NOTES

PREFACE

1 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (London: Sphere Books, 1969; rev. edn., Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 1:12–20. I have consulted the modern English translations of H. A. J. Munro (1914), W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (1975, 1992), Frank O. Copley (1977), Ronald Melville (1997), A. E. Stallings (2007), and David Slavitt (2008). Among earlier English translations I have consulted those of John Evelyn (1620–1706), Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681), John Dryden (1631–1700), and Thomas Creech (1659–1700). Of these translations Dryden’s is the best, but, in addition to the fact that he only translated small portions of the poem (615 lines in all, less than 10 percent of the total), his language often renders Lucretius difficult for the modern reader to grasp. For ease of access, unless otherwise indicated, I have used Smith’s 2001 prose translation, and I have cited the lines in the Latin text given in the readily available Loeb edition—Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

2 On the Nature of Things 5:737–40. Venus’ “winged harbinger” is Cupid, whom Botticelli depicts blindfolded and aiming his winged arrow; Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, strews blossoms gathered in the folds of her exquisite dress; and Zephyr, the god of the fecundating west wind, is reaching for the nymph Chloris. On Lucretius’ influence on Botticelli, mediated by the humanist Poliziano, see Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s “Primavera” and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 36–49; Horst Bredekamp, Botticelli: Primavera. Florenz als Garten der Venus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag GmbH, 1988); and Aby Warburg’s seminal 1893 essay, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance,” in The Revival of Pagan Antiquity, ed. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), pp. 88–156.

3 A total of 558 letters by Poggio, addressed to 172 different correspondents, survive. In a letter written in July 1417 congratulating Poggio on his discoveries, Francesco Barbaro refers to a letter about the journey of discovery that Poggio had sent to “our fine and learned friend Guarinus of Verona”—Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Nicolis, trans. Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 201. For Poggio’s letters, see Poggio Bracciolini, Lettere, ed. Helene Harth, 3 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1984).

CHAPTER ONE: THE BOOK HUNTER

1 On Poggio’s appearance, see Poggio Bracciolini 1380–1980: Nel VI centenario della nascita, Instituto Nazionale di Studi Sul Rinascimento, vol. 7 (Florence: Sansoni, 1982) and Un Toscano del ’400 Poggio Bracciolini, 1380–1459, ed. Patrizia Castelli (Terranuova Bracciolini: Administrazione Comunale, 1980). The principal biographical source is Ernst Walser, Poggius Florentinus: Leben und Werke (Hildesheim: George Olms, 1974).

2 On curiosity as a sin and the complex process of rehabilitating it, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983; orig. German edn. 1966), pp. 229–453.

3 Eustace J. Kitts, In the Days of the Councils: A Sketch of the Life and Times of Baldassare Cossa (Afterward Pope John the Twenty-Third) (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1908), p. 359.

4 Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 54.

5 Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 123–27.

6 In 1416 he evidently tried, with the others in the curia, to secure a benefice for himself, but the grant was controversial and in the end was not awarded. Apparently, he could also have taken a position as Scriptor in the new papacy of Martin V, but he refused, regarding it as a demotion from his position as secretary—Walser, Poggius Florentinus, pp. 42ff.

CHAPTER TWO: THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY

1 Nicholas Mann, “The Origins of Humanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 11. On Poggio’s response to Petrarch, see Riccardo Fubini, Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla, Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 18 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003). On the development of Italian humanism, see John Addington Symonds, The Revival of Learning (New York: H. Holt, 1908; repr. 1960); Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948); Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Impact of Early Italian Humanism on Thought and Learning,” in Bernard S. Levy, ed. Developments in the Early Renaissance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972), pp. 120–57; Charles Trinkaus, The Scope of Renaissance Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983); Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth-and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Peter Burke, “The Spread of Italian Humanism,” in Anthony Goodman and Angus Mackay, eds., The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 1–22; Ronald G. Witt, “In the Footsteps of the Ancients”: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, ed. Heiko A. Oberman, vol. 74 (Leiden: Brill, 2000); and Riccardo, Fubini, L’Umanesimo Italiano e I Suoi Storici (Milan: Franco Angeli Storia, 2001).

2 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (The Orator’s Education), ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library, 127 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 10.1, pp. 299ff. Though a complete (or nearly complete) copy of Quintilian was only found—by Poggio Bracciolini—in 1516, book X, with its lists of Greek and Roman writers, circulated throughout the Middle Ages. Quintilian remarks of Macer and Lucretius that “Each is elegant on his own subject, but the former is prosaic and the latter difficult,” p. 299.

3 Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988). Estimates of literacy rates in earlier societies are notoriously unreliable. Kaster, citing the research of Richard Duncan-Jones, concludes: “the great majority of the empire’s inhabitants were illiterate in the classical languages.” The figures for the first three centuries CE suggest upwards of 70 percent illiteracy, though with many regional differences. There are similar figures in Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), though Haines-Eitzen has even lower literacy levels (10 percent perhaps). See also Robin Lane Fox, “Literacy and Power in Early Christianity,” in Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf, eds., Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

4 Cited in Fox, “Literacy and Power,” p. 147.

5 The Rule does include a provision for those who simply cannot abide reading: “If anyone is so remiss and indolent that he is unwilling or unable to study or to read, he is to be given some work in order that he may not be idle”—The Rule of Benedict, trans. by Monks of Glenstal Abbey (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1982), 48:223.

6 John Cassian, The Institutes, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Newman Press, 2000), 10:2.

7 The Rule of Benedict, 48:19–20. I have amended the translation given, “as a warning to others,” to capture what I take to be the actual sense of the Latin: ut ceteri timeant.

8 Spiritum elationis: the translators render these words as “spirit of vanity” but I believe that “elation” or “exaltation” is the principal sense here.

9 The Rule of Benedict, 38:5–7.

10 Ibid., 38:8.

11 Ibid., 38:9.

12 Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago and London: American Library Association and the British Library: 1991), p. 324. The manuscript is in Barcelona.

13 On the larger context of Poggio’s handwriting, see Berthold L. Ullman, The Origin and Development of Humanistic Script (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960). For a valuable introduction, see Martin Davies, “Humanism in Script and Print in the Fifteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, pp. 47–62.

14 Bartolomeo served as secretary in 1414; Poggio the following year—Partner, The Pope’s Men, pp. 218, 222.

15 Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, pp. 208–9 (letter to Ambrogio Traversari).

16 Ibid, p. 210.

17 Eustace J. Kitts, In the Days of the Councils: A Sketch of the Life and Times of Baldassare Cossa (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1908), p. 69.

18 Cited in W. M. Shepherd, The Life of Poggio Bracciolini (Liverpool: Longman et al., 1837), p. 168.

19 Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books, p. 224. The scribe in question actually used “vellum,” not parchment, but it must have been a particularly miserable vellum.

20 Ibid.

21 Quoted in George Haven Putnam, Books and Their Makers During the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (New York: Hillary House, 1962; repr. of 1896–98 edn.) 1:61.

22 The great monastery at Bobbio, in the north of Italy, had a celebrated library: a catalogue drawn up at the end of the ninth century includes many rare ancient texts, including a copy of Lucretius. But most of these have disappeared, presumably scraped away to make room for the gospels and psalters that served the community. Bernhard Bischhoff writes: “Many ancient texts were buried when their codices were palimsested at Bobbio, which had abandoned the rule of Columbanus for the rule of Benedict. A catalogue from the end of the ninth century informs us that Bobbio possessed at that time one of the most extensive libraries in the West, including many grammatical treatises as well as rare poetical works. The sole copy of Septimius Serenus’ De runalibus, an elaborate poem from the age of Hadrian, was lost. Copies of Lucretius and Valerius Flaccus seem to have disappeared without Italian copies having been made. Poggio eventually discovered these works in Germany”—Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 151.

23 A strong alternative candidate is the Abbey of Murbach, in southern Alsace. By the middle of the ninth century, Murbach, founded in 727, had become an important center of scholarship and is known to have possessed a copy of Lucretius. The challenge facing Poggio would have been roughly the same in any monastic library he approached.

24 In the context of the current book, the most intriguing comment comes in Rabanus’s prose preface to his fascinating collection of acrostic poems in praise of the Cross, composed in 810. Rabanus writes that his poems include the rhetorical figure of synalpha, the contraction of two syllables into one. This is a figure, he explains, Quod et Titus Lucretius non raro fecisse invenitur—“which is frequently found in Titus Lucretius.” Quoted in David Ganz, “Lucretius in the Carolingian Age: The Leiden Manuscripts and Their Carolingian Readers,” in Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel and Margaret M. Smith, eds., Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics: Production and Use, Proceedings of the Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Leiden, 1993 (Los Altos Hills, CA: Anderson-Lovelace, 1996), 99.

25 Pliny the Younger, Letters, 3.7.

26 The humanists might have picked up shadowy signs of the poem’s continued existence. Macrobius, in the early fifth century CE, quotes a few lines in his Saturnalia (see George Hadzsits, Lucretius and His Influence [New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1935]), as does Isidore of Seville’s vast Etymologiae in the early seventh century. Other moments in which the work surfaced briefly will be mentioned below, but it would have been rash for anyone in the early fifteenth century to believe that the entire poem would be found.

CHAPTER THREE: IN SEARCH OF LUCRETIUS

1 “Send me some piece by Lucretius or Ennius,” the highly cultivated emperor Antoninus Pius (86–161 CE) wrote to a friend; “something harmonious, powerful, and expressive of the state of the spirit.” (Apart from fragments, Ennius, the greatest early Roman poet, has never been recovered.)

2 “Lucreti poemata, ut scribes, ita sunt, multis luminibus ingenii, multae tamen artis”—Cicero, Q.Fr. 2.10.3.

3 Georgics, 2.490–92:

Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,

atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum

subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari.

Acheron, a river of the underworld, is used by Virgil and Lucretius as a symbol of the whole realm of the afterlife. For Lucretius’ presence in the Georgics, see especially Monica Gale, Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius, and the Didactic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

4 The author of the Aeneid, with his somber sense of the burden of imperial power and the stern necessity of renouncing pleasures, was clearly more skeptical than he had been in the Georgics about anyone’s ability to grasp with serene clarity the hidden forces of the universe. But Lucretius’ vision and the tough elegance of his poetry are present throughout Virgil’s epic, if only as glimpses of an achieved security that now constantly and forever eludes the poet and his hero. On the deep presence of Lucretius in the Aeneid (and in other works of Virgil, as well as those of Ovid and Horace), see Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History, The Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

5 Amores, 1.15.23–24. See Philip Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) esp. pp. 143–63, 173–207.

6 Son-in-law for a time of the merciless patrician dictator Sulla, Memmius’ political career came to an end in 54 BCE, when, as a candidate for the office of consul, he was forced to disclose his involvement in a financial scandal that lost him the crucial support of Julius Caesar. As an orator, in Cicero’s view, Memmius was lazy. He was, Cicero conceded, extremely well read, though more in Greek than in Latin literature. Perhaps this immersion in Greek culture helps to explain why, after his political fortunes fell, Memmius moved to Athens, where he apparently bought land on which stood the ruins of the house of the philosopher Epicurus, who died more than two hundred years earlier. In 51 BCE, Cicero wrote a letter to Memmius in which he asked him as a personal favor to give these ruins to “Patro the Epicurean.” (The ruins were evidently threatened by a building project that Memmius had in mind.) Patro pleads, Cicero reports, “that he owes a responsibility to his office and duty, to the sanctity of testaments, to the prestige of Epicurus’ name … to the abode, domicile, and memorials of great men”—Letter 63 (13:1) in Cicero’s Letters to Friends (Loeb edn.), 1:271. With Epicurus, we close the circle back to Lucretius, for Lucretius was Epicurus’ most passionate, intelligent, and creative disciple.

7 On the creation of the legend, see esp. Luciano Canfora’s Vita di Lucrezio (Palermo: Sellerio, 1993). The greatest evocation of it is Tennyson’s “Lucretius.”

8 Canfora’s fascinating Vita di Lucrezio is not a biography in any conventional sense, but rather a brilliant exercise in dismantling the mythic narrative launched by Jerome. In a work in progress, Ada Palmer shows that Renaissance scholars assembled what they thought were clues to Lucretius’ life, but that most of those clues turn out to have been comments about other, unrelated people.

9 Johann Joachim Winkelmann, cited in David Sider, The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005). Winkelmann’s colorful phrase is an Italian proverb.

10 Camillo Paderni, director of the Museum Herculanense in the Royal Palace at Portici, in a letter written on February 25, 1755, quoted in Sider, The Library, p. 22.

11 Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books, pp. 83ff.

12 At this point, by rare good fortune, the investigation of the site was under the supervision of a Swiss army engineer, Karl Weber, who took a more responsible and scholarly interest in what lay underground.

13 This way of viewing themselves had a long life. When Scipio sacked Carthage in 146 BCE, the library collections of that great North African city fell into his hands, along with all the other plunder. He wrote to the Senate and asked what to do with the books now in his possession. Answer came back that a single book, a treatise on agriculture, was worth returning to be translated into Latin; the rest of the books, the senators wrote, Scipio should distribute as gifts to the petty kings of Africa—Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 18:5.

14 The seizing of Greek libraries as spoils became a fairly common practice, though rarely as the conqueror’s sole prize. In 67 BCE, Lucullus, an ally of Sulla, brought home from his eastern conquests a very valuable library, along with other riches, and in retirement he devoted himself to the study of Greek literature and philosophy. At his villa and gardens in Rome and in Tusculum, near Naples, Lucullus was the generous patron of Greek intellectuals and poets, and he figures in Cicero’s dialogue Academica as one of the principal interlocutors.

15 Appointed to administer northern Italy (Gallia Transpadana), Pollio used his influence to save Virgil’s property from confiscation.

16 Augustus’ two libraries were known as the Octavian and the Palatine. The former, founded in honor of his sister (33 BC), was situated in the Porticus Octaviae and combined a magnificent promenade on the lower story with the reading room and book collection on the upper. The other library, attached to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill, seems to have had two separately administered departments, a Greek and a Latin one. Both libraries were subsequently destroyed by fire. Augustus’ successors maintained the tradition of establishing libraries: Tiberius founded the Tiberian Library in his house on the Palatine (according to Suetonius, he caused the writings and images of his favorite Greek poets to be placed in the public libraries). Vespasian established a library in the Temple of Peace erected after the burning of the city under Nero. Domitian restored the libraries after the same fire, even sending to Alexandria for copies. The most important imperial library was the Ulpian Library, created by Ulpius Trajanus—first established in the Forum of Trajan but afterwards removed to the Baths of Diocletian. See Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

17 Among them: Athens, Cyprus, Como, Milan, Smyrna, Patrae, Tibur—from which books could even be borrowed. But see the inscription found in the Agora of Athens, on the wall of the Library of Pantainos (200 ce): “No book shall be removed, since we have sworn thus. Opening hours are from six in the morning until noon” (quoted in Sider, The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, p. 43).

18 Clarence E. Boyd, Public Libraries and Literary Culture in Ancient Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915), pp. 23–24.

19 Cf. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

20 Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 237.

21 Knut Kleve, “Lucretius in Herculaneum,” in Croniche Ercolanesi 19 (1989), p. 5.

22 In Pisonem (“Against Piso”), in Cicero, Orations, trans. N. H. Watts, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 252 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 167 (“in suorum Gaecorum foetore atque vino”).

23 The Epigrams of Philodemos, ed. and trans. David Sider (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 152.

24 Though there had been a serious recent earthquake, the last major eruption had taken place in 1200 BCE, so the source of queasiness, if there was one, was not the volcano.

25 Cicero, De natura deorum (“On the Nature of the Gods”), trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 268 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 1.6, pp. 17–19.

26 Ibid., p. 383.

27 Cicero, De officiis (“On Duties”), trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library, 30. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 1.37, p. 137.

28 As I will discuss below, the word translated here as “superstitition” is in Latin religio, that is, “religion.”

29 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library, 184–85 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 2:531–33.

30 Epicurus’ epilogismos was a term frequently used to suggest “reasoning based on empirical data,” but according to Michael Schofield, it conveys “our everyday procedures of assessment and appraisal”—Schofield, in Rationality in Greek Thought, ed. Michael Frede and Gisele Striker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Schofield suggests that these procedures are linked to a famous passage by Epicurus on time: “We must not adopt special expressions for it, supposing that this will be an improvement; we must use just the existing ones,” p. 222. The thinking that Epicurus urged upon his followers was “a perfectly ordinary kind of activity available to all, not a special intellectual accomplishment restricted to, for example, mathematicians or dialecticians,” p. 235.

31 Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes (“Tusculan Disputations”), trans. J. E. King. Loeb Classical Library, 141 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 1.6.10.

32 Ibid., 1.21.48–89.

33 The charge was made by “Timocrates, the brother of Metrodorus, who was his [Epicurus’] disciple and then left the school,” in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library, 185 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 2:535.

34 Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard Gummere, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), 1:146.

35 Letter to Menoeceus, in Laertius, Lives, 2:657.

36 Philodemus, On Choices and Avoidances, trans. Giovanni Indelli and Voula Tsouna-McKirahan, La Scuola di Epicuro, 15 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1995), pp. 104–6.

37 Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Alvin B. Kernan, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), II.ii.41–42; 72–87. Jonson is participating in a tradition of representing Epicurus as the patron saint of the inn and the brothel, a tradition that includes Chaucer’s well-fed Franklin, who is described in the Canterbury Tales as “Epicurus owene sone.”

38 Maxim #7, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library, 185 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925; rev. ed. 1931), 1:665.

39 Vatican sayings 31, in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1:150.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE TEETH OF TIME

1 Cf. Moritz W. Schmidt, De Didymo Chalcentero (Oels: A. Ludwig, 1851) and Didymi Chalcenteri fragmenta (Leipzig: Teubner, 1854).

2 Cf. David Diringer, The Book Before Printing (New York: Dover Books, 1982), pp. 241ff.

3 Diogenes Laertius: “Epicurus was a most prolific author and eclipsed all before him in the number of his writings: for they amount to about three hundred rolls, and contain not a single citation from other authors; it is Epicurus himself who speaks throughout”—Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2:555. Diogenes Laertius lists the titles of thirty-seven books by Epicurus, all of which have been lost.

4 Cf. Andrew M. T. Moore, “Diogenes’s Inscription at Oenoanda,” in Dane R. Gordon and David B. Suits, eds., Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance (Rochester, NY: Rochester Institute of Technology Cary Graphic Arts Press, 2003), pp. 209–14. See The Epicurean Inscription [of Diogenes of Oinoanda], ed. and trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992).

5 Aristotle, Historia animalium, trans. A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library, 438 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965–91), 5:32.

6 Quoted in William Blades, The Enemies of Books (London: Elliot Stock, 1896), pp. 66–67.

7 Ovid, Ex ponto, trans. A. L. Wheeler, rev. G. P. Goold, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 1.1.73.

8 Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library, 194 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), Epistle 1.20.12.

9 In Greek Anthology, trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library, 84 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 9:251. (Evenus of Ascalon, fl. between 50 BCE and 50 CE).

10 Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 4.

11 Quoted in Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 77.

12 Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago: American Library Association, 1991), p. 171. See also pp. 149–53.

13 On women copyists, see Haines-Eitzen.

14 It is estimated that the number of books that had been produced cumulatively in the history of the world before 1450 was equaled by the number produced between 1450 and 1500; that this number was produced again between 1500 and 1510; and that twice this number was produced in the next decade.

15 On scribes, see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 2nd edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1974); Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books; Rosamond McKitterick, Books, Scribes and Learning in the Frankish Kingdoms, 6th–9th Centuries (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1994); M. B. Parkes, Scribes, Scripts, and Readers (London: Hambledon Press, 1991). On the symbolic significance of the scribe, cf. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 246ff. Avicenna’s figure of “perfect potentiality,” for example, is the scribe in the moment in which he does not write.

16 Huge granaries south of Alexandria received endless bargeloads of grain, harvested from the rich flood plains along the river. These had been scrutinized by lynx-eyed officials, appointed to ensure that the grain was “unadulterated, with no admixture of earth or barley, untrodden and sifted”—Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 42. The sacks in their thousands were then transported by canal to the harbor, where the grain fleet awaited them. From there the heavily laden ships fanned out to cities whose burgeoning populations had long outstripped the capacity of the surrounding countryside to support them. Alexandria was one of the key control points in the ancient world for bread and hence stability and hence power. Grain was not the sole commodity that Alexandria controlled; the city’s merchants were famous for the trade in wine, linens, tapestries, glass, and—most interesting for our purposes—papyrus. The huge marshes near the city were particularly suitable for the cultivation of the reeds from which the best paper was made. All through the ancient world, from the time of the Caesars to the rule of the Frankish kings, “Alexandrian papyrus” was the preferred medium on which bureaucrats, philosophers, poets, priests, merchants, emperors, and scholars gave orders, recorded debts, and wrote down their thoughts.

17 Ptolomey III (246–221 BCE) is said to have sent messages to all the rulers of the known world, asking for books to copy. Officials were under order to confiscate from passing ships all the books that they had on board. Copies of these books were made and returned, but the originals went into the great library (where in the catalogue they were marked “from the ships”). Royal agents fanned out through the Mediterranean to buy or borrow more and more books. Lenders grew increasingly wary—borrowed books had a way of not coming back—and demanded large deposits. When, after intense cajoling, Athens agreed to lend Alexandria its precious authoritative texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—texts that were zealously guarded in the city’s records office—the city insisted on the enormous bond of 15 talents of gold. Ptolomey posted the bond, received the books, sent copies back to Athens, and, forfeiting the bond, deposited the originals in the Museum.

18 Ammianus Marcellinus, History, Loeb Classical Library, 315 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 2:303. Cf. Rufinus: “The whole edifice is built of arches with enormous windows above each arch. The hidden inner chambers are separate from one another and provide for the enactment of various ritual acts and secret observances. Sitting courts and small chapels with images of the gods occupy the edge of the highest level. Lofty houses rise up there in which the priests … are accustomed to live. Behind these buildings, a freestanding portico raised on columns and facing inward runs around the periphery. In the middle stands the temple, built on a large and magnificent scale with an exterior of marble and precious columns. Inside there was a statue of Serapis so vast that the right hand touched one wall and the left the other”—Cited in Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, p. 148.

19 Alexandria was, as we have seen, a strategically important city, and it could not escape the conflicts that constantly tore at the fabric of Roman society. In 48 BCE, Julius Caesar pursued his rival Pompey to Alexandria. At the Egyptian king’s command, Pompey was promptly murdered—his head was presented to Caesar who professed to be grief-stricken. But though he probably had no more than 4,000 troops, Caesar decided to remain and secure control of the city. At one point in the course of the nine-month struggle that followed, the gravely outnumbered Romans found themselves threatened by a royal fleet that had sailed into the harbor. Using resin-smeared pine torches with an undercoating of sulfur, Caesar’s forces managed to set the ships on fire. The conflagration was intense, for the hulls were sealed with highly flammable pitch and the decks were caulked with wax. (Details of the firing of ancient fleets are from Lucan, Pharsalia, trans. Robert Graves [Baltimore: Penguin, 1957], p. 84, III:656–700). The fire leaped from the ships to the shore and then spread through the wharves to the library, or at least to storehouses that held some of the collections. The books themselves were not the object of attack; they were merely convenient combustible material. But burned books do not take into consideration the arsonist’s intentions. Caesar left the conquered city in the hands of the deposed king’s glamorous and resourceful sister, Cleopatra. Some portion of the library’s losses may have been quickly restored—a few years later the besotted Mark Antony is said to have given Cleopatra some 200,000 books that he had looted from Pergamum. (Columns from Pergamum’s library are still visible among the impressive ruins of that once great city on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.) Books randomly stolen from one library and dumped into another do not, however, make up for the destruction of a collection that has been painstakingly and intelligently assembled. No doubt the library staff worked feverishly to repair the losses, and the institution, with its scholars and its enormous resources, remained a celebrated one. But the point must have been painfully clear: Mars is an enemy of books.

20 It was not until 407 that bishops in the empire were granted the legal authority to close or demolish temples—Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, p. 160.

21 Rufinus, cited in ibid., pp. 161–62.

22 Greek Anthology, p. 172.

23 The Letters of Synesius of Cyrene, trans. Augustine Fitzgerald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 253. Something in Hepatia’s whole way of being evidently excited profound respect, not only from scholars but also from the great mass of her fellow citizens. A young man from Damascus who traveled to Alexandria to study philosophy some two generations later still heard stories of the admiration that Hypatia aroused: “The entire city naturally loved her and held her in exceptional esteem, while the powers-that-be paid their respects first to her”—Damascius, The Philosophical History, trans. Polhymnia Athanassiadi (Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999), p. 131. Cf. the poet Palladas’ praise of Hypatia:

Searching the zodiac, gazing on Virgo,

Knowing your province is really the heavens,

Finding your brilliance everywhere I look,

I render you homage, revered Hypatia,

Teaching’s bright star, unblemished, undimmed …

Poems, trans. Tony Harrison (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1975), no. 67.

24 Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History (London: Samuel Bagster & Sons, 1844), p. 482.

25 See The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu [c. CE 690], trans. R. H. Charles (London: Text and Translation Society, 1916): “she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through (her) Satanic wiles. And the governor of the city honoured her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic” (84:87–88), p. 100.

26 More than two hundred years later, when the Arabs conquered Alexandria, they evidently found books on the shelves, but these were for the most part works of Christian theology, not pagan philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. When Caliph Omar was asked what to do with this remnant, he is said to have sent a chilling reply: “If the content of the books is in accordance with the book of Allah, we may do without them, for in that case, the book of Allah more than suffices. If, on the other hand, they contain matter not in accordance with the book of Allah there can be no need to preserve them. Proceed, then, and destroy them.” Quoted in Roy MacLeod, ed., The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), p. 10. If the story is to be believed, the papyrus rolls, parchments, and codices were distributed to the public baths and burned in the stoves that heated the water. This fuel supply, legend has it, lasted for some six months. See also Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, trans. Martin Ryle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and Casson,Libraries in the Ancient World. On Hypatia, see Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

27 Ammianus Marcellinus, History, trans. Rolfe, I: 47 (xiv.6.18).

28 Jerome, Select Letters of St. Jerome, Loeb Classical Library, 2362 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), Letter XXII (to Eustochium), p. 125.

29 “When I was a young man, though I was protected by the rampart of the lonely desert, I could not endure against the promptings of sin and the ardent heat of my nature. I tried to crush them by frequent fasting, but my mind was always in a turmoil of imagination. To subdue it I put myself in the hands of one of the brethren who had been a Hebrew before his conversion, and asked him to teach me his language. Thus, after having studied the pointed style of Quintilian, the fluency of Cicero, the weightiness of Fronto, and the gentleness of Pliny, I now began to learn the alphabet again and practice harsh and guttural words [stridentia anhelantiaque verba]”—Jerome, Select Letters, p. 419. In the same letter, Jerome advises a monk, “Twist lines too for catching fish, and copy out manuscripts, so that your hand may earn you food and your soul be satisfied with reading,” p. 419. The copying of manuscripts in monastic communities, as we have already seen, turned out to be crucial to the survival of Lucretius and other pagan texts.

30 Jerome, Select Letters, p. 127.

31 Ibid., p. 129.

32 “It is no small thing for a noble man, a man fluent of speech, a wealthy man, to avoid the accompaniment of the powerful in the streets, to mingle with the crowds, to cleave to the poor, to associate with peasants.” Ep. 66.6, in praise of Pammachius, cited in Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 81.

33 Jerome, Select Letters, Letter XXII (to Eustochium), p. 125.

34 Pope Gregory I, Dialogues, trans. Odo John Zimmerman (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1959), 2:55–56.

35 Not everyone agreed that Plato and Aristotle could be accommodated. Cf. Tertullian, “Against the Heretics,” ch. 7:

For philosophy is the material of the world’s wisdom, the rash interpreter of the nature and dispensation of God. Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy…. What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our instruction comes from the porch of Solomon, who had himself taught that the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart. Away with all attempts to produce a Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic Christianity! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after receiving the gospel! When we believe, we desire no further belief. For this is our first article of faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides.

See Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951), 3:246. Conversely, as we will see, efforts were made in the fifteenth century and later to reconcile Christianity with a modified version of Epicureanism.

36 Minucius Felix, Octavius, trans. T. R. Glover and Gerald H. Rendall, Loeb Classical Library, 250 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 345 (mockery of Christians), p. 385 (mockery of pagans). See, similarly, in the same volume, Tertullian, Apologeticus (“Apology”), “I turn to your literature, by which you are trained in wisdom and the liberal arts; and what absurdities I find! I read how the gods on account of Trojans and Achaeans fell to it and fought it out themselves like so many pairs of gladiators …,” p. 75.

37 Tertullian, Concerning the Resurrection of the Flesh, trans. A. Souter (London: SPCK, 1922), pp. 153–54.

38 Ibid., p. 91.

39 See James Campbell, “The Angry God: Epicureans, Lactantius, and Warfare,” in Gordon and Suits, eds., Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance. The shift in Christianity toward an angry God, Campbell observes, comes only in the fourth century, with the growth of power and prominence in the Roman world. Before then, Christianity was closer to the Epicururean attitude and more sympathetic to its doctrines. “Indeed Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Athenagoras found so much to admire in Epicureanism that Richard Jungkuntz has warned that ‘any generalizations about patristic antipathy to Epicureanism really need careful qualification to be valid.’ The Epicurean practice of the social virtues, emphasis on forgiveness and mutual helpfulness, and suspicion of worldly values so closely paralleled similar Christian attitudes that … DeWitt has observed that it ‘would have been singularly easy for an Epicurean to become of Christian’—and, one might suppose, a Christian to become an Epicurean,” p. 47.

40 Then he added: “though indeed the gods have already in their wisdom destroyed their works, so that most of their books are no longer available”—Floridi on Sextus, p. 13. In addition to Epicureans, Julian wishes to exclude Pyrrhonians, that is, philosophical skeptics.

41 Strictly speaking, the term did not mean atheist. An apikoros, explained Maimonides, was a person who rejected revelation and insisted that God had no knowledge or interest in human affairs.

42 Tertullian, Apologeticus, 45:7 (Loeb, p. 197).

43 See Lactantius, De ira (“A Treatise on the Anger of God”), in Ante-Nicene Christian Fathers, ed. Roberts and Donaldson, vol. 7, ch. 8.

44 See Lactantius, Divine Institutes, 3–1.

45 Pope Gregory I, Dialogues, 2:60.

46 Flagellation had widespread use as a punishment in antiquity, and not only in Rome: “If the guilty man is sentenced to be flogged,” Deuteronomy (25:2) declares, “the judge shall cause him to lie down and be beaten in his presence.” For the history of flagellation, see Nicklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal, trans. Graham Harman (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

47 Public punishments did not, of course, end with paganism or die out in antiquity. Molinet reports that the citizens of Mons bought a bandit at a high price in order to enjoy the pleasure of seeing him quartered, “at which the people were happier than if a new sacred body had been revived”—(Molinet, in Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990; orig. 1983), p. 107. The Swiss diarist Felix Platter remembered all his life something he had seen as a child:

A criminal, having raped a seventy-year-old woman, was flayed alive with burning tongs. With mine own eyes I saw the thick smoke produced by his living flesh that had been subjected to the tongs. He was executed by Master Nicolas, executioner of Berne, who had come expressly for the event. The prisoner was a strong and vigorous man. On the bridge over the Rhine, just nearby, they tore out his breast; then he was led to the scaffold. By now, he was extremely feeble and blood was gushing from his hands. He could no longer remain standing, he fell down continually. Finally, he was decapitated. They drove a stake through his body, and then his corpse was thrown into a ditch. I myself was witness to his torture, my father holding me by the hand.

48 One of these exceptions was St. Anthony, who, according to his hagiographer, “possessed in a very high degree apatheia—perfect self-control, freedom from passion…. Christ, who was free from every emotional weakness and fault, is his model”—Athanasius [attr.], Life of Anthony, section 67, quoted in Peter Brown, “Asceticism: Pagan and Christian,” in Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, eds., Cambridge Ancient History: Late Empire, a.d. 337–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13: 616.

49 See Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, a.d. 200–1000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 221; R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

50 Nothing is ever—quite—an innovation. The active pursuit of pain in emulation or imitation of the sufferings of a deity has precedents in the cults of Isis, Attis, and others.

51 Cited, with much other evidence, in Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal, pp. 90, 188.

52 Ibid., p. 36. Largier also rehearses the stories that follow.

CHAPTER FIVE: BIRTH AND REBIRTH

1 Ernst Walser, Poggius Florentinus: Leben und Werke (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1974).

2 Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410 (Boston: David Godine; 1986, orig. 1957).

3 Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 22.

4 “By the end of the fourteenth century there was hardly a well-to-do household in Tuscany without at least one slave: brides brought them as part of their dowry, doctors accepted them from their patients in lieu of fees—and it was not unusual to find them even in the service of a priest”—Origo, Merchant of Prato, pp. 90–91.

5 Ibid., p. 109.

6 Fine wool was purchased from Majorca, Catalonia, Provence, and the Cotswolds (the last being the most expensive and highest quality) and shipped across borders and through a tangle of rapacious tax authorities. The dyeing and finishing required further imports: alum from the Black Sea (to make mordant for fixing the dyes), oak gall-nuts (to make the highest quality purple-black ink), woad from Lombardy (for deep blue dyes and as a foundation for other colors); madder from the Low Countries (for bright red dyes or, combined with woad, for dark reds and purples). And these were only the routine imports. Rarer dyes, the kind displayed on the costly clothes proudly worn in aristocratic portraits from the period, included deep scarlet from murex shells in the eastern Mediterranean, carmine red known as grana from tiny cochineal insects, orange-red vermilion from a crystalline substance found on the shores of the Red Sea, and the extravagantly expensive and therefore much prized kermis red from the powdered remains of an oriental louse.

7 Martin Davis, “Humanism in Script and Print,” in Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 48. The experience, Petrarch remarked, was more like looking at a painting than reading a book.

8 Pious Christians were urged to suppress its impulses and to spurn its contaminated fruits. Though Dante’s poetry confers a magnificent dignity on Ulysses’ determination to sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the Inferno makes it clear that this determination is the expression of a fallen soul, condemned for eternity to reside near the innermost circle of Hell.

9 See esp. Charles Trinkaus, “In Our Image and Likeness”: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

10 “Aurum, argentum, gemmae, purpurea vestis, marmorea domus, cultus ager, pietae tabulae, phaleratus sonipes, caeteraque id genus mutam habent et superficiariam voluptatem: libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consultunt, et viva quaddam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur.” Quoted in John Addington Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy, 7 vols. (New York: Georg Olms, 1971; orig. 1875–86), 2:53 (translated by SG).

11 “Among the many subjects, I was especially interested in antiquity, inasmuch as I have always disliked my own age, so that, had not love of dear ones restrained me, I would always have wanted to be born in any other age. In order to forget my own time, I have always tried to place myself in spirit in other times.” Posteriati, ed. P.G. Ricci, in Petrarch, Prose, p. 7, quoted in Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 276.

12 The Doctor utriusque juris (DUJ) (the degree in both canon and civil law) took ten years.

13 Witt, In the Footsteps, p. 263.

14 Rerum fam. XXII.2 in Familiari, 4:106, quoted in Witt, In the Footsteps, p. 62. The letter probably dates to 1359.

15 Quoted in Martines, Social World, p. 25.

16 For Petrarch, there were values that transcended mere style: “What good will it do if you immerse yourself wholly in the Ciceronian springs and know well the writings either of the Greeks or of the Romans? You will indeed be able to speak ornately, charmingly, sweetly, and sublimely; you certainly will not be able to speak seriously, austerely, judiciously, and, most importantly, uniformly”—Rerum fam. I.9, in Witt, In the Footstep s, p. 242.

17 in the early 1380s, at the urging of a friend, he wrote a massive defense of the monastic life, and he was ready, even in the midst of praising active engagement, to acknowledge the superiority, at least in principle, of contemplative withdrawal.

18 See Salutati to Gaspare Squaro de’ Broaspini in Verona, November 17, 1377: “In this noble city, the flower of Tuscany and the mirror of Italy, the match of that most glorious Rome from which it descends and whose ancient shadows it follows in the struggle for the salvation of Italy and the freedom of all, here in Florence I have undertaken a labor that is unstinting but for which I am exceptionally grateful.” See Eugenio Garin, La Cultura Filosofica del Renascimento Italiano: Ricerche e Documenti (Florence: Sansuni, 1979), esp. pp. 3–27.

19 Witt, In the Footsteps, p. 308.

20 Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, pp. 80–81.

21 “Just imagine,” Niccoli wrote to the fiscal officials near the end of his life, “what sort of tax my poor goods can bear, with all the debts and pressing expenses I have. Which is why, begging your humanity and clemency, I pray that it will please you to treat me in such a way that current taxes will not force me in my old age to die far from my birthplace, where I have spent all I had.” Quoted in Martines, Social World, p. 116.

22 Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence (Libri della Famiglia), trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 2:98. It is sometimes claimed that this vision of companionate marriage was only introduced by Protestantism, but there is considerable evidence of its existence much earlier.

23 Origo, Merchant of Prato, p. 179.

24 Vespasiano da Bisticci, The Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of the Illustrious Men of the XV Century, trans. William George and Emily Waters (London: Routledge, 1926), p. 402.

25 “One day, when Nicolao was leaving his house, he saw a boy who had around his neck a chalcedony engraved with a figure by the hand of Polycleitus, a beautiful work. He enquired of the boy his father’s name, and having learnt this, sent to ask him if he would sell the stone; the father readily consented, like one who neither knew what it was nor valued it. Nicolao sent him five florins in exchange, and the good man to whom it had belonged deemed that he had paid him more than double its value”—Ibid., p. 399. In this case at least, the expenditure proved a very good investment: “There was in Florence in the time of Pope Eugenius a certain Maestro Luigi, the Patriarch, who took great interest in such things as these, and he sent word to Nicolao, asking if he might see the chalcedony. Nicolao sent it to him, and it pleased him so greatly that he kept it, and sent to Nicolao two hundred golden ducats, and he urged him so much that Nicolao, not being a rich man, let him have it. After the death of this Patriarch it passed to Pope Paul, and then to Lorenzo de’ Medici,” ibid., p. 399. For a remarkable tracking of the movements through time of a single ancient cameo, see Luca Giuliani, Ein Geschenk für den Kaiser: Das Geheimnis des grossen Kameo (Munich: Beck, 2010).

26 In reality, Niccoli’s vision exceeded his means: he died massively in debt. But the debt was canceled by his friend Cosimo de’ Medici, in exchange for the right to dispose of the collection. Half of the manuscripts went to the new Library of S. Marco, where they were housed in Michelozzi’s magnificent structure; the other half formed the core of the city’s great Laurentian Library. Though he was responsible for its creation, the idea of the public library was not Niccoli’s alone. It had been called for by Salutati. Cf. Berthold L. Ullman and Philip A. Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence: Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Library of San Marco (Padua: Antenore, 1972), p. 6.

27 Cino Rinuccini, Invettiva contro a cierti calunniatori di Dante e di messer Francesco Petrarcha and di messer Giovanni Boccacio, cited in Witt, In the Footsteps, p. 270. See Ronald Witt, “Cino Rinuccini’s Risponsiva alla Invetirra di Messer Antonio Lusco,” Renaissance Quarterly 23 (1970), pp. 133–49.

28 Bruni, Dialogus 1, in Martines, Social World, p. 235.

29 Ibid.

30 Martines, Social World, p. 241.

31 Vespasiano Memoirs, p. 353.

32 Martines, Social World, p. 265.

CHAPTER SIX: IN THE LIE FACTORY

1 See Poggio to Niccoli, February 12, 1421: “For I am not one of those perfect men, who are commanded to abandon father and mother and sell everything and give to the poor; that power belonged to very few people and only long ago, in an earlier age”—Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, p. 49.

2 William Shepherd, Life of Poggio Bracciolini (Liverpool: Longman et al., 1837), p. 185.

3 Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, p. 58.

4 Peter Partner, The Pope’s Men: The Papal Civil Service in the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 115.

5 Lapo da Castiglionchio, On the Excellence and Dignity of the Roman Court, in Christopher Celenza, Renaissance Humanism and the Papal Curia: Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger’s De curiae commodis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 111.

6 Ibid., p. 127.

7 Ibid., p. 155.

8 Ibid., p. 205.

9 See Celenza, Renaissance Humanism and the Papal Curia, pp. 25–26.

10 Ibid., p. 177.

11 Poggio, The Facetiae, or Jocose Tales of Poggio, 2 vols. (Paris: Isidore Liseux, 1879), Conclusion, p. 231. (References are to the volume in this Paris edition and to the number of the tale.) The manuscript of the Facetiae did not appear until 1457, two years before Poggio’s death, but Poggio represents the stories as circulating among the scriptors and secretaries many years earlier. Cf. Lionello Sozzi, “Le ‘Facezie’ e la loro fortuna Europea,” in Poggio Bracciolini 1380–1980: Nel VI centenario della nascità (Florence: Sansoni, 1982), pp. 235–59.

12 Ibid., 1:16.

13 Ibid., 1:50.

14 Ibid., 1:5, 1:45, 1:123, 2:133.

15 Ibid., 2:161.

16 Jesús Martínez de Bujanda, Index des Livres Interdits, 11 vols. (Sherbrooke, Quebec: Centre d’études de la Renaissance; Geneva: Droz; Montreal: Médiaspaul, 1984–2002), 11 (Rome):33.

17 Poggio, Facetiae, 1:23.

18 Ibid., 1:113.

19 Ibid., 2:187.

20 John Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden: Brill, 1976), p. 110.

21 Symonds, The Revival of Learning (New York: C. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960), p. 176. “In the fifteenth century scholarship was all-absorbing,” p. 177.

22 “Aspira ad virtutem recta, non hac tortuosa ac fallaci via; fac, ut mens conveniat verbis, opera sint ostentationi similia; enitere ut spiritus paupertas vestium paupertatem excedat, tunc fugies simulatoris crimen; tunc tibit et reliquis proderis vera virtute. Sed dum te quantunvis hominem humilem et abiectum videro Curiam frequentatem, non solum hypocritam, sed pessimum hypocritam iudicabo.” (17: p. 97). Poggio Bracciolini, Opera omnia, 4 vols. (Turin: Erasmo, 1964–69).

23 Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, pp. 156, 158.

24 Ibid., p. 54.

25 Ibid., p. 75.

26 Ibid., p. 66.

27 Ibid., p. 68.

28 Ibid., pp. 22–24.

29 Ibid., p. 146.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., p. 148.

32 Ibid., p. 164.

33 Ibid., p. 166.

34 Ibid., p. 173.

35 Ibid., p. 150.

36 The precise date of Poggio’s appointment as apostolic secretary to John XXIII is unclear. In 1411 he was listed as the pope’s scriptor and close associate (familiaris). But a papal bull of June 1, 1412, is signed by Poggio as Secretarius (as is a later bull, dating from the time of the General Council of Constance), and Poggio referred to himself during this period as Poggius Secretarius apostolicus. Cf. Walser, Poggius Florentinus: Leben und Werke, p. 25, n4.

CHAPTER SEVEN: A PIT TO CATCH FOXES

1 For much of the fourteenth century the popes had resided at Avignon; only in 1377 did the French-born Gregory XI, supposedly inspired by the stirring words of St. Catherine of Siena, return the papal court to Rome. When Gregory died the next year, crowds of Romans, fearing that a new French pope would almost certainly be drawn back to the civilized pleasures and security of Avignon, encircled the conclave of cardinals and noisily demanded the election of an Italian. The Neapolitan Bartolomeo Prignano was duly elected and assumed the title Urban VI. Five months later the French faction of cardinals, claiming that they had been coerced by a howling mob and that the election was therefore invalid, held a new conclave in which they elected Robert of Geneva, who settled in Avignon and called himself Clement VII. There were now two rival popes.

The French faction had chosen a hard man for a hard time: Robert of Geneva had distinguished himself the year before, when as papal legate in charge of a company of Breton soldiers, he promised a complete amnesty to the rebellious citizens of Cesena if they would open their gates to him. When the gates were opened, he ordered a general massacre. “Kill them all,” he was heard shouting. Urban VI, for his part, raised money to hire mercenaries, busied himself with the fantastically complicated alliances and betrayals of Italian politics, enriched his family, narrowly escaped traps set for him, ordered the torture and execution of his enemies, and repeatedly fled from and reentered Rome. Urban declared his French rival the antipope; Robert declared Urban the anti-Christ. The sordid details do not directly concern us—by the time Poggio came on the scene, both Robert of Geneva and Urban VI were dead and had been replaced by other equally problematical contenders for the papal see.

2 See Poggio’s melancholy observation in De varietate fortunae: “Survey the … hills of the city, the vacant space is interrupted only by ruins and gardens”—Quoted in Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1910), 6:617.

3 Ibid., 6:302. Gibbon uses this passage as the climax of his vast magnum opus, the summary articulation of the disaster that had befallen Rome.

4 Eustace J. Kitts, In the Days of the Councils: A Sketch of the Life and Times of Baldassare Cossa (Afterward Pope John the Twenty-Third) (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1908), p. 152.

5 Ibid., pp. 163–64.

6 Ulrich Richental, Chronik des Konstanzer Konzils 1414–1418 (“Richental’s Chronicle of the Council of Constance”), in The Council of Constance: The Unification of the Church, ed. John Hine Mundy and Kennerly M. Woody, trans. Louise Ropes Loomis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 84–199.

7 See, e.g., Remigio Sabbadini, Le Scoperte dei Codici Latini e Greci ne Secoli XIV e XV (Florence: Sansoni, 1905), 1:76–77.

8 “Richental’s Chronicle,” p. 190.

9 “Some have said that a great crowd of persons were executed for robbery, murder, and other crimes, but that is not the truth. I could not learn from our magistrates at Constance that more than twenty-two had been put to death for any such cause”—“Richental’s Chronicle,” p. 157.

10 Ibid., pp. 91, 100.

11 Quoted in Gordon Leff, Heresy, Philosophy and Religion in the Medieval West (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), p 122.

12 Kitts, In the Days of the Councils, p. 335.

13 “Richental’s Chronicle,” p. 114.

14 Ibid., p. 116.

15 This is Richental’s account. Another contemporary observer, Guillaume Fillastre, has a different version of the event: “the Pope, realizing his situation, left the city by river during the night between Wednesday and Thursday, March 21, after midnight, under escort provided by Frederick, duke of Austria”—in The Council of Constance, p. 222.

16 Fillastre in The Council of Constance, p. 236.

17 E. H. Gillett, The Life and Times of John Huss, 2 vols. (Boston: Gould & Lincoln, 1863), 1:508.

18 Kitts, In the Days of the Councils, pp. 199–200.

19 Poggio’s long letter about Jerome and Bruni’s alarmed reply are quoted in William Shepherd, The Life of Poggio Bracciolini (Liverpool: Longman et al., 1837), pp. 78–90.

20 Richental’s Chronicle,” p. 135. Poggio, however, who claimed that he “was a witness of his end, and observed every particular of its process,” told Bruni that “neither did Mutius suffer his hand to be burnt so patiently as Jerome endured the burning of his whole body; nor did Socrates drink the hemlock as cheerfully as Jerome submitted to the fire” (Shepherd, p. 88). Poggio’s reference is to Mucius Scaevola, the legendary Roman hero who stoically thrust his hand into the flames and thus impressed Rome’s enemy, the Etruscan Porsenna.

21 This and the quotes to follow are from a letter to Niccoli, May 18, 1416, in Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, pp. 26–30.

22 L. D. Reynolds, Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 158. The commentary was by the fourth-century Roman grammarian Donatus.

23 Poggio’s transcription of the Ciceronian speeches that he had discovered was identified in the Vatican Library [Vatican lat. 11458 (X)] by A. Campana in 1948, with the following subscription: Has septem M. Tulii orationes, que antea culpa temporum apud Italos deperdite erant, Poggius Florentinus, perquisitis plurimis Gallie Germanieque summo cum studio ac diligentia bibyothecis, cum latenetes comperisset in squalore et sordibus, in lucem solus extulit ac in pristinam dignitatem decoremque restituens Latinis musis dicavit (p. 91).

24 In the continuation of this description of the tattered manuscript, Poggio fantasizes that Quintilian’s Institutes had been instrumental in saving the Roman Republic. Hence he imagines that the “imprisoned” Quintilian feels it “a disgrace that he who had once preserved the safety of the whole population by his influence and his eloquence could now not find one single advocate who would pity his misfortunes and take some trouble over his welfare and prevent his being dragged off to an undeserved punishment”—Letter to Niccoli, December 15, 1425, in Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, p. 105). In these words one may perhaps glimpse a twinge of Poggio’s own guilty conscience at witnessing Jerome’s condemnation and execution. Or rather, the rescue of the manuscript stands in for a failed rescue: saving a classical text from the clutches of the monks was a liberation that Poggio could not possibly have brought about for eloquent, doomed Jerome.

25 Ibid., Letter IV, p. 194.

26 Ibid., Letter IV, p. 197.

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE WAY THINGS ARE

1 The key role played by Lucretius in early modern philosophy and natural science has been subtly explored by Catherine Wilson: Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008). See also W. R. Johnson, Lucretius and the Modern World (London: Duckworth, 2000); Dane R. Gordon and David B. Suits, Epicurus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance (Rochester, NY: RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press, 2003); and Stuart Gillespie and Donald Mackenzie, “Lucretius and the Moderns,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 306–24.

2 George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 23.

3 This is one of those innumerable moments in which Lucretius’ dazzling verbal skills are inevitably lost in translation. Here in describing the innumerable combinations, he plays with similar words jostling one another: “sed quia multa modis multis mutata per omne.”

4 In The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), Gilles Deleuze explores the relationship between this minimal, indeterminate motion of atoms and modern physics.

5 “If all movements are invariably interlinked, if new movement arises from the old in unalterable succession, if there is no atomic swerve [declinando … primordia motus] to initiate movement that can annul the decrees of destiny and prevent the existence of an endless chain of causation, what is the source of this free will possessed by living creatures all over the earth? What, I ask, is the source of this power of will wrested from destiny, which enables each of us to advance where pleasures leads us …?” (2.251–58).

6 Both willing oneself to go forward and willing oneself to remain stationary are only possible because everything is not strictly determined, that is, because of the subtle, unpredictable, free movements of matter. What keeps the mind from being crushed by inner necessity is “the minute swerve [clinamen principiorum] of the atoms at unpredictable places and times” (2.293–94).

7 Just as there is no divine grace in any of this tangled history of development, there is no perfect or final form. Even the creatures that flourish are beset with flaws, evidence that their design is not the product of some sublime higher intelligence but of chance. Lucretius articulated, in effect, what human males, with chagrin, might call the principle of the prostate.

8 Cf. Dryden’s translation of these lines:

Thus like a sailor by the tempest hurled

Ashore, the babe is shipwrecked on the world:

Naked he lies, and ready to expire;

Helpless of all that human wants require:

Exposed upon unhospitable earth,

From the first moment of his hapless birth.

John Dryden, Complete Poems, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 1:421. Here and elsewhere I have modernized Dryden’s spelling and punctuation.

9 “For example, often before a god’s gracefully ornamented shrine a calf falls a victim beside the incense-smoking altars, and with its last breath spurts a hot stream of blood from its breast. Meanwhile the bereaved mother ranges through green glades searching the ground for the imprint of those cloven hoofs. With her eyes she explores every place in the hope that she will be able to spy somewhere the young one she has lost. Now she halts and fills the leafy grove with her plaintive calls. Time after time she returns to the cowshed, her heart transfixed with longing for her calf” (2.352–60). This passage, of course, does more than make the point that a particular cow can identify its particular calf: it registers once again the destructiveness, the murderousness, of religion, this time from the perspective of the animal victim. The whole sacrificial cult, at once unnecessary and cruel, is set against something intensely natural, not only the capacity of a mother to identify her offspring but also the deep love that lies behind this identification. Animals are not material machines—they are not simply programmed, as we would say, to care for their young; they feel emotions. And one member of the species cannot simply substitute for another, as if individual creatures were interchangeable.

10 “Whose heart does not contract with dread of the gods, and who does not cower in fear, when the scorched earth shudders beneath the terrible stroke of the thunderbolt, and rumbles of thunder run across the vast heaven?” (5:1218–21).

11 Hans Blumenberg, in his elegant short book on this passage, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997) shows that over the course of centuries of brooding and commenting on this passage, the spectator tended to lose his privileged position of distance: we are on the ship.

12 A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet, 2nd. edn. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1962), p. 267, cited by David Hopkins, “The English Voices of Lucretius from Lucy Hutchinson to John Mason Good,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, p. 266. Here is Dryden’s translation of the passage:

When Love its utmost vigor does imploy,

Ev’n tben, ’tis but a restless wandring joy:

Nor knows the Lover, in that wild excess,

With hands or eyes, what first he would possess:

But strains at all; and fast’ning where he strains,

Too closely presses with his frantic pains;

With biting kisses hurts the twining fair,

Which shows his joys imperfect, unsincere. (1:414)

To modern ears, “unsincere” sounds strange, but it is a Latinism. Sincerus in Latin can mean “pure,” and Lucretius writes that the storm-tossed violence arises from the fact that the lovers’ pleasure is not pure: quia non est pura voluptas (4:1081).

13 “Just like thirsty people who in dreams desire to drink and, instead of obtaining water to quench the fire that consumes their limbs, with vain effort pursue images of water and remain thirsty, though they drink in the midst of a torrent stream, so, in love, lovers are deluded by Venus with images: no matter how intently they gaze at the beloved body, they cannot sate their eyes; nor can they remove anything from the velvety limbs that they explore with roving, uncertain hands.” (4.1097–1104).

14 Here is Smith’s more workmanlike prose translation:

At last, with limbs interlocked, they enjoy the flower of youth: the body has a presentiment of ecstasy, and Venus is on the point of sowing the woman’s fields; they greedily press body to body and intermingle the salivas of their mouths, drawing deep breaths and crushing lips with teeth. But it is all in vain, since they cannot take away anything from their lover’s body or wholly penetrate it and merge into it. At times they do indeed seem to be striving and struggling to do this: so eagerly do they remain fettered in the bonds of Venus, while their limbs are slackened and liquefied by the force of ecstasy.

15 Smith’s prose translation of the opening lines reads:

Mother of Aeneas’ people, delight of human beings and the gods, Venus, power of life, it is you who beneath the sky’s sliding stars inspirit the ship-bearing sea, inspirit the productive land. To you every kind of living creature owes its conception and first glimpse of the sun’s light. You goddess, at your coming hush the winds and scatter the clouds, for you the creative earth thrusts up fragrant flowers, for you the smooth stretches of the ocean smile, and the sky, tranquil now, is flooded with effulgent light.

Once the door to spring is flung open and Favonius’ fertilizing breeze, released from imprisonment, is active, first, goddess, the birds of the air, pierced to the heart with your powerful shafts, signal your entry. Next wild creatures and cattle bound over rich pastures and swim rushing rivers: so surely are they all captivated by your charm and eagerly follow your lead. Then you inject seductive love into the heart of every creature that lives in the seas and mountains and river torrents and bird-haunted thickets and verdant plains, implanting in it the passionate urge to reproduce its kind.

CHAPTER NINE: THE RETURN

1 Letter to Francesco Barbaro, in Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, Appendix: Letter VIII, p. 213.

2 The textual history of Lucretius has occupied scholars for many generations and was the object of the most famous of all philological reconstructions, that of the great German classicist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851). The lost scribal copy, made for Poggio, is known to textual scholars as thePoggianus. I have been greatly assisted in grasping the complexity of the textual issues by D. J. Butterfield of Cambridge University, to whom I am indebted.

3 Ibid., pp. 38, 46.

4 Ibid., pp. 46, 48.

5 Ibid., p. 74.

6 Ibid., p. 65.

7 Ibid., pp. 89, 92.

8 and the quotes that follow: Ibid., pp. 110, 154, 160.

9 The copies Niccoli made of a substantial number of ancient texts have survived and are in the San Marco collection to which he willed his library. These include, in addition to the Lucretius, works by Plautus, Cicero, Valerius Flaccus, Celsus, Aulus Gellius, Tertullian, Plutarch, and Chrysostom. Others—including the copy of Asconius Pedianus mentioned by Poggio—are lost. See B. L. Ullman and Philip A. Stadter, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence. Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Library of San Marco (Padua: Antenore, 1972), p. 88.

10 Gordan, Two Renaissance Book Hunters, pp. 147, 166–67.

11 As Lauro Martines notes, power and wealth had shifted in the thirteenth century from the old feudal nobility to the merchant class, to families like the Albizzi, Medici, Rucellai, and Strozzi. But, though not any longer very wealthy, the bride’s father was reasonably prosperous. “In 1427 Vaggia’s father, Gino, claimed one large house with a courtyard and shop, two cottages, four farms, various land parcels, and some livestock. His remaining assets included an outstanding credit of 858 florins and government bonds with a market value of 118 florins. Altogether his gross capital came to 2424 florins. The debts on this estate amounted to 500 florins, and rental and subsistence deductions reduced Gino’s taxable capital to 336 florins. Consequently, Poggio’s match with Vaggia was hardly contracted with an eye (on his part) to forming an alliance with a moneyed family. Nevertheless, she brought him a dowry whose value, 600 florins, conformed with the dowries customarily given by the political families of medium stature, or by the distinguished old families (somewhat down at heel) whose major social virtue was their blood”—Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 211–12.

12 William Shepherd, Life of Poggio Bracciolini (Liverpool: Longman et al., 1837), p. 394.

13 Quoted in Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 1:268.

CHAPTER TEN: SWERVES

1 Quoted in Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 49. Cf. Girolamo Savonarola, Prediche sopra Amos e Zacaria, no. 3 (February 19, 1496), ed. Paolo Ghiglieri (Rome: A. Belardetti, 1971), 1:79–81. See also Peter Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 140, and Jill Kraye, “The Revival of Hellenistic Philosophies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 102–6.

2 On Machiavelli’s Lucretius manuscript, see Brown, Return of Lucretius, pp. 68–87, and Appendix, pp. 113–22.

3 See James Hankins, “Ficino’s Theology and the Critique of Lucretius,” forthcoming in the proceedings of the conference on Platonic Theology: Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance, held at the Villa I Tatti and the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Florence, April 26–27, 2007.

4 On the controversy, see Salvatore I. Camporeale, “Poggio Bracciolini contro Lorenzo Valla. Le ‘Orationes in L. Vallam,’” in Poggio Bracciolini, 1380–1980 (Florence: Sansoni, 1982), pp. 137–61. On the whole problem of orthodoxy in Valla (and Ficino as well), see Christopher S. Celenza’s illuminating The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 80–114.

5 “Nunc sane video, cur in quodam tuo opusculo, in quo Epicureorum causam quantam datur tutaris, vinum tantopere laudasti … Bacchum compotatoresque adeo profuse laudans, ut epicureolum quendam ebrietatis assertorem te esse profitearis … Quid contra virginitatem insurgis, quod numquam fecit Epicurus? Tu prostitutas et prostibula laudas, quod ne gentiles quidem unquam fecerunt. Non verbis oris tui sacrilegi labes, sed igne est expurganda, quem spero te non evasurum.” Cited in Don Cameron Allen, “The Rehabilitation of Epicurus and His Theory of Pleasure in the Early Renaissance,” Studies in Philology 41 (1944), pp. 1–15.

6 Valla directly quotes Lucretius, but only passages he could have found in Lactantius and other Christian texts.

7 Indeed that spokesman, not a fictional character but the contemporary poet Maffeo Vegio, makes it clear that even he is not really an Epicurean, but that he is willing to play the role of a defender of pleasure in order to refute Stoical arguments for virtue as the highest good that, in his view, represent a far more serious threat to Christian orthodoxy.

8 Lorenzo Valla, De vero falsoque bono/On Pleasure, trans. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), p. 319. I will use the better known title, De voluptate, throughout.

The text of Valla’s in question actually deploys several different strategies in addition to dialogical disavowal to protect its author from the charge of Epicureanism. Valla has good grounds then for indignantly rejecting Poggio’s charge of Epicureanism. The Epicurean arguments that take up the entire second book of De voluptate and much of the first are carefully framed by proper Christian doctrines, doctrines that the narrator and the other interlocutors unanimously declare have carried the day.

9 Valla, De voluptate, pp. 219–21.

10 Ibid., p. 221.

11 Ibid., p. 295.

12 Cf. Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion,” in Glyph 8 (1981), pp. 40–61.

13 See Michele Marullo, Inni Naturali (Florence: Casa Editrice le Lettere, 1995); on Bruno and Epicureanism, see, among other works, Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983; orig. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 1966).

14 “L’anima è sol … in un pan bianco caldo un pinocchiato”—Brown, Return of Lucretius, p. 11.

15 Erasmus, “The Epicurean,” in The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 538, 542. On Erasmus’s criticism of Marullo, see P. S. Allen, Opus Epistolarum des. Erasmi Roterodami, 12 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906–58), 2:187; 5:519, trans. in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), 3:225; 10:344. Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. P. G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 2:398–99.

16 Cited in More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; rev. edn. 2002), p. 68.

17 More plays a characteristically brilliant and self-conscious game in Utopia with the complex factors that led ancient texts to survive or perish, including the role of accident: “When about to go on the fourth voyage,” Hythloday remarks, “I put on board, in place of wares to sell, a fairly large package of books, having made up my mind never to return rather than to come back soon. They received from me most of Plato’s works, several of Aristotle’s, as well as Theophrastus on plants, which I regret to say was mutilated in parts. During the voyage an ape found the book, left lying carelessly about, and in wanton sport tore out and destroyed several pages in various sections,” p. 181.

18 At the time I am writing this essay, in the United States one out of every nine African Americans aged twenty to thirty-five is incarcerated, while the United States has achieved the greatest disparity in wealth of any time in the past century.

19 Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), pp. 17–18, translating Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante, 1, part 3, in Dialoghi Italiani, ed. Giovanni Gentile (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), pp. 633–37.

20 Walter L. Wakefield, “Some Unorthodox Popular Ideas of the Thirteenth Century,” in Medievalia et Humanistica, p. 28.

21 John Edwards, “Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450–1500,” in Past and Present 120 (1988), p. 8.

22 Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, ed. and trans. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1977), p. 91.

23 Jacopo Corbinelli, the Florentine secretary to Queen Mother Catherine de Medicis, cited in Rowland, Giordano Bruno, p. 193.

24 Ash Wednesday Supper, p. 87.

25 De l’Infinito, Universo e Mondi, Dialogue Quinto, in Dialoghi Italiani, pp. 532–33, citing De rerum natura, 2:1067–76.

26 See J. W. Shirley, ed., Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) and Shirley, Thomas Harriot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); J. Jacquot, “Thomas Harriot’s Reputation for Impiety,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 9 (1951–2), pp. 164–87.

27 Ash Wednesday Supper, p. 90.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: AFTERLIVES

1 A famous exception was the inquisitorial investigation of Paolo Veronese for his 1573 depiction of the Last Supper, whose intense materiality—the swirling life, the food on the table, the dogs scratching and scrounging for scraps, and so forth—triggered accusations of irreverence and even heresy. Veronese avoided unpleasant consequences by renaming the work The Feast in the House of Levi.

2 Jonson wrote his name on the title page and, tiny as the book is—only 11 by 6 centimeters—he made many marks and jottings in the margins, evidence of an attentive and engaged reading. He seems to have been particularly struck by the passage in book 2 in which Lucretius denies that the gods have any interest in the behavior of mortals. At the foot of the page, he penned a translation of two of the lines:

Far above grief & dangers, those blest powers,

Rich in their active goods, need none of ours.

Cf. 2:649–50:

Nam privati dolori omni, privata periclis,

ipsa suis pollens opibus, nil indiga nostri.

Lucy Hutchinson translates the lines as follows:

The devine nature doth it selfe possesse

Eternally in peacefull quiettnesse,

Nor is concernd in mortall mens affairs,

Wholly exempt from dangers, griefes, and cares,

Rich in it selfe, of us no want it hath.

3 The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 846, 240.

4 Ibid., p. 318.

5 Ibid., p. 397.

6 Ibid., p. 310.

7 The quotations that follow are from ibid., pp. 464, 634, and 664.

8 Ibid., p. 62.

9 Ibid., p. 65.

10 M. A. Screech, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius: A Transcription and Study of the Manuscript, Notes, and Pen-Marks (Geneva: Droz, 1998).

11 “Ut sunt diuersi atomorum motus non incredibile est sic conuenisse olim atomos aut conuenturas ut alius nascatur montanus.”—Ibid., p. 11. I have altered Screech’s translation: “Since the movements of the atoms are so varied, it is not unbelievable that the atoms once came together, or will together again in the future, so that another Montaigne be born.”

12 Trevor Dadson, “Las bibliotecas de la nobleza: Dos inventarios y un librero, año de 1625,” in Aurora Egido and José Enrique Laplana, eds., Mecenazgo y Humanidades en tiempos de Lastanosa. Homenaje a la memoria de Domingo Ynduráin (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2008), p. 270. I am grateful to Professor Dadson’s research into Spanish library inventories for all of the glimpses of Lucretius in post-Tridentine Spain.

13 Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987; orig. Italian edn. 1983), “Documents,” p. 340—“Exercitatio de formis substantialibus et de qualitatibus physicis, anonymous.”

14 Ibid., p. 132.

15 Redondi’s core argument—that the attack on Galileo for heliocentrism served as a kind of cover for an underlying attack on his atomism—has been criticized by many historians of science. But there is no reason to think that the Church’s motivation could only have been one or the other concern and not both.

16 “At Lucretius animorum immortalitatem oppugnat, deorum providentiam negat, religiones omneis tollit, summum bonum in voluptate ponit. Sed haec Epicuri, quem sequitur Lucretius, non Lucretii culpa est. Poema quidem ipsum propter sententias a religione nostra alienas, nihilominus poema est. tantumne? Immo vero poema venustum, poema praeclarum, poema omnibus ingenii luminibus distinctum, insignitum, atque illustratum. Hasce autem Epicuri rationes insanas, ac furiosas, ut & illas absurdas de atomorum concursione fortuita, de mundis innumerabilibus, & ceteras, neque difficile nobis est refutare, neque vero necesse est: quippe cum ab ipsa veritatis voce vel tacentibus omnibus facillime refellantur” (Paris, 1563) f. ã3. I have used the translation of Ada Palmer, to whose unpublished essay, “Reading Atomism in the Renaissance,” I am indebted.

17 Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius: “De rerum natura,” ed. Hugh de Quehen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 139.

18 On the contrary, with a backward glance at John Evelyn, Hutchinson observed that a “masculine wit,” presenting to the public only a single book of the difficult poem, “thought it worth printing his head in a laurel crown.”

19 Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation, pp. 24–25.

20 Ibid., p. 23.

21 Ibid., p. 26.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., p. 24.

24 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, II.ii.

25 The most powerful philosophical expression of this view is in the works of the French priest, astronomer, and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655).

26 Isaac Newton, Opticks, Query 32 (London, 1718), cited in Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson, “Lucretius and the History of Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, pp. 141–42.

27 To William Short, October 31, 1819: “I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.” Cited in Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 24. John Quincy Adams, “Dinner with President Jefferson,” from Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia, 1874): November 3, 1807: “Mr. Jefferson said that the Epicurean philosophy came nearest to the truth, in his opinion, of any ancient system of philosophy. He wished the work of Gassendi concerning it had been translated. It was the only accurate account of it extant. I mentioned Lucretius. He said that was only a part—only thenatural philosophy. But the moral philosophy was only to be found in Gassendi.”

28 Miller, Jefferson and Nature, p. 24.