tail,smaller and smaller, being shapedalmost like a carrot…. It has twolong horns before, which arestraight, and tapering towards thetop, curiously ringed or knobbed….The hinder part is terminated withthree tails, in every particularresembling the two longer hornsthat grow out of the head. The legsare scaled and haired. This animalprobably feeds upon the paper andcovers of books, and perforates inthem several small round holes.

them several small round holes.

The bookworm—“one of the teethof time,” as Hooke put it—is no longerfamiliar to ordinary readers, but theancients knew it very well. In exile, theRoman poet Ovid likened the “constantgnawing7 of sorrow” at his heart to thegnawing of the bookworm—“as the bookwhen laid away is nibbled by the worm’steeth.” His contemporary Horace fearedthat his book will eventually become“food for vandal moths.”8 And for theGreek poet Evenus, the bookworm wasthe symbolic enemy of human culture:“Page-eater,9 the Muses’ bitterest foe,lurking destroyer, ever feeding on thythefts from learning, why, blackbookworm, dost thou lie concealedamong the sacred utterances, producingthe image of envy?” Some protective

measures, such as sprinkling cedar oilon the pages, were discovered to beeffective in warding off damage, but itwas widely recognized that the best wayto preserve books from being eaten intooblivion was simply to use them and,when they finally wore out, to make morecopies.

Though the book trade in theancient world was entirely aboutcopying, little information has survivedabout how the enterprise was organized.There were scribes in Athens, as in othercities of the Greek and Hellenistic world,but it is not clear whether they receivedtraining in special schools or wereapprenticed to master scribes or simplyset up on their own. Some were evidentlypaid for the beauty of their calligraphy;others were paid by the total number oflines written (there are line numbers

recorded at the end of some survivingmanuscripts). In neither case is thepayment likely to have gone directly tothe scribe: many, perhaps most, Greekscribes10 must have been slavesworking for a publisher who owned orrented them. (An inventory of the propertyof a wealthy Roman citizen with anestate in Egypt lists, among his fifty-nineslaves, five notaries, two amanuenses,one scribe, and a book repairer, alongwith a cook and a barber.) But we do notknow whether these scribes generallysat in large groups, writing from dictation,or worked individually from a mastercopy. And if the author of the work wasalive, we do not know if he was involvedin checking or correcting the finishedcopy.

Somewhat more is known about

the Roman book trade, where adistinction evolved between copyists(librari) and scribes (scribae). The librarigenerally were slaves or paid laborerswho worked for booksellers. Thebooksellers set up advertisements onpillars and sold their wares in shopslocated in the Roman Forum. Thescribae were free citizens; they workedas archivists, government bureaucrats,and personal secretaries. (Julius Caesarhad seven scribes who followed himaround taking dictation.) WealthyRomans employed (or owned as slaves)personal librarians and clerks whocopied books borrowed from the librariesof their friends. “I have received thebook,”11 Cicero wrote to his friendAtticus, who had lent him a copy of ageographical work in verse by Alexander

of Ephesus. “He’s incompetent as a poetand he knows nothing; however, he’s ofsome use. I’m having it copied and I’llreturn it.”

Authors made nothing from thesale of their books; their profits derivedfrom the wealthy patron to whom thework was dedicated. (The arrangement—which helps to account for the fulsomeflattery of dedicatory epistles—seemsodd to us, but it had an impressivestability, remaining in place until theinvention of copyright in the eighteenthcentury.) Publishers had to contend,12as we have seen, with the widespreadcopying of books among friends, but thebusiness of producing and marketingbooks must have been a profitable one:there were bookshops not only in Romebut also in Brindisi, Carthage, Lyons,

Reims, and other cities in the empire.Large numbers of men and women

—for there are records of female as wellas male copyists—spent13 their livesbent over paper, with an inkwell, ruler,and hard split-reed pen, satisfying thedemand for books. The invention ofmovable type14 in the fifteenth centurychanged the scale of productionexponentially, but the book in the ancientworld was not a rare commodity: a well-trained slave reading a manuscript aloudto a roomful of well-trained scribes15could produce masses of text. Over thecourse of centuries, tens of thousands ofbooks, hundreds of thousands of copies,were made and sold.

There was a time in the ancientworld—a very long time—in which thecentral cultural problem must have

seemed an inexhaustible outpouring ofbooks. Where to put them all? How toorganize them on the groaning shelves?How to hold the profusion of knowledgein one’s head? The loss of this plenitudewould have been virtually inconceivableto anyone living in its midst.

Then, not all at once but with thecumulative force of a mass extinction, thewhole enterprise came to an end. Whatlooked stable turned out to be fragile,and what had seemed for all time wasonly for the time being.

The scribes must have beenamong the first to notice: they had lessand less to do. Most of the copyingstopped. The slow rains, drippingthrough the holes in the decaying roofs,washed away the letters in books that theflames had spared, and the worms, those“teeth of time,” set to work on what was

left. But worms were only the lowliestagents of the Great Vanishing. Otherforces were at work to hasten thedisappearance of the books, and thecrumbling of the shelves themselves intodust and ashes. Poggio and his fellowbook hunters were lucky to find anythingat all.

The fate of the books in all their vastnumbers is epitomized in the fate of thegreatest library in the ancient world, al i b ra ry located not in Italy but inAlexandria,16 the capital of Egypt andthe commercial hub of the easternMediterranean. The city had many tourist

attractions, including an impressivetheater and red-light district, but visitorsalways took note of something quiteexceptional: in the center of the city, at alavish site known as the Museum, mostof the intellectual inheritance of Greek,Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Jewishcultures had been assembled atenormous cost and carefully archived forresearch. Starting as early as 300 BCE,the Ptolomaic kings who ruledAlexandria had the inspired idea of luringleading scholars, scientists, and poets totheir city by offering them lifeappointments at the Museum, withhandsome salaries, tax exemptions, freefood and lodging, and the almostlimitless resources of the library.

The recipients of this largesseestablished remarkably high intellectualstandards. Euclid developed his

geometry in Alexandria; Archimedesdiscovered pi and laid the foundation forcalculus; Eratosthenes posited that theearth was round and calculated itscircumference to within 1 percent; Galenrevolutionized medicine. Alexandrianastronomers postulated a heliocentricuniverse; geometers deduced that thelength of a year was 365¼ days andproposed adding a “leap day” everyfourth year; geographers speculated thatit would be possible to reach India bysailing west from Spain; engineersdeveloped hydraulics and pneumatics;anatomists first understood clearly thatthe brain and the nervous system were aunit, studied the function of the heart andthe digestive system, and conductedexperiments in nutrition. The level ofachievement was staggering.

The Alexandrian library was not

associated with a particular doctrine orphilosophical school; its scope was theentire range of intellectual inquiry. Itrepresented a global cosmopolitanism, adetermination to assemble17 theaccumulated knowledge of the wholeworld and to perfect and add to thisknowledge. Fantastic efforts were madenot only to amass vast numbers of booksbut also to acquire or establish definitiveeditions. Alexandrian scholars werefamously obsessed with the pursuit oftextual accuracy. How was it possible tostrip away the corruptions that inevitablyseeped into books copied and recopied,for the most part by slaves, for centuries?Generations of dedicated scholarsdeveloped elaborate techniques ofcomparative analysis and painstakingcommentary in pursuit of the master

texts. They pursued as well access to theknowledge that lay beyond theboundaries of the Greek-speaking world.It is for this reason that an Alexandrianruler, Ptolomey Philadelphus, is said tohave undertaken the expensive andambitious project of commissioningsome seventy scholars to translate theHebrew Bible into Greek. The result—known as the Septuagint (after the Latinfor “seventy”)—was for many earlyChristians their principal access to whatthey came to call the Old Testament.

At its height the Museum containedat least a half-million papyrus rollssystematically organized, labeled, andshelved according to a clever newsystem that its first director, a Homerscholar named Zenodotus, seems tohave invented: the system wasalphabetical order. The institution

extended beyond the Museum’senormous holdings to a secondcollection, housed in one of thearchitectural marvels of the age, theSerapeon, the Temple of Jupiter Serapis.Adorned with elegant, colonnadedcourtyards, lecture halls, “almostbreathing statues,” and many otherprecious works of art, the Serapeon, inthe words of Ammianus Marcellinus, thefourth-century historian rediscovered byPoggio, was second in magnificence18only to the Capitol in Rome.

The forces that destroyed thisinstitution help us understand how itcame about that the Lucretius manuscriptrecovered in 1417 was almost all thatremained of a school of thought that wasonce eagerly debated in thousands ofbooks. The first blow came19 as a

consequence of war. A part of thelibrary’s collection—possibly only scrollskept in warehouses near the harbor—was accidentally burned in 48 BCEwhen Julius Caesar struggled tomaintain control of the city. But therewere greater threats than military actionalone, threats bound up with aninstitution that was part of a templecomplex, replete with statues of godsand goddesses, altars, and otherparaphernalia of pagan worship. TheMuseum was, as its name implies, ashrine dedicated to the Muses, the ninegoddesses who embodied humancreative achievement. The Serapeon,where the secondary collection waslocated, housed a colossal statue of thegod Serapis—a masterpiece fashionedin ivory and gold by the famous Greeksculptor Bryaxis—combining the cult of

the Roman deity Jupiter with the cult ofthe Egyptian deities Osiris and Apis.

The Jews and Christians who livedin large numbers in Alexandria wereintensely uneasy with this polytheism.They did not doubt that other godsexisted, but those gods were withoutexception demons, fiendishly bent onluring gullible humanity away from thesole and universal truth. All otherrevelations and prayers recorded inthose mountains of papyrus rolls werelies. Salvation lay in the Scriptures,which Christians opted to read in a newformat: not the old-fashioned scroll (usedby Jews and pagans alike) but thecompact, convenient, easily portablecodex.

Centuries of religious pluralismunder paganism—three faiths living sideby side in a spirit of mingled rivalry and

absorptive tolerance—were coming to anend. In the early fourth century theemperor Constantine began the processwhereby Rome’s official religion becameChristianity. It was only a matter oftime20 before a zealous successor—Theodosius the Great, beginning in 391CE—issued edicts forbidding publicsacrifices and closing major cultic sites.The state had embarked on thedestruction of paganism.

In Alexandria, the spiritual leader ofthe Christian community, the patriarchTheophilus, heeded the edicts with avengeance. At once contentious andruthless, Theophilus unleashed mobs ofChristian zealots who roamed throughthe streets insulting pagans. The pagansresponded with predictable shock andanxiety, and tensions between the two

communities rose. All that was neededwas an appropriately charged incidentfor matters to be brought to a head, andthe incident was not long in coming.Workmen renovating a Christian basilicafound an underground sanctuary that stillcontained pagan cult objects (such asanctuary—a shrine to Mithras—may beseen today in Rome, deep below theBasilica of S. Clemente). Seeing achance to expose the secret symbols ofpagan “mysteries” to public mockery,Theophilus ordered that the cult objectsbe paraded through the streets.

Pious pagans erupted in anger: “asthough,”21 a contemporary Christianobserver wryly noted, “they had drunk achalice of serpents.” The enragedpagans violently attacked Christians andthen withdrew behind the locked doors of

the Serapeon. Armed with axes andhammers, a comparably frenziedChristian crowd burst into the shrine,overwhelmed its defenders, andsmashed the celebrated marble, ivory,and gold statue of the god. Pieces weretaken to different parts of the city to bedestroyed; the headless, limbless trunkwas dragged to the theater and publiclyburned. Theophilus ordered monks tomove into the precincts of the pagantemple, whose beautiful buildings wouldbe converted into churches. Where thestatue of Serapis had stood, thetriumphant Christians would erectreliquaries holding the precious remainsof Elijah and John the Baptist.

After the downfall of the Serapeon,a pagan poet, Palladas, expressed hismood of devastation:

Is it not true22 that we are dead,

and living only inappearance,

We Hellenes, fallen on disaster,Likening life to a dream, since

we remain alive whileOur way of life is dead and

gone? The significance of the destruction, asPalladas understood, extended beyondthe loss of the single cult image. Whetheron this occasion mayhem reached thelibrary is unknown. But libraries,museums, and schools are fragileinstitutions; they cannot long surviveviolent assaults. A way of life was dying.

A few years later, Theophilus’successor as Christian patriarch, his

nephew Cyril, expanded the scope of theattacks, directing pious wrath this timeupon the Jews. Violent skirmishes brokeout at the theater, in the streets, and infront of churches and synagogues. Jewstaunted and threw stones at Christians;Christians broke into and plunderedJewish shops and homes. Emboldenedby the arrival from the desert of fivehundred monks who joined the alreadyformidable Christian street mobs, Cyrildemanded the expulsion of the city’slarge Jewish population. Alexandria’sgovernor Orestes, a moderate Christian,refused, and this refusal was supportedby the city’s pagan intellectual elitewhose most distinguished representativewas the influential and immenselylearned Hypatia.

Hypatia was the daughter of amathematician, one of the Museum’s

famous scholars-in-residence.Legendarily beautiful as a young woman,she had become famous for herattainments in astronomy, music,mathematics, and philosophy. Studentscame from great distances to study theworks of Plato and Aristotle under hertutelage. Such was her authority thatother philosophers wrote to her andanxiously solicited her approval. “If youdecree23 that I ought to publish mybook,” wrote one such correspondent toHypatia, “I will dedicate it to orators andphilosophers together.” If, on the otherhand, “it does not seem to you worthy,”the letter continues, “a close andprofound darkness will overshadow it,and mankind will never hear itmentioned.”

Wrapped in the traditional

philosopher’s cloak, called a tribon, andmoving about the city in a chariot,Hypatia was one of Alexandria’s mostvisible public figures. Women in theancient world often lived sequesteredlives, but not she. “Such was her self-possession24 and ease of manner,arising from the refinement andcultivation of her mind,” writes acontemporary, “that she not unfrequentlyappeared in public in presence of themagistrates.” Her easy access to theruling elite did not mean that sheconstantly meddled in politics. At thetime of the earlier attacks on the cultimages, she and her followers evidentlyheld themselves aloof, telling themselvesperhaps that the smashing of inanimatestatues left intact what really mattered.But with the agitation against the Jews it

must have become clear that the flamesof fanaticism were not going to die down.

Hypatia’s support for Orestes’refusal to expel the city’s Jewishpopulation may help to explain whathappened next. Rumors began tocirculate25 that her absorption inastronomy, mathematics, and philosophy—so strange, after all, in a woman—wassinister: she must be a witch, practicingblack magic. In March 415 the crowd,whipped into a frenzy by one of Cyril’shenchmen, erupted. Returning to herhouse, Hypatia was pulled from herchariot and taken to a church that wasformerly a temple to the emperor. (Thesetting was no accident: it signified thetransformation of paganism into the onetrue faith.) There, after she was strippedof her clothing, her skin was flayed off

with broken bits of pottery. The mob thendragged her corpse outside the city wallsand burned it. Their hero Cyril waseventually made a saint.

The murder of Hypatia signifiedmore than the end of one remarkableperson; it effectively marked the downfallof Alexandrian intellectual life and wasthe death knell26 for the wholeintellectual tradition that underlay the textthat Poggio recovered so many centurieslater. The Museum, with its dream ofassembling all texts, all schools, allideas, was no longer at the protectedcenter of civil society. In the years thatfollowed the library virtually ceased to bementioned, as if its great collections,virtually the sum of classical culture, hadvanished without a trace. They hadalmost certainly not disappeared all at

once—such a momentous act ofdestruction would have been recorded.But if one asks, Where did all the booksgo? the answer lies not only in the quickwork of the soldiers’ flames and the long,slow, secret labor of the bookworm. Itlies, symbolically at least, in the fate ofHypatia.

The other libraries of the ancientworld fared no better. A survey of Romein the early fourth century listed twenty-eight public libraries, in addition to theunnumbered private collections inaristocratic mansions. Near the century’send, the historian Ammianus Marcellinuscomplained that Romans had virtuallyabandoned serious reading. Ammianuswas not lamenting barbarian raids orChristian fanaticism. No doubt thesewere at work, somewhere in thebackground of the phenomena that

struck him. But what he observed, as theempire slowly crumbled, was a loss ofcultural moorings, a descent into febriletriviality. “In place of the philosopher27the singer is called in, and in place of theorator the teacher of stagecraft, and whilethe libraries are shut up forever liketombs, water-organs are manufacturedand lyres as large as carriages.”Moreover, he noted sourly, people weredriving their chariots at lunatic speedthrough the crowded streets.

When, after a long, slow deathagony, the Roman Empire in the Westfinally collapsed—the last emperor,Romulus Augustulus, quietly resigned in476 CE—the Germanic tribes that seizedone province after another had notradition of literacy. The barbarians whobroke into the public buildings and

seized the villas may not have beenactively hostile to learning, but theycertainly had no interest in preserving itsmaterial traces. The former owners of thevillas, dragged off to slavery on someremote farmstead, would have had moreimportant household goods to salvageand take with them than books. And,since the conquerors were for the mostpart Christians, those among them wholearned to read and write had noincentive to study the works of theclassical pagan authors. Compared tothe unleashed forces of warfare and offaith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to thelegacy of antiquity.

But a prestigious cultural tradition thathas shaped the inner lives of the elitedoes not disappear easily, even in thosewho welcome its burial. In a letter writtenin 384 CE, Jerome—the scholarly saintto whom we owe the story of Lucretius’madness and suicide—described aninner struggle. Ten years earlier, herecalled, he was on his way from Rometo Jerusalem, where he planned towithdraw from all worldly entanglements,but still he took his prized classicallibrary with him. He was committed todisciplining his body and saving his soul,but he could not forgo the addictivepleasures of his mind: “I would fast,28only to read Cicero afterwards. I wouldspend many nights in vigil, I would shedbitter tears called from my inmost heartby the remembrance of my past sins; and

then I would take up Plautus again.”Cicero, Jerome understood, was a paganwho argued for a thoroughgoingskepticism toward all dogmatic claims,including the claims of religion, but theelegance of his prose seemedirresistible. Plautus was, if anything,worse: his comedies were populated bypimps, whores, and hangers-on, but theirzany wit was delicious. Delicious butpoisonous: whenever Jerome turnedfrom these literary delights to theScriptures, the holy texts seemed crudeand uncultivated. His love for the beautyand elegance of Latin was such thatwhen he determined to learn Hebrew, heinitially found the experience almostphysically repellant: “From the judiciousprecepts29 of Quintilian, the rich andfluent eloquence of Cicero, the graver

style of Fronto, and the smoothness ofPliny,” he wrote in 411, “I turned to thislanguage of hissing and broken-windedwords.”

What saved him, Jerome wrote,was a nightmare. He had fallen gravelyill, and in his delirium, he dreamed thathe had been dragged before God’sjudgment seat. Asked to state hiscondition, he replied that he was aChristian. But the Judge sternly replied,“You lie;30 you are a Ciceronian, not aChristian” (Ciceronianus es, nonChristianus). These terrible words mighthave signaled his eternal damnation, butthe Lord, in his mercy, instead orderedthat Jerome merely be whipped. Thesinner was pardoned, “on theunderstanding that the extreme of tortureshould be inflicted on me if ever I read

again the works of Gentile authors.”When he awoke, Jerome found that hisshoulders were black and blue.

Jerome went on to settle inBethlehem, where he established twomonasteries, one for himself and hisfellow monks, the other for the piouswomen who had accompanied him.There he lived for thirty-six years,studying, engaging in vehementtheological controversies, and, mostimportantly, translating HebrewScriptures into Latin and revising theLatin translation of the New Testament.His achievement, the great Latin Bibletranslation known as the Vulgate, was inthe sixteenth century declared by theCatholic Church to be “more authentic”than the original.

There is, as Jerome’s nightmaresuggests, a distinctly destructive element

in his piety. Or rather, from theperspective of his piety, his intensepleasure in pagan literature wasdestroying him. It was not a mattermerely of spending more of his time withChristian texts but of giving up the pagantexts altogether. He bound himself with asolemn oath: “O Lord, if ever31 again Ipossess worldly books or read them, Ihave denied thee.” This renunciation ofthe authors he loved was a personalaffair: he had in effect to cure himself of adangerous addiction in order to save hissoul. But the addiction—and hence theneed for renunciation—was not hisalone. What he found so alluring32 waswhat kept many others like him in thrall topagan authors. He therefore had topersuade others to make the sacrifice hehad made. “What has Horace33 to do

with the Psalter,” he wrote to one of hisfollowers, “Virgil with the Gospels andCicero with Paul?”

For many generations, learnedChristians remained steeped, as Jeromewas, in a culture whose values had beenshaped by the pagan classics. Platonismcontributed to Christianity its model of thesoul; Aristotelianism its Prime Mover;Stoicism its model of Providence. All themore reason why those Christiansrepeated to themselves exemplarystories of renunciation. Through thetelling of these stories, they acted out, asin a dream, the abandonment of the richcultural soil in which they, their parents,and their grandparents were nurtured,until one day they awoke to find that theyactually had abandoned it.

The knights of renunciation, as in apopular romance, were almost always

glamorous figures who cast off thegreatest symbol of their status—theirintimate access to an elite education—forthe sake of the religion they loved. Themo me n t of renunciation came afterrigorous training in grammar and rhetoric,engagement with the literarymasterpieces, immersion in the myths.Only in the sixth century did Christiansventure to celebrate as heroes those whodispensed entirely with education, andeven then one can observe a certainhesitation or compromise. Here isGregory the Great’s celebration of St.Benedict:

He was born in the district34 ofNorcia of distinguished parents,who sent him to Rome for a liberaleducation. But when he saw many

of his fellow students fallingheadlong into vice, he steppedback from the threshold of theworld in which he had just set foot.For he was afraid that if heacquired any of its learning he, too,would later plunge, body and soul,into the dread abyss. In his desireto please God alone, he turned hisback on further studies, gave uphome and inheritance and resolvedto embrace the religious life. Hetook this step, well aware of hisignorance, yet wise, uneducatedthough he was.

What flickers through such

moments of abdication is a fear of beinglaughed at. The threat was notpersecution—the official religion of theempire by this time was Christian—but

ridicule. A fate no doubt preferable tobeing thrown to the lions, laughter in theancient world nonetheless had verysharp teeth. What was ridiculous aboutChristianity, from the perspective of acultivated pagan, was not only itslanguage—the crude style of theGospels’ Greek resting on the barbarousotherness of Hebrew and Aramaic—butalso its exaltation of divine humiliationand pain conjoined with an arroganttriumphalism.

When Christianity had completelysecured its position, it managed todestroy most of the expressions of thishostile laughter. A few traces, however,survive in the quotations and summariesof Christian apologists. Some of the jibeswere common to all of Christianity’spolemical enemies—Jesus was born inadultery, his father was a nobody, and

any claims to divine dignity aremanifestly disproved by his poverty andhis shameful end—but others bring uscloser to the specific strain of mockerythat surged up from Epicurean circles,when they encountered the messianicreligion from Palestine. That mockeryand the particular challenge it posed forearly Christians set the stage for thesubsequent disappearance of the wholeEpicurean school of thought: Plato andAristotle,35 pagans who believed in theimmortality of the soul, could ultimatelybe accommodated by a triumphantChristianity; Epicureanism could not.

Epicurus did not deny theexistence of gods. Rather, he thoughtthat if the concept of divinity made anysense at all, the gods could not possiblybe concerned with anything but their own

pleasures. Neither creators of theuniverse nor its destroyers, utterlyindifferent to the doings of any beingsother than themselves, they were deaf toour prayers or our rituals. TheIncarnation, Epicureans scoffed, was aparticularly absurd idea. Why should thehumans think of themselves as sosuperior to bees, elephants, ants, or anyof the available species, now or in eonsto come, that god should take their formand not another? And why then, amongall the varieties of humans, should hehave taken the form of a Jew? Whyshould anyone with any sense credit theidea of Providence, a childish ideacontradicted by any rational adult’sexperience and observation? Christiansare like a council of frogs in a pond,croaking at the top of their lungs, “For oursakes was the world created.”

Christians could try, of course, toreverse the mockery. If such doctrines asthe Incarnation and the resurrection ofthe body seemed absurd—“figments ofdiseased imagination,”36 as one paganput it, “and the futile fairy-tales inventedby poets’ fancy”—what about the talesthat pagans profess to believe:

Vulcan is lame and crippled;Apollo after years and years stillbeardless … Neptune has sea-green eyes; Minerva grey, like acat’s, Juno those of an ox … Janushas two faces, ready to walkbackwards; Diana is sometimesshort-kilted for the hunt, while atEphesus she is figured with manybreasts and paps.

But there is, of course, somethinguncomfortable about the “back-to-you”strategy, since the allegedridiculousness of one set of beliefshardly shores up the validity of another.

Christians knew, moreover, thatmany pagans did not believe in the literaltruth of their own myths and that therewere some—Epicureans prominentamong them—who called into questionvirtually all religious systems andpromises. Such enemies of faith foundthe doctrine of bodily resurrectionparticularly risible, since it wascontradicted both by their scientifictheory of atoms and by the evidence oftheir own senses: the rotting corpses thattestified with nauseating eloquence tothe dissolution of the flesh.

The early Church Father Tertullianvehemently insisted that, despite all

appearances, everything would comeback in the afterlife, down to the lastdetails of the mortal body. He knew alltoo well the responses he would get fromthe doubters:

What will be the use37 of thehands themselves and the feet andall the working parts of the body,when even trouble about food willcease? What will be the use of thekidneys … and of the other genitalorgans of both sexes and thedwelling places of the foetus andthe streams from the nurse’sbreasts, when sexual intercourseand conception and upbringingalike will cease to be? Finally,what use will the whole body be,which will of course have

absolutely nothing to do? “The crowd mocks,” Tertullian wrote,“judging that nothing is left over afterdeath,” but they will not have the lastlaugh: “I will rather laugh at the crowd atthe time when they are cruelly burning upthemselves.” On the Day of Judgment,each man will be brought forth before theheavenly tribunal, not a piece of him, nota shadow, not a symbolic token, butrather the whole of him, as he lived onthe earth. And that means teeth andintestines and genitals, whether or nottheir mortal functions have ceasedforever. “Yes!” Tertullian addressed 38his pagan listeners. “We too in our daylaughed at this. We are from amongyourselves. Christians are made, notborn!”

Some critics pointed out with aderisory smile that many features of theChristian vision were stolen from muchmore ancient pagan stories: a tribunal inwhich souls are judged, fire used forpunishment in an underground prisonhouse, a divinely beautiful paradisereserved for the spirits of the holy. ButChristians replied that these ancientbeliefs were all distorted reflections ofthe true Christian mysteries. Theeventual success of this argumentativestrategy is suggested by the very wordwe have been using for those who clungto the old polytheistic faith. Believers inJupiter, Minerva, and Mars did not thinkof themselves as “pagans”: the word,which appeared in the late fourth century,is etymologically related to the word“peasant.” It is an insult, then, a sign thatthe laughter at rustic ignorance had

decisively reversed direction.The charge of doctrinal plagiarism

was easier for Christians to deal withthan the charge of absurdity.Pythagoreans who believed in bodilyresurrection had the right general idea; itwas simply an idea that neededcorrection. But Epicureans who said thatthe whole idea of resurrection was agrotesque violation of everything that weknow about the physical universe couldnot be so easily corrected. It made somesense to argue with the former, but thelatter were best simply silenced.

Though early Christians,39Tertullian among them, found certainfeatures in Epicureanism admirable—thecelebration of friendship, the emphasison charity and forgiveness, a suspicionof worldly ambition—by the early fourth

century, the task had become clear: theatomists had to disappear. The followersof Epicurus had already arousedconsiderable enmity outside theChristian community. When the emperorknown as Julian the Apostate (c. 331–363), who attempted to revive paganismagainst the mounting Christianonslaught, drew up a list of works that itwas important for pagan priests to read,he also noted some titles that heexplicitly wished to exclude: “Let usnot,”40 he wrote, “admit discourses byEpicureans.” Jews, likewise, termedanyone who departed from the rabbinictradition apikoros, an Epicurean.41

But Christians particularly foundEpicureanism a noxious threat. If yougrant Epicurus42 his claim that the soulis mortal, wrote Tertullian, the whole

fabric of Christian morality unravels. ForEpicurus, human suffering is alwaysfinite: “if it is slight, he [Epicurus] says,you may despise it, if it is great it will notbe long.” But to be Christian, Tertulliancountered, is to believe that torture andpain last forever: “Epicurus utterlydestroys43 religion,” wrote anotherChurch Father; take Providence away,and “confusion and disorder will overtakelife.”

Christian polemicists had to find away to turn the current of mockeryagainst Epicurus and his followers.Ridiculing the pagan pantheon did notwork in this case, since Epicureanismeloquently dismantled the wholesacrificial worship of the gods anddismissed the ancient stories. What hadto be done was to refashion the account

of the founder Epicurus so that heappeared no longer as an apostle ofmoderation in the service of reasonablepleasure but instead as a Falstaffianfigure of riotous excess. He was a fool, apig, a madman. And his principal Romandisciple, Lucretius, had to be comparablymade over.

But it was not enough to blackenthe reputations of Epicurus andLucretius, to repeat endlessly that theywere stupid, swinishly self-indulgent,insane, and, finally, suicidal. It was notenough even, by this means, to suppressthe reading of their works, to humiliateanyone who might express interest inthem, to discourage copies from everbeing made. Even more than the theorythat the world consisted only of atomsand void, the main problem was the coreethical idea: that the highest good is the

pursuit of pleasure and the diminution ofpain. What had to be undertaken was thedifficult project of making what appearedsimply sane and natural—the ordinaryimpulses of all sentient creatures—seemlike the enemy of the truth.

Centuries were required toaccomplish this grand design, and it wasnever fully completed. But the grandoutlines may be seen in the late third andearly fourth century in the works of aNorth African convert from paganism toChristianity: Lactantius. Appointed tutorto the son of the emperor Constantine,who had established Christianity as thereligion of the empire, Lactantius wrote aseries of polemics against Epicureanism.That philosophy had, he acknowledges,a substantial following, “not because itbrings44 forward any truth, but because

the attractive name of pleasure invitesmany.” Christians must refuse theinvitation and understand that pleasure isa code name for vice.

The task, for Lactantius, was notonly to draw believers away from theirpursuit of human pleasures; it was alsoto persuade them that God was not, asEpicureans believed, entirely absorbedwithin the orbit of divine pleasures andhence indifferent to the fate of humans.Instead, as Lactantius wrote in acelebrated work written in 313 CE, Godcared about humans, just as a fathercared about his wayward child. And thesign of that care, he wrote, was anger.God was enraged at man—that was thecharacteristic manifestation of His love—and wanted to smite him over and overagain, with spectacular, unrelentingviolence.

A hatred of pleasure-seeking and avision of God’s providential rage: thesewere death knells of Epicureanism,henceforward branded by the faithful as“insane.” Lucretius had urged the personwho felt the prompting of sexual desire tosatisfy it: “a dash of gentle pleasuresooths the sting.” (4.177) Christianity, asa story rehearsed by Gregorydemonstrates, pointed in a differentdirection. The pious Benedict foundhimself thinking of a woman he had onceseen, and, before he knew what washappening, his desires were aroused:

He then noticed45 a thick patch ofnettles and briers next to him.Throwing his garment aside heflung himself into the sharp thornsand stinging nettles. There he

rolled and tossed until his wholebody was in pain and covered withblood. Yet, once he had conqueredpleasure through suffering, his tornand bleeding skin served to drainthe poison of temptation from hisbody. Before long, the pain thatwas burning his whole body hadput out the fires of evil in his heart.It was by exchanging these twofires that he gained the victory oversin.

What worked for the saint in the earlysixth century would, as monastic rulesmade clear, work for others. In one of thegreat cultural transformations in thehistory of the West, the pursuit of paintriumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.

The infliction of pain46 was hardly

unknown in the world of Lucretius. TheRomans were specialists in it, dedicatingvast sums and huge arenas to publicspectacles of violence. And it was notonly in the Colosseum that Romanscould glut themselves on injury, pain,and death. Plays and poems, based onthe ancient myths, were often blood-drenched, as were paintings andsculptures. Violence was part of thefabric47 of everyday life. Schoolmastersand slaveholders were expected to flogtheir victims, and whipping was afrequent prelude to Roman executions.This is why in the gospel account, priorto his crucifixion, Jesus was tied to acolumn and scourged.

But for the pagans, in the greatmajority of these instances, pain wasunderstood not as a positive value, a

stepping stone to salvation, as it was bypious Christians intent on whippingthemselves, but as an evil, somethingvisited upon rule-breakers, criminals,captives, unfortunate wretches, and—theonly category with dignity—soldiers.Romans honored a brave soldier’svoluntary acceptance of pain, but thatacceptance was far different from theecstatic embrace celebrated in hundredsof convents and monasteries. Theheroes of Roman stories willingly metwhat they could not, in good conscience,avoid or what they felt they had to endurein order to prove to their enemies theirdauntless courage. Outside the orbit ofthat heroic obligation, there lay thespecial philosophical discipline thatenabled the classical sage to regardinescapable pain—of kidney stones, forexample—with equanimity. And for

everyone, from the most exaltedphilosopher to the humblest artisan,there was the natural pursuit of pleasure.

In pagan Rome, the mostextravagant version of this pursuit ofpleasure came together in thegladiatorial arena with the mostextravagant infliction and endurance ofpain. If Lucretius offered a moralized andpurified version of the Roman pleasureprinciple, Christianity offered a moralizedand purified version of the Roman painprinciple. Early Christians, brooding onthe sufferings of the Saviour, thesinfulness of mankind, and the anger of ajust Father, found the attempt to cultivatepleasure manifestly absurd anddangerous. At best a trivial distraction,pleasure was at worst a demonic trap,figured in medieval art by those alluringwomen beneath whose gowns one can

glimpse reptilian claws. The only life trulyworth imitating—the life of Jesus—boreample witness to the inescapablepresence in mortal existence of sadnessand pain, but not of pleasure. Theearliest pictorial depictions of Jesus wereuniform in their melancholy sobriety. Asevery pious reader of Luke’s Gospelknew, Jesus wept, but there were noverses that described him laughing orsmiling, let alone pursuing pleasure.

It was not difficult for Christians ofthe fifth and sixth centuries to findreasons to weep: the cities were fallingapart, the fields were soaked in the bloodof dying soldiers, robbery and rape wererampant. There had to be someexplanation for the catastrophic behaviorof human beings over so manygenerations, as if they were incapable oflearning anything from their historical

experience. Theology provided ananswer deeper and more fundamentalthan this or that flawed individual orinstitution: humans were by naturecorrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam andEve, they richly deserved everymiserable catastrophe that befell them;they needed to be punished; they hadcoming to them an endless diet of pain.Indeed, it was only through this pain thata small number could find the narrowgate to salvation.

The most ardent early believers inthis doctrine, those fired by an explosivemix of fear, hope, and fierce enthusiasm,were determined to make the pain towhich all humankind was condemnedtheir active choice. In doing so, theyhoped to pay to an angry God the dues ofsuffering that He justly and implacablydemanded. They possessed something

of the martial hardness admired bytraditional Roman culture, but, with a fewexceptions,48 the goal was not theachievement of Stoical indifference topain. On the contrary. Their whole projectdepended on experiencing an intensesensitivity to hunger, thirst, andloneliness. And when they whippedthemselves with thorny branches orstruck themselves with jagged stones,they made no effort to suppress theircries of anguish. Those cries were part ofthe payment, the atonement that would, ifthey were successful, enable them torecover in the afterlife the happiness thatAdam and Eve had lost.

By the year 60049 there were overthree hundred monasteries and conventsin Italy and Gaul. Many of these were stillsmall—little more than fortified villas,

with their outbuildings—but theypossessed a spiritual rationale and aninstitutional coherence that conferredupon them stability in an unstable world.Their inhabitants were drawn from thosewho felt compelled to transform theirlives, to atone for their own sins and forthe sins of others, to secure eternal blissby turning their backs on ordinarypleasures. Over time, their numbers weresupplemented by many less ferventsouls who had in effect been given to theChurch by their parents or guardians.

In monasteries and conventsdriven by the belief that redemptionwould only come through abasement, itis not surprising that forms of corporalpunishment—virgarum verbera (hittingwith rods), corporale supplicium (bodilypunishment), ictus (blows), vapulatio(cudgeling), disciplina (whipping), and

flagellatio—were routinely inflicted oncommunity members who broke therules. Disciplinary practices that would,in pagan society, have been disgracesinflicted only on social inferiors weremeted out with something likedemocratic indifference to rank.Typically, the guilty party had to carry therod that was used for the beating, andthen sitting on the ground and constantlyrepeating the words Mea culpa, submit toblows until the abbot or abbess wassatisfied.

The insistence that punishment50be actively embraced by the victims—literalized in the kissing of the rod—marked a deliberate Christian tramplingon the Epicurean credo of pursuingpleasure and avoiding pain. After all, theexperience of pain was not only

punishment; it was a form of piousemulation. Christian hermits, brooding onthe sufferings of the Saviour, mortifiedtheir flesh, in order to experience in theirown bodies the torments that Jesus hadhad to undergo. Though these acts ofself-scourging began to be reported inlate antiquity—they were novel andstrange enough in the beginning toattract widespread attention—it was notuntil the eleventh century that a monasticreformer, the Italian Benedictine PeterDamian, established voluntary self-flagellation as a central ascetic practiceacceptable to the Church.

It had taken a thousand years towin the struggle and secure the triumphof pain seeking. “Did our Redeemer notendure scourging?” Damian asked thosecritics who called into question thecelebration of the whip. Weren’t the

apostles and many of the saints andmartyrs flogged? What better way tofollow in their footsteps, what surermethod of imitating Christ, than to sufferthe blows that they suffered? To be sure,Damian concedes, in the case of theseglorious predecessors, someone elsewas doing the whipping. But in a world inwhich Christianity has triumphed, wehave to do the whipping for ourselves.Otherwise the whole dream and doctrineof the imitation of Christ would have to beabandoned. “The body has to beshaped51 like a piece of wood,”explained one of the many texts thatfollowed in Damian’s wake, “withbeatings and whippings, with canes,scourges, and discipline. The body hasto be tortured and starved, so that itsubmits to the spirit and takes perfect

shape.” In the pursuit of this spiritualgoal, all boundaries, restraints, andinhibitions drop away. Shame atappearing naked before the eyes ofothers has no place, nor does theembarrassment of being seen trembling,howling, or sobbing.

Here is a description of theDominican nuns of Colmar, penned atthe turn of the fourteenth century by asister named Catherine vonGebersweiler who had lived in theconvent since childhood:

At Advent52 and during the wholeof Lent, the sisters would maketheir way after matins into the mainhall or some other place devoted totheir purpose. There they abusedtheir bodies in the most acute

fashion with all manner ofscourging instruments until theirblood flowed, so that the sound ofthe blows of the whip rang throughthe entire convent and rose moresweetly than any other melody tothe ears of the Lord.

This is no mere sadomasochistic fantasy:a vast body of evidence confirms thatsuch theaters of pain, the ritualized heirsto St. Benedict’s spontaneous roll in thestinging nettles, were widespread in thelate Middle Ages. They were noted againand again as a distinctive mark ofholiness. St. Teresa, “although she wasslowly wasting away, tormented herselfwith the most painful whips, frequentlyrubbed herself with fresh stinging nettles,and even rolled about naked in thorns.”St. Clare of Assisi “tore apart the

alabaster container of her body with awhip for forty-two years, and from herwounds there arose heavenly odors thatfilled the church.” St. Dominic cut into hisflesh every night with a whip affixed withthree iron chains. St. Ignatius of Loyolarecommended whips with relatively thinstraps, “summoning pain into the flesh,but not into the bones.” Henry Suso, whocarved the name of Jesus on his chest,had an iron cross fixed with nailspressed into his back and whippedhimself until the blood flowed. Suso’scontemporary, Elsbeth of Oye, a nunfrom Zurich, whipped herself soenergetically that the bystanders in thechapel were spattered with her blood.

The ordinary self-protective,pleasure-seeking impulses of the laypublic could not hold out against thepassionate convictions and

overwhelming prestige of their spiritualleaders. Beliefs and practices that hadbeen the preserve of religiousspecialists, men and women set apartfrom the vulgar, everyday imperatives ofthe “world,” found their way into themainstream, where they thrived insocieties of flagellants and periodicbursts of mass hysteria. What was oncein effect a radical counterculture insistedwith remarkable success that itrepresented the core values of allbelieving Christians.

Of course, people continued topursue pleasure—the Old Adam couldnot be so easily eradicated. In peasants’huts and the halls of the great, alongcountry lanes, in prelates’ palaces, andbehind the high walls of the monasteries,there was drinking, overeating, raucouslaughter, merry dancing, and plenty of

sex. But virtually no one in moralauthority, no one with a public voice,dared speak up to justify any of it. Thesilence was not, or not only, theconsequence of timidity or fear. Pleasureseeking had come to seemphilosophically indefensible. Epicuruswas dead and buried, almost all of hisworks destroyed. And after St. Jerome inthe fourth century briefly noted thatLucretius had committed suicide, therewere no attacks on Epicurus’ greatRoman disciple. He was forgotten.

The survival of the disciple’s oncecelebrated poem was left to fortune. Itwas by chance that a copy of On theNature of Things made it into the libraryof a handful of monasteries, places thathad buried, seemingly forever, theEpicurean pursuit of pleasure. It was bychance that a monk laboring in a

scriptorium somewhere or other in theninth century copied the poem before itmoldered away forever. And it was bychance that this copy escaped fire andflood and the teeth of time for some fivehundred years until, one day in 1417, itcame into the hands of the humanist whoproudly called himself PoggiusFlorentinus, Poggio the Florentine.

CHAPTER FIVE

BIRTH AND REBIRTH

FLORENCE AT THE dawn of thefifteenth century had few of thearchitectural features with which it is nowgraced, features that deliberately evokeon a grand scale the dream of theancient past. Brunelleschi’s magnificentcupola on the Duomo, the city’s vastcathedral—the first large domeconstructed since Roman antiquity andto this day the principal feature of thecity’s skyline—did not yet exist, nor didhis elegantly arched loggia of theFoundling Hospital or his other projects

carefully constructed on principlesderived from antiquity. The cathedral’sbaptistery lacked the famous classicizingdoors designed by Ghiberti, and theChurch of S. Maria Novella was withoutLeon Battista Alberti’s harmonious,gracefully symmetrical facade. Thearchitect Michelozzi had not designedthe beautiful, austere buildings for theConvent of San Marco. The wealthiestfamilies of the city—the Medici, the Pitti,the Rucelli—had not yet built their grandpalaces, whose columns, arches, andcarved capitals conspicuouslyemphasize classical order andproportion.

The walled city was distinctlymedieval in appearance, closed in anddark. Its densely populated central zonewas crowded with high towers andfortified stone buildings, with twisting

narrow lanes and alleys made still darkerby projecting upper stories and coveredbalconies. Even on the old bridge—thePonte Vecchio—that crossed the Arno,shops crammed tightly next to each othermade it impossible to glimpse an openlandscape. From the air, it might havelooked as though the city possessedmany open spaces, but these were forthe most part the walled interiorcourtyards of the huge monasteries builtby the rival religious orders: theDominicans’ S. Maria Novella, theFranciscans’ S. Croce, the AugustinianHermits’ S. Spirito, the Carmelites’ S.Maria del Carmine, and others. Secular,open, public spaces were few and farbetween.

It was to this somber, constricted,congested city, subject to periodicoutbreaks of bubonic plague, that Poggio

Bracciolini came as a young man in thelate 1390s. He had been born1 in 1380in Terranuova, an undistinguishedbackwater within the territory thatFlorence controlled. Years later TomasoMorroni, one of his polemical enemies,wrote that Poggio was the bastard son ofpeasants who eked out a living from thesoil. The account cannot be takenseriously—it is one of many libels thatRenaissance humanists, Poggio amongthem, hurled recklessly at one another,like punch-drunk pugilists. But, growingup where he did, he was undoubtedlyfamiliar with Tuscan farms, whether hetoiled on one or not. It was difficult forPoggio to claim a long line of illustriousancestors, or rather, in order to do so witha straight face after he had establishedhimself in the world, he had to purchase

a fraudulent 350-year-old coat of arms.A more plausible story, one Poggio

himself seems to have allowed at certainpoints in his life, is that his father Gucciowas a notary, though a tax record of theperiod describes him as a spetiale, thatis, a druggist. Perhaps he was both.Notaries were not figures of great dignity,but in a contractual and intenselylitigious culture, they were legion. TheFlorentine notary Lapo Mazzei describessix or seven hundred of them crowdedinto the town hall, carrying under theirarms bundles of documents, “each folderthick2 as half a bible.” Their knowledgeof the law enabled them to draw up localregulations, arrange village elections,compose letters of complaint. Townofficials who were meant to administerjustice often had no clue how to proceed;

the notaries would whisper in their earswhat they were meant to say and wouldwrite the necessary documents. Theywere useful people to have around.

There was, in any case, anindubitable link in Poggio’s family to anotary, his maternal grandfatherMichaelle Frutti. The link is worth notingbecause in 1343, many years beforePoggio’s birth, Ser Michaelle signed anotarial register with a strikingly beautifulsignature. Penmanship would turn out toplay an oddly important role in thegrandson’s story. In the concatenation ofaccidents that led to the recovery ofLucretius’ poem, Poggio’s handwritingwas crucial.

Other children were born to GuccioBracciolini and his wife Jacoba—twodaughters (one of whom died veryyoung) and another son, about whom his

older brother Poggio had angrycomplaints later in his life. To judge fromhis father’s tax payments, Poggio’s earlyyears were reasonably comfortable; butaround 1388, when he was eight yearsold, things took a very bad turn. Gucciohad to sell his house and property, fleefrom his creditors, and move with hisfamily to nearby Arezzo. According toTomaso Morroni, young Poggio was sentout to the fields to labor for someonenamed Luccarus. When he was caughtcheating Luccarus, Morroni reports,Poggio was condemned to be crucifiedand was pardoned only because of histender years. Once again we should nottake these slanders seriously, except assymptoms of the boundless loathing ofsquabbling scholars. In Arezzo, Poggiomust have been attending a school,learning the elements of Latin, and

mastering the art of handwriting, notploughing someone’s fields or dodgingt h e executioner. But that he had fewresources he himself attested later in hislife, recalling that he arrived in Florencecum quinque solidis—with five penniesin his pocket.

It was at some point in the 1390s,well before he turned twenty, that theimpoverished young man came toFlorence. He probably had in hand aletter of recommendation from hisschoolteacher in Arezzo, and he mighthave acquired as well a smattering oflegal knowledge from brief studies inBologna. After a time he was reunitedwith his improvident father and the rest ofhis family, all of whom eventually movedto Florence. But when he initially set footin the Piazza della Signoria or looked upfor the first time at Giotto’s beautiful

belltower next to the Duomo, Poggio wasby himself, a nobody.

With a population hovering around50,000, Florentine political, social, andcommercial life was dominated by asmall number of powerful mercantile andnoble families: the Albizzi, Strozzi,Peruzzi, Capponi, Pitti, Buondelmonti,and a few others. The leading familiessignaled their presence and importancethrough conspicuous expenditure. “It ismuch sweeter3 to spend money than toearn it,” wrote Giovanni Rucellai, whosefamily had grown rich in wool dying andbanking; “spending gave me deepersatisfaction.” The wealthy were attendedby large numbers of clients, bailiffs,accountants, clerics, secretaries,messengers, tutors, musicians, artists,servants, and slaves. The labor shortage

after the Black Death in 1348 had greatlyincreased the market for slaves,4 broughtnot only from Muslim Spain and Africabut also from the Balkans,Constantinople, and the shores of theBlack Sea. The traffic was allowed,provided that the slaves were infidels,not Christians, and Poggio must haveseen a fair number of them, NorthAfricans, Cypriots, Tartars, Greeks,Russians, Georgians, and others.

Florence was an oligarchy, and thesmall coterie of the wealthy and wellbornwere the people who counted. Wealthlay in banking and landowning, as itusually does, and it derived as well fromthe weaving and finishing of cloth, forwhich the city was famous. The clothbusiness required a cosmopolitanoutlook, strong nerves, and extraordinary

attention to detail. The surviving archiveof a single great merchant of this period,Francesco di Marco Datini of nearbyPrato—not, by any means, the greatest ofthese early capitalists—contains some150,000 letters, along with 500 accountbooks or ledgers, 300 deeds ofpartnership, 400 insurance policies,several thousand bills of lading, letters ofadvice, bills of exchange, and checks.On the first pages of Datini’s ledgerswere inscribed the words: “In the name ofGod5 and of profit.”

In Florence, God was served in theastonishing number of churches thatadjoined one another in the crowdedstreets. He was served as well in thelong, passionate sermons that drew hugecrowds, in the harangues of itinerantfriars, in the prayers, vows, offerings, and

expressions of religious fear that recur inalmost all writings, formal and informal,and must have saturated everydayspeech, and in periodic bursts of popularpiety.

Profit was served in a vibrantinternational cloth industry6 that requiredlarge numbers of trained workmen. Someof the most skilled of these wereorganized in powerful guilds that lookedout for their interests, but other workmenlabored for a pittance. In 1378, two yearsbefore Poggio’s birth, the seethingresentment of these miserable daylaborers, the populo minuto, had boiledover into a full-scale bloody revolt.Gangs of artisans ran through the streets,crying, “Long live the people and thecrafts!” and the uprising briefly toppledthe ruling families and installed a

democratic government. But the old orderwas quickly restored, and with it a regimedetermined to maintain the power of theguilds and the leading families.

After the defeat of the Ciompi, asthe working-class revolutionaries werecalled, the resurgent oligarchs held on topower tenaciously for more than fortyyears, shaping Poggio’s wholeknowledge and experience of the citywhere he determined to make hisfortune. He had to find a way into aconservative, socially bounded world.Fortunately for him, by innate skill andtraining he possessed one of the fewgifts that would enable someone of hismodest origins and resources to do so.The key that opened the first doorthrough which he slipped was somethingthat has come to mean next to nothing inthe modern world: beautiful handwriting.

Poggio’s way of fashioning letterswas a move away from the intricatelyinterwoven and angular writing known asGothic hand. The demand for more open,legible handwriting had already beenvoiced earlier in the century by Petrarch(1304–1374). Petrarch complained thatthe writing then in use in mostmanuscripts often made it extremelydifficult to decipher the text, “as though ithad been designed,”7 he noted, “forsomething other than reading.” To maketexts more legible, the individual lettershad somehow to be freed from theirinterlocking patterns, the spacesbetween the words opened up, the linesspaced further apart, the abbreviationsfilled out. It was like opening a windowand letting air into a tightly closed room.

What Poggio accomplished, in

collaboration with a few others, remainsstartling. They took Carolingianminuscule—a scribal innovation of theninth-century court of Charlemagne—and transformed it into the script theyused for copying manuscripts and writingletters. This script in turn served as thebasis for the development of italics. Theywere then in effect the inventors of thescript we still think of as at once theclearest, the simplest, and the mostelegant written representation of ourwords. It is difficult to take in the full effectwithout seeing it for oneself, for example,in the manuscripts preserved in theLaurentian Library in Florence: thesmooth bound volumes of vellum, stillcreamy white after more than fivehundred years, contain page after pageof perfectly beautiful script, almostmagical in its regularity and fineness.

There are tiny pinholes on the margins,where the blank sheets must have beenfixed to hold them steady, and scarcelyvisible score marks to form straight lines,twenty-six per page. But these aidscannot begin to explain how the taskscould have been accomplished withsuch clean elegance.

To have invented a way to designletters immediately recognizable andadmired after six centuries is no smallachievement. But the way Poggiofashioned his letters showed more thanjust unusual skill in graphic design; itsignaled a creative response to powerfulcultural currents stirring in Florence andthroughout Italy. Poggio seems to havegrasped that the call for a new cursivewriting was only a small piece of a muchlarger project, a project that linked thecreation of something new with a search

for something ancient. To speak of thissearch as a project runs the risk ofmaking it sound routine and familiar. Infact it was a shared mania, one whoseorigin can be traced back to Petrarch,who, a generation before Poggio’s birth,had made the recovery of the culturalheritage of classical Rome a collectiveobsession.

Modern scholarship has founddozens of ways to qualify and diminishthis obsession. Petrarch’s admirers wroteas if the ancient past had been utterlyforgotten, until their hero heroicallyrecalled it to life, but it can bedemonstrated that Petrarch’s vision wasless novel than it seemed. In addition tothe fifteenth-century Renaissance, therehad been other moments of intenseinterest in antiquity, both throughoutmedieval Italy and in the kingdoms of the

north, including the great CarolingianRenaissance of the ninth century. And itwas not these moments alone that keptthe intellectual heritage of antiquity alive.Medieval compendia provided muchmore continuity with classical thoughtthan believed by those under Petrarch’sspell. In the high Middle Ages, scholasticphilosophers, reading Aristotle throughthe lens of the brilliant Arabiccommentator Averroës, constructed asophisticated, highly rational account ofthe universe. And even Petrarch’svaunted aesthetic commitment toclassical Latinity—his dream of walkingin the footsteps of the ancients—hadbeen evident for at least seventy yearsbefore his birth. Much of what Petrarchand his followers claimed for the noveltyof their approach was tendentious, self-congratulatory exaggeration.

But it is difficult entirely to demystifythe movement to which Petrarch gaverise, if only because he and hiscontemporaries were so articulate abouttheir experience. To them at least it didnot seem obvious that the search onwhich they embarked was only a politestroll onto well-trodden ground. Theysaw themselves as adventurousexplorers both in the physical world—themountains they crossed, the monasticlibraries they investigated, the ruins theydug up—and in their inner world ofdesire. The urgency of the enterprisereflects their underlying recognition thatthere was nothing obvious or inevitableabout the attempt to recover or imitate thelanguage, material objects, and culturalachievements of the very distant past. Itwas a strange thing to do, far strangerthan continuing to live the ordinary,

familiar life that men and women hadlived for centuries, making themselvesmore or less comfortable in the midst ofthe crumbling, mute remains of antiquity.

Those remains were everywherevisible in Italy and throughout Europe:bridges and roads still in use after morethan a millennium, the broken walls andarches of ruined baths and markets,temple columns incorporated intochurches, old inscribed stones used asbuilding materials in new constructions,fractured statues and broken vases. Butthe great civilization that left these traceshad been destroyed. The remnants couldserve as walls to incorporate into newhouses, as reminders that all things passand are forgotten, as mute testimony tothe triumph of Christianity overpaganism, as literal quarries to be minedfor precious stones and metals.

Generations of men and women, in Italyand elsewhere in Europe, haddeveloped effective techniques for therecycling of classical fragments, in theirwriting as well as their building. Thetechniques bypassed any anxiety aboutmeddling with the leftovers of a paganculture: as broken shards whether ofstone or of language, these leftoverswere at once useful and unthreatening.What more would anyone want with therubble over which the living hadclambered for more than a thousandyears?

To insist on the original,independent meaning of this rubblewould cause trouble and moralperplexity. A passion for antiquity couldcertainly not be justified on the basis ofcuriosity alone, for curiosity had long

been rigorously condemned8 as a mortalsin. The religion of the pagans waswidely regarded as the worship ofdemons, and, even setting aside thatfear, the Christian faithful was urged toremember the cultural achievements ofancient Greece and Rome as thequintessential works of the world, thekingdom of man, set against thetranscendent, timeless kingdom of God.

Petrarch was a devout Christian,9and throughout his life he reflected withardent seriousness on his spiritualcondition. And yet he was, over thecourse of a complex career of restlessjourneying, diplomacy, soul-searching,and compulsive writing, a man held inthe grip of a fascination with paganantiquity that he himself could nevercompletely fathom. Though he was for

long periods of his life a relatively solitaryfigure, Petrarch did not keep thisfascination to himself. He insisted withmissionary zeal on the expressivepower, the beauty, and the challenge ofall that lay broken and buried beneaththe crushing weight of neglect.

A gifted scholar, Petrarch began tosearch for ancient texts that had beenforgotten. He was not the first to do so,but he managed to invest this searchwith a new, almost erotic urgency andpleasure, superior to all other treasureseeking:

Gold, silver, jewels,10 purplegarments, houses built of marble,groomed estates, pious paintings,caparisoned steeds, and otherthings of this kind offer a mutable

and superficial pleasure; booksgive delight to the very marrow ofone’s bones. They speak to us,consult with us, and join with us ina living and intense intimacy.

Copying, comparing, and correcting theancient Latin texts that he found,Petrarch returned them to circulation bysharing them with a vast network ofcorrespondents to whom, often rising atmidnight to sit at his desk, he wrote withmanic energy. And he responded to theancient writers as if they were somehowa living part of this network, intimatefriends and family with whom he couldshare his thoughts. When he found agreat cache of Cicero’s private letters tohis wealthy friend Atticus, candid lettersfilled with glimpses of egotism, ambition,and resentment, Petrarch did not hesitate

to write a letter to Cicero, reproachinghim for failing to live up to his own highprinciples.

For his own present,11 where hewas forced to live, Petrarch professedlimitless contempt. He lived in a sordidtime, he complained, a time ofcoarseness, ignorance, and triviality thatwould quickly vanish from humanmemory. But his was the kind ofcontempt that seems only to intensifycharisma and celebrity. His fame steadilygrew, and with it the cultural significanceof his obsession with the past. Insucceeding generations that obsessionwas partly routinized and settled into aninfluential new educational curriculum,the humanities (studia humanitatis), withemphasis on a mastery of Greek andLa t i n language and literature and a

particular focus on rhetoric. But thehumanism that Petrarch himself helpedto create and that he communicated tohis closest friends and disciples—preeminently, to Giovanni Boccaccio(1313–1374) and Coluccio Salutati(1331–1406)—was not a strictlyacademic affair.

The early humanists feltthemselves, with mingled pride, wonder,and fear, to be involved in an epochalmovement. In part the movementinvolved recognizing that something thathad seemed alive was really dead. Forcenturies, princes and prelates hadclaimed that they were continuing theliving traditions of the classical world andhad appropriated, in some form or other,the symbols and the language of thepast. But Petrarch and those he inspiredinsisted that this easy appropriation was

a lie: the Roman Empire did not actuallyexist in Aachen, where the ruler whocalled himself the “Holy RomanEmperor” was crowned; the institutionsand ideas that had defined the world ofCicero and Virgil had been torn topieces, and the Latin written by thephilosophers and theologians of the pastsix or seven hundred years was an uglyand distorted image, like that reflected ina badly made mirror, of what had oncebeen so beautifully eloquent. It wasbetter not to pretend any longer, but toacknowledge that there was nocontinuity. Instead, there was a corpse,long buried and by now disintegrated,under one’s feet.

But this acknowledgment was onlythe necessary first step. Once onerecognized what was gone, once onehad mourned the tragic loss, it was

possible to prepare the way for what layon the other side of death: nothing lessthan resurrection. The pattern was, ofcourse, familiar to every good Christian—and Petrarch, in holy orders, was avery good Christian indeed—but theresurrection in this case was in thisworld, not in the next. The object ofrecovery was fundamentally cultural andsecular.

Poggio arrived in Rome a quarterof a century after Petrarch’s death, at atime when the charismatic moment of themovement had already begun to fade.The sense of creative daring wasgradually giving way to a spirit ofantiquarianism and with it a desire todiscipline, correct, and regulate allrelations with the ancient past. Poggioand his generation became increasinglycaught up in the desire to avoid mistakes

in Latin grammar and to catch theblunders of others. But the lingeringsense of the strangeness of the recoveryof classical antiquity helps to explain thepeculiar impact of his handwriting. Thescript that he fashioned was not a directevocation of the handwriting used by theancient Romans: all traces of thathandwriting had long since vanished,leaving only the carved inscriptions inhandsome capital letters on stone andoccasional rough graffiti. But Poggio’sscript was a graphic expression of thedeep longing for a different style ofbeauty, a cultural form that would signalthe recovery of something precious thathad been lost. The shape of his letterswas based on the manuscript style ofcertain Carolingian scribes. But Poggioand his contemporaries did not identifythis style with the court of Charlemagne;

they called it lettera antica, and, in doingso, they dreamed not of Charlemagne’stutor Alcuin but of Cicero and Virgil.

In order to earn money the youngPoggio copied books and documents,probably a very large number of them.His handwriting and his skill in copying—for which he became celebrated in hislifetime—must have been sufficientlyremarkable from the beginning to enablehim to pay for lessons. He improved hisLatin, which was already quiteadvanced, by studying with a giftedscholar from Ravenna, GiovanniMalpaghino, a restless, quarrelsomeman who had in his youth beenPetrarch’s secretary and amanueunsisand who had made a living lecturing inVenice, Padua, Florence, and elsewhereo n Cicero and Roman poetry. Poggio’searnings paid too for his training as a

notary, training that had the advantage12of being cheaper and shorter than thelong course of study required to becomea lawyer.

At twenty-two years old, Poggiostood for his exam, not in the universitybut before a panel of lawyers andnotaries. He had managed to survive thevagaries of his impoverished childhoodand was poised to begin a career. Thefirst notarial document in his hand is aletter of recommendation for his ownfather, who had fled from Florence toRimini to escape an irate moneylender.We do not have a clue what Poggiothought when he penned this copy.Perhaps what already mattered more tohim was the person in whose name theletter of recommendation was written:Coluccio Salutati, the great chancellor ofthe Florentine Republic.

the Florentine Republic.The chancellor of the Florentine

Republic was in effect the permanentsecretary of state for foreign affairs.Florence was an independent state incontrol of a substantial swath of territoryin central Italy and engaged in aconstant, high-stakes chess game withthe other powerful states of the Italianpeninsula, especially Venice and Milanin the north, Naples in the south, and thepapacy in Rome, weakened by internaldivisions but still rich, dangerous, andmeddlesome. Each of these rivals wasprepared, if its position seemedthreatened, to take the risky step ofcalling for aid, in money and troops, fromthe rulers of the Continent whowelcomed the opportunity to intervene.All of the players in the game wereambitious, cunning, treacherous,ruthless, and armed, and the chancellor’s

conduct of diplomatic relations, includingrelations with the Church, was crucial notmerely for the well-being of the city butfor its very survival in the face of thethreats from France, the Holy RomanEmpire, and Spain.

When Poggio arrived on the scenein Florence, in the late 1390s, Salutati—who had begun life as a lowly provincialnotary—had filled this post for sometwenty-five years, conducting intrigues,hiring and ridding himself ofmercenaries, drafting precise instructionsto ambassadors, negotiating treaties,seeing through the ruses of his enemies,forging alliances, issuing manifestos.Virtually everyone—the city’s bitterestenemies as well as its most patrioticcitizens—understood that in itschancellor Florence had someone trulyexceptional, endowed not only with legal

knowledge, political cunning, anddiplomatic skill, but also withpsychological penetration, a gift forpublic relations, and unusual literaryskill.

Like Petrarch, with whom he hadcorresponded, Salutati felt theconcentrated force of the buried past andhad embarked on a scholarly search forthe vestiges of classical culture. LikePetrarch, he was an intensely devoutChristian who at the same time foundalmost nothing to cherish, at leaststylistically, in anything written betweenCassiodorus in the sixth century andDante in the thirteenth. Like Petrarch,Salutati sought instead to imitate thestyle of Virgil and Cicero, and, though herecognized that he lacked Petrarch’sliterary genius—Ego michi non placeo (“Ido not like myself”), he ruefully wrote—

he astonished his contemporaries withthe power of his prose.

Above all, Salutati shared withPetrarch the conviction that the recoveryof the past had to be of more thanantiquarian interest. The goal of readingwas not to make oneself sound exactlylike one of the ancients, even if that werepossible. “I much prefer13 that my ownstyle be my own,” Petrarch wrote,“uncultivated and rude, but made to fit, asa garment, to the measure of my mind,rather than to someone else’s, whichmay be more elegant, ambitious, andadorned, but one that, deriving from agreater genius, continually slips off,unfitted to the humble proportions of myintellect.” Though there is clearly a largedose of false modesty here, there is alsoa genuine desire to fashion a new and

original voice not by disappearing intothe old masters but by taking thosemasters into the self. The ancientauthors, Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio,“have become absorbed14 into my beingand implanted not only in my memory butin the marrow of my bones, and havebecome one with my mind so that even ifI never read them again in my life, theywould inhere in me with their roots sunkin the depths of my soul.” “I have alwaysbelieved,”15 Salutati wrote in the samespirit, that “I must imitate antiquity notsimply to reproduce it, but in order toproduce something new….”

To prove its worth,16 Petrarch andSalutati both insisted, the wholeenterprise of humanism had not merelyto generate passable imitations of theclassical style but to serve a larger

ethical end. And to do so it needed to livefully and vibrantly in the present. Buthere the disciple parted from his master,for while Petrarch, who was born in exileand never fully identified with a particularhomeland, moved throughout his lifefrom place to place—shuttling from royalpalace to city to papal court to ruralretreat, despairing of stable attachmentsand feeling the pull toward acontemplative withdrawal from the world—Salutati wanted17 to producesomething new in the city-state hepassionately loved.

At the center of Florence’scramped urban landscape of fortifiedtowers and walled monasteries was thePalazzo della Signoria, the political heartof the republic. It was here for Salutati18that the city’s glory resided. The

independence of Florence—the fact thatit was not a client of another state, that itwas not dependent on the papacy, andthat it was not ruled by a king, a tyrant, ora prelate but governed by a body of itsown citizens—was for Salutati what mostmattered in the world. His letters,dispatches, protocols, and manifestos,written on behalf of the ruling priors ofFlorence, are stirring documents, andthey were read and copied throughoutItaly. They demonstrated that ancientrhetoric was alive, that it effectivelystirred up political emotions andawakened old dreams. A supremelygifted diplomat and politician, Salutatihad a range of voices, a range almostimpossible to convey quickly, butsomething of his spirit may be gaugedfrom a letter of February 13, 1376, to thetown of Ancona. Ancona was, like

Florence, an independent commune, andSalutati was urging its citizens to revoltagainst the papal government that hadbeen imposed upon them: “Will youalways stand19 in the darkness ofslavery? Do you not consider, O best ofmen, how sweet liberty is? Ourancestors, indeed the whole Italian race,fought for five hundred years … so thatliberty would not be lost.” The revolt hewas trying to incite was, of course, inFlorence’s strategic interest, but inattempting to arouse a spirit of liberty,Salutati was not being merely cynical.He seems genuinely to have believedthat Florence was the heir to therepublicanism on which ancient Romangreatness had been founded. Thatgreatness, the proud claim of humanfreedom and dignity, had all but vanished

from the broken, dirty streets of Rome,the debased staging ground of sordidclerical intrigues, but it lived, in Salutati’sview, in Florence. And he was itsprincipal voice.

He knew that he would not be itsvoice forever. As he reached hisseventies, troubled by intensifyingreligious scruples and anxious about themany threats to the city he loved, Salutatilooked to a group of gifted young men hehad taken under his wing. Poggio wasamong these young men, though we donot know precisely how Salutatiidentified him or the others whom hetrained, in the hope that one or anotherwould continue his labor. The mostpromising student was Leonardo Bruni ofArezzo, a man about ten years older thanPoggio, and like Poggio, from a verymodest background. Bruni had set out to

study law, but, along with otherintellectually gifted men of his generationand particularly those in the orbit ofSalutati, he had been seized by apassion for classical studies. In his case,the decisive factor was the study ofancient Greek, made possible when in1397 Salutati invited the preeminentByzantine scholar Manuel Chrysolaras toreside in Florence and give classes in alanguage that had been almostcompletely forgotten. “At the coming ofChrysolaras,”20 Bruni later recalled, “Iwas made to halt in my choice of lives,seeing that I held it wrong to desert law,and yet I reckoned it a crime to omit sogreat an occasion of learning the Greekliterature.” The lure proved irresistible:“Conquered at last by these reasonings, Idelivered myself over to Chrysolaras with

such passion that what I had receivedfrom him by day in hours of waking,occupied my mind at night in hours ofsleep.”

In the circle jockeying forrecognition by the great Salutati, onemight have expected Poggio most toidentify with the earnest, hardworking,ambitious Bruni, a penniless, provincialoutsider endowed only with his ownacute intelligence. But though headmired Bruni—who eventually servedas a brilliant, deeply patriotic chancellorof Florence and was the author, amongother works, of the first great history ofthe city—the young Poggio formed hisdeepest bond of friendship with anotherone of Salutati’s students, thehypersensitive, argumentative aestheteNiccolò Niccoli.

Some sixteen years older than

Poggio, Niccoli had been born to one ofthe city’s wealthiest families. His fatherhad made a fortune in the manufacture ofwool cloth, along with money-lending,grain futures, and other enterprises. Taxrecords from the 1390s indicate thatNiccolò Niccoli and his five brotherswere wealthier than most of the residentsin their quarter of the city, including suchruling families as the Brancacci and thePitti. (Modern tourists to Florence cangauge the scale of this wealth byrecalling the grandeur of the Pitti Palace,built some twenty years after Niccoli’sdeath.)

By the time that Poggio came toknow him, Niccoli’s fortunes, and thoseof his brothers, were in decline. Thoughthey were still very rich men, the brotherswere quarreling bitterly amongthemselves, and the family as a whole

seems to have been unwilling or unableto play the political game that wasalways necessary in Florence to protectand enhance accumulated wealth. Onlythose who actively exercised politicalpower in the city and kept a sharp eyeout for their interests could avert thecrushing and often vindictive taxes thatwere levied on vulnerable fortunes.Taxes were used in Florence,21 as thehistorian Guicciardini cannily remarked acentury later, like a dagger.

Niccolò Niccoli spent all he had ona ruling passion that kept him from thecivic pursuits that might have helped himsecure some of the family wealth. Thewool trade and commodity speculationwere not for him, any more than servingthe republic in the Signoria, theexecutive body of government, or on the

important councils known as the TwelveGood Men and the Sixteen Standard-bearers of the Militia. Even more than hishumanist mentor and friends, Niccoli wasobsessed with the vestiges of Romanantiquity and had no time for anythingelse. He determined, probably at an earlyage, to have no career and hold no civicoffices, or rather, he determined to usehis inherited wealth to live a beautifuland full life by conjuring up the ghosts ofthe ancient past.

In the Florence of Niccoli’s time,the family was the central institution,socially, economically, andpsychologically, and for anyone who didnot choose to enter the special world ofthe Church—and particularly for anyonewith inherited wealth—there wasoverwhelming pressure to marry, to havechildren, and to augment the family

fortunes. “Marriage gives anabundance22 of all sorts of pleasure anddelight,” wrote Niccoli’s youngercontemporary, Leon Battista Alberti,summing up widely held views,

If intimacy increases good will, noone has so close and continued afamiliarity with anyone as with hiswife; if close bonds and a unitedwill arise through the revelationand communication of yourfeelings and desires, there is noone to whom you have moreopportunity to communicate fullyand reveal your mind than to yourown wife, your constantcompanion; if, finally, an honorablealliance leads to friendship, norelationship more entirely

commands your reverence than thesacred tie of marriage. Add to allthis that every moment bringsfurther ties of pleasure and utility,confirming the benevolence fillingour hearts.

And if the picture painted here wasexceedingly rosy, it was reinforced bydire warnings. Woe to the man, intonedSan Bernardino, the greatest popularpreacher of the time, who has no wife:

If he is rich23 and has somewhat,the sparrows eat it, and mice….Know you what his bed is like? Helies in a ditch, and when he has puta sheet on his bed, he never takesit off again, until it is torn. And in theroom in which he eats, the floor is

covered with a melon rind andbones and salad leaves…. Hewipes the trenchers off: the doglicks them, and so washes them.Know you how he lives? Like abrute beast.

Niccoli rejected both the

inducements and the warnings. Hechose to remain single, so that, it wassaid, no woman would distract him fromhis studies. “Studies” is a perfectlyaccurate term—he was a deeplyscholarly and learned man—but it doesnot adequately convey the overarchingvision of a mode of life immersed in thepast that Niccoli arrived at early and thath e pursued with a tenacious single-mindedness. As for the rest, all thatordinarily constitutes the pursuit ofhappiness, he seems to have been

indifferent: “He had a housekeeper,”24his early biographer Vespasiano writes,“to provide for his wants.”

Niccoli was one of the firstEuropeans to collect antiquities as worksof art, prized possessions with which hesurrounded himself in his Florentineapartments. Such collecting is by nowsuch a familiar practice among the veryrich that it is easy to lose sight of the factthat it was once a novel idea. Pilgrims toRome in the Middle Ages had long beenaccustomed to gawking at theColosseum and other “marvels” ofpaganism on their way to worshipping atthe places that actually mattered, therevered Christian shrines of saints andmartyrs. Niccoli’s collection in Florencerepresented a very different impulse: notthe accumulation of trophies but theloving appreciation of aesthetic objects.

As word got round that an eccentricman was willing to pay handsomely forancient heads and torsos, farmers whomight in the past have burned anymarble fragments that they ploughed upfor the lime they could extract from themor used the old carved stones for thefoundations of a pigsty began instead tooffer them for sale. On display inNiccoli’s elegant rooms, along withantique Roman goblets, pieces ofancient glassware, medals, cameos, andother treasures, the sculptures inspired inothers the impulse to collect.

Poggio could not possibly hope25to be served his meals, as his friend was,on ancient Roman plates or disbursegold coins, as his friend did, for antiquecameos that he happened to glimpsearound the necks of street urchins. But

he could share and deepen the desirethat underlay Niccoli’s acquisitions, thedesire to understand and to reenterimaginatively the cultural world that hadfashioned the beautiful objects withwhich he surrounded himself. The twofriends studied together, traded historicalanecdotes about the Roman Republicand Empire, pondered the religion andmythology represented by the statues ofthe gods and the heroes, measured thefoundations of ruined villas, discussedthe topography and the organization ofancient cities, and above all enrichedtheir detailed understanding of the Latinlanguage they both loved and which theyroutinely used in their personal lettersand perhaps in private conversation aswell.

From these letters it is clear thatNiccolò Niccoli cared about one thing

even more passionately than the ancientsculptures that were being exhumed fromthe earth: the classical and patristic textsthat his fellow humanists were ferretingout of monastic libraries. Niccoli loved topossess these texts, to study them, andto copy them slowly, ever so slowly, inhandwriting even more beautiful thanPoggio’s. Perhaps indeed theirfriendship coalesced at least as mucharound the forms of letters—Niccolishares with Poggio the credit for theinvention of humanist script—as aroundthe forms of ancient thought.

Manuscripts of ancient texts wereexpensive to acquire, but to the avidcollector no price seemed too great.Niccoli’s library was famous amonghumanists in Italy and elsewhere, and,though he was often reclusive, crotchety,and fiercely opinionated, he generously

welcomed into his house scholars whowished to consult his collections. Whenin 1437 he died at the age of seventy-three, he left eight hundred manuscripts,by far the largest and best collection inFlorence.

Guided by Salutati’s vision, Niccolihad formulated an idea of what to do withthese texts. Petrarch and Boccaccio hadboth contemplated keeping together themanuscripts they had acquired, after theydied, but their valuable collections werein fact sold off, dispersed, or simplyneglected. (Many of the precious codicesthat Petrarch painstakingly gathered andthat he brought to Venice, to serve as thecore of what he dreamed would be a newAlexandrian Library, were shut away andforgotten in a damp palazzo where theycrumbled into dust.) Niccoli did not wantto see the work of his lifetime suffer a

similar fate. He drew up a will in whichhe called for the manuscripts to be kepttogether, forbade their sale or dispersion,prescribed strict rules for loans andreturns, appointed a committee oftrustees, and left a sum of money to builda library. The building would beconstructed and the collection housed ina monastery; but Niccoli emphatically didnot want this to be a monastic library,closed off to the world and reserved forthe monks. He specified that the books26would be available not for the religiousalone but for all learned citizens, omnescives studiosi. Centuries after the lastRoman library had been shut down andabandoned, Niccoli had brought backinto the world the idea of the publiclibrary.

In the late 1390s, when Poggio first

met Niccoli, the mania for collecting thatled to this remarkable result must onlyhave been in its early stages, but thefriends bonded in their shared insistenceon the superiority of all things ancient—setting aside matters of faith—overanything that followed. The astonishingliterary ambition and creativitycharacteristic of Petrarch had largelyshriveled up in them, as had the patrioticzeal and the passion for liberty that hadfueled Salutati’s humanism. What tooktheir place was something far lessexpansive in spirit, something harder andmore punishing: a cult of imitation and acraving for exactitude. Perhaps theyounger generation simply lacked theoverpowering talent of their elders, but itwas as if these gifted disciples of Salutatihad deliberately rejected the bold desireto bring something truly new into the

world. Despising the new, they dreamedonly of calling back to life something old.This dream, narrow and arid in spirit, wasdoomed to failure; but, all the same, ithad surprising results.

To those outside the charmedcircle of young humanists, the emergingattitude toward language and culturecould seem repellent. “In order to appearwell read27 to the mob,” wrote onedisgusted contemporary, “they shoutabout the piazza how many diphthongsthe ancients had and why today only twoare in use.” Even Salutati was uneasy,and with good reason, for though thefervent classicism of Poggio and Niccoliwas clearly indebted to him, it was also aparting of the ways, as he understood,and in some subtle sense a repudiation.

On the death of Petrarch on July

19, 1374, the grieving Salutati haddeclared that Petrarch was a greaterprose writer than Cicero and a greaterpoet than Virgil. By the 1390s, this praiseseemed to Poggio and Niccoli ridiculous,and they pressed Salutati to repudiate it.In all the intervening centuries, no one,they argued, had bettered the greatclassic writers in stylistic perfection. Itwas impossible. Since ancient times allthere had been, in their view, was a long,tragic history of stylistic corruption andloss. Indifferent or ignorant, evensupposedly well-educated medievalwriters had forgotten how to formsentences correctly, in the propermanner of the masters of classical Latin,or to use words with the elegance,accuracy, and precision with which theyhad once been wielded. Moreover, thesurviving samples of classical texts had

been corrupted, so that they could nolonger serve as correct models, even ifanyone had the ambition to use them assuch. The “ancients” cited by medievalscholastics, Niccoli argued, “would nothave recognized28 as their own thewritings attributed to them, preserved asthey are in corrupt texts and translatedwithout taste and sense.”

Petrarch, who repeatedly insistedthat the mastery of a classical style wasby itself inadequate for the achievementof true literary or moral greatness, hadonce stood on the steps of the Capitoland had himself crowned poet laureate—as if the spirit of the ancient past had trulybeen reborn in him. But from theperspective of the radical, hard-coreclassicism of the younger generation,nothing truly worthwhile had been

achieved by Dante, Petrarch, orBoccaccio, let alone by lesser lights:“While the literary legacy29 of antiquity isin such a pitiful state, no real culture ispossible, and any disputation isnecessarily built on shaky ground.”

These were unmistakably Niccoli’sviews, but they were not his precisewords. Rather, they were the wordsattributed to him in a dialogue byLeonardo Bruni. For apart from letters tointimate friends, Niccoli wrote virtuallynothing. How could he, given hishypercritical sourness and narrow,unrelenting classicism? Friends senttheir Latin texts to him and anxiouslyawaited his corrections, which werealmost invariably punishing, stern, andunforgiving. But Niccoli was at his mostunforgiving in relation to himself.

Niccolò Niccoli was, Salutatiobserved, Poggio’s “second self.”30 ButPoggio did not suffer from the cripplinginhibitions that virtually silenced hisfriend. In the course of his long career, hewrote books on such subjects ashypocrisy, avarice, true nobility, whetheran old man should marry, thevicissitudes of fortune, the miseries of thehuman condition, and the history ofFlorence. “He had a great gift31 ofwords,” his younger contemporaryVespasiano da Bisticci wrote of him,adding, “He was given to stronginvective, and all stood in dread of him.”If Poggio, the master of invective, wasnot willing to grant to his old master thatany writer of the past millennium couldequal, let alone outstrip, the eloquence ofthe ancients, he was willing to concede

that Petrarch had accomplishedsomething: Petrarch was the first, Poggiogranted, “who with his labor,32 industry,and watchful attention called back to lightthe studies almost brought to destruction,and opened the path to those others whowere eager to follow.”

That was the path on which Niccolihad decisively embarked, casting asideeverything else in his life. Poggio, for hispart, was happy to join him, but he hadsomehow to make a living. He hadfantastic skill as a scribe, but that wouldhardly have supported him in the mannerhe hoped to live. His command ofclassical Latin would have enabled himto embark on a career as a teacher, butthis was a life with very few of theamenities he sought. Universitiesgenerally lacked buildings, libraries,

endowments; they consisted of scholarsand masters, and humanists wereusually paid much less than professorsof law and medicine. Most teachers ofthe humanities lived itinerant lives,traveling from city to city, giving lectureson a few favorite authors, and thenrestlessly moving on, in the hope offinding new patrons. Poggio had had theopportunity to witness such lives, andthey did not appeal to him. He wantedsomething much more stable and settled.

At the same time Poggio lacked thepatriotic zeal—the passion for the cityand for republican liberty—that inspiredSalutati and had been stirred in Bruni.And he lacked as well the calling thatmight have led him to take religiousorders and embark on the life of a priestor a monk. His spirit was emphaticallysecular and his desires were in and of

the world. Still, he had to do something.In the fall of 1403, armed with a letter ofrecommendation from Salutati, thetwenty-three-year-old Poggio set off forRome.

CHAPTER SIX

IN THE LIE FACTORY

FOR AN AMBITIOUS provincial upstartlike Poggio, the swirling, swollen orbit ofthe pope was the principal magnet, butRome held out other opportunities. Thepowerful Roman noble families—mostprominently, the Colonna or the Orsini—could always find some way to make useof someone endowed with excellentLatin and exquisite handwriting. Stillmore, the bishops and cardinals residingin Rome had their own smaller courts, inwhich a notary’s ability to draft and penlegal documents was a sought-after skill.

Upon his arrival, Poggio found a place inone of these courts, that of the cardinal ofBari. But this was only a brief halt on theway to the higher goal of papal service—whether in the palace (the palatium) orthe court (the curia). Before the year wasout, the staunchly republican Salutatihad pulled enough strings at the court ofthe reigning pope, Boniface IX, to helphis prized pupil get what he mostwanted, the coveted position of scribe—apostolic scriptor.

Most of the papal bureaucrats werefrom Rome and its surroundings; many ofthem, like Poggio, had some training inthe law. Though scriptors were expectedto attend mass every day before work,their post was a secular one—theybusied themselves principally with thebusiness side of the papacy, the side thatentailed rationality, calculation,

administrative skill, and legal acumen.The pope was (or at least claimed to be)the absolute ruler of a large swath ofcentral Italy, extending north into theRomagna and to the territories controlledby the Venetian Republic. Many of thecities over which he ruled wereperennially restive, the policies of thesurrounding states were as aggressive,treacherous, and grasping as his own,foreign powers were always poised tomake their own armed incursions into thepeninsula. To hold his own, he neededall of the diplomatic cunning, money, andmartial ferocity he could muster, andhence he needed and maintained a largegovernmental apparatus.

The pope was, of course, theabsolute ruler of a much larger spiritualkingdom, one that extended, in principleat least, to the entire human race and

affected to shape its destiny both in thisworld and in the next. Some of those heclaimed as his subjects professedsurprise at his presumption—as did theNew World peoples whom the pope inthe late fifteenth century grandly signedover en masse to be vassals of the kingsof Spain and Portugal—and others, suchas the Jews or the Eastern OrthodoxChristians, stubbornly resisted. But thegreat majority of Christians in the West,even if they lived in distant regions, orwere ignorant of the Latin in which heconducted his affairs, or knew somethingof the spectacular moral failings thatstained his office, believed that theystood in a special relationship to thepope’s unique authority. They looked tothe papacy to determine points ofdoctrine in a dogmatic religion thatclaimed these points were crucial for the

fate of the soul and enforced this claimwith fire and sword. They sought papaldispensations—that is, exemptions fromthe rules of canon law—in such mattersas marriages and annulments and athousand other delicate social relations.They jockeyed for appointment to variousoffices and confirmation of valuablebenefices. They looked for everythingthat people hope an immensely wealthyand powerful lawmaker, landowner, andspiritual leader will confer upon them ordeny to their rivals. In the early fifteenthcentury, when Poggio got his bearings inRome, cases came into the papal courtfor settlement at the rate of two thousanda week.

All of this activity—far exceedingany other chancery court in Europe—required skilled personnel: theologians,lawyers, notaries, clerks, secretaries.

Petitions had to be drawn up in theproper form and filed. Minutes had to becarefully kept. Decisions had to berecorded. Orders were transcribed andcopied. Papal bulls—that is, decrees,letters patent, and charters—were copiedand sealed. Abbreviated versions ofthese bulls were prepared anddisseminated. The bishop of Rome had alarge household staff, as befitted hisprincely rank; he had a huge entourageof courtiers, advisers, clerks, andservants, as befitted his political officeand his ceremonial significance; he hadan enormous chancery, as befitted hisjuridical power; and he had a massivereligious bureaucracy, as befitted hisspiritual authority.

This was the world Poggio enteredand in which he hoped to thrive. Aposition in the curia could serve as a

step toward highly remunerativeadvancement in the Church hierarchy,but those who aspired to suchadvancement became churchmen.Poggio certainly understood thatordination was the route to wealth andpower, and, unmarried as he was, therewas no obstacle to his taking it. (He mayalready have had a mistress andillegitimate children, but that certainlywas no obstacle). And yet he held back.

He knew himself1 well enough tounderstand that he lacked a religiousvocation. That, of course, did not stopmany of his contemporaries, but he didnot like what he observed in those whohad made this choice anyway. “I amdetermined2 not to assume thesacerdotal office,” he wrote to his friendNiccoli, “for I have seen many men whom

I have regarded as persons of goodcharacter and liberal dispositions,degenerate into avarice, sloth, anddissipation, in consequence of theirintroduction into the priesthood.” Thisdegeneration would, he thought, almostcertainly be his own fate, one he wasdetermined to avoid: “Fearing lest thisshould be the case with myself, I haveresolved to spend the remaining term ofmy pilgrimage as a layman.” He was, tobe sure, turning his back on a particularlycomfortable and secure existence in avery insecure world, but for Poggio thecost of this security was too high: “I donot think3 of the priesthood as liberty, asmany do,” he confided to Niccoli, “but asthe most severe and oppressive form ofservice.” The life course he opted forinstead may seem to us a peculiarly

constrained one—a lay bureaucrat in theservice of the pope—but to Poggio therefusal of orders evidently felt liberating,as if he were guarding an inner core ofindependence.

He needed every bit ofindependence that he could muster. TheRoman curia was, from a moralperspective, a notoriously perilous place,a peril deftly summed up4 by a Latinproverb of the time: Curialis bonus, homosceleratissimus (“Good curialist,wickedest of men”). The atmosphere hebreathed is most brilliantly conveyed bya strange work of the 1430s, writtenwhen Poggio was still very much at thecenter of the curia. The work, entitled Onthe Excellence and Dignity of the RomanCourt, is by a younger humanistcontemporary, the Florentine Lapo da

Castiglionchio. It is a dialogue, in thestyle of Cicero, a form much favored atthe time by writers who wished to aircontroversial and even dangerous viewswithout taking full responsibility for them.Hence, at the start of Lapo’s imaginaryconversation, a character called Angelo—not Lapo himself, of course, heavenforbid—violently assails the moralbankruptcy of the curia, a place “in whichcrime,5 moral outrage, fraud, and deceittake the name of virtue and are held inhigh esteem.” The thought that this sinkof hypocrisy makes a claim to religiousfaith is grotesque: “What can be morealien6 to religion than the curia?”

Lapo, professing to speak in hisown voice, rises to the defense of thepapal court. The place attracts crowds ofpetitioners, to be sure, but we know that

God wants to be worshipped bymultitudes. Therefore he must beparticularly gratified by the magnificentspectacles of worship staged in Hishonor by the richly dressed priests. Andfor ordinary mortals, the curia is the bestplace to acquire the virtue known asprudence, since there are so many typesof people in attendance from all over theworld. Just to observe the wide array ofoutlandish costumes and accents andways of wearing one’s beard is in itself avaluable lesson in the range of humancustoms. And the court is also the bestplace to study the humanities. After all,Lapo writes, as “the pope’s domesticsecretary”7 (and hence a very influentialfigure), “there is Poggio of Florence, inwhom there is not only the highesterudition and eloquence, but also a

unique gravity, seasoned with plenty ofgreat wit and urbanity.”

True, he concedes, it is disturbingthat bribery and corruption lie at the heartof the curia, but these problems are thework of a small group of miserablethieves and perverts who have broughtthe place into disrepute. Perhaps thepope will notice the scandal one day andundertake to clean his house, but in anycase one should in life always keep inmind what was intended, not what isactually done.

Angelo, evidently persuaded bythese arguments, begins to waxenthusiastic over the cunning of thelawyers in the curia, with their subtlegrasp of the weaknesses and intimatesecrets of everyone and their ability toexploit all opportunities to make money.And, given the huge sums that are paid

for bits of paper with papal seals, whatfantastic profits are reaped! The place isa gold mine. There is no need any longerto affect the poverty of Christ: that wasnecessary only at the beginning in orderto avoid the imputation of bribing peopleto believe. Times have changed, andnow riches, so essential for anyimportant enterprise, are in order forwhoever can acquire them. Priests areallowed to amass all the wealth theywant; they only have to be poor in spirit.To want high priests actually to be poor,rather than the immensely rich men thatthey are, displays a kind of“mindlessness.”8

So the dialogue runs on, withdeadpan seriousness and wide-eyedenthusiasm. The curia, the friends agree,is a great place not only for serious study

but also for lighter amusements such asgaming, horsemanship, and hunting. Justthink of the dinner parties at the papalcourt—witty gossip, along with fantasticfood and drink served by beautiful,young, hairless boys. And for thosewhose tastes do not run in the directionof Ganymede, there are the abundantpleasures of Venus. Mistresses,adulterous matrons, courtesans of alldescriptions occupy a central place inthe curia, and appropriately so, since thedelights they offer have such a centralplace in human happiness. Lewd songs,naked breasts, kissing, fondling, withsmall white lap-dogs trained to lickaround your groin to excite desire—andall for remarkably low prices.

This expansive enthusiasm foroutrageously corrupt behavior and thefrantic pursuit of wealth must be a sly

satirical game. Yet On the Excellenceand Dignity of the Roman Court is a verypeculiar satire, and not merely becauseits gushing praise for what the reader ispresumably meant to despise evidentlytook in some contemporaries.9 Theproblem is that when he wrote the work,Lapo was busily seeking appointment inthe curia for himself. It is possible, ofcourse, that he felt ambivalent about hisattempt: people often despise the veryinstitutions they are frantically trying toenter. But perhaps compiling thisinventory of the vices of the curia wassomething more than an expression ofambivalence.

There is a moment in the work inwhich Lapo praises the gossip, obscenestories, jokes, and lies that characterizethe conversation of the apostolic scribes

and secretaries. No matter, he says,whether the things that are reported aretrue or false. They are all amusing and,in their way, instructive:

No one is spared,10 whether he isabsent or present, and everyone isequally attacked, to the greatguffawing and laughter of all.Dinner parties, tavern life,pandering, bribes, thefts, adultery,sexual degradation, and shamefulacts are publicly revealed. Fromthis one acquires not only pleasurebut also the greatest utility, sincethe life and character of all is thusplaced before your eyes.

Lapo is no doubt being ironic, but he isalso, in the very manner of his irony,

showing that he gets the cynical joke andthereby demonstrating his suitability toparticipate in the conversations hepillories. This was in effect a way ofpresenting himself to the members of thecuria, and above all to “Poggio ofFlorence.”

By the time Lapo came on thescene, in the 1430s, Poggio had risenfrom scriptor to the much more powerfuland remunerative position of papalsecretary. At any one time there wereabout a hundred scriptors in the papalcourt, but only six apostolic secretaries.The latter had direct access to the popehimself and hence far greater influence.A careful suggestion here, a well-timedword there, could make all the differencein the outcome of an important case orthe disposition of a wealthy benefice.

Among the secretaries, there was

one in particular who was known as thesecretarius domesticus or secretus, thatis, the pope’s private or intimatesecretary. This coveted position was thegolden apple, and, after years ofmaneuvering, Poggio—whose father hadonce fled from Arezzo a step ahead ofhis creditors—finally plucked it. Whenambitious Lapo or any other office seekersurveyed the court, it was easy enoughto see that Poggio was foremost among“the pope’s men.”

But why then should Lapo havethought to ingratiate himself with Poggioby painting a slyly ironic picture of thecorrupt institution to which he hoped tobe appointed? Because already in the1430s, and probably for a long timebefore this, Poggio had establishedhimself at the very center of what hecalled “the Bugiale,” the Lie Factory.

There, in a room at the court, the papalsecretaries would regularly gather toexchange stories and jokes. “Nobodywas spared,”11 Poggio wrote, in aphrase echoed by Lapo, “and whatevermet with our disapprobation was freelycensured; oftentimes the Pope himselfwas the first subject-matter of ourcriticism.” The chatter, trivial,mendacious, sly, slanderous, oftenobscene, was the kind of speech that isalmost forgotten before its sound fadesaway, but Poggio seems not to haveforgotten any of it. He went back to hisdesk and, in his best Latin, fashioned theconversations he had had in the LieFactory into something he entitled theFacetiae.

It is almost impossible for jokes thatare centuries old to retain any life. The

fact that a few of the jokes ofShakespeare or Rabelais or Cervantescontinue to make us smile is somethingof a miracle. Almost six hundred yearsold, Poggio’s Facetiae is by now largelyinteresting only as a symptom. Theserelics, like the remains of long-deadinsects, tell us what once buzzed aboutin the air of the Vatican. Some of thejokes are professional complaints, of thesort secretaries must always have had:the boss routinely claims to detectmistakes and demands rewriting, but, ifyou bring him the identical document,which you pretend to have corrected, hewill take it into his hand, as if to peruse it,give it a glance, and then say, “Now it isall right:12 go, seal it up….” Some arestories, half-skeptical, half-credulous,about popular miracles and prodigies of

nature. A few reflect wryly on Churchpolitics, as when Poggio compares thep o p e who conveniently forgot hispromise to end the schism to a quackfrom Bologna who announced that hewas going to fly: “At the end of the day,13when the crowd had watched andwaited, he had to do something, so heexposed himself and showed his ass.”

Most of the stories in the Facetiaeare about sex, and they convey, in theirclubroom smuttiness, misogyny mingledwith both an insider’s contempt for yokelsand, on occasion, a distinct anticlericalstreak. There is the woman14 who tellsher husband that she has two cunts(duos cunnos), one in front that she willshare with him, the other behind that shewants to give, pious soul that she is, tothe Church. The arrangement works

because the parish priest is onlyinterested in the share that belongs to theChurch. There is the clueless priest whoin a sermon against lewdness (luxuria)describes practices that couples areusing to heighten sexual pleasure; manyin the congregation take note of thesuggestions and go home to try them outfor themselves. There are dumb priestswho, baffled by the fact that in confessionalmost all the women say that they havebeen faithful in matrimony and almost allthe men confess to extramarital affairs,cannot for the life of them figure out whothe women are with whom the men havesinned. There are many tales aboutseductive friars and lusty hermits, aboutFlorentine merchants nosing out profits,about female medical woes magicallycured by lovemaking, about cunningtricksters, bawling preachers, unfaithful

wives, and foolish husbands. There isthe fellow humanist—identified by nameas Francesco Filelfo—who dreams thathe puts his finger into a magic ring thatwill keep his wife from ever beingunfaithful to him and wakes to find thathe has his finger in his wife’s vagina.There is the quack doctor who claimsthat he can produce children of differenttypes—merchants, soldiers, generals—depending on how far he pushes hiscock in. A foolish rustic, bargaining for asoldier, hands his wife over to thescoundrel, but then, thinking himself sly,comes out of hiding and hits the quack’sass to push his cock further in: “PerSancta Dei Evangelia,”15 the rusticshouts triumphantly, “hic erit Papa!” “Thisone is going to be pope!”

The Facetiae was a huge success.

If Poggio’s work—the best knownjokebook of its age—captures anythingof the atmosphere of the papal court, it isless surprising that Lapo tried to callattention to himself by signaling openly astrange blend of moral outrage andcynicism. (As it turned out, a few monthsafter he penned his Dialogue in Praise ofthe Papal Court, poor Lapo died ofplague at the age of thirty-three.) By thesixteenth century, the Catholic hierarchy,deeply alarmed by the ProtestantReformation, would attempt to stamp outwithin its own ranks this current ofsubversive humor. Poggio’s Facetiaewas on a list,16 alongside books byBoccaccio, Erasmus, and Machiavelli,that the Church wished to burn. But in theworld Poggio inhabited, it was stillpermissible, even fashionable, to reveal

what was, in any case, widelyunderstood. Poggio could write of theinstitution where he spent most of hisworking life that “there is seldom room17for talent or honesty; every thing isobtained through intrigue or luck, not tomention money, which seems to holdsupreme sway over the world.”

Ambitious young intellectuals,living by their wits, the papal scribes andsecretaries looked about and felt thatthey were cleverer, more complex, moreworthy of advancement than theoverstuffed prelates they served. Theirswas, predictably, a world of resentment:we complained, Poggio writes, “of theinadequate men18 who hold the highestdignities of the Church, discreet andlearned men being left out in the cold,whilst ignorant and worthless persons

are exalted.”Theirs was also, equally

predictably, a world of intense sniping,competitiveness, and backbiting. Wehave, in the snide remarks aboutPoggio’s parentage, already had a tasteof what they dished out to one another,and Poggio’s own “jokes” about hisenemy, the rival humanist Filelfo, are cutfrom the same cloth:

At a meeting19 of the Pope’sSecretaries, in the Pontificalpalace, attended, as usual, by anumber of men of great learning,conversation had turned upon thefilthy and disgusting life led by thatvillain, Francesco Filelfo, who was,on all sides, charged withnumerous outrages, and someone

inquired if he was of nobleextraction,—“To be sure,” said oneof his fellow-countrymen, assuminga most earnest look, “to be sure heis, and his nobility is even mostillustrious; for his father constantlywore silk in the morning.”

And then, eager to make sure that hisreaders get the point of the wisecrack,Poggio adds an explanatory note(always a sign of a damp squib):“meaning by that that Filelfo was thebastard of a priest. When officiating,priests are generally clothed with silk.”

At this distance, much of thissquabbling seems childish. But thesewere adults intent on drawing blood, andon occasion the blows were not onlyrhetorical. In 1452, Poggio had beenhaving a running quarrel with another

papal secretary, the notoriously morosehumanist George of Trebizond, over theburning question of who deserved morecredit for several translations of ancienttexts. When Poggio screamed at his rivalthat he was a liar, George struck Poggiowith his fist. The two sulked backmomentarily to their desks, but then thefight resumed, the seventy-two-year-oldPoggio grabbling the fifty-seven-year-oldGeorge’s cheek and mouth with onehand while attempting to gouge out hiseye with the other. After it was over, in anangry note to Poggio about the fracas,George represented himself as havingacted with exemplary restraint: “Rightly Icould have20 bitten off the fingers youstuck in my mouth; I did not. Since I wasseated and you were standing, I thoughtof squeezing your testicles with both

hands and thus lay you out; I did not doit.” The whole thing seems a grotesquefarce, akin to one of the stories inPoggio’s jokebook, except for its real-world consequences: with his bettercontacts and more genial manner,Poggio had George expelled from thecuria. Poggio ended his life covered withhonors; George died obscure, resentful,and poor.

In a celebrated nineteenth-centurybook on “the revival of learning,” JohnAddington Symonds, recounting thesegladiatorial struggles among humanistscholars, suggests that “they may betaken21 as proof of their enthusiasm fortheir studies.” Perhaps. However wildtheir insults, the arguments swirledaround fine points of Latin grammar,accusations of mistakes in diction, subtle

questions of translation. But theextravagance and bitterness of thecharges—in the course of a quarrel overLatin style, Poggio accused the youngerhumanist Lorenzo Valla of heresy, theft,lying, forgery, cowardice, drunkenness,sexual perversion, and insane vanity—discloses something rotten in the innerlives of these impressively learnedindividuals.

Though he was knocking at thedoor trying to gain admission, Laposeems to have understood and analyzedthe sickness of the whole environment.The problem was not only a matter of thisor that difficult personality; it wasstructural. The papal court had, to serveits own needs, brought into being a classof rootless, ironic intellectuals. Theseintellectuals were committed to pleasingtheir masters, on whose patronage they

utterly depended, but they were cynicaland unhappy. How could the rampantcynicism, greed, and hypocrisy, the needto curry favor with perverse satraps whoprofessed to preach morality to the rest ofmankind, the endless jockeying forposition in the court of an absolutemonarch, not eat away at whatever washopeful and decent in anyone whobreathed that air for very long? What—apart from attempts at characterassassination and outright assassination—could be done with the seethingfeeling of rage?

One way that Poggio dealt with thesickness—to which he himself hadquickly succumbed and from which hewas never entirely cured—was throughlaughter, the abrasive, obscene laughterof the Facetiae. The laughter must havegiven him some relief, though evidently

not enough. For he also wrote asuccession of dialogues—On Avarice,Against the Hypocrites, On Nobility, Onthe Vicissitudes of Fortune, On theMisery of Human Life, and so forth—inwhich he adopted the stance of a seriousmoralist. There are clear links betweenthe jokes and the moral essays, but themoral essays allowed Poggio to explorethe issues only hinted at in the comicalanecdotes.

The essay Against the Hypocrites,for example, has its share of stories ofclerical seducers, but the stories are partof a larger, much more serious analysisof an institutional dilemma: whychurchmen, and especially monks, areparticularly prone to hypocrisy. Is there arelation, Poggio asks, between religiousvocation and fraud? A full answer wouldcertainly involve sexual motives, but

those motives alone cannot adequatelyaccount for the swarms of hypocrites in aplace such as the curia, including monksnotable for their ostentatious piety andtheir ascetic pallor who are feverishlyseeking benefices, immunities, favors,privileges, positions of power. Nor cansexual intrigues adequately explain thestill larger swarms of robed hypocrites inthe world outside the curia, charismaticpreachers who mint money with theirsonorous voices and their terrible threatsof hellfire and damnation, Observantfriars who claim to adhere strictly to theOrder of St. Francis but have the moralsof bandits, mendicant friars with their littlesacks, their long hair and longer beards,and their fraudulent pretense of living inholy poverty, confessors who pry into thesecrets of every man and woman. Whydon’t all these models of extravagant

religiosity simply shut themselves up intheir cells and commit themselves tolives of fasting and prayer? Becausetheir conspicuous professions of piety,humility, and contempt for the world areactually masks for avarice, laziness, andambition. To be sure, someone in theconversation concedes, there are somegood and sincere monks, but very, veryfew of them, and one may observe eventhose slowly drawn toward the fatalcorruption that is virtually built into theirvocation.

“Poggio,” who represents himselfas a character in the dialogue, arguesthat hypocrisy is better at least than openviolence, but his friend Aliotti, an abbot,responds that it is worse, since everyonecan perceive the horror of a confessedrapist or murderer, but it is more difficultto defend oneself against a sly deceiver.

How is it possible then to identifyhypocrites? After all, if they are good attheir simulations, it is very difficult todistinguish the frauds from genuinelyholy figures. The dialogue lists thewarning signs. You should be suspiciousof anyone who

displays an excessive purity oflife;22

walks barefoot through thestreets, with a dirty face andshabby robes;

shows in public a disdain formoney;

always has the name of JesusChrist on his lips;

wants to be called good, withoutactually doing anythingparticularly good;

attracts women to him to satisfyhis wishes;

runs here and there outside hismonastery, seeking fame andhonors;

makes a show of fasting andother ascetic practices;

induces others to get things forhimself;

refuses to acknowledge orreturn what is given to him intrust.

Virtually any priest or monk who is at thecuria is a hypocrite, writes Poggio, for itis impossible to fulfill the highestpurposes of religion there. And if youhappen at the curia to see someone whois particularly abject in his humility,beware: he is not merely a hypocrite butthe worst hypocrite of all. In general, you

should be wary of people who seem tooperfect, and remember that it is actuallyquite difficult to be good: “Difficile estbonum esse.”

Against the Hypocrites is a workwritten not in the wake of Martin Lutherby a Reformation polemicist but acentury earlier, by a papal bureaucratliving and working at the center of theRoman Catholic hierarchy. It indicatesthat the Church, though it could and didrespond violently to what it perceived asdoctrinal or institutional challenges, waswilling to tolerate extremely sharpcritiques from within, including critiquesfrom secular figures like Poggio. And itindicates too that Poggio and his fellowhumanists in the curia struggled tochannel their anger and disgust intomore than obscene laughter and violentquarrels with one another.

The greatest and mostconsequential work in this critical spiritwas written by Poggio’s bitter enemy,Lorenzo Valla. Valla famously used hisbrilliant command of Latin philology todemonstrate that the “Donation ofConstantine,” the document in which theRoman emperor purportedly gavepossession of the Western Empire to thepope, was a forgery. After the publicationof this piece of detective work, Valla wasin considerable danger. But the Church’stolerance for internal critique extended,at least for a brief period in the fifteenthcentury, even to this extreme edge: thehumanist pope Nicholas V eventuallyappointed Valla to the post of apostolicsecretary, and thus this mostindependent and critical of spirits was,like Poggio, employed by the curia hehad so relentlessly exposed and

ridiculed.Poggio lacked Valla’s radicalism

and originality. One of the speakers inAgainst the Hypocrites briefly floats anargument that might have led in aperilous direction, moving from thetheatrical pretense of holiness in theCatholic Church to the fraudulent use oforacles in pagan religion as a means tooverawe and manipulate the vulgar. Butthe subversive link—which Machiavelliwould exploit to shocking effect in thenext century in constructing adisenchanted analysis of the politicaluses of all religious faith—is never quitemade, and Poggio’s work merely endswith a fantasy of stripping the hypocritesof their protective cloaks. In the afterlife,we are told, the dead, in order to enterthe infernal kingdom, have to passthrough gates of different diameters.

Those who are known by the custodianto be clearly bad or good pass throughthe wide gates; through the narrow onesgo those about whom it is not clearwhether they are honest or hypocritical.The honest souls pass through, with onlyminimal scratching; the hypocrites havetheir skin entirely lacerated.

This fantasy of laceration managesto combine Poggio’s aggression and hispessimism: the hypocrites will all beexposed and definitively punished, but itis not until the afterlife that it is possibleeven to reveal who they are. If angeralways hovers within him just beneaththe surface of his laughter, so too despair—at the impossibility of reformingabuses, at the steady loss of everythingworth treasuring, at the wretchedness ofthe human condition—hovers justbeneath his anger.

Like many of his colleagues,Poggio was an indefatigable letter writer,and through these letters we glimpse himgrappling with the cynicism, disgust, andworldweariness that seems to haveafflicted everyone in the papalentourage. Monasteries, he writes to afriend, are “not congregations23 of thefaithful or places of religious men but theworkshops of criminals”; the curia is “asink of men’s vices.” (158) Everywherehe looks around Rome, people aretearing down ancient temples to get thelime from the stones, and within ageneration or two most of the gloriousremains of the past, so much moreprecious than our own miserablepresent, will be gone. He is wasting hislife and must find an escape route: “Imust try everything,24 so that I may

achieve something, and so stop being aservant to men and have time forliterature.”

Yet though he indulged atmoments in fantasies of changing his life—“to abandon25 all these worldlyconcerns, all the empty cares,annoyances, and daily plans, and to fleeinto the haven of poverty, which isfreedom and true quiet and safety”—Poggio recognized sadly that such aroute was not open to him. “I do notknow26 what I can do outside the Curia,”he wrote to Niccoli, “except teach boys orwork for some master or rather tyrant. If Ihad to take up either one of these, Ishould think it utter misery. For not onlyis all servitude a dismal thing, as youknow, but especially so is serving thelusts of a wicked man. As for school

teaching, may I be spared that! For itwould be better to be subject to one manthan to many.” He would stay at the curia,then, in the hope that he would makeenough money to enable him to retireearly: “My one ambition:27 by the hardwork of a few years to achieve leisure forthe rest of my life.” As it turned out, the“few years” would prove to be fifty.

The pattern of dreaming anddeferral and compromise is an altogetherfamiliar one: it is the epitome of a failedlife. But Poggio did not succumb to it,though he had every reason to do so. Helived in a world not only pervaded bycorruption and greed but also repeatedlybattered by conspiracies, riots, wars, andoutbreaks of plague. He worked in theRoman curia, but the curia was not evenstable in its location in Rome, since the

pope and his entire court repeatedlywere forced to flee the city. He grappled,as everyone in his world had to grapple,with the constant presence of pain—fromwhich there was no medical relief—andwith the constant threat of death. Hecould easily have contracted into brittle,defensive cynicism, relieved only byunfulfilled fantasies of escape.

What saved him was an obsessivecraving, his book mania.

In 1406, when he learned that hisgreat mentor Salutati had died, Poggiowas grief-stricken. The great old manhad seized upon anyone in whom hehad seen “some gleam of intellect”28and had helped those whom he had soidentified with instruction, guidance,letters of recommendation, money, and,above all, the use of his own books. “We

have lost a father,” he wrote; “we havelost the haven and refuge of all scholars,the light of our nation.” Poggio claimedthat he was weeping as he wrote hisletter, and there is no reason to doubt thegenuineness of his words: “Express mysympathy to his sons,” he wrote toNiccoli in Florence, “and tell them that Iam plunged in grief. This too I want tofind out from you: what you think willhappen to his books.”

“I was upset and terrified,”29Poggio wrote Niccoli in July 1449, “bythe death of Bartolomeo deMontepulciano,” the close friend withwhom he had explored the monasticlibraries of Switzerland. But a momentlater his mind shifts to what he had justdiscovered at Monte Cassino: “I found abook30 containing Julius Frontinus’ De

aquaeductu urbis.” And in a letter writtena week later, the same pattern recurs. Hebegins by mentioning two ancientmanuscripts that he has copied and thathe wishes, he notes, “to be ruled in red31and bound.”

I could not write you this from theCity on account of my grief over thedeath of my dearest friend and onaccount of my confusion of spirit,deriving partly from fear and partlyfrom the sudden departure of thePope. I had to leave my house andsettle all my things; a great dealhad to be done at once so thatthere was no opportunity for writingor even for drawing breath. Therewas besides the greatest grief,which made everything else much

harder. But to go back to the books.

“But to go back to the books …”This is the way out, the escape from thepervasive fear and bafflement and pain.“My country has not yet32 recovered fromthe plague which troubled it five yearsago,” he writes in September, 1430;“Now again it seems that it will succumbto a massacre equally violent.” And thena moment later: “But let us get back toour own affairs. I see what you writeabout the library.” If it is not plague thatthreatens, it is war: “Every man waits hisdestined hour; even the cities aredoomed to their fate.” And then the samenote: “Let us spend33 our leisure withour books, which will take our minds offthese troubles, and will teach us todespise what many people desire.” In the

north the powerful Visconti of Milan areraising an army; Florentine mercenariesare besieging Lucca; Alfonso in Naplesis stirring up trouble, and the emperorSigismond is applying intolerablepressure on the pope. “I have alreadydecided34 what I shall do even if thingsturn out as many people fear; namely,that I shall devote myself to Greekliterature….”

Poggio was highly self-consciousabout these letters, and expected them tocirculate, but his book mania, expressedagain and again, seems unguarded,candid, and authentic. It was the key to afeeling he characterized with a word thatotherwise seems singularly inappropriateto a papal bureaucrat: freedom. “YourPoggio,”35 he wrote, “is content with verylittle and you shall see this for yourself;

sometimes I am free for reading, freefrom all care about public affairs which Ileave to my superiors. I live free as muchas I can.” Freedom here has nothing todo with political liberty or a notion ofrights or the license to say whatever hewished or the ability to go wherever hechose. It is rather the experience ofwithdrawing inwardly from the press ofthe world—in which he himself was soambitiously engaged—and enspheringhimself in a space apart. For Poggio, thatexperience was what it meant toimmerse himself in an ancient book: “Iam free for reading.”

Poggio savored the feeling of freedom at

those times when the usual Italianpolitical disorder became particularlyacute or when the papal court was in anuproar or when his own personalambitions were thwarted or, perhapsequally threatening, when thoseambitions were realized. Hence it was afeeling to which he must have clung withparticular intensity when sometime after1410,36 having amply displayed his giftsas a humanist scribe, a learned writer,and a court insider, he accepted the mostprestigious and most dangerousappointment of his career: the post ofapostolic secretary to the sinister, sly,and ruthless Baldassare Cossa, who hadbeen elected pope.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A PIT TO CATCH FOXES

TO SERVE AS the pope’s apostolicsecretary was the pinnacle of curialambition: though he was only in his earlythirties, Poggio’s skills had taken himfrom nothing to the top of the heap. Andthe heap at this moment was swarmingwith diplomatic maneuvers, complexbusiness transactions, rumors ofinvasion, heresy hunts, threats, feints,and doubledealing, for BaldassareCossa—Pope John XXIII, as he calledhimself—was a master of intrigue.Poggio would have been involved in

controlling access to the pontiff, digestingand passing along key information,taking notes, articulating policies thathad only been roughly sketched, craftingthe Latin missives sent to princes andpotentates. He was necessarily privy tosecrets and to strategies, for theapostolic secretary had to be initiatedinto his master’s plans for dealing withthe two rival claimants1 to the papalthrone, with a Holy Roman Emperordetermined to end the schism, withheretics in Bohemia, with neighboringpowers poised to seize territoriescontrolled by the Church. The sheerquantity of work on Poggio’s desk musthave been enormous.

Yet during this period Poggio foundthe time to copy in his beautifulhandwriting the three long books of

Cicero’s On the Laws (De legibus), alongwith his oration on Lucullus. (Themanuscript is in the Vatican Library: Cod.Vatican lat. 3245.) Somehow then hemanaged to hold on at least to momentsof what he called his freedom. But thatfreedom—the plunging back into theancient past—appears always to haveheightened his alienation from thepresent. To be sure, his love for classicalLatin did not lead him to idealize, assome of his contemporaries did, ancientRoman history: Poggio understood thathistory to have had its full measure ofhuman folly and wickedness. But he wasaware that the city in which he lived wasa pathetic shadow of its past glory.

The population of Rome, a smallfragment of what it had once been, livedin detached settlements, one at theCapitol where the massive ancient

Temple of Jupiter had once stood,another near the Lateran whose oldimperial palace had been given byConstantine to the bishop of Rome, yetanother around the crumbling fourth-century Basilica of St. Peter’s. Betweenthese settlements2 spread a wastelandof ruins, hovels, rubble-strewn fields, andthe shrines of martyrs. Sheep grazed inthe Forum. Armed thugs, some in the payof powerful families, others operating ontheir own, swaggered through dirtystreets, and bandits lurked outside thewalls. There was virtually no industry,very little trade, no thriving class ofskilled artisans or burghers, no civicpride, and no prospect of civic freedom.One of the only spheres of seriousenterprise was the trade in digging outthe metal clasps that had knitted the

ancient buildings together and in peelingoff the thin sheets of marble veneer sothat they could be reused in churchesand palaces.

Though most of Poggio’s writingscome from later in his career, there is noindication that he ever felt anything otherthan a kind of soul-sickness at thecontemporary world in which he wasimmersed. His career triumph in thepontificate of John XXIII must have givenhim some pleasure, but it only intensifiedthis immersion and hence intensifiedboth the soul-sickness and the fantasy ofan escape. Like Petrarch before him,Poggio cultivated an archaeologist’ssense of what had once existed, so thatvacant spaces and the jumble ofcontemporary Rome were haunted bythe past. “The hill of the Capitol, onwhich we sit,” he wrote, “was formerly the

head of the Roman empire, the citadel ofthe earth, the terror of kings; illustrated bythe footsteps of so many triumphs,enriched with the spoils and tributes ofso many nations.” Now just look at it:

This spectacle of the world, how isit fallen! How changed! Howdefaced! The path of victory isobliterated by vines, and thebenches of the senators areconcealed by a dunghill…. Theforum of the Roman people, wherethey assembled to enact their lawsand elect magistrates, is nowinclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs or thrown open for thereception of swine and buffaloes.

The relics of the fallen greatness onlymade the experience of the present more

melancholy. In the company of hishumanist friends, Poggio could try toconjure up what it all must once havelooked like: “Cast your eyes3 on thePalatine hill, and seek, among theshapeless and enormous fragments, themarble theatre, the obelisks, the colossalstatues, the porticoes of Nero’s palace.”But it was to the shattered present that,after his brief imaginary excursions intoantiquity, the papal bureaucrat alwayshad to return.

That present, in the turbulent yearsthat Rome was ruled by John XXIII, musthave threatened not only to extinguishthe occasional “freedom” Poggio prizedbut also to drag him into cynicism sodeep that there could be no escape. Forthe question with which Poggio andothers in Rome grappled was how they

could retain even the shreds of a moralsensibility while living and working in thecourt of this particular pope. A decadeolder than his apostolic secretaryPoggio, Baldassare Cossa had beenborn on the small volcanic island ofProcida, near Naples. His noble familyheld the island as its personalpossession, the hidden coves and well-defended fortress evidently well suited tothe principal family occupation, piracy.The occupation was a dangerous one:two of his brothers were eventuallycaptured and condemned to death. Theirsentence was commuted, after muchpulling of strings, to imprisonment. It wassaid by his enemies that the youngCossa participated in the familybusiness, owed to it his lifelong habit ofwakefulness at night, and learned from ithis basic assumptions about the world.

Procida was far too small a stagefor Baldassare’s talents. Energetic andastute, he early displayed an interest inwhat we might call higher forms of piracy.He studied jurisprudence at theUniversity of Bologna—in Italy it waslegal studies rather than theology thatbest prepared one for a career in theChurch—where he obtained doctoratesin both civil and canon law. At hisgraduation ceremony, a colorful affair inwhich the successful candidate wasconducted in triumph through the town,Cossa was asked what he was going todo now. He answered, “To be Pope.”4

Cossa began his career, as Poggiodid, in the court of his fellow NeapolitanBoniface IX, whom he served as privatechamberlain. In this capacity he helpedto oversee the open sale of Church

offices and the feverish market inindulgences. He also helped to organizethe hugely profitable jubilee whenpilgrims to Rome’s principal churcheswere granted a plenary indulgence, thatis, a remission of the horrible pain ofpurgatorial fires in the afterlife. Themassive crowds filled the city’s inns,patronized the taverns and brothels, filedacross the narrow bridges, prayed at thesacred shrines, lit candles, gawked atwonder-working pictures and statues,and returned home with talismanicsouvenirs.

The original idea was that therewould be a jubilee once every hundredyears, but the demand was so great andthe consequent profits so enormous thatthe interval was shortened first to fiftyyears, then thirty-three, and then twenty-five. In 1400, shortly before Poggio

arrived on the scene, the huge numbersof pilgrims drawn to Rome by thedawning of a new century led the pope toissue a plenary indulgence, though onlya decade had passed since the lastjubilee. To enhance its profits, theChurch came up with a variety of offersthat may reflect Cossa’s practicalintelligence. Hence, for example, peoplewho desired5 the spiritual benefitsconferred by the pilgrimage to Rome—exemption from thousands of years ofpostmortem torments in Purgatory—butwho wanted to avoid the difficult journeyover the Alps could obtain the sameindulgences by visiting certain shrines inGermany, provided that they paid whatthe longer trip would have cost.

Cossa’s gifts were not limited toclever marketing schemes. Appointed

governor of Bologna, he proved himselfto be a highly successful civil andmilitary commander, as well as avigorous orator. He was in many waysthe embodiment of those qualities—astute intelligence, eloquence, boldnessin action, ambition, sensuality, limitlessenergy—that together form the ideal ofthe Renaissance man. But even for anage accustomed to a gap betweenreligious professions and lived realities,the cardinal deacon of Bologna, asCossa was called, seemed an unusualfigure to be wearing clerical vestments.Though he was, as Poggio’s friend Bruniremarked, a hugely gifted man of theworld, it was obvious that he did not havea trace of a spiritual vocation.

This widespread perception of hischaracter helps account for the peculiarblend of admiration, fear, and suspicion

that he aroused and that led people tobelieve that he was capable of anything.When on May 4, 1410, Pope AlexanderV died immediately after a visit toBologna for a dinner with his friend thecardinal deacon, it was widely rumoredthat he had been poisoned. Thesuspicions did not prevent Cossa’sfaction of fellow cardinals from electinghim to succeed Alexander as pope.Perhaps they were simply frightened. Orperhaps it seemed to them that Cossa,only forty years old, had the skillsneeded to end the disgraceful schism inthe Church and to defeat the rival claimsby the doggedly inflexible SpaniardPedro de Luna, who styled himself PopeBenedict XIII, and the intransigentVenetian Angelo Correr, who styledhimself Pope Gregory XII.

If this was the cardinals’ hope, they

were soon disappointed, but they couldnot have been altogether surprised. Theschism had already lasted more thanthirty years and had eluded all attemptsat resolution. Each of the claimants hadexcommunicated the followers of theothers and had called down divinevengeance upon them. Each combinedattempts to seize the moral high groundwith thuggish tactics. Each had powerfulallies but also strategic weaknesses thatmade achieving unity through militaryconquest impossible. Everyoneunderstood that the situation wasintolerable. The competing nationalfactions—the Spanish, French, andItalians each backing a differentcandidate—undermined the claim to theexistence of a catholic, that is, universal,church. The spectacle of multiplesquabbling popes called the whole

institution into question. The situationwas embarrassing, distasteful,dangerous. But who could solve it?

Fifteen years earlier, thetheologians at the University of Paris hadplaced a large chest in the cloister of theMathurins and asked anyone who hadany idea how to end the schism to write itdown and drop it in the slot that had beencut in the lid. More than ten thousandnotes were deposited. Fifty-fiveprofessors, assigned to read through thenotes, reported that three principalmethods had been proposed. The first,the so-called “Way of Cession,” requiredthe simultaneous abdication of thosewho claimed to be pope, followed by theproper election of a single candidate; thesecond, the “Way of Compromise,”envisaged arbitration at the end of whichone of the existing claimants would

emerge as the sole pope; the third, the“Way of Council,” called for theconvening of the bishops of all of theCatholic world who would, by formal votein an ecumenical assembly, have thefinal authority to resolve the dispute.

The first two methods had theadvantage of being relatively simple,cost-effective, and straightforward;however, they had, like military conquest,the disadvantage of being impossible.Calls for simultaneous abdication metwith the predictable results, and attemptsto set the preconditions for arbitrationinevitably broke down into hopelesssquabbling. That left the option of the“Way of Council,” strongly supported bythe Holy Roman Emperor-elect, KingSigismund of Hungary, who was at leastnominally allied to Cossa’s faction inRome.

Surrounded by his cardinals andsecretaries, in the massive paganmausoleum that had been converted intothe fortified Castel St. Angelo, the wilypope could see no reason to accede topressure to convene an ecumenicalassembly. Such an assembly, whichwould inevitably unleash long-standinghostility to Rome, could only threaten hisposition. So he temporized and delayed,busying himself with making andunmaking alliances, with maneuveringagainst his ambitious enemy to thesouth, Ladislas, king of Naples, and withfilling the papal coffers. After all, therewere innumerable petitions to beconsidered, bulls to be issued, the papalstates to defend, administer, and tax,Church offices and indulgences to besold. Poggio and the other secretaries,scriptors, abbreviators, and minor court

bureaucrats were kept very busy.The stalemate might have

continued indefinitely—that, in any case,is what the pope must have hoped for—had it not been for an unexpected turn ofevents. In June 1413, Ladislas’s armysuddenly broke through Rome’sdefenses and sacked the city, robbinghouses, pillaging shrines, breaking intopalaces and carting off treasures. Thepope and his court escaped to Florence,where they could count on some limitedprotection: the Florentines and theNeapolitans were enemies. But tosurvive as pope, Cossa now absolutelyneeded the support of Sigismund—thenresiding in Como—and urgentnegotiations made clear that this supportwould only come if the pope agreed toconvoke a general council.

His back to the wall, Cossa

proposed that the council be held in Italy,where he could marshal his principalallies, but the emperor objected that thelong journey across the Alps would betoo difficult for the more elderly bishops.The council, he declared, should be inConstance, a city in his territory, nestledin the mountains between Switzerlandand Germany on the shores of theBodensee. Though the location washardly to the pope’s liking, by the fall of1413 his agents—exploratores—were inConstance, inquiring about lodging andprovisions, and by the following summerthe pope and his court were on the move,as were powerful churchmen and theirservants from everywhere in Europe, allconverging on the one small SouthGerman town.

A citizen of Constance,6 Ulrich

Richental, was fascinated enough bywhat was going on around him to write acircumstantial chronicle of the events.From Richental we learn that the popetraveled over the Alps with an enormousretinue, some six hundred men. Fromother sources,7 we know that among thisgroup (or shortly to join them) were thegreatest humanists of the time: PoggioBracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Pier PaoloVergerio, Cencio Rustici, BartolomeoAragazzi da Montepulciano, Zomino(Sozomeno) da Pistoia, Benedetto daPiglio, Biagio Guasconi, CardinalsFrancesco Zaba rella, Alamano Adimari,Branda da Castiglione, the archbishop ofMilan Bartolomeo della Capra, and hisfuture successor Francesco Pizzolpasso.The pope was a thug, but he was alearned thug, who appreciated the

company of fine scholars and expectedcourt business to be conducted in highhumanist style.

The trip across the mountains wasnever easy, even in late summer. At onepoint the pope’s carriage tipped over,dumping him in the snow. When, inOctober 1414, he looked down atConstance and its lake ringed bymountains, he turned to his train—amongwhom, of course, was Poggio—and said,“This is the pit where they catch foxes.”

If he had only the competingfactions within the Italian church to dealwith, Cossa would probably have beenconfident that he could evade the foxtrap; after all, he had for several yearsprevailed, or at least managed tomaintain his hold upon the papal thronein Rome. The problem was that others,many from beyond the reach of his

patronage or his poisons, werestreaming into Constance from all overChristendom: some thirty cardinals, threepatriarchs, thirty-three archbishops, onehundred abbots, fifty provosts(ecclesiastical officials), three hundreddoctors of theology, five thousand monksand friars, and about eighteen thousandpriests. In addition to the emperor and hislarge retinue, there were also, byinvitation, many other secular rulers andtheir representatives: the electors Ludwigvon der Pfalz and Rudolph of Saxony,the dukes of Bavaria, Austria, Saxony,Schleswig, Mecklenburg, Lorraine, andTeck, the margrave of Brandenburg, theambassadors of the kings of France,England, Scotland, Denmark, Poland,Naples, and the Spanish realms, alongwith a vast array of lesser nobles,barons, knights, lawyers, professors, and

public officials. Each of these in turn hadsmall armies of retainers, guards,servants, cooks, and the like, and thewhole assembly attracted hordes ofsight-seers, merchants, mountebanks,jewelers, tailors, shoemakers,apothecaries, furriers, grocers, barbers,scribes, jugglers, acrobats, streetsingers, and hangers-on of all types. Thechronicler Richental estimates that overseven hundred whores came to town andhired their own houses, plus “some wholay in stables8 and wherever they could,beside the private ones whom I could notcount.”

The arrival of somewhere between50,000 and 150,000 visitors put a hugestrain on Constance and invited everykind of abuse. Officials tried to combatcrime in the usual way—staging public

executions9—and set rules for the rangeand quality of services that visitorsshould expect: so, for example, “Everyfourteen days the tablecloths and sheetsand whatever needed washing shouldbe changed for clean.” Food for thevisitors (and their 30,000 horses) was aconstant concern, but the area was wellstocked, and the rivers made it possibleto renew supplies. Bakers with movablecarts went through the streets with littleovens in which they baked rolls, pretzels,and pastries stuffed with spiced chickenand other meats. In inns and makeshiftfood stalls set up in booths and tents,cooks prepared the usual range of meatsand fowl, along with thrush, blackbirds,wild boar, roe venison, badger, otter,beaver, and hare. For those whopreferred fish, there were eels, pike,sturgeon, garfish, bream, whitefish,

sturgeon, garfish, bream, whitefish,gudgeons, catfish, bullheads, dace, saltcod, and herring. “There were alsofrogs10 and snails for sale,” Richentaladds with distaste, “which the Italiansbought.”

Once he and his own court hadbeen provided for in suitable style, thepractical arrangements were the least ofCossa’s concerns. Against his wishes,the council determined to organize itselfand conduct its votes by blocs or“nations”—Italians, French, Germans,Spanish, and English—an arrangementthat diminished his own special positionand the influence of his core supporters.With his power rapidly melting away hetook care to insist on his prestige. If hecould hardly claim any moral highground, he could at least establish hisceremonial significance. He needed to

show the whole enormous assembly thathe was no mere Neapolitan fox; he wasthe Vicar of Christ, the embodiment ofspiritual radiance and worldly grandeur.

Clad in white vestments and awhite miter, on October 28, 1414,Baldassare Cossa made his entry intoConstance on a white horse. Fourburghers of the town carried a goldencanopy over his head. Two counts, oneRoman and the other German, walked byhis side, holding his bridle. Behind themrode a man on a great horse from whosesaddle rose a long staff bearing a hugeumbrella—Richental mistook it for a hat—made of red and gold cloth. Theumbrella, broad enough to spread overthree horses, was topped by a goldenknob on which stood a golden angelholding a cross. Behind the umbrellacame nine cardinals on horseback, all in

long, red mantles, with red hoods, and allwearing wide red hats. Other clerics andthe staff of the curia, including Poggio,followed, along with attendants andservants. And at the front of theprocession stretched a line of nine whitehorses, covered with red saddlecloths.Eight of these were laden with garments—the pope’s wardrobe was evidence ofhis hold upon his sacred identity—andthe ninth, a little bell jingling on its head,bore on its back a casket of silvergiltcovered with a red cloth to which wereattached two silver candlesticks withburning candles. Within the casket, atonce jewel box and tomb, was the HolySacrament, the blood and body of Christ.John XXIII had arrived.

Ending the schism was thecouncil’s most important item ofbusiness, but it was not the only one.

Two other major issues were the reformof ecclesiastical government—that wasalso not happy news for John XXIII—andthe repression of heresy. The latter heldout some promise for the cornered fox,almost the only tactical weapon he couldfind. The correspondence that thesecretaries copied out for their popeattempted to turn the focus away from theschism and from papal corruption andtoward someone whose name Poggiomust have begun to write in officialdocuments again and again.

Forty-four-year-old Jan Hus, aCzech priest and religious reformer, hadbeen for some years a thorn in the side ofthe Church. From his pulpit and in hiswritings, he vehemently attacked theabuses of clerics, condemning theirwidespread greed, hypocrisy, and sexualimmorality. He denounced the selling of

indulgences as a racket, a shamelessattempt to profit from the fears of thefaithful. He urged his congregants not toput their faith in the Virgin, the cult of thesaints, the Church, or the pope, but inGod alone. In all matters of doctrine hepreached that Holy Scripture was theultimate authority.

Hus boldly meddled not withdoctrine alone but with the politics of theChurch at a moment of growing nationalrestiveness. He argued that the state hadthe right and the duty to supervise theChurch. Laymen could and should judgetheir spiritual leaders. (It is better, hesaid, to be a good Christian than awicked pope or prelate.) An immoralpope could not possibly claim infallibility.After all, he said, the papacy was ahuman institution—the word “pope” wasnowhere in the Bible. Moral probity was

the test of a true priest: “If he is manifestlysinful,11 then it should be supposed,from his works, that he is not just, but theenemy of Christ.” And such an enemyshould be stripped of his office.

It is easy to see why Hus had beenexcommunicated for his teachings in1410 and why the Church dignitarieswho gathered in Constance wereexercised about his refusal to submit.Protected by powerful Bohemiannoblemen, he continued to disseminatedangerous views, views that threatenedto spread. And one can see as well whyCossa, his back to the wall, thought thatit might be advantageous to shift thecouncil’s focus to Hus, and not only as aconvenient distraction. For theBohemian, feared and hated by theChurch establishment, was articulating

as a principle precisely what Cossa’senemies in that same establishmentwere proposing to do: to disobey anddepose a pope accused of corruption.Perhaps this uneasy mirroring helps toexplain a strange charge12 that wascirculated in Constance about Hus: thathe was an extraordinary magician whocould read the thoughts of all whoapproached him within a certaindistance.

Hus, who had repeatedly asked forthe opportunity to explain himself beforea Church council, had been formallyinvited to present his views in personbefore the prelates, theologians, andrulers at Constance. The Czech reformerhad the visionary’s luminous confidencethat his truths, should he only be allowedto articulate them clearly, would sweep

away the cobwebs of ignorance and badfaith.

As someone who had beencharged with heresy, he was alsounderstandably wary. Hus had recentlyseen three young men, two of whomwere his students, beheaded by theauthorities. Before he left the relativesafety of his protectors in Bohemia, heapplied for and received a certificate oforthodoxy from the grand inquisitor of thediocese of Prague, and he received aswell a guarantee of free passage fromthe emperor Sigismund. The safe-conduct, bearing the large imperial seal,promised “protection and safeguard” andrequested that Hus be allowed “freelyand securely” to “pass, sojourn, stop, andreturn.” The Bohemian nobles whoaccompanied him rode ahead to meetwith the pope and ask whether Hus

would be allowed to remain inConstance free from the risk of violence.“Had he killed my own brother,” Johnreplied, “not a hair of his head should betouched while he remained in the city.”With these assurances, not long after thegrand arrival of the beleaguered pope,the reformer reached Constance.

Hus’s arrival on November 3 musthave seemed a godsend, as it were, toJohn XXIII. The heretic was hated by theupright in the Church as well as by thecrooked. He and his principal associate,Jerome of Prague, were known followersof the English heretic John Wycliffe,whose advocacy of vernaculartranslations of the Bible, insistence onthe primacy of Scripture-based faith overworks, and attacks on clerical wealth andthe selling of indulgences had led to hiscondemnation in the previous century.

Wycliffe had died in his bed, much to thedisappointment of his ecclesiasticalenemies, but the council now orderedthat his remains be dug up and cast outof consecrated ground. It was not anauspicious sign for their reception of JanHus.

Notwithstanding the assurancesthat the pope, the council, and theemperor had given him, Hus was almostimmediately vilified and denied theopportunity to speak in public. OnNovember 28, barely three weeks afterhe arrived, he was arrested on order ofthe cardinals and taken to the prison of aDominican monastery on the banks ofthe Rhine. There he was thrown into anunderground cell through which all thefilth of the monastery was discharged.When he fell seriously ill, he asked thatan advocate be appointed to defend his

cause, but he was told that, according tocanon law, no one could plead the causeof a man charged with heresy. In the faceof protests from Hus and his Bohemiansupporters about the apparent violationof his safe-conduct, the emperor chosenot to intervene. He was, it was said,uncomfortable about what seemed aviolation of his word, but an Englishcardinal had reportedly reassured himthat “no faith need be kept with heretics.”

If Cossa thought that thepersecution of Hus would distract thecouncil from its determination to end theschism or silence his own enemies, hewas sorely mistaken. As the mood in thepapal court turned grim, the popecontinued to stage extravagant publicdisplays. Richental describes thespectacles:

When the Pope was to give13 hisblessing, a bishop in a mitre camefirst into the balcony, carrying across, and behind the cross cametwo bishops in white mitres,carrying two tall burning candles intheir hands and set the candlesburning in the window. Then camefour cardinals, also in white mitres,or sometimes six, or at other timesless. Sometimes also our lord Kingcame into the balcony. Thecardinals and the King stood in thewindows. After them came OurHoly Father the Pope, wearing themost costly priest’s robes and awhite mitre on his head. Under thevestments as for Mass he wore onemore robe than a priest and had

gloves on his hands and a largering, set with a rare great stone, onthe middle finger of his right hand.He stood in the central window, sothat everyone saw him. Then camehis singers, all with burningcandles so that the balcony shoneas if it were on fire, and they tooktheir places behind him. And abishop went up to him and took offhis mitre. Thereupon the Popebegan to chant….

But what was going on away from thegawking public was more and moredisquieting. Though he continued topreside over the council meetings, thepope had lost control of the agenda, andit was clear that the emperor Sigismund,who had arrived in Constance onDecember 25, was not inclined to save

him.Cossa still had allies. At a session

of the council on March 11, 1415,discussing how they might obtain asingle pope for the whole Church, thearchbishop of Mainz stood up and saidthat he would never obey anyone butJohn XXIII. But there was no chorus ofsupport, of the kind he must have hopedto trigger. Instead, the patriarch ofConstantinople exclaimed, “Quis est isteipse? Dignus est comburendus!—Who isthat fellow? He deserves to be burned!”The archbishop walked out, and thesession broke up.

The fox saw that the trap was aboutto be sprung. Constance, he said, wasnot safe. He no longer felt secure. Hewanted to move the council to someplace more suitable. The king demurred,and the town council of Constance

hastened to offer reassurance: “If HisHoliness14 had not sufficient security,”the burghers declared, “they would givehim more and guard him against all theworld, even though a disastrous fateshould compel them to eat their ownchildren.” Cossa, who had madecomparably extravagant promises to JanHus, was evidently not appeased. OnMarch 20, 1415,15 at approximately 1p.m., he fled. Wearing a gray cape with agray cowl wrapped around him so that noone could see his face, he rode quietlythrough the town gates. Next to him rodea crossbowman, along with two othermen, both muffled up. In the evening andall through the night, the pope’sadherents—his servants and attendantsand secretaries—left town as stealthilyas they could. But the word quickly

spread. John XXIII was gone.In the following weeks Cossa’s

enemies, who tracked the fugitive toSchaffhausen where he had fled to anally’s castle, drew up a bill of indictmentagainst him. As menacing rumorscirculated and his remaining alliesstarted to crumble, he fled again, thistime too in disguise, and his court—among whom, presumably, was hisapostolic secretary, Poggio—was throwninto further confusion: “The members ofthe Curia16 all followed him in haste andwild disorder,” one of the contemporarychroniclers puts it; “for the Pope was inflight and the rest in flight too, by night,though with no pursuers.” Finally, undergreat pressure from the emperor,Cossa’s principal protector gave over hisunwelcome guest, and the world had the

edifying spectacle of a pope put underguard as a criminal.

Seventy charges17 were formallyread out against him. Fearing their effecton public opinion, the council decided tosuppress the sixteen most scandalouscharges—never subsequently revealed—and accused the pontiff only of simony,sodomy, rape, incest, torture, andmurder. He was charged with poisoninghis predecessor, along with his physicianand others. Worst of all—at least amongthe charges that were made public—wasone that his accusers dredged up fromthe ancient struggle againstEpicureanism: the pope was said to havemaintained stubbornly, before reputablepersons, that there was no future life orresurrection, and that the souls of menperish with their bodies, like brutes.

On May 29, 1415, he was formallydeposed. Stricken from the roster ofofficial popes, the name John XXIII wasonce again available, though it took morethan five hundred years for another pope—the remarkable Angelo Roncalli—to becourageous enough in 1958 to adopt thename for himself.

Shortly after the deposition, Cossawas briefly imprisoned in GottliebenCastle on the Rhine, where Hus, nearstarvation, had been chained in irons formore than two months. It is not knownwhether the pope and the heretic, soimplausibly united in abject misery, werebrought together by their captors. At thispoint,18 if Poggio was still with hismaster—and the record does not makethat clear—he would have parted fromhim for the last time. All of the former

pope’s attendants were dismissed, andthe prisoner, soon transferred to anotherplace of confinement, was henceforwardsurrounded by German-speaking guardswith whom he could only communicate insign language. Effectively cut off from theworld, he occupied himself by writingverses on the transitory nature of allearthly things.

The pope’s men were suddenlymasterless. Some scrambled quickly tofind employment with one or another ofthe prelates and princes in Constance.But Poggio remained unemployed, abystander to events in which he was nolonger a party. He stayed on inConstance, but we do not know if he waspresent when Hus was finally broughtbefore the council—the moment thereformer had longed for and upon whichhe had staked his life—only to be

mocked and shouted down when heattempted to speak. On July 6, 1415, at asolemn ceremony in the cathedral ofConstance, the convicted heretic wasformally unfrocked. A round paper crown,almost eighteen inches high anddepicting three devils seizing a soul andtearing it apart, was placed upon hishead. He was led out of the cathedralpast a pyre on which his books were inflames, shackled in chains, and burnedat the stake. In order to ensure that therewould be no material remains, theexecutioners broke his charred bonesinto pieces and threw them all into theRhine.

There is no direct record of whatPoggio personally thought of theseevents in which he had played his smallpart, the part of a bureaucrat who helpsthe ongoing functioning of a system that

he understands is vicious andhopelessly corrupt. It would have beendangerous for him to speak out, evenhad he been inclined to do so, and hewas, after all, in the service of the papacywhose power Hus was challenging. (Acentury later, Luther, mounting a moresuccessful challenge, remarked: “We areall Hussites without knowing it.”) Butwhen, some months later, Hus’sassociate, Jerome of Prague, was alsoput on trial for heresy, Poggio was notable to remain silent.

A committed religious reformer withdegrees from the universities of Paris,Oxford, and Heidelberg, Jerome was afamous orator whose testimony on May26, 1416, made a powerful impressionon Poggio. “I must confess,” he wrote tohis friend Leonardo Bruni, “that I neversaw any one who in pleading a cause,

especially a cause on the issue of whichhis own life depended, approachednearer to that standard of ancienteloquence, which we so much admire.”Poggio was clearly aware that he wastreading on dangerous ground, but thepapal bureaucrat could not entirelyrestrain the humanist’s passionateadmiration:

It was astonishing19 to witnesswith what choice of words, withwhat closeness of argument, withwhat confidence of countenancehe replied to his adversaries. Soimpressive was his peroration, thatit is a subject of great concern, thata man of so noble and excellent agenius should have deviated intoheresy. On this latter point,

however, I cannot help entertainingsome doubts. But far be it from meto take upon myself to decide in soimportant a matter. I shallacquiesce in the opinion of thosewho are wiser than myself.

This prudent acquiescence did notaltogether reassure Bruni. “I must adviseyou henceforth,” he told Poggio in reply,“to write upon such subjects in a moreguarded manner.”

What had happened to leadPoggio, ordinarily careful not to court realdanger, to write so unguardedly to hisfriend? In part, the rashness might havebeen provoked by the trauma of what hehad just seen: his letter is dated May 30,1416, which is the day that Jerome wasexecuted. Poggio was writing in thewake of witnessing something

particularly horrible, as we know from thechronicler Richental who also recordedwhat happened. As the thirty-seven-year-old Jerome was led out of the city, to thespot where Hus was burned and wherehe too would meet his end, he repeatedthe creed and sang the litany. As hadhappened with Hus, no one would hearhis confession; that sacrament was notgranted to a heretic. When the fire was lit,Hus cried out and died quickly, but thesame fate, according to Richental, wasnot granted to Jerome: “He lived muchlonger20 in the fire than Hus andshrieked terribly, for he was a stouter,stronger man, with a broad, thick, blackbeard.” Perhaps these terrible shrieksexplain why Poggio could not any longerremain discreetly silent, why he feltcompelled to testify to Jerome’s

eloquence.Shortly before he was so unnerved

by Jerome’s trial and execution, hopingto cure the rheumatism in his hands (aserious concern for a scribe), Poggiodecided to visit the celebrated medicinalbaths at Baden. It was not an altogethereasy trip from Constance: first twenty-fourmiles on the Rhine by boat toSchaffhausen, where the pope had fled;then, because the river descendedsteeply at that point over cliffs and rocks,ten miles on foot to a castle calledKaiserstuhl. From this spot, Poggio sawthe Rhine cascading in a waterfall, andthe loud sound made him think ofclassical descriptions of the fall of theNile.

At the bathhouse in Baden, Poggiowas amazed by what he saw: “Old

women21 as well as younger ones,” hewrote to a friend in Florence, “goingnaked into the water before the eyes ofmen and displaying their private partsand their buttocks to the onlookers.”There was a sort of lattice between themen’s and women’s baths, but theseparation was minimal: there were, heobserved, “many low windows, throughwhich the bathers can drink together andtalk and see both ways and touch eachother as is their usual custom.”

Poggio refused to enter the bathshimself, not, he insisted, from any unduemodesty but because “it seemed to meridiculous that a man from Italy, ignorantof their language, should sit in the waterwith a lot of women, completelyspeechless.” But he watched from thegallery that ran above the baths anddescribed what he saw with the

described what he saw with theamazement that someone from SaudiArabia might bring to an account of thebeach scene at Nice.

There were, he observed, bathingsuits of some sort, but they concealedvery little: “The men wear nothing but aleather apron, and the women put onlinen shifts down to their knees, so cut oneither side that they leave uncoveredneck, bosom, arms, and shoulders.”What would cause a crisis in Poggio’sItaly and perhaps trigger violenceseemed simply to be taken for granted inBaden: “Men watched their wives beinghandled by strangers and were notdisturbed by it; they paid no attention andtook it all in the best possible spirit.” Theywould have been at home in Plato’sRepublic, he laughed, “where allproperty was held in common.”

The rituals of social life at Baden

seemed dreamlike to Poggio, as if theywere conjuring up the vanished world ofJove and Danae. In some of the pools,there was singing and dancing, andsome of the girls—“good looking andwell-born and in manner and form like agoddess”—floated on the water while themusic was playing: “They draw theirclothes slightly behind them, floatingalong the top of the water, until you mightthink they were winged Venuses.” Whenmen gaze down at them, Poggioexplains, the girls have a custom to askplayfully for something. The men throwdown pennies, especially to the prettiest,along with wreaths of flowers, and thegirls catch them sometimes in theirhands, sometimes in their clothes, whichthey spread wider. “I often threw penniesand garlands,” Poggio confessed.

Confident, easy in themselves, and

contented, these are people “for whomlife is based on fun, who come togetherhere so that they may enjoy the things forwhich they hunger.” There are almost athousand of them at the baths, manydrinking heavily, Poggio wrote, and yetthere is no quarreling, bickering, orcursing. In the simple, playfullyunselfconscious behavior before him,Poggio felt he was witnessing forms ofpleasures and contentment that hisculture had lost:

We are terrified of futurecatastrophes and are thrown into acontinuous state of misery andanxiety, and for fear of becomingmiserable, we never cease to beso, always panting for riches andnever giving our souls or ourbodies a moment’s peace. But

those who are content with littlelive day by day and treat any daylike a feast day.

He is describing the scenes at the baths,he tells his friend, “so that you mayunderstand from a few examples what agreat center of the Epicurean way ofthinking this is.”

With his contrasting vision ofanxious, work-obsessed, overlydisciplined Italians and happy-go-lucky,carefree Germans, Poggio believed heglimpsed for a moment the Epicureanpursuit of pleasure as the highest good.He knew perfectly well that this pursuitran counter to Christian orthodoxy. But inBaden it was as if he found himself onthe threshold of a mental world in whichChristian rules no longer applied.

In his reading, Poggio had

frequently stood on that threshold. Henever ceased to occupy himself with thepursuit of lost classical texts. Judgingfrom a remark by Niccoli, he spent someof his time in Constance looking throughlibrary collections—there in themonastery of St. Mark he evidently founda copy of an ancient commentary22 onVirgil. In the early summer of 1415,probably just after his master had beenformally deposed and he found himselfdefinitively out of work, he made his wayto Cluny, in France, where he found acodex with seven orations by Cicero, twoof which had been unknown. He sent thisprecious manuscript to his friends inFlorence and also made a copy in hisown hand, inscribed with a remarkdeeply revealing of his mood:

These seven orations23 by MarcusTullius had through the fault of thetimes been lost to Italy. Byrepeated searches through thelibraries of France and Germany,with the greatest diligence andcare, Poggio the Florentine allalone brought them out of thesordid squalor in which they werehidden and back into the light,returning them to their pristinedignity and order and restoringthem to the Latin muses.

When he wrote these words, the worldaround Poggio was falling to pieces, buthis response to chaos and fear wasalways to redouble his immersion inbooks. In the charmed circle of hisbibliomania, he could rescue the

imperiled legacy of the glorious past fromthe barbarians and return it to the rightfulheirs.

A year later, in the summer of 1416,in the wake of the execution of Jerome ofPrague and shortly after the interlude atBaden, Poggio was once again outbook-hunting, this time accompanied bytwo other Italian friends on a visit to themonastery of St. Gall, about twenty milesfrom Constance. It was not thearchitectural features of the greatmedieval abbey that drew the visitors; itwas a library of which Poggio and hisfriends had heard extravagant rumors.They were not disappointed: a fewmonths later Poggio wrote a triumphantletter to another friend back in Italy,announcing that he had located anastonishing cache of ancient books. Thecapstone of these was the complete text

of Quintilian’s Institutes, the mostimportant ancient Roman handbook onoratory and rhetoric. This work had beenknown to Poggio and his circle only infragmentary form. To recover the wholeof it seemed to them wildly exciting—“Ohwondrous treasure! Oh unexpected joy!”one of them exclaimed—because it gavethem back a whole lost world, a world ofpublic persuasion.

It was the dream of persuading anaudience through the eloquence andconviction of public words that haddrawn Hus and Jerome of Prague toConstance. If Hus had been shouteddown, Jerome, dragged from themiserable dungeon where he had beenchained for 350 days, managed at leastto make himself heard. For a modernreader, there is something almost absurdabout Poggio’s admiration for Jerome’s

“choice of words” and the effectivenessof his “peroration”—as if the quality of theprisoner’s Latin were the issue; but it wasprecisely the quality of the prisoner’sLatin that unsettled Poggio and madehim doubt the validity of the chargesagainst the heretic. For he could not, atleast at this strange moment of limbo,disguise from himself the tensionbetween the bureaucrat who worked forthe sinister John XXIII and the humanistwho longed for the freer, clearer air, ashe imagined it, of the ancient RomanRepublic. Poggio could find no real wayto resolve this tension; instead, heplunged into the monastic library with itsneglected treasures.

“There is no question,” Poggiowrote, “that this glorious man, so elegant,so pure, so full of morals and wit, couldnot much longer have endured the filth of

that prison, the squalor of the place, andthe savage cruelty of his keepers.” Thesewords were not a further lapse into thekind of imprudent admiration of theeloquent, doomed Jerome that alarmedLeonardo Bruni; they are Poggio’sdescription of the manuscript ofQuintilian that he found at St. Gall:

He was sad24 and dressed inmourning, as people are whendoomed to death; his beard wasdirty and his hair caked with mud,so that by his expression andappearance it was clear that hehad been summoned to anundeserved punishment. Heseemed to stretch out his handsand beg for the loyalty of theRoman people, to demand that he

be saved from an unjust sentence. The scene he had witnessed in Mayappears still vivid in the humanist’simagination as he searched through themonastery’s books. Jerome hadprotested that he had been kept “in filthand fetters, deprived of every comfort”;Quintilian was found “filthy with mold anddust.” Jerome had been confined, Poggiowrote to Leonardo Aretino, “in a darkdungeon, where it was impossible forhim to read”; Quintilian, he indignantlywrote of the manuscript in the monasticlibrary, was “in a sort of foul and gloomydungeon … where not even menconvicted of a capital offense would havebeen stuck away.” “A man worthy ofeternal remembrance!” So Poggio rashlyexclaimed about the heretic Jeromewhom he could not lift a finger to save. A

few months later in the monastery of St.Gall, he rescued another man worthy ofeternal remembrance from thebarbarians’ prison house.

It is not clear how conscious thelink was in Poggio’s mind between theimprisoned heretic and the imprisonedtext. At once morally alert and deeplycompromised in his professional life, heresponded to books as if they wereliving, suffering human beings. “ByHeaven,” he wrote of the Quintilianmanuscript, “if we had not brought help,he would surely have perished the verynext day.” Taking no chances, Poggiosat down and began copying the wholelengthy work in his beautiful hand. It tookhim fifty-four days to complete the task.“The one and only light25 of the Romanname, except for whom there was no one

but Cicero and he likewise cut intopieces and scattered,” he wrote toGuarino of Verona, “has through ourefforts been called back not only fromexile but from almost completedestruction.”

The expedition to the monasterywas expensive, and Poggio wasperennially short of money: such was theconsequence of his decision not to takethe profitable route of priesthood. Back inConstance his money worries deepened,as he found himself dangling, withoutwork and without clear prospects. Hisdeposed master, Baldassare Cossa, wasdesperately negotiating a quietretirement for himself. After spendingthree years in prison, he eventuallybought his release and was made acardinal in Florence, where he died in1419, his elegant tomb by Donatello

erected in the baptistry of the Duomo.Another pope Poggio had earlier workedfor, the deposed Gregory XII, died duringthis same period. The last thing he saidwas “I have not understood the world,and the world has not understood me.”

It was high time for a prudent,highly trained bureaucrat, almost fortyyears old, to look out for himself and findsome stable means of support. ButPoggio did nothing of the kind. Instead, afew months after his return from St. Gall,he left Constance again, this timeapparently without companions. Hiscraving to discover and to liberatewhatever noble beings were hidden inthe prison house had evidently onlyintensified. He had no idea what hewould find; he only knew that if it wassomething ancient and written in elegantLatin, then it was worth rescuing at all

costs. The ignorant, indolent monks, hewas convinced, were locking awaytraces of a civilization far greater thananything the world had known for morethan a thousand years.

Of course, all Poggio could hope tofind were pieces of parchment, and noteven very ancient ones. But for him thesewere not manuscripts but human voices.What emerged from the obscurity of thelibrary was not a link in a long chain oftexts, one copied from the other, butrather the thing itself, wearing borrowedgarments, or even the author himself,wrapped in gravecloths and stumblinginto the light.

“We accept Aesculapius asbelonging among the gods because hecalled back Hippolytus, as well as othersfrom the underworld,” Francesco Barbarowrote to Poggio after hearing of his

discoveries;

If people, nations,26 and provinceshave dedicated shrines to him,what might I think ought to be donefor you, if that custom had notalready been forgotten? You haverevived so many illustrious menand such wise men, who weredead for eternity, through whoseminds and teachings not only webut our descendants will be able tolive well and honourably.

Books that had fallen out of circulationand were sitting in German libraries werethus transformed into wise men who haddied and whose souls had beenimprisoned in the underworld; Poggio,the cynical papal secretary in the service

of the famously corrupt pope, wasviewed by his friends as a culture hero, amagical healer who reassembled andreanimated the torn and mangled body ofantiquity.

Thus it was that in January 1417,Poggio found himself once again in amonastic library, probably Fulda. Therehe took from the shelf a long poemwhose author he may have recalledseeing mentioned in Quintilian or in thechronicle compiled by St. Jerome: T.LUCRETI CARI DE RERUM NATURA.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE WAY THINGS ARE

ON THE NATURE of Things is not aneasy read. Totaling 7,400 lines, it iswritten in hexameters, the standardunrhymed six-beat lines in which Latinpoets like Virgil and Ovid, imitatingHomer’s Greek, cast their epic poetry.Divided into six untitled books, the poemyokes together moments of intenselyrical beauty, philosophical meditationson religion, pleasure, and death, andcomplex theories of the physical world,the evolution of human societies, theperils and joys of sex, and the nature of

disease. The language is often knottyand difficult, the syntax complex, and theoverall intellectual ambition astoundinglyhigh.

The difficulty would not in the leasthave fazed Poggio and his learnedfriends. They possessed wonderful Latin,rose eagerly to the challenge of solvingtextual riddles, and had often wanderedwith pleasure and interest through thestill more impenetrable thickets ofpatristic theology. A quick glance at thefirst few pages of the manuscript wouldhave sufficed to convince Poggio that hehad discovered something remarkable.

What he could not have grasped,without carefully reading through thework and absorbing its arguments, wasthat he was unleashing something thatthreatened his whole mental universe.Had he understood this threat, he might

still have returned the poem tocirculation: recovering the lost traces ofthe ancient world was his highestpurpose in life, virtually the only principleuncontaminated by disillusionment andcynical laughter. But, as he did so, hemight have uttered the words that Freudreputedly spoke to Jung, as they sailedinto New York Harbor to receive theaccolades of their American admirers:“Don’t they know we are bringing themthe plague?”

One simple name for the plaguethat Lucretius brought—a chargefrequently leveled against him, when hispoem began once again to be read—isatheism. But Lucretius was not in fact anatheist. He believed that the godsexisted. But he also believed that, byvirtue of being gods, they could notpossibly be concerned with human

beings or with anything that we do.Divinity by its very nature, he thought,must enjoy eternal life and peace entirelyuntouched by any suffering ordisturbance and indifferent to humanactions.

If it gives you pleasure to call thesea Neptune or to refer to grain and wineas Ceres and Bacchus, Lucretius wrote,you should feel free to do so, just as youcan dub the round world the Mother ofthe Gods. And if, drawn by their solemnbeauty, you choose to visit religiousshrines, you will be doing yourself noharm, provided that you contemplate theimages of the gods “in peace andtranquillity.” (6:78) But you should notthink for a minute that you can eitheranger or propitiate any of these deities.The processions, the animal sacrifices,the frenzied dances, the drums and

cymbals and pipes, the showers ofsnowy rose petals, the eunuch priests,the carved images of the infant god: all ofthese cultic practices, though compellingand impressive in their way, arefundamentally meaningless, since thegods they are meant to reach are entirelyremoved and separated from our world.

It is possible to argue that, despitehis profession of religious belief,Lucretius was some sort of atheist, aparticularly sly one perhaps, since toalmost all believers of almost all religiousfaiths in almost all times it has seemedpointless to worship a god without thehope of appeasing divine wrath oracquiring divine protection and favor.What is the use of a god who isuninterested in punishing or rewarding?Lucretius insisted that such hopes andanxieties are precisely a toxic form of

superstition, combining in equal measureabsurd arrogance and absurd fear.Imagining that the gods actually careabout the fate of humans or about theirritual practices is, he observed, aparticularly vulgar insult—as if divinebeings depended for their happiness onour mumbled words or good behavior.But that insult is the least of theproblems, since the gods quite literallycould not care less. Nothing that we cando (or not do) could possibly interestthem. The serious issue is that falsebeliefs and observances inevitably leadto human mischief.

These views were certainlycontrary to Poggio’s own Christian faithand would have led any contemporarywho espoused them into the mostserious trouble. But by themselves,encountered in a pagan text, they were

not likely to trigger great alarm. Poggiocould have told himself, as did somelater sympathetic readers of On theNature of Things, that the brilliant ancientpoet simply intuited the emptiness ofpagan beliefs and hence the absurdity ofsacrifices to gods who did not in factexist. Lucretius, after all, had themisfortune of living shortly before thecoming of the Messiah. Had he beenborn a century later, he would have hadthe opportunity of learning the truth. As itwas, he at least grasped that thepractices of his own contemporarieswere worthless. Hence even manymodern translations of Lucretius’ poeminto English reassuringly have itdenounce as “superstition” what the Latintext calls simply religio.

But atheism—or, more accurately,the indifference of the gods—was not the

only problem posed by Lucretius’ poem.Its main concerns lay elsewhere, in thematerial world we all inhabit, and it ishere that the most disturbing argumentsarose, arguments that lured those whowere most struck by their formidablepower—Machiavelli, Bruno, Galileo, andothers—into strange trains of thought.Those trains of thought had once beeneagerly explored in the very land towhich they now returned, as a result ofPoggio’s discovery. But a thousandyears of virtual silence had renderedthem highly dangerous.

By now much of what On theNature of Things claims about theuniverse seems deeply familiar, at leastamong the circle of people who are likelyto be reading these words. After all,many of the work’s core arguments are

among the foundations1 on whichmodern life has been constructed. But itis worth remembering that some of thearguments remain alien and that othersare hotly contested, often by those whogladly avail themselves of the scientificadvances they helped to spawn. And toall but a few of Poggio’s contemporaries,most of what Lucretius claimed, albeit ina poem of startling, seductive beauty,seemed incomprehensible,unbelievable, or impious.

Here is a brief list, by no meansexhaustive, of the elements thatconstituted the Lucretian challenge:

• Everything is made of invisibleparticles. Lucretius, who dislikedtechnical language, chose not touse the standard Greek

philosophical term for thesefoundational particles, “atoms,” i.e.,things that cannot be divided. Hedeployed instead a variety ofordinary Latin words: “first things,”“first beginnings,” “the bodies ofmatter,” “the seeds of things.”Everything is formed of theseseeds and, on dissolution, returnsto them in the end. Immutable,indivisible, invisible, and infinite innumber, they are constantly inmotion, clashing with one another,coming together to form newshapes, coming apart, recombiningagain, enduring.

• The elementary particles of matter—“the seeds of the things”—areeternal. Time is not limited—adiscrete substance with abeginning and an end—but infinite.

The invisible particles from whichthe entire universe is made, fromthe stars to the lowliest insect, areindestructible and immortal, thoughany particular object in theuniverse is transitory. That is, allthe forms that we observe, eventhose that seem the most durable,are temporary: the building blocksfrom which they are composed willsooner or later be redistributed. Butthose building blocks themselvesare permanent, as is the ceaselessprocess of formation, dissolution,and redistribution.

Neither creation nor destructionever has the upper hand; the sumtotal of matter remains the same,and the balance between the livingand the dead is always restored:

And so the destructivemotions cannot hold swayeternally and bury existenceforever; nor again can themotions that cause life andgrowth preserve createdthings eternally. Thus, in thiswar that has been wagedfrom time everlasting, thecontest between theelements is an equal one:now here, now there, the vitalforces conquer and, in turn,are conquered; with thefuneral dirge mingles the wailthat babies raise when theyreach the shores of light; nonight has followed day, andno dawn has followed night,which has not heard mingled

with those woeful wails thelamentations that accompanydeath and the black funeral.(2.569–80)

The Spanish-born Harvard

philosopher George Santayanacalled this idea—the ceaselessmutation of forms composed ofindestructible substances—“thegreatest thought2 that mankind hasever hit upon.”

• The elementary particles areinfinite in number but limited inshape and size. They are like theletters in an alphabet, a discrete setcapable of being combined in aninfinite number of sentences.(2.688ff.) And, with the seeds ofthings as with language, the

combinations are made accordingto a code. As not all letters or allwords can be coherentlycombined, so too not all particlescan combine with all other particlesin every possible manner. Some ofthe seeds of things routinely andeasily hook onto others; somerepel and resist one another.Lucretius did not claim to know thehidden code of matter. But, heargued, it is important to grasp thatthere is a code and that, inprinciple, it could be investigatedand understood by human science.

• All particles are in motion in aninfinite void. Space, like time, isunbounded. There are no fixedpoints, no beginnings, middles, orends, and no limits. Matter is notpacked together in a solid mass.

There is a void in things, allowingthe constitutive particles to move,collide, combine, and move apart.Evidence for the void includes notonly the restless motion that weobserve all around us, but alsosuch phenomena as water oozingthrough the walls of caves, fooddispersed through bodies, soundpassing through walls of closedrooms, cold permeating to thebones.

The universe consists then ofmatter—the primary particles andall that those particles cometogether to form—and space,intangible and empty. Nothing elseexists.

• The universe has no creator ordesigner. The particlesthemselves have not been made

and cannot be destroyed. Thepatterns of order and disorder inthe world are not the product of anydivine scheme. Providence is afantasy.

What exists is not themanifestation of any overarchingplan or any intelligent designinherent in matter itself. Nosupreme choreographer plannedtheir movements, and the seeds ofthings did not have a meeting inwhich they decided what would gowhere.

But because throughout theuniverse3 from timeeverlasting countlessnumbers of them, buffetedand impelled by blows, have

shifted in countless ways,experimentation with everykind of movement andcombination has at lastresulted in arrangementssuch as those that createdand compose our world.(1.1024–28)

There is no end or purpose toexistence, only ceaseless creationand destruction, governed entirelyby chance.

• Everything comes into being as aresult of a swerve. If all theindividual particles, in their infinitenumbers, fell through the void instraight lines, pulled down by theirown weight like raindrops, nothingwould ever exist. But the particlesdo not move lockstep in a

preordained single direction.Instead, “at absolutelyunpredictable times and placesthey deflect slightly from theirstraight course, to a degree thatcould be described as no morethan a shift of movement.” (2.218–20) The position of the elementaryparticles4 is thus indeterminate.

The swerve—whichLucretius called variouslydeclinatio, inclinatio, or clinamen—is only the most minimal ofmotions, nec plus quam minimum.(2.244) But it is enough to set off aceaseless chain of collisions.Whatever exists in the universeexists because of these randomcollisions of minute particles. Theendless combinations and

recombinations, resulting from thecollisions over a limitless span oftime, bring it about that “the riversreplenish the insatiable sea withplentiful streams of water, that theearth, warmed by the sun’sfostering heat, renews her produce,that the family of animals springsup and thrives, and that the glidingethereal fires have life.” (1.1031–34)

• The swerve is the source of freewill. In the lives of all sentientcreatures, human and animal alike,the random swerve of elementaryparticles is responsible for theexistence of free will. For if all ofmotion were one long5predetermined chain, there wouldbe no possibility of freedom. Cause

would follow cause from eternity,as the fates decreed. Instead, wewrest free will from the fates.

But what is the evidence thatthe will exists? Why should we notsimply think that the matter in livingcreatures moves because of thesame blows that propel dustmotes? Lucretius’ image is the splitsecond on the race track after thestarting gate is opened, before thestraining horses, frantically eagerto move, can actually propel theirbodies forward. That split second isthe thrilling spectacle of a mentalact bidding a mass of matter intomotion. And because this imagedid not quite answer to his wholepurpose—because, after all, racehorses are precisely creaturesdriven to move by the blows of their

riders—Lucretius went on toobserve that though an outsideforce may strike against a man, thatman may deliberately hold himselfback.6

• Nature ceaselessly experiments.There is no single moment oforigin, no mythic scene of creation.All living beings, from plants andinsects to the higher mammals andman, have evolved through a long,complex process of trial and error.The process involves many falsestarts and dead ends, monsters,prodigies, mistakes, creatures thatwere not endowed with all thefeatures that they needed tocompete for resources and tocreate offspring. Creatures whosecombination7 of organs enables

them to adapt and to reproduce willsucceed in establishingthemselves, until changingcircumstances make it impossiblefor them any longer to survive.

The successful adaptations,like the failures, are the result of afantastic number of combinationsthat are constantly being generated(and reproduced or discarded) overan unlimited expanse of time. It isdifficult to grasp this point,Lucretius acknowledged, but “whathas been created gives rise to itsown function.” (4.835) That is, heexplained, “Sight did not existbefore the birth of the eyes, norspeech before the creation of thetongue.” (4.836–37) These organswere not created in order to fulfill apurposed end; their usefulness

gradually enabled the creatures inwhom they emerged to survive andto reproduce their kind.

• The universe was not created foror about humans. The earth—with its seas and deserts, harshclimate, wild beasts, diseases—was obviously not purpose-built tomake our species feel at home.Unlike many other animals, whoare endowed at birth with what theyneed to survive, human infants arealmost completely vulnerable:Consider, Lucretius wrote in acelebrated passage, how a baby,8like a shipwrecked sailor flungashore by fierce waves,

lies on the ground naked,speechless, and utterly

helpless as soon as naturehas cast it forth with pangs oflabor from its mother’s wombinto the shores of light.(5.223–25)

The fate of the entire species

(let alone that of any individual) isnot the pole around whicheverything revolves. Indeed, thereis no reason to believe that humanbeings as a species will lastforever. On the contrary, it is clearthat, over the infinite expanses oftime, some species grow, othersdisappear, generated anddestroyed in the ceaseless processof change. There were other formsof life before us, which no longerexist; there will be other forms oflife after us, when our kind has

vanished.• Humans are not unique. They are

part of a much larger materialprocess that links them not only toall other life forms but to inorganicmatter as well. The invisibleparticles out of which living things,including humans, are composedare not sentient nor do they comefrom some mysterious source. Weare made of the same stuff thateverything else is made of.

Humans do not occupy theprivileged place in existence theyimagine for themselves: thoughthey often fail to recognize the fact,they share many of their mostcherished qualities with otheranimals. To be sure, eachindividual is unique, but, thanks tothe abundance of matter, the same

is true of virtually all creatures: howelse do we imagine that a calfrecognizes its dam9 or the cow hercalf? We have only to lookattentively at the world around us tograsp that many of the most intenseand poignant experiences of ourlives are not exclusive to ourspecies.

• Human society began not in aGolden Age of tranquility andplenty, but in a primitive battlefor survival. There was no originalparadisal time of plenty, as somehave dreamed, in which happy,peaceful men and women, living insecurity and leisure, enjoyed thefruits of nature’s abundance. Earlyhumans, lacking fire, agriculture,and other means to soften a

brutally hard existence, struggledto eat and to avoid being eaten.

There may always have beensome rudimentary capacity forsocial cooperation in the interest ofsurvival, but the ability to formbonds and to live in communitiesgoverned by settled customsdeveloped slowly. At first there wasonly random mating—either frommutual desire or from barter or rape—and the hunting and gathering offood. Mortality rates were extremelyhigh, though not, Lucretius notedwryly, as high as they currently are,inflated by warfare, shipwreck, andovereating.

The idea that language wassomehow given to humans, as amiraculous invention, is absurd.Instead, Lucretius wrote, humans,

who like other animals usedinarticulate cries and gestures invarious situations, slowly arrived atshared sounds to designate thesame things. So too, long beforethey were able to join together tosing melodious songs, humansimitated the warbling of birds andthe sweet sound of a gentle breezein the reeds and so graduallydeveloped a capacity to makemusic.

The arts of civilization—notgiven to man by some divinelawmaker but painstakinglyfashioned by the shared talentsand mental power of the species—are accomplishments worthcelebrating, but they are notunmixed blessings. They arose intandem with the fear of the gods,

the desire for wealth, the pursuit offame and power. All of theseoriginated in a craving for security,a craving that reaches back to theearliest experiences of the humanspecies struggling to master itsnatural enemies. That violentstruggle—against the wild beaststhat threatened human survival—was largely successful, but theanxious, acquisitive, aggressiveimpulses have metastasized. Inconsequence, human beingscharacteristically develop weaponsthat turn against themselves.

• The soul dies. The human soul ismade of the same material as thehuman body. The fact that wecannot physically locate the soul ina particular organ only means thatit is made of exceedingly minute

particles interlaced through theveins, flesh, and sinews. Ourinstruments are not fine enough toweigh the soul: at the moment ofdeath, it dissolves “like the case ofa wine whose bouquet hasevaporated, or of a perfume whoseexquisite scent has dispersed intothe air.” (3.221–2) We do notimagine that the wine or perfumecontains a mysterious soul; onlythat the scent consists of verysubtle material elements, too smallto measure. So too of the humanspirit: it consists of tiny elementshidden in body’s most secretrecesses. When the body dies—that is, when its matter is dispersed—the soul, which is part of thebody, dies as well.

• There is no afterlife. Humans have

both consoled and tormentedthemselves with the thought thatsomething awaits them after theyhave died. Either they will gatherflowers for eternity in a paradisalgarden where no chill wind everblows or they will be frog-marchedbefore a harsh judge who willcondemn them, for their sins, tounending misery (misery thatsomewhat mysteriously requiresthem after dying to have heat-sensitive skin, an aversion to cold,bodily appetite and thirst, and thelike). But once you grasp that yoursoul dies along with your body, youalso grasp that there can be noposthumous punishments orrewards. Life on this earth is all thathuman beings have.

• Death is nothing to us. When you

are dead—when the particles thathave been linked together, tocreate and sustain you, have comeapart—there will be neitherpleasure nor pain, longing nor fear.Mourners, Lucretius wrote, alwayswring their hands in anguish andsay, “Never again will your dearchildren race for the prize of yourfirst kisses and touch your heartwith pleasure too profound forwords.” (3.895–98) But they do notgo on to add, “You will not care,because you will not exist.”

• All organized religions aresuperstitious delusions. Thedelusions are based on deeplyrooted longings, fears, andignorance. Humans project imagesof the power and beauty andperfect security that they would like

to possess. Fashioning their godsaccordingly, they become enslavedto their own dreams.

Everyone is subject to thefeelings that generate suchdreams: they wash over you whenyou look up at the stars and startimagining beings of immeasurablepower; or when you wonder if theuniverse has any limits; or whenyou marvel at the exquisite order ofthings; or, less agreeably,10 whenyou experience an uncanny stringof misfortunes and wonder if youare being punished; or whennature shows its destructive side.There are entirely naturalexplanations for such phenomenaas lightning and earthquakes—Lucretius spells them out—but

terrified humans instinctivelyrespond with religious fear andstart praying.

• Religions are invariably cruel.Religions always promise hopeand love, but their deep, underlyingstructure is cruelty. This is why theyare drawn to fantasies of retributionand why they inevitably stir upanxiety among their adherents. Thequintessential emblem of religion—and the clearest manifestation ofthe perversity that lies at its core—is the sacrifice of a child by aparent.

Almost all religious faithsincorporate the myth of such asacrifice, and some have actuallymade it real. Lucretius had in mindthe sacrifice of Iphegenia by herfather Agamemnon, but he may

also have been aware of theJewish story of Abraham and Isaacand other comparable NearEastern stories for which theRomans of his times had a growingtaste. Writing around 50 BCE hecould not, of course, haveanticipated the great sacrifice myththat would come to dominate theWestern world, but he would nothave been surprised by it or by theendlessly reiterated, prominentlydisplayed images of the bloody,murdered son.

• There are no angels, demons, orghosts. Immaterial spirits of anykind do not exist. The creatureswith which the Greek and Romanimagination populated the world—Fates, harpies, daemons, genii,nymphs, satyrs, dryads, celestial

messengers, and the spirits of thedead—are entirely unreal. Forgetthem.

• The highest goal of human life isthe enhancement of pleasureand the reduction of pain. Lifeshould be organized to serve thepursuit of happiness. There is noethical purpose higher thanfacilitating this pursuit for oneselfand one’s fellow creatures. All theother claims—the service of thestate, the glorification of the gods orthe ruler, the arduous pursuit ofvirtue through self-sacrifice—aresecondary, misguided, orfraudulent. The militarism and thetaste for violent sports thatcharacterized his own cultureseemed to Lucretius in the deepestsense perverse and unnatural.

Man’s natural needs are simple. Afailure to recognize the boundariesof these needs leads humanbeings to a vain and fruitlessstruggle for more and more.

Most people grasp rationallythat the luxuries they crave are, forthe most part, pointless and do littleor nothing to enhance their well-being: “Fiery fevers quit your bodyno quicker, if you toss inembroidered attire of blushingcrimson, than if you must lie sick ina common garment.” (2.34–36) But,as it is difficult to resist fears of thegods and the afterlife, so too it isdifficult to resist the compulsivesense that security, for oneself andone’s community, can somehow beenhanced through exploits ofpassionate acquisitiveness and

conquest. These exploits, however,only decrease the possibility ofhappiness and put everyoneengaged in them at the risk ofshipwreck.

The goal, Lucretius wrote in acelebrated and famously disturbingpassage, must be to escape fromthe whole mad enterprise andobserve it from a position of safety:

It is comforting,11 whenwinds are whipping up thewaters of the vast sea, towatch from land the severetrials of another person: notthat anyone’s distress is acause of agreeable pleasure;but it is comforting to seefrom what troubles you

yourself are exempt. It iscomforting also to witnessmighty clashes of warriorsembattled on the plains,when you have no share inthe danger. But nothing ismore blissful than to occupythe heights effectively fortifiedby the teaching of the wise,tranquil sanctuaries fromwhich you can look downupon others and see themwandering everywhere intheir random search for theway of life, competing forintellectual eminence,disputing about rank, andstriving night and day withprodigious effort to scale thesummit of wealth and tosecure power. (2:1–13)

• The greatest obstacle to pleasure

is not pain; it is delusion. Theprincipal enemies of humanhappiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining somethingthat exceeds what the finite mortalworld allows—and gnawing fear.Even the dreaded plague, inLucretius’ account—and his workends with a graphic account of acatastrophic plague epidemic inAthens—is most horrible not onlyfor the suffering and death that itbrings but also and still more forthe “perturbation and panic” that ittriggers.

It is perfectly reasonable toseek to avoid pain: such avoidanceis one of the pillars of his wholeethical system. But how is it

possible to keep this naturalaversion from turning into panic,panic that only leads to the triumphof suffering? And, more generally,why are humans so unhappy?

The answer, Lucretiusthought, had to do with the powerof the imagination. Though they arefinite and mortal, humans aregripped by illusions of the infinite—infinite pleasure and infinite pain.The fantasy of infinite pain helps toaccount for their proneness toreligion: in the misguided beliefthat their souls are immortal andhence potentially subject to aneternity of suffering, humansimagine that they can somehownegotiate with the gods for a betteroutcome, an eternity of pleasure inparadise. The fantasy of infinite

pleasure helps to account for theirproneness to romantic love: in themisguided belief that theirhappiness depends upon theabsolute possession of somesingle object of limitless desire,humans are seized by a feverish,unappeasable hunger and thirstthat can only bring anguish insteadof happiness.

Once again it is perfectlyreasonable to seek sexualpleasure: that is, after all, one of thebody’s natural joys. The mistake,Lucretius thought, was to confoundthis joy with a delusion, thefrenzied craving to possess—atonce to penetrate and to consume—what is in reality a dream. Ofcourse, the absent lover is alwaysonly a mental image and in this

sense akin to a dream. ButLucretius observed in passages ofremarkable frankness that in thevery act of sexual consummationlovers remain in the grip ofconfused longings that they cannotfulfill:

Even in the hour ofpossession the passion ofthe lovers fluctuates andwanders in uncertainty: theycannot decide what to enjoyfirst with their eyes andhands. They tightly squeezethe object of their desire andcause bodily pain, oftendriving their teeth into oneanother’s lips and crushingmouth against mouth.(4.1076–81)

The point of this passage—part

of what W. B. Yeats called “thefinest description12 of sexualintercourse ever written”—is not tourge a more decorous, tepid form oflovemaking. It is to take note of theelement of unsated appetite13 thathaunts even the fulfillment ofdesire. The insatiability of sexualappetite is, in Lucretius’ view, oneof Venus’ cunning strategies; ithelps to account for the fact that,after brief interludes, the same actsof love are performed again andagain. And he understood too thatthese repeated acts are deeplypleasurable. But he remainedtroubled by the ruse, by theemotional suffering that comes in

its wake, by the arousal ofaggressive impulses, and, aboveall, by the sense that even themoment of ecstasy leavessomething to be desired. In 1685,the great poet John Drydenbrilliantly captured Lucretius’remarkable vision: … when the youthful pair14

more closely join,When hands in hands they lock,

and thighs in thighs theytwine;

Just in the raging foam of fulldesire,

When both press on, bothmurmur, both expire,

They grip, they squeeze, theirhumid tongues they dart,

As each would force their way toth’others heart.

In vain; they only cruise aboutthe coast.

For bodies cannot pierce, nor bein bodies lost,

As sure they strive to be, whenboth engage

In that tumultuous momentaryrage.

So tangled in the nets of lovethey lie,

Till man dissolves in that excessof joy.

(4.1105–14)

• Understanding the nature of

things generates deep wonder.The realization that the universe

consists of atoms and void andnothing else, that the world was notmade for us by a providentialcreator, that we are not the centerof the universe, that our emotionallives are no more distinct than ourphysical lives from those of allother creatures, that our souls areas material and as mortal as ourbodies—all these things are not thecause for despair. On the contrary,grasping the way things really areis the crucial step toward thepossibility of happiness. Humaninsignificance—the fact that it is notall about us and our fate—is,Lucretius insisted, the good news.

It is possible for humanbeings to live happy lives, but notbecause they think that they are thecenter of the universe or because

they fear the gods or because theynobly sacrifice themselves forvalues that purport to transcendtheir mortal existence.Unappeasable desire and the fearof death are the principal obstaclesto human happiness, but theobstacles can be surmountedthrough the exercise of reason.

The exercise of reason is notavailable only to specialists; it isaccessible to everyone. What isneeded is to refuse the liesproffered by priests and otherfantasymongers and to looksquarely and calmly at the truenature of things. All speculation—all science, all morality, all attemptsto fashion a life worth living—muststart and end with acomprehension of the invisible

seeds of things: atoms and the voidand nothing else.

It might seem at first that thiscomprehension would inevitablybring with it a sense of coldemptiness, as if the universe hadbeen robbed of its magic. But beingliberated from harmful illusions isnot the same as disillusionment.The origin of philosophy, it wasoften said in the ancient world, waswonder: surprise and bafflementled to a desire to know, andknowledge in turn laid the wonderto rest. But in Lucretius’ accountthe process is something like thereverse: it is knowing the waythings are that awakens thedeepest wonder. On the Nature of Things is that

rarest of accomplishments: a great workof philosophy that is also a great poem.Inevitably, compiling a list ofpropositions, as I have done, obscuresLucretius’ astonishing poetic power, apower he himself downplayed when hecompared his verses to honey smearedaround the lip of a cup containingmedicine that a sick man might otherwiserefuse to drink. The downplaying is notaltogether surprising: his philosophicalmaster and guide, Epicurus, wassuspicious of eloquence and thought thatthe truth should be uttered in plain,unadorned prose.

But the poetic greatness ofLucretius’ work is not incidental to hisvisionary project, his attempt to wrest thetruth away from illusion-mongerers. Whyshould the tellers of fables, he thought,possess a monopoly on the means that

humans have invented to express thepleasure and beauty of the world?Without those means, the world weinhabit runs the risk of seeminginhospitable, and for their comfort peoplewill prefer to embrace fantasies, even ifthose fantasies are destructive. With theaid of poetry, however, the actual natureof things—an infinite number ofindestructible particles swerving into oneanother, hooking together, coming to life,coming apart, reproducing, dying,recreating themselves, forming anastonishing, constantly changinguniverse—can be depicted in its truesplendor.

Human beings, Lucretius thought,must not drink in the poisonous beliefthat their souls are only part of the worldtemporarily and that they are headingsomewhere else. That belief will only

spawn in them a destructive relation tothe environment in which they live theonly lives that they have. These lives,like all other existing forms in theuniverse, are contingent and vulnerable;all things, including the earth itself, willeventually disintegrate and return to theconstituent atoms from which they werecomposed and out of which other thingswill form in the perpetual dance of matter.But while we are alive, we should befilled with the deepest pleasure, for weare a small part of a vast process ofworld-making that Lucretius celebratedas essentially erotic.

Hence it is that, as a poet, a makerof metaphors, Lucretius could dosomething very strange, something thatappears to violate his conviction that thegods are deaf to human petitions. On theNature of Things opens with a prayer to

Venus. Once again Dryden probablybest renders in English the spirit ofLucretius’ ardor:

Delight of humankind15 and godsabove,

Parent of Rome, propitious Queen ofLove,

Whose vital power, air, earth, and seasupplies,

And breeds whate’er is born beneaththe rolling skies;

For every kind, by thy prolific might,Springs and beholds the regions of

the light:Thee, Goddess, thee, the clouds and

tempests fear,And at thy pleasing presence

disappear;For thee the land in fragrant flowers is

dressed,For thee the ocean smiles and

smooths her wavy breast,And heaven itself with more serene

and purer light is blessed.(1.1–9)

The hymn pours forth, full of

wonder and gratitude, glowing with light.It is as if the ecstatic poet actually beheldthe goddess of love, the sky clearing ather radiant presence, the awakeningearth showering her with flowers. She isthe embodiment of desire, and her return,on the fresh gusts of the west wind, fillsall living things with pleasure andpassionate sexual longing:

For when the rising spring adorns the

mead,And a new scene of nature stands

displayed,When teeming buds and cheerful

greens appear,And western gales unlock the lazy

year,The joyous birds thy welcome first

expressWhose native songs thy genial fire

confess.Then savage beasts bound o’er their

slighted food,Struck with thy darts, and tempt the

raging flood.All nature is thy gift: earth, air, and

sea;Of all that breathes, the various

progeny,Stung with delight, is goaded on by

thee.

O’er barren mountains, o’er theflowery plain,

The leafy forest, and the liquid mainExtends thy uncontrolled and

boundless reign.Through all the living regions dost

thou moveAnd scatterest, where thou goest, the

kindly seeds of Love.

(1.9–20)

We do not know how the German

monks who copied the Latin verses andkept them from destruction responded,nor do we know what Poggio Bracciolini,who must at least have glanced at themas he salvaged the poem from oblivion,thought they meant. Certainly almost

every one of the poem’s key principleswas an abomination to right-thinkingChristian orthodoxy. But the poetry wascompellingly, seductively beautiful. Andwe can see with hallucinatory vividnesswhat at least one Italian, later in thefifteenth century, made of them: we haveonly to look at Botticelli’s great paintingof Venus, ravishingly beautiful, emergingfrom the restless matter of the sea.

CHAPTER NINE

THE RETURN

“LUCRETIUS HAS NOT yet come backto me,” Poggio wrote to his Venetianfriend, the patrician humanist FrancescoBarbaro, “although he has been copied.”Evidently, then, Poggio had not beenallowed to borrow the ancient manuscript(which he characteristically referred to asif it were the poet himself) and take itback to Constance with him. The monksmust have been too wary for that andforced him instead to find someone tomake a copy. He did not expect thisscribe to deliver the result, important as it

was, in person: “The place is rather faraway1 and not many people come fromthere,” Poggio wrote, “and so I shall waituntil some people turn up who will bringhim.” How long would he be willing towait? “If no one comes,” he assured hisfriend, “I shall not put public duties aheadof private needs.” A very strange remark,for what is public here and what isprivate? Poggio was, perhaps, tellingBarbaro not to worry: official duties inConstance (whatever they might be)would not stand in the way of getting hishands on Lucretius.

When the manuscript2 of On theNature of Things finally did reach him,Poggio evidently sent it off at once toNiccolò Niccoli, in Florence. Eitherbecause the scribe’s copy was crudelymade or simply because he wanted a

version for himself, Poggio’s friendundertook to transcribe it. Thistranscription in Niccoli’s elegant hand,together with the copy made by theGerman scribe, spawned dozens offurther manuscript copies—more thanfifty are known to survive—and were thesources of all fifteenth-century and earlysixteenth-century printed editions ofLucretius. Poggio’s discovery thusserved as the crucial conduit throughwhich the ancient poem, dormant for athousand years, reentered circulation inthe world. In the cool gray and whiteLaurentian library that Michelangelodesigned for the Medici, Niccoli’s copy ofthe scribe’s copy of the ninth-centurycopy of Lucretius’ poem—CodexLaurentianus 35.30—is preserved. Oneof the key sources of modernity, it is amodest book, bound in fading, tattered

red leather inlaid with metal, a chainattached to the bottom of the back cover.There is little to distinguish it physicallyfrom many other manuscripts in thecollection, apart from the fact that areader is given latex gloves to wearwhen it is delivered to the desk.

The copy that the scribe made andthat Poggio sent from Constance toFlorence is lost. Presumably, aftercompleting his transcription, Niccoli sentit back to Poggio, who does not seem tohave copied it in his own exquisite hand.Perhaps, confident in Niccoli’s skills,Poggio or his heirs deemed the scribe’scopy not worth preserving and in the endsimply threw it away. Lost too is themanuscript that the scribe had copiedand that presumably remained in themonastic library. Did it burn up in a fire?Was the ink carefully scraped off in order

to make room for some other text? Did itfinally molder away from neglect, thevictim of damp and rot? Or did a piousreader actually take in its subversiveimplications and choose to destroy it? Noremnants of it have been discovered.Two ninth-century manuscripts of On theNature of Things, unknown to Poggio orany of his humanist contemporaries, didmanage to make it through the almostimpenetrable barrier of time. Thesemanuscripts, named after their formatsthe Oblongus and the Quadratus, werecataloged in the collection of a greatseventeenth-century Dutch scholar andcollector, Isaac Voss, and have been inthe Leiden University Library since 1689.Fragments of a third ninth-centurymanuscript, containing about 45 percentof Lucretius’ poem, also turned out tosurvive and are now housed in

collections in Copenhagen and Vienna.But by the time these manuscriptssurfaced, Lucretius’ poem, thanks toPoggio’s discovery, had already longbeen helping to unsettle and transformthe world.

It is possible that Poggio sent hiscopy of the poem to Niccoli withouthaving done more than look at it briefly.He had much to occupy his mind.Baldassare Cossa had been stripped ofthe papacy and was languishing inprison. The second claimant to thethrone of St. Peter, Angelo Correr, whohad been forced to resign his title ofGregory XII, died in October 1417. Thethird claimant, Pedro de Luna,barricaded first in the fortress ofPerpignan and then on the inaccessiblerock of Peñiscola on the sea coast nearValencia, still tenaciously called himself

Benedict XIII, but it was clear to Poggioand almost everyone else that PapaLuna’s claim could not be takenseriously. The papal throne was vacant,and the council—which, like the currentEuropean Community, was riven withtensions among the English, French,German, Italian, and Spanishdelegations—squabbled over theconditions that would have to be metbefore proceeding to elect a new pope.

In the long interval before anagreement was finally reached, manymembers of the curia had found paths tonew employment; some, like Poggio’sfriend Bruni, had already returned to Italy.Poggio’s own attempts wereunsuccessful. The apostolic secretary tothe disgraced pope had enemies, and herefused to appease them by distancinghimself from his former master. Other

bureaucrats in the papal court testifiedagainst the imprisoned Cossa, butPoggio’s name does not appear on thelist of witnesses for the prosecution. Hisbest hope was that one of Cossa’sprincipal allies, Cardinal Zabarella,would be named pope, but Zabarelladied in 1417. When the electors finallymet in secret conclave in the fall of 1418,they chose someone with no interest insurrounding himself with humanistintellectuals, the Roman aristocrat OddoColonna, who took the name Martin V.Poggio was not offered the post ofapostolic secretary, though he couldhave stayed on at court in the lower rankof scriptor. Instead, he decided to make avery surprising and risky career move.

In 1419, Poggio accepted the postof secretary to Henry Beaufort, bishop ofWinchester. The uncle of Henry V

(Shakespeare’s heroic warrior ofAgincourt fame), Beaufort was the leaderof the English delegation to the Councilof Constance, where he evidently metand was impressed by the Italianhumanist. For the wealthy and powerfulEnglish bishop, Poggio represented themost advanced and sophisticated type ofsecretary, someone deeply versed bothin the Roman curial bureaucracy and inprestigious humanist studies. For theItalian secretary, Beaufort representedthe salvaging of dignity. Poggio had thesatisfaction of refusing what would havebeen in effect a demotion, had hereturned to the Roman Curia. But heknew no English, and, if that did notgreatly matter in the service of anaristocratic cleric whose mother tonguewas French and who was comfortable inLatin and Italian, it did mean that Poggio

could never hope to feel entirely at homein England.

The decision to move, as heapproached his fortieth birthday, to aland where he had no family, allies, orfriends was motivated by somethingother than pique. The prospect of asojourn in a distant realm—much moreremote and exotic than Tasmania wouldnow seem to a contemporary Roman—excited the book hunter in Poggio. Hehad had spectacular successes inSwitzerland and Germany, successesthat had made his name famous inhumanist circles. Other great discoveriesmight await him now in English monasticlibraries. Those libraries had not yetbeen thoroughly searched by humanistsendowed, as Poggio was, with a carefulreading of known classical texts, anencyclopedic grasp of the clues to

missing manuscripts, and remarkablephilological acumen. If he had alreadybeen hailed as a demigod for his abilityto resurrect the ancient dead, how wouldhe be praised for what he might nowbring to light?

In the event, Poggio remained inEngland for almost four years, but thestay was deeply disappointing. BishopBeaufort was not the gold mine thatPoggio, perennially short of money, haddreamed he would be. He was awaymuch of the time—“as nomadic as aScythian”—leaving his secretary withlittle or nothing to do. Except for Niccoli,his Italian friends seem all to haveforgotten him: “I have been relegated3 tooblivion as though I were dead.” TheEnglish people he met were almostuniformly disagreeable: “plenty of men

given over to gluttony and lust but veryfew lovers of literature and those fewbarbarians, trained rather in triflingdebates and in quibbling than in reallearning.”

His letters back to Italy were alitany of complaints. There was plague;the weather was miserable; his motherand brother wrote to him only to pesterhim for money that he did not have; hesuffered from hemorrhoids. And the trulyterrible news was that the libraries—atleast the ones he visited—were fromPoggio’s point of view almost completelyuninteresting. “I saw many monasteries,4all crammed with new doctors,” he wroteto Niccoli in Florence,

none of whom you would evenhave found worth listening to.

There were a few volumes ofancient writings, which we have inbetter versions at home. Nearly allthe monasteries of this island havebeen built within the last fourhundred years and that has notbeen an age which produced eitherlearned men or the books whichwe seek; these books were alreadysunk without trace.

There might, Poggio conceded, besomething or other at Oxford, but hismaster Beaufort was not planning a visitthere, and his own resources wereseverely strained. It was time for hishumanist friends to abandon theirdreams of stupendous discoveries: “youhad better give up hope of books fromEngland, for they care very little for themhere.”

Poggio professed to find someconsolation in embarking on a seriousstudy of the Church Fathers—there wasno shortage of theological tomes inEngland—but he felt painfully theabsence of the classical texts he loved:“During my four years5 here I have paidno attention to the study of theHumanities,” he complained, “and I havenot read a single book that had anythingto do with style. You can guess this frommy letters, for they are not what theyused to be.”

In 1422, after ceaselesscomplaining, conniving, and cajoling, hefinally secured for himself a newsecretarial post at the Vatican. Obtainingthe money for the voyage back was noteasy—“I am hunting6 everywhere to findsome means of leaving here at someone

else’s expense,” he wrote frankly—buteventually he cobbled enough together.He returned to Italy, having uncovered nolost bibliographic treasures and havinghad no appreciable impact on theEnglish intellectual scene.

On May 12, 1425, he wrote toremind Niccoli that he wished to see thetext he had sent him some eight yearsearlier: “I wanted the Lucretius7 for twoweeks and no more but you want to copythat and Silius Italicus, Nonius Marcellus,and Cicero’s Orations all in one breath,”he wrote; “because you talk of everythingyou will accomplish nothing.” After amonth had gone by, he tried again onJune 14, suggesting that he was notalone in his eagerness to read the poem:“If you send me the Lucretius you will bedoing a favor to many people. I promise

you not to keep the book more than onemonth and then it will come back to you.”But another year passed without anyresults; the wealthy collector seemed tofeel that the best place for On the Natureof Things was on his own shelf, near theancient cameos, the fragments ofstatues, and the precious glassware.There it sat, perhaps unread, a trophy. Itwas as if the poem had been reburied,now not in a monastery but in thehumanist’s gilded rooms.

In a letter sent on September 12,1426, Poggio was still trying to recover it:“Send me the Lucretius too,8 which Ishould like to see for a little while. I shallsend it back to you.” Three years later,Poggio’s patience was understandablywearing thin: “You have now kept theLucretius for twelve years,” he wrote on

December 13, 1429; “it seems to me thatyour tomb will be finished sooner thanyour books will be copied.” When hewrote again, two weeks later, impatienceshowed signs of giving way to anger,and, in a revealing slip of the pen, heexaggerated the number of years he hadbeen waiting: “You have now kept theLucretius for fourteen years and theAsconius Pedianus too…. Does it seemjust to you that, if I sometimes want toread one of these authors, I cannot onaccount of your carelessness? … I wantto read Lucretius but I am deprived of hispresence; do you intend to keep himanother ten years?” Then he added, in amore cajoling note, “I urge you to sendme either the Lucretius or the Asconius,which I shall have copied as soon aspossible and then I shall send them backto you to keep as long as you like.”

But finally—the actual date isunknown—it was done. Released fromthe confinement9 of Niccoli’s rooms, Onthe Nature of Things slowly made its wayonce again into the hands of readers,about a thousand years after it haddropped out of sight. There is no trace ofPoggio’s own response to the poem hehad relaunched, nor is anything known ofNiccoli’s reactions, but there are signs—manuscript copies, brief mentions,allusions, subtle marks of influence—thatit began quietly to circulate, at first inFlorence, and then beyond.

Back in Rome, Poggio had meanwhile

picked up the familiar pieces of hisexistence in the papal court: conductingoften lucrative business, exchangingcynical jokes with his fellow secretariesat the “Lie Factory,” writing to humanistfriends about the manuscripts theycoveted, quarrelling bitterly with rivals. Ina busy life—the court rarely stayed inplace for very long—he managed to findtime to translate ancient texts from Greekto Latin, to make copies of oldmanuscripts, and to write moral essays,philosophical reflections, rhetoricaltreatises, diatribes, and funeral orationson the friends—Niccolò Niccoli, Lorenzode’ Medici, Cardinal Niccolò Albergati,Leonardo Bruni, Cardinal GiulianoCesarini—who were passing away.

He also managed to fatherchildren, many children, with his mistressLucia Pannelli: they had, if contemporary

accounts are accurate, twelve sons andtwo daughters. To take the scan-dalmongering of the times at face valuewould be rash, but Poggio himselfacknowledged the existence ofillegitimate children. When a cardinalwith whom he was on good termsreproached him for the irregularity of hislife, Poggio conceded his fault but addedacerbically, “Do we not every day, and inall countries, meet with priests, monks,abbots, bishops, and dignitaries of a stillhigher order, who have families ofchildren by married women, widows, andeven by virgins consecrated to theservice of God?”

As Poggio accumulated moremoney—and his tax records suggest thathe did so with increasing success afterhis return from England—his life slowlybegan to change. He remained

passionately interested in the recovery ofancient texts, but his own voyages ofdiscovery were behind him. In theirplace, he began to emulate his wealthyfriend Niccoli by collecting antiquities: “Ihave a room full of marble heads,” heboasted in 1427. In that same yearPoggio purchased a house inTerranuova, the small town in Tuscanywhere he was born and where he wouldover the next years gradually increasehis property holdings. He raised themoney for the purchase, it was said,chiefly by copying a manuscript of Livyand selling it for the princely sum of 120gold florins.

Poggio’s debt-ridden father hadonce been forced to flee from the town;now Poggio contemplated creating therewhat he called his “Academy,” to whichhe dreamed of someday retiring and

living in style. “I fished out10 a marblebust of a woman, wholly undamaged,which I like very much,” he wrote a fewyears later. “It was found one day whenthe foundations of some house werebeing dug. I took care to have it broughtto me here and then to my little garden atTerra Nova, which I shall decorate withantiquities.” About another cache ofstatues he purchased, he wrote that“when they arrive, I shall place them inmy little gymnasium.” Academy, garden,gymnasium: Poggio was recreating, atleast in his fantasy, the world of theancient Greek philosophers. And he waseager to confer upon it a high aestheticpolish. The sculptor Donatello, heremarks, saw one of the statues “andpraised it highly.”

All the same, Poggio’s life was notperfectly settled and secure. At one point

perfectly settled and secure. At one pointin 1433, when he was serving asapostolic secretary to Pope Eugenius IV(who had succeeded Martin V), therewas a violent popular insurrection inRome against the papacy. Disguised asa monk and leaving his followers to fendfor themselves, the pope set out in asmall boat on the Tiber to reach the portat Ostia, where a ship belonging to hisFlorentine allies awaited him. Amutinous crowd along the banks of theriver recognized him and showered theboat with rocks, but the pope managed toescape. Poggio was not quite asfortunate: fleeing the city, he wascaptured by one of the bands of thepope’s enemies. Negotiations for hisrelease broke down, and he waseventually forced to ransom himself for asubstantial sum of his own money.

But somehow each of these violent

disruptions of his world was righted,sooner or later, and Poggio returned tohis books and statues, his scholarlytranslations and quarrels, and the steadyaccumulation of wealth. The gradualchanges in his life culminated in amomentous decision: on January 19,1436, he married Vaggia di GinoBuondelmonti. Poggio was fifty-six yearsold; his bride eighteen. The marriagewas not contracted for money but for adifferent form of cultural capital.11 TheBuondelmonti were one of the ancientfeudal families in Florence, a fact thatPoggio—who wrote eloquently againsttaking pride in aristocratic bloodlines—manifestly loved. Against those whoridiculed his decision, he wrote adialogue, “Should an Old Man Marry?”(An seni sit uxor ducenda). The

predictable arguments, most of themcharged with misogyny, are rehearsedand are met with the predictable replies,many of them equally dubious. Hence—according to the anti-marriageinterlocutor, who is none other thanNiccolò Niccoli—it is folly for any olderman, let alone a scholar, to change hiswell-tried style of life for one that isinescapably alien and risky. His bridemay prove to be peevish, morose,intemperate, sluttish, lazy. If she is awidow, she will inevitably dwell on thehappy times she had with her latehusband; if she is a young maiden, shewill almost certainly prove to betemperamentally unsuited to the gravityof her aging spouse. And if there arechildren, the old man will experience thebitter pain of knowing that he will leavethem before they reach maturity.

But no—according to the pro-marriage interlocutor—a man of matureyears will compensate for theinexperience and ignorance of a youngwife whom he will be able to mold likewax to his will. He will temper herimpetuous sensuality with his wiserestraint, and if they are blessed withchildren, he will enjoy the reverence dueto his advanced age. Why should heassume that his life must inevitably becut short? And, for however many yearshe is granted, he will experience theunspeakable pleasure of sharing his lifewith someone he loves, a second self.Perhaps the most convincing momentcomes when Poggio speaks in his ownvoice to say, with unusual simplicity, thathe is very happy. Niccoli concedes thatthere may be exceptions to thepessimistic rule.

As it turned out, in an age of whatby our standards was exceedingly lowlife expectancy, Poggio flourished, andhe and Vaggia had what seems to havebeen a happy marriage, one that lastedalmost a quarter of a century. They hadfive sons—Pietro Paolo, GiovanniBattista, Jacopo, Giovanni Francesco,and Filippo—and a daughter, Lucretia,all of whom survived into adulthood. Fourof the five sons embarked onecclesiastical careers; the exception,Jacopo, became a distinguished scholar.(Jacopo made the mistake of beingcaught up in the Pazzi conspiracy toassassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de’Medici and was hanged in Florence in1478.)

The fate of Poggio’s mistress andtheir fourteen children is not known. Hisfriends congratulated the newly married

Poggio on his good fortune and his moralrectitude; his enemies circulated storiesof his indifference to those he had thrownoff. According to Valla, Poggio cruellyrescinded the procedure by which hehad petitioned that four of the sons hismistress bore him be declared legitimate.The charge may be a malicious slander,of the kind rival humanists took vindictivepleasure in, but there is no indication thatPoggio went out of his way to treat thosehe had abandoned with particulargenerosity or kindness.

As a layman, Poggio was notobliged to leave the papal court after hismarriage. He continued to serve thepope, Eugenius IV, through long years ofbitter conflict between the papacy andthe Church councils, feverish diplomaticmaneuvering, denunciations of heretics,military adventures, precipitous flights,

and outright war. On Eugenius’s death in1447, Poggio continued on as apostolicsecretary to his successor, Nicholas V.

This was the eighth pope whom hehad served in this capacity, and Poggio,now in his later sixties, may have beengrowing weary. He was, in any case,pulled in different directions. His writingoccupied an increasing amount of histime, and he had a growing family toattend to. Moreover, his wife’s deepfamily ties to Florence intensified thelinks that he had always carefullymaintained to what he claimed as hisnative city, a city to which he returned atleast once a year. But in many ways hisservice to the new pope must have beendeeply satisfying, for prior to his election,Nicholas V—whose secular name wasTommaso da Sarzana—haddistinguished himself as a learned

humanist. He was the embodiment ofthat project of education in classicallearning and taste to which Petrarch,Salutati, and other humanists haddevoted themselves.

Poggio, who had met the futurepope in Bologna and had come to knowhim well, had in 1440 dedicated to himone of his works, On the Unhappiness ofPrinces. Now, in the congratulatoryepistle he hastened to send after theelection, he assured the new pope thatnot all princes needed to be completelyunhappy. To be sure, in his elevatedposition, he would not be able any longerto indulge himself in the joys offriendship and literature, but at least hewould be able to “become the protectorof men12 of genius and cause the liberalarts to raise their drooping heads.” “Let

me now entreat you, most holy father,”Poggio added, “not to forget your ancientfriends, of which number I profess myselfto be one.”

In the event, though the reign ofNicholas V was highly gratifying, it wasnot perhaps as perfectly idyllic as theapostolic secretary might have dreamed.During this period Poggio had hisgrotesque scuffle with George ofTrebizond, complete with screams andblows. He must have been vexed as wellthat the pope, as if taking seriously theinjunction to be the patron of men ofgenius, chose as another of the apostolicsecretaries his bitter enemy LorenzoValla. Poggio and Valla promptlyembarked on a vitriolic public quarrel,mingling snide comments about eachother’s mistakes in Latin with still nastierremarks about hygiene, sex, and family.

The ugliness of these quarrelsmust have intensified the dream ofretirement that Poggio had been toyingwith since he had purchased the housein Terranuova and begun to collectancient fragments. And the retirementproject was not only his private fantasy;he was at this point in his life famousenough as a book hunter, scholar, writer,and papal official to command theattention of a broader public. He hadcarefully cultivated friends in Florence,marrying into an important family andallying himself with the interests of theMedici. Though he had lived and workedin Rome for most of his adult life, theFlorentines were happy to claim him asone of their own. The Tuscangovernment passed a public revenue billin his favor, noting that he had declaredhis intention eventually to retire to his

native land and to dedicate theremainder of his time on earth to study.Whereas his literary pursuits would notpermit him to acquire the wealth thatcame to those engaged in commerce, thebill declared, he and his children shouldthenceforth be exempted from thepayment of all public taxes.

In April 1453, Carlo Marsuppini, thechancellor of Florence, died. Marsuppiniwas an accomplished humanist; at thetime of his death, he was translating theIliad into Latin. The office was no longerthe actual locus of state power: theconsol idation of Medici power hadreduced the political significance of thechancellorship. Many years had passedsince Salutati’s command of classicalrhetoric had seemed critical to thesurvival of the republic. But the patternhad been set for the Florentine post to be

held by a distinguished scholar,including two terms by Poggio’s oldfriend, the immensely gifted historianLeonardo Bruni.

The remuneration was generousand the prestige high. Florence conferredupon its humanist chancellors all themarks of respect and honor that thebuoyant, self-loving city felt were its owndue. Chancellors who died in office werehonored with elaborate state funerals,surpassing those of any other citizen ofthe republic. When Poggio, seventy-three years old, was offered the vacantposition, he accepted. For more than fiftyyears, he had worked at the court of anabsolute monarch; now he would returnas the titular leader of a city that prideditself on its history of civic freedom.

Poggio served as chancellor ofFlorence for five years. The

chancellorship evidently did not functionentirely smoothly under his leadership;he seems to have neglected the lesserduties of the office. But he attended to hissymbolic role, and he made time to workon the literary projects he had pledgedhimself to pursue. In the first of theseprojects, a somber two-volume dialogueo n The Wretchedness of the HumanCondition, the conversation moves froma specific disaster—the fall ofConstantinople to the Turks—to ageneral review of the catastrophes thatbefall virtually all men and women ofevery class and profession and in alltimes. One of the interlocutors, Cosimode’ Medici, suggests that an exceptionmight be made for popes and princes ofthe Church who certainly seem to livelives of extraordinary luxury and ease.Speaking in his own voice, Poggio

replies: “I am a witness13 (and I livedwith them for fifty years) that I have foundno one who seemed in any way happy tohimself, who did not bemoan that life asharmful, disquieting, anxious, oppressedwith many cares.”

The unremitting gloominess of thedialogue could make it seem that Poggiohad entirely succumbed to late-lifemelancholy, but the second of the worksof this period, presented to the sameCosimo de’ Medici, suggests otherwise.Drawing on the Greek he had firstlearned more than a half century earlier,Poggio translated (into Latin) Lucian ofSamosta’s richly comic novel The Ass, amagical tale of witchcraft andmetamorphosis. And for his thirdenterprise, moving in still a differentdirection, he undertook to write anambitious, highly partisan History of

ambitious, highly partisan History ofFlorence from the mid-fourteenth centuryto his own time. The remarkable range ofthe three projects—the first seeminglysuitable for a medieval ascetic, thesecond for a Renaissance humanist, thethird for a patriotic civic historian—suggests the complexity both of Poggio’sown character and of the city herepresented. To the Florentine citizens ofthe fifteenth century the distinct strainsseemed closely bound together, parts ofa single, complex cultural whole.

In April 1458, shortly after hisseventy-eighth birthday, Poggioresigned, declaring that he wished topursue his studies and writing as aprivate citizen. His death followedeighteen months later, on October 30,1459. Since he had resigned his office,the Florentine government could not givehim a grand state funeral, but they buried

him with appropriate ceremony in theChurch of Santa Croce and hung hisportrait, by Antonio Pollaiolo, in one ofthe city’s public halls. The city alsocommissioned a statue of him, whichwas erected in front of Florence’scathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. Whenin 1560, a century later, the Duomo’sfacade was refashioned, the statue wasmoved to a different part of the buildingand now serves as one of a sculptedgroup of the twelve apostles. It is, Isuppose, an honor for the likeness of anypious Christian to function in this way,but I do not imagine that Poggio wouldhave been entirely pleased. He wasalways determined to receiveappropriate public recognition.

Much of the recognition by now hasvanished. His tomb in Santa Croce hasdisappeared, displaced by those of other

celebrities. To be sure, the town wherehe was born has been renamedTerranuova Bracciolini, in honor of itsnative son, and in 1959, on the fivehundredth anniversary of his death, hisstatue was erected in the leafy townsquare. But few of those who passthrough, on their way to the nearbyfashion factory outlets, can have anyidea who is being commemorated.

Nonetheless, in his book-huntingexploits in the early fifteenth century,Poggio had done something amazing.The texts he returned to circulation gavehim a claim to a place of honor amidsthis more famous Florentinecontemporaries: Filippo Brunelleschi,Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, FraAngelico, Paolo Uccello, Luca dellaRobbia, Masaccio, Leon Battista Alberti,Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca.

Unlike Brunelleschi’s massive cupola,the greatest dome constructed sinceclassical antiquity, Lucretius’ great poemdoes not stand out against the sky. Butits recovery permanently changed thelandscape of the world.

CHAPTER TEN

SWERVES

MORE THAN FIFTY manuscripts of Dererum natura from the fifteenth centurysurvive today—a startlingly largenumber, though there must have beenmany more. Once Gutenberg’s clevertechnology was commerciallyestablished, printed editions quicklyfollowed. The editions were routinelyprefaced with warnings and disavowals.

As the fifteenth century neared itsend, the Dominican friar GirolamoSavonarola ruled Florence for severalyears as a strict “Christian republic.”

Savonarola’s passionate, charismaticpreaching had provoked large numbersof Florentines, the elite as well as themasses, into a short-lived but feverishlyintense mood of repentance. Sodomywas prosecuted as a capital crime;bankers and merchant princes wereattacked for their extravagant luxuriesand their indifference to the poor;gambling was suppressed, along withdancing and singing and other forms ofworldly pleasure. The most memorableevent of Savonarola’s turbulent yearswas the famous “Bonfire of the Vanities,”when the friar’s ardent followers wentthrough the streets collecting sinfulobjects—mirrors, cosmetics, seductiveclothing, songbooks, musicalinstruments, playing cards and othergambling paraphernalia, sculptures andpaintings of pagan subjects, the works of

ancient poets—and threw them onto anenormous blazing pyre in the Piazzadella Signoria.

After a while, the city tired of itspuritanical frenzy, and on May 23, 1498,Savonarola himself was hanged inchains, alongside two of his keyassociates, and burned to ashes on thespot where he had staged his culturalbonfire. But when his power was at itsheight and his words still filled thecitizenry with pious fear and loathing, hedevoted a series of his Lenten sermonsto attacking ancient philosophers,singling out one group in particular forspecial ridicule. “Listen women,”1 hepreached to the crowd, “They say thatthis world was made of atoms, that is,those tiniest of particles that fly throughthe air.” No doubt savoring the absurdity,

he encouraged his listeners to expresstheir derision out loud: “Now laugh,women, at the studies of these learnedmen.”

By the 1490s, then, some sixty orseventy years after Lucretius’ poem wasreturned to circulation, atomism wassufficiently present in Florence to make itworth ridiculing. Its presence did notmean that its positions were openlyembraced as true. No prudent personstepped forward and said, “I think that theworld is only atoms and void; that, inbody and soul, we are only fantasticallycomplex structures of atoms linked for atime and destined one day to comeapart.” No respectable citizen openlysaid, “The soul dies with the body. Thereis no judgment after death. The universewas not created for us by divine power,and the whole notion of the afterlife is a

superstitious fantasy.” No one whowished to live in peace stood up in publicand said, “The preachers who tell us tolive in fear and trembling are lying. Godhas no interest in our actions, and thoughnature is beautiful and intricate, there isno evidence of an underlying intelligentdesign. What should matter to us is thepursuit of pleasure, for pleasure is thehighest goal of existence.” No one said,“Death is nothing to us and no concern ofours.” But these subversive, Lucretianthoughts percolated and surfacedwherever the Renaissance imaginationwas at its most alive and intense.

At the very time that Savonarolawas urging his listeners to mock thefoolish atomists, a young Florentine civilservant was quietly copying out forhimself the whole of On the Nature ofThings. Though its influence may be

detected, he did not once mention thework directly in the famous books hewent on to write. He was too cunning forthat. But the handwriting wasconclusively identified in 1961: the copywas made by Niccolò Machiavelli.Machiavelli’s copy of Lucretius2 ispreserved in the Vatican Library, MSRossi 884. What better place for theprogeny of Poggio, the apostolicsecretary? In the wake of Poggio’s friend,the humanist pope Nicholas V, classicaltexts had a place of honor in the VaticanLibrary.

Still, Savonarola’s warningscorresponded to authentic concerns: theset of convictions articulated with suchpoetic power in Lucretius’ poem wasvirtually a textbook—or, better still, aninquisitor’s—definition of atheism. Its

eruption into Renaissance intellectuallife elicited an array of anxiousresponses precisely from those mostpowerfully responsive to it. One suchresponse was that of the great mid-fifteenth-century Florentine MarsilioFicino. In his twenties, Ficino3 wasdeeply shaken by On the Nature ofThings and undertook to write a learnedcommentary on the poet he called “ourbrilliant Lucretius.” But, coming to hissenses—that is, returning to his faith—Ficino burned this commentary. Heattacked those he called the “Lucretiani”and spent much of his life adapting Platoto construct an ingenious philosophicaldefense of Christianity. A secondresponse was to separate Lucretius’poetic style from his ideas. Thisseparation seems to have been Poggio’s

own tactic: he took pride in his discovery,as in the others he made, but he neverassociated himself or even grappledopenly with Lucretian thought. In theirLatin compositions Poggio and closefriends like Niccoli could borrow elegantdiction and turns of phrase from a widerange of pagan texts, but at the sametime hold themselves aloof from theirmost dangerous ideas. Indeed, later inhis career Poggio did not hesitate toaccuse his bitter rival, Lorenzo Valla, of aheretical adherence4 to Lucretius’master, Epicurus. It is one thing to enjoywine,5 Poggio wrote, but quite another tosing its praises, as he claims Valla did, inthe service of Epicureanism. Valla evenwent beyond Epicurus himself, Poggioadds, in attacking virginity and praisingprostitution. “The stains of your

sacrilegious speech will not be cleansedby means of words” Poggio addedominously, “but with fire, from which Ihope you will not escape.”

One might have expected Vallasimply to turn the charge around andpoint out that it was after all Poggio whoreturned Lucretius to circulation. ThatValla failed to do so suggests thatPoggio had been successful in keepinga discreet distance from the implicationsof his own discovery. But it may suggestas well how limited the early circulationof On the Nature of Things was. When, inthe early 1430s, in a work called OnPleasure (De voluptate), Valla waspenning the praises of drink and sex thatPoggio professed to find so shocking, themanuscript of Lucretius’ poem6 was stillbeing guarded by Niccoli. The fact of its

existence, which had been gleefullyannounced in letters among thehumanists, may have helped to stimulatea resurgent interest in Epicureanism, butValla probably had to rely on othersources and on his own fertileimagination to construct his praise ofpleasure.

Interest in a pagan philosophyradically at odds with fundamentalChristian principles had its risks, asPoggio’s attack suggests. Valla’s reply tothis attack allows us to glimpse a thirdtype of response to the Epicureanferment of the fifteenth century. Thestrategy is what might be called“dialogical disavowal.” The ideas Poggiocondemns were present in On Pleasure,Valla conceded, but they were not hisown ideas but rather those of a

spokesman for Epicureanism7 in aliterary dialogue. At the dialogue’s end, itis not Epicureanism but rather Christianorthodoxy, voiced by the monk AntonioRaudense, that is declared the clearvictor: “When Antonio Raudense8 hadthus concluded his speech, we did notget up immediately. We were caught inimmense admiration for such pious andreligious words.”

And yet. At the center of hisdialogue, Valla constructs a remarkablyvigorous and sustained defense of keyEpicurean principles: the wisdom ofwithdrawing from competitive striving intothe tranquil garden of philosophy (“Fromthe shore you shall laugh in safety at thewaves, or rather at those who are wave-tossed”), the primacy of bodily pleasure,the advantages of moderation, the

perverse unnaturalness of sexualabstinence, the denial of any afterlife. “Itis plain,”9 the Epicurean states, “thatthere are no rewards for the dead,certainly there are no punishmentseither.” And lest this formulation allow anambiguity, still setting human souls apartfrom all other created things, he returnsto the point to render it unequivocal:

According to my Epicurus …nothing remains after thedissolution of the living being, andin the term “living being” heincluded man just as much as hedid the lion, the wolf, the dog, andall other things that breathe. Withall this I agree. They eat, we eat;they drink, we drink; they sleep,and so do we. They engender,

conceive, give birth, and nourishtheir young in no way different fromours. They possess some part ofreason and memory, some morethan others, and we a little morethan they. We are like them inalmost everything; finally, they dieand we die—both of us completely.

If we grasp this end clearly—“finally, theydie and we die—both of us completely”—then our determination should be equallyclear: “Therefore,10 for as long aspossible (would that it were longer!) letus not allow those bodily pleasures toslip away that cannot be doubted andcannot be recovered in another life.”

It is possible to argue that Vallawrote these words only to show themcrushed by the sober admonitions of the

monkish Raudense:

If you were to see11 the form of anyangel next to your beloved, thebeloved would seem so horribleand uncouth that you would turnaway from her as from thecountenance of a cadaver anddirect all your attention to theangel’s beauty—a beauty, I say,that does not inflame butextinguishes lust, and infuses amost sanctified religious awe.

If this interpretation is true, then OnPleasure is an attempt to containsubversion.12 Aware that he and hiscontemporaries had been exposed to thetoxic allure of Lucretius, Valla decidednot to suppress the contamination, as

Ficino had tried to do, but to lance theimposthume by exposing Epicureanarguments to the purifying air of Christianfaith.

But Valla’s enemy Poggio reachedthe opposite conclusion: the Christianframework and the dialogic form of OnPleasure was, in his view, only aconvenient cover to permit Valla to makepublic his scandalous and subversiveassault on Christian doctrine. And ifPoggio’s venomous hatred calls thisinterpretation in question, Valla’scelebrated proof of the fraudulence of theso-called “Donation of Constantine”suggests that he was by no means asafely orthodox thinker. On Pleasurewould, from this perspective, be acomparably radical and subversive text,wearing a fig leaf designed to give itsauthor, a priest who continued to jockey

for the post of apostolic secretary that heeventually obtained, some protection.

How can the conflict betweenthese two sharply opposedinterpretations be resolved? Which is it:subversion or containment? It isexceedingly unlikely that at this distanceanyone will discover the evidence thatmight definitively answer this question—if such evidence ever existed. Thequestion itself implies13 a programmaticcertainty and clarity that may bear littlerelation to the actual situation ofintellectuals in the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies. A very small number of peoplemay have fully embraced radicalEpicureanism, as far as they understoodit, in its entirety. Thus, for example, in1484 the Florentine poet Luigi Pulci wasdenied Christian burial for denying

miracles and describing the soul as “nomore than a pine nut14 in hot whitebread.” But for many of the most daringspeculative minds of the Renaissance,the ideas that surged up in 1417, with therecovery of Lucretius’ poem and therenewed interest in Epicureanism, didnot constitute a fully formedphilosophical or ideological system.Couched in its beautiful, seductivepoetry, the Lucretian vision was aprofound intellectual and creativechallenge.

What mattered was not adherencebut mobility—the renewed mobility of apoem that had been resting untouched inone or at most two monastic libraries formany centuries, the mobility of Epicureanarguments that had been silenced first byhostile pagans and then by hostile

Christians, the mobility of daydreams,half-formed speculations, whispereddoubts, dangerous thoughts.

Poggio may have distancedhimself from the content of On the Natureof Things, but he took the crucial firststep in pulling the poem off the shelf,having it copied, and sending the copy tohis friends in Florence. Once it began tocirculate again, the difficulty was not inreading the poem (provided, of course,one had adequate Latin) but indiscussing its content openly or taking itsideas seriously. Valla found a way totake one central Epicurean argument—the praise of pleasure as the ultimategood—and give it sympatheticarticulation in a dialogue. That argumentis detached from the full philosophicalstructure that gave it its original weightand finally repudiated. But the dialogue’s

Epicurean speaks in defense of pleasurewith an energy, subtlety, andpersuasiveness that had not been heardfor more than a millennium.

In December 1516—almost acentury after Poggio’s discovery—theFlorentine Synod, an influential group ofhigh-ranking clergymen, prohibited thereading of Lucretius in schools. Itsexquisite Latin may have temptedschoolteachers to assign it to theirstudents, but it should be banned, theclerics said, as “a lascivious and wickedwork, in which every effort is used todemonstrate the mortality of the soul.”Violators of the edict were threatenedwith eternal damnation and a fine of 10ducats.

The prohibition might haverestricted circulation and it effectivelyhalted the printing of Lucretius in Italy,

but it was too late to close the door. Anedition had already appeared inBologna, another in Paris, another, fromthe great press of Aldus Manutius, inVenice. And in Florence thedistinguished publisher Filippo Giuntihad brought out an edition edited by thehumanist Pier Candido Decembrio,whom Poggio had known well at thecourt of Nicholas V.

The Giunti edition incorporatedemendations proposed by theremarkable soldier, scholar, and poet ofGreek origin Michele TarchaniotaMarullo. Marullo, whose portrait waspainted by Botticelli, was well known inItalian humanist circles. He had, in thecourse of a restless career, writtenbeautiful pagan hymns inspired byLucretius, with whose work he engagedwith remarkable intensity. In 1500 he

was pondering the textual complexitiesof On the Nature of Things when, clad inarmor, he rode out of Volterra to fightagainst Cesare Borgia’s troops, thenmassing at the coast near Piombino. Itwas raining heavily, and the peasantsadvised him not to attempt to ford theswollen Cecina River. He supposedlyreplied that a gypsy had told him as achild that it was not Neptune but Marswhom he should fear. Halfway across theriver, his horse slipped and fell on him,and it was said that he died cursing thegods. A copy of Lucretius’ poem wasfound in his pocket.

The death of Marullo could becirculated as a cautionary tale—even thebroad-minded Erasmus remarked thatMarullo wrote as if he were a pagan—butit could not quell interest in Lucretius.And indeed the Church authorities

themselves, many of whom hadhumanist sympathies, were not of onemind on its dangers. In 1549 it wasproposed to include On the Nature ofThings on the Index of Prohibited Books—the list, only abolished in 1966, ofthose works that Catholics wereforbidden to read—but the proposal wasdropped at the request of the powerfulCardinal Marcello Cervini, who waselected pope a few years later. (Heserved for less than one month, fromApril 9 to May 1, 1555.) The commissarygeneral of the Inquisition, MicheleGhislieri, also opposed calls for thesuppression of On the Nature of Things.He listed Lucretius as the author of oneof those pagan books that could be readbut only if they were read as fables.Ghislieri, who was himself elected popein 1566, focused the attention of his

pontificate on the struggle againstheretics and Jews and did not furtherpursue the threat posed by pagan poets.

In fact, Catholic intellectuals couldand did engage with Lucretian ideasthrough the medium of fables. Though hecomplained that Marullo sounded “justlike a pagan,” Erasmus wrote a fictionaldialogue called The Epicurean in whichone of the characters, Hedonius, sets outto show that “there are no people moreEpicurean15 than godly Christians.”Christians who fast, bewail their sins,and punish their flesh may look anythingbut hedonist, but they are seeking to liverighteously, and “none live moreenjoyably than those who liverighteously.”

If this paradox seems like littlemore than a sleight-of-hand, Erasmus’

friend Thomas More took theengagement with Epicureanism muchfurther in his most famous work, Utopia(1516). A learned man, deeply immersedin the pagan Greek and Latin texts thatPoggio and his contemporaries hadreturned to circulation, More was also apious Christian ascetic who wore a hairshirt under his clothes and whippedhimself until the blood ran down hisflesh. His speculative daring and hisrelentless intelligence enabled him tograsp the force of what had surged backfrom the ancient world and at the sametime his ardent Catholic convictions ledhim to demarcate the boundaries beyondwhich he thought it was dangerous forhim or anyone else to go. That is, hebrilliantly explored the hidden tensions inthe identity to which he himselfsubscribed: “Christian humanist.”

Utopia begins with a searingindictment of England as a land wherenoblemen, living idly off the labor ofothers, bleed their tenants white byconstantly raising their rents, where landenclosures for sheep-raising throwuntold thousands of poor people into anexistence of starvation or crime, andwhere the cities are ringed by gibbets onwhich thieves are hanged by the scorewithout the slightest indication that thedraconian punishment deters anyonefrom committing the same crimes.

That depiction of a ghastly reality—and the sixteenth-century chroniclerHolinshed reports that in the reign ofHenry VIII, 72,000 thieves were hanged—is set against an imaginary island,Utopia (the name means “No-place” inGreek), whose inhabitants are convincedthat “either the whole or the most part of

human happiness” lies in the pursuit ofpleasure. This central Epicurean tenet,the work makes clear, lies at the heart ofthe opposition between the good societyof the Utopians and the corrupt, vicioussociety of his own England. That is, Moreclearly grasped that the pleasureprinciple—the principle given its mostpowerful expression in Lucretius’spectacular hymn to Venus—is not adecorative enhancement of routineexistence; it is a radical idea that, if takenseriously, would change everything.

More set his Utopia in the remotestpart of the world. Its discoverer, Morewrites at the beginning of the work, was aman who “joined Amerigo Vespucci andwas his constant companion in the lastthree of his four voyages, which are nowuniversally read of, but on the finalvoyage he did not return with him.” He

was instead one of those left behind, athis own urging, in a garrison at thefarthest point of the explorers’ ventureinto the unknown.

Reading Amerigo Vespucci andreflecting on the newfound lands known,in his honor, as “America,” More seizedupon one of Vespucci’s observationsabout the peoples he had encountered:“Since their life is so entirely givenover16 to pleasure,” Vespucci hadwritten, “I should style it Epicurean.” Moremust have realized with a jolt that hecould use the amazing discoveries toexplore some of the disturbing ideas thathad returned to currency with Lucretius’On the Nature of Things. The link wasnot entirely surprising: the FlorentineVespucci was a part of the humanistcircle in which On the Nature of Things

circulated. The Utopians, More wrote, areinclined to believe “that no kind ofpleasure is forbidden, provided no harmcomes of it.” And their behavior is notmerely a matter of custom; it is aphilosophical position: “They seem tolean more than they should to the schoolthat espouses pleasure as the object bywhich to define either the whole or thechief part of human happiness.” That“school” is the school of Epicurus andLucretius.

The setting, in the remotest part ofthe remotest part of the world, enabledMore to convey a sense that wasextremely difficult17 for hiscontemporaries to articulate: that thepagan texts recovered by the humanistswere at once compellingly vital and atthe same time utterly weird. They had

been reinjected into the intellectualbloodstream of Europe after longcenturies in which they had been almostentirely forgotten, and they representednot continuity or recovery but rather adeep disturbance. They were in effectvoices from another world, a world asdifferent as Vespucci’s Brazil was toEngland, and their power derived asmuch from their distance as theireloquent lucidity.

The invocation of the New Worldallowed More to articulate a second keyresponse to the texts that fascinated thehumanists. He insisted that these textsbe understood not as isolatedphilosophical ideas but as expressionsof a whole way of life lived in particularphysical, historical, cultural, and socialcircumstances. The description of theEpicureanism of the Utopians only made

sense for More in the larger context of anentire existence.

But that existence, More thought,would have to be for everyone. He tookseriously the claim, so ardently made inOn the Nature of Things, that Epicurus’philosophy would liberate all of mankindfrom its abject misery. Or rather, Moretook seriously the universality that is theunderlying Greek meaning of the word“catholic.” It would not be enough forEpicureanism to enlighten a small elite ina walled garden; it would have to applyto society as a whole. Utopia is avisionary, detailed blueprint for thisapplication, from public housing touniversal health care, from child carecenters to religious toleration to the six-hour work day. The point of More’scelebrated fable is to imagine thoseconditions that would make it possible for

an entire society to make the pursuit ofhappiness its collective goal.

For More, those conditions wouldhave to begin with the abolition of privateproperty. Otherwise the avidity of humanbeings, their longing for “nobility,magnificence, splendor and majesty,”would inevitably lead to the unequaldistribution of wealth that consigns alarge portion of the population to lives ofmisery, resentment, and crime. Butcommunism was not enough. Certainideas would have to be banned.Specifically, More wrote, the Utopiansimpose strict punishment, including theharshest form of slavery, on anyone whodenies the existence of divineprovidence or of the afterlife.

The denial of Providence and thedenial of the afterlife were the twin pillarsof Lucretius’ whole poem. Thomas More

then at once imaginatively embracedEpicureanism—the most sustained andintelligent embrace since Poggiorecovered De rerum natura a centuryearlier—and carefully cut its heart out. Allcitizens of his Utopia are encouraged topursue pleasure; but those who think thatthe soul dies with the body or whobelieve that chance rules the universe,More writes, are arrested and enslaved.

This harsh treatment was the onlyway More could conceive of the pursuitof pleasure actually being realized bymore than a tiny privileged group ofphilosophers who have withdrawn frompublic life. People would have to believe,at a bare minimum, that there was anoverarching providential design—notonly in the state but in the very structureof the universe itself—and they wouldhave to believe as well that the norms by

which they are meant to regulate theirpursuit of pleasure and hence disciplinetheir behavior were reinforced by thisprovidential design. The way that thisreinforcement would work would bethrough a belief in rewards andpunishments in an afterlife. Otherwise, inMore’s view, it would be impossibledrastically to reduce, as he wished, boththe terrible punishments and theextravagant rewards that kept his ownunjust society18 in order.

By the standards of More’s age, theUtopians are amazingly tolerant: they donot prescribe a single official religiousdoctrine and then apply thumbscrews tothose who do not adhere to it. Theircitizens are permitted to worship any godthey please and even to share thesebeliefs with others, provided that they do

so in a calm and rational manner. But inUtopia there is no tolerance at all forthose who think that their souls willdisintegrate at death along with theirbodies or who doubt that the gods, if theyexist at all, concern themselves with thedoings of mankind. These people are athreat, for what will restrain them fromdoing anything that they please?Utopians regard such unbelievers, Morewrote, as less than human and certainlyunfit to remain in the community. For noone, in their view, can be counted“among their citizens whose laws andcustoms he would treat as worthless if itwere not for fear.”

“If it were not for fear”: fear might beeliminated in the philosopher’s garden,among a tiny, enlightened elite, but itcannot be eliminated from an entiresociety, if that society is to be imagined

as inhabited by the range of people whoactually exist in the world as it hasalways been known. Even with the fullforce of Utopian social conditioning,human nature, More believed, wouldinevitably lead men to resort to force orfraud in order to get whatever theydesire. More’s belief was conditioned nodoubt by his ardent Catholicism, but inthis same period Machiavelli, who wasconsiderably less pious than the saintlyMore, came to the same conclusion.Laws and customs, the author of ThePrince thought, were worthless withoutfear.

More tried to imagine what it wouldtake not for certain individuals to beenlightened but for a wholecommonwealth to do away with crueltyand disorder, share the goods of lifeequitably, organize itself around the

pursuit of pleasure, and tear down thegibbets. The gibbets, all but a few, couldbe dismantled, More concluded, if andonly if people were persuaded toimagine gibbets (and rewards) in anotherlife. Without these imaginarysupplements the social order wouldinevitably collapse, with each individualattempting to fulfill his wishes: “Who candoubt that he will strive either to evadeby craft the public laws of his country orto break them by violence in order toserve his private desires when he hasnothing to fear but laws and no hopebeyond the body?” More was fullyprepared to countenance the publicexecution of anyone who thought andtaught otherwise.

More’s imaginary Utopians have apractical, instrumental motive forenforcing faith in Providence and in the

afterlife: they are convinced that theycannot trust anyone who does not holdthese beliefs. But More himself, as apious Christian, had another motive:Jesus’ own words. “Are not two sparrowssold for a penny? And not one of themwill fall on the ground without yourFather’s will,” Jesus tells his disciples,adding that “even the hairs of your headare all numbered” (Matthew 10:29–30).There is, as Hamlet paraphrased theverse, “a special providence in the fall ofa sparrow.” Who in Christendom woulddare to argue with that?

One answer in the sixteenthcentury was a diminutive Dominicanmonk, Giordano Bruno. In the mid-1580s,the thirty-six-year-old Bruno, who hadfled from his monastery in Naples andhad wandered restlessly through Italyand France, found himself in London.

Brilliant, reckless, at once charminglycharismatic and insufferablyargumentative, he survived by cobblingtogether support from patrons, teachingthe art of memory, and lecturing onvarious aspects of what he called theNolan philosophy, named after the smalltown near Naples where he was born.That philosophy had several roots,tangled together in an exuberant andoften baffling mix, but one of them wasEpicureanism. Indeed, there are manyindications that De rerum natura hadunsettled and transformed Bruno’s wholeworld.

During his stay in England, Brunowrote and published a flood of strangeworks. The extraordinary daring of theseworks may be gauged by taking in theimplications of a single passage fromone of them, The Expulsion of the

Triumphant Beast, printed in 1584. Thepassage—quoted here in Ingrid D.Rowland’s fine translation—is long, butits length is very much part of the point.Mercury, the herald of the gods, isrecounting to Sofia all the things Jovehas assigned him to bring about. He hasordered

that today at noon19 two of themelons in Father Franzino’s melonpatch will be perfectly ripe, but thatthey won’t be picked until threedays from now, when they will nolonger be considered good to eat.He requests that at the samemoment, on the jujube tree at thebase of Monte Cicala in the houseof Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfectjujubes will be picked, and he says

that several shall fall to earth stillgreen, and that fifteen shall beeaten by worms. That Vasta, wifeof Albenzio Savolino, when shemeans to curl the hair at hertemples, shall burn fifty-seven hairsfor having let the curling iron gettoo hot, but she won’t burn herscalp and hence shall not swearwhen she smells the stench, butshall endure it patiently. That fromthe dung of her ox two hundred andfifty-two dung beetles shall be born,of which fourteen shall be trampledand killed by Albenzio’s foot,twenty-six shall die upside down,twenty-two shall live in a hole,eighty shall make a pilgrim’sprogress around the yard, forty-twoshall retire to live under the stoneby the door, sixteen shall roll their

ball of dung wherever they please,and the rest shall scurry around atrandom.

This is by no means all that Mercury hasto arrange.

Laurenza, when she combs herhair, shall lose seventeen hairsand break thirteen, and of these,ten shall grow back within threedays and seven shall never growback at all. Antonio Savolino’sbitch shall conceive five puppies,of which three shall live out theirnatural lifespan and two shall bethrown away, and of these threethe first shall resemble its mother,the second shall be mongrel, andthe third shall partly resemble thefather and partly resemble

Polidoro’s dog. In that moment acuckoo shall be heard from LaStarza, cuckooing twelve times, nomore and no fewer, whereupon itshall leave and fly to the ruins ofCastle Cicala for eleven minutes,and then shall fly off to Scarvaita,and as for what happens next, we’llsee to it later.

Mercury’s work in this one tiny corner ofa tiny corner of the Campagna is still notdone.

That the skirt Mastro Danese iscutting on his board shall come outcrooked. That twelve bedbugsshall leave the slats of Costantino’sbed and head toward the pillow:seven large ones, four small, andone middlesized, and as for the

one who shall survive until thisevening’s candlelight, we’ll see toit. That fifteen minutes thereafter,because of the movement of hertongue, which she has passed overher palate four times, the old ladyof Fiurulo shall lose the third rightmolar in her lower jaw, and it shallfall without blood and without pain,because that molar has been loosefor seventeen months. ThatAmbrogio on the one hundredtwelfth thrust shall finally havedriven home his business with hiswife, but shall not impregnate herthis time, but rather another, usingthe sperm into which the cookedleek that he has just eaten withmillet and wine sauce shall havebeen converted. Martinello’s son isbeginning to grow hair on his

chest, and his voice is beginning tocrack. That Paulino, when hebends over to pick up a brokenneedle, shall snap the reddrawstring of his underpants….

Conjuring up in hallucinatory detail

the hamlet where he was born, Brunostaged a philosophical farce, designed toshow that divine providence, at least aspopularly understood, is rubbish. Thedetails were all deliberately trivial but thestakes were extremely high: to mockJesus’ claim that the hairs on one’s headare all numbered risked provoking anunpleasant visit from the thought police.Religion was not a laughing matter, atleast for the officials assigned to enforceorthodoxy. They did not treat even trivialjokes lightly. In France, a villager namedIsambard was arrested for having

exclaimed, when a friar announced aftermass that he would say a few wordsabout God, “The fewer the better.”20 InSpain, a tailor named Garcia Lopez,coming out of church just after the priesthad announced the long schedule ofservices for the coming week, quippedthat “When we were Jews,21 we werebored stiff by one Passover each year,and now each day seems to be aPassover and feast-day.” Garcia Lopezwas denounced to the Inquisition.

But Bruno was in England. Despitethe vigorous efforts that Thomas Moremade, during his time as chancellor, toestablish one, England had noInquisition. Though it was still quitepossible to get into serious trouble forunguarded speech, Bruno may have feltmore at liberty to speak his mind, or, in

this case, to indulge in raucous, wildlysubversive laughter. That laughter had aphilosophical point: once you takeseriously the claim that God’s providenceextends to the fall of a sparrow and thenumber of hairs on your head, there isvirtually no limit, from the agitated dustmotes in a beam of sunlight to theplanetary conjunctions that are occurringin the heavens above. “O Mercury,” Sofiasays pityingly. “You have a lot to do.”

Sofia grasps that it would takebillions of tongues to describe all thatmust happen even in a single moment ina tiny village in the Campagna. At thisrate, no one could envy poor Jove. Butthen Mercury admits that the whole thingdoes not work that way: there is noartificer god standing outside theuniverse, barking commands, meting outrewards and punishments, determining

everything. The whole idea is absurd.There is an order in the universe, but it isone built into the nature of things, into thematter that composes everything, fromstars to men to bedbugs. Nature is not anabstract capacity, but a generativemother, bringing forth everything thatexists. We have, in other words, enteredthe Lucretian universe.

That universe was not for Bruno aplace of melancholy disenchantment. Onthe contrary, he found it thrilling to realizethat the world has no limits in eitherspace or time, that the grandest thingsare made of the smallest, that atoms, thebuilding blocks of all that exists, link theone and the infinite. “The world is fine22as it is,” he wrote, sweeping away as ifthey were so many cobwebsinnumerable sermons on anguish, guilt,

and repentance. It was pointless tosearch for divinity in the bruised andbattered body of the Son and pointless todream of finding the Father in some far-off heaven. “We have the knowledge,” hewrote, “not to search for divinity removedfrom us if we have it near; it is within usmore than we ourselves are.” And hisphilosophical cheerfulness extended tohis everyday life. He was, a Florentinecontemporary observed, “a delightfulcompanion23 at the table, much given tothe Epicurean life.”

Like Lucretius, Bruno warnedagainst focusing all of one’s capacity forlove and longing on a single object ofobsessive desire. It was perfectly good,he thought, to satisfy the body’s sexualcravings, but absurd to confuse thosecravings with the search for ultimate

truths, the truths that only philosophy—the Nolan philosophy, of course—couldprovide. It is not that those truths wereabstract and bodiless. On the contrary,Bruno might have been the first person inmore than a millennium to grasp the fullforce, at once philosophical and erotic, ofLucretius’ hymn to Venus. The universe,in its ceaseless process of generationand destruction and regeneration, isinherently sexual.

Bruno found the militantProtestantism he encountered inEngland and elsewhere as bigoted andnarrow-minded as the Counter-Reformation Catholicism from which hehad fled. The whole phenomenon ofsectarian hatred filled him with contempt.What he prized was the courage to standup for the truth against the belligerentidiots who were always prepared to

shout down what they could notunderstand. That courage he foundpreeminently in the astronomerCopernicus, who was, as he put it,“ordained by the gods24 to be the dawnwhich must precede the rising of the sunof the ancient and true philosophy, for somany centuries entombed in the darkcaverns of blind, spiteful, arrogant, andenvious ignorance.”

Copernicus’s assertion that theearth was not the fixed point at the centerof the universe but a planet in orbitaround the sun was still, when Brunochampioned it, a scandalous idea,anathema both to the Church and to theacademic establishment. And Brunomanaged to push the scandal ofCopernicanism still further: there was nocenter to the universe at all, he argued,

neither earth nor sun. Instead, he wrote,quoting Lucretius, there were multipleworlds,25 where the seeds of things, intheir infinite numbers, would certainlycombine to form other races of men,other creatures. Each of the fixed starsobserved in the sky is a sun, scatteredthrough limitless space. Many of theseare accompanied by satellites thatrevolve around them as the earthrevolves around our sun. The universe isnot all about us, about our behavior andour destiny; we are only a tiny piece ofsomething inconceivably larger. And thatshould not make us shrink in fear.Rather, we should embrace the world inwonder and gratitude and awe.

These were extremely dangerousviews, every one of them, and it did notimprove matters when Bruno, pressed to

reconcile his cosmology with Scripture,wrote that the Bible was a better guide tomorality than to charting the heavens.Many people may have quietly agreed,but it was not prudent to say so in public,let alone in print.

Bruno was hardly the only brilliantscientific mind at work in Europe,rethinking the nature of things: in Londonhe would almost certainly have metThomas Harriot,26 who constructed thelargest telescope in England, observedsun spots, sketched the lunar surface,observed the satellites of planets,proposed that planets moved not inperfect circles but in elliptical orbits,worked on mathematical cartography,discovered the sine law of refraction, andachieved major breakthroughs inalgebra. Many of these discoveries

anticipated ones for which Galileo,Descartes, and others became famous.But Harriot is not credited with any ofthem: they were found only recently inthe mass of unpublished papers he left athis death. Among those papers was acareful list that Harriot, an atomist, kept ofthe attacks upon him as a purportedatheist. He knew that the attacks wouldonly intensify if he published any of hisfindings, and he preferred life to fame.Who can blame him?

Bruno, however, could not remainsilent. “By the light of his senses27 andreason,” he wrote about himself, “heopened those cloisters of truth which it ispossible for us to open with the key ofmost diligent inquiry, he laid barecovered and veiled nature, gave eyes tothe moles and light to the blind … he

loosed the tongues of the dumb whocould not and dared not express theirentangled opinions.” As a child, herecalled in On the Immense and theNumberless, a Latin poem modeled onLucretius, he had believed that there wasnothing beyond Vesuvius, since his eyecould not see beyond the volcano. Nowhe knew that he was part of an infiniteworld, and he could not enclose himselfonce again in the narrow mental cell hisculture insisted that he inhabit.

Perhaps if he had stayed inEngland—or in Frankfurt or Zurich,Prague or Wittenberg, where he had alsowandered—he could, though it wouldhave been difficult, have found a way toremain at liberty. But in 1591 he made afateful decision to return to Italy, to whatseemed to him the safety of famouslyindependent Padua and Venice. The

safety proved illusory: denounced by hispatron to the Inquisition, Bruno wasarrested in Venice and then extradited toRome, where he was imprisoned in acell of the Holy Office near St. Peter’sBasilica.

Bruno’s interrogation and triallasted for eight years, much of his timespent endlessly replying to charges ofheresy, reiterating his philosophicalvision, rebutting wild accusations, anddrawing on his prodigious memory todelineate his precise beliefs again andagain. Finally threatened with torture, hedenied the right of the inquisitors todictate what was heresy and what wasorthodox belief. That challenge was thelast straw. The Holy Officeacknowledged no limits to its supremejurisdiction—no limits of territory and,apart from the pope and the cardinals, no

limits of person. It claimed the right tojudge and, if necessary, to persecuteanyone, anywhere. It was the final arbiterof orthodoxy.

Before an audience of spectators,Bruno was forced to his knees andsentenced as “an impenitent, pernicious,and obstinate heretic.” He was no Stoic;he was clearly terrified by the grisly fatethat awaited him. But one of thespectators, a German Catholic, jotteddown strange words that the obstinateheretic had spoken at the moment of hisconviction and excommunication: “Hemade no other reply than, in a menacingtone, ‘You may be more afraid to bringthat sentence against me than I am toaccept it.’”

On February 17, 1600, thedefrocked Dominican, his head shaved,was mounted on a donkey and led out to

the stake that had been erected in theCampo dei Fiori. He had steadfastlyrefused to repent during the innumerablehours in which he had been haranguedby teams of friars, and he refused torepent or simply to fall silent now at theend. His words are unrecorded, but theymust have unnerved the authorities,since they ordered that his tongue bebridled. They meant it literally: accordingto one account, a pin was driven into hischeek, through his tongue, and out theother side; another pin sealed his lips,forming a cross. When a crucifix washeld up to his face, he turned his headaway. The fire was lit and did its work.After he was burned alive, his remainingbones were broken into pieces and hisashes—the tiny particles that would, hebelieved, reenter the great, joyous,eternal circulation of matter—were

scattered.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

AFTERLIVES

SILENCING BRUNO PROVED fareasier than returning On the Nature ofThings to the darkness. The problemwas that, once Lucretius’ poem reenteredthe world, the words of this visionary poetof human experience began to resonatepowerfully in the works of Renaissancewriters and artists, many of whomthought of themselves as piousChristians. This resonance—the trace ofan encounter in painting or in epicromance—was less immediatelydisturbing to the authorities than it was in

the writings of scientists or philosophers.The ecclesiastical thought police wereonly rarely called to investigate1 works ofart for their heretical implications. But justas Lucretius’ gifts as a poet had helpedto diffuse his radical ideas, so too thoseideas were transmitted, in waysextremely difficult to control, by artistswho were in contact directly or indirectlywith Italian humanist circles: painters likeSandro Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, andLeonardo da Vinci; poets like MatteoBoiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, and TorquatoTasso. And before long the ideassurfaced as well far from Florence andRome.

On the London stage in the mid-1590s, Mercutio teased Romeo with afantastical description of Queen Mab:

She is the fairies’

midwife, and she comesIn shape no bigger

than an agate stoneOn the forefinger of

an alderman,Drawn with a team

of little atomiAthwart men’s

noses as they lie asleep …(Romeo and Juliet, I.iv.55–59)

“… a team of little atomi”: Shakespeareexpected then that his popular audiencewould immediately understand thatMercutio was comically conjuring up anunimaginably small object. That isinteresting in itself, and still moreinteresting in the context of a tragedy that

broods upon the compulsive power ofdesire in a world whose main charactersconspicuously abjure any prospect of lifeafter death:

Here, here willI remain

With worms that are thychambermaids. O, here

Will I set up myeverlasting rest …

(V.iii.108–10)

Bruno’s years in England had not

been in vain. The author of Romeo andJuliet shared his interest in Lucretianmaterialism with Spenser, Donne,Bacon, and others. Though Shakespearehad not attended either Oxford or

Cambridge, his Latin was good enoughto have enabled him to read Lucretius’poem for himself. In any case, he seemsto have personally known John Florio,Bruno’s friend, and he could also havediscussed Lucretius with his fellowplaywright Ben Jonson, whose ownsigned copy2 of On the Nature of Thingshas survived and is today in theHoughton Library at Harvard.

Shakespeare would certainly haveencountered Lucretius from one of hisfavorite books: Montaigne’s Essays. TheEssays, first published in French in 1580and translated into English by Florio in1603, contains almost a hundred directquotations from On the Nature of Things.It is not a matter of quotations alone:there is a profound affinity betweenLucretius and Montaigne, an affinity that

goes beyond any particular passage.Montaigne shared Lucretius’

contempt for a morality enforced bynightmares of the afterlife; he clung to theimportance of his own senses and theevidence of the material world; heintensely disliked ascetic self-punishment and violence against theflesh; he treasured inward freedom andcontent. In grappling with the fear ofdeath, he was influenced by Stoicism aswell as Lucretian materialism, but it is thelatter that proves the dominant guide,leading him toward a celebration ofbodily pleasure.

Lucretius’ impersonalphilosophical epic offered no guidance atall in Montaigne’s great project ofrepresenting the particular twists andturns of his physical and mental being:

I am not excessively fond3 of eithersalads or fruits, except melons. Myfather hated all kinds of sauces; Ilove them all…. There are changesthat take place in us, irregular andunknown. Radishes, for example, Ifirst found to agree with me, andthen to disagree, now to agreeagain.

But this sublimely eccentric attempt toget his whole self into his text is builtupon the vision of the material cosmosthat Poggio awoke from dormancy in1417.

“The world is but a perennialmovement,” Montaigne writes in “OfRepentance,”

All things in it are in constantmotion—the earth, the rocks of theCaucasus, the pyramids of Egypt—both with the common motion andwith their own. Stability itself isnothing but a more languid motion.(610)

And humans, however much they maythink they choose whether to move or tostand still, are no exception: “Ourordinary practice,” Montaigne reflects inan essay on “The Inconsistency of ouractions,” “is to follow the inclinations ofour appetite, to the left, to the right, uphilland down, as the wind of circumstancecarries us.”

As if that way of putting things stillgives humans too much control, he goeson to emphasize, with a quotation fromLucretius, the entirely random nature of

human swerves: “We do not go; we arecarried away, like floating objects, nowgently, now violently, according as thewater is angry or calm: ‘Do we not see allhumans unaware/Of what they want, andalways searching everywhere,/Andchanging place, as if to drop the loadthey bear?’” (240). And the volatileintellectual life in which his essaysparticipate is no different: “Of one subjectwe make a thousand, and, multiplyingand subdividing, fall back into Epicurus’infinity of atoms” (817). Better thananyone—including Lucretius himself—Montaigne articulates what it feels likefrom the inside to think, write, live in anEpicurean universe.

In doing so, Montaigne found thathe had to abandon altogether one ofLucretius’ most cherished dreams: thedream of standing in tranquil security on

land and looking down at a shipwreckbefalling others. There was, he grasped,no stable cliff on which to stand; he wasalready on board the ship. Montaignefully shared Lucretius’ Epicureanskepticism about the restless striving forfame, power, and riches, and hecherished his own withdrawal from theworld into the privacy of his book-linedstudy in the tower of his château. But thewithdrawal seems only to haveintensified his awareness of theperpetual motion, the instability of forms,the plurality of worlds, the randomswerves to which he himself was as fullyprone as everyone else.

Montaigne’s skeptical temper kepthim from the dogmatic certainty ofEpicureanism. But his immersion in Onthe Nature of Things, in its style as wellas its ideas, helped him to account for his

experience of lived life and to describethat experience, along with the fruits ofhis reading and reflection, as faithfully ashe could. It helped him articulate hisrejection of pious fear, his focus on thisworld and not on the afterlife, hiscontempt for religious fanaticism, hisfascination with supposedly primitivesocieties, his admiration for the simpleand the natural, his loathing of cruelty,his deep understanding of humans asanimals and his correspondingly deepsympathy with other species of animals.

It was in the spirit of Lucretius thatMontaigne wrote, in “Of Cruelty,” that hewillingly resigned “that imaginarykingship4 that people give us over theother creatures,” admitted that he couldbarely watch the wringing of a chicken’sneck, and confessed that he “cannot well

refuse my dog the play he offers me orasks of me outside the proper time.” It isin the same spirit in “Apology forRaymond Sebond” that he mocked thefantasy that humans are the center of theuniverse:

Why shall a gosling5 not say thus:“All the parts of the universe haveme in view; the earth serve for meto walk on, the sun to give me light,the stars to breathe their influencesinto me; I gain this advantage fromthe winds, that from the waters;there is nothing that the heavenlyvault regards so favorably as me; Iam the darling of nature.”

And when Montaigne reflected on thenoble end of Socrates, it was in the spirit

of Lucretius that he focused on the mostimplausible—and the most Epicurean—of details, as in “Of Cruelty,” “the quiver ofpleasure”6 that Socrates felt “inscratching his leg after the irons wereoff.”

Above all, Lucretius’ fingerprintsare all over Montaigne’s reflections ontwo of his favorite subjects: sex anddeath.7 Recalling that “the courtesanFlora used to say that she had never lainwith Pompey without making him carryaway the marks of her bites,” Montaigneimmediately recalls lines from Lucretius:“They hurt the longed-for body with theirviselike grip,/And with their teeth theylacerate the tender lip” (“That our desireis increased by difficulty”). Urging thosewhose sexual passion is too powerful to“disperse it,” Montaigne in “Of Diversion”

quotes Lucretius’ scabrous advice—“Eject the gathered sperm in anythingat all”—and then adds, “I have often triedit with profit.” And attempting to conquerany bashfulness and capture the actualexperience of intercourse, he finds thatno description ever written is morewonderful—more ravishing, as he puts it—than Lucretius’ lines on Venus andMars cited in “On some verses of Virgil”:

He who rulesthe savage things

Of war, the mightyMars, oft on thy bosom flings

Himself; the eternalwound of love drains all his powers

Wide-mouthed, withgreedy eyes thy person he devours,

Head back, his verysoul upon thy lips suspended:

Take him in thyembrace, goddess, let him be blended

With thy holy body ashe lies; let sweet words pour

Out of thy mouth.

Citing the Latin, Montaigne does notattempt to match this description in hisown French; he simply stops to savor itsperfection, “so alive, so profound.”

There are moments, rare andpowerful, in which a writer, longvanished from the face of the earth,seems to stand in your presence andspeak to you directly, as if he bore amessage meant for you above all others.Montaigne seems to have felt thisintimate link with Lucretius, a link thathelped him come to terms with theprospect of his own extinction. He oncesaw a man die, he recalled, who

complained bitterly in his last momentsthat destiny was preventing him fromfinishing the book he was writing. Theabsurdity of the regret, in Montaigne’sview, is best conveyed by lines fromLucretius: “But this they fail to add: thatafter you expire/Not one of all thesethings will fill you with desire.” As forhimself, Montaigne wrote, “I want death8to find me planting my cabbages, butcareless of death, and still more of myunfinished garden” (“That to philosophizeis to learn to die”).

To die “careless of death,”Montaigne understood, was a far moredifficult goal than it sounded: he had tomarshal all of the resources of hiscapacious mind in order to hear and toobey what he took to be the voice ofNature. And that voice, he understood,

spoke above all others the words ofLucretius. “Go out of this world,”9Montaigne imagined Nature to say,

as you entered it. The samepassage that you made from deathto life, without feeling or fright,make it again from life to death.Your death is part of the order ofthe universe; it is part of the life ofthe world.

Our lives we borrow from each other…

And men, like runners, pass along thetorch of life. (Lucretius)

(“That to philosophize”)

Lucretius was for Montaigne the surestguide to understanding the nature ofthings and to fashioning the self to livelife with pleasure and to meet death withdignity.

In 1989, Paul Quarrie, then thelibrarian at Eton College, bought a copyof the splendid 1563 De rerum natura,edited by Denys Lambin, at auction for£250. The catalogue entry noted that theendpapers of the copy were covered withnotes and that there were manymarginalia in both Latin and French, butthe owner’s name was lost. Scholarsquickly10 confirmed what Quarriesuspected, as soon as he had the bookin his hands: this was Montaigne’spersonal copy of Lucretius, bearing thedirect marks of the essayist’s passionateengagement with the poem. Montaigne’s

name on his copy of Lucretius wasoverwritten—that is why it took so long torealize who had owned it. But in a wildlyheterodox comment penned in Latin onthe verso of the third flyleaf, he did leavean odd proof that the book was his.“Since the movements of the atoms11are so varied,” he wrote, “it is notunbelievable that the atoms once cametogether in this way, or that in the futurethey will come together like this again,giving birth to another Montaigne.”

Montaigne took pains to mark themany passages in the poem that seemedto him “against religion” in denying thefundamental Christian principles ofcreation ex nihilo, divine providence, andjudgment after death. Fear of death, hewrote in the margin, is the cause of allour vices. Above all, he noted again and

again, the soul is corporeal: “The soul isbodily” (296); “The soul and the bodyhave an extreme conjunction” (302); “thesoul is mortal” (306); “The soul, like thefoot, is part of the body” (310); “the bodyand the soul are inseparably joined.”(311) These are reading notes, notassertions of his own. But they suggest afascination with the most radicalconclusions to be drawn from Lucretianmaterialism. And though it was prudentto keep that fascination hidden, it is clearthat Montaigne’s response was by nomeans his alone.

Even in Spain, where the vigilanceof the Inquisition was high, Lucretius’poem was being read, in printed copiescarried across the border from Italy andFrance and in manuscripts that quietlypassed from hand to hand. In the earlyseventeenth century Alonso de Olivera,

doctor to Princess Isabel de Borbón,owned a French edition printed in 1565.At a book sale in 1625,12 the Spanishpoet Francisco de Quevedo acquired amanuscript copy of the work for only onereal. The writer and antiquary RodrigoCaro, from Seville, had two copies,printed in Antwerp in 1566, in his libraryinventoried in 1647; and in themonastery of Guadalupe an edition ofLucretius, printed in Amsterdam in 1663,was kept in his cell, it would appear, byPadre Zamora. As Thomas Morediscovered when he tried to buy up andburn Protestant translations of the Bible,the printing press had made itmaddeningly difficult to kill a book. Andto suppress a set of ideas that werevitally important in enabling newscientific advances in physics and

astronomy proved to be even moredifficult.

It was not for want of trying. Here isan attempt from the seventeenth centuryto accomplish what the killing of Brunohad failed to do:

Nothingcomes from atoms.13

All the bodies of the world shine withthe beauty of their forms.

Without these the globe would only bean immense chaos.

In the beginning God made all things,so that they might generatesomething.

Consider to be nothing that fromwhich nothing can come.

You, O Democritus, form nothingdifferent starting from atoms.

Atoms produce nothing; therefore,atoms are nothing.

These are the words of a Latin prayerthat young Jesuits at the University ofPisa were assigned to recite every day toward off what their superiors regarded asa particularly noxious temptation. Theaim of the prayer was to exorciseatomism and to claim the form, structure,and beauty of things as the work of God.The atomists had found joy and wonderin the way things are: Lucretius saw theuniverse as a constant, intensely erotichymn to Venus. But the obedient youngJesuit was to tell himself every day thatthe only alternative to the divine order hecould see celebrated all around him inthe extravagance of Baroque art was acold, sterile, chaotic world ofmeaningless atoms.

Why did it matter? As More’sUtopia had made clear, divineprovidence and the soul’s postmortemrewards and punishments were non-negotiable beliefs, even in playfulfantasies about non-Christian peoples atthe edge of the known world. But theUtopians did not base their doctrinalinsistence on their understanding ofphysics. Why would the Jesuits, at oncethe most militant and the mostintellectually sophisticated Catholic orderin this period, commit themselves to thethankless task of trying to eradicateatoms? After all, the notion of theinvisible seeds of things had nevercompletely vanished during the MiddleAges. The core idea of the universe’sbasic material building blocks—atoms—had survived the loss of the ancient texts.Atoms could even be spoken of without

substantial risk, provided that they weresaid to be set in motion and ordered bydivine providence. And there remainedwithin the highest reaches of the CatholicChurch daring speculative minds eagerto grapple with the new science. Whyshould atoms in the High Renaissancehave come to seem, in some quarters atleast, so threatening?

The short answer is that therecovery and recirculation of Lucretius’On the Nature of Things had succeededin linking the very idea of atoms, as theultimate substrate of all that exists, with ahost of other, dangerous claims.Detached from any context, the idea thatall things might consist of innumerableinvisible particles did not seemparticularly disturbing. After all, the worldhad to consist of something. ButLucretius’ poem restored to atoms their

missing context, and the implications—for morality, politics, ethics, and theology—were deeply upsetting.

Those implications were notimmediately apparent to everyone.Savonarola may have mocked thepointy-headed intellectuals who thoughtthe world was made up out of invisibleparticles, but on this issue at least hewas playing for laughs, not yet calling foran auto-da-fé. Catholics like Erasmusand More could, as we have seen, thinkseriously about how to integrateelements of Epicureanism with theChristian faith. And in 1509, whenRaphael painted the School of Athens inthe Vatican—his magnificent vision ofGreek philosophy—he seems to havebeen sublimely confident that the wholeclassical inheritance, not simply the workof a select few, could live in harmony

with the Christian doctrine beingearnestly debated by the theologiansdepicted on the opposite wall. Plato andAristotle have pride of place in Raphael’sluminous scene, but there is room underthe capacious arch for all of the majorthinkers, including—if traditionalidentifications are correct—Hypatia ofAlexandria and Epicurus.

But by midcentury, this confidencewas no longer possible. In 1551 thetheologians at the Council of Trent had,to their satisfaction at least, resolvedonce and for all the debates that hadswirled around the precise nature of thecentral Christian mystery. They hadconfirmed as Church dogma the subtlearguments with which Thomas Aquinasin the thirteenth century, drawing onAristotle, had attempted to reconciletransubstantiation—the metamorphosis

of the consecrated water and wine intothe body and blood of Jesus Christ—withthe laws of physics. Aristotle’s distinctionbetween the “accidents” and the“substance” of matter made it possible toexplain how something that looked andsmelled and tasted exactly like a piece ofbread could actually (and not merelysymbolically) be Christ’s flesh. What thehuman senses experienced was merelythe accidents of bread; the substance ofthe consecrated wafer was God.

The theologians at Trent presentedthese ingenious arguments not as atheory but as the truth, a truth utterlyincompatible with Epicurus andLucretius. The problem with Epicurusand Lucretius was not their paganism—after all, Aristotle too was a pagan—butrather their physics. Atomism absolutelydenied the key distinction between

substance and accidents, and thereforethreatened the whole magnificentintellectual edifice resting on Aristotelianfoundations. And this threat came atexactly the moment when Protestantshad mounted their most serious assaulton Catholic doctrine. That assault did notdepend on atomism—Luther and Zwingliand Calvin were not Epicureans, anymore than Wycliffe and Hus had been—but for the militant, embattled forces ofthe Counter-Reformation CatholicChurch, it was as if the resurgence ofancient materialism had opened adangerous second front. Indeed,atomism seemed to offer the Reformersaccess to an intellectual weapon of massdestruction. The Church was determinednot to allow anyone to lay hands on thisweapon, and its ideological arm, theInquisition, was alerted to detect the

telltale signs of proliferation.“Faith must take first place14

among all the other laws of philosophy,”declared a Jesuit spokesman in 1624,“so that what, by established authority, isthe word of God may not be exposed tofalsity.” The words were a clear warningto curb unacceptable speculation: “Theonly thing necessary to the Philosopher,in order to know the truth, which is oneand simple, is to oppose whatever iscontrary to Faith and to accept that whichis contained in Faith.” The Jesuit did notspecify a specific target of this warning,but contemporaries would have easilyunders tood that his words wereparticularly directed at the writer of arecently published scientific work calledThe Assayer. That writer was GalileoGalilei.

Galileo had already been in troublefor using his astronomical observationsto support the Copernican claim that theearth was in orbit around the sun. Underpressure from the Inquisition, he hadpledged not to continue to advance thisclaim. But The Assayer, published in1623, demonstrated that the scientistwas continuing to tread on extremelydangerous ground. Like Lucretius,Galileo defended the oneness of thecelestial and terrestrial world: there wasno essential difference, he claimed,between the nature of the sun and theplanets and the nature of the earth andits inhabitants. Like Lucretius, hebelieved that everything in the universecould be understood through the samedisciplined use of observation andreason. Like Lucretius, he insisted on thetestimony of the senses, against, if

necessary, the orthodox claims ofauthority. Like Lucretius, he sought towork through this testimony toward arational comprehension of the hiddenstructures of all things. And likeLucretius, he was convinced that thesestructures were by nature constituted bywhat he called “minims” or minimalparticles, that is, constituted by a limitedrepertory of atoms combined ininnumerable ways.

Galileo had friends in the highestplaces: The Assayer was dedicated tonone other than the enlightened newpope, Urban VIII, who as Cardinal MaffeoBarbarini had warmly supported thegreat scientist’s research. As long as thepope was willing to protect him, Galileocould hope to get away with theexpression of his views and with thescientific investigations that they helped

to generate. But the pope himself wasunder growing pressure to suppresswhat many in the Church, the Jesuitsabove all, regarded as particularlynoxious heresies. On August 1, 1632, theSociety of Jesus strictly prohibited andcondemned the doctrine of atoms. Thatprohibition in itself could not haveprecipitated a move against Galileo,since The Assayer had been clearedeight years earlier for publication. ButGalileo’s publication, also in 1632, of theDialogue Concerning the Two ChiefWorld Systems gave his enemies theopportunity that they had been lookingfor: they promptly denounced him to theCongregation of the Holy Office, as theInquisition was called.

On June 22, 1633, the Inquisitiondelivered its verdict: “We say, sentence,and declare that you, Galileo, by reason

of the evidence arrived at in the trial, andby you confessed as above, haverendered yourself in the judgment of thisHoly Office vehemently suspected ofheresy.” Still protected by powerfulfriends and hence spared torture andexecution, the convicted scientist15 wassentenced to life imprisonment, underhouse arrest. The heresy officiallyspecified in the verdict was “havingbelieved and held the doctrine, false andcontrary to sacred and divine Scripture,that the Sun is the center of the worldand does not move from east to west andthat the Earth moves and is not thecenter of the world.” But in 1982 anItalian scholar, Pietro Redondi,uncovered a document in the archives ofthe Holy Office that altered the picture.The document was a memorandum

detailing heresies found in The Assayer.Specifically, the inquisitor foundevidence of atomism. Atomism,explained the inquisitor, is incompatiblewith the second canon of the thirteenthsession of the Council of Trent, thesession that spelled out the dogma of theEucharist. If you accept Signor GalileoGalilei’s theory, the document observes,then when you find in the Most HolySacrament “the objects of touch, sight,taste, etc.,” characteristic of bread andwine, you will also have to say,according to the same theory, that thesecharacteristics are produced on oursenses by “very tiny particles.” And fromthis you will have to conclude “that in theSacrament there must be substantialparts of bread and wine,” a conclusionthat is flat-out heresy. Thirty-three yearsafter the execution of Bruno, atomism

remained a belief that the vigilant forcesof orthodoxy were determined tosuppress.

If complete suppression provedimpossible, there was some consolationfor the enemies of Lucretius in the factthat most printed editions carrieddisclaimers. One of the most interestingof these is in the text used byMontaigne,16 the 1563 edition annotatedby Denys Lambin. It is true, Lambinconcedes, that Lucretius denies theimmortality of the soul, rejects divineprovidence, and claims that pleasure isthe highest good. But “even though thepoem itself is alien to our religionbecause of its beliefs,” Lambin writes, “itis no less a poem.” Once the distinctionhas been drawn between the work’sbeliefs and its artistic merit, the full force

of that merit can be safelyacknowledged: “Merely a poem? Ratherit is an elegant poem, a magnificentpoem, a poem highlighted, recognizedand praised by all wise men.” Whatabout the content of the poem, “theseinsane and frenzied ideas of Epicurus,those absurdities about a fortuitousconjunction of atoms, about innumerableworlds, and so on”? Secure in their faith,Lambin writes, good Christians do nothave to worry: “neither is it difficult for usto refute them, nor indeed is it necessary,certainly when they are most easilydisproved by the voice of truth itself or byeveryone remaining silent about them.”Disavowal shades into a reassurancesubtly conjoined with a warning: sing thepraises of the poem, but remain silentabout its ideas.

The aesthetic appreciation of

Lucretius depended on the possession ofvery good Latin, and hence the poem’scirculation was limited to a relativelysmall, elite group. Everyone grasped thatany attempt to make it more broadlyaccessible to the literate public wouldarouse the deepest suspicion andhostility from the authorities. More thantwo hundred years apparently passed,after Poggio’s discovery in 1417, beforean attempt was actually made.

But by the seventeenth century thepressure of the new science, growingintellectual speculation, and the lure ofthe great poem itself became too great tocontain. The brilliant French astronomer,philosopher, and priest Pierre Gassendi(1592–1655) devoted himself to anambitious attempt to reconcileEpicureanism and Christianity, and oneof his most remarkable students, the

playwright Molière (1622–1673),undertook to produce a verse translation(which does not, unfortunately, survive)o f De rerum natura. Lucretius hadalready appeared in a prose translationin French by the abbé Michel deMarolles (1600–1681). Not longafterwards, an Italian translation by themathematician Alessandro Marchetti(1633–1714) began to circulate inmanuscript, to the dismay of the RomanChurch, which successfully banned itfrom print for decades. In England, thewealthy diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706)translated the first book of Lucretius’poem; a complete version in heroiccouplets was published in 1682 by theyoung Oxford-educated scholar ThomasCreech.

Creech’s Lucretius was greeted asan astonishing achievement when it

appeared in print, but an Englishtranslation of almost the entire poem,also in couplets, was already in verylimited circulation, and from a surprisingsource. This translation, which was notprinted until the twentieth century, was bythe Puritan Lucy Hutchinson, the wife ofColonel John Hutchinson,parliamentarian and regicide. What ismost striking perhaps about thisremarkable accomplishment is that, bythe time the learned translator presentedthe text to Arthur Annesley, first Earl ofAnglesey, on June 11, 1675, she hadcome to detest its central principles—orso she claimed—and to hope that theywould vanish from the face of the earth.

She would certainly haveconsigned these verses to the fire, shewrote in her autograph dedicatory letter,

“had they not by misfortune17 been goneout of my hands in one lost copy.” Thissounds, of course, like the familiargesture of feminine modesty. It is agesture she reinforces by refusing totrans l a te several hundred sexuallyexplicit lines in book 4, noting in themargin that “much here was left out for amidwife to translate whose obscene art itwould better become than a nicer pen.”But in fact Hutchinson made no apologyfor what she called her “aspiringMuse.”18 Rather, she abhorred “all theatheism and impieties” in Lucretius’work.

The “lunatic” Lucretius, asHutchinson called him, is no better thanthe other pagan philosophers and poetsroutinely commended to pupils by theirtutors, an educational practice that is

“one great means19 of debauching thelearned world, at least of confirming themin that debauchery of soul, which theirfirst sin led them into, and of hinderingtheir recovery, while they puddle all thestreams of Truth, that flow down to themfrom divine grace, with this pagan mud.”It is a lamentation and a horror,Hutchinson wrote, that now, in thesedays of the Gospel, men should studyLucretius and adhere to his “ridiculous,impious, execrable doctrines, revivingthe foppish, casual dance of atoms.”

Why, then, when she earnestlyhopes that this wickedness willdisappear, did she painstakingly preparea verse translation, pay a professionalscribe to write out the first five books, andcarefully copy out book 6, along with theArguments and the marginalia, in herown hand?

own hand?Her answer is a revealing one. She

had not initially realized, she confessed,how dangerous Lucretius was. Sheundertook the translation “out ofyouthful20 curiosity, to understand thingsI heard so much discourse of at secondhand.” We have, through this remark, aglimpse of those quiet conversations,conducted not in the lecture hall or fromthe pulpit, but away from the prying earsof the authorities, in which Lucretius’ideas were weighed and debated. Thisgifted, learned woman wanted to knowfor herself what the men in her worldwere arguing about.

When her religious convictionsmatured, Hutchinson wrote, when she“grew in Light and Love,” this curiosityand the pride she felt and in some sensecontinued to feel in her accomplishment

began to sour:

The little glory21 I had amongsome few of my intimate friends, forunderstanding this crabbed poet,became my shame, and I found Inever understood him till I learnedto abhor him, and dread a wantondalliance with impious books.

But why, in that case, should she havewished to make this wanton dallianceavailable to others?

Hutchinson said that she wassimply obeying Anglesey, who hadasked to see this book that she nowbeseeched him to conceal. To conceal,not to destroy. Something restrained herfrom urging that it be consigned to thefire, something more than the copy that

had already gone out of her hands—forwhy should that have held her back?—and more even than her pride in her ownaccomplishment. An ardent Puritan, sheechoed Milton’s principled opposition tocensorship. She had, after all, “reapedsome profit22 by it, for it showed me thatsenseless superstitions drive carnalreason into atheism.” That is, shelearned from Lucretius that childish“fables” meant to enhance piety have theeffect of leading rational intelligencetoward disbelief.

Perhaps too Hutchinson found themanuscript strangely difficult to destroy. “Iturned it23 into English,” she wrote, “in aroom where my children practiced theseveral qualities they were taught withtheir tutors, and I numbered the syllablesof my translation by the threads of the

canvas I wrought in, and set them downwith a pen and ink that stood by me.”

Lucretius insisted that those thingsthat seemed completely detached fromthe material world—thoughts, ideas,fa n ta s i e s , souls themselves—werenonetheless inseparable from the atomsthat constituted them, including in thisinstance the pen, the ink, and the threadsof the needlework Hutchinson used tocount the syllables in her lines of verse.In his theory, even vision, so seeminglyimmaterial, depended on tiny films ofatoms that constantly emanated from allthings and, as images or simulacra,floated through the void until they struckthe perceiving eye. Thus it was, heexplained, that people who saw whatthey thought to be ghosts were falselypersuaded of the existence of an afterlife.Such apparitions were not in reality the

souls of the dead but films of atoms stillfloating through the world after the deathand dissolution of the person from whomthey had emanated. Eventually, theatoms in these films too would bedispersed, but for the moment they couldastonish and frighten the living.

The theory now only makes ussmile, but perhaps it can serve as animage of the strange afterlife of Lucretius’poem, the poem that almost disappearedforever, dispersed into random atoms,but that somehow managed to survive. Itsurvived because a succession ofpeople, in a range of places and timesand for reasons that seem largelyaccidental, encountered the materialobject—the papyrus or parchment orpaper, with its inky marks attributed toTitus Lucretius Carus—and then satdown to make material copies of their

own. Sitting in the room with her children,counting the syllables of translatedverses on the threads of her canvas, thePuritan Lucy Hutchinson was serving ineffect as one of the transmitters of theatomic particles that Lucretius had set inmotion centuries and centuries earlier.

By the time Hutchinson reluctantlysent her translation to Anglesey, the ideaof what she called “the foppish, casualdance of atoms” had already longpenetrated the intellectual imagination ofEngland. Edmund Spenser had writtenan ecstatic and strikingly Lucretian hymnto Venus; Francis Bacon had venturedthat “In nature nothing24 really existsbesides individual bodies”; ThomasHobbes had reflected wryly on therelationship between fear and religiousdelusions.

In England, as elsewhere inEurope, it had proved possible, thoughquite difficult, to retain a belief in God25as the creator of atoms in the first place.Thus Isaac Newton, in what has beencalled one of the most influential piecesof writing in the history of science,declared himself an atomist, makingwhat appears to be a direct allusion tothe title of Lucretius’ poem. “While theParticles continue entire,” he remarked,“they may compose Bodies of one andthe same Nature and Texture in all Ages:But should they wear away, or break inpieces, the Nature of Things dependingon them, would be changed.” At thesame time, Newton was careful to invokea divine maker. “It seems probable tome,” Newton wrote in the second editionof the Opticks (1718),

That God in the Beginning26form’d Matter in solid, massy, hard,impenetrable, moveable Particles,of such Sizes and Figures, andwith such other Properties, and insuch Proportions to Space, as mostconduced to the End for which heform’d them; and that theseprimitive Particles being Solids, areincomparably harder than anyporous Bodies compounded ofthem; even so very hard, as neverto wear or break in pieces; noordinary Power being able todivine what God himself made onein the first creation.

For Newton, as for other scientists

from the seventeenth century to our own

time, it remained possible to reconcileatomism with Christian faith. ButHutchinson’s fears proved wellgrounded. Lucretius’ materialism helpedto generate and support the skepticism ofthe likes of Dryden and Voltaire and theprogrammatic, devastating disbeliefexpressed in Diderot, Hume, and manyother Enlightenment figures.

What lay ahead, beyond thehorizon of even these farsighted figures,were the astonishing empiricalobservations and experimental proofsthat put the principles of ancient atomismon a whole different plane. When in thenineteenth century he set out to solve themystery of the origin of human species,Charles Darwin did not have to draw onLucretius’ vision of an entirely natural,unplanned process of creation anddestruction, endlessly renewed by

sexual reproduction. That vision haddirectly influenced the evolutionarytheories of Darwin’s grandfather,Erasmus Darwin, but Charles could basehis arguments on his own work in theGalápagos and elsewhere. So too whenEinstein wrote of atoms, his thoughtrested on experimental andmathematical science, not upon ancientphilosophical speculation. But thatspeculation, as Einstein himself knewand acknowledged, had set the stage forthe empirical proofs upon which modernatomism depends. That the ancientpoem could now be safely left unread,that the drama of its loss and recoverycould fade into oblivion, that PoggioBracciolini could be forgotten almostentirely—these were only signs ofLucretius’ absorption into the mainstreamof modern thought.

Among those for whom Lucretiuswas still a crucial guide, before thisabsorption had become complete, was awealthy Virginia planter with a restlessskeptical intelligence and a scientificbent. Thomas Jefferson owned at leastfive Latin editions of On the Nature ofThings, along with translations of thepoem into English, Italian, and French. Itwas one of his favorite books, confirminghis conviction that the world is naturealone and that nature consists only ofmatter. Still more, Lucretius helped toshape Jefferson’s confidence thatignorance and fear were not necessarycomponents of human existence.

Jefferson took this ancientinheritance in a direction that Lucretiuscould not have anticipated but of whichThomas More, back in the early sixteenthcentury, had dreamed. Jefferson had not,

as the poet of On the Nature of Thingsurged, withdrawn from the fierce conflictsof public life. Instead, he had given amomentous political document, at thefounding of a new republic, a distinctlyLucretian turn. The turn was toward agovernment whose end was not only tosecure the lives and the liberties of itscitizens but also to serve “the pursuit ofHappiness.” The atoms of Lucretius hadleft their traces on the Declaration ofIndependence.

On August 15, 1820, the seventy-seven-year-old Jefferson wrote toanother former president, his friend JohnAdams. Adams was eighty-five, and thetwo old men were in the habit ofexchanging views on the meaning of life,as they felt it ebb away. “I [am] obliged27to recur ultimately to my habitual

anodyne,” Jefferson wrote:

“I feel: therefore I exist.” I feelbodies which are not myself: thereare other existencies then. I callthem matter. I feel them changingplace. This gives me motion.Where there is an absence ofmatter, I call it void, or nothing, orimmaterial space. On the basis ofsensation, of matter and motion, wemay erect the fabric of all thecertainties we can have or need.

These are the sentiments that Lucretiushad most hoped to instill in his readers. “Iam,” Jefferson wrote28 to acorrespondent who wanted to know hisphilosophy of life, “an Epicurean.”

This portrait of the young Poggio

Bracciolini appears in the preface tohis Latin translation of Xenophon’s

account of the education of the idealruler, the Cyropaedia.

Proudly noting that he is the secretary

to Pope Martin V, Poggio signs hischaracteristically elegant transcription

of Cicero, made in 1425, and wishesthe reader farewell. Poggio’s

handwriting was prized in his ownlifetime and was one of the keys to his

advancement.

This bronze Seated Hermes was

found in fragments in 1758 at the Villaof the Papyri in Herculaneum. A pair

of winged sandals reveals his identityas the messenger god Hermes. To anEpicurean the figure’s elegant reposemight have suggested that the gods

had no messages to deliver tomankind.

The enemies of Epicureanism

associated it not with the thoughtfulpose of the Seated Hermes but withthe drunken abandonment of thisSilenus, sprawled on a wineskin

draped over a lion’s pelt, found nearthe Hermes sculpture at the Villa of

the Papyri.

The small bust of Epicurus, which

retains its original base with thephilosopher’s name inscribed in

Greek, was one of three such busts

that adorned the Villa of the Papyri inHerculaneum. In his Natural History

(chap. 35), the Roman author Pliny theElder (23–79 CE) noted a vogue in his

time for portrait busts of Epicurus.

“Then Pilate took Jesus and had himflogged” (John 19:1). The biblical textinspired images like this painting by

the Austrian Michael Pacher andhelped promote not only sympathy for

the cruelly mistreated Messiah andrage at his tormentors but also a

fervent desire to emulate his suffering.

The heretic Hus, forced to wear amock paper crown declaring hismisdeeds, is burned at the stake.

Afterwards, to prevent anysympathetic bystander from collecting

a relic of the martyr, his ashes areshoveled into the Rhine.

This portrait of Poggio appears in amanuscript of his work De varietate

fortunae. The work, written whenPoggio was sixty-eight years old,eloquently surveys the ruins of

ancient Roman greatness.

Poggio’s friend Niccoli here brings his

long-awaited transcription of On theNature of Things to a close with thecustomary word “Explicit” (from theLatin for “unrolled”). He enjoins the

reader to “read happily” (“Legefeliciter”) and adds—in some tensionwith the spirit of Lucretius’ poem—a

pious “Amen.”

At the center of Botticelli’s paintingstands Venus, surrounded by the

ancient gods of the spring. Thecomplex choreography derives from

Lucretius’ description of the greatseasonal renewal of the earth: “Spring

comes and Venus, preceded byVenus’ winged harbinger, and motherFlora, following hard on the heels ofZephyr, prepares the way for them,

strewing all their path with a profusionof exquisite hues and scents” (5:737–

40).

Montaigne’s signature on the title

page of his heavily annotatedLucretius—the great edition publishedin 1563 and edited by Denis Lambin—

was written over by a subsequentowner—“Despagnet”—and hence not

identified for what it is until thetwentieth century.

A bronze statue of Bruno, sculpted byEttore Ferrari, was erected in 1889 inRome’s Campo de’ Fiori on the spotwhere he was burned at the stake. Inthe monument, on the base of which

are plaques devoted to otherphilosophers persecuted by the

Catholic Church, the larger-than-lifeBruno looks broodingly in the

direction of the Vatican.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

Portrait of young Poggio. BibliotecaMedicea Laurenziana, Florence, Ms.Strozzi 50, 1 recto. By permission of theMinistero per i Beni e le Attività Culturaliwith all rights reserved Poggio’s transcription of Cicero.Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana,

Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana,Florence, Ms. Laur.Plut.48.22, 121 recto.By permission of the Ministero per i Benie le Attività Culturali with all rightsreserved Seated Hermes. Alinari / Art Resource,NY Resting Hermes. Erich Lessing / ArtResource, NY Bust of Epicurus. By courtesy of theMuseo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli/ Soprintendenza Speciale per i BeniArcheologici di Napoli e Pompei The Flagellation of Christ, MichaelPacher. The Bridgeman Art LibraryInternational

Heretic Hus, burned at the stake. Bycourtesy of the ConstanceRosgartenmuseum Portrait of elderly Poggio. © 2011Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms.lat.224, 2 recto Niccoli’s transcription of On the Natureof Things. Biblioteca MediceaLaurenziana, Florence, Ms.Laur.Plut.35.30, 164 verso. Bypermission of the Ministero per i Beni ele Attività Culturali with all rightsreserved La Primavera, Sandro Botticelli. ErichLessing / Art Resource, NY Montaigne’s edition of Lucretius.Reproduced by kind permission of the

Syndics of Cambridge University Library Ettore Ferrari’s statue of GiordanoBruno. Photograph by Isaac Vita Kohn

NOTES

PREFACE

1 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things,

trans. Martin Ferguson Smith

(London: Sphere Books, 1969; rev.edn., Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001),1:12–20. I have consulted themodern English translations of H.A. J. Munro (1914), W. H. D.Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith(1975, 1992), Frank O. Copley(1977), Ronald Melville (1997), A.E. Stallings (2007), and DavidSlavitt (2008). Among earlierEnglish translations I haveconsulted those of John Evelyn(1620–1706), Lucy Hutchinson(1620–1681), John Dryden (1631–1700), and Thomas Creech (1659–1700). Of these translationsDryden’s is the best, but, inaddition to the fact that he onlytranslated small portions of thepoem (615 lines in all, less than 10percent of the total), his language

often renders Lucretius difficult forthe modern reader to grasp. Forease of access, unless otherwiseindicated, I have used Smith’s2001 prose translation, and I havecited the lines in the Latin textgiven in the readily available Loebedition—Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1975.

2 On the Nature of Things 5:737–40.Venus’ “winged harbinger” isCupid, whom Botticelli depictsblindfolded and aiming his wingedarrow; Flora, the Roman goddessof flowers, strews blossomsgathered in the folds of herexquisite dress; and Zephyr, thegod of the fecundating west wind,is reaching for the nymph Chloris.On Lucretius’ influence on

Botticelli, mediated by thehumanist Poliziano, see CharlesDempsey, The Portrayal of Love:Botticelli’s “Primavera” andHumanist Culture at the Time ofLorenzo the Magnificent(Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1992), esp. pp. 36–49; HorstBredekamp, Botticelli: Primavera.Florenz als Garten der Venus(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer VerlagGmbH, 1988); and Aby Warburg’sseminal 1893 essay, “SandroBotticell i ’s Birth of Venus andSpring: An Examination ofConcepts of Antiquity in the ItalianEarly Renaissance,” in TheRevival of Pagan Antiquity, ed.Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt(Los Angeles: Getty ResearchInstitute for the History of Art and

the Humanities, 1999), pp. 88–156.

3 A total of 558 letters by Poggio,addressed to 172 differentcorrespondents, survive. In a letterwritten in July 1417 congratulatingPoggio on his discoveries,Francesco Barbaro refers to a letterabout the journey of discovery thatPoggio had sent to “our fine andlearned friend Guarinus ofVerona”—Two Renaissance BookHunters: The Letters of PoggiusBracciolini to Nicolaus de Nicolis,trans. Phyllis Walter GoodhartGordan (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1974), p. 201. ForPoggio’s letters, see PoggioBracciol ini, Lettere, ed. HeleneHarth, 3 vols. (Florence: Olschki,1984).

CHAPTER ONE: THE BOOKHUNTER

1 On Poggio’s appearance, see

Poggio Bracciolini 1380–1980: NelVI centenario della nascita,Instituto Nazionale di Studi SulRinascimento, vol. 7 (Florence:Sansoni, 1982) and Un Toscanodel ’400 Poggio Bracciolini, 1380–1459, ed. Patrizia Castelli(Terranuova Bracciolini:Administrazione Comunale, 1980).The principal biographical sourceis Ernst Walser, PoggiusFlorentinus: Leben und Werke

(Hildesheim: George Olms, 1974).

2 On curiosity as a sin and thecomplex process of rehabilitating it,see Hans Blumenberg, TheLegitimacy 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 theCouncils: A Sketch of the Life andTimes of Baldassare Cossa(Afterward Pope John the Twenty-Third) (London: ArchibaldConstable & Co., 1908), p. 359.

4 Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men: ThePapal Civil Service in theRenaissance (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1990), p. 54.

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

6 In 1416 he evidently tried, with theothers in the curia, to secure abenefice for himself, but the grantwas controversial and in the endwas not awarded. Apparently, hecould also have taken a position asScriptor in the new papacy ofMartin V, but he refused, regardingit as a demotion from his positionas secretary—Walser, PoggiusFlorentinus, pp. 42ff.

CHAPTER TWO: THE MOMENTOF DISCOVERY

1 Nicholas Mann, “The Origins of

Humanism,” in The CambridgeCompanion to RenaissanceHumanism, ed. Jill Kraye(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996), p. 11. On Poggio’sresponse to Petrarch, see RiccardoF u b i n i , Humanism andSecularization: From Petrarch toValla, Duke Monographs inMedieval and RenaissanceStudies, 18 (Durham, NC, andLondon: Duke University Press,2003). On the development ofItalian humanism, see John

Addington Symonds, The Revivalof Learning (New York: H. Holt,1908; repr. 1960); Wallace K.Ferguson, The Renaissance inHistorical Thought: Five Centuriesof Interpretation (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1948);Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Impactof Early Italian Humanism onThought and Learning,” in BernardS. Levy, ed. Developments in theEarly Renaissance (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press,1972), pp. 120–57; CharlesT r i n k a u s , The Scope ofRenaissance Humanism (AnnArbor: University of MichiganPress, 1983); Anthony Grafton andLisa Jardine, From Humanism tothe Humanities: Education and theLiberal Arts in Fifteenth-and

Sixteenth-Century Europe(Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1986); PeterBurke, “The Spread of ItalianHumanism,” in Anthony Goodmanand Angus Mackay, eds., TheImpact of Humanism on WesternEurope (London: Longman, 1990),pp. 1–22; Ronald G. Witt, “In theFootsteps of the Ancients”: TheOrigins of Humanism from Lovatoto Bruni, Studies in Medieval andReformation Thought, ed. Heiko A.Oberman, vol. 74 (Leiden: Brill,2000); and Riccardo, Fubini,L’Umanesimo Italiano e I SuoiStorici (Milan: Franco AngeliStoria, 2001).

2 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (TheOrator’s Education), ed. and trans.

Donald A. Russell, Loeb ClassicalLibrary, 127 (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2001),10.1, pp. 299ff. Though a complete(or nearly complete) copy ofQuintilian was only found—byPoggio Bracciolini—in 1516, bookX, with its lists of Greek andRoman writers, circulatedthroughout the Middle Ages.Quintilian remarks of Macer andLucretius that “Each is elegant onhis own subject, but the former isprosaic and the latter difficult,” p.299.

3 Robert A. Kaster, Guardians ofLanguage: The Grammarian andSociety in Late Antiquity (Berkeleyand London: University ofCalifornia Press, 1988). Estimates

of literacy rates in earlier societiesare notoriously unreliable. Kaster,citing the research of RichardDuncan-Jones, concludes: “thegreat majority of the empire’sinhabitants were illiterate in theclassical languages.” The figuresfor the first three centuries CEsuggest upwards of 70 percentilliteracy, though with manyregional differences. There aresimilar figures in Kim Haines-E i t z e n , Guardians of Letters:Literacy, Power, and theTransmitters of Early ChristianLiterature (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000), thoughHaines-Eitzen has even lowerliteracy levels (10 percentperhaps). See also Robin LaneFox, “Literacy and Power in Early

Christianity,” in Alan K. Bowmanand Greg Woolf, eds., Literacy andPower in the Ancient World(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994).

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

5 The Rule does include a provisionfor those who simply cannot abidereading: “If anyone is so remissand indolent that he is unwilling orunable to study or to read, he is tobe given some work in order thathe may not be idle”—The Rule ofBenedict, trans. by Monks ofGlenstal Abbey (Dublin: FourCourts 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. Ihave amended the translationgiven, “as a warning to others,” tocapture what I take to be the actualsense of the Latin: ut ceteri timeant.

8 Spiritum elationis: the translatorsrender these words as “spirit ofvanity” but I believe that “elation” or“exaltation” is the principal sensehere.

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 fromAntiquity to the Renaissance(Chicago and London: AmericanLibrary Association and the BritishLibrary: 1991), p. 324. Themanuscript is in Barcelona.

13 On the larger context of Poggio’shandwriting, see Berthold L.U l l m a n , The Origin andDevelopment of Humanistic Script(Rome: Edizioni di Storia eLetteratura, 1960). For a valuableintroduction, see Martin Davies,“Humanism in Script and Print inthe Fifteenth Century,” in TheCambridge Companion toRenaissance 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 BookHunters, pp. 208–9 (letter toAmbrogio Traversari).

16 Ibid, p. 210.

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

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

19 Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books,

p. 224. The scribe in questionactually used “vellum,” notparchment, but it must have been aparticularly miserable vellum.

20 Ibid.

21 Quoted in George Haven Putnam,Books and Their Makers Duringthe Middle Ages, 2 vols. (NewYork: Hillary House, 1962; repr. of1896–98 edn.) 1:61.

22 The great monastery at Bobbio, inthe north of Italy, had a celebratedlibrary: a catalogue drawn up at theend of the ninth century includesmany rare ancient texts, including acopy of Lucretius. But most of these

have disappeared, presumablyscraped away to make room for thegospels and psalters that servedthe community. Bernhard Bischhoffwrites: “Many ancient texts wereburied when their codices werepalimsested at Bobbio, which hadabandoned the rule of Columbanusfor the rule of Benedict. Acatalogue from the end of the ninthcentury informs us that Bobbiopossessed at that time one of themost extensive libraries in theWest, including many grammaticaltreatises as well as rare poeticalworks. The sole copy of SeptimiusS e r e n u s ’ De runalibus, anelaborate poem from the age ofHadrian, was lost. Copies ofLucretius and Valerius Flaccusseem to have disappeared without

Italian copies having been made.Poggio eventually discoveredthese works inGermany”—Manuscripts andLibraries in the Age ofCharlemagne (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1994), p. 151.

23 A strong alternative candidate isthe Abbey of Murbach, in southernAlsace. By the middle of the ninthcentury, Murbach, founded in 727,had become an important center ofscholarship and is known to havepossessed a copy of Lucretius. Thechallenge facing Poggio wouldhave been roughly the same in anymonastic library he approached.

24 In the context of the current book,

the most intriguing comment comesin Rabanus’s prose preface to hisfascinating collection of acrosticpoems in praise of the Cross,composed in 810. Rabanus writesthat his poems include therhetorical figure of synalpha, thecontraction of two syllables intoone. This is a figure, he explains,Quod et Titus Lucretius non rarofecisse invenitur—“which isfrequently found in Titus Lucretius.”Quoted in David Ganz, “Lucretiusin the Carolingian Age: The LeidenManuscripts and Their CarolingianReaders,” in Claudine A.Chavannes-Mazel and Margaret M.Smith, eds., Medieval Manuscriptsof the Latin Classics: Productionand Use, Proceedings of theSeminar in the History of the Book

to 1500, Leiden, 1993 (Los AltosHills, CA: Anderson-Lovelace,1996), 99.

25 Pliny the Younger, Letters, 3.7.

26 The humanists might have pickedup shadowy signs of the poem’scontinued existence. Macrobius, inthe early fifth century CE, quotes afew lines in his Saturnalia (seeGeorge Hadzsits, Lucretius andHis Influence [New York:Longmans, Green & Co., 1935]), asdoes Isidore of Seville’s vastEtymologiae in the early seventhcentury. Other moments in whichthe work surfaced briefly will bementioned below, but it would havebeen rash for anyone in the earlyfifteenth century to believe that the

entire poem would be found.

CHAPTER THREE: IN SEARCHOF LUCRETIUS

1 “Send me some piece by Lucretius

or Ennius,” the highly cultivatedemperor Antoninus Pius (86–161CE) wrote to a friend; “somethingharmonious, powerful, andexpressive of the state of the spirit.”(Apart from fragments, Ennius, thegreatest early Roman poet, hasnever been recovered.)

2 “Lucreti poemata, ut scribes, itasunt, multis luminibus ingenii,

multae tamen artis”—Cicero, Q.Fr.2.10.3.

3 Georgics, 2.490–92:

Felix, qui potuit rerumcognoscere causas,atque metus omnis etinexorabile fatumsubiecit pedibusstrepitumque Acherontisavari.

Acheron, a river of the underworld,is used by Virgil and Lucretius as asymbol of the whole realm of theafterlife. For Lucretius’ presence int h e Georgics, see especiallyMonica Gale, Virgil on the Natureof Things: The Georgics, Lucretius,and the Didactic Tradition

(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2000).

4 The author of the Aeneid, with hissomber sense of the burden ofimperial power and the sternnecessity of renouncing pleasures,was clearly more skeptical than hehad been in the Georgics aboutanyone’s ability to grasp withserene clarity the hidden forces ofthe universe. But Lucretius’ visionand the tough elegance of hispoetry are present throughoutVirgil’s epic, if only as glimpses ofan achieved security that nowconstantly and forever eludes thepoet and his hero. On the deeppresence of Lucretius in the Aeneid(and in other works of Virgil, aswell as those of Ovid and Horace),

see Philip Hardie, LucretianReceptions: History, The Sublime,Knowledge (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,2009).

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

6 Son-in-law for a time of themerciless patrician dictator Sulla,Memmius’ political career came toan end in 54 BCE, when, as acandidate for the office of consul,he was forced to disclose hisinvolvement in a financial scandalthat lost him the crucial support ofJulius Caesar. As an orator, in

Cicero’s view, Memmius was lazy.He was, Cicero conceded,extremely well read, though morein Greek than in Latin literature.Perhaps this immersion in Greekculture helps to explain why, afterhis political fortunes fell, Memmiusmoved to Athens, where heapparently bought land on whichstood the ruins of the house of thephilosopher Epicurus, who diedmore than two hundred yearsearlier. In 51 BCE, Cicero wrote aletter to Memmius in which heasked him as a personal favor togive these ruins to “Patro theEpicurean.” (The ruins wereevidently threatened by a buildingproject that Memmius had in mind.)Patro pleads, Cicero reports, “thathe owes a responsibility to his

office and duty, to the sanctity oftestaments, to the prestige ofEpicurus’ name … to the abode,domicile, and memorials of greatmen”—Letter 63 (13:1) in Cicero’sLetters to Friends (Loeb edn.),1:271. With Epicurus, we close thecircle back to Lucretius, forLucretius was Epicurus’ mostpassionate, intelligent, and creativedisciple.

7 On the creation of the legend, seeesp. Luciano Canfora’s Vita diLucrezio (Palermo: Sellerio, 1993).The greatest evocation of it isTennyson’s “Lucretius.”

8 Canfora’s fascinating Vita diLucrezio is not a biography in anyconventional sense, but rather a

brilliant exercise in dismantling themythic narrative launched byJerome. In a work in progress, AdaPalmer shows that Renaissancescholars assembled what theythought were clues to Lucretius’life, but that most of those cluesturn out to have been commentsabout other, unrelated people.

9 Johann Joachim Winkelmann, citedin David Sider, The Library of theVilla dei Papiri at Herculaneum(Los Angeles: J. Paul GettyMuseum, 2005). Winkelmann’scolorful phrase is an Italianproverb.

10 Camillo Paderni, director of theMuseum Herculanense in theRoyal 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 wasunder the supervision of a Swissarmy engineer, Karl Weber, whotook a more responsible andscholarly interest in what layunderground.

13 This way of viewing themselveshad a long life. When Scipiosacked Carthage in 146 BCE, thelibrary collections of that greatNorth African city fell into hishands, along with all the otherplunder. He wrote to the Senate

and asked what to do with thebooks now in his possession.Answer came back that a singlebook, a treatise on agriculture, wasworth returning to be translated intoLatin; the rest of the books, thesenators wrote, Scipio shoulddistribute as gifts to the petty kingsof Africa—Pliny the Elder, NaturalHistory, 18:5.

14 The seizing of Greek libraries asspoils became a fairly commonpractice, though rarely as theconqueror’s sole prize. In 67 BCE,Lucullus, an ally of Sulla, broughthome from his eastern conquests avery valuable library, along withother riches, and in retirement hedevoted himself to the study ofGreek literature and philosophy. At

his villa and gardens in Rome andin Tusculum, near Naples, Luculluswas the generous patron of Greekintellectuals and poets, and hefigures in Cicero’s dialogueAcademica as one of the principalinterlocutors.

15 Appointed to administer northernItaly (Gallia Transpadana), Pollioused his influence to save Virgil’sproperty from confiscation.

16 Augustus’ two libraries wereknown as the Octavian and thePalatine. The former, founded inhonor of his sister (33 BC), wassituated in the Porticus Octaviaeand combined a magnificentpromenade on the lower story withthe reading room and book

collection on the upper. The otherlibrary, attached to the Temple ofApollo on the Palatine Hill, seemsto have had two separatelyadministered departments, a Greekand a Latin one. Both librarieswere subsequently destroyed byfire. Augustus’ successorsmaintained the tradition ofestablishing libraries: Tiberiusfounded the Tiberian Library in hishouse on the Palatine (accordingto Suetonius, he caused thewritings and images of his favoriteGreek poets to be placed in thepublic libraries). Vespasianestablished a library in the Templeof Peace erected after the burningof the city under Nero. Domitianrestored the libraries after the samefire, even sending to Alexandria for

copies. The most importantimperial library was the UlpianLibrary, created by Ulpius Trajanus—first established in the Forum ofTrajan but afterwards removed tothe Baths of Diocletian. See LionelCasson, Libraries in the AncientWorld (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2002).

17 Among them: Athens, Cyprus,Como, Milan, Smyrna, Patrae,Tibur—from which books couldeven be borrowed. But see theinscription found in the Agora ofAthens, on the wall of the Library ofPantainos (200 ce): “No book shallbe removed, since we have swornthus. Opening hours are from six inthe morning until noon” (quoted inSider, The Library of the Villa dei

Papiri at Herculaneum, p. 43).

18 Clarence E. Boyd, Public Librariesand Literary Culture in AncientRome (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1915), pp. 23–24.

19 Cf. Arnaldo Momigliano, AlienWisdom: The Limits ofHellenization (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1975).

20 Erich Auerbach, Literary Languageand Its Public in Late LatinAntiquity and in the Middle Ages,trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1965),p. 237.

21 Knut Kleve, “Lucretius in

Herculaneum,” in CronicheErcolanesi 19 (1989), p. 5.

22 In Pisonem (“Against Piso”), inCicero, Orations, trans. N. H. Watts,Loeb Classical Library, vol. 252(Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1931), p. 167 (“insuorum Gaecorum foetore atquevino”).

23 The Epigrams of Philodemos, ed.and trans. David Sider (New York:Oxford University Press, 1997), p.152.

24 Though there had been a seriousrecent earthquake, the last majoreruption had taken place in 1200BCE, so the source of queasiness,if there was one, was not the

volcano.

25 Cicero, De natura deorum (“On theNature of the Gods”), trans. H.Rackham, Loeb Classical Library,268 (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1933), 1.6, pp.17–19.

26 Ibid., p. 383.

27 Cicero, De officiis (“On Duties”),trans. Walter Miller, Loeb ClassicalLibrary, 30. (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1913),1.37, p. 137.

28 As I will discuss below, the wordtranslated here as “superstitition” isin Latin religio, that is, “religion.”

29 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the

Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols.,Loeb Classical Library, 184–85(Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1925), 2:531–33.

30 Epicurus’ epilogismos was a termfrequently used to suggest“reasoning based on empiricaldata,” but according to MichaelSchofield, it conveys “our everydayprocedures of assessment andappraisal”—Schofield, inRationality in Greek Thought, ed.Michael Frede and Gisele Striker(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).Schofield suggests that theseprocedures are linked to a famouspassage by Epicurus on time: “Wemust not adopt special expressions

for it, supposing that this will be animprovement; we must use just theexisting ones,” p. 222. The thinkingthat Epicurus urged upon hisfollowers was “a perfectly ordinarykind of activity available to all, not aspecial intellectualaccomplishment restricted to, forexample, mathematicians ordialecticians,” p. 235.

31 Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes(“Tusculan Disputations”), trans. J.E. King. Loeb Classical Library,141 (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1927), 1.6.10.

32 Ibid., 1.21.48–89.

33 The charge was made by“Timocrates, the brother of

Metrodorus, who was his[Epicurus’] disciple and then leftthe school,” in Diogenes Laertius,Lives of Eminent Philosophers,trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols., LoebClassical Library, 185 (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press,1925), 2:535.

34 Seneca, Ad Lucilium EpistulaeMorales, trans. Richard Gummere,3 vols. (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1917), 1:146.

35 Letter to Menoeceus, in Laertius,Lives, 2:657.

36 Philodemus, On Choices andAvoidances, trans. Giovanni Indelliand Voula Tsouna-McKirahan, LaScuola di Epicuro, 15 (Naples:

Bibliopolis, 1995), pp. 104–6.

37 Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed.Alvin B. Kernan, 2 vols. (NewHaven: Yale University Press,1974), II.ii.41–42; 72–87. Jonson isparticipating in a tradition ofrepresenting Epicurus as thepatron saint of the inn and thebrothel, a tradition that includesChaucer’s well-fed Franklin, who isdescribed in the Canterbury Talesas “Epicurus owene sone.”

38 Maxim #7, in Diogenes Laertius,Lives of Eminent Philosophers,trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols. LoebClassical Library, 185 (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press,1925; rev. ed. 1931), 1:665.

39 Vatican sayings 31, in A. A. Long

and D. N. Sedley, The HellenisticPhilosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1987), 1:150.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE TEETHOF TIME

1 Cf. Moritz W. Schmidt, De Didymo

Chalcentero (Oels: A. Ludwig,1851) and Didymi Chalcenterifragmenta (Leipzig: Teubner,1854).

2 Cf. David Diringer, The Book Before

Printing (New York: Dover Books,1982), pp. 241ff.

3 Diogenes Laertius: “Epicurus was amost prolific author and eclipsed allbefore him in the number of hiswritings: for they amount to aboutthree hundred rolls, and contain nota single citation from other authors;it is Epicurus himself who speaksthroughout”—Lives of EminentPhilosophers, 2:555. DiogenesLaertius lists the titles of thirty-seven books by Epicurus, all ofwhich have been lost.

4 Cf. Andrew M. T. Moore,“Diogenes’s Inscription atOenoanda,” in Dane R. Gordonand David B. Suits, eds., Epicurus:His Continuing Influence and

Contemporary Relevance(Rochester, NY: Rochester Instituteof Technology Cary Graphic ArtsPress, 2003), pp. 209–14. See TheEpicurean Inscription [of Diogenesof Oinoanda], ed. and trans. MartinFerguson Smith (Naples:Bibliopolis, 1992).

5 Aristotle, Historia animalium, trans.A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library,438 (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1965–91), 5:32.

6 Quoted in William Blades, TheEnemies of Books (London: ElliotStock, 1896), pp. 66–67.

7 Ovid, Ex ponto, trans. A. L. Wheeler,rev. G. P. Goold, 2nd edn.(Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1924), 1.1.73.

8 Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art ofPoetry, trans. H. RushtonFairclough, Loeb Classical Library,194 (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1926), Epistle1.20.12.

9 In Greek Anthology, trans. W. R.Paton, Loeb Classical Library, 84(Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1917), 9:251.(Evenus of Ascalon, fl. between 50BCE and 50 CE).

10 Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians ofLetters: Literacy, Power, and theTransmitters of Early ChristianLiterature (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000), p. 4.

11 Quoted in Lionel Casson, Libraries

in the Ancient World (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2001), p. 77.

12 Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script andBooks: The Book Arts fromAntiquity to the Renaissance(Chicago: American LibraryAssociation, 1991), p. 171. Seealso pp. 149–53.

13 On women copyists, see Haines-Eitzen.

14 It is estimated that the number ofbooks that had been producedcumulatively in the history of theworld before 1450 was equaled bythe number produced between1450 and 1500; that this number

was produced again between 1500and 1510; and that twice thisnumber was produced in the nextdecade.

15 On scribes, see L. D. Reynoldsand N. G. Wilson, Scribes andScholars: A Guide to theTransmission of Greek and LatinLiterature, 2nd edn. (London:Oxford University Press, 1974);Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books;Rosamond McKitterick, Books,Scribes and Learning in theFrankish Kingdoms, 6th–9thCenturies (Aldershot, UK:Variorum, 1994); M. B. Parkes,Scribes, Scripts, and Readers(London: Hambledon Press, 1991).On the symbolic significance of thescribe, cf. Giorgio Agamben,

Potentialities: Collected Essays inPhilosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 2000), pp. 246ff.Avicenna’s figure of “perfectpotentiality,” for example, is thescribe in the moment in which hedoes not write.

16 Huge granaries south ofAlexandria received endlessbargeloads of grain, harvested fromthe rich flood plains along the river.These had been scrutinized bylynx-eyed officials, appointed toensure that the grain was“unadulterated, with no admixtureo f earth or barley, untrodden andsifted”—Christopher Haas,Alexandria in Late Antiquity:Topography and Social Conflict

(Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1997), p. 42. Thesacks in their thousands were thentransported by canal to the harbor,where the grain fleet awaited them.From there the heavily laden shipsfanned out to cities whoseburgeoning populations had longoutstripped the capacity of thesurrounding countryside to supportthem. Alexandria was one of thekey control points in the ancientworld for bread and hence stabilityand hence power. Grain was notthe sole commodity that Alexandriacontrolled; the city’s merchantswere famous for the trade in wine,linens, tapestries, glass, and—most interesting for our purposes—papyrus. The huge marshes nearthe city were particularly suitable

for the cultivation of the reeds fromwhich the best paper was made.All through the ancient world, fromthe time of the Caesars to the ruleof the Frankish kings, “Alexandrianpapyrus” was the preferred mediumon which bureaucrats,philosophers, poets, priests,merchants, emperors, and scholarsgave orders, recorded debts, andwrote down their thoughts.

17 Ptolomey III (246–221 BCE) is saidto have sent messages to all therulers of the known world, askingfor books to copy. Officials wereunder order to confiscate frompassing ships all the books thatthey had on board. Copies of thesebooks were made and returned, butthe originals went into the great

library (where in the catalogue theywere marked “from the ships”).Royal agents fanned out throughthe Mediterranean to buy or borrowmore and more books. Lendersgrew increasingly wary—borrowedbooks had a way of not comingback—and demanded largedeposits. When, after intensecajoling, Athens agreed to lendAlexandria its preciousauthoritative texts of Aeschylus,Sophocles, and Euripides—textsthat were zealously guarded in thecity’s records office—the cityinsisted on the enormous bond of15 talents of gold. Ptolomey postedthe bond, received the books, sentcopies back to Athens, and,forfeiting the bond, deposited theoriginals in the Museum.

18 Ammianus Marcellinus, History,

Loeb Classical Library, 315(Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1940), 2:303. Cf.Rufinus: “The whole edifice is builtof arches with enormous windowsabove each arch. The hidden innerchambers are separate from oneanother and provide for theenactment of various ritual acts andsecret observances. Sitting courtsand small chapels with images ofthe gods occupy the edge of thehighest level. Lofty houses rise upthere in which the priests … areaccustomed to live. Behind thesebuildings, a freestanding porticoraised on columns and facinginward runs around the periphery.In the middle stands the temple,

built on a large and magnificentscale with an exterior of marbleand precious columns. Inside therewas a statue of Serapis so vast thatthe right hand touched one walland the left the other”—Cited inHaas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity,p. 148.

19 Alexandria was, as we have seen,a strategically important city, and itcould not escape the conflicts thatconstantly tore at the fabric ofRoman society. In 48 BCE, JuliusCaesar pursued his rival Pompeyto Alexandria. At the Egyptianking’s command, Pompey waspromptly murdered—his head waspresented to Caesar whoprofessed to be grief-stricken. Butthough he probably had no more

than 4,000 troops, Caesar decidedto remain and secure control of thecity. At one point in the course ofthe nine-month struggle thatfollowed, the gravely outnumberedRomans found themselvesthreatened by a royal fleet that hadsailed into the harbor. Using resin-smeared pine torches with anundercoating of sulfur, Caesar’sforces managed to set the ships onfire. The conflagration was intense,for the hulls were sealed withhighly flammable pitch and thedecks were caulked with wax.(Details of the firing of ancientfleets are from Lucan, Pharsalia,trans. Robert Graves [Baltimore:Penguin, 1957], p. 84, III:656–700).The fire leaped from the ships tothe shore and then spread through

the wharves to the library, or atleast to storehouses that held someof the collections. The booksthemselves were not the object ofattack; they were merelyconvenient combustible material.But burned books do not take intoconsideration the arsonist’sintentions. Caesar left theconquered city in the hands of thedeposed king’s glamorous andresourceful sister, Cleopatra. Someportion of the library’s losses mayhave been quickly restored—a fewyears later the besotted MarkAntony is said to have givenCleopatra some 200,000 booksthat he had looted from Pergamum.(Columns from Pergamum’s libraryare still visible among theimpressive ruins of that once great

city on Turkey’s Mediterraneancoast.) Books randomly stolen fromone library and dumped intoanother do not, however, make upfor the destruction of a collectionthat has been painstakingly andintelligently assembled. No doubtthe library staff worked feverishly torepair the losses, and theinstitution, with its scholars and itsenormous resources, remained acelebrated one. But the point musthave been painfully clear: Mars isan enemy of books.

20 It was not until 407 that bishops inthe empire were granted the legalauthority to close or demolishtemples—Haas, Alexandria in LateAntiquity, p. 160.

21 Rufinus, cited in ibid., pp. 161–62.

22 Greek Anthology, p. 172.

23 The Letters of Synesius of Cyrene,

trans. Augustine Fitzgerald (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1926), p.253. Something in Hepatia’s wholeway of being evidently excitedprofound respect, not only fromscholars but also from the greatmass of her fellow citizens. Ayoung man from Damascus whotraveled to Alexandria to studyphilosophy some two generationslater still heard stories of theadmiration that Hypatia aroused:“The entire city naturally loved herand held her in exceptionalesteem, while the powers-that-be

paid their respects first to her”—Damasci us, The PhilosophicalHistory, trans. PolhymniaAthanassiadi (Athens: ApameaCultural Association, 1999), p. 131.Cf. the poet Palladas’ praise ofHypatia:

Searching the zodiac, gazingon Virgo,Knowing your province isreally the heavens,Finding your brillianceeverywhere I look,I render you homage, reveredHypatia,Teaching’s bright star,unblemished, undimmed …

Poems, trans. Tony Harrison(London: Anvil Press Poetry,

1975), no. 67.

24 Socrates Scholasticus,Ecclesiastical History (London:Samuel Bagster & Sons, 1844), p.482.

25 See The Chronicle of John, Bishopof Nikiu [c. CE 690], trans. R. H.Charles (London: Text andTranslation Society, 1916): “shewas devoted at all times to magic,astrolabes and instruments ofmusic, and she beguiled manypeople through (her) Satanic wiles.And the governor of the cityhonoured her exceedingly; for shehad beguiled him through hermagic” (84:87–88), p. 100.

26 More than two hundred years later,

when the Arabs conqueredAlexandria, they evidently foundbooks on the shelves, but thesewere for the most part works ofChristian theology, not paganphilosophy, mathematics, andastronomy. When Caliph Omarwas asked what to do with thisremnant, he is said to have sent achilling reply: “If the content of thebooks is in accordance with thebook of Allah, we may do withoutthem, for in that case, the book ofAllah more than suffices. If, on theother hand, they contain matter notin accordance with the book ofAllah there can be no need topreserve them. Proceed, then, anddestroy them.” Quoted in RoyMacLeod, ed., The Library ofAlexandria: Centre of Learning in

the Ancient World (London: I. B.Tauris, 2004), p. 10. If the story is tobe believed, the papyrus rolls,parchments, and codices weredistributed to the public baths andburned in the stoves that heatedthe water. This fuel supply, legendhas it, lasted for some six months.See also Luciano Canfora, TheVanished Library: A Wonder of theAncient World, trans. Martin Ryle(Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1989), and Casson,Libraries in the Ancient World. OnHypatia, see Maria Dzielska,Hypatia of Alexandria (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press,1995).

27 Ammianus Marcellinus, History,trans. Rolfe, I: 47 (xiv.6.18).

28 Jerome, Select Letters of St.

Jerome, Loeb Classical Library,2362 (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1933), Letter XXII(to Eustochium), p. 125.

29 “When I was a young man, thoughI was protected by the rampart ofthe lonely desert, I could notendure against the promptings ofsin and the ardent heat of mynature. I tried to crush them byfrequent fasting, but my mind wasalways in a turmoil of imagination.To subdue it I put myself in thehands of one of the brethren whohad been a Hebrew before hisconversion, and asked him to teachme his language. Thus, afterhaving studied the pointed style of

Quintilian, the fluency of Cicero,the weightiness of Fronto, and thegentleness of Pliny, I now began tolearn the alphabet again andpractice harsh and guttural words[stridentia anhelantiaque verba]”—Jerome, Select Letters, p. 419. Inthe same letter, Jerome advises amonk, “Twist lines too for catchingfish, and copy out manuscripts, sothat your hand may earn you foodand your soul be satisfied withreading,” p. 419. The copying ofmanuscripts in monasticcommunities, as we have alreadyseen, turned out to be crucial to thesurvival of Lucretius and otherpagan texts.

30 Jerome, Select Letters, p. 127.

31 Ibid., p. 129.

32 “It is no small thing for a noble

man, a man fluent of speech, awealthy man, to avoid theaccompaniment of the powerful inthe streets, to mingle with thecrowds, to cleave to the poor, toassociate with peasants.” Ep. 66.6,in praise of Pammachius, cited inRobert A. Kaster, Guardians ofLanguage: The Grammarian andSociety in Late Antiquity (Berkeley:University of California Press,1988), p. 81.

33 Jerome, Select Letters, Letter XXII(to Eustochium), p. 125.

34 Pope Gregory I, Dialogues, trans.

Odo John Zimmerman(Washington, DC: CatholicUniversity of America Press, 1959),2:55–56.

35 Not everyone agreed that Platoand Aristotle could beaccommodated. Cf. Tertullian,“Against the Heretics,” ch. 7:

For philosophy is the materialof the world’s wisdom, therash interpreter of the natureand dispensation of God.Indeed heresies arethemselves instigated byphilosophy…. What indeedhas Athens to do withJerusalem? What has theAcademy to do with theChurch? What have heretics

to do with Christians? Ourinstruction comes from theporch of Solomon, who hadhimself taught that the Lordshould be sought in simplicityof heart. Away with allattempts to produce a Stoic,Platonic, and dialecticChristianity! We want nocurious disputation afterpossessing Christ Jesus, noinquisition after receiving thegospel! When we believe, wedesire no further belief. Forthis is our first article of faith,that there is nothing whichwe ought to believe besides.

S e e Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed.Alexander Roberts and JamesDonaldson, 10 vols. (Grand

Rapids: Wm. B. EerdmansPublishing Co., 1951), 3:246.Conversely, as we will see, effortswere made in the fifteenth centuryand later to reconcile Christianitywith a modified version ofEpicureanism.

36 Minucius Felix, Octavius, trans. T.R. Glover and Gerald H. Rendall,Loeb Classical Library, 250(Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1931), p. 345(mockery of Christians), p. 385(mockery of pagans). See,similarly, in the same volume,T e r t u l l i a n , Apologeticus(“Apology”), “I turn to your literature,by which you are trained in wisdomand the liberal arts; and whatabsurdities I find! I read how the

gods on account of Trojans andAchaeans fell to it and fought it outthemselves like so many pairs ofgladiators …,” p. 75.

37 Tertullian, Concerning theResurrection of the Flesh, trans. A.Souter (London: SPCK, 1922), pp.153–54.

38 Ibid., p. 91.

39 See James Campbell, “The AngryGod: Epicureans, Lactantius, andWarfare,” in Gordon and Suits,e d s . , Epicurus: His ContinuingInfluence and ContemporaryRelevance. The shift in Christianitytoward an angry God, Campbellobserves, comes only in the fourthcentury, with the growth of power

and prominence in the Romanworld. Before then, Christianity wascloser to the Epicururean attitudeand more sympathetic to itsdoctrines. “Indeed Tertullian,Clement of Alexandria, andAthenagoras found so much toadmire in Epicureanism thatRichard Jungkuntz has warned that‘any generalizations about patristicantipathy to Epicureanism reallyneed careful qualification to bevalid.’ The Epicurean practice ofthe social virtues, emphasis onforgiveness and mutualhelpfulness, and suspicion ofworldly values so closelyparalleled similar Christianattitudes that … DeWitt hasobserved that it ‘would have beensingularly easy for an Epicurean to

become of Christian’—and, onemight suppose, a Christian tobecome an Epicurean,” p. 47.

40 Then he added: “though indeedthe gods have already in theirwisdom destroyed their works, sothat most of their books are nolonger available”—Floridi onSextus, p. 13. In addition toEpicureans, Julian wishes toexclude Pyrrhonians, that is,philosophical skeptics.

41 Strictly speaking, the term did notmean atheist. An apikoros,explained Maimonides, was aperson who rejected revelation andinsisted that God had noknowledge or interest in humanaffairs.

42 Tertullian, Apologeticus, 45:7

(Loeb, p. 197).

43 See Lactantius, De ira (“A Treatiseon the Anger of God”), in Ante-Nicene Christian Fathers, ed.Roberts and Donaldson, vol. 7, ch.8.

44 See Lactantius, Divine Institutes,3–1.

45 Pope Gregory I, Dialogues, 2:60.

46 Flagellation had widespread useas a punishment in antiquity, andnot only in Rome: “If the guilty manis sentenced to be flogged,”Deuteronomy (25:2) declares, “thejudge shall cause him to lie down

and be beaten in his presence.”For the history of flagellation, seeNicklaus Largier, In Praise of theWhip: A Cultural History of Arousal,trans. Graham Harman (New York:Zone Books, 2007).

47 Public punishments did not, ofcourse, end with paganism or dieout in antiquity. Molinet reports thatthe citizens of Mons bought abandit at a high price in order toenjoy the pleasure of seeing himquartered, “at which the peoplewere happier than if a new sacredbody had been revived”—(Molinet,in Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear:The Emergence of a Western GuiltCulture, 13th–18th Centuries,trans. Eric Nicholson (New York:St. Martin’s Press, 1990; orig.

1983), p. 107. The Swiss diaristFelix Platter remembered all his lifesomething he had seen as a child:

A criminal, having raped aseventy-year-old woman,was flayed alive with burningtongs. With mine own eyes Isaw the thick smokeproduced by his living fleshthat had been subjected tothe tongs. He was executedby Master Nicolas,executioner of Berne, whohad come expressly for theevent. The prisoner was astrong and vigorous man. Onthe bridge over the Rhine,just nearby, they tore out hisbreast; then he was led to thescaffold. By now, he was

extremely feeble and bloodwas gushing from his hands.He could no longer remainstanding, he fell downcontinually. Finally, he wasdecapitated. They drove astake through his body, andthen his corpse was throwninto a ditch. I myself waswitness to his torture, myfather holding me by thehand.

48 One of these exceptions was St.

Anthony, who, according to hishagiographer, “possessed in a veryhigh degree apatheia—perfect self-control, freedom from passion….Christ, who was free from everyemotional weakness and fault, ishis model”—Athanasius [attr.], Life

of Anthony, section 67, quoted inPeter Brown, “Asceticism: Paganand Christian,” in Averil Cameronand Peter Garnsey, eds.,Cambridge Ancient History: LateEmpire, a.d. 337–425 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,2008), 13: 616.

49 See Peter Brown, The Rise ofWestern Christendom: Triumphand Diversity, a.d. 200–1000(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 221;R. A. Markus, The End of AncientChristianity (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1990); and Marilyn Dunn, TheEmergence of Monasticism: Fromthe Desert Fathers to the EarlyMiddle Ages (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000).

50 Nothing is ever—quite—an

innovation. The active pursuit ofpain in emulation or imitation of thesufferings of a deity has precedentsin the cults of Isis, Attis, and others.

51 Cited, with much other evidence, inLargier, In Praise of the Whip: ACultural History of Arousal, pp. 90,188.

52 Ibid., p. 36. Largier also rehearsesthe stories that follow.

CHAPTER FIVE: BIRTH ANDREBIRTH

1 Ernst Walser, Poggius Florentinus:

Leben und Werke (Hildesheim:Georg Olms, 1974).

2 Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato:Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410 (Boston: David Godine; 1986,orig. 1957).

3 Lauro Martines, The Social World ofthe Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1963), p. 22.

4 “By the end of the fourteenth centurythere was hardly a well-to-dohousehold in Tuscany without atleast one slave: brides broughtthem as part of their dowry, doctorsaccepted them from their patients

in lieu of fees—and it was notunusual to find them even in theservice of a priest”—Origo,Merchant of Prato, pp. 90–91.

5 Ibid., p. 109.

6 Fine wool was purchased fromMajorca, Catalonia, Provence, andthe Cotswolds (the last being themost expensive and highestquality) and shipped acrossborders and through a tangle ofrapacious tax authorities. Thedyeing and finishing requiredfurther imports: alum from the BlackSea (to make mordant for fixing thedyes), oak gall-nuts (to make thehighest quality purple-black ink),woad from Lombardy (for deepblue dyes and as a foundation for

other colors); madder from the LowCountries (for bright red dyes or,combined with woad, for dark redsand purples). And these were onlythe routine imports. Rarer dyes, thekind displayed on the costlyclothes proudly worn in aristocraticportraits from the period, includeddeep scarlet from murex shells inthe eastern Mediterranean,carmine red known as grana fromtiny cochineal insects, orange-redvermilion from a crystallinesubstance found on the shores ofthe Red Sea, and the extravagantlyexpensive and therefore muchprized kermis red from thepowdered remains of an orientallouse.

7 Martin Davis, “Humanism in Script

and Print,” in CambridgeCompanion to RenaissanceHumanism, ed. Jill Kraye(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996), p. 48. Theexperience, Petrarch remarked,was more like looking at a paintingthan reading a book.

8 Pious Christians were urged tosuppress its impulses and to spurnits contaminated fruits. ThoughDante’s poetry confers amagnificent dignity on Ulysses’determination to sail beyond thePillars of Hercules, the Infernomakes it clear that thisdetermination is the expression ofa fallen soul, condemned foreternity to reside near theinnermost circle of Hell.

9 See esp. Charles Trinkaus, “In Our

Image and Likeness”: Humanityand Divinity in Italian HumanistThought, 2 vols. (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1970).

10 “Aurum, argentum, gemmae,purpurea vestis, marmorea domus,cultus ager, pietae tabulae,phaleratus sonipes, caeteraque idgenus mutam habent etsuperficiariam voluptatem: librimedullitus delectant, colloquuntur,consultunt, et viva quaddam nobisatque arguta familiaritatejunguntur.” Quoted in JohnAddington Symonds, TheRenaissance in Italy, 7 vols. (NewYork: Georg Olms, 1971; orig.1875–86), 2:53 (translated by SG).

11 “Among the many subjects, I was

especially interested in antiquity,inasmuch as I have always dislikedmy own age, so that, had not loveof dear ones restrained me, I wouldalways have wanted to be born inany other age. In order to forget myown time, I have always tried toplace myself in spirit in othertimes.” Posteriati, ed. P.G. Ricci, inPetrarch, Prose, p. 7, quoted inRonald G. Witt, In the Footsteps ofthe Ancients: The Origins ofHumanism from Lovato to Bruni(Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 276.

12 The Doctor utriusque juris (DUJ)(the degree in both canon and civillaw) took ten years.

13 Witt, In the Footsteps, p. 263.

14 Rerum fam. XXII.2 in Familiari,

4:106, quoted in Witt, In theFootsteps, p. 62. The letterprobably dates to 1359.

15 Quoted in Martines, Social World,p. 25.

16 For Petrarch, there were valuesthat transcended mere style: “Whatgood will it do if you immerseyourself wholly in the Ciceroniansprings and know well the writingseither of the Greeks or of theRomans? You will indeed be ableto speak ornately, charmingly,sweetly, and sublimely; youcertainly will not be able to speak

seriously, austerely, judiciously,and, most importantly,uniformly”—Rerum fam. I.9, in Witt,In the Footstep s, p. 242.

17 in the early 1380s, at the urging ofa friend, he wrote a massivedefense of the monastic life, and hewas ready, even in the midst ofpraising active engagement, toacknowledge the superiority, atleast in principle, of contemplativewithdrawal.

18 See Salutati to Gaspare Squarode’ Broaspini in Verona, November17, 1377: “In this noble city, theflower of Tuscany and the mirror ofItaly, the match of that mostglorious Rome from which itdescends and whose ancient

shadows it follows in the strugglefor the salvation of Italy and thefreedom of all, here in Florence Ihave undertaken a labor that isunstinting but for which I amexceptionally grateful.” SeeEugenio Garin, La CulturaFilosofica del RenascimentoItaliano: Ricerche e Documenti(Florence: Sansuni, 1979), esp. pp.3–27.

19 Witt, In the Footsteps, p. 308.

20 Symonds, Renaissance in Italy,pp. 80–81.

21 “Just imagine,” Niccoli wrote to thefiscal officials near the end of hislife, “what sort of tax my poor goodscan bear, with all the debts and

pressing expenses I have. Which iswhy, begging your humanity andclemency, I pray that it will pleaseyou to treat me in such a way thatcurrent taxes will not force me inmy old age to die far from mybirthplace, where I have spent all Ihad.” Quoted in Martines, SocialWorld, p. 116.

22 Alberti, The Family inRenaissance Florence (Libri dellaFamiglia), trans. Renée NeuWatkins (Columbia: University ofSouth Carolina Press, 1969), 2:98.It is sometimes claimed that thisvision of companionate marriagewas only introduced byProtestantism, but there isconsiderable evidence of itsexistence much earlier.

23 Origo, Merchant of Prato, p. 179.

24 Vespasiano da Bisticci, The

Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of theIllustrious Men of the XV Century,trans. William George and EmilyWaters (London: Routledge, 1926),p. 402.

25 “One day, when Nicolao wasleaving his house, he saw a boywho had around his neck achalcedony engraved with a figureby the hand of Polycleitus, abeautiful work. He enquired of theboy his father’s name, and havinglearnt this, sent to ask him if hewould sell the stone; the fatherreadily consented, like one whoneither knew what it was nor

valued it. Nicolao sent him fiveflorins in exchange, and the goodman to whom it had belongeddeemed that he had paid him morethan double its value”—Ibid., p.399. In this case at least, theexpenditure proved a very goodinvestment: “There was in Florencein the time of Pope Eugenius acertain Maestro Luigi, the Patriarch,who took great interest in suchthings as these, and he sent wordto Nicolao, asking if he might seethe chalcedony. Nicolao sent it tohim, and it pleased him so greatlythat he kept it, and sent to Nicolaotwo hundred golden ducats, and heurged him so much that Nicolao,not being a rich man, let him haveit. After the death of this Patriarch itpassed to Pope Paul, and then to

Lorenzo de’ Medici,” ibid., p. 399.For a remarkable tracking of themovements through time of asingle ancient cameo, see LucaGiul iani, Ein Geschenk für denKaiser: Das Geheimnis desgrossen Kameo (Munich: Beck,2010).

26 In reality, Niccoli’s visionexceeded his means: he diedmassively in debt. But the debt wascanceled by his friend Cosimo de’Medici, in exchange for the right todispose of the collection. Half ofthe manuscripts went to the newLibrary of S. Marco, where theywere housed in Michelozzi’smagnificent structure; the other halfformed the core of the city’s greatLaurentian Library. Though he was

responsible for its creation, theidea of the public library was notNiccoli’s alone. It had been calledfor by Salutati. Cf. Berthold L.Ullman and Philip A. Stadter, ThePublic Library of RenaissanceFlorence: Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimode’ Medici, and the Library of SanMarco (Padua: Antenore, 1972), p.6.

27 Cino Rinuccini, Invettiva contro acierti calunniatori di Dante e dimesser Francesco Petrarcha anddi messer Giovanni Boccacio, citedin Witt, In the Footsteps, p. 270.See Ronald Witt, “Cino Rinuccini’sRisponsiva alla Invetirra di MesserAntonio Lusco, ” RenaissanceQuarterly 23 (1970), pp. 133–49.

28 Bruni, Dialogus 1, in Martines,

Social World, p. 235.

29 Ibid.

30 Martines, Social World, p. 241.

31 Vespasiano Memoirs, p. 353.

32 Martines, Social World, p. 265.

CHAPTER SIX: IN THE LIEFACTORY

1 See Poggio to Niccoli, February 12,

1421: “For I am not one of those

perfect men, who are commandedto abandon father and mother andsell everything and give to thepoor; that power belonged to veryfew people and only long ago, inan earlier age”—Gordan, TwoRenaissance Book Hunters, p. 49.

2 William Shepherd, Life of PoggioBracciolini (Liverpool: Longman etal., 1837), p. 185.

3 Gordan, Two Renaissance BookHunters, p. 58.

4 Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men: ThePapal Civil Service in theRenaissance (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1990), p. 115.

5 Lapo da Castiglionchio, On the

Excellence and Dignity of theRoman Court, in ChristopherCelenza, Renaissance Humanismand the Papal Curia: Lapo daCastiglionchio the Younger’s Decuriae commodis (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press,1999), p. 111.

6 Ibid., p. 127.

7 Ibid., p. 155.

8 Ibid., p. 205.

9 See Celenza, RenaissanceHumanism and the Papal Curia,pp. 25–26.

10 Ibid., p. 177.

11 Poggio, The Facetiae, or Jocose

Tales of Poggio , 2 vols. (Paris:Isidore Liseux, 1879), Conclusion,p. 231. (References are to thevolume in this Paris edition and tothe number of the tale.) Themanuscript of the Facetiae did notappear until 1457, two years beforePoggio’s death, but Poggiorepresents the stories as circulatingamong the scriptors andsecretaries many years earlier. Cf.Lionello Sozzi, “Le ‘Facezie’ e laloro fortuna Europea,” in PoggioBracciolini 1380–1980: Nel VIcentenario della nascità (Florence:Sansoni, 1982), pp. 235–59.

12 Ibid., 1:16.

13 Ibid., 1:50.

14 Ibid., 1:5, 1:45, 1:123, 2:133.

15 Ibid., 2:161.

16 Jesús Martínez de Bujanda, Index

des Livres Interdits, 11 vols.(Sherbrooke, Quebec: Centred’études de la Renaissance;Geneva: Droz; Montreal:Médiaspaul, 1984–2002), 11(Rome):33.

17 Poggio, Facetiae, 1:23.

18 Ibid., 1:113.

19 Ibid., 2:187.

20 John Monfasani, George of

Trebizond: A Biography and aStudy of His Rhetoric and Logic(Leiden: Brill, 1976), p. 110.

21 Symonds, The Revival of Learning(New York: C. P. Putnam’s Sons,1960), p. 176. “In the fifteenthcentury scholarship was all-absorbing,” p. 177.

22 “Aspira ad virtutem recta, non hactortuosa ac fallaci via; fac, ut mensconveniat verbis, opera sintostentationi similia; enitere utspiritus paupertas vestiumpaupertatem excedat, tunc fugiessimulatoris crimen; tunc tibit etreliquis proderis vera virtute. Seddum te quantunvis hominem

humilem et abiectum videroCuriam frequentatem, non solumhypocritam, sed pessimumhypocritam iudicabo.” (17: p. 97).Poggio Bracciolini, Opera omnia, 4vols. (Turin: Erasmo, 1964–69).

23 Gordan, Two Renaissance BookHunters, pp. 156, 158.

24 Ibid., p. 54.

25 Ibid., p. 75.

26 Ibid., p. 66.

27 Ibid., p. 68.

28 Ibid., pp. 22–24.

29 Ibid., p. 146.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., p. 148.

32 Ibid., p. 164.

33 Ibid., p. 166.

34 Ibid., p. 173.

35 Ibid., p. 150.

36 The precise date of Poggio’s

appointment as apostolic secretaryto John XXIII is unclear. In 1411 hewas listed as the pope’s scriptorand close associate (familiaris).But a papal bull of June 1, 1412, is

signed by Poggio as Secretarius(as is a later bull, dating from thetime of the General Council ofConstance), and Poggio referred tohimself during this period asPoggius Secretarius apostolicus.Cf. Walser, Poggius Florentinus:Leben und Werke, p. 25, n4.

CHAPTER SEVEN: A PIT TOCATCH FOXES

1 For much of the fourteenth century

the popes had resided at Avignon;only in 1377 did the French-bornGregory XI, supposedly inspired bythe stirring words of St. Catherine

of Siena, return the papal court toRome. When Gregory died the nextyear, crowds of Romans, fearingthat a new French pope wouldalmost certainly be drawn back tothe civilized pleasures and securityof Avignon, encircled the conclaveof cardinals and noisily demandedthe election of an Italian. TheNeapolitan Bartolomeo Prignanowas duly elected and assumed thetitle Urban VI. Five months later theFrench faction of cardinals,claiming that they had beencoerced by a howling mob and thatthe election was therefore invalid,held a new conclave in which theyelected Robert of Geneva, whosettled in Avignon and calledhimself Clement VII. There werenow two rival popes.

The French faction had chosena hard man for a hard time: Robertof Geneva had distinguishedhimself the year before, when aspapal legate in charge of acompany of Breton soldiers, hepromised a complete amnesty tothe rebellious citizens of Cesena ifthey would open their gates to him.When the gates were opened, heordered a general massacre. “Killthem all,” he was heard shouting.Urban VI, for his part, raised moneyto hire mercenaries, busied himselfwith the fantastically complicatedalliances and betrayals of Italianpolitics, enriched his family,narrowly escaped traps set for him,ordered the torture and executionof his enemies, and repeatedly fledfrom and reentered Rome. Urban

declared his French rival theantipope; Robert declared Urbanthe anti-Christ. The sordid detailsdo not directly concern us—by thetime Poggio came on the scene,both Robert of Geneva and UrbanVI were dead and had beenreplaced by other equallyproblematical contenders for thepapal see.

2 See Poggio’s melancholyobservation in De varietatefortunae: “Survey the … hills of thecity, the vacant space is interruptedonly by ruins and gardens”—Quoted in Edward Gibbon, TheHistory of the Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire, 6 vols. (NewYork: Knopf, 1910), 6:617.

3 Ibid., 6:302. Gibbon uses this

passage as the climax of his vastmagnum opus, the summaryarticulation of the disaster that hadbefallen Rome.

4 Eustace J. Kitts, In the Days of theCouncils: A Sketch of the Life andTimes of Baldassare Cossa(Afterward Pope John the Twenty-Third) (London: ArchibaldConstable & Co., 1908), p. 152.

5 Ibid., pp. 163–64.

6 Ulrich Richental, Chronik desKonstanzer Konzils 1414–1418(“Richental’s Chronicle of theCouncil of Constance”), in TheCouncil of Constance: The

Unification of the Church, ed. JohnHine Mundy and Kennerly M.Woody, trans. Louise RopesLoomis (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1961), pp. 84–199.

7 See, e.g., Remigio Sabbadini, LeScoperte dei Codici Latini e Grecine Secoli XIV e XV (Florence:Sansoni, 1905), 1:76–77.

8 “Richental’s Chronicle,” p. 190.

9 “Some have said that a great crowdof persons were executed forrobbery, murder, and other crimes,but that is not the truth. I could notlearn from our magistrates atConstance that more than twenty-two had been put to death for any

such cause”—“Richental’sChronicle,” p. 157.

10 Ibid., pp. 91, 100.

11 Quoted in Gordon Leff, Heresy,Philosophy and Religion in theMedieval West (Aldershot, UK:Ashgate, 2002), p 122.

12 Kitts, In the Days of the Councils,p. 335.

13 “Richental’s Chronicle,” p. 114.

14 Ibid., p. 116.

15 This is Richental’s account.Another contemporary observer,Guillaume Fillastre, has a different

version of the event: “the Pope,realizing his situation, left the cityby river during the night betweenWednesday and Thursday, March21, after midnight, under escortprovided by Frederick, duke ofAustr i a ”—i n The Council ofConstance, p. 222.

16 Fillastre in The Council ofConstance, p. 236.

17 E. H. Gillett, The Life and Times ofJohn Huss, 2 vols. (Boston: Gould& Lincoln, 1863), 1:508.

18 Kitts, In the Days of the Councils,pp. 199–200.

19 Poggio’s long letter about Jeromeand Bruni’s alarmed reply are

quoted in William Shepherd, TheLife of Poggio Bracciolini(Liverpool: Longman et al., 1837),pp. 78–90.

20 Richental’s Chronicle,” p. 135.Poggio, however, who claimed thathe “was a witness of his end, andobserved every particular of itsprocess,” told Bruni that “neitherdid Mutius suffer his hand to beburnt so patiently as Jeromeendured the burning of his wholebody; nor did Socrates drink thehemlock as cheerfully as Jeromesubmitted to the fire” (Shepherd, p.88). Poggio’s reference is toMucius Scaevola, the legendaryRoman hero who stoically thrusthis hand into the flames and thusimpressed Rome’s enemy, the

Etruscan Porsenna.

21 This and the quotes to follow arefrom a letter to Niccoli, May 18,1416, in Gordan, TwoRenaissance Book Hunters, pp.26–30.

22 L. D. Reynolds, Texts andTransmission: A Survey of theLatin Classics (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1983), p. 158. Thecommentary was by the fourth-century Roman grammarianDonatus.

23 Poggio’s transcription of theCiceronian speeches that he haddiscovered was identified in theVatican Library [Vatican lat. 11458(X)] by A. Campana in 1948, with

the following subscription: Hasseptem M. Tulii orationes, queantea culpa temporum apud Italosdeperdite erant, PoggiusFlorentinus, perquisitis plurimisGallie Germanieque summo cumstudio ac diligentia bibyothecis,cum latenetes comperisset insqualore et sordibus, in lucemsolus extulit ac in pristinamdignitatem decoremque restituensLatinis musis dicavit (p. 91).

24 In the continuation of thisdescription of the tatteredmanuscript, Poggio fantasizes thatQuinti l ian’s Institutes had beeninstrumental in saving the RomanRepublic. Hence he imagines thatthe “imprisoned” Quintilian feels it“a disgrace that he who had once

preserved the safety of the wholepopulation by his influence and hiseloquence could now not find onesingle advocate who would pity hismisfortunes and take some troubleover his welfare and prevent hisbeing dragged off to anundeserved punishment”—Letter toNiccoli, December 15, 1425, inGordan, Two Renaissance BookHunters, p. 105). In these wordsone may perhaps glimpse a twingeof Poggio’s own guilty conscienceat witnessing Jerome’scondemnation and execution. Orrather, the rescue of the manuscriptstands in for a failed rescue: savinga classical text from the clutches ofthe monks was a liberation thatPoggio could not possibly havebrought about for eloquent,

doomed Jerome.

25 Ibid., Letter IV, p. 194.

26 Ibid., Letter IV, p. 197.

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE WAYTHINGS ARE

1 The key role played by Lucretius in

early modern philosophy andnatural science has been subtlyexplored by Catherine Wilson:Epicureanism at the Origins ofModernity (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 2008). See also W. R.Johnson, Lucretius and the Modern

World (London: Duckworth, 2000);Dane R. Gordon and David B.Su i ts , Epicurus: His ContinuingInfluence and ContemporaryRelevance (Rochester, NY: RITCary Graphic Arts Press, 2003);and Stuart Gillespie and DonaldMackenzie, “Lucretius and theModerns,” in The CambridgeCompanion to Lucretius, ed. StuartGillespie and Philip Hardie(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2007), pp. 306–24.

2 George Santayana, ThreePhilosophical Poets: Lucretius,Dante, and Goethe (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press,1947), p. 23.

3 This is one of those innumerable

moments in which Lucretius’dazzling verbal skills are inevitablylost in translation. Here indescribing the innumerablecombinations, he plays with similarwords jostling one another: “sedquia multa modis multis mutata peromne.”

4 In The Logic of Sense, trans. MarkLester with Charles Stivale, ed.Constantin V. Boundas (New York:Columbia University Press, 1990),Gilles Deleuze explores therelationship between this minimal,indeterminate motion of atoms andmodern physics.

5 “If all movements are invariablyinterlinked, if new movement arisesfrom the old in unalterable

succession, if there is no atomicswerve [declinando … primordiamotus] to initiate movement thatcan annul the decrees of destinyand prevent the existence of anendless chain of causation, what isthe source of this free willpossessed by living creatures allover the earth? What, I ask, is thesource of this power of will wrestedfrom destiny, which enables eachof us to advance where pleasuresleads us …?” (2.251–58).

6 Both willing oneself to go forwardand willing oneself to remainstationary are only possiblebecause everything is not strictlydetermined, that is, because of thesubtle, unpredictable, freemovements of matter. What keeps

the mind from being crushed byinner necessity is “the minuteswerve [clinamen principiorum] ofthe atoms at unpredictable placesand times” (2.293–94).

7 Just as there is no divine grace inany of this tangled history ofdevelopment, there is no perfect orfinal form. Even the creatures thatflourish are beset with flaws,evidence that their design is not theproduct of some sublime higherintelligence but of chance.Lucretius articulated, in effect, whathuman males, with chagrin, mightcall the principle of the prostate.

8 Cf. Dryden’s translation of theselines:

Thus like a sailor by thetempest hurledAshore, the babe isshipwrecked on the world:Naked he lies, and ready toexpire;Helpless of all that humanwants require:Exposed upon unhospitableearth,From the first moment of hishapless birth.

John Dryden, Complete Poems,ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1958), 1:421.Here and elsewhere I havemodernized Dryden’s spelling andpunctuation.

9 “For example, often before a god’s

gracefully ornamented shrine a calffalls a victim beside the incense-smoking altars, and with its lastbreath spurts a hot stream of bloodfrom its breast. Meanwhile thebereaved mother ranges throughgreen glades searching the groundfor the imprint of those clovenhoofs. With her eyes she exploresevery place in the hope that shewill be able to spy somewhere theyoung one she has lost. Now shehalts and fills the leafy grove withher plaintive calls. Time after timeshe returns to the cowshed, herheart transfixed with longing for hercalf” (2.352–60). This passage, ofcourse, does more than make thepoint that a particular cow can

identify its particular calf: itregisters once again thedestructiveness, themurderousness, of religion, thistime from the perspective of theanimal victim. The whole sacrificialcult, at once unnecessary andcruel, is set against somethingintensely natural, not only thecapacity of a mother to identify heroffspring but also the deep lovethat lies behind this identification.Animals are not material machines—they are not simply programmed,as we would say, to care for theiryoung; they feel emotions. And onemember of the species cannotsimply substitute for another, as ifindividual creatures wereinterchangeable.

10 “Whose heart does not contract

with dread of the gods, and whodoes not cower in fear, when thescorched earth shudders beneaththe terrible stroke of thethunderbolt, and rumbles ofthunder run across the vastheaven?” (5:1218–21).

11 Hans Blumenberg, in his elegantshort book on this passage,Shipwreck with Spectator:Paradigm of a Metaphor forExistence, trans. Steven Rendall(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997)shows that over the course ofcenturies of brooding andcommenting on this passage, thespectator tended to lose hisprivileged position of distance: we

are on the ship.

12 A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats:Man and Poet, 2nd. edn. (London:Routledge & Kegan Paul,1962), p.267, cited by David Hopkins, “TheEnglish Voices of Lucretius fromLucy Hutchinson to John MasonGood,” in The CambridgeCompanion to Lucretius, p. 266.Here is Dryden’s translation of thepassage:

When Love its utmost vigordoes imploy,Ev’n tben, ’tis but a restlesswandring joy:Nor knows the Lover, in thatwild excess,With hands or eyes, what firsthe would possess:

But strains at all; andfast’ning where he strains,Too closely presses with hisfrantic pains;With biting kisses hurts thetwining fair,Which shows his joysimperfect, unsincere. (1:414)

To modern ears, “unsincere”sounds strange, but it is a Latinism.Sincerus in Latin can mean “pure,”and Lucretius writes that the storm-tossed violence arises from the factthat the lovers’ pleasure is notpure: quia non est pura voluptas(4:1081).

13 “Just like thirsty people who indreams desire to drink and, insteadof obtaining water to quench the

fire that consumes their limbs, withvain effort pursue images of waterand remain thirsty, though theydrink in the midst of a torrentstream, so, in love, lovers aredeluded by Venus with images: nomatter how intently they gaze at thebeloved body, they cannot satetheir eyes; nor can they removeanything from the velvety limbs thatthey explore with roving, uncertainhands.” (4.1097–1104).

14 Here is Smith’s more workmanlikeprose translation:

At last, with limbs interlocked,they enjoy the flower ofyouth: the body has apresentiment of ecstasy, andVenus is on the point of

sowing the woman’s fields;they greedily press body tobody and intermingle thesalivas of their mouths,drawing deep breaths andcrushing lips with teeth. But itis all in vain, since theycannot take away anythingfrom their lover’s body orwholly penetrate it and mergeinto it. At times they doindeed seem to be strivingand struggling to do this: soeagerly do they remainfettered in the bonds ofVenus, while their limbs areslackened and liquefied bythe force of ecstasy.

15 Smith’s prose translation of the

opening lines reads:

Mother of Aeneas’ people,delight of human beings andthe gods, Venus, power oflife, it is you who beneath thesky’s sliding stars inspirit theship-bearing sea, inspirit theproductive land. To you everykind of living creature owesits conception and firstglimpse of the sun’s light.You goddess, at your cominghush the winds and scatterthe clouds, for you thecreative earth thrusts upfragrant flowers, for you thesmooth stretches of theocean smile, and the sky,tranquil now, is flooded witheffulgent light.

Once the door to spring is

flung open and Favonius’fertilizing breeze, releasedfrom imprisonment, is active,first, goddess, the birds of theair, pierced to the heart withyour powerful shafts, signalyour entry. Next wildcreatures and cattle boundover rich pastures and swimrushing rivers: so surely arethey all captivated by yourcharm and eagerly followyour lead. Then you injectseductive love into the heartof every creature that lives inthe seas and mountains andriver torrents and bird-haunted thickets and verdantplains, implanting in it thepassionate urge to reproduceits kind.

CHAPTER NINE: THE RETURN

1 Letter to Francesco Barbaro, in

Gordan, Two Renaissance BookHunters, Appendix: Letter VIII, p.213.

2 The textual history of Lucretius hasoccupied scholars for manygenerations and was the object ofthe most famous of all philologicalreconstructions, that of the greatGerman classicist Karl Lachmann(1793–1851). The lost scribal copy,made for Poggio, is known totextual scholars as the Poggianus.

I have been greatly assisted ingrasping the complexity of thetextual issues by D. J. Butterfield ofCambridge University, to whom Iam indebted.

3 Ibid., pp. 38, 46.

4 Ibid., pp. 46, 48.

5 Ibid., p. 74.

6 Ibid., p. 65.

7 Ibid., pp. 89, 92.

8 and the quotes that follow: Ibid., pp.110, 154, 160.

9 The copies Niccoli made of a

substantial number of ancient textshave survived and are in the SanMarco collection to which he willedhis library. These include, inaddition to the Lucretius, works byPlautus, Cicero, Valerius Flaccus,Celsus, Aulus Gellius, Tertullian,Plutarch, and Chrysostom. Others—including the copy of AsconiusPedianus mentioned by Poggio—are lost. See B. L. Ullman andPhilip A. Stadter, The PublicLibrary of Renaissance Florence.Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimo de’ Mediciand the Library of San Marco(Padua: Antenore, 1972), p. 88.

10 Gordan, Two Renaissance BookHunters, pp. 147, 166–67.

11 As Lauro Martines notes, power

and wealth had shifted in thethirteenth century from the oldfeudal nobility to the merchantclass, to families like the Albizzi,Medici, Rucellai, and Strozzi. But,though not any longer verywealthy, the bride’s father wasreasonably prosperous. “In 1427Vaggia’s father, Gino, claimed onelarge house with a courtyard andshop, two cottages, four farms,various land parcels, and somelivestock. His remaining assetsincluded an outstanding credit of858 florins and government bondswith a market value of 118 florins.Altogether his gross capital cameto 2424 florins. The debts on thisestate amounted to 500 florins, andrental and subsistence deductionsreduced Gino’s taxable capital to

336 florins. Consequently,Poggio’s match with Vaggia washardly contracted with an eye (onhis part) to forming an alliance witha moneyed family. Nevertheless,she brought him a dowry whosevalue, 600 florins, conformed withthe dowries customarily given bythe political families of mediumstature, or by the distinguished oldfamilies (somewhat down at heel)whose major social virtue was theirblood”—Lauro Martines, TheSocial World of the FlorentineHumanists, 1390–1460, (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1963),pp. 211–12.

12 William Shepherd, Life of PoggioBracciolini (Liverpool: Longman etal., 1837), p. 394.

13 Quoted in Charles Trinkaus, In Our

Image and Likeness: Humanity andDivinity in Italian HumanistThought, 2 vols. (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1970),1:268.

CHAPTER TEN: SWERVES

1 Quoted in Alison Brown, The Return

of Lucretius to RenaissanceFlorence (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2010), p. 49. Cf.Girolamo Savonarola, Predichesopra Amos e Zacaria, no. 3(February 19, 1496), ed. Paolo

Ghiglieri (Rome: A. Belardetti,1971), 1:79–81. See also PeterG o d m a n , From Poliziano toMachiavelli: Florentine Humanismin the High Renaissance(Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1998), p. 140, and JillKraye, “The Revival of HellenisticPhilosophies,” in The CambridgeCompanion to RenaissancePhilosophy, ed. James Hankins(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2007), esp. pp. 102–6.

2 On Machiavelli’s Lucretiusmanuscript, see Brown, Return ofLucretius, pp. 68–87, andAppendix, pp. 113–22.

3 See James Hankins, “Ficino’sTheology and the Critique of

Lucretius,” forthcoming in theproceedings of the conference onPlatonic Theology: Ancient,Medieval and Renaissance, held atthe Villa I Tatti and the IstitutoNazionale di Studi sulRinascimento, Florence, April 26–27, 2007.

4 On the controversy, see Salvatore I.Camporeale, “Poggio Bracciolinicontro Lorenzo Valla. Le ‘Orationesin L. Vallam,’” in PoggioBracciolini, 1380–1980 (Florence:Sansoni, 1982), pp. 137–61. Onthe whole problem of orthodoxy inValla (and Ficino as well), seeChristopher S. Celenza’si l l uminati ng The Lost ItalianRenaissance: Humanists,Historians, and Latin’s Legacy

(Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2006), pp. 80–114.

5 “Nunc sane video, cur in quodamtuo opusculo, in quo Epicureorumcausam quantam datur tutaris,vinum tantopere laudasti …Bacchum compotatoresque adeoprofuse laudans, ut epicureolumquendam ebrietatis assertorem teesse profitearis … Quid contravirginitatem insurgis, quodnumquam fecit Epicurus? Tuprostitutas et prostibula laudas,quod ne gentiles quidem unquamfecerunt. Non verbis oris tuisacrilegi labes, sed igne estexpurganda, quem spero te nonevasurum.” Cited in Don CameronAllen, “The Rehabilitation of

Epicurus and His Theory ofPleasure in the EarlyRenaissance,” Studies in Philology41 (1944), pp. 1–15.

6 Valla directly quotes Lucretius, butonly passages he could havefound in Lactantius and otherChristian texts.

7 Indeed that spokesman, not afictional character but thecontemporary poet Maffeo Vegio,makes it clear that even he is notreally an Epicurean, but that he iswilling to play the role of adefender of pleasure in order torefute Stoical arguments for virtueas the highest good that, in hisview, represent a far more seriousthreat to Christian orthodoxy.

8 Lorenzo Valla, De vero falsoque

bono/On Pleasure, trans. A. KentHieatt and Maristella Lorch (NewYork: Abaris Books, 1977), p. 319. Iwill use the better known title, Devoluptate, throughout.

The text of Valla’s in questionactually deploys several differentstrategies in addition to dialogicaldisavowal to protect its author fromthe charge of Epicureanism. Vallahas good grounds then forindignantly rejecting Poggio’scharge of Epicureanism. TheEpicurean arguments that take upthe entire second book of Devoluptate and much of the first arecarefully framed by properChristian doctrines, doctrines thatthe narrator and the other

interlocutors unanimously declarehave carried the day.

9 Valla, De voluptate, pp. 219–21.

10 Ibid., p. 221.

11 Ibid., p. 295.

12 Cf. Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets:Renaissance Authority and ItsSubversion,” in Glyph 8 (1981), pp.40–61.

13 See Michele Marullo, Inni Naturali(Florence: Casa Editrice le Lettere,1995); on Bruno andEpicureanism, see, among otherworks, Hans Blumenberg, TheLegitimacy of the Modern Age(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983;

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983;orig. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit,1966).

14 “L’anima è sol … in un pan biancocaldo un pinocchiato”—Brown,Return of Lucretius, p. 11.

15 Erasmus, “The Epicurean,” in TheColloquies of Erasmus, trans.Craig R. Thompson (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1965),pp. 538, 542. On Erasmus’scriticism of Marullo, see P. S. Allen,Opus Epistolarum des. ErasmiRoterodami, 12 vols. (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1906–58),2:187; 5:519, trans. in CollectedWorks of Erasmus (Toronto:University of Toronto Press,1974–), 3:225; 10:344.Contemporaries of Erasmus: A

Biographical Register of theRenaissance and Reformation, ed.P. G. Bietenholz and Thomas B.Deutscher (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2003), 2:398–99.

16 Cited in More, Utopia, ed. GeorgeM. Logan and Robert M. Adams(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress; rev. edn. 2002), p. 68.

17 More plays a characteristicallybrilliant and self-conscious game inUtopia with the complex factorsthat led ancient texts to survive orperish, including the role ofaccident: “When about to go on thefourth voyage,” Hythloday remarks,“I put on board, in place of wares tosell, a fairly large package ofbooks, having made up my mind

never to return rather than to comeback soon. They received from memost of Plato’s works, several ofAristotle’s, as well asTheophrastus on plants, which Iregret to say was mutilated in parts.During the voyage an ape foundthe book, left lying carelesslyabout, and in wanton sport tore outand destroyed several pages invarious sections,” p. 181.

18 At the time I am writing this essay,in the United States one out ofevery nine African Americans agedtwenty to thirty-five is incarcerated,while the United States hasachieved the greatest disparity inwealth of any time in the pastcentury.

19 Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano

Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (NewYork: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,2008), pp. 17–18, translatingSpaccio de la Bestia Trionfante, 1,part 3, in Dialoghi Italiani, ed.Giovanni Gentile (Florence:Sansoni, 1958), pp. 633–37.

20 Walter L. Wakefield, “SomeUnorthodox Popular Ideas of theThirteenth Century,” in Medievaliaet Humanistica, p. 28.

21 John Edwards, “Religious Faithand Doubt in Late Medieval Spain:Soria circa 1450–1500,” in Pastand Present 120 (1988), p. 8.

22 Giordano Bruno, The Ash

Wednesday Supper, ed. and trans.Edward A. Gosselin and LawrenceS. Lerner (Hamden, CT: ArchonBooks, 1977), p. 91.

23 Jacopo Corbinelli, the Florentinesecretary to Queen MotherCatherine de Medicis, cited inRowland, Giordano Bruno, p. 193.

24 Ash Wednesday Supper, p. 87.

25 De l’Infinito, Universo e Mondi,Dialogue Quinto, in DialoghiItaliani, pp. 532–33, citing Dererum natura, 2:1067–76.

26 See J. W. Shirley, ed., ThomasHarriot: Renaissance Scientist(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)and Shirley, Thomas Harriot: A

Biography (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1983); J. Jacquot, “ThomasHarriot’s Reputation for Impiety,”Notes and Records of the RoyalSociety 9 (1951–2), pp. 164–87.

27 Ash Wednesday Supper, p. 90.

CHAPTER ELEVEN:AFTERLIVES

1 A famous exception was the

inquisitorial investigation of PaoloVeronese for his 1573 depiction ofthe Last Supper, whose intensemateriality—the swirling life, thefood on the table, the dogs

scratching and scrounging forscraps, and so forth—triggeredaccusations of irreverence andeven heresy. Veronese avoidedunpleasant consequences byrenaming the work The Feast in theHouse of Levi.

2 Jonson wrote his name on the titlepage and, tiny as the book is—only11 by 6 centimeters—he mademany marks and jottings in themargins, evidence of an attentiveand engaged reading. He seems tohave been particularly struck by thepassage in book 2 in whichLucretius denies that the godshave any interest in the behavior ofmortals. At the foot of the page, hepenned a translation of two of thelines:

Far above grief & dangers,those blest powers,Rich in their active goods,need none of ours.

Cf. 2:649–50:

Nam privati dolori omni,privata periclis,ipsa suis pollens opibus, nilindiga nostri.

Lucy Hutchinson translates thelines as follows:

The devine nature doth itselfe possesseEternally in peacefullquiettnesse,Nor is concernd in mortall

mens affairs,Wholly exempt from dangers,griefes, and cares,Rich in it selfe, of us no wantit hath.

3 The Complete Essays of Montaigne,

trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1957),pp. 846, 240.

4 Ibid., p. 318.

5 Ibid., p. 397.

6 Ibid., p. 310.

7 The quotations that follow are fromibid., pp. 464, 634, and 664.

8 Ibid., p. 62.

9 Ibid., p. 65.

10 M. A. Screech, Montaigne’s

Annotated Copy of Lucretius: ATranscription and Study of theManuscript, Notes, and Pen-Marks(Geneva: Droz, 1998).

11 “Ut sunt diuersi atomorum motusnon incredibile est sic conuenisseolim atomos aut conuenturas utalius nascatur montanus.”—Ibid., p.11. I have altered Screech’stranslation: “Since the movementsof the atoms are so varied, it is notunbelievable that the atoms oncecame together, or will togetheragain in the future, so that anotherMontaigne be born.”

12 Trevor Dadson, “Las bibliotecas de

la nobleza: Dos inventarios y unlibrero, año de 1625,” in AuroraEgido and José Enrique Laplana,eds., Mecenazgo y Humanidadesen tiempos de Lastanosa.Homenaje a la memoria deDomingo Ynduráin (Zaragoza:Institución Fernando el Católico,2008), p. 270. I am grateful toProfessor Dadson’s research intoSpanish library inventories for all ofthe glimpses of Lucretius in post-Tridentine Spain.

13 Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic,trans. Raymond Rosenthal(Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1987; orig. Italian edn.1983), “Documents,” p. 340

—“Exercitatio de formissubstantialibus et de qualitatibusphysicis, anonymous.”

14 Ibid., p. 132.

15 Redondi’s core argument—that theattack on Galileo for heliocentrismserved as a kind of cover for anunderlying attack on his atomism—has been criticized by manyhistorians of science. But there isno reason to think that the Church’smotivation could only have beenone or the other concern and notboth.

16 “At Lucretius animorumimmortalitatem oppugnat, deorumprovidentiam negat, religionesomneis tollit, summum bonum in

voluptate ponit. Sed haec Epicuri,quem sequitur Lucretius, nonLucretii culpa est. Poema quidemipsum propter sententias areligione nostra alienas,nihilominus poema est. tantumne?Immo vero poema venustum,poema praeclarum, poemaomnibus ingenii luminibusdistinctum, insignitum, atqueillustratum. Hasce autem Epicurirationes insanas, ac furiosas, ut &illas absurdas de atomorumconcursione fortuita, de mundisinnumerabilibus, & ceteras, nequedifficile nobis est refutare, nequevero necesse est: quippe cum abipsa veritatis voce vel tacentibusomnibus facillime refellantur”(Paris, 1563) f. ã3. I have used thetranslation of Ada Palmer, to

whose unpublished essay,“Reading Atomism in theRenaissance,” I am indebted.

17 Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation ofLucretius: “De rerum natura,” ed.Hugh de Quehen (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press,1996), p. 139.

18 On the contrary, with a backwardglance at John Evelyn, Hutchinsonobserved that a “masculine wit,”presenting to the public only asingle book of the difficult poem,“thought it worth printing his headin a laurel crown.”

19 Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation , pp.24–25.

20 Ibid., p. 23.

21 Ibid., p. 26.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., p. 24.

24 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum,

II.ii.

25 The most powerful philosophicalexpression of this view is in theworks of the French priest,astronomer, and mathematicianPierre Gassendi (1592–1655).

26 Isaac Newton, Opticks, Query 32(London, 1718), cited in Monte

Johnson and Catherine Wilson,“Lucretius and the History ofScience,” in The CambridgeCompanion to Lucretius, pp. 141–42.

27 To William Short, October 31,1819: “I consider the genuine (notthe imputed) doctrines of Epicurusas containing everything rational inmoral philosophy which Greeceand Rome have left us.” Cited inCharles A. Miller, Jefferson andNature: An Interpretation (Baltimoreand London: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1988), p. 24.John Quincy Adams, “Dinner withPresident Jefferson,” from Memoirsof John Quincy Adams, ComprisingPortions of His Diary from 1795 to1848, ed. Charles Francis Adams

(Philadelphia, 1874): November 3,1807: “Mr. Jefferson said that theEpicurean philosophy camenearest to the truth, in his opinion,of any ancient system ofphilosophy. He wished the work ofGassendi concerning it had beentranslated. It was the only accurateaccount of it extant. I mentionedLucretius. He said that was only apart—only the natural philosophy.But the moral philosophy was onlyto be found in Gassendi.”

28 Miller, Jefferson and Nature, p. 24.

INDEX

The page references in this indexcorrespond to the printed edition fromwhich this ebook was created. To find

a specific word or phrase from theindex, please use the search feature

of your ebook reader.

Aachen, 120Aalen, 15abbots, 29, 30, 31–32, 38, 42, 45–

50, 106, 148, 163, 210Abracadabra, 60–61Abraham, 194academies, 28, 59, 211Accius, Lucius, 23–24acediosus (apathetic), 25–26Acheron, 52, 273nAdam, 105, 109Adams, John, 263adaptation, 189–90Adimari, Alamano, 162adultery, 98, 141, 143–44Aeneid (Virgil), 52, 273nAeschylus, 81, 280nAesculapius, 180afterlife, 6, 57, 75–76, 98, 99–100,

101, 150, 158, 159, 171, 183,

192–95, 220, 223, 230–32, 244,260

Against the Hypocrites (Poggio),147–49, 150

Agamemnon, 194Agora, 276nagriculture, 38, 45, 66, 126, 191,

228, 275n, 279n–80nAlbergati, Niccolò, 210Alberti, Leon Battista, 9, 110, 127–

28, 218Albizzi family, 113, 301nAlcubierre, Rocque Joaquin de, 55Alcuin, 121Alexander of Ephesus, 85Alexander the Great, 60Alexander V, Pope, 159–60Alexandria, 279n–80n, 282nAlexandrian Library, 86–94, 130–

31, 275n, 279n–83nAlexandrian Museum, 93

Alfonso II, King of Naples, 153algebra, 239Allah, 282n–83nalphabetical order, 88altars, 10, 89Ammianus Marcellinus, 49, 89, 93anatomy, 87, 99–100Ancona, 125angels, 10, 194–95anger, 6, 75–76, 103, 105, 145–46,

150, 209, 285nAnglesey, Arthur Annesley, Earl of,

257–58, 260animal sacrifices, 183, 298nannotations, 23, 88, 221, 248–49,

256, 306nAnthony, Saint, 68, 286nantipopes, 160, 205, 293n–94nsee also John XXIII (BaldassareCossa), Antipopeantiquarianism, 123, 129, 208–9,

290nAntoninus Pius, Emperor of Rome,

273nAntony, Mark, 61, 281napikoros (Epicurean), 101Apis, 89Apollo, 75, 99Apologeticus (Tertullian), 284n“Apology for Raymond Sebond”

(Montaigne), 246apostles, 24, 217–18apostolic secretary (secretarius

domesticus), 141–42, 154, 155–58, 161, 170, 180, 181, 205–15,221, 224, 269n

Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 252–53Arabs, 282n–83nAragazzi, Bartolomeo de, 34–35,

44Aramaic language, 97archaeology, 54–59, 63–64

Archimedes, 87architecture, 9, 110–11, 129, 151,

156Aretino, Leonardo, 179Arezzo, 34, 141Ariosto, Ludovico, 9, 242aristocracy, 14–20, 36, 44, 59–61,

93Aristotelianism, 96, 252–53Aristotle, 62, 69, 73, 83, 91, 96, 98,

252–53, 284n, 304nart, 9, 17, 39, 40, 59, 60, 70, 88,

104, 129asceticism, 6, 37, 41, 94–97, 104–

9, 195, 228, 244, 285n–86nAss, The (Lucian), 217Assayer, The (Galileo), 254–55astronomy, 5–6, 8, 48, 87, 91, 92,

239atheism, 183–84, 221, 239, 259,

261

Athens, 59, 75, 77, 78–79, 274n,276n, 280n

atomism, 5–6, 8, 46, 73–75, 82, 99,101, 185–89, 198–201, 220–21,237, 239, 242–43, 244, 249,250–53, 254, 255–56, 258, 260,261, 297n, 306n

atonement, 105–6Atticus, 85, 119Attila, 11Augustine, Saint, 43Augustinians, 111Augustus, Emperor of Rome, 48,

61, 275nAustria, 55, 163Averroës, 117Avignon, 293n Bacchus, 183Bacon, Francis, 8, 243, 261Baden, 173–76, 177

Baghdad, 38Balbus, Quintus Lucilius, 69–70banking, 21, 22, 113–14Baptistry (Florence), 110barbarians, 11, 24, 28, 49, 59, 94Barbaro, Francesco, 180–81, 203,

268nBarberini, Maffeo, 254Bari, 135Bassus, Saleius, 23–24Bay of Naples, 54–55Beaufort, Henry (bishop of

Winchester), 206–8beauty, 1–2, 8–10, 11, 201–2, 228,

251, 260–61, 299nBenedict, Saint, 25–28, 97, 103Benedict XIII, Antipope, 160, 205Benedictine Rule, 25–28, 37, 272nBenedictines, 25–28, 37, 44, 107,

272nbenefices, 147, 269n

Bernardino, Saint, 128Bethlehem, 95Bibaculus, Marcus Furius, 23–24Bible, 3, 24, 43, 46, 88, 89, 95–96,

97, 105, 166, 239, 250, 285nbibliomancy, 18–19bibliomania, 19, 152–54, 131, 177Bischhoff, Bernhard, 271n–72nbishops, 20, 36, 38, 135, 161, 162,

168–69, 210Black Death, 113Bobbio monastery, 271n–72nBoccaccio, Giovanni, 120, 124,

132–33, 144Bohemia, 155, 166, 168Boiardo, Matteo, 242Bologna, 113, 143, 158, 159–60,

214, 226Bologna, University of, 158“Bonfire of the Vanities,” 219Boniface, Saint, 44, 45–46

Boniface IX, Pope, 135, 158book repairers, 84–85books of hours, 17bookworms, 30, 83–84, 93Borgia, Cesare, 226Botticelli, Sandro, 10, 202, 226,

242, 267nBourbon dynasty, 55Bracciolini, Filippo, 213Bracciolini, Giovanni Battista, 213Bracciolini, Giovanni Francesco,

213Bracciolini, Guicco, 111–12, 113,

122, 141, 211Bracciolini, Jacoba, 112Bracciolini, Jacopo, 213Bracciolini, Lucretia, 213Bracciolini, Pietro Paolo, 213Bracciolini, Poggio, see Poggio

Bracciolini, Gian FrancescoBracciolini, Vaggia di

Buondelmonti, 212–14, 301nBrancacci family, 126Branda de Castiglione, 162bribery, 139–40Brunelleschi, Filippo, 110, 218Bruni, Leonardo, 125–26, 133, 134,

159, 162, 172–73, 178, 205,210, 216, 295n

Bruno, Giordano, 10, 233–41, 242,243, 250, 256

Brutus, 61Bryaxis, 89bubonic plague, 18“Bugiale” (“Lie Factory”), 142, 210Buondelmonti, Gino dei, 301nBuondelmonti, Vaggia di Gino, see

Bracciolini, Vaggia diBuondelmonte

Buondelmonti family, 113, 212,301n

bureaucrats, 85, 135–38, 157

burning at the stake, 172–73, 177–79, 240–41

Burton, Robert, 8Byzantium, 126 Caesar, Julius, 61, 65, 79, 85, 89,

274n, 281nCaesarini, Giuliano, 210Cairo, 38calculus, 87calfskin, 40Caligula, Emperor of Rome, 48calligraphy, 112–13, 115–16, 121,

130, 135, 155–56, 179Calvin, John, 253cameos, 129, 209Campbell, James, 285nCampo dei Fiori, 240–41candles, 41, 83, 158canon law, 136–37, 158Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 278n

capitalism, 114Capponi family, 113Capra, Bartolomeo della, 162–63Caravaggio, 9carbonized remains, 54–59, 63–64,

68, 77, 82cardinals, 135, 161, 163, 165, 168,

169, 210, 293nCarmelites, 111Caro, Rodrigo, 250Carolingian minuscules, 115, 121Carthage, 59, 85, 275ncartography, 239Cassian, John, 26Cassiodorus, 123Castel St. Angelo, 20, 161catasto (official inventory), 22Catherine of Siena, Saint, 293nCatherine von Gebersweiler, 108Catholic Church:apologetics of, 23–24, 47–48, 53–

54, 97–108, 101, 208, 285nbureaucracy of, 85, 135–38, 157corruption in, 136–41, 151–52,165–66, 170–71, 181Epicureanism opposed to, 7, 97–109, 182–84, 219–41, 249–62,284n, 285n, 302nfundamentalism in, 89–108, 219–21, 227, 236, 239–40, 254–56legal system of, 136–37, 158literature of, 42, 43, 46–47national factions in, 160, 163, 164,176, 178, 205as official religion, 89–108paganism suppressed by, 10, 13,19, 53–54, 75–78, 86–108, 117–18, 123, 129, 150, 222–24, 258,283n, 284n, 286npapacy of, see specific popesschism in, 142–43, 155, 160, 161–78, 205

spiritual authority of, 100–109,136–37, 149–50, 164–65, 168–69,227, 230, 232temporal authority of, 36, 135–37,149–50, 157–58, 161–62, 239–40theology of, 16, 17, 27, 75–76, 94–108, 120, 136–37, 163, 208, 252–54, 282n–83n, 285nCatullus, 53celestial spheres, 5–6Ceres, 183Cervantes, 9, 142Cervini, Marcello, 227Cesena, 293n–94nchancery courts, 137change, 5–7, 10, 186–87, 243–45,

259–60, 263Charlemagne, 12, 47, 121Chaucer, Geoffrey, 277n–78nchildren, 127, 137, 193, 194, 210,

212–13, 215

Chloris, 267nChronicles of Herculaneum, 65Chrysippus, 82Chrysolaras, Manuel, 126Church Fathers, 23–24, 47–48,

53–54, 99–100, 101, 208, 284n,285n

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 23, 24, 43,49, 53, 65, 69–70, 71, 72, 76,85, 94–95, 96, 119, 120, 121–22, 123 138, 155–56, 176–77,208, 273n, 274n, 283n, 289n,296n, 300n

Cicero, Quintus Tullius, 51Ciompi (working-class

revolutionaries), 114–15city-states, 59, 122–24Clare of Assisi, Saint, 108Clement of Alexandria, 285nClement VII, Pope, 293n, 294nCleopatra, 281n

clinamen (swerve) principle, 7–13,188–89, 297n

Cluny abbey, 176–77codices, 39–40, 42–43, 62, 82–83,

89, 176–77Colonna, Oddo, 205–6, 211, 269nColonna family, 135Colosseum, 63, 129Columbanus, Saint, 27–28, 272ncommentaries, 46, 221–41conclaves, papal, 205–6confession, 65, 143, 173, 255Constance, 15, 19–20, 31, 35–36,

102, 162–78, 180, 206, 294nConstantine I, Emperor of Rome,

89, 102, 149–50, 224Constantinople, 113, 169, 216convents, 106, 108Copernicus, Nicolaus, 10, 238, 254Coptics, 24–25copyists (librari), 85–86

copyright, 85corporale supplicium (bodily

punishments), 106corporal punishment, 104–6Correr, Angelo, 160, 180, 205Cossa, Baldassare, see John XXIII

(Baldassare Cossa), AntipopeCotta, Gaius Aurelius, 69–70Council of Constance (1414–18),

15, 19–20, 31, 35–36, 102, 162–78, 180, 206, 294n

Council of Trent (1545–63), 252,253, 255

Counter-Reformation, 237–38, 253courtiers, 8, 14, 15Creech, Thomas, 257, 267ncrime, 38, 104, 140, 228crucifixions, 104, 112, 194, 241cruelty, 194, 195, 198, 246, 298ncult objects, 90–91, 92cults, 89–90

Cupid, 267ncyclical patterns, 10Cyril, Saint, 91, 92–93 Damian, Peter, 107Danae, 175Dante Alighieri, 123, 132–33, 288nDarwin, Charles, 262Darwin, Erasmus, 262David, King, 43day laborers (populo minuto), 114–

15Day of Judgment, 100De aquaeductu urbis (Frontius),

152death, fear of, 2–5, 9, 75–76, 112,

152, 180, 192–94, 196, 199,220, 248

death sentences, 104, 158, 164,172–73, 177–79, 213, 219, 228,240–41, 255, 286n, 296n, 297n

debate, 27–28Decembrio, Pier Candido, 226Declaration of Independence, 263declinatio (swerve) principle, 7–13,

188–89, 297ndella Robbia, Luca, 218delusion, 195–97Democritus, 74–75, 82demons, 8, 10, 26, 89, 105, 194–95De rerum natura (Lucretius), 182–

202, 219–41adaptation principle in, 189–90afterlife denied in, 171, 183, 192–94, 195, 196–97, 220, 223, 230–32, 244, 260Aldine edition of, 226atheism in, 183–84, 221, 239, 259,261atomist theory in, 5–6, 8, 46, 73–75, 82, 99, 101, 185–89, 198–201,220–21, 237, 239, 242–43, 244,

249, 250–53, 254, 255–56, 258,260, 261, 297n, 306nauthor’s reading of, 1–13beauty in, 1–2, 8–10, 11, 201–2,228, 251, 260–61, 299nbooks and sections of, 65Catholic doctrine opposed to, 7,97–109, 182–84, 219–41, 249–62,284n, 285n, 302nchange and transition in, 5–7, 10,186–87, 243–45, 259–60, 263Cicero’s revision of, 53classical references to, 49–52commentaries on, 221–41creation vs. destruction in, 186–89,220, 249, 250–52, 261cultural influence of, 11–13, 49–52,182–83, 185, 204–5, 209–10, 218,219–63, 302ncyclical patterns in, 10dedication written for, 53

delusion in, 195–97description of, 182–202desire in, 197–98detachment in, 195–97disappearance of, 12–13, 49–52,88–89, 209–10, 272ndivine will in, 71, 74, 75, 102–3,105, 187, 194–95, 220, 230–36,249, 251, 285nemendations of, 226English translations of, 184, 198,201, 257–62, 267n, 297n–98n,299n, 305nEpicurean philosophy of, 1–5, 58–59, 72–80, 88–89, 103, 104, 109,182–202, 220–21, 222, 228–32,244–46, 252–54, 256, 262–63,303neroticism in, 197–98, 201–2ethics and morality in, 195–96fear of death in, 2–5, 9, 192–94,

196, 199, 220, 248free will in, 71, 74–75, 189French translations of, 243–44,247, 257, 262gods and goddesses in, 1–2, 10,183, 184, 193–94, 195, 197, 198,199, 201–2, 228, 231–32, 251,260–61, 298n, 299nas grammatical source, 12happiness in, 195–97, 199Herculaneum fragments of, 54–59,64–65, 70–72, 81hexameters of, 2, 182historical influence of, 11–13human existence in, 190–92hymn to Venus in, 1–2, 10, 201–2,228, 251, 260–61, 299nillusion in, 198–99imagination in, 196–97infinity in, 186, 187, 189, 196–97,237, 239, 244, 256

“intelligent design” discredited by,187–88, 220, 297nItalian translation of, 257, 262language of, 2–3Latin language of, 2–3, 12, 50, 182,202, 225, 243, 247, 256Machiavelli’s copy of, 221manuscripts of, 11–13, 49–50, 88–89, 181, 182–85, 202, 203–5, 208–10, 218, 221–22, 225, 226, 231,244, 256, 262, 272n, 300nmaterialism in, 9–10, 184–86, 190–91, 193, 198–201, 243, 244, 249,259–63, 297nmetaphors in, 201in Middle Ages, 52–53, 88–89,209–10, 272nmodern influence of, 6–7, 8, 13,185, 242–63Montaigne’s copy of, 248–49, 256,306n

mythology in, 193–95natural world in, 6, 10–11, 188–90,262, 298nNiccoli’s transcription of, 203–4“Oblongus” manuscript of, 204paradise in, 191–92, 193pleasure principle in, 8–10, 11, 75–80, 82, 102, 103–9, 195–98, 222–26, 228, 231as poetry, 2–3, 50, 54, 80, 198,200, 201–2, 221, 247, 259–60Poggio’s copy of, 49–50, 203–5,208–10, 225, 300nPoggio’s discovery of, 11–13, 22,23–24, 49–50, 62, 65, 88–89, 93,109, 181, 182–85, 202, 203–5,218, 221–22, 225, 226, 231, 244,256, 262printed editions of, 204, 219, 248–50, 256, 262Providence in, 187, 230–36, 251

“Quadratus” manuscript of, 204readership of, 65–67, 70–72, 182,209–10, 219–63readings of, 71–72, 226reason in, 199religious superstitions opposed by,2, 6, 10–11, 18–19, 36, 72, 74–75,183, 184, 193–97, 199, 249, 299nRenaissance influenced by, 7–13reputation of, 6–7, 8, 13, 51–52,109, 185, 242–63resurrection denied by, 171, 231–32sexuality in, 103, 197–98, 201–2,222, 247soul in, 192–93, 196–97, 220, 231–32, 249, 251space and time in, 186–89, 196–97, 237, 239, 244, 256style of, 2–3, 7, 51suffering in, 183, 195–98

swerve (clinamen) principle in, 7–13, 188–89, 297nsyntax of, 182title of, 46, 49, 181translations of, 1–3, 184, 198, 201,243–44, 247, 257–62, 267n, 297n–98n, 299n–300n, 305nuniverse as conceived in, 7–8, 73–74, 87, 186, 187, 189, 194, 220,237, 238–39, 250–52, 306nvoid in, 187, 198–99De rerum naturis (Maurus), 49De runalibus (Serenus), 272nDescartes, René, 68, 239desire, 197–98detachment, 195–97Deuteronomy, Book of, 285ndialogical disavowal, 222–23,

302n–3nDialogue Concerning the Two

Chief World Systems (Galileo),

255dialogues, 69–72, 138–39, 147–

49, 216–17, 222–26, 255, 302n–3n

Diana, 99Diderot, Denis, 262Didymus of Alexandria, 81–82Diogenes Laertius, 82, 278ndiplomacy, 122–26, 155, 214disciplina (whipping), 106disillusion, 198–99dispensations, 21, 136–37divine will, 71, 74, 75, 102–3, 105,

187, 194–95, 220, 230–36, 249,251, 285n

divinity, 98–99, 183documents, official, 56–57Dominic, Saint, 108Dominicans, 111, 168, 219, 240Domitian, Emperor of Rome, 48,

275n

Donatello, 211, 218“Donation of Constantine,” 149–50,

224Donne, John, 143dowries, 301ndrama, 77–78, 81, 94, 95, 104,

242–43Dryden, John, 198, 201, 262, 267n,

297n–98n, 299nDuccio, 10Dungal, 12Duomo (Florence), 110, 113, 180,

217–18 Eastern Orthodox Church, 136edicts, religious, 89–90education, 24, 28, 59, 71, 91, 97,

104, 112–13, 121–22, 138–41,151, 211, 214, 226

Egypt, 24–25, 42, 56–57, 61, 66,84–94, 279n–80n

Einstein, Albert, 262elections, papal, 205–6, 293nElijah, 90Elsbeth of Oye, 108emendations, textual, 226empiricism, 73, 262–63England, 163, 164, 205, 206–8,

227–40, 242–43, 257–62English language, 184, 198, 201,

206, 257–62, 267n, 297n–98n,299n, 305n

Enlightenment, 262Ennius, 273nEphesus, 99epic poetry, 48–49, 182, 243, 273nEpicurean, The (Erasmus), 227Epicureanism, 1–5, 7, 58–59, 69–

80, 82, 88–89, 97–109, 182–202, 219–41, 244–46, 249–63,277n, 284n, 285n, 302n–3n

Epicure Mammon, Sir, 77–78

Epicurus, 2, 62, 72–80, 101–2,109, 222, 274n, 277n–78n

Erasmus, 144, 227, 252Eratosthenes, 59, 87Ernst, Max, 1eroticism, 197–98, 201–2Essays (Montaigne), 243–49Eton College, 248–49Eucharist, 165, 252–53, 255–56Euclid, 87Eugenius IV, Pope, 211–12, 214,

290nEuripides, 81, 280nEuropean Community, 205Eve, 105Evelyn, John, 257, 267nexcommunication, 160, 166executions, 104, 112, 158, 164,

172–73, 177–79, 213, 219, 228,240–41, 255, 286n, 296n, 297n

Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast,

The (Bruno), 233–36 Facetiae (Poggio), 142–45, 146,

291n–92nFalstaff, Epicurus and, 102families, 110, 112, 113–15, 127–

29, 135, 137, 206, 210, 212–14Fates, 195Feast in the House of Levi, The

(Veronese), 305nFerreol, Saint, 38Festus, Sextus Pompeius, 35feudalism, 301nFicino, Marsilio, 221, 224Filelfo, Francesco, 143, 145Fillastre, Guillaume, 295nfire, 41, 73, 83, 93, 191Flaccus, Valerius, 272n, 300nflagellation, 28, 104, 106–9, 228,

285n–86nFlaubert, Gustave, 71

Florence, 10, 20–21, 22, 34, 49,110, 113–34, 153, 162, 176,179–80, 203, 210–18, 215–21,226, 289n

Florentine Republic, 122–26, 127,215–17

Florentine Synod, 226florins, 21, 211, 290n, 301nFlorio, John, 243, 244Foundling Hospital (Florence), 110four elements, 73–74Fra Angelico, 218France, 11, 24, 38, 55, 122, 160,

163, 164, 176, 226, 233, 236,249, 286n

Franciscans, 111, 147–48free will, 71, 74–75, 189French language, 206, 243–44,

247, 257, 262French Revolution, 11Freud, Sigmund, 183

friars, 114, 143, 147–48, 163, 236,240

Frontius, Julius, 152, 283nFronto, Marcus Cornelius, 95Frutti, Michaelle, 112Fulda abbey, 44–50, 181 Galen, 87Galileo Galilei, 8, 185, 239, 254–

56, 306nGamelion, 66Ganymede, 140Garcia Lopez (tailor), 236Gassendi, Pierre, 257Gaul, 106Genesis, Book of, 3geography, 87geometry, 87George of Trebizond, 21, 145–46,

215Georgics (Virgil), 51–52, 273n

Germany, 14–21, 29, 31, 33–34,35, 36, 44–50, 159, 162, 164,173–77, 181, 205, 206

Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 110, 218Ghislieri, Michele, 227Giotto, 113Giunti, Filippo, 226God, 10–11, 27, 37, 42, 89, 95, 97,

102–3, 105, 114, 166, 220, 233–36, 251, 253, 261, 285n

gods and goddesses, 1–2, 5–6, 7,10, 67–68, 71, 74, 88, 89, 98–99, 100, 101, 130, 139, 180,183, 184, 193–94, 195, 197,198, 199, 201–2, 226–27, 228,231–36, 251, 260–61, 298n,299n

gold, 129, 280nGolden Age, 191Gospels, 96, 97, 105Gothic script, 115

Gothic Wars, 28, 49Gottlieben Castle, 171grain, 45, 66, 126, 279n–80ngrammar, 12, 24, 25, 28–29, 31, 49,

97, 121“Great Vanishing,” 86Greek culture, 28, 59–60, 70, 72,

84, 87, 194–95Greek language, 43, 88, 97, 119–

20, 126, 217Greek literature, 42, 58, 59, 60, 61,

62–63, 81, 84, 153, 182, 210,228, 273n, 275n–76n

see also specific worksGreek philosophy, 72–80, 211, 252Gregory I, Pope, 97, 103Gregory XI, Pope, 293nGregory XII, Antipope, 160, 180,

205Guarino of Verona, 179Guasconi, Biagio, 162

Guicciardini, Francesco, 127guilds, 15, 16, 114Gutenberg, Johann, 32, 219 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 3, 75, 233handwriting, 37–38, 62, 112–13,

115–16, 121, 130, 135, 155–56,179

happiness, 195–96, 198Harriot, Thomas, 239Harvey, William, 10Hebrew language, 88, 95Hebrews, 42, 283nHeidelberg, University of, 172Heidenheim, 15heliocentrism, 87, 306nHell, 30, 288nHenry V, King of England, 206Henry VIII, King of England, 228Herculaneum, 54–59, 63–67, 68,

70–72, 77, 79, 81, 82

heresy, 13, 17, 155, 165, 166–68,170–73, 177–79, 227, 233–41,250–56

hermits, 35, 68, 107, 111heroism, 104, 130Hippolytus, 180History of Florence (Poggio), 217History of Rome (Livy), 23Hobbes, Thomas, 10, 261Holinshed Raphael, 228holy orders, 120, 137–38, 147–48Holy Roman Empire, 44, 120, 122,

155Homer, 48–49, 62, 89, 182, 215Hooke, Robert, 83–84Hooker, Richard, 8Horace, 84, 96Houghton Library, 243human existence, 190–92humanities (studia humanitatis), 8–

13, 23, 119–24, 134, 208, 214

Hume, David, 262Hus, Jan, 166–68, 170, 171–72,

177, 253Hutchinson, John, 257Hutchinson, Lucy, 257–62, 267n,

305nhymn to Venus (Lucretius), 1–2, 10,

201–2, 228, 251, 260–61, 299nHypatia of Alexandria, 91–93, 252,

282nhypocrisy, 37, 133, 138–39 Ignatius of Loyola, Saint, 108Iliad (Homer), 3, 215illness, 12, 75, 76–77, 104, 147,

195illusion, 198–99immortality, 6, 57, 75–76, 98, 99–

100, 101, 150, 158, 159, 183,192–95, 220, 223, 230–32, 244,260

Incarnation, 98–99inclinatio (swerve) principle, 7–13,

188–89, 297nIndex of Prohibited Books, 227India, 59, 87indices, 39–40, 63, 227individuality, 9–10, 16indulgences, 158, 159, 161, 168infallibility, 166Inferno (Dante), 288ninfinity, 186, 187, 189, 196–97,

237, 239, 244, 256ink, 39, 40, 43, 82–86Inquisition, 227, 236, 239–40, 254–

56Institutes (Quintillian), 177, 178–79,

296nintellectuals, 46–47, 51, 65–70,

87–88, 91–93, 122–26, 142–45,227–33

“intelligent design,” 187–88, 220,

297nIphegenia, 194Ireland, 12, 38Isaac, 194Isambard, 236Isidore of Seville, 12Islam, 113, 282n–83nItalian language, 31, 206, 257, 262italics, 115Italy, 17, 21–22, 30, 31, 34, 43, 45,

60, 111, 122, 136, 160, 163,174, 176, 205, 210–18, 233,239–40, 249

see also specific towns and cities Janus, 99Jefferson, Thomas, 262–63, 307n–

8nJerome, Saint, 53–54, 94–96, 109,

181, 283nJerome of Prague, 168, 172–73,

177–79, 295n, 296nJerusalem, 94Jesuits, 250–51, 253–56Jesus Christ, 9, 10, 19, 71, 98,

104–5, 107, 108, 139–40, 194,236, 241, 252–53, 286n

Jews, 3, 15, 39, 42, 67, 78, 87, 89,91, 92, 98, 101, 136, 194, 227,236, 283n

Johann von Merlau, 45–46John the Baptist, 90John XXIII (Baldassare Cossa),

Antipope, 152–78abdication of, 160–61, 165–67,170–80, 205birthplace of, 158as bishop of Rome, 137as cardinal deacon of Bologna,159–60as cardinal of Florence, 179–80corruption of, 136–41, 151–52,

165–66, 170–71, 181at Council of Constance, 162–78,180criminal charges against, 170–71curia of, 18, 19–21, 22, 31, 33, 36–37, 44, 45, 135–41, 144, 150–58,161, 162–63, 165, 168–69, 170,171, 180, 181death of, 180ecclesiastical career of, 158–60election of, 154, 160, 161entourage of, 137, 138, 161–62in Florence, 162, 179–80imprisonment of, 171, 179–80, 205papacy of, 19–21, 22, 34, 44, 135–41, 150–78, 180, 205papal name of, 171Poggio’s relationship with, 157–58,165–66, 170, 178, 180, 181, 205poisoning accusation against,159–60, 170–71

release of, 179–80rival popes of, 160, 180, 205in schism, 142–43, 155, 160, 161–78, 205spiritual authority of, 136–37, 149–50, 164–65, 168–69temporal authority of, 135–37, 157–58, 161–62John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli),

Pope, 171Jonson, Ben, 77–78, 79, 243,

277n, 305nJove, 75, 175, 233, 236jubilee years, 159Judaism, 39, 67, 101, 194, 236Julian the Apostate, 101Jung, Carl, 183Jungkuntz, Richard, 285nJuno, 99Jupiter, 88, 89, 100, 156Jupiter Serapis, 88

Kaiserstuhl, 174Kleve, Knut, 64 labor, manual, 25, 37Lactantius, 102–3Ladislas, King of Naples, 161–62Lambin, Denys, 248–49, 256landowners, 113–14, 228, 230Lapo da Castiglionchio, 138–42,

144Last Supper, 304n–5nLateran palace, 156Latin Festival, 69Latin language, 2–3, 7, 12, 18, 19,

31–32, 42–52, 112–13, 119–22,123–24, 130, 131–34, 135, 136,138, 149, 155, 179, 180, 182,202, 206, 210, 215, 217, 221–22, 225, 243, 247, 256

Latin literature, 42, 62–63, 81, 87,

117, 121–24, 182, 228, 273n,275n, 289n

see also specific worksLaurentian Library, 115, 204, 290nlaws, universal, 74–75lawyers, 35, 137, 139leap days, 87legal systems, 17, 35, 38, 111–12,

125–26, 134, 137, 139, 158,228, 232

legions, 59, 79Leiden, University of, 204–5Lent, 108Leonardo da Vinci, 8, 9, 242lettera antica, 121letters patent, 137Leucippus of Abdera, 73, 82lexicography, 12, 35liberty, 9–10, 16, 125, 239–40,

262–63librarians, 29, 31–32, 39, 43, 50

libraries:monastic, 24–33, 37–38, 39, 43,45–50, 65, 109, 117, 130–31, 152,176–79, 204, 206–8, 209, 225,271n–72n, 290nprivate, 54–60, 86, 94–96, 134public, 54–63, 86–94, 91, 93, 130–31, 134, 275n–76n, 279n–83n,290nLibrary of Pantainos, 276nLippi, Filippo, 218literacy, 17, 24–26, 93–94, 270nLivy, 23, 211Lucca, 153Luccarus, 112Lucian of Samosta, 217“Lucretiani,” 221Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus:aesthetics of, 51biography of, 52–54, 274nCicero’s reference to, 51

classical references to, 23, 49–50,51, 54death of, 51, 53–54, 94, 109as Epicurean, 1–2, 7, 52, 72–80,104, 109, 222family background of, 53legacy of, 51–80, 109madness ascribed to, 53–54, 94name of, 49Ovid’s reference to, 54pacifism of, 52as pagan, 53–54readings by, 71–72rediscovery of, 23–24, 43, 49–50reputation of, 1–2, 7, 49–50, 51, 54,71–72, 272n–73nin Rome, 71–72, 75Saint Jerome’s account of, 53–54,94, 109skepticism of, 52, 72suicide ascribed to, 53–54, 94, 109

Virgil influenced by, 51–52, 273nwritings of, see De rerum natura(Lucretius)Lucullus, 155–56, 275nLudwig von der Pfalz, 163Luke, Saint, 105Luna, Pedro de, 160, 205Luther, Martin, 149, 172, 253 Macer, 23, 270nMachiavelli, Niccolò, 8, 144, 150,

185Maestà (Duccio), 10magic, 60–61, 73Malpaghino, Giovanni, 121–22Manilius, 48manuscripts:annotation of, 23, 88, 221, 248–49,256, 306ncopies of, 17–18, 32–33, 35, 37–41, 47, 49, 50, 84–86, 88, 109,

112–16, 121, 130, 133–34, 135,152, 154, 155–56, 173–77, 179,206, 296n, 300ncorruptions in, 41, 88of De rerum natura, 11–13, 49–50,88–89, 181, 182–85, 202, 203–5,208–10, 218, 221–22, 225, 226,231, 244, 256, 262, 272n, 300ndestruction of, 7, 17–18, 23–24, 29,41, 81–109, 130–31, 275n, 280n–83neditions of, 23, 87–88fragments of, 54–59, 64–65, 70–72,81hunting for, 11–15, 22, 23–24, 29,30, 31–36, 40, 42–43, 47–49, 53,54, 62, 86, 88, 130, 131, 152–54,176–81, 206–11, 212, 215, 218,228, 300nilluminated, 17, 39, 40market for, 28, 29–30, 84–86, 131

in monastic libraries, 24–33, 37–38, 39, 43, 45–50, 65, 109, 117,130–31, 152, 176–79, 204, 206–8,209, 225, 271n–72n, 290non papyrus, 28, 40, 54–59, 62–65,68, 69, 71, 77, 82–83, 88, 260,280n, 283non parchment, 17–18, 28, 38, 39–40, 42–43, 62, 82, 260, 283nprinting of, 32, 38–39, 204, 219,248–50, 256, 262, 279nin private libraries, 54–60, 86, 94–96, 134production of, 28–29, 84–86in public libraries, 54–63, 86–94,91, 93, 130–31, 134, 275n–76n,280n–83n, 290nreferences to, 23–24scripts used for, 38, 84, 115–16,121, 130translation of, 88, 168, 210, 212,

215see also specific books andmanuscriptsManutius, Aldus, 32, 226Marcellus, Nonius, 208Marchetti, Alessandro, 257Marco Datini, Francesco di, 114Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of

Rome, 71Marolles, Michel de, 257marriage, 127–29, 133, 136, 143,

212–13, 214, 215, 289nMars, 2, 100, 226, 247, 281nMarsuppini, Carlo, 215Martines, Lauro, 301nMartin V, Pope, 205–6, 211, 269nmartyrs, 10, 107, 129Marullo, Michele Tarchaniota, 226–

27Masaccio, 218masks, ancestors, 62

master copies, 84–85materialism, 9–10, 184–86, 190–

91, 193, 198–201, 243, 244,249, 259–63, 297n

mathematics, 87, 91, 92, 239Mazzei, Lapo, 111–12Medici, Cosimo de,’ 216, 217, 290nMedici, Giovanni de,’ 213Medici, Lorenzo de,’ 210, 213,

290nMedici family, 110, 210, 213, 215–

16, 217, 290n, 301nmedicine, 17, 60–61, 75, 87, 152melancholy, 49, 133, 142–57, 216–

17Memmius, Gaius, 53, 273n–74nmendicant friars, 147–48mental illness, 8, 19, 49, 133, 142–

57, 216–17mercenaries, 153, 293n–94nmerchants, 15, 36, 219, 300n–301n

Mercury, 233–36messiahs, 67, 72–73, 98, 107, 184Metrodorus, 277nMichelangelo, 9, 204Michelozzi, Michelozzo di

Bartolomeo, 110, 290nMicrographia (Hooke), 83–84Middle Ages, 38, 52–53, 88–89,

106–8, 110–11, 116–17, 129,132–33, 209–10, 251, 272n–73n

Milan, 122, 153Minerva, 99, 100minims, 254minuscules, 115miracles, 142, 225misogyny, 143, 212missals, 17, 65mistresses, 137, 141Mithras, 90moderation, 101–2

modernism, 6–7, 8, 13, 185, 242–63

Molière, 257monasteries, 95, 106, 107–9, 111,

151, 168see also libraries, monasticmonks, 12, 21, 24–29, 31, 36–37,

90, 91, 131, 134, 147–48, 163,180, 210, 211

Mons, 286nMontaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 9,

243–49, 256, 306nMonte Cassino, 152Montepulciano, Bartolomeo

Aragazzi da, 34–35, 44, 152–53,162

morality, 11, 101–3, 124, 146–47,178–79, 195–96

More, Thomas, 227–33, 236, 250,251, 252, 263, 304n

Morroni, Tomaso, 111

mortality rates, 191–92, 213mortal sin, 16, 119Mother of the Gods, 183Mount Vesuvius, 54–59, 67, 94,

239MS Rossi 884, 221murder, 38, 148, 159–60, 170–71Muses, 89museums, 91, 93music, 9, 70, 91, 93, 175, 219mythology, 130, 193–96 Naples, 54–55, 60, 63, 64, 122,

153, 158, 161–62, 163, 233natural world, 6, 10–11, 12, 70, 74–

75, 188–90, 194, 248, 261–62,298n

Neptune, 99, 183, 226Nero, Emperor of Rome, 48, 157,

275nNew Testament, 24, 95–96, 97,

105Newton, Isaac, 261New World, 11–12, 136, 229–30Niccoli, Niccolò, 126–34, 137–38,

222, 289n, 290nNicholas V, Pope, 150, 214–15,

221, 226nightmares, 95, 96Nile River, 56, 174Nolan philosophy, 233“noonday demon,” 26notaries, 84–85, 111–12, 122, 123,

135, 137nuns, 106, 108 “Oblongus” manuscript, 204obsessions, 4–5, 19, 116“Of Cruelty” (Montaigne), 246“Of Diversion” (Montaigne), 247“Of Repentance” (Montaigne), 244–

45

Old Testament, 43, 88, 95–96,285n

oligarchy, 110, 113–15, 135Olivera, Alonso de, 249–50Omar, Caliph, 282n–83nomnes cives studiosi (all learned

citizens), 131On Avarice (Poggio), 21, 133, 138,

147On Nobility (Poggio), 147On Pleasure (De voluptate) (Valla),

222–26, 303n“On some verses of Virgil”

(Montaigne), 247On the Excellence and Dignity of

the Roman Court(Castiglionchio), 138–42, 144

On the Immense and theNumberless (Bruno), 239

On the Laws (De legibus) (Cicero),155–56

On the Misery of Human Life(Poggio), 147

On the Nature of Things (De rerumnatura) (Lucretius), see Dererum natura (Lucretius)

On the Republic (Cicero), 43On the Unhappiness of Princes

(Poggio), 214On the Vicissitudes of Fortune (De

varietate fortunae) (Poggio),147, 294n

Opticks (Newton), 261Orations (Cicero), 208oratory, 31, 70, 93, 177–78Order of St. Francis, 147–48Orestes, 91, 92Orsini family, 135Osiris, 89Ovid, 23, 43, 49, 52, 53, 54, 84Oxford, University of, 172, 208, 243

Pachomius, Saint, 24–25Pacuvius, Marcus, 23–24Padua, 121, 239–40paganism, 10, 13, 19, 53–54, 75–

78, 86–108, 117–18, 123, 129,150, 222–24, 258, 283n, 284n,286n

pain, 8–10, 11, 26–27, 103–4,195–98, 224–26, 228, 231

painting, 9, 10, 70, 104, 202, 252,305n

Palatine Hill, 157, 275nPalazzo della Signoria, 124palazzos, 110, 124Palestine, 67, 98palimpsests, 43, 271n–72nPalladas, 91Palmer, Ada, 274nPan, 63Pannelli, Lucia, 210

papacy, 18, 122, 135–36, 137, 139,161, 165, 166, 205–6, 293n–94n

see also specific popespapal bulls, 137papal seals, 139papal states, 135–36, 161paper, 15, 40, 56papyrology, 64–65, 71papyrus, 28, 40, 54–59, 62–65, 71,

260, 280npapyrus rolls, 28, 40, 54–59, 62–

65, 68, 69, 71, 77, 82–83, 88,260, 280n, 283n

parchment, 17–18, 28, 38, 39–40,42–43, 62, 82, 260, 283n

Paris, 24, 160, 226Paris, University of, 160, 172Passover, 236patriarchs, 163, 169patrons, 70–72, 85, 233Patro the Epicurean, 274n

Paul, Saint, 96Paulus, Aemilius, 60Pazzi conspiracy, 213peasants, 36, 100, 111Pedianus, Asconius, 209Pedo, Albinovanus, 23–24pens, 39, 85–86Pergamum, 281nperpetual motion, 244–45Perpignan, 205Perseus, King of Macedon, 60Persia, 67Peruzzi family, 113Petrarch, 23, 29, 115, 116, 117,

119–21, 123, 124, 130–33, 157,214, 288n, 289n

Philip, King of Macedon, 50Philodemus, 58–59, 65–66, 71, 77philology, 149philosophy, 1–5, 28, 51, 58–59,

65–70, 71, 72–80, 91–95, 117,

120, 132, 182–202, 220–21,252–54, 277n

pi, 87Piaggio, Antonio, 58Piazza della Signoria, 113, 219Piero della Francesca, 218Piero di Cosimo, 242piety, 94–96, 114, 147–48Piglio, Benedetto da, 162pilgrims, 15, 45, 158–59Pisa, University of, 250–51Piso, Lucius Calpurnius, 65–66, 79Pistoia, Zomino (Sozomeno) da,

162Pitti family, 110, 113, 126Pitti Palace, 126Pizzolpasso, Francesco, 163plague, 18, 113, 153, 196planets, 239, 254Plato, 62, 73, 91, 96, 98, 175, 221,

252, 284n, 304n

Platonism, 96Plautus, 94, 95, 300npleasure, 8–10, 11, 75–80, 82,

103–9, 195–98, 222–26, 228,231

plenary indulgences, 158, 159Pliny the Younger, 48poetry, 2–3, 50, 54, 59, 68–69, 70,

80, 104, 121–22, 132, 198, 200,201–2, 221, 247, 259–60

Poggio Bracciolini, GianFrancesco:

antiquities collected by, 210–11,212as apostolic secretary (secretariusdomesticus), 141–42, 154, 155–58,161, 170, 180, 181, 205–15, 221,224, 269nin Arezzo, 112–13attacks against, 111, 112–13, 133,142–45, 210, 212, 213, 215, 221–

22avarice as viewed by, 21, 133, 138,147background of, 111, 144–45, 212at Baden, 173–76, 177as bishop of Winchester’ssecretary, 206–8in Bologna, 113, 214books and manuscripts recoveredby, 11–15, 22, 23–24, 29, 30, 31–36, 40, 42–43, 47–49, 53, 54, 62,86, 88, 130, 131, 152–54, 176–81,206–11, 212, 215, 218, 228, 300nBruni’s relationship with, 172–73,178, 205, 210, 216, 295nCatholicism of, 29, 44, 75–76, 137–38, 172–73, 176, 177–78, 179,182–84, 217–18as chancellor of Florence, 215–17childhood of, 111–12, 122children of, 210, 212–13, 215

at Cluny abbey, 176–77coat of arms of, 111competitiveness of, 34–38, 44,112–13, 144–45at Constance, 15, 19–20, 31, 34,162–78, 180, 206, 294ncorrespondence of, 13, 20, 21, 33,34, 44, 45–46, 130, 137–38, 150–54, 172–73, 178–81, 203, 207–9,268n, 295ncynicism of, 133, 142–54, 291n–92ndeath of, 217–18, 291nDe rerum natura copy of, 49–50,203–5, 208–10, 225, 300nDe rerum natura discovered by,11–13, 22, 23–24, 49–50, 62, 65,88–89, 93, 109, 181, 182–85, 202,203–5, 218, 221–22, 225, 226,231, 244, 256, 262education of, 112–13, 121–22,

138–41in England, 206–8essays of, 21, 133, 138, 147–49,150, 212–13, 214, 216–17, 294nfamily of, 112, 113, 137, 206, 210,212–14finances of, 20–22, 113, 121–22,141–42, 151, 179, 207, 208, 210–11, 212, 215, 301nin Florence, 20–21, 22, 34, 49, 110,113–34, 162, 210–18at Fulda abbey, 44–50, 181German travels of, 14–21, 31, 33–34, 35, 36, 44–50, 173–77, 206handwriting of, 112–13, 115–16,121, 130, 135, 155–56, 179as humanist, 18–19, 23, 24, 29, 30,33–34, 46–47, 48, 51, 54, 120–34,138–54, 162–63, 172–73, 178–79,204, 205–6, 208, 210, 213, 214,215, 216, 217, 221–22

illegitimate children of, 210, 213Italian background of, 17, 21–22,30, 31, 34, 43, 45, 111, 174, 176,210–18Jerome of Prague’s executionwitnessed by, 172–73, 177–79as Latinist, 18, 19, 31–32, 49, 52,112–13, 120–22, 130, 131–34,135, 149, 155, 179, 180, 182, 206,217, 221–22as layman, 29, 44, 137–38, 179legal background of, 113, 122,136–37letters of recommendation of, 45,113, 134as linguist, 31marriage as viewed by, 127–29,133, 212–13, 214, 215marriage of, 212–14, 301nmelancholy of, 49, 133, 142–57,216–17

mistress of, 210, 213monks as viewed by, 36–37, 180as moralist, 146–47, 178–79Niccoli’s relationship with, 126–34,137–38, 151, 152–54, 176, 203,207–10, 211, 212, 213, 221as notary, 122, 135, 137official fees charged by, 21in papal curia, 18, 19–21, 22, 31,33, 36–37, 44, 45, 135–41, 144,150–58, 161, 162–63, 165, 168–69, 170, 171, 180, 181, 205–6,269npatrons of, 19–21, 33–34personal freedom of, 137–38, 153–57personality of, 31–32, 36–37, 41,137–38, 142–52, 208–9, 213physical appearance of, 14–15,268npolitical influence of, 19–21

property holdings of, 211provincial background of, 111,112–13, 135ransom paid by, 212in Ravensburg, 15reputation of, 34–35, 111, 112–13,138–45, 210, 212, 213, 215–18,221–22retirement of, 151rheumatism of, 173–76in Rome, 121–56, 205–12in Rome insurrection (1433), 211–12in St. Gall monastery, 34–35, 177,178–79, 180Salutati’s relationship with, 122–26, 130, 131, 152as scholar, 116, 128–29as scribe, 32–33, 37–38, 49, 112–13, 115–16, 121, 130, 133–34,135, 152, 154, 155–56, 173–77,

179, 206, 296nscribes employed by, 33, 35, 50,179script used by, 38, 84, 121, 130sense of humor of, 20, 31, 36–37,142–45sexuality as viewed by, 174–76social position of, 14–22statue of, 217–18taxes of, 22, 210, 215Terranuova as birthplace of, 34,111, 218Terranuova palazzo of, 22, 210–18tomb of, 271, 218translations by, 145–46, 217Valla’s relationship with, 149–50,213, 215, 221–26, 303nwealth of, 20–22, 113, 151, 210–11, 215, 301nwritings of, 21, 133, 138, 142–45,146, 147–49, 150, 152, 212–13,

214, 216–17, 291n–92n, 294npoison, 159–60, 170–71politics, 8, 11–12, 91–93, 122–27,

150, 154, 215–16, 228–33, 263Pollaiolo, Antonio, 217Pollio, Gaius Asinius, 61, 275nPolycleitus, 290npolytheism, 89, 100Pompeii, 54–59Pompey, 61, 247, 281nPonte Vecchio, 111Pope, Alexander, 15–16Porticus Octaviae, 275npoverty, 147–48, 219Prague, 167, 239prayer, 17, 24–25, 27, 37, 41, 45,

250–51“prayerful reading,” 24–25, 27, 37priests, 31, 134, 137–38, 141, 143,

145, 179, 199, 210Prignano, Bartolomeo, 293n–94n

Primavera (Botticelli), 10Prime Mover, 96printing press, 32, 38–39, 204, 219,

248–50, 256, 262, 279nPro Archia (Cicero), 24Procida, 158Propertius, 23, 24prophesies, 67, 226–27prostitutes, 140, 158, 164Protestants, 144, 149, 173, 237–

38, 250, 253, 289nprotokollon (“first glued”), 56Providence, 96, 101, 230–31Psalms, 24, 43psalters, 43, 96Ptolomaic dynasty, 87, 88, 280nPtolomey II Philadelphus, King of

Egypt, 88Ptolomey III Euergetes, King of

Egypt, 280nPulci, Luigi, 225

pumice stones, 40punishment, 26, 27–28, 75–76,

103–6, 170, 240, 230–31, 255Purgatory, 46, 158, 159Puritans, 257, 259Pythagoreans, 100 Qenoanda, 82“Quadratus” manuscript, 204Quarrie, Paul, 248–49Quevedo, Francisco de, 250Quintillian, 23–24, 95, 177, 178–

79, 270n, 283n, 296n Rabanus, Maurus, 46–47, 49, 272nRabelais, François, 142Rabirius, Gaius, 23–24Ralegh, Walter, 8rape, 148, 170, 191, 286nRaphael, 9, 252Raudense, Antonio, 222–24

reading, 24–29, 37, 61–62reading rooms, 61–62Redondi, Pietro, 255, 306nReformation, 144, 149, 173, 237–

38, 250, 253, 289nrelics, 15, 45–46, 90religion, 62, 67–68, 71, 75, 98–99,

150, 183, 184, 193–97, 199,249, 299n

see also Catholic Churchreliquaries, 90Renaissance, 7–13, 110–24, 129–

31, 135, 159, 219–21, 240–41,290n

Republic (Plato), 175republicanism, 114, 124–25, 134resurrection, 98–101, 120, 171,

231–32rhetoric, 24, 28–29, 31, 97, 119–20,

177Richental, Ulrich, 162, 164, 165,

168–69, 173, 295nRobert of Geneva, 293n, 294nRoman Curia, 18, 19–21, 22, 31,

33, 36–37, 44, 45, 135–41, 144,150–58, 161, 170, 180, 181,205–6, 205, 269n

Roman Empire, 18, 24, 28, 47, 48–49, 53, 59–60, 62, 63, 67–68,69, 75, 81, 84–85, 89–108, 116–22, 129, 131, 132–33, 151, 156–57, 194–95, 275n, 289n

Roman Forum, 63, 85, 156Roman Republic, 67, 79–80, 129–

30, 178Rome, 11, 18, 20, 21, 34, 63, 85,

90, 94, 97, 122, 125, 137, 151–52, 156–59, 161–62, 240, 293n

Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare),9, 242–43

Romulus Augustulus, Emperor ofRome, 94

Roncalli, Angelo, 171Rothenburg ob der Tauber, 15Rowland, Ingrid D., 233Rucelli family, 110, 301nRudolph of Saxony, 163Rule of St. Ferreol, 38rules, monastic, 24–28, 37, 38, 43,

47, 103, 147–48, 270n, 272nRustici, Cencio, 162 Sack of Rome (1413), 11, 49, 161–

62sacrifices, 90, 101, 183, 184, 194,

298nSt. Gall monastery, 34–35, 177,

178–79, 180St. Mark monastery, 176St. Peter’s Basilica, 46, 156, 240saints, 10, 15, 93, 129see also specific saintsSalutati, Coluccio, 120, 122–26,

130, 131, 134, 135, 214, 289nSammonicus Serenus, Quintus,

60–61Samos, 72–73San Clemente basilica, 90San Marco convent, 110, 290nSanta Croce basilica, 111, 217,

218Santa Maria del Carmine church,

111Santa Maria Novella church, 110Santayana, George, 186Santo Spirito church, 111satire, 138–41, 233–36satyrs, 63, 195Savonarola, Girolamo, 219–21,

252Scaevola, Mucius, 295nSchaffhausen, 170, 174Schofield, Michael, 277nSchool of Athens (Raphael), 252

schools, 28, 59, 91, 104, 151, 211,226

science, 8, 59, 60–61, 71, 73–75,87, 239, 253, 254–57, 261–63

Scipio, 274nscribes (scribae), 17–18, 32–33,

35, 37–41, 47, 49, 50, 84–86,88, 109, 112–16, 121, 130, 133–34, 135, 152, 154, 155–56, 173–77, 179, 206, 296n

script, 38, 84, 121, 130scriptoria, 38–41, 109scrolls, 39–40, 89sculpture, 9, 104, 129secretarius domesticus (apostolic

secretary), 141–42, 154, 155–58, 161, 170, 180, 181, 205–15,221, 224, 269n

self-discipline, 6, 28, 37, 41, 77,78–79, 94–97, 104–9, 195, 228,244, 285n–86n

Seneca, 43, 77Septuagint, 88Serapeon, 88, 89, 90, 280n–81nSerenus, Septimus, 272nSeverus, Cornelius, 23–24sexual intercourse, 99–100, 109,

143–44, 197–98, 247sexuality, 1–2, 75–78, 99–100,

109, 143–44, 147, 166, 197–98,247

Shakespeare, William, 3, 9, 75, 76,77, 206, 233, 242–43

sheep, 40, 42, 156shepherds, 68–69“Should an Old Man Marry?” (An

seni sit uxor ducenda) (Poggio),212–13

shrines, 15, 129, 158Siena, 10Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor,

161, 162, 168, 169, 170

signs, 43–44silence, rule of, 27–28, 43, 47silent reading, 27–28Silius Italicus, 48, 208sillybos (tag), 63simony, 170sin, 16, 95, 104–5, 118, 119, 138sine law, 239Sisyphus, 76Sixteen Standard-bearers of the

Militia, 127skepticism, 30, 94–95, 244–46,

261–62slaves, 37, 53, 67, 72, 84–86, 94,

104, 113, 125, 230–31Smith, Martin Ferguson, 2–3,

299n–300nsocial hierarchy, 14–20, 71, 73,

110, 113–15, 135Socrates, 246, 295nsodomy, 171, 219

Sofia, 233–36Sophocles, 58, 61, 81, 280nsorcery, 17, 18–19soul, 11, 19, 46, 73–76, 96, 98,

136, 171, 192–93, 196–97, 220,231–32, 249, 251, 288n

space, 186–89, 196–97, 237, 239,244, 256

Spain, 11–12, 87, 113, 122, 136,160, 163, 164, 205, 249–50

Spenser, Edmund, 243, 260–61Spinoza, Baruch, 10, 68spirits, 62, 194–95Starace, Tommaso, 64statues, 55, 62, 63, 88, 90, 117,

158, 209, 211, 212Stobaeus, Joannes, 82Stoicism, 69, 82, 96, 104–5, 240,

244Strozzi family, 113, 301nSuetonius, 275n

suffering, 75–76, 101, 103, 106–9,183, 195–98

suicide, 53–54, 94, 109Sulla, Lucius Cornelius, 273n,

275nsuperstition, 2, 6, 10–11, 18–19,

36, 72, 74–75, 183, 184, 193–97, 199, 249, 299n

Suso, Henry, 108swerve (clinamen) principle, 7–13,

188–89, 297nSwitzerland, 29, 152, 162, 206Symeon Stylites, Saint, 68Symonds, John Addington, 146synagogues, 91Syria, 62, 67 Tacitus, 63Tantalus, 76Tasso, Torquato, 242taxation, 15, 22, 33, 49, 56, 111–

12, 126, 287n, 289ntelescopes, 239Temple of Apollo, 275nTemple of Daphne, 62Temple of Jupiter, 156Temple of Peace, 275ntemples, 62, 67, 88, 89, 90, 156,

275nTennyson, Alfred Lord, 54Teresa, Saint, 108Terranuova, 34, 111, 211, 210–18Terranuova Bracciolini, 218Tertullian, 47–48, 99–100, 101,

284n, 285n, 300nTeutonic knights, 14, 15Theodosius I, Emperor of Rome,

89–90theology, 16, 17, 27, 65, 75–76,

94–108, 120, 136–37, 163, 208,252–54, 282n–83n, 285n

Theophilus, 90, 91

Theophrastus, 304nThirty Years’ War, 14–15Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 252–53Tiberian Library, 275ntime, 186–89, 196–97, 237, 239,

244, 256Timocrates, 277nTommaso da Sarzana, 214Torah, 39torture, 170, 240, 255transition, 5–7, 10, 145–46, 186–

87, 217, 243–45, 259–60, 263translations, 88, 168, 210, 212, 215tribon (cloak), 92Turkey, 82, 216Tuscany, 34, 45, 141Twelve Good Men, 127“Twentieth,” 66 Uccello, Paolo, 218Ulm, 15

Ulpian Library, 275nUlysses, 288numbilicus (wooden stick), 56underworld, 76, 180universe, 5–8, 73–74, 87, 186, 187,

189, 194, 220, 237, 238–39,250–52, 306n

Urban VI, Pope, 293n–94nUtopia (More), 227–33, 251, 304n Valla, Lorenzo, 149–50, 213, 215,

221–26, 303nvapulatio (cudgeling), 106Varro of Atax, 23–24Vatican, 20, 46, 142Vatican Library, 46, 58, 155–56,

221, 296nVegetius Renatus, Flavius, 35Vegio, Maffeo, 302nVelleius, Gaius, 69–70vellum, 40, 115–16

Venice, 32, 121, 122, 130–31, 136,239–40

Venus, 1–2, 10, 140, 175, 198,201–2, 228, 247, 251, 260–61

Vergerio, Pier Paolo, 162Veronese, Paolo, 305nVesalius, Andreas, 10Vespasian, Emperor of Rome,

275nVespasiano da Bisticci, 129, 133Vespucci, Amerigo, 229–30Villa of the Papyri, 54–59, 63–65,

68, 70–72, 79, 81, 82virgarum verbera (hitting with rods),

106Virgil, 23, 43, 51–52, 58, 61, 96,

120, 121, 123, 132, 176, 247,273n

Virgin Mary, 10, 166virtue, 102, 128–29, 138–39Visconti family, 153

Vitruvius, 62void, 74, 75, 102, 187, 188–89volcanic eruptions, 54–59, 63–64,

67Voltaire, 262Voss, Isaac, 204Vulcan, 99Vulgate Bible, 95–96 warfare, 24, 49, 59, 79, 89, 153,

192, 195, 226–27, 281nwater, 73, 86water-soluble ink, 82–83, 86“Way of Cession,” 160–61“Way of Compromise,” 161“Way of Council,” 161wealth, 20–22, 113, 127, 151, 192,

210–11, 215, 219, 301n, 304n“wergild” codes, 38witchcraft, 17, 18–19, 92–93, 217women, 17, 66, 76, 85, 91–93,

127–29, 143–44, 174–76, 210,212, 217, 220, 257–58

wool trade, 113, 114, 126, 287nWretchedness of the Human

Condition, The (Poggio), 216–17

writing, 37–38, 62, 112–16, 121,130, 135, 155–56, 179

Wycliffe, John, 168, 253 Yeats, William Butler, 197 Zabarella, Francesco, 162, 205Zamora, Padre, 250Zenodotus, 88Zephyr, 10, 267nZwingli, Huldrych, 253

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHER whosework gave rise to the story that I trace inthese pages believed that life’s highestend was pleasure, and he took particularpleasure in the community of his friends.It is only fitting then that I acknowledgethe rich and sustaining network of friendsand colleagues who have enhanced the

writing of this book. Over the course of ayear at the Wissenschaftskolleg in BerlinI spent many pleasurable hoursdiscussing Lucretius with the lateBernard Williams, whose marvelousintelligence illuminated everything that ittouched. And some years later at thesame wonderful Berlin institution Iparticipated in an extraordinary Lucretiusreading group that gave me the criticalimpetus I needed. Generously guided bytwo philosophers, Christoph Horn andChristof Rapp, the group, which includedHorst Bredekamp, Susan James,Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, QuentinSkinner, and Ramie Targoff, along withmore occasional visitors, worked its waywith exemplary care andcontentiousness through the poem.

A second wonderful institution—the American Academy in Rome—

provided the perfect setting for the bulk ofthe book’s writing: Nowhere else in myexperience is the precious opportunity tosit quietly and work so exquisitelybraided together with Epicureanpleasure. To the Academy’s director,Carmela Vircillo Franklin, and itscapable staff, along with a host of fellowsand visitors, I owe a deep debt ofgratitude. My agent, Jill Kneerim, and myeditor, Alane Salierno Mason, have beenextraordinarily helpful, generous, andacute readers. Among the many otherswho have given me advice andassistance, I want to single out AlbertAscoli, Homi Bhabha, Alison Brown,Gene Brucker, Joseph Connors, BrianCummings, Trevor Dadson, KennethGouwens, Jeffrey Hamburger, JamesHankins, Philip Hardie, Bernard Jussen,Joseph Koerner, Thomas Laqueur,

George Logan, David Norbrook, WilliamO’Connell, Robert Pinsky, OliverPrimavesi, Steven Shapin, MarcelloSimonetta, James Simpson, PippaSkotnes, Nick Wilding, and DavidWootton.

My students and colleagues atHarvard have been a source of constantintellectual stimulation and challenge,and the stupendous library resources ofthis university have never ceased toamaze me. I owe particular thanks forresearch assistance to Christine Barrett,Rebecca Cook, Shawon Kinew, AdaPalmer, and Benjamin Woodring.

My deepest debt of gratitude—forwise advice and for inexhaustiblepleasure—is to my wife, Ramie Targoff.

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