The Swerve (9 page)

Modern classical scholarship suggests that every one of Jerome’s biographical claims should be taken with a heavy dose of skepticism. They were recorded—or invented—centuries after Lucretius’ death by a Christian polemicist who had an interest in telling cautionary tales about pagan philosophers. However, since no good fifteenth-century Christian would have been likely to doubt the saint’s account, Poggio must have thought that the poem that he had found and was returning to circulation was tainted by its pagan author’s madness and suicide. But the humanist book hunter was part of a generation passionately eager to unearth ancient texts, even by those whose lives epitomized moral confusion and mortal sin. And the thought that Cicero himself had revised the books would have sufficed to quiet any lingering reservations.

In the more than sixteen hundred years that have elapsed since the fourth-century chronicle entry, no further biographical information has turned up, either to confirm or disprove Jerome’s story of the love potion and its tragic aftermath. As a person, Lucretius remains almost
⁸
as little known as he was when Poggio recovered his poem in 1417. Given the extravagance of Ovid’s praise of “the verse of sublime Lucretius” and the other signs of the poem’s influence, it remains a mystery that so little was said directly about him by his contemporaries and near contemporaries. But archaeological disoveries, made long after Poggio’s death, have helped us to get eerily close to the world in which
On the Nature of Things
was first read, and perhaps to the poet himself.

The discoveries were made possible by a famous ancient disaster. On August 24, 79
CE
, the massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius completely destroyed not only Pompeii but also the
small
seaside resort of Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples. Buried under some sixty-five feet of volcanic debris hardened to the density of concrete, this site, where wealthy Romans had once vacationed in their elegant, colonnaded villas, was forgotten until the early eighteenth century, when workmen, digging a well, uncovered some marble statues. An Austrian officer—for Naples at the time was under the control of Austria—took over, and excavators began digging shafts through the thick crust.

The explorations, which continued when Naples passed into Bourbon hands, were extremely crude, less an archaeological investigation than a prolonged smash-and-grab. The official in charge for more than a decade was a Spanish army engineer, Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre, who seemed to treat the site as an ossified garbage dump in which loot had unaccountably been buried. (“This man,”
⁹
remarked a contemporary, dismayed at the wanton damage, “knew as much of antiquities as the moon does of lobsters.”) The diggers burrowed away in search of statues, gems, precious marbles, and other more or less familiar treasures, which they found in abundance and delivered in jumbled heaps to their royal masters.

In 1750, under a new director, the explorers became somewhat more careful about what they were doing. Three years later, tunneling through the remains of one of the villas, they came across something baffling: the ruins of a room graced with a mosaic floor and filled with innumerable objects “about half a palm long,
¹⁰
and round,” as one of them wrote, “which appeared like roots of wood, all black, and seeming to be only of one piece.” At first they thought they had come on a cache of charcoal briquettes, some of which they burned to dissipate the early morning chill. Others thought that the peculiar fragments might have been rolls of burned cloth or fishing nets. Then one of these objects, chancing to fall on the ground, broke open.
The
unexpected sight of letters inside what had looked like a charred root made the explorers realize what they were looking at: books. They had stumbled on the remains of a private library.

The volumes that Romans piled up in their libraries were smaller than most modern books: they were for the most part written on scrolls of papyrus.
¹¹
(The word “volume” comes from
volumen
, the Latin word for a thing that is rolled or wound up.) Rolls of papyrus—the plant from which we get our word “paper”—were produced from tall reeds that grew in the marshy delta region of the Nile in Lower Egypt. The reeds were harvested; their stalks cut open and sliced into very thin strips. The strips were laid side by side, slightly overlapping one another; another layer was placed on top, at right angles to the one below; and then the sheet was gently pounded with a mallet. The natural sap that was released allowed the fibers to adhere smoothly to each other, and the individual sheets were then glued into rolls. (The first sheet, on which the contents of the roll could be noted, was called in Greek the
protokollon
, literally, “first glued”—the origin of our word “protocol.”) Wooden sticks, attached to one or both of the ends of the roll and slightly projecting from the top and bottom edges, made it easier to scroll through as one read along: to read a book in the ancient world was to unwind it. The Romans called such a stick the
umbilicus
, and to read a book cover-to-cover was “to unroll to the umbilicus.”

At first white and flexible, the papyrus would over time gradually get brittle and discolored—nothing lasts forever—but it was lightweight, convenient, relatively inexpensive, and surprisingly durable. Small landowners in Egypt had long realized that they could write their tax receipts on a scrap of papyrus and be reasonably confident that the record would be perfectly legible for years and even generations to come.
Priests
could use this medium to record the precise language for supplicating the gods; poets could lay claim to the symbolic immortality they dreamed of in their art; philosophers could convey their thoughts to disciples yet unborn. Romans, like the Greeks before them, easily grasped that this was the best writing material available, and they imported it in bulk from Egypt to meet their growing desire for record keeping, official documents, personal letters, and books. A roll of papyrus might last three hundred years.

The room unearthed
¹²
in Herculaneum had once been lined with inlaid wooden shelves; at its center were the traces of what had been a large, freestanding, rectangular bookcase. Scattered about were the carbonized remains—so fragile that they fell apart at the touch—of the erasable waxed tablets on which readers once took notes (a bit like the Mystic Writing Pads with which children play today). The shelves had been piled high with papyrus rolls. Some of the rolls, perhaps the more valuable ones, were wrapped about with tree bark and covered with pieces of wood at each end. In another part of the villa, other rolls, now fused into a single mass by the volcanic ash, seemed to have been hastily bundled together in a wooden box, as if someone on the terrible August day had for a brief, wild moment thought to carry some particularly valued books away from the holocaust. Altogether—even with the irrevocable loss of the many that were trashed before it was understood what they were—some eleven hundred books were eventually recovered.

Many of the rolls in what became known as the Villa of the Papyri had been crushed by falling debris and the weight of the heavy mud; all had been carbonized by the volcanic lava, ash, and gas. But what had blackened these books had also preserved them from further decay. For centuries they had in effect been sealed in an airtight container. (Even today only one small segment
of
the villa has been exposed to view, and a substantial portion remains unexcavated.) The discoverers, however, were disappointed: they could barely make out anything written on the charcoal-like rolls. And when again and again they tried to unwind them, the rolls inevitably crumbled into fragments.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of books were destroyed in these attempts. But eventually a number of the rolls that had been cut open were found to contain near the center some readable portions. At this point—after two years of more or less destructive and fruitless effort—a learned Neapolitan priest who had been working in the Vatican Library in Rome, Father Antonio Piaggio, was called in. Taking issue with the prevailing method of investigation—simply scraping off the charred outer layers of the rolls until some words could be discerned—he invented an ingenious device, a machine that would delicately and slowly unroll the carbonized papyrus scrolls, disclosing much more readable material than anyone had imagined to have survived.

Those who read the recovered texts, carefully flattened and glued onto strips, found that the villa’s library (or at least the portion of it that they had found) was a specialized one, many of the rolls being tracts in Greek by a philosopher named Philodemus. The researchers were disappointed—they had been hoping to find lost works by the likes of Sophocles and Virgil—but what they had so implausibly snatched from oblivion has an important bearing on the discovery made centuries earlier by Poggio. For Philodemus, who taught in Rome from about 75 to about 40
BCE
, was Lucretius’ exact contemporary and a follower of the school of thought most perfectly represented in
On the Nature of Things
.

Why were the works of a minor Greek philosopher in the library of the elegant seaside retreat? And why, for that matter, did a vacation house have an extensive library at all? Philodemus, a pedagogue paid to give lessons and deliver lectures, was certainly not the master of the Villa of the Papyri. But the presence
of
a substantial selection of his works probably provides a clue to the owner’s interests and illuminates the moment that brought forth Lucretius’ poem. That moment was the culmination of a lengthy process that braided together Greek and Roman high culture.

The two cultures had not always been comfortably intertwined. Among the Greeks, Romans had long held the reputation of tough, disciplined people, with a gift for survival and a hunger for conquest. But they were also regarded as barbarians—“refined barbarians,” in the moderate view of the Alexandrian scientist Eratosthenes, crude and dangerous barbarians in the view of many others. When their independent city-states were still flourishing, Greek intellectuals collected some arcane lore about the Romans, as they did about the Carthaginians and Indians, but they did not find anything in Roman cultural life worthy of their notice.

The Romans of the early republic might not altogether have disagreed with this assessment. Rome had traditionally been wary of poets and philosophers. It prided itself on being
¹³
a city of virtue and action, not of flowery words, intellectual speculation, and books. But even as Rome’s legions steadily established military dominance over Greece, Greek culture just as steadily began to colonize the minds of the conquerors. Skeptical as ever of effete intellectuals and priding themselves on their practical intelligence, Romans nonetheless acknowledged with growing enthusiasm the achievements of Greek philosophers, scientists, writers, and artists. They made fun of what they took to be the defects of the Greek character, mocking what they saw as its loquaciousness, its taste for philosophizing, and its foppishness. But ambitious Roman families sent their sons to study at the philosophical academies for which Athens was famous, and Greek intellectuals like Philodemus were brought to Rome and paid handsome salaries to teach.

It was never quite respectable for a Roman aristocrat to
admit
to a boundlessly ardent Hellenism. Sophisticated Romans found it desirable to downplay a mastery of Greek language and a connoisseur’s grasp of Greek art. Yet Roman temples and public spaces were graced with splendid statues stolen from the conquered cities of the Greek mainland and the Peloponnese, while battle-hardened Roman generals adorned their villas with precious Greek vases and sculptures.

The survival of stone and fired clay makes it easy for us to register the pervasive presence in Rome of Greek artifacts, but it was books that carried the full weight of cultural influence. In keeping with the city’s martial character, the first great collections were brought there as spoils of war. In 167
BCE
the Roman general Aemilius Paulus routed King Perseus of Macedon and put an end to a dynasty that had descended from Alexander the Great and his father Philip. Perseus and his three sons were sent in chains to be paraded through the streets of Rome behind the triumphal chariot. In the tradition of national kleptocracy, Aemilius Paulus shipped back enormous plunder to deposit in the Roman treasury. But for himself and his children the conqueror reserved only a single prize: the captive monarch’s library.
¹⁴
The gesture was evidence, of course, of the aristocratic general’s personal fortune, but it was also a spectacular signal of the value of Greek books and the culture these books embodied.

Others followed in Aemilius Paulus’ wake. It became increasingly fashionable for wealthy Romans to amass large private libraries in their town houses and country villas. (There were no bookshops in the early years in Rome, but, in addition to the collections seized as booty, books could be purchased from dealers in southern Italy and Sicily where the Greeks had founded such cities as Naples, Tarentum, and Syracuse.) The grammarian Tyrannion is reputed to have had 30,000 volumes; Serenus Sammonicus, a physician who was an expert on the
use
of the magical formula “Abracadabra” to ward off illness, had more than 60,000. Rome had caught the Greek fever for books.

Lucretius lived his life in a culture of wealthy private book collectors, and the society into which he launched his poem was poised to expand the circle of reading to a larger public. In 40
BCE
, a decade after Lucretius’ death, Rome’s first public library
¹⁵
was established by a friend of the poet Virgil, Asinius Pollio. The idea seems to have originated with Julius Caesar, who admired the public libraries he had seen in Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and determined to bestow such an institution upon the Roman people. But Caesar was assassinated before he could carry out the plan, and it took Pollio, who had sided with Caesar against Pompey and then with Mark Antony against Brutus, to do so. A skillful military commander, canny (or extremely lucky) in his choice of allies, Pollio was also a man of broad literary interests. Apart from a few fragments of his speeches, all of his writings are now lost, but he composed tragedies—worthy of Sophocles, according to Virgil—histories, and literary criticism, and he was one of the first Roman authors to recite his writings to an audience of his friends.