The Swerve (26 page)

It was the dream of persuading an audience through the eloquence and conviction of public words that had drawn Hus and Jerome of Prague to Constance. If Hus had been shouted down, Jerome, dragged from the miserable dungeon where he had been chained for 350 days, managed at least to make himself heard. For a modern reader, there is something almost absurd
about
Poggio’s admiration for Jerome’s “choice of words” and the effectiveness of his “peroration”—as if the quality of the prisoner’s Latin were the issue; but it was precisely the quality of the prisoner’s Latin that unsettled Poggio and made him doubt the validity of the charges against the heretic. For he could not, at least at this strange moment of limbo, disguise from himself the tension between the bureaucrat who worked for the sinister John XXIII and the humanist who longed for the freer, clearer air, as he imagined it, of the ancient Roman Republic. Poggio could find no real way to resolve this tension; instead, he plunged into the monastic library with its neglected treasures.

“There is no question,” Poggio wrote, “that this glorious man, so elegant, so pure, so full of morals and wit, could not much longer have endured the filth of that prison, the squalor of the place, and the savage cruelty of his keepers.” These words were not a further lapse into the kind of imprudent admiration of the eloquent, doomed Jerome that alarmed Leonardo Bruni; they are Poggio’s description of the manuscript of Quintilian that he found at St. Gall:

He was sad
²⁴
and dressed in mourning, as people are when doomed to death; his beard was dirty and his hair caked with mud, so that by his expression and appearance it was clear that he had been summoned to an undeserved punishment. He seemed to stretch out his hands and beg for the loyalty of the Roman people, to demand that he be saved from an unjust sentence.

The scene he had witnessed in May appears still vivid in the humanist’s imagination as he searched through the monastery’s books. Jerome had protested that he had been kept “in filth and fetters, deprived of every comfort”; Quintilian was found
“filthy
with mold and dust.” Jerome had been confined, Poggio wrote to Leonardo Aretino, “in a dark dungeon, where it was impossible for him to read”; Quintilian, he indignantly wrote of the manuscript in the monastic library, was “in a sort of foul and gloomy dungeon … where not even men convicted of a capital offense would have been stuck away.” “A man worthy of eternal remembrance!” So Poggio rashly exclaimed about the heretic Jerome whom he could not lift a finger to save. A few months later in the monastery of St. Gall, he rescued another man worthy of eternal remembrance from the barbarians’ prison house.

It is not clear how conscious the link was in Poggio’s mind between the imprisoned heretic and the imprisoned text. At once morally alert and deeply compromised in his professional life, he responded to books as if they were living, suffering human beings. “By Heaven,” he wrote of the Quintilian manuscript, “if we had not brought help, he would surely have perished the very next day.” Taking no chances, Poggio sat down and began copying the whole lengthy work in his beautiful hand. It took him fifty-four days to complete the task. “The one and only light
²⁵
of the Roman name, except for whom there was no one but Cicero and he likewise cut into pieces and scattered,” he wrote to Guarino of Verona, “has through our efforts been called back not only from exile but from almost complete destruction.”

The expedition to the monastery was expensive, and Poggio was perennially short of money: such was the consequence of his decision not to take the profitable route of priesthood. Back in Constance his money worries deepened, as he found himself dangling, without work and without clear prospects. His deposed master, Baldassare Cossa, was desperately negotiating a quiet retirement for himself. After spending three years in prison, he eventually bought his release and was made a cardinal
in
Florence, where he died in 1419, his elegant tomb by Donatello erected in the baptistry of the Duomo. Another pope Poggio had earlier worked for, the deposed Gregory XII, died during this same period. The last thing he said was “I have not understood the world, and the world has not understood me.”

It was high time for a prudent, highly trained bureaucrat, almost forty years old, to look out for himself and find some stable means of support. But Poggio did nothing of the kind. Instead, a few months after his return from St. Gall, he left Constance again, this time apparently without companions. His craving to discover and to liberate whatever noble beings were hidden in the prison house had evidently only intensified. He had no idea what he would find; he only knew that if it was something ancient and written in elegant Latin, then it was worth rescuing at all costs. The ignorant, indolent monks, he was convinced, were locking away traces of a civilization far greater than anything the world had known for more than a thousand years.

Of course, all Poggio could hope to find were pieces of parchment, and not even very ancient ones. But for him these were not manuscripts but human voices. What emerged from the obscurity of the library was not a link in a long chain of texts, one copied from the other, but rather the thing itself, wearing borrowed garments, or even the author himself, wrapped in gravecloths and stumbling into the light.

“We accept Aesculapius as belonging among the gods because he called back Hippolytus, as well as others from the underworld,” Francesco Barbaro wrote to Poggio after hearing of his discoveries;

If people, nations,
²⁶
and provinces have dedicated shrines to him, what might I think ought to be done for you, if that custom had not already been forgotten? You have
revived
so many illustrious men and such wise men, who were dead for eternity, through whose minds and teachings not only we but our descendants will be able to live well and honourably.

Books that had fallen out of circulation and were sitting in German libraries were thus transformed into wise men who had died and whose souls had been imprisoned in the underworld; Poggio, the cynical papal secretary in the service of the famously corrupt pope, was viewed by his friends as a culture hero, a magical healer who reassembled and reanimated the torn and mangled body of antiquity.

Thus it was that in January 1417, Poggio found himself once again in a monastic library, probably Fulda. There he took from the shelf a long poem whose author he may have recalled seeing mentioned in Quintilian or in the chronicle compiled by St. Jerome:
T. LUCRETI CARI DE RERUM NATURA
.

ON THE NATURE
of Things
is not an easy read. Totaling 7,400 lines, it is written in hexameters, the standard unrhymed six-beat lines in which Latin poets like Virgil and Ovid, imitating Homer’s Greek, cast their epic poetry. Divided into six untitled books, the poem yokes together moments of intense lyrical beauty, philosophical meditations on religion, pleasure, and death, and complex theories of the physical world, the evolution of human societies, the perils and joys of sex, and the nature of disease. The language is often knotty and difficult, the syntax complex, and the overall intellectual ambition astoundingly high.

The difficulty would not in the least have fazed Poggio and his learned friends. They possessed wonderful Latin, rose eagerly to the challenge of solving textual riddles, and had often wandered with pleasure and interest through the still more impenetrable thickets of patristic theology. A quick glance at the first few pages of the manuscript would have sufficed to convince Poggio that he had discovered something remarkable.

What he could not have grasped, without carefully reading through the work and absorbing its arguments, was that he was unleashing something that threatened his whole mental universe. Had he understood this threat, he might still have
returned
the poem to circulation: recovering the lost traces of the ancient world was his highest purpose in life, virtually the only principle uncontaminated by disillusionment and cynical laughter. But, as he did so, he might have uttered the words that Freud reputedly spoke to Jung, as they sailed into New York Harbor to receive the accolades of their American admirers: “Don’t they know we are bringing them the plague?”

One simple name for the plague that Lucretius brought—a charge frequently leveled against him, when his poem began once again to be read—is atheism. But Lucretius was not in fact an atheist. He believed that the gods existed. But he also believed that, by virtue of being gods, they could not possibly be concerned with human beings or with anything that we do. Divinity by its very nature, he thought, must enjoy eternal life and peace entirely untouched by any suffering or disturbance and indifferent to human actions.

If it gives you pleasure to call the sea Neptune or to refer to grain and wine as Ceres and Bacchus, Lucretius wrote, you should feel free to do so, just as you can dub the round world the Mother of the Gods. And if, drawn by their solemn beauty, you choose to visit religious shrines, you will be doing yourself no harm, provided that you contemplate the images of the gods “in peace and tranquillity.” (6:78) But you should not think for a minute that you can either anger or propitiate any of these deities. The processions, the animal sacrifices, the frenzied dances, the drums and cymbals and pipes, the showers of snowy rose petals, the eunuch priests, the carved images of the infant god: all of these cultic practices, though compelling and impressive in their way, are fundamentally meaningless, since the gods they are meant to reach are entirely removed and separated from our world.

It is possible to argue that, despite his profession of religious belief, Lucretius was some sort of atheist, a particularly sly one
perhaps
, since to almost all believers of almost all religious faiths in almost all times it has seemed pointless to worship a god without the hope of appeasing divine wrath or acquiring divine protection and favor. What is the use of a god who is uninterested in punishing or rewarding? Lucretius insisted that such hopes and anxieties are precisely a toxic form of superstition, combining in equal measure absurd arrogance and absurd fear. Imagining that the gods actually care about the fate of humans or about their ritual practices is, he observed, a particularly vulgar insult—as if divine beings depended for their happiness on our mumbled words or good behavior. But that insult is the least of the problems, since the gods quite literally could not care less. Nothing that we can do (or not do) could possibly interest
them
. The serious issue is that false beliefs and observances inevitably lead to human mischief.

These views were certainly contrary to Poggio’s own Christian faith and would have led any contemporary who espoused them into the most serious trouble. But by themselves, encountered in a pagan text, they were not likely to trigger great alarm. Poggio could have told himself, as did some later sympathetic readers of
On the Nature of Things
, that the brilliant ancient poet simply intuited the emptiness of pagan beliefs and hence the absurdity of sacrifices to gods who did not in fact exist. Lucretius, after all, had the misfortune of living shortly before the coming of the Messiah. Had he been born a century later, he would have had the opportunity of learning the truth. As it was, he at least grasped that the practices of his own contemporaries were worthless. Hence even many modern translations of Lucretius’ poem into English reassuringly have it denounce as “superstition” what the Latin text calls simply
religio
.

But atheism—or, more accurately, the indifference of the gods—was not the only problem posed by Lucretius’ poem. Its main concerns lay elsewhere, in the material world we all
inhabit
, and it is here that the most disturbing arguments arose, arguments that lured those who were most struck by their formidable power—Machiavelli, Bruno, Galileo, and others—into strange trains of thought. Those trains of thought had once been eagerly explored in the very land to which they now returned, as a result of Poggio’s discovery. But a thousand years of virtual silence had rendered them highly dangerous.

By now much of what
On the Nature of Things
claims about the universe seems deeply familiar, at least among the circle of people who are likely to be reading these words. After all, many of the work’s core arguments are among the foundations
¹
on which modern life has been constructed. But it is worth remembering that some of the arguments remain alien and that others are hotly contested, often by those who gladly avail themselves of the scientific advances they helped to spawn. And to all but a few of Poggio’s contemporaries, most of what Lucretius claimed, albeit in a poem of startling, seductive beauty, seemed incomprehensible, unbelievable, or impious.