The Swerve (43 page)

 

16
Fillastre in
The Council of Constance
, p. 236.

 

17
E. H. Gillett,
The Life and Times of John 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 Jerome and Bruni’s alarmed reply are quoted in William Shepherd,
The Life of Poggio Bracciolini
(Liverpool: Longman et al., 1837), pp. 78–90.

 

20
Richental’s Chronicle,” p. 135. Poggio, however, who claimed that he “was a witness of his end, and observed every particular of its process,” told Bruni that “neither did Mutius suffer his hand to be burnt so patiently as Jerome endured the burning of his whole body; nor did Socrates drink the hemlock as cheerfully as Jerome submitted to the fire” (Shepherd, p. 88). Poggio’s reference is to Mucius Scaevola, the legendary Roman hero who stoically thrust his hand into the flames and thus impressed Rome’s enemy, the Etruscan Porsenna.

 

21
This and the quotes to follow are from a letter to Niccoli, May 18, 1416, in Gordan,
Two Renaissance Book Hunters
, pp. 26–30.

 

22
L. D. Reynolds,
Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 158.
The
commentary was by the fourth-century Roman grammarian Donatus.

 

23
Poggio’s transcription of the Ciceronian speeches that he had discovered was identified in the Vatican Library [Vatican lat. 11458 (X)] by A. Campana in 1948, with the following subscription:
Has septem M. Tulii orationes, que antea culpa temporum apud Italos deperdite erant, Poggius Florentinus, perquisitis plurimis Gallie Germanieque summo cum studio ac diligentia bibyothecis, cum latenetes comperisset in squalore et sordibus, in lucem solus extulit ac in pristinam dignitatem decoremque restituens Latinis musis dicavit
(p. 91).

 

24
In the continuation of this description of the tattered manuscript, Poggio fantasizes that Quintilian’s
Institutes
had been instrumental in saving the Roman Republic. Hence he imagines that the “imprisoned” Quintilian feels it “a disgrace that he who had once preserved the safety of the whole population by his influence and his eloquence could now not find one single advocate who would pity his misfortunes and take some trouble over his welfare and prevent his being dragged off to an undeserved punishment”—Letter to Niccoli, December 15, 1425, in Gordan,
Two Renaissance Book Hunters
, p. 105). In these words one may perhaps glimpse a twinge of Poggio’s own guilty conscience at witnessing Jerome’s condemnation and execution. Or rather, the rescue of the manuscript stands in for a failed rescue: saving a classical text from the clutches of the monks was a liberation that Poggio could not possibly have brought about for eloquent, doomed Jerome.

 

25
Ibid., Letter IV, p. 194.

 

26
Ibid., Letter IV, p. 197.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE WAY THINGS ARE

 

1
The key role played by Lucretius in early modern philosophy and natural science has been subtly explored by Catherine Wilson:
Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008). See also W. R. Johnson,
Lucretius and the Modern World
(London: Duckworth, 2000); Dane R. Gordon and David B. Suits,
Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance
(Rochester, NY: RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press, 2003); and Stuart Gillespie and Donald Mackenzie, “Lucretius and the Moderns,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius
, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 306–24.

 

2
George Santayana,
Three Philosophical 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 inevitably lost in translation. Here in describing the innumerable combinations, he plays with similar words jostling one another: “sed quia multa modis multis mutata per omne.”

 

4
In
The Logic of Sense
, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), Gilles Deleuze explores the relationship between this minimal, indeterminate motion of atoms and modern physics.

 

5
“If all movements are invariably interlinked, if new movement arises from the old in unalterable succession, if there is no atomic swerve [
declinando … primordia motus
] to initiate movement that can annul the decrees of destiny and prevent the existence of an endless chain of causation, what is the source of this free will possessed by living creatures all over the earth? What, I ask, is the source of this power of will wrested from destiny, which enables each of us to advance where pleasures leads us …?” (2.251–58).

 

6
Both willing oneself to go forward and willing oneself to remain stationary are only possible because everything is not strictly determined, that is, because of the subtle, unpredictable, free movements of matter. What keeps the mind from being crushed by inner necessity is “the minute swerve [
clinamen principiorum
] of the atoms at unpredictable places and times” (2.293–94).

 

7
Just as there is no divine grace in any of this tangled history of development, there is no perfect or final form. Even the creatures that flourish are beset with flaws, evidence that their design is not the product of some sublime higher intelligence but of chance. Lucretius articulated, in effect, what human males, with chagrin, might call the principle of the prostate.

 

8
Cf. Dryden’s translation of these lines:

 

Thus like a sailor by the tempest hurled

Ashore, the babe is shipwrecked on the world:

Naked he lies, and ready to expire;

Helpless of all that human wants require:

Exposed upon unhospitable earth,

From the first moment of his hapless birth.

 

John Dryden,
Complete Poems
, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 1:421. Here and elsewhere I have modernized Dryden’s spelling and punctuation.

 

9
“For example, often before a god’s gracefully ornamented shrine a calf falls a victim beside the incense-smoking altars, and with its last breath spurts a hot stream of blood from its breast. Meanwhile the bereaved mother ranges through green glades searching the ground for the imprint of those cloven hoofs. With her eyes she explores every place in the hope that she will be able to spy somewhere the young one she has lost. Now she halts and fills the leafy grove with her plaintive calls. Time after time she returns to the cowshed, her heart transfixed with longing for her calf” (2.352–60). This passage, of course, does more than make the point that a particular cow can identify its particular calf: it registers once again the destructiveness, the murderousness, of religion, this time from the perspective of the animal victim. The whole sacrificial cult, at once unnecessary and cruel, is set against something intensely natural, not only the capacity of a mother to identify her offspring but also the deep love that lies behind this identification. Animals are not material machines—they are not simply programmed, as we would say, to care for their young; they feel emotions. And one member of the species cannot simply substitute for another, as if individual creatures were interchangeable.

 

10
“Whose heart does not contract with dread of the gods, and who does not cower in fear, when the scorched earth shudders beneath the terrible stroke of the thunderbolt, and rumbles of thunder run across the vast heaven?” (5:1218–21).

 

11
Hans Blumenberg, in his elegant short book on this passage,
Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence
, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997) shows that over the course of centuries of brooding and commenting on this passage, the spectator tended to lose his privileged 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, “The English Voices of Lucretius from Lucy Hutchinson to John Mason Good,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius
, p. 266. Here is Dryden’s translation of the passage:

 

When Love its utmost vigor does imploy,

Ev’n tben, ’tis but a restless wandring joy:

Nor knows the Lover, in that wild excess,

With hands or eyes, what first he would possess:

But strains at all; and fast’ning where he strains,

Too closely presses with his frantic pains;

With biting kisses hurts the twining fair,

Which shows his joys imperfect, 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 fact that the lovers’ pleasure is not pure:
quia non est pura voluptas
(4:1081).

 

13
“Just like thirsty people who in dreams desire to drink and, instead of obtaining water to quench the fire that consumes their limbs, with vain effort pursue images of water and remain thirsty, though they drink in the midst of a torrent stream, so, in love, lovers are deluded by Venus with images: no matter how intently they gaze at the beloved body, they cannot sate their eyes; nor can they remove anything from the velvety limbs that they explore with roving, uncertain hands.” (4.1097–1104).

 

14
Here is Smith’s more workmanlike prose translation:

 

At last, with limbs interlocked, they enjoy the flower of youth: the body has a presentiment of ecstasy, and Venus is on the point of sowing the woman’s fields; they greedily press body to body and intermingle the salivas of their mouths, drawing deep breaths and crushing lips with teeth. But it is all in vain, since they cannot take away anything from their lover’s body or wholly penetrate it and merge into it. At times they do indeed seem to be striving and struggling to do this: so eagerly do they remain fettered in the bonds of Venus, while their limbs are slackened and liquefied by the force of ecstasy.

 

15
Smith’s prose translation of the opening lines reads:

 

Mother of Aeneas’ people, delight of human beings and the gods, Venus, power of life, it is you who beneath the sky’s sliding stars inspirit the ship-bearing sea, inspirit the productive land. To you every kind of living creature owes its conception
and
first glimpse of the sun’s light. You goddess, at your coming hush the winds and scatter the clouds, for you the creative earth thrusts up fragrant flowers, for you the smooth stretches of the ocean smile, and the sky, tranquil now, is flooded with effulgent light.

Once the door to spring is flung open and Favonius’ fertilizing breeze, released from imprisonment, is active, first, goddess, the birds of the air, pierced to the heart with your powerful shafts, signal your entry. Next wild creatures and cattle bound over rich pastures and swim rushing rivers: so surely are they all captivated by your charm and eagerly follow your lead. Then you inject seductive love into the heart of every creature that lives in the seas and mountains and river torrents and bird-haunted thickets and verdant plains, implanting in it the passionate urge to reproduce its kind.

 

CHAPTER NINE: THE RETURN

 

1
Letter to Francesco Barbaro, in Gordan,
Two Renaissance Book Hunters
, Appendix: Letter VIII, p. 213.

 

2
The textual history of Lucretius has occupied scholars for many generations and was the object of the most famous of all philological reconstructions, that of the great German classicist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851). The lost scribal copy, made for Poggio, is known to textual scholars as the
Poggianus
. I have been greatly assisted in grasping the complexity of the textual issues by D. J. Butterfield of Cambridge University, to whom I am indebted.

 

3
Ibid., pp. 38, 46.

 

4
Ibid., pp. 46, 48.

 

5
Ibid., p. 74.

 

6
Ibid., p. 65.

 

7
Ibid., pp. 89, 92.