Before my turn came round for Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, I thought it was just about Lucretius and a copy of his book that was found during the Renaissance, more a book of ideas than anything else. But what a delightful surprise to discover how very bookish this book really is.

I got a good dose of Renaissance history and Church politics, a history of books and libraries, and a biography of Poggio Bracciolini, apostolic secretary, book hunter, and a man with the most gorgeous handwriting I have ever seen. Here is a sample from Wikipedia of Poggio’s handwriting:

It is not the best resolution, The Swerve has a color high resolution photo of a manuscript in his hand and it took my breath away. His family was not that well off, but managed to get him a good education and Poggio’s handwriting and political savvy along with friends in the right places, got him his job as secretary to the Pope (he served six popes if I am remembering correctly). Poggio was famous for his handwriting in a time when a gorgeous script and a good education could get you very far in life.

It was also that handwriting and education that allowed him to travel all over Europe, riffling through the forgotten and decaying manuscripts in monasteries looking for important and unknown works. Thus in 1417, he eventually discovered the manuscript of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, a follower of Epicurean philosophy. The monks would not let Poggio copy it but made him hire a scribe. He then sent the book to his friend Niccolo Niccoli (the inventor of the Italic script on which the printer Aldus Manutius based his first book type). Niccoli was supposed to copy the book and then give it back to Poggio but instead he put on his shelves, ignoring Poggio’s pleas for a good many years before Niccoli relented and allowed Poggio a copy of it.

At that point, Lucretius was finally set free into the world. Even though it was the Renaissance and we, at least I, always think of it as being very liberal time, it was not. The Church was in charge of everything in Italy and On the Nature of Things turned out to be a very dangerous book.

On the Nature of Things is a 7,400 line hexameter poem written in a very difficult Latin. In the poem Lucretius writes about how everything is made of invisible particles called atoms. These atoms are the seeds of everything – all things are made of atoms – and atoms are eternal and infinite in number. Everything comes into being from the atoms swerving into each other in random collisions and forming endless combinations and recombinations. As if this weren’t enough to rile up the Church, Lucretius also claims that the universe was not created for humans and humans are not the center of it. Humans, in fact, are a product, like everything else, of atoms. He even outlines a kind of evolutionary theory.

But wait, that’s not all. Because we are made of atoms, when we die, the soul dies too because it is also made of atoms and is anchored in the body. Therefore, there is no afterlife and when we are dead all our atoms disperse into the universe to be recombined into something else. There is no divine creator; religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel. Because we only get one life, the highest goal of human beings should be the “enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.” In other words, life is about the pursuit of happiness for oneself and one’s fellow creatures.

Can you see why the Church wouldn’t like Lucretius? But by the time they caught on, it was too late. At least one copy made it out of Italy, beyond the reach of the Church, and to a printing press.

A good many Renaissance artists and thinkers were influenced by Lucretius and the idea of atoms. They had to be very careful though so as not to cross the Church as Galileo found out too late. Those who believed in atoms came to be called “atomists.”

Those who have read and been influenced by Lucretius through the ages are too many to name, but just to give you an idea, there is Shakespeare, Montaigne (whose heavily annotated copy of Lucretius was bought at auction in 1989 for £ 250 but only later discovered to belong to him because his name had been written over), and Thomas More. In 1675 an English verse translation was published by a Puritan woman named Lucy Hutchinson who, as would befit a Puritan and a smart woman of the time, claimed she had merely undertaken the translation as an exercise and didn’t believe anything the “lunatic” Lucretius wrote. She was only publishing the book because a scholarly friend asked her to. Isaac Newton was also a reader of Lucretius as was Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson called himself an Epicurean and the phrase, “the pursuit of happiness” supposedly appears in the American Declaration of Independence because of Jefferson.

The Swerve is enjoyable reading from beginning to end. And even though the actual text is only 263 pages, it is richly and entertainingly packed with information. There is a twenty-six page “selected” bibliography at the back so I have no doubt that Greenblatt left out more information than went into the book. But he synthesizes it all so very nicely that it doesn’t feel like anything is missing. I have no doubt that practically every bookish person who also enjoys a bit of history and biography will end up liking this book. It’s probably got a long line of holds on it at the library like my copy did, so go put yourself in the queue for it before it gets any longer. When your turn to read the book comes around, you’ll be glad you did.