The Swerve (12 page)

The affliction—the fear of some horrendous punishment waiting for one in a realm beyond the grave—no longer weighs heavily on most modern men and women, but it evidently did in the ancient Athens of Epicurus and the ancient Rome of Lucretius, and it did as well in the Christian world inhabited by Poggio. Certainly Poggio would have seen images of such
horrors
, lovingly carved on the tympanum above the doors to churches or painted on their inner walls. And those horrors were in turn modeled on accounts of the afterlife fashioned in the pagan imagination. To be sure, not everyone in any of these periods, pagan or Christian, believed in such accounts. Aren’t you terrified, one of the characters in a dialogue by Cicero asks, by the underworld, with its terrible three-headed dog, its black river, its hideous punishments? “Do you suppose
³¹
me so crazy as to believe such tales?” his companion replies. Fear of death is not about the fate of Sisyphus and Tantalus: “Where is the crone so silly as to be afraid” of such scare stories? It is about the dread of suffering and the dread of perishing, and it is difficult to understand,
³²
Cicero wrote, why the Epicureans think that they are offering any palliative. To be told that one perishes completely and forever, soul as well as body, is hardly a robust consolation.

Followers of Epicurus responded by recalling the last days of the master, dying from an excruciating obstruction of the bladder but achieving serenity of spirit by recalling all of the pleasures he had experienced in his life. It is not clear that this model was easily imitable—“Who can hold a fire in his hand/By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?” as one of Shakespeare’s characters asks—but then it is not clear that any of the available alternatives, in a world without Demerol or morphine, was more successful at dealing with death agonies. What the Greek philosopher offered was not help in dying but help in living. Liberated from superstition, Epicurus taught, you would be free to pursue pleasure.

Epicurus’ enemies seized upon his celebration of pleasure and invented malicious stories of his debauchery, stories heightened by his unusual inclusion of women as well as men among his followers. He “vomited twice a day
³³
from over-indulgence,” went one of these stories, and spent a fortune on his feasting.
In
reality, the philosopher seems to have lived a conspicuously simple and frugal life. “Send me a pot of cheese,” he wrote once to a friend, “that, when I like, I may fare sumptuously.” So much for the alleged abundance of his table. And he urged a comparable frugality on his students. The motto carved over the door to Epicurus’ garden urged the stranger to linger, for “here our highest good is pleasure.” But according to the philosopher Seneca, who quotes these words in a famous letter that Poggio and his friends knew and admired, the passerby who entered
³⁴
would be served a simple meal of barley gruel and water. “When we say, then,
³⁵
that pleasure is the goal,” Epicurus wrote in one of his few surviving letters, “we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality.” The feverish attempt to satisfy certain appetites—“an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry … sexual love … the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table”—cannot lead to the peace of mind that is the key to enduring pleasure.

“Men suffer the worst evils
³⁶
for the sake of the most alien desires,” wrote his disciple Philodemus, in one of the books found in the library at Herculaneum, and “they neglect the most necessary appetites as if they were the most alien to nature.” What are these necessary appetites that lead to pleasure? It is impossible to live pleasurably, Philodemus continued, “without living prudently and honourably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic.”

This is the voice of an authentic follower of Epicurus, a voice recovered in modern times from a volcano-blackened papyrus roll. But it is hardly the voice that anyone familiar with the term “Epicureanism” would ever expect. In one of his memorable satirical grotesques, Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson perfectly depicted the spirit in which Epicurus’ philosophy was for long centuries widely understood. “I’ll have all my beds
³⁷
blown
up, not stuffed,” Jonson’s character declares. “Down is too hard.”

My meat shall all come in in Indian shells,

Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded,

With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies….

My foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons,

Knots, godwits, lampreys. I myself will have

The beards of barbels served instead of salads;

Oiled mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps

Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off,

Drest with an exquisite and poignant sauce;

For which, I’ll say unto my cook, “There’s gold,

Go forth and be a knight.”

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

A philosophical claim that life’s ultimate goal is pleasure—even if that pleasure was defined in the most restrained and responsible terms—was a scandal, both for pagans and for their adversaries, the Jews and later the Christians. Pleasure as the highest good? What about worshipping the gods and ancestors? Serving the family, the city, and the state? Scrupulously observing the laws and commandments? Pursuing virtue or a vision of the divine? These competing claims inevitably entailed forms of ascetic self-denial, self-sacrifice, even self-loathing. None was compatible with the pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. Two thousand years after Epicurus lived and taught, the sense of scandal was still felt intensely enough to generate the manic energy in travesties like Jonson’s.

Behind such travesties lay a half-hidden fear that to maximize pleasure and to avoid pain were in fact appealing goals and might plausibly serve as the rational organizing principles
of
human life. If they succeeded in doing so, a whole set of time-honored alternative principles—sacrifice, ambition, social status, discipline, piety—would be challenged, along with the institutions that such principles served. To push the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure toward grotesque sensual self-indulgence—depicted as the single-minded pursuit of sex or power or money or even (as in Jonson) extravagant, absurdly expensive food—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 was
too
quiet: he counseled his followers against a full, robust engagement in the affairs of the city. “Some men have sought
³⁸
to become famous and renowned,” he wrote, “thinking that thus they would make themselves secure against their fellow-men.” If security actually came with fame and renown, then the person who sought them attained a “natural good.” But if fame actually brought heightened insecurity, as it did in most cases, then such an achievement was not worth pursuing. From this perspective, Epicurus’ critics observed, it would be difficult to justify most of the restless striving and risk taking that leads to a city’s greatness.

Such a criticism of Epicurean quietism may well have been voiced in the sun-drenched garden of Herculaneum: the guests at the Villa of the Papyri, after all, would probably have included their share of those who sought fame and renown at the center of the greatest city in the Western world. But perhaps Julius Caesar’s father-in-law—if Piso was indeed the villa’s owner—and some in his circle of friends were drawn to this philosophical school precisely because it offered an alternative to their stressful endeavors. Rome’s enemies were falling before the might of its legions, but it did not take prophetic powers to perceive ominous signs for the future of the republic. And even
for
those most safely situated, it was difficult to gainsay one of Epicurus’ celebrated aphorisms: “Against other things
³⁹
it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city” The key point, as Epicurus’ disciple Lucretius wrote in verses of unrivalled beauty, was to abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the cultivation of pleasure.

APART FROM THE
charred papyrus fragments recovered in Herculaneum, there are no surviving contemporary manuscripts from the ancient Greek and Roman world. Everything that has reached us is a copy, most often very far removed in time, place, and culture from the original. And these copies represent only a small portion of the works even of the most celebrated writers of antiquity. Of Aeschylus’ eighty or ninety plays and the roughly one hundred twenty by Sophocles, only seven each have survived; Euripides and Aristophanes did slightly better: eighteen of ninety-two plays by the former have come down to us; eleven of forty-three by the latter.

These are the great success stories. Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace. Scientists, historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and statesmen have left behind some of their achievements—the invention of trigonometry, for example, or the calculation of position by reference to latitude and longitude, or the rational analysis of political power—but their books are gone. The indefatigable scholar Didymus of Alexandria
¹
earned the nickname Bronze-Ass (literally, “Brazen-Bowelled”) for having what it took to write more than 3,500 books; apart from
a
few fragments, all have vanished. At the end of the fifth century
CE
an ambitious literary editor
²
known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world’s best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works that are now lost.

In this general vanishing, all the works of the brilliant founders of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus, and most of the works of their intellectual heir Epicurus, disappeared. Epicurus had been extraordinarily prolific.
³
He and his principal philosophical opponent, the Stoic Chrysippus, wrote between them, it was said, more than a thousand books. Even if this figure is exaggerated or if it counts as books what we would regard as essays and letters, the written record was clearly massive. That record no longer exists. Apart from three letters quoted by an ancient historian of philosophy, Diogenes Laertius, along with a list of forty maxims, almost nothing by Epicurus has survived. Modern scholarship, since the nineteenth century, has only been able to add some fragments. Some of these were culled from the blackened papyrus rolls found at Herculaneum; others were painstakingly recovered from the broken pieces of an ancient wall. On that wall,
⁴
discovered in the town of Oenoanda, in the rugged mountains in southwest Turkey, an old man, in the early years of the second century
CE
, had had his distinctly Epicurean philosophy of life—“a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure”—chiseled in stone. But where did all the books go?

The actual material disappearance of the books was largely the effect of climate and pests. Though papyrus and parchment were impressively long-lived (far more so than either our cheap paper or computerized data), books inevitably deteriorated over the centuries, even if they managed to escape the ravages of fire and flood. The ink was a mixture of soot (from burnt lamp wicks), water, and tree gum: that made it cheap and
agreeably
easy to read, but also water-soluble. (A scribe who made a mistake could erase it with a sponge.) A spilled glass of wine or a heavy downpour, and the text disappeared. And that was only the most common threat. Rolling and unrolling the scrolls or poring over the codices, touching them, dropping them, coughing on them, allowing them to be scorched by fire from the candles, or simply reading them over and over eventually destroyed them.

Carefully sequestering books from excessive use was of little help, for they then became the objects not of intellectual hunger but of a more literal appetite. Tiny animals, Aristotle noted, may be detected in such things as clothes, woolen blankets, and cream cheese. “Others are found,”
⁵
he observed, “in books, some of them similar to those found in clothes, others like tailless scorpions, very small indeed.” Almost two thousand years later in
Micrographia
(1655), the scientist Robert Hooke reported with fascination what he saw when he examined one of these creatures under that remarkable new invention, the microscope: