In his new book, The Swerve, Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt argues that the fifteenth century rediscovery of an ancient Roman poem helped to usher in the modern world. The poem, 7,400 lines of Latin hexameters, was written in the first century B.C. by Lucretius, about whom little is known. Entitled De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, the poem was a revelatory and subversive call to dispense with fear of the gods and fear of death, and to strive instead for peace of mind and happiness.
The Swerve (published by W.W. Norton) opens with Greenblatt recalling his first encounter with the poem, as a student at Yale on a hunt for cheap summer reading. He tells of having been struck by the surrealist cover illustration of a bargain bin copy of On the Nature of Things. To his own surprise, he was swept away by the poem, presented in Martin F. Smith’s “clear and unfussy” prose translation. As it happens, Smith is also responsible for the editing of the Loeb Classical Library’s take on Lucretius. Presented as Loeb Volume 181, the LCL’s On the Nature of Things is based on W. H. D. Rouse’s early twentieth century English translation of the poem, but was completely re-edited by Smith in the ‘70s, and updated again in the ‘90s. In its pocket-sized casing, with the original Latin presented alongside the English translation, and Smith’s erudite Introduction, this volume remains the perfect offering of Lucretius, and an ideal companion to Greenblatt’s new study.
From the opening lines of the Loeb translation, one can feel what hooked Greenblatt those years ago:
Mother of Aeneas and his race, darling of men and gods, nurturing Venus, who beneath the smooth-moving heavenly signs fill with yourself the sea full-laden with ships, the earth that bears the crops, since through you every kind of living thing is conceived and rising up looks on the light of the sun: from you, O goddess, from you the winds flee away, the clouds of heaven from you and your coming; for you the wonder-working earth puts forth sweet flowers, for you the wide stretches of ocean laugh, and heaven grown peaceful glows with outpoured light. For as soon as the vernal face of day is made manifest, and the breeze of the teeming west wind blows fresh and free, first the fowls of the air proclaim you, divine one, and your advent, pierced to the heart by your might. Next wild creatures and farm animals dance over the rich pastures and swim across rapid rivers: so greedily does each one follow you, held captive by your charm, whither you go on to lead them. Then throughout seas and mountains and sweeping torrents and the leafy dwellings of birds and verdant plains, striking alluring love into the breasts of all creatures, you cause them greedily to beget their generations after their kind.
Since therefore you alone govern the nature of things, since without you nothing comes forth into the shining borders of light, nothing joyous and lovely is made, you I crave as partner in writing the verses, which I essay to fashion on the Nature of Things, for my friend Memmius, whom you, goddess, have willed at all times to excel, endowed with all gifts. Therefore all the more grant to my speech, goddess, an ever-living charm.
And, while on the subject of Lucretius, we should mention as well our recent publication of Alison Brown’s The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence. Brown’s focus is the attraction that Lucretius held for Florentines in the hundred years after the rediscovery of De Rerum Natura. They were drawn, she writes, by three themes intrinsic to his argument: fear of death, evolutionary primitivism, and atomism. Brown tracks interest in Lucretius through direct quotations of De Rerum Natura itself, disproving the notion, put forth by some scholars, that Lucretius mostly reached Renaissance readers filtered through Cicero or Christian critics.
So, should any time with Stephen Greenblatt’s new book pique your interest in Lucretius, explore the poem in Loeb Volume 181, and consider wading through the Renaissance with Brown, in her short book that Greenblatt calls “an important contribution to a crucial chapter in the history of modern thought.”