The Swerve (29 page)

Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and that they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives that they have. These lives, like all other existing forms in the universe, are contingent and vulnerable; all things, including the earth itself, will eventually disintegrate and return to the constituent atoms from which they were composed and out of which other things
will
form in the perpetual dance of matter. But while we are alive, we should be filled with the deepest pleasure, for we are a small part of a vast process of world-making that Lucretius celebrated as essentially erotic.

Hence it is that, as a poet, a maker of metaphors, Lucretius could do something very strange, something that appears to violate his conviction that the gods are deaf to human petitions.
On the Nature of Things
opens with a prayer to Venus. Once again Dryden probably best renders in English the spirit of Lucretius’ ardor:

Delight of humankind
¹⁵
and gods above,

Parent of Rome, propitious Queen of Love,

Whose vital power, air, earth, and sea supplies,

And breeds whate’er is born beneath the 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.

The hymn pours forth, full of wonder and gratitude, glowing with light. It is as if the ecstatic poet actually beheld the goddess of love, the sky clearing at her radiant presence, the awakening earth showering her with flowers. She is the embodiment of desire, and her return, on the fresh gusts of the west wind, fills all living things with pleasure and passionate 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 express

Whose 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 the flowery plain,

The leafy forest, and the liquid main

Extends thy uncontrolled and boundless reign.

Through all the living regions dost thou move

And scatterest, where thou goest, the kindly seeds of Love.

We do not know how the German monks who copied the Latin verses and kept them from destruction responded, nor do we know what Poggio Bracciolini, who must at least have glanced at them as he salvaged the poem from oblivion, thought they meant. Certainly almost every one of the poem’s key principles was an abomination to right-thinking Christian orthodoxy. But the poetry was compellingly, seductively beautiful. And we can see with hallucinatory vividness what at least one Italian, later in the fifteenth century, made of them: we have only to look at Botticelli’s great painting of Venus, ravishingly beautiful, emerging from the restless matter of the sea.

“
LUCRETIUS HAS NOT
yet come back to me,” Poggio wrote to his Venetian friend, the patrician humanist Francesco Barbaro, “although he has been copied.” Evidently, then, Poggio had not been allowed to borrow the ancient manuscript (which he characteristically referred to as if it were the poet himself) and take it back to Constance with him. The monks must have been too wary for that and forced him instead to find someone to make a copy. He did not expect this scribe to deliver the result, important as it was, in person: “The place is rather far away
¹
and not many people come from there,” Poggio wrote, “and so I shall wait until some people turn up who will bring him.” How long would he be willing to wait? “If no one comes,” he assured his friend, “I shall not put public duties ahead of private needs.” A very strange remark, for what is public here and what is private? Poggio was, perhaps, telling Barbaro not to worry: official duties in Constance (whatever they might be) would not stand in the way of getting his hands on Lucretius.

When the manuscript
²
of
On the Nature of Things
finally did reach him, Poggio evidently sent it off at once to Niccolò Niccoli, in Florence. Either because the scribe’s copy was crudely made or simply because he wanted a version for himself, Poggio’s friend undertook to transcribe it. This transcription in Niccoli’s elegant hand,
together
with the copy made by the German scribe, spawned dozens of further manuscript copies—more than fifty are known to survive—and were the sources of all fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century printed editions of Lucretius. Poggio’s discovery thus served as the crucial conduit through which the ancient poem, dormant for a thousand years, reentered circulation in the world. In the cool gray and white Laurentian library that Michelangelo designed for the Medici, Niccoli’s copy of the scribe’s copy of the ninth-century copy of Lucretius’ poem—Codex Laurentianus 35.30—is preserved. One of the key sources of modernity, it is a modest book, bound in fading, tattered red leather inlaid with metal, a chain attached to the bottom of the back cover. There is little to distinguish it physically from many other manuscripts in the collection, apart from the fact that a reader is given latex gloves to wear when it is delivered to the desk.

The copy that the scribe made and that Poggio sent from Constance to Florence is lost. Presumably, after completing his transcription, Niccoli sent it back to Poggio, who does not seem to have copied it in his own exquisite hand. Perhaps, confident in Niccoli’s skills, Poggio or his heirs deemed the scribe’s copy not worth preserving and in the end simply threw it away. Lost too is the manuscript that the scribe had copied and that presumably remained in the monastic library. Did it burn up in a fire? Was the ink carefully scraped off in order to make room for some other text? Did it finally molder away from neglect, the victim of damp and rot? Or did a pious reader actually take in its subversive implications and choose to destroy it? No remnants of it have been discovered. Two ninth-century manuscripts of
On the Nature of Things
, unknown to Poggio or any of his humanist contemporaries, did manage to make it through the almost impenetrable barrier of time. These manuscripts, named after their formats the Oblongus and the Quadratus, were cataloged in the collection of a great seventeenth-century Dutch scholar and collector, Isaac Voss, and have been in the Leiden University
Library
since 1689. Fragments of a third ninth-century manuscript, containing about 45 percent of Lucretius’ poem, also turned out to survive and are now housed in collections in Copenhagen and Vienna. But by the time these manuscripts surfaced, Lucretius’ poem, thanks to Poggio’s discovery, had already long been helping to unsettle and transform the world.

It is possible that Poggio sent his copy of the poem to Niccoli without having done more than look at it briefly. He had much to occupy his mind. Baldassare Cossa had been stripped of the papacy and was languishing in prison. The second claimant to the throne of St. Peter, Angelo Correr, who had been forced to resign his title of Gregory XII, died in October 1417. The third claimant, Pedro de Luna, barricaded first in the fortress of Perpignan and then on the inaccessible rock of Peñiscola on the sea coast near Valencia, still tenaciously called himself Benedict XIII, but it was clear to Poggio and almost everyone else that Papa Luna’s claim could not be taken seriously. The papal throne was vacant, and the council—which, like the current European Community, was riven with tensions among the English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish delegations—squabbled over the conditions that would have to be met before proceeding to elect a new pope.

In the long interval before an agreement was finally reached, many members of the curia had found paths to new employment; some, like Poggio’s friend Bruni, had already returned to Italy. Poggio’s own attempts were unsuccessful. The apostolic secretary to the disgraced pope had enemies, and he refused to appease them by distancing himself from his former master. Other bureaucrats in the papal court testified against the imprisoned Cossa, but Poggio’s name does not appear on the list of witnesses for the prosecution. His best hope was that one of Cossa’s principal allies, Cardinal Zabarella, would be named pope, but Zabarella died in 1417. When the electors finally met in secret conclave in the fall of 1418, they chose someone with no interest in surrounding himself with
humanist
intellectuals, the Roman aristocrat Oddo Colonna, who took the name Martin V. Poggio was not offered the post of apostolic secretary, though he could have stayed on at court in the lower rank of scriptor. Instead, he decided to make a very surprising and risky career move.

In 1419, Poggio accepted the post of secretary to Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. The uncle of Henry V (Shakespeare’s heroic warrior of Agincourt fame), Beaufort was the leader of the English delegation to the Council of Constance, where he evidently met and was impressed by the Italian humanist. For the wealthy and powerful English bishop, Poggio represented the most advanced and sophisticated type of secretary, someone deeply versed both in the Roman curial bureaucracy and in prestigious humanist studies. For the Italian secretary, Beaufort represented the salvaging of dignity. Poggio had the satisfaction of refusing what would have been in effect a demotion, had he returned to the Roman Curia. But he knew no English, and, if that did not greatly matter in the service of an aristocratic cleric whose mother tongue was French and who was comfortable in Latin and Italian, it did mean that Poggio could never hope to feel entirely at home in England.

The decision to move, as he approached his fortieth birthday, to a land where he had no family, allies, or friends was motivated by something other than pique. The prospect of a sojourn in a distant realm—much more remote and exotic than Tasmania would now seem to a contemporary Roman—excited the book hunter in Poggio. He had had spectacular successes in Switzerland and Germany, successes that had made his name famous in humanist circles. Other great discoveries might await him now in English monastic libraries. Those libraries had not yet been thoroughly searched by humanists endowed, as Poggio was, with a careful reading of known classical texts,
an
encyclopedic grasp of the clues to missing manuscripts, and remarkable philological acumen. If he had already been hailed as a demigod for his ability to resurrect the ancient dead, how would he be praised for what he might now bring to light?

In the event, Poggio remained in England for almost four years, but the stay was deeply disappointing. Bishop Beaufort was not the gold mine that Poggio, perennially short of money, had dreamed he would be. He was away much of the time—“as nomadic as a Scythian”—leaving his secretary with little or nothing to do. Except for Niccoli, his Italian friends seem all to have forgotten him: “I have been relegated
³
to oblivion as though I were dead.” The English people he met were almost uniformly disagreeable: “plenty of men given over to gluttony and lust but very few lovers of literature and those few barbarians, trained rather in trifling debates and in quibbling than in real learning.”