Greenblatt
, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, 2011.
Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction
Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction
The Players
Epicurus (341 BCE – 270 BCE), moral and natural ancient Greek philosopher, author of On Nature, and founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism.
Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 99 BCE – ca. 55 BCE), Roman poet and philosopher, author of a 6-book poem (scientific and philosophical), and based on the teachings of Epicurus.
Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (1380 – 1459), the Italian humanist, copyist and book hunter, secretary to seven popes, who, in 1417, finds a surviving copy of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura
Stephen Greenblatt (1943- ): The contemporary (Shakespearian) scholar, storyteller, founder of the New Historicism.
You, the reader (2016)
Epicurean philosophy
For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by ataraxia—peace and freedom from fear—and aponia—the absence of pain—and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends.
1) The nature of the universe (atomic and random, clinamen is accidental and temporary)
2) The gods (elsewhere on their own business) so no judgment day or punishment
3) Body & soul are both mortal so only the present matters
4) the purpose of living then is to have a good life (simplicity, tranquility and friendship)
5) Social contract (reciprocity; utilitarianism )
Epicurean epitaph read: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo
Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
Latin, 6 books, 7 200 dactylic (heroic) hexameters (six beat lines)
Philosophical conviction in poetically beautiful terms
Humanism and book hunting
Poggio Bracciolini (invented the humanist book hand that became Roman type, while his friend Niccolò de’ Niccoli invented the font that became italics and was used by Aldus Manutius in 1501)
How does this manuscript bring us to modernity?
Renaissance: 14th to 17th C.
Enlightenment: 18th C.
Existentialism and atheism: 21st C.
The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia. Trans. & ed. By Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson. Intro by D. S. Hutchinson.
The Villa of the Papyri (Herculaneum, near Pompei, southern Italy, up the slope of the volcano Vesuvius) owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus.
In 79 AD, the eruption of Vesuvius covered all of Herculaneum with some 30 m of volcanic ash.
First excavations: 1750 and 1765
1,785 carbonized papyrus scrolls first discovered (now over 2,000), the private library of Philodemus of of Gàdara, the Epicurean
Contains books XIV, XV, XXV, XXVIII of Epicurus’s De Natura
Deciphering the carbonized papyri:
1990: multi-spectral imaging (infrared and ultraviolet technology)
Today: CT scans (Xray imaging)