The Swerve (8 page)

When he and his hosts emerged once again into the light and when he deemed that he had reached the appropriate moment, Poggio would have nudged the conversation toward his actual purpose in coming. He could have done so by initiating a discussion of one of Fulda’s most celebrated figures, Rabanus Maurus, who had served as abbot for two decades, from 822 to 842. Rabanus Maurus was a prolific author of biblical commentaries, doctrinal treatises, pedagogical guides, scholarly compendia, and a series of fantastically beautiful poems in cipher. Most of these works Poggio could easily have seen in the Vatican Library, along with the vast tome for which Rabanus was best known: a work of stupefying erudition and dullness that attempted to bring together in its twenty-two books all of human knowledge. Its title was
De rerum naturis
—“On the Natures of Things”—but contemporaries, acknowledging the scope of its ambition, called it “On the Universe.”

The works of the ninth-century monk epitomized the heavy, plodding style that Poggio and his fellow humanists despised. But he also recognized that Rabanus Maurus was an immensely
learned
man, steeped in pagan as well as Christian literature, and that he had transformed Fulda’s monastic school into the most important in Germany. As all schools do, the one at Fulda needed books, and Rabanus had met the need by greatly enriching the monastic library. Rabanus, who as a young man
²⁴
had studied with Alcuin, the greatest scholar of the age of Charlemagne, knew where to get his hands on important manuscripts. He had them brought to Fulda, where he trained a large cohort of scribes to copy them. And so he had built what was for the time a stupendous collection.

That time, some six hundred years before Poggio, was from the book hunter’s perspective highly propitious. It was far enough into the past to hold out the possibility of a link to a more distant past. And the gradual decline over the centuries in the monastery’s intellectual seriousness only intensified the excitement. Who knew what was sitting on those shelves, untouched perhaps for centuries? Tattered manuscripts that had chanced to survive the long nightmare of chaos and destruction, in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, might well have found their way to remote Fulda. Rabanus’s monks could have made the scratching or gagging sign for pagan books to copy, and those copies, having fallen into oblivion, would be awaiting the humanist’s revivifying touch.

Such, in any case, was Poggio’s ardent hope, in Fulda or wherever he found himself, and his pulse must have quickened when at last he would have been led by the monastery’s chief librarian into a large vaulted room and shown a volume attached by a chain to the librarian’s own desk. The volume was a catalogue, and as he pored over its pages, Poggio pointed—for the rule of silence in the library was strictly observed—to the books he wanted to see.

Genuine interest, as well as a sense of discretion, might have dictated that Poggio request first to see unfamiliar works by one
of
the greatest Church Fathers, Tertullian. Then, as the manuscripts were brought to his desk, he plunged, with what must have been increasing excitement, into a series of ancient Roman authors whose works were utterly unknown to him and to any of his fellow humanists. Though Poggio did not reveal precisely where he went, he did reveal—indeed, he trumpeted—what he had found. For what all book hunters dreamed of was actually happening.

He opened an epic poem in some 14,000 lines on the wars between Rome and Carthage. Poggio might have recognized the name of the author, Silius Italicus, though until this moment none of his works had surfaced. A canny politician and a wily, unscrupulous orator, who served as a tool in a succession of show trials, Silius had managed to survive the murderous reigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian. In retirement, the younger Pliny had written with urbane irony, he “obliterated by the praiseworthy use
²⁵
he made of leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days.” Now Poggio 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 name the book hunter would certainly not have recognized, for it is not mentioned by any surviving ancient author. Poggio saw at once that it was a learned work on astronomy, and he would have been able to tell from the style and from the poet’s own allusions that it had been written at the very beginning of the empire, during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius.

More ghosts surged up from the Roman past. An ancient literary critic who had flourished during Nero’s reign and had written notes and glosses on classical authors; another critic who quoted extensively from lost epics written in imitation of
Homer
; a grammarian who wrote a treatise on spelling that Poggio knew his Latin-obsessed friends in Florence would find thrilling. Yet another manuscript was a discovery whose thrill might have been tinged for him with melancholy: a large fragment of a hitherto unknown history of the Roman Empire written by a high-ranking officer in the imperial army, Ammianus Marcellinus. The melancholy would have arisen not only from the fact that the first thirteen of the original thirty-one books were missing from the manuscript Poggio copied by hand—and these lost books have never been found—but also from the fact that the work was written on the eve of the empire’s collapse. A clearheaded, thoughtful, and unusually impartial historian, Ammianus seems to have sensed the impending end. His description of a world exhausted by crushing taxes, the financial ruin of large segments of the population, and the dangerous decline in the army’s morale vividly conjured up the conditions that made it possible, some twenty years after his death, for the Goths to sack Rome.

Even the smallest of the finds that Poggio was making was highly significant—for anything at all to surface after so long seemed miraculous—but they were all eclipsed, from our own perspective if not immediately, by the discovery of a work still more ancient than any of the others that he had found. One of the manuscripts consisted of a long text written around 50
BCE
by a poet and philosopher named Titus Lucretius Carus. The text’s title,
De rerum natura
—
On the Nature of Things
—was strikingly similar to the title of Rabanus Maurus’s celebrated encyclopedia,
De rerum naturis
. But where the monk’s work was dull and conventional, Lucretius’ work was dangerously radical.

Poggio would almost certainly have recognized the name Lucretius from Ovid, Cicero, and other ancient sources he had painstakingly pored over, in the company of his humanist
friends
, but neither he nor anyone in his circle
²⁶
had encountered more than a scrap or two of his actual writing, which had, as far as anyone knew, been lost forever.

Poggio may not have had time, in the gathering darkness of the monastic library, and under the wary eyes of the abbot or his librarian, to do more than read the opening lines. But he would have seen immediately that Lucretius’ Latin verses were astonishingly beautiful. Ordering his scribe to make a copy, he hurried to liberate it from the monastery. What is not clear is whether he had any intimation at all that he was releasing a book that would help in time to dismantle his entire world.

SOME FOURTEEN HUNDRED
and fifty years before Poggio set out to see what he could find, Lucretius’ contemporaries had read his poem, and it continued to be read
¹
for several centuries after its publication. Italian humanists, on the lookout for clues to lost ancient works, would have been alert to even fleeting references in the works of those celebrated authors whose writings had survived in significant quantities. Thus, though he strongly disagreed with its philosophical principles, Cicero—Poggio’s favorite Latin writer—conceded the marvelous power of
On the Nature of Things
. “The poetry of Lucretius,”
²
he wrote to his brother Quintus on February 11, 54
BCE
, “is, as you say in your letter, rich in brilliant genius, yet highly artistic.” Cicero’s turn of phrase—especially that slightly odd word “yet”—registers his surprise: he was evidently struck by something unusual. He had encountered a poem that conjoined “brilliant genius” in philosophy and science with unusual poetic power. The conjunction was as rare then as it is now.

Cicero and his brother were not alone in grasping that Lucretius had accomplished a near-perfect integration of intellectual distinction and aesthetic mastery. The greatest Roman poet, Virgil, about fifteen years old when Lucretius died, was under the spell of
On the Nature of Things
. “Blessed is he
³
who has
succeeded
in finding out the causes of things,” Virgil wrote in the
Georgics
, “and has trampled underfoot all fears and inexorable fate and the roar of greedy Acheron.” Assuming that this is a subtle allusion to the title of Lucretius’ poem, the older poet in this account is a culture hero, someone who has heard the menacing roar of the underworld and triumphed over the superstitious fears that threaten to sap the human spirit. But Virgil did not mention
⁴
his hero by name, and, though he had certainly read the
Georgics
, Poggio was unlikely to have picked up the allusion before he had actually read Lucretius. Still less would Poggio have been able to grasp the extent to which Virgil’s great epic, the
Aeneid
, was a sustained attempt to construct an alternative to
On the Nature of Things
: pious, where Lucretius was skeptical; militantly patriotic, where Lucretius counseled pacifism; soberly renunciatory, where Lucretius embraced the pursuit of pleasure.

What Poggio and other Italian humanists probably did notice, however, were the words of Ovid, words that were enough to send any book hunter scurrying through the catalogs of monastic libraries: “The verses of sublime Lucretius
⁵
are destined to perish only when a single day will consign the world to destruction.”

It is all the more striking then that Lucretius’ verses did almost perish—the survival of his work hung by slenderest of threads—and that virtually nothing about his actual identity is reliably known. Many of the major poets and philosophers of ancient Rome had been celebrities in their own time, the objects of gossip which eager book hunters centuries later pored over for clues. But in the case of Lucretius there were almost no biographical traces. The poet must have been a very private person, living his life in the shadows, and he does not seem to have written anything apart from his one great work. That work, difficult and challenging, was hardly the kind of
popular
success that got diffused in so many copies that significant fragments of it were assured of surviving into the Middle Ages. Looking back from this distance, with Lucretius’ masterpiece securely in hand, modern scholars have been able to identify a network of early medieval signs of the text’s existence—a citation here, a catalogue entry there—but most of these would have been invisible to the early fifteenth-century book hunters. They were groping in the dark, sensing perhaps a tiny gossamer filament but unable to track it to its source. And following in their wake, after almost six hundred years of work by classicists, historians, and archaeologists, we know almost nothing more than they did about the identity of the author.

The Lucretii were an old, distinguished Roman clan—as Poggio may have known—but since slaves, when freed, often took the name of the family that had owned them, the author was not necessarily an aristocrat. Still, an aristocratic lineage was plausible, for the simple reason that Lucretius addressed his poem, in terms of easy intimacy, to a nobleman, Gaius Memmius. That name Poggio might have encountered in his wide reading, for Memmius had a relatively successful
⁶
political career, was a patron of celebrated writers, including the love poet Catullus, and was himself reputed to be a poet (an obscene one, according to Ovid). He was also an orator, as Cicero noted somewhat grudgingly, “of the subtle, ingenious type.” But the question remained, who was Lucretius?

The answer, for Poggio and his circle, would have come almost completely from a brief biographical sketch that the great Church Father St. Jerome (c. 340–420
CE
) added to an earlier chronicle. In 94
BCE
, Jerome noted that “Titus Lucretius, poet, is born. After a love-philtre had turned him mad, and he had written, in the intervals of his insanity, several books which Cicero revised, he killed himself by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of his age.” These lurid details
⁷
have shaped all subsequent
representations
of Lucretius, including a celebrated Victorian poem in which Tennyson imagined the voice of the mad, suicidal philosopher tormented by erotic fantasies.