This might sound surprising, but take a closer look at “On the Nature of Things” - you’ll discover that he’s writing about a world that feels modern. Of course he didn’t know, Greenblatt tells us, what he was preserving: “a book that would help in time to dismantle his entire world.”īorn more than 2,000 years ago, Lucretius belongs as much to our day as his own. Soon his friends were hailing him as the great “restorer of antiquity” and, on a journey to a German monastery (believed to be the Abbey of Fulda), he retrieved Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things. Out of a job, Poggio turned to book hunting and began recovering invaluable works, like those by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian. He rose to become apostolic secretary to the wily, corrupt Pope John XXIII, who was deposed in 1415 (his name was erased from the books until Giuseppe Roncalli, the architect of Vatican II, claimed it for himself in 1958).

His years of maneuvering as a secular member in the Roman Curia amounted to nothing. This growing cultural attitude was unexpected and signaled the coming of the Renaissance - Lucretius referred to unpredictable changes with the word “clinamen,” which Greenblatt says refers to “a swerve.”įor Poggio, however, part of the reason for his book hunting did involve money. People were eager to enter the mind-set of the past, and a text like Lucretius’ provided a luminous doorway into a glorious, distant world. There was a growing fascination with antiquity, and collectors paid fabulous sums for old objects overlooked as junk.

Their interest in the classical past, Greenblatt notes, was fueled by far more than money.

The swerve lucretius