Stephen Greenblatt is a prominent Harvard professor and Shakespeare scholar. His previous book, Will in the World, is about William Shakespeare. The premise of his new book is that the ancient Latin poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), by the Epicurean philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus, caused the world to swerve in a new, more enlightened direction.
The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt is the tale of an ancient poem and the Renaissance humanist who rediscovered it. It won the Pulitzer Prize and has been a strong seller on Amazon.
There are chapters in this work of nonfiction that I enjoyed more than anything I’ve read in years. The story of the book hunters who scoured monasteries and religious institutions in search of ancient Greek and Roman texts is breathtaking. On the Nature of Things is one such work, found in a German monastery. It was discovered by Poggio Bracciolini, a Florentine book lover and personal secretary to the pope. One of Poggio’s gifts was his beautiful handwriting, which he used to transcribe books, but his more important talent was his love of ancient writing and his passion for discovering and preserving it.
It’s unfortunate there weren’t more Poggios; ninety-nine percent of classical literature has been lost. The way so many of these ancient texts disappeared makes you want to weep. They were destroyed by plunderers with no sense of the value of books, by religious fanatics who found the classics heretical, by mobs of fools who burned libraries, or by one of papyrus’s most persistent enemies: bookworms.
What I found most incredible about Lucretius’s poem is that two thousand years ago, he wrote that the world is made of atoms swirling in a void and nothing more. There is no heaven, hell, or God, just these constantly moving particles. He also states that pleasure is the highest pursuit in life and pain the principal evil to be combated.
Greenblatt gives little evidence that De Rerum Natura changed the world, significantly helped bring on the Renaissance, or even caused a moderate tilt in a new direction. The poem is fascinating, but it was not widely circulated or known. Still, there is plenty of history and papal intrigue to keep you turning the pages. At times, The Swerve bogs down in detail, but the story is important and well worth reading and preserving.
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Read review @ NPR
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