The Swerve (39 page)

 

CHAPTER THREE: IN SEARCH OF LUCRETIUS

 

1
“Send me some piece by Lucretius or Ennius,” the highly cultivated emperor Antoninus Pius (86–161
CE
) wrote to a friend; “something harmonious, powerful, and expressive of the state of the spirit.” (Apart from fragments, Ennius, the greatest early Roman poet, has never been recovered.)

 

2
“Lucreti poemata, ut scribes, ita sunt, multis luminibus ingenii, multae tamen artis”—Cicero,
Q.Fr
. 2.10.3.

 

3
Georgics
, 2.490–92:

 

Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas
,

atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum

subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari
.

 

Acheron, a river of the underworld, is used by Virgil and Lucretius as a symbol of the whole realm of the afterlife. For Lucretius’ presence in the
Georgics
, see especially Monica Gale,
Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius, and the Didactic Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

 

4
The author of the
Aeneid
, with his somber sense of the burden of imperial power and the stern necessity of renouncing pleasures, was clearly more skeptical than he had been in the
Georgics
about anyone’s ability to grasp with serene clarity the hidden forces of the universe. But Lucretius’ vision and the tough elegance of his poetry are present throughout Virgil’s epic, if only as glimpses of an achieved security that now constantly and forever eludes the poet and his hero. On the deep presence of Lucretius in the
Aeneid
(and in other works of Virgil, as well as those of Ovid and Horace), see Philip Hardie,
Lucretian Receptions: History, The Sublime, Knowledge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

 

5
Amores
, 1.15.23–24. See Philip Hardie,
Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) esp. pp. 143–63, 173–207.

 

6
Son-in-law for a time of the merciless patrician dictator Sulla, Memmius’ political career came to an end
in
54
BCE
, when, as a candidate for the office of consul, he was forced to disclose his involvement in a financial scandal that lost him the crucial support of Julius Caesar. As an orator, in Cicero’s view, Memmius was lazy. He was, Cicero conceded, extremely well read, though more in Greek than in Latin literature. Perhaps this immersion in Greek culture helps to explain why, after his political fortunes fell, Memmius moved to Athens, where he apparently bought land on which stood the ruins of the house of the philosopher Epicurus, who died more than two hundred years earlier. In 51
BCE
, Cicero wrote a letter to Memmius in which he asked him as a personal favor to give these ruins to “Patro the Epicurean.” (The ruins were evidently threatened by a building project that Memmius had in mind.) Patro pleads, Cicero reports, “that he owes a responsibility to his office and duty, to the sanctity of testaments, to the prestige of Epicurus’ name … to the abode, domicile, and memorials of great men”—Letter 63 (13:1) in
Cicero’s Letters to Friends
(Loeb edn.), 1:271. With Epicurus, we close the circle back to Lucretius, for Lucretius was Epicurus’ most passionate, intelligent, and creative disciple.

 

7
On the creation of the legend, see esp. Luciano Canfora’s
Vita di Lucrezio
(Palermo: Sellerio, 1993). The greatest evocation of it is Tennyson’s “Lucretius.”

 

8
Canfora’s fascinating
Vita di Lucrezio
is not a biography in any conventional sense, but rather a brilliant exercise in dismantling the mythic narrative launched by Jerome. In a work in progress, Ada Palmer shows that Renaissance scholars assembled what they thought were clues to Lucretius’ life, but that most of those clues turn out to have been comments about other, unrelated people.

 

9
Johann Joachim Winkelmann, cited in David Sider,
The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum
(Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005). Winkelmann’s colorful phrase is an Italian proverb.

 

10
Camillo Paderni, director of the Museum Herculanense in the Royal 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 was under the supervision of a Swiss army engineer, Karl Weber, who took a more responsible and scholarly interest in what lay underground.

 

13
This way of viewing themselves had a long life. When Scipio sacked Carthage in 146
BCE
, the library collections of that great North African city fell into his hands, along with all the other plunder. He wrote to the Senate and asked what to do with the books now in his possession. Answer came back that a single book, a treatise on agriculture, was worth returning to be translated into Latin; the rest of the books, the senators wrote, Scipio should distribute as gifts to the petty kings of Africa—Pliny the Elder,
Natural History
, 18:5.

 

14
The seizing of Greek libraries as spoils became a fairly common practice, though rarely as the conqueror’s sole prize. In 67
BCE
, Lucullus, an ally of Sulla, brought home from his eastern conquests a very valuable library, along with other riches, and in retirement he devoted himself to the study of Greek literature and philosophy. At his villa and gardens in Rome and in Tusculum, near Naples, Lucullus was the generous patron of Greek intellectuals and poets, and he figures in Cicero’s dialogue
Academica
as one of the principal interlocutors.

 

15
Appointed to administer northern Italy (Gallia Transpadana), Pollio used his influence to save Virgil’s property from confiscation.

 

16
Augustus’ two libraries were known as the Octavian and the Palatine. The former, founded in honor of his sister (33
BC
), was situated in the Porticus Octaviae and combined a magnificent promenade on the lower story with the reading room and book collection on the upper. The other library, attached to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill, seems to have had two separately administered departments, a Greek and a Latin one. Both libraries were subsequently destroyed by fire. Augustus’ successors maintained the tradition of establishing libraries: Tiberius founded the Tiberian Library in his house on the Palatine (according to Suetonius, he caused the writings and images of his favorite Greek poets to be placed in the public libraries). Vespasian established a library in the Temple of Peace erected after the burning of the city under Nero. Domitian restored the libraries after the same fire, even sending to Alexandria for copies. The most important imperial library was the Ulpian Library, created by Ulpius Trajanus—first established in the Forum of Trajan but afterwards removed to the Baths of Diocletian. See Lionel Casson,
Libraries in the Ancient World
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

 

17
Among them: Athens, Cyprus, Como, Milan, Smyrna, Patrae, Tibur—from which books could even be borrowed. But see the inscription found in the Agora of Athens, on the wall of the Library of Pantainos (200 ce): “No book shall be removed, since we have sworn thus. Opening hours are from six in the morning until noon” (quoted in Sider,
The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum
, p. 43).

 

18
Clarence E. Boyd,
Public Libraries and Literary Culture in Ancient Rome
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915), pp. 23–24.

 

19
Cf. Arnaldo Momigliano,
Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

 

20
Erich Auerbach,
Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages
, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 237.

 

21
Knut Kleve, “Lucretius in Herculaneum,” in
Croniche Ercolanesi
19 (1989), p. 5.

 

22
In Pisonem
(“Against Piso”), in Cicero,
Orations
, trans. N. H. Watts, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 252 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 167 (“in suorum Gaecorum foetore atque vino”).

 

23
The Epigrams of Philodemos
, ed. and trans. David Sider (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 152.

 

24
Though there had been a serious recent earthquake, the last major eruption had taken place in 1200
BCE
, so the source of queasiness, if there was one, was not the volcano.

 

25
Cicero,
De natura deorum
(“On the Nature of the Gods”), trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 268 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 1.6, pp. 17–19.

 

26
Ibid., p. 383.

 

27
Cicero,
De officiis
(“On Duties”), trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library, 30. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 1.37, p. 137.

 

28
As I will discuss below, the word translated here as “superstitition” is in Latin
religio
, that is, “religion.”

 

29
Diogenes Laertius,
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library, 184–85 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 2:531–33.

 

30
Epicurus’
epilogismos
was a term frequently used to suggest “reasoning based on empirical data,” but according to Michael Schofield, it conveys “our everyday procedures of assessment and appraisal”—Schofield, in
Rationality in Greek Thought
, ed. Michael Frede and Gisele Striker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Schofield suggests that these procedures are linked to a famous passage by Epicurus on time: “We must not adopt special expressions for it, supposing that this will be an improvement; we must use just the existing ones,” p. 222. The thinking that Epicurus urged upon his followers was “a perfectly ordinary kind of activity available to all, not a special intellectual accomplishment restricted to, for example, mathematicians or dialecticians,” p. 235.

 

31
Cicero,
Tusculanae disputationes
(“Tusculan Disputations”), trans. J. E. King. Loeb Classical Library, 141 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 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 left the school,” in Diogenes Laertius,
Lives of Eminent Philosophers
, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library, 185 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 2:535.

 

34
Seneca,
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales
, trans. Richard Gummere, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), 1:146.

 

35
Letter to Menoeceus, in Laertius,
Lives
, 2:657.

 

36
Philodemus,
On Choices and Avoidances
, trans. Giovanni Indelli and Voula Tsouna-McKirahan, La Scuola di Epicuro, 15 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1995), pp. 104–6.

 

37
Ben Jonson,
The Alchemist
, ed. Alvin B. Kernan, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), II.ii.41–42; 72–87. Jonson is participating in a tradition of representing Epicurus as the patron saint of the inn and the brothel, a tradition that includes Chaucer’s
well-fed
Franklin, who is described in the
Canterbury Tales
as “Epicurus owene sone.”

 

38
Maxim #7, in Diogenes Laertius,
Lives of Eminent Philosophers
, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols. Loeb Classical 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 Hellenistic Philosophers
, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1:150.

 

CHAPTER FOUR: THE TEETH OF TIME

 

1
Cf. Moritz W. Schmidt,
De Didymo Chalcentero
(Oels: A. Ludwig, 1851) and
Didymi Chalcenteri fragmenta
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1854).

 

2
Cf. David Diringer,
The Book Before Printing
(New York: Dover Books, 1982), pp. 241ff.

 

3
Diogenes Laertius: “Epicurus was a most prolific author and eclipsed all before him in the number of his writings: for they amount to about three hundred rolls, and contain not a single citation from other authors; it is Epicurus himself who speaks throughout”—
Lives of Eminent Philosophers
, 2:555. Diogenes Laertius lists the titles of thirty-seven books by Epicurus, all of which have been lost.