It was not an era friendly to what Lucretius had to say. He then did something that would resonate for centuries: he ordered that the poem be copied, and thereby delivered a long-dead Roman’s philosophy, conceived in another time and largely forgotten, into a new era. In Swerve, the butterfly is Poggio Bracciolini, an unemployed papal secretary who, finding himself by chance with the time and the means to hunt down copies of ancient texts, stumbled upon a manuscript of Lucretius in a German monastery in 1417. There is in Greenblatt’s work a keen appreciation that the course of history is at any moment perched on a razor’s edge, and that many of the chains of consequence culminating in the modern Zeitgeist can be traced to seemingly inconsequential instances-butterflies flapping their wings to beget faraway storms. Watching this power slowly unfold is one of the book’s pleasures. “I wanted to tell a story about its power-how it helped inspire the Renaissance and remade our whole culture.” “I didn’t want to write a book whose central concern is a technical analysis of Lucretius’s poem or the detailed reception history of that poem in later literary works,” he says.

But neither is he addressing an audience of specialists. At six books and some 7,400 lines of Latin, laden with allusion, philosophical reflection, and long forays into ancient physics, the work is demanding even for a highly trained classicist, which Greenblatt, an English professor, readily admits he is not.

The improbable story of how it re-emerged, and how the mindset it advocated informs our present, is the subject of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Norton), a new book by Cogan University Professor and noted Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, to be published in September.Įven with its sugary rim, De rerum natura is not an easy read. Still, it barely weathered the incursions of time and hostile authorities, which conspired to put it out of view for nearly a millennium.

In later centuries, when that poem, De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”), came under siege for its subversive potential, the work’s captivating beauty would be key to its survival.

The format for his observations, many of them highly technical and uncannily modern, was a single elegant poem: readers would stomach such material more easily if it was presented artfully, he suggested, just as a child would drink bitter medicine more readily out of a cup with a honeyed rim. More than 2,000 years ago, a Roman named Titus Lucretius Carus set down his thoughts on topics ranging from creation to religion to death.

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