The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition

t h e luc r e t i a n r e n a i s s a n c e The Lucretian Renaissance phi l ol o gy a n d t h e a fter life of tr a d...

Author: Gerard Passannante

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t h e luc r e t i a n r e n a i s s a n c e

The Lucretian Renaissance phi l ol o gy a n d t h e a fter life of tr a dition

* Gerard Passannante

The University of Chicago Press * Chicago and London

ger a r d passa n na n te is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Maryland. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2011 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011. Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-64849-1 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-64849-4 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Passannante, Gerard Paul, 1978– The Lucretian renaissance : philology and the afterlife of tradition / Gerard Passannante. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-64849-1 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-64849-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Lucretius Carus, Titus—Influence. 2. Materialism—History. 3. Philosophy, Ancient. 4. Philosophy, Renaissance. I. Title. pa6484.p36 2011 187—dc22 2011016217 o This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents

contents

Introduction 1 1. Extra Destinatum 15 2. The Philologist and the Epicurean 78 3. Homer Atomized 120 4. The Pervasive Influence 154 Epilogue 198

* Acknowledgments, 217 Bibliography, 221 Index, 245

Introduction

Like Raphael’s School of Athens, the fantasy was one of synchronic time: a barge floating down the Tiber River carrying a flock of Renaissance humanists dressed as ancient poets. The story comes to us from the imagination of a Jesuit called Famiano Strada (1572–1649), a professor at the Collegio Romano who had a talent for metaphor and a decidedly baroque sensibility. As Strada tells us, the vessel was outfitted like Mount Parnassus, carrying Apollo and the Muses, with branches of laurel concealing its machinery and Pegasus jutting from the side. It was on this barge that the humanists were said to have staged a competition at the request of Leo X, each performing his role by imitating a different ancient author. Among the group was Pietro Bembo, a scholar, poet, and later a cardinal, who had authored a short treatise on literary imitation. Playing the part of the scientific poet Lucretius in a philosopher’s cloak and toga, Bembo delivered a poem in Latin hexameters that described a device composed of a magnet, a dial plate displaying the letters of the alphabet, and an iron needle, which together made possible an early form of text messaging. By spelling out a word on the dial, letter by letter, a person could communicate with another with the same device, “so that if one of [the needles] was moved by chance at Rome, although it was far away, the other shared in the motion, being impelled by some hidden law of nature [arcano naturai foedere].” “By this means,” as Joseph Addi1. Strada may have been thinking of a similar device that Leon Battista Alberti described in De cifris, a treatise on cryptography, perhaps even drawing a connection between the idea of coded messages and the hidden world of atoms Lucretius envisioned in the letters of the alphabet. 2. Strada, Prolusiones academicae, 306: “Ut si forte ex his aliquis Romae moveatur, / Alter ad hunc motum, quamvis sit dissitu’ longe, / Arcano se naturai foedere

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2 * i n t roduc t ion

son later explained to a woman who was pining for her absent husband, “they talked together across a whole continent, and conveyed their thoughts to one another in an instant over cities or mountains, seas or deserts.” When readers stumbled across Strada’s account in the nineteenth century, some wondered whether the real Pietro Bembo had been hiding an early prototype of the magnetic telegraph in his famous collection of manuscripts, sculptures, and mystical Egyptian tablets. Blurring the line between object and metaphor, between talking long distance and speaking with the dead, Bembo’s “iron interpreter” looks back to an ancient history of magnets and technological desire— from Plato’s description of the magnetic furor of the Homeric rhapsode in the Ion to Philo’s account of the transcription of Mosaic law by Jewish scribes guided by the hand of an “invisible prompter.” As both ancient and Renaissance readers understood, Lucretius’s poem itself was something of a wonder in this regard: an instrument designed to broadcast the Greek wisdom of the philosopher Epicurus and explain the physical workings of the universe in the material concourse of atoms. In book 6 of his De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), Lucretius himself spends a good deal of time discussing the physical workings vertat.” The word naturai is a deliberate archaism designed to imitate Lucretius’s habit of mixing old words with new ones. 3. Addison, Works, 1:351. With tongue firmly in cheek, Addison said that he could only think of one improvement to the device: “In the meanwhile, if ever the invention should be revived or put in practice, I would propose that upon the lover’s dial-plate there should be written not only the four-and-twenty letters, but several entire words which have always a place in passionate epistles, as flames, darts, die, languish, absence, Cupid, heart, eyes, hang, down, and the like.” And so modern technological romance was born. 4. See Pearson, “On Sympathetic Needles.” Like the Mensa Isiaca that Bembo had supposedly bought from a soldier in Rome, which was thought to contain the occult mysteries of ancient Egypt, the device could easily be imagined as another object of wonder to be collected in a Kunstkammer. 5. See Plato, Ion 533d; and Philo, Life of Moses 2:37– 39 (in vol. 6 of the Loeb Philo). For a modern history of technological desire, see Ronell, Telephone Book. 6. Statius famously wrote of the “towering frenzy of learned Lucretius” (et docti furor arduus Lucreti), and in the Quattrocento Marsilio Ficino listed the Epicurean poet among those who, like Homer, had been possessed by a divine furor. See Statius, Silvae 2.7.73; and Ficino, Platonic Theology, 4:126–27.

i n t roduc t ion * 3

of magnets, describing the ways that the atoms of iron and loadstone jostle in relation to one another, generating a subtle game of fullness and emptiness that could make an iron needle sigh and weep across great distances. In having Bembo dress up as Lucretius and sing about magnets, however, Strada was not only using the ancient poet to explain the function of the iron interpreter; he was also using the device to describe the effects of Lucretius on his readers. If any poet ever knew anything about collapsing time and space in an instant or transforming absence into presence it was the author of De rerum natura—the one who taught Virgil and Milton how to make an epic simile into an engine of physics, who took his readers from a vision of dust swirling in a ray of sunlight to a hidden world of causes. Merely to read Lucretius after his own miraculous recovery from seeming oblivion in 1417 was to be transported long-distance—from Renaissance Italy to ancient Rome, from Rome in the heat of a civil war to the green shade of an Epicurean garden. The sixteenth-century poet Giovanni Pontano perhaps put it best when he said that Lucretius “drags the reader wherever he wants to go.” I have begun with the fantasy of humanists sending messages wirelessly with magnets because the story dramatizes a problem of visibility at the center of Lucretius’s poem and its Renaissance reception, namely, the problem of reading a history of materialism into a history of letters. I am using the word letters here in the sense of individual characters of the alphabet, such as the letters that make up this book, but also in the larger sense of a history of literature, a historia literaria. In trying to picture Bembo’s iron needle moving across an alphabetic dial plate, or whole words translated through a chain of invisible atoms, we are reminded of one of the central analogies of De rerum natura, an analogy that the poet himself echoes again and again in a kind of refrain: the letters of the alphabet are like the atoms of the universe. As individual letters are combined to form words, so atoms are combined in different 7. On Lucretius’s personal witnessing of a magnet in Samothrace, see esp. Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, 51–54; and Wallace, “ ‘Amaze Your Friends!’ ” 8. Pontano, I dialoghi, 238–39: “Rapit quo vult lectorem.” Cited and translated in Haskell, “Religion and Enlightenment,” 189.


arrangements to form things. In the most basic sense, The Lucretian Renaissance might be described as an attempt to recover this analogy for the period, and to understand it as a way of thinking about the nature of intellectual history and reception. How did the idea that letters are like atoms, for example, become meaningful for the development of textual criticism, for thinking about the transmission of ancient knowledge in print, or for understanding the Renaissance itself as a material relation to a classical past? To even begin to ask these questions in their broadest outlines is to discover the central thesis of this book, which is, simply, that the history of materialism in the Renaissance is inextricably tied to a history of literature and the material text. Well before its more familiar scientific and philosophic appearance in the age of Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, the ancient philosophy of Lucretius and Epicurus reemerged in the Renaissance imagination as a story about reading and letters—a story that unfolded in the volatile fortunes of texts, in their physical recomposition, and in their scattering. There is a world of invisible bodies behind every letter and word. This was the secret of the iron interpreter. In recent years, there has been another renaissance of Lucretius in contemporary scholarship, with the poet reappearing at the thresholds of modern political, social, and scientific thought. Generally speaking, my own book seeks to build upon this new wave of scholarship 9. Among many important studies are Reid Barbour’s English Epicures and Stoics, which traces the impact of Epicurean atomism on the political and religious imagination of the seventeenth century; Richard Kroll’s meditation on materialism in England after Gassendi; Susanna Gambino Longo’s, Valentina Prosperi’s, and Alison Brown’s studies of the philosophical and literary fortunes of Epicureanism in Italy; Catherine Wilson’s book on the philosophical impact of Epicureanism in the seventeenth century; Jonathan Goldberg’s rethinking of the stakes of Lucretian materialism for the history of sexuality; and Natania Meeker’s recent study of materialism and reading in the eighteenth century. One must add to this list the formidable collection of articles in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius; Jacques Lezra’s study on the concept of the “event”; David Quint’s reading of Lucretian influence in the poetry of Milton; Charlotte Goddard’s unpublished dissertation, “Epicureanism and the Poetry of Lucretius in the Renaissance”; and Stephen Campbell’s interpretation of Lucretius’s presence in Giorgione’s Tempest and the poet’s importance for the larger intellectual context in which the painting was produced.


but takes a somewhat different approach to the question of influence, focusing on De rerum natura as a poem that dramatizes its materiality and theorizes its own receptions. In this sense, The Lucretian Renaissance seeks to remedy what Jonathan Goldberg has described as a relative lack of interest in materialism on the part of historians of the book by showing how the history of the book is itself an object of philosophy. In the process of exploring the ways in which the dynamic, invisible world of De rerum natura came to reflect ideas about the production of literature and knowledge, we will see the poet’s elemental analogy between letters and atoms realized in and through the work of readers and their texts—that is, in the making of humanist thought and scholarly practice. Because the primary vehicle of Epicurus’s revival in the Renaissance was a poem (a fact that is sometimes overlooked or obscured), the history of materialism as a philosophy in this period is also fundamentally a history of words and poetic tropes, a history of philology. The word “philology” has come to mean many things to many people. The notion of philology that I refer to in the title of this book naturally includes the emergent science of textual criticism, and I will try to show just how dramatically the practices of the textual critic were transformed in the atomic light of De rerum natura. The sense of philology that I am invoking here is not, however, entirely limited to the work of humanists putting texts back together. Rather, it gestures to the writings of authors such as Giambattista Vico and Erich Auerbach, for whom philology, as Charles Breslin has explained, “designates the whole residual corpus of the historical process in all its staggering complexity.” The ancient poet who attempted to compress the entire history of “things” into six books still has something to teach us, I believe, about reading complexity, and about the ways that we represent historical processes, or at least try to. As Auerbach once put it: “It is a difficult and infinite task to understand the particular character of historical forms and their interrelations”—as difficult perhaps as understanding 10. For other authors who have recently called for a rethinking of the materiality of reception, see esp. Hamilton, Soliciting Darkness; O’Brien, Anacreon Redivivus; Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis; Harris, Untimely Matter; and Butler, Matter of the Page. 11. Breslin, “Philosophy or Philology,” 373.


the material relations between invisible bodies that is the subject of Lucretius’s poem. In moving freely from philology in the narrow sense of textual criticism to philology in this much larger, almost cosmological sense, we may begin to understand what is at stake in Lucretius’s influence—an influence that brings us from the correction of an individual letter or word to the frame of the world itself. It is in this way, we might say, that the ancient Epicurean poet not only transformed the language of modern science and philosophy in this period, but transformed the very language of interconnection—the ways Renaissance readers imagined the network of links, both seen and unseen, that make up the “residual corpus” of texts and traditions. This brings us to the basic problem of how we define the text and how the poet himself defined or imagined it. Whereas scholars sometimes like to distinguish between a classical text and its reception, in this case the reception of De rerum natura is understood in the poet’s own terms as an extension of the text, and the material history of the poem as a dynamic expression of its philosophy. For this reason, the story of atoms and the void in the Renaissance cannot be strictly limited to the discourses of science and philosophy, at least in our own sense of those disciplines. Rather, the history of materialism must be discovered again in the most familiar Renaissance practices such as literary imitation, in the work of the author and the printer, and in the shifting concept of the classical text itself. In other words, it must be recovered from our own most familiar narratives of literary and intellectual history. In a late unfinished manuscript, the troubled philosopher Louis Althusser once spoke of “the existence of an almost completely unknown materialist tradition in the history of philosophy.” If that narrative has become somewhat less unknown in recent years, what we are exploring in these pages might still very well be called “an almost completely unknown materialist tradition” in the history of letters. As I will show, the materialism of the Renaissance took shape not as something marginal 12. Auerbach, Studia philologica et litteraria, 34. Unlike Vico, Lucretius did not draw a sharp line between our knowledge of nature and culture. 13. Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 167. Cited and discussed in Goldberg, Seeds of Things, 5.


to an established classical tradition (as something foreign or other); rather, it was enacted within the very body of tradition itself. Readers have sometimes misunderstood the nature of this particular story because they have begun with a distorted idea of Lucretius’s revival in the Renaissance, and forgotten that the poem is and was an unstable material text. As Lucretius himself reminds us, the magnet only looks as if it works without touching, and what might appear at first as an unmediated phenomenon unlocks a story that is all about mediation (i.e., the mediation of atoms). We might recall here, for example, Michel Serres’s claim that the age of modern physics was “there to welcome [Lucretius’s poem] intact and as yet unread.” As we shall see, the fortunes of the text—a text that no one could have called “intact” in the Renaissance—occasioned a number of key philosophical reflections on the work of the humanist and poet, and what we might call the matter of the text. What Serres misses when he laments that we have been forced to “read Lucretius’s De rerum natura as humanists and philologians, and not as a treatise on physics,” is just how coextensive those histories of reading once were. In the age of Bembo’s iron interpreter—which is to say, in the age of movable type—the poet’s materialism lent the physical encounter with ancient texts a kind of material depth, inviting readers to envision a world of knowledge broadcast across vast seas of time, to see in the disintegrating reflection of Homer a vision of matter and tradition in the process of becoming. The poet John Donne captured something of what I’m describing here in a smaller and more personal way when, worried that his letters might not arrive in the right sequence, he wrote from Paris to a friend: “If our letters come not in due order, and so make not a certain and concurrent chain, yet if they come as atoms, and so meet at last by any crooked and casual application, they make up and they nourish bodies of friendship.” 14. Serres, Birth of Physics, 71. 15. Serres, Birth of Physics, 4. 16. Donne, Letters, 1:305–6. I am grateful to Marshall Grossman for bringing this passage to my attention. For a discussion of the passage and Donne’s knowledge of Epicureanism, see Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, 33.


In imagining the vagaries of his correspondence in the language of matter, Donne adumbrates a sense of how Lucretius’s startling picture of material change and transformation gave expression to the tumultuous and uncertain world of Renaissance knowledge and its making. For the printed text, Adrian Johns has described this shifting uncertainty as the “nature of the book,” arguing for a dynamic print culture against the notion of textual fixity proposed by Elizabeth Eisenstein. In De rerum natura, behind the idea of a solid, fixed text was the idea of a poem in perpetual motion, a tradition in the process of being made and unmade and made again in time. The temporality of atomism, by which I mean both its late recovery in the Renaissance and its description of time in relation to matter, posed a radical challenge to any reader reflecting on antiquity and the “stuff ” of tradition, the multiple and evolutionary forms of literary and intellectual history, and the future of the past in the pages of the printed book. Against the formal stability of the atom—that irreducible unit of Lucretian physics—Renaissance readers of De rerum natura came to discover the poet’s vision of flux and change and to see it in themselves and their texts. For some this idea of textual flux represented an increasingly crumbling and fragmented tradition on the brink of resolving into chaos and nonsense: an image of the void. For others, however, it represented something quite different: a figure of creative potential, progress, and generativity that reflected the poet’s use of the word semina for atoms and the raw potential of atomism as philosophy and metaphor. In looking at both of these kinds of responses, we will explore more fundamentally how the poet’s description of the physical world and the world of the material text came to influence one of the most enduring questions of the period: what does it mean for a text, a poem, a philosophy to be reborn? By its very nature, this study does not and cannot aim at any kind of completeness. Here we are reminded of the “infinite task” that Auerbach describes as the work of the philologist. Lucretius, of course, 17. See Johns, Nature of the Book, 1–57. 18. In his book Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, James I. Porter has uncovered an important development of this story in the early philological work of Nietzsche, showing how some of the philosopher’s most important ideas were worked out in a fragmentary encounter with the atomism of Democritus.


understood this in his own way. As the poet once said of his arguments for the void: “But for a keen-scented mind, these little tracks are enough to enable you to recognize the others for yourself.” Each of the various poets, philosophers, and humanists that I treat in this book represents a significant material encounter with both the poetry of De rerum natura and its text, and each was more than casually affected by the poet’s ideas of matter and material change. We might even speak of a kind of sympathy, a word suspended between an ancient history of magnetic force and a modern history of reading. By the term “sympathy,” I do not necessarily mean an assent to the poet’s materialism—rather, something like a vulnerability to it. Arthur O. Lovejoy once called it a “susceptibility” to “metaphysical pathos.” As he explained, perhaps even intentionally echoing the title of Lucretius’s poem, “ ‘Metaphysical pathos’ is exemplified in any description of the nature of things, any characterization of the world to which one belongs, in terms which, like the words of a poem, awaken through their associations, and through a sort of empathy which they engender, a congenial mood or tone of feeling on the part of the philosopher or his readers.”At first it may seem strange to speak of any kind of sympathy at all with regard to an author who has for so long been characterized by the force of repulsion he has inspired—a poet still best known for arguing that the soul is mortal and that there is no such thing as divine Providence. This, however, is only one part of the complex story of the poet’s influence. In what follows in these pages, I will be less concerned with the question of atheism or impiety that has haunted Lucretius since antiquity (and has been well documented) than with the question of how a poem about invisible bodies and what passes between bodies crept into the Renaissance literary and historical imaginations—sometimes in spite of a reader’s more orthodox positions. As Michel de Montaigne once put it, the poetry of 19. Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.400– 401: “Verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci / sunt, per quae possis cognoscere cetera tute.” All references to the text of De rerum natura refer to the Oxford Classical Texts edition by Bailey (hereafter referred to as DRN) unless otherwise noted. Translations follow the Loeb edition by Rouse and Smith unless otherwise noted. 20. Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, 11. As its etymology suggests, “congenial” in this passage means sympathetic in mind or spirit rather than merely pleasant.


De rerum natura “does not so much please as fill and ravish; and it ravishes the strongest minds most.” In trying to capture something of the ravishment of the poet and his readers, this book proceeds not only chronologically, but also occasionally backward and forward through time, in a double motion that I hope will begin to make visible the deep homologies that connect the Renaissance inventions of Lucretius and his text to the history of our own critical practices. If most of the recent scholarship on the poet’s reception has had a relatively narrow focus, marooning him either in Italy, France, or England, this study deliberately takes a much longer view, tracing the latent interconnections between readers responding to one another across time and space, and exploring the idea of interconnectedness itself. Like the shifting scale of Lucretius’s poem, which slips between the minute and the universal, the scale of this project is itself closely connected to its story, moving from the pen marks of readers through large shifts in reference that span the space of the continent and the length of several centuries. In occupying this unstable perspective, I am attempting both to describe the effects of Lucretian influence in the Renaissance from the kind of measured distance that the poet celebrates at the start of book 2 (“Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s great tribulation”), and to bear witness to my own vulnerability to the turbulence of the poet’s imagination. In a letter to a good friend and colleague, the German art historian Aby Warburg once imagined the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno in vivid terms “as an antenna for European modes of thought, which received waves equally from Italy, France, England, and Ger21. Montaigne, Essais 3.5; trans. Frame, 665; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 873: “Qui ne plaict pas tant comme elle remplit et ravit, et ravit le plus les plus forts espris.” Tellingly, Montaigne here is speaking both of Lucretius and arguably his “strongest” reader, Virgil. For the English translation of Montaigne, in this chapter I follow Frame, Complete Works of Montaigne. All references to the French text are to the Villey-Saulnier edition of Les essais. 22. Lucretius, DRN 2.1– 2: “Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, / e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem.”


many.” Since, as scholars have recently shown, Bruno himself was so vulnerable to Lucretius, Warburg might very well have added ancient Rome to the list. Looking back to the iron interpreter and forward now to Warburg, The Lucretian Renaissance might be described finally as another story of waves and antennae—a history embodied in the figure of dynamic, material change and reflected in our own materialist models of reception and influence. It seems somehow appropriate that this scholarly renaissance of Lucretius is taking place now in what we might call the late age of print, when the fantasy of sending messages, books, and even whole libraries instantly across great distances has suddenly become a commonplace reality. To trace the dynamic movement of a Lucretian sympathy in the Renaissance is in the end not just to follow the fortunes of a single ancient poet moving from one “antenna” to another, but rather to explore our own materialist idea of the Renaissance unfolding between them—what we might call the form of the “wave” itself. Because the character of this sympathy has for the most part been forgotten or obscured for so long, I shall try in my own way to turn another absence into presence. *

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I have broken down the book into four chapters that deal with different, though overlapping, material stages in the transmission of De rerum natura—from Lucretius’s latent presence in the poetry of Virgil to the text’s physical reconstruction at the hands of philologists to its later dissemination in print and scattering in the minds of readers. Each of these chapters contributes to an evolving description of Lucre23. Warburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence, Aby Warburg to Fritz Saxl, 13 December 1928: “Giordano Bruno stellt sich mir im Augenblick als Drehscheibe im Denkgeleissystem [sic] des 16. Jahrh. dar, und bildet durch Personalunion eine Antenne europäischer Denkweise, die ihre Wellen gleichermassen aus Italien, Frankreich, England und Deutschland empfing.” I am grateful to Elizabeth Sears for sharing this passage with me and for allowing me to use her translation. For Warburg’s lifelong interest in Bruno, see Mann, “Denkenergetische Inversion: Aby Warburg and Giordano Bruno.” 24. See Gatti, Essays on Giordano Bruno, 70– 90; and Monti, “Incidenza e significato.”


tius’s influence in the Renaissance—a description that examines both the historical specificity of the reader and his engagement with the text and the transformation of a single idea over time, the idea of the text in flux. The story begins, paradoxically, in the period when scholars have for the most part agreed that there was very little reception of Lucretius to speak of—the period roughly from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, when the text of De rerum natura is thought to have been dormant or its readers asleep. It is in the midst of this long period that I want to begin to recover a forgotten strain of Lucretian influence. As we shall see, the Epicurean poet was not exactly lost during this crucial moment of transmission; on the contrary, his influence was detected within the writings of later poets—poets such as Virgil, who was thought to have absorbed a great deal from De rerum natura, especially concerning the matter of the plague. In following the traces of Lucretius’s indirect transmission through the eyes of Macrobius, Petrarch, and Angelo Poliziano, we will explore how the poet’s absent presence powerfully shaped the development of humanist thought on the work of literary transmission, the relationship between philosophy and poetry, and the nature of intellectual debt. In theorizing about what passes invisibly between a poem and its reader, Petrarch throws into relief the question of what it means to recognize a Lucretian subtext, to sense the presence of the poet across a distance. The second chapter moves from the matter of Lucretius’s transmission through Virgil to the ways his text was pieced back together, letter by letter. In this case I want to explore what happens when a poem which says that letters are like atoms coincides with an emergent history of textual criticism, and the philologist begins to look like an Epicurean. From Karl Lachmann’s famous nineteenth-century archetype to Michele Marullo’s Lucretian furor to the flyleaves of Montaigne’s copy of the poem, we will see how the historical rebuilding of the poem from a few fragmented manuscripts occasioned a deep analogy between a humanist casting his mind into the text and an Epicurean imagining the world of invisible matter. In working with a text so profoundly concerned with the poetics and physics of renewal, even


the most well-worn metaphors of philology became vulnerable to another Lucretian sympathy. The Renaissance humanist read the poem, one could say, as the poem read the humanist. In chapter 3 we follow the larger consequences that the analogy between atoms and letters holds for an account of Renaissance intellectual history. At the heart of this discussion is a silent dialogue between two other readers who absorbed Lucretius intensely and who remade the poetic materialism of De rerum natura to suit their own very different ends: Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. The conversation I have in mind concerns the nature of the Homeric tradition and the problem of atomizing or breaking down tradition into its component parts. Whereas Montaigne, for example, saw in the scattered idea of Homer’s poetry a vision of a gaping Epicurean void opening out into deep time, Bacon found a generative vision of knowledge in constant flux—a vision that reflected his own engagements with materialism— and an idea of the past and future of knowledge. It turns out that a vulnerability to Lucretius’s atomic imagination could lead one either to a world of French skepticism or to an Advancement of Learning. As both Montaigne and Bacon knew all too well, sometimes the difference lay in only a single letter or word. The final chapter follows closely upon Bacon’s notion of a scattered and diffuse tradition that is constantly evolving to explore how the influence of the Epicurean poet came to pervade the idea and practice of literary and intellectual history in the seventeenth century. In the first section, on Edmund Spenser, I show how defining Lucretius’s influence in Spenser’s posthumously published Mutability Cantos (a task that has proved curiously difficult) leads to another meditation on the matter and form of literary history and of Spenser’s own poetry. In the second part, we move from the character Mutabilitie’s “Epicurean revival” to Pierre Gassendi’s philosophical revival of Epicurus in France some years later and the “atomization” of Lucretius’s poem. In breaking up the text of De rerum natura and scattering it throughout his own books, Gassendi would lend another expression to Lucretius’s poetic materialism even as he tried to forget the poet himself. The chapter ends with the Cambridge Platonist Henry More and his own attempt to capture


and contain the influence of Lucretius in an imitation of Spenser, helping us to see the connections that join the notion of a pervasive literary influence with the idea of a real pervasive force in the world. In each of these cases, I will show how Lucretius’s atomic vision of an influence that was unseen and everywhere continued to transform the material practices of poets and philosophers well into the seventeenth century, and to inflect what we might properly call the physics of thought.

*1* Extra Destinatum

In the early 1840s, the sole manuscript copy of Gabriele de Mussis’s Historia de Morbo—a fourteenth-century narrative account of the origins of the Black Death—was discovered by a German physician and published as part of the second volume of the Archiv für die gesammte Medicin, a new journal for a burgeoning discipline called the history of medicine. Heinrich Haeser, the first editor, following the celebrated example of Leopold von Ranke, argued that a history of medicine was not a fruitless philological enterprise, but rather a necessary corrective to the “ ‘materialism’ and skepticism that had been infecting the ‘new’ scientific medicine.” “To us,” he explained, “history is no longer an enumeration of ‘deviations’ of the human mind, thus flattering our vanity. Rather, it is mirroring our weakness; it has grown into a shining torch to recognize the finger of God—the rule of an eternal law in the doings of mankind.” Framed by a series of apocalyptic warnings, de Mussis’s account of the plague fit Haeser’s purposes nicely as a dramatic prelude to his own multivolume history of epidemic diseases. Beyond the frame, however, de Mussis told a very different story, one that Haeser 1. Henschel, “Document zur Geschichte des schwarzen Todes,” 45–57. De Mussis’s account has been translated into English in Horrox, Black Death, 14–26. 2. Huisman and Warner, Locating Medical History, 9. 3. Haeser, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin, 1:xviii–xix: “Aus solchen Träumen sind wir längst erwacht; wir sind demüthiger, sind gerechter geworden, und die Geschichte ist uns nicht mehr eine Aufzählung der ‘Verirrungen’ des menschlichen Geistes, nicht mehr ein Kitzel unsrer Eitelkeit, sondern ein Spiegel unsrer Schwachheit und eine Leuchte geworden, um auch hier den Finger Gottes zu erkennen—das Walten eines ewigen Gesetzes in dem Thun der Menschen.” Cited and translated in Huisman and Warner, Locating Medical History, 10. In this passage, Haeser might have had in mind Friedrich Schiller’s promise to enumerate man’s Verirrungen (deviations) in the preamble to his Philosophische Briefe; see Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, 5:336–58.

* 15 *

16 * c h a p t e r on e

and his contemporaries were perhaps less inclined to hear—not of the finger of God or of eternal law, but of digression and contingency. The story begins with an incident in Tana, an ancient trading city on the banks of the River Don that Strabo once described as the dividing line between East and West. It was here, we are told, that an argument erupted between Italian merchants and Muslim locals, perhaps over the price of perfume or silk. What began as a seemingly small argument quickly grew into a full-fledged riot that drove the Italians to the city of Kaffa, a place with its own history of political instability. For nearly three years the Muslim forces besieged the walls of Kaffa until one day a disease infected their whole army. The Christians thought that the hand of Providence had reached down “to strike and crush the Tartars’ arrogance.” The sky was darkened not, however, by the vengeance of a Christian God, but by the shadow of human bodies being hurled headlong into the city. “What seemed like mountains of dead” accumulated inside the walls, and “soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee.” For the men searching for deliverance and a happy ending at Kaffa, things took an ironic turn, for when the Italians finally sailed home they were carrying with them the Black Death. With his dramatic play of scale and the quick movement between invisible disasters and their visible effects, de Mussis unlocks a troubling question about the nature of causes and our ability (or failure) to digest them in narratives. Perhaps that is why his account was lost for so long or why it was interpreted the way it was when it was finally found. In what follows in this chapter, I want to explore another his4. Horrox, Black Death, 17; Haeser, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin, 3:157: “Et ecce Morbo Tartaros inuadente totus exercitus perturbatus languebat et cottidie Infinita millia sunt extincta videbatur eis, sagittas euolare de celo, tangere et opprimere superbiam Tartarorum.” 5. Horrox, Black Death, 17; Haeser, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin, 3:158: “Sic sic proiecta videbantur Cacumina mortuorum, nec christiani latere, nec fugere, nec a tali precipicio liberari valebant, licet deffunctos, quos poterant marinis traderent fluctibus inmergendos. Moxque toto aere inffecto, et aqua uenenata, corrupta putredine, tantusque fetor Increbuit, ut vix ex Millibus unus, relicto exercitu fugere conaretur qui eciam uenenatus aliis ubique uenena preparans, solo aspectu loca et homines morbo Infficeret uniuersos.”

e x t r a de st i nat u m * 17

tory of contagion that turns on an accidental transmission: the story of one buried strain of Lucretius’s literary influence in the Renaissance. Our story begins, however, not as one might expect, with Poggio Braccilioni’s monumental rediscovery of De rerum natura in 1417 (the starting point of so many narratives about Lucretius). Rather, it begins with the familiar texts of Virgil, and with Virgil’s ancient and late-antique readers who sensed and recorded the lingering presence of the Epicurean poet beneath the surface of imitations. My first question is: what gets passed on through Virgil’s poetry during the period when Lucretius and his poem were thought to be lost? How did this largely forgotten transmission come to transform some of the period’s most fundamental ideas about intellectual debt, the theory and practice of literary imitation, and the relationship between philosophy and poetry? In answering these questions, my intention is not so much to demonstrate that the author of De rerum natura is present, or not, in any given passage from Virgil, but rather to explore the association between the two poets as it was perceived, understood, and remembered historically by readers who were theorizing about the nature of literary borrowing and dependence. I begin with the grandfather of humanism, Francis Petrarch, reading Virgil during the years of and just following the Black Death (1348– 1350), trying in his own way to make sense of the kind of story de Mussis was telling about the nature of chance events and the spread of influence. For Petrarch, Virgil’s debt to Lucretius provided a disturbing example, representing an alternative model of agency that ran decidedly counter to his own emergent ideals of literary practice. The second part of the chapter shifts backward in time to explore the seeds of Petrarch’s rare sensitivity to Lucretius in the lost world of Virgil’s ancient readers. Here we trace a number of crucial passages from De rerum natura as they were transmitted through the distorted mirror of Macrobius’s Saturnalia and other late-antique discussions of Virgil’s literary debts. The chapter ends with the afterlife of this figure of contagion in the work of the Florentine poet Angelo Poliziano, who, in his own way, lends expression to a history of invisible influence and philosophical contamination. What emerges finally from the subtle web of this story is an idea of transmission that links the poetic materialism of De rerum natura to a material account of literary practices. It is in this sense that


we may see both the recasting of an ancient materialism through the Renaissance literary imagination and the Renaissance literary imagination itself transformed. As in the case of de Mussis’s story, how this strain of influence developed over time, how it was recognized or felt, is inextricable from what we may think it means.

Invisible Disasters After the real Laura, the glittering subject of his Rime, was stricken down by plague in Avignon in 1348, Petrarch would meticulously note the month, the day, and the time of her death in the flyleaves of his copy of Virgil, an enormous manuscript filled with notes that he is said to have carried with him almost everywhere he went: “I thought I should write these words as a bitter reminder of the facts, yet with a certain bitter sweetness [amara quadam dulcedine], and put them in this place that is so often before my eyes, so that I may realize when I look at them that there is nothing left in the world that should delight me.” As men and women historically have sometimes recorded deaths and other significant events in the front matter of their Bibles, Petrarch buried Laura in the flyleaves of his most important book, though it would seem that not even Virgil could help him now—and perhaps for the first time in his life. For the author of the Rime sparse, the devastation of the plague was perhaps the ultimate test of the idea that a cultivated devotion to the literature of the ancients was the best “remedy” to the slings and arrows of fortune—a test of the sometimes-necessary fiction that reading is enough. Two years later, in 1350, Petrarch would compile the Rerum familiar6. “Hec autem ad acerbam rei memoriam amara quadam dulcedine scribere visum est, hoc potissimum loco qui sepe sub oculis meis redit, ut scilicet cogitem nihil esse debere quod amplius mihi placeat in hac vita.” Cited and translated in Watkins, “Petrarch and the Black Death,” 199. On Petrarch’s manuscript copy of Virgil and its history, see Ratti, “Ancora del celebre codice manoscritto”; de Nolhac, “Virgile chez Pétrarque”; Lord, “Petrarch and Vergil’s First Eclogue”; and Billanovich, “Il Virgilio del Giovane Petrarca.” 7. Petrarch explores the consolation of literature throughout his life and work, but especially in his De remediis utriusque fortunae.


ium libri, having barely overcome a desire to commit his letters to Vulcan’s correcting hand. Teetering on the fire’s edge (where Virgil is said to have once dangled his Aeneid), this collection of letters is fraught with an all-too-understandable anxiety about the fragile permanence of the written word and a sense of temporality sharpened by disaster. As Petrarch knew, the competing desires for remembrance and amnesia were not easily disentangled in the act of writing. This was especially true in the letters he wrote during and in the wake of the plague. In the Rerum familiarium libri is a letter to his friend Socrates from 1348 that begins with another poignant reflection on the difficulty of reading in a time of disaster: Oh brother, brother, brother (a new kind of beginning for a letter, indeed an ancient one used by Marcus Tullius almost fourteen hundred years ago); alas dearest brother, what shall I say? Where shall I begin? Where shall I turn? Everywhere we see sorrow, on all sides we see terror. In me alone you may see what you read in Virgil concerning so great a city, for “on all sides there is cruel mourning, everywhere there is trembling and countless images of death.”

In not knowing where to turn, the author turns to what he knows best: to the only two authors who survived his father’s bonfire of the pagans years ago when Petrarch was piddling around with ancient books instead of studying the law. These opening words of the letter selfconsciously evoke Cicero’s own letter to his brother Quintus on the occasion of his exile from Rome. There the ancient orator had described a sense of sheer desperation that would become the dizzy mirror of Petrarch’s own: “You can imagine how I weep as I write these lines as I am 8. Petrarch, Rerum familiarium libri (hereafter cited as Fam.) 8.7.1; trans. Bernardo, 1:415; ed. Rossi, 2:174: “Mi frater, mi frater, mi frater—novum epystole principium, imo antiquum, et ante mille fere quadringentos annos a Marco Tullio usurpatum—; heu michi, frater amantissime, quid dicam? unde ordiar? quonam vertar? undique dolor, terror undique. In me uno videas quod de tanta urbe apud Virgilium legisti, nam ‘crudelis ubique / Luctus, ubique pavor et plurima mortis imago.’ ” All citations of the Rerum familiarium libri follow Vittorio Rossi’s and Umberto Bosco’s edition and Aldo S. Bernardo’s English translation. 9. Petrarch recounts the story of his father burning his books in letter 16.7 of Rerum senilium libri (trans. Bernardo et al., 2:600–601).


sure you do as you read them.” Amplifying his grief, Petrarch then asks us to recall a passage from Virgil, who is also imagined as both a sympathetic partner and an all-too-distant friend. The passage that “every schoolboy knows,” as Petrarch described it in the Secretum, conjures up a vision of a devastated Aeneas watching Troy burn to the ground, his wife Creusa, like Laura, dead. “In me alone you may see what you read in Virgil,” he writes, though even the supreme gravitas and piety of Virgil strain under the weight of the present circumstance. There are no Augustan consolations, no reassurances to be had where the plague is concerned. To Petrarch’s troubled and wandering mind even the promise of Rome seems out of reach. From its opening cry, the letter vacillates between hyperbole and understatement, though what one feels perhaps most urgently here is Petrarch’s desperate desire for identification with his ancient authors and with a reader he could not even be sure was alive to receive the letter— a desire that resolves quickly into despair. “Is it perhaps true as is sus10. Cicero, Ad Quintum fratrem 1.3.3: “Haec ipsa me quo fletu putas scripsisse? Eodem, quo te legere certe scio. An ego possum aut non cogitare aliquando de te, aut umquam sine lacrimis cogitare?” (How do you suppose I am weeping as I write these very words? Just as you are weeping, I am sure, as you read them. Can I for a moment cease from thinking about you, or ever think of you without tears?). All citations of Ad Quintum fratrem follow the Loeb edition, Letters to His Brother Quintus, Letters to Brutus, Handbook of Electioneering, Letter to Octavian, by Williams, Cary, and Henderson. On the importance of intimacy in Petrarch’s writing, see esp. Eden, “Petrarchan Hermeneutics.” 11. See Virgil, Aeneid 2.361– 69: “Quis cladem illius noctis, quis funera fando / explicet aut possit lacrimis aequare labores? / urbs antiqua ruit, multos dominata per annos; / plurima perque vias sternuntur inertia passim / corpora perque domos et religiosa deorum / limina . . . crudelis ubique / luctus, ubique pauor et plurima mortis imago” (Who could unfold in speech that night’s havoc? Who its carnage? Who could match our toils with tears? The ancient city falls, for many years a queen; in heaps lifeless corpses lie scattered amid the streets, amid the home and hallowed portals of the gods . . . . Everywhere is cruel grief, everywhere panic, and full many a shape of death). All references to Virgil follow the Loeb edition by Fairclough unless otherwise noted. 12. Petrarch, Secretum, in Prose, 102. 13. For the evolution of Petrarch’s thinking on the plague, see esp. Watkins, “Petrarch and the Black Death”; and Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, 9–10 and 70–81.


pected by certain great minds that God cares not for mortal things?” the author asks slightly further on. “Let such madness not even enter our minds.” But the thought, of course, already had. As Petrarch takes a sharp turn into a world of skepticism and doubt, the letter reveals itself as a dense palimpsest of emotions, hesitations, and partial erasures that we are invited to read in many tenses: “I shall not deny that I did feel some shame, for without the control of reason I felt my mind and my style [stilum] pulled along [trahi] with my feelings beyond what I intended [extra destinatum], something I find most disturbing.” The fantasy of the letter, like that of so many letters, is the fantasy of co-presence. As Cicero had suggested to his brother, we feel the letter as it is being written, and it pulses across the page in waves of grief. At the start of the collection Petrarch himself had insisted that his correspondence underwent very little revision once it had been written and irrevocably sent out into the world, but in this last passage we find what would appear to be the evidence of a later return. In this place where he tells us that he felt his pen pulled beyond what he intended, the author dramatically interrupts the forward movement of the letter, shifting tenses as if it had already been written and he were looking back upon his own words (words he finds hard to recognize or acknowledge as his own). This interruption is, in fact, our first clue to understanding 14. Petrarch, Fam. 8.7.18; trans. Bernardo, 1:418; ed. Rossi, 2:177: “An illud fortasse verius, quod magna quedam ingenia suspicata sunt, Deum mortalia non curare? Sed absit a mentibus nostris hec amentia: si non curares, illa non subsisterent.” As we will see, when Petrarch speaks of “certain great minds” in this passage and their “madness,” he is thinking of Epicurus and Lucretius, among others. Petrarch refers explicitly to the biographical tradition of Lucretius’s madness in Fam. 24.11 (trans. Bernardo, 3:340) and in Rerum senilium libri 5.5 (trans. Bernardo et al., 1:184). 15. An echo of these “certain great minds” “still reverberates,” as Timothy Kircher has argued, “for the very reason that the plague remains inexplicable” (Kircher, Poet’s Wisdom, 91). 16. Petrarch, Fam. 8.7.10; trans. Bernardo, 1:416; ed. Rossi, 2:176: “Nec me tamen erubuisse negaverim; sensi enim animum ac stilum, excusso rationis freno, extra destinatum iter affectibus iunctos trahi; quo nichil molestius pati possum.” 17. As Watkins has suggested: “The letter presented as Fam. 8, 7 . . . may also, on the model of the changes visible in Fam. 8, 9, be the work of 1350, for no original has been preserved. It is a rhetorical expression of inner turmoil” (Watkins, “Petrarch and the Black Death,” 201–20).


the subtle traces of Lucretius in the letter—traces that become visible again in what Timothy Kircher has described as Petrarch’s “fluctuation of feeling.” This was not the first time Petrarch was disturbed by what he had put down on paper. The failure of destinatum or intention to console himself and his friend, for example, recalls what he had said earlier, in the preface to the collection, about his style becoming “weaker” as the letters progressed—a literary and moral declination he wished he could revise or blot out entirely. “It is that style especially,” he wrote, “that I beg you to try to conceal [occultare]. What can one expect others to say when I myself blush at rereading those portions?” In the letter to Socrates, the author is clearly embarrassed by his weakness of faith, his inability to control his emotions or to reign in his doubt in the face of the plague. In this fraught context, as it were, the word destinatum can also mean Providence in the very largest sense, hinting that our author was pulled not only beyond what he intended when he set out to write the letter, but also beyond the idea of a divine plan. Here again Petrarch reminds us of those “certain great minds” who believed “that God cares not for mortal things.” This sense of doubt manifested itself in a number of ways, especially, as Petrarch suggests, in the act of writing itself, which becomes the site of his struggle. If we take the word stilus here to mean both pen and literary style, as Cicero sometimes used it figuratively, then we might understand what it meant to be dragged extra destinatum in a slightly different way. A man who once said that he had absorbed the writings of antiquity so thoroughly that they had become part of his very marrow opens himself up here to another, more dangerous possibility: that those same influences may possess him. As 18. Kircher, Poet’s Wisdom, 88. 19. Petrarch, Fam. 1.1.38; trans. Bernardo, 1:11–12; ed. Rossi, 1:12: “Illa precipue ut occultare studeas, precor. Quid enim alii dicerent, cum ipse relegens erubescam?” 20. See, for example, Cicero, Brutus 45.167: “Huius orationes tantum argutiarum, tantum exemplorum, tantum urbanitatis habent, ut paene Attico stilo scriptae esse videantur” (His orations have such refinements of expression, such wealth of anecdote and example, such urbanity, that they would seem almost to have been written by an Attic pen). On the figure of writing in Cicero, see Butler, Hand of Cicero. 21. As Petrarch describes this intimacy in Fam. 22.2.13: “Hec se michi tam familiariter ingessere et non modo memorie sed medullis affixa sunt unumque cum ingenio facta sunt meo, ut etsi per omnem vitam amplius non legantur, ipsa quidem


he once imagined the hunter Actaeon accidently stumbling upon the goddess Diana at the bath just before he was ripped apart by his own hounds: “I felt myself drawn from my own image” (ch’i senti’ trarmi de la propria imago). Or, as he tellingly described his “weakness” of style in the preface to his letters: “A serious disease is not easily hidden [non facile occultatur] since it breaks out and becomes visible [proditur] through its own peculiar features [indicio suo].” The indicia of this deadly metamorphosis pervade the letter to Socrates, and if we read them symptomatically—to use Petrarch’s metaphor rather than Althusser’s—we may begin to detect this subtle shift in “style” and “intention.” We might look, for example, at the passage from the letter that follows closely upon the author’s account of this troubling loss of control: How can posterity believe that there was once a time without floods, without fire either from heaven or from earth, without wars, or other visible disaster, in which not only this part or that part of the world, but almost all of it remained without a dweller? When was anything similar either seen or heard? In what chronicles did anyone ever read that dwellings were emptied, cities abandoned, countrysides filthy, fields laden with bodies, and a dreadful vast solitude covered the earth? Consult the historians: they are silent; question the scientists: they are stupefied; ask the philosophers: they shrug their shoulders, their finger to their lips. hereant, actis in intima animi parte radicibus” (ed. Rossi, 4:106) (I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow, and they have so become one with my mind that were I never to read them for the remainder of my life, they would cling to me, having taken root in the innermost recesses of my mind [trans. Bernardo, 3:212– 13]). On Petrarch’s intimate relation to the Latin language, see Celenza, “Petrarch, Latin, and Italian Renaissance Latinity.” 22. Petrarch, Rime 23, line 157; trans. Robert M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 66–67. The irony of the hunter transformed into the hunted is, as Gordon Braden has put it nicely, the irony of “alienated speech, now definitively failing of its object and returning upon its helpless creator” (Braden, Petrarchan Love, 42). 23. Petrarch, Fam. 1.1.38; trans. Bernardo, 1:11; ed. Rossi, 1:12: “sed ingens morbus non facile occultatur; erumpit enim et indicio suo proditur.” 24. Petrarch, Fam. 8.7.12–13; trans. Bernardo, 1:417; ed. Rossi, 2:176: “Quando hoc posteritas credet, fuisse tempus sine diluvio sine celi aut telluris incendio sine bellis aut alia clade visibili, quo non hec pars aut illa terrarum, sed universus fere orbis


Petrarch is here interrogating not only the plague, which presents a crisis of epistemology, but also the very value of past experience in interpreting the present—that is, the value of humanistic study itself, of reading. His library was shaken, as he later described the effects of an earthquake which occurred that same year, his books fallen upon him and his faith in them disturbed. In citing the various authorities that had failed to account for the plagues of the past, however, Petrarch leaves one out. In this sense, we might say, the passage represents a simultaneous act of remembering and forgetting, for at the very moment the author seems to forget the disasters of the past (or to suggest that they were, as he put it, a “delight” by comparison), he quietly calls upon another ancient source, scattering enough footprints for us to discern its outlines. He leaves us a hint, for example, when he conspicuously omits poets from the list of men—scientists, philosophers, and historians—who have fallen silent on the subject. I say conspicuously, for it is in this precise instance of literary and spiritual crisis that Petrarch will draw our attention back to the poets and, in particular, back to the memory of Lucretius, who had lent an unforgettable expression to Thucydides’ description of the Athenian plague in book 6 of De rerum natura. Compare, for example, the passage above to the following lines from the poem: Nec requies erat ulla mali: defessa iacebant corpora. mussabat tacito medicina timore. sine habitatore remanserit? Quando unquam tale aliquid visum aut fando auditum? Quibus hoc unquam in annalibus lectum est, vacuas domos, derelictas urbes, squalida rura, arva cadaveribus angusta, horrendam vastamque toto orbe solitudinem? Consule historicos: silent; interroga physicos: obstupescunt; quere a philosophis: humeros contrahunt, frontem rugant, et digitulo labris impresso silentium iubent.” 25. Kircher, Poet’s Wisdom, 89–90. 26. Petrarch recounts having experienced an earthquake while sitting in his library in Verona in Rerum senilium libri 10.2 (trans. Bernardo et al., 2:373). Writing in the wake of a series of earthquakes in 1505, Filippo Beroaldo would echo this image from Petrarch, lamenting that his library had trembled and that the only thing certain was that nothing was certain. Beroaldo, De terraemotu et pestilentia, sig. B6. 27. See Petrarch, Fam. 8.7.15. 28. Lucretius, DRN 6.1178–79.


[Nor was there any rest from pain: outwearied the bodies lay. Medicine muttered below her breath, scared into silence.]

Petrarch translates this image of silent medicine into the image of doctors who put their fingers to their lips, who shrug their shoulders in the face of invisible disease. With a similar subtlety, he brings us to a passage from Lucretius that imagines the city devastated of its inhabitants: Haec ratio quondam morborum et mortifer aestus finibus in Cecropis funestos reddidit agros vastavitque vias, exhausit civibus urbem. [Such a cause of disease and death-bringing current once in the realms of Cecrops poisoned the countryside, made the roads a desert, and drained the city of men.]

The poet who explained the origins of everything in the random encounters of matter—indeed, one of those “great minds” who suspected that “God cares not for mortal things”—is both the ideal and the deeply troubled source for the conflicted author “pulled” disturbingly beyond his own destinatum and beyond the idea of divine intentionality. Here these vestiges of Lucretius in Petrarch’s writing, however faint, correspond directly with his plunge into doubt, even give voice to it. “Why is it, then, oh blessed judge,” Petrarch addresses God himself, “why is it that the violence of your vengeance lies so extraordinary upon our times? Why is it that when guilt is not absent, examples of just judgment are lacking?” 29. Lucretius, DRN 6.1138–40. 30. Petrarch, Fam. 8.7.14; trans. Bernardo, 1:417; ed. Rossi, 2:177: “Quid est ergo, iudicum iustissime, quid est quod insigniter adeo in nostrum tempus ultionis tue fervor incubuit? Quid est quod cum culpe non desint, desunt exempla supplicii?” Petrarch’s questions here should remind us of the exordium of Claudian’s In Rufinum, which has historically been thought to contain echoes of Epicurean doubt. See Claudian, In Rufinum 1.1–18: “Saepe mihi dubiam traxit sententia mentem / curarent superi terras an nullus inesset / rector et incerto fluerent mortalia casu. . . . sed cum res hominum tanta caligine volui / aspicerem laetosque diu florere nocentes / vexarique pios, rursus labefacta cadebat / religio causaeque viam non sponte sequebar / alterius, uacuo quae currere semina motu / adfirmat magnumque novas per inane figuras / fortuna non arte regi” (My mind has often wavered between two opinions: have the gods a care for the world or is there no ruler therein and do mortal things drift as dubious chance dictates? . . . But when I saw the impenetrable


In this place where the specter of Lucretius appears in the letter, the idea of being extra destinatum powerfully crosses with the idea that the author has lost control of his imitation, as if imitation itself were a form of intention or control, a way of policing the relation between the self and the other. Clearly, this was not always so simple. The turn to Lucretius in the letter to Socrates—a turn that has remained invisible to modern readers—unlocks for us a more complicated reflection on the nature of influence and transmission, for Petrarch’s encounter with Lucretius (like Dante’s and Boccaccio’s) was probably not a direct one. The two passages from De rerum natura that Petrarch recalls here in the letter were, in fact, transmitted indirectly through the veil of Virgil and his commentators. Petrarch, for example, learned a great deal about Virgil’s debt to Lucretius from the text of Macrobius’s Saturnalia, an early fifth-century dialogue which Petrarch read carefully and which was roughly contemporary with the commentary by Servius that accompanied his manuscript of Virgil. The context of Macrobius’s use of Lucretius, as we shall see, is an extended section of the dialogue in which one of the interlocutors discusses the nature of Virgil’s borrowing of whole passages from the history of Latin literature. In book 6, Macrobius goes to extravagant lengths to show how extensively Virgil had used Lucretius’s representation of the Athenian plague in his own description of the Noric one: “The general ‘color,’ and almost all the details, of a description of the plague in the third Georgics are taken [tracta sunt] from the demist which surrounds human affairs, the wicked happy and long prosperous and the good discomforted, then in turn my belief in God was weakened and failed, and even against mine own will I embraced the tenets of that other philosophy which teaches that atoms drift in purposeless motion and that new forms throughout the vast void are shaped by chance and not design). Unless otherwise noted, citations to In Rufinum follow the Loeb edition, Claudian, by Maurice Platnauer. 31. de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme, 1:159– 60. For the debate concerning the transmission of Lucretius during the Middle Ages, see Bignone, “Per la fortuna di Lucrezio”; Reeve, “Italian Tradition of Lucretius,” “Italian Tradition of Lucretius Revisited,” and “Lucretius from the 1460s to the 17th Century”; and Lokaj, “Strepitumque Acherontis avari.” In his article for the Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, Reeve nicely summarizes the various routes to Lucretius that a medieval author might have taken without having read the poem directly. See Reeve, “Lucretius in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance.”


scription of the plague in the sixth Book of Lucretius.” If a fourteenthcentury reader such as Petrarch knew nothing about Lucretius’s poem (besides that it dealt with atoms and was supposedly impious), he knew that Virgil himself had absorbed and learned much from it—and that he had been intensely drawn to Lucretius’s example. As the character of Reason explains the matter to an overly confident Joy in Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae: “Such riches are excellent, but they are uncertain and subject to many hurtful events, fraud, robbery, and plagues that occur so often and with such vehemence that entire flocks and entire herds may be destroyed. You know the plague as described by Lucretius and, based on him, by Virgil.” In this account of the trouble with resting on one’s good fortune, Virgil’s literary debt is elided with the problem of chance and contingency, as if Virgil’s imitation of Lucretius in the Georgics were itself some kind of unforeseen disaster. As Pierre de Nolhac pointed out long ago, it was from the traces of this literary disaster that Petrarch gleaned the great part of his knowledge of De rerum natura. He even carefully transcribed all of the passages from Lucretius that he found in Macrobius, putting them in the margins of the same copy of Virgil where he bitterly inscribed the loss of Laura. In channeling Lucretius in the letter, then, Petrarch was not only borrowing from the fragmented remains of the poet that Macrobius had preserved for posterity, but also remembering and isolating Virgil’s own dependence on the Lucretian plague, recovering the memory of an ancient association that lingered in Virgil’s poetry. At the same time, 32. Macrobius, Saturnalia 6.2.7; trans. Davies, 399; ed. Willis, 358: “Ipsius vero pestilentiae, quae est in tertio Georgicorum, color totus et liniamenta paene omnia tracta sunt de descriptione pestilentiae quae est in sexto Lucretii.” 33. As we shall see, Macrobius himself borrowed most of the Saturnalia from other books. For this reason, there is a possibility that Macrobius knew no more of De rerum natura than Petrarch did. 34. Petrarch, Remedies 1:177; Les remèdes aux deux fortunes, 1:286: “Laudate divitie, sed incerte, & casibus multis obnoxie, fraudibus, rapinis, pestibus, que tam crebre, tamque valide sunt, ut sepe totos greges, totaque lacerent armenta, nota pestis quam Lucretius, quamque illum sequens Maro descripsit.” 35. de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme, 1:159–60. 36. Lokaj describes Petrarch’s interest in the Lucretian echoes in Virgil nicely, though in a different context: “Consequently, Lucretius became a model to emulate


he was also raising a question about the nature of literary dependence, and about what it might mean to reproduce whole passages from another poet nearly intact. As scholars of Renaissance imitation know very well, Petrarch had a great deal to say on this matter of literary practice, and as we read him it becomes even more clear that Virgil’s imitation of De rerum natura was not exactly what he would have called an ideal one. In a famous letter to Boccaccio, the author recounts a conversation with his student, who he says was excessively overtaken (captus) by a love for Virgil. The proper way to imitate, he insists, is to disguise: We must thus see to it that if there is something similar, there is also a great deal that is dissimilar, and that the similar be elusive and unable to be extricated except in silent meditation, for the resemblance is to be felt rather than expressed. Thus we may appropriate another’s ideas as well as his coloring but we must abstain from his actual words; for, with the former, resemblance remains hidden, and with the latter it is glaring.

The emphasis here is on the author’s mastery and control. It is the diligent author who actively transforms influence into honey or, in a slightly different version of the same story, hides influence from himself. The keen-scented reader may gather (intellectere) or feel the presence of a subtext that resists an easy description—that, like pollen broken down by bees or the invisible strains of sound or the mixing of perfume, lies “hidden away below the surface” and, for the reader, between the lines. “But there is I don’t know what hidden presence [occultum] that has this power.” In The Light in Troy, Thomas Greene classifies these kinds of imitations broadly as ”heuristic” imitations that “come to us advertising their also for Petrarch, the latter-day Vergil, who presents him as if he knew him directly” (Lokaj, “Strepitumque Acherontis avari,” 373). 37. Petrarch, Fam. 23.19.13; trans. Bernardo, 3:302; ed. Rossi, 4:206: “Sic et nobis providendum ut cum simile aliquid sit, multa sint dissimilia, et id ipsum simile lateat ne deprehendi possit nisi tacita mentis indagine, ut intelligi simile queat potiusquam dici. Utendum igitur ingenio alieno utendumque coloribus, abstinendum verbis; illa enim similitudo latet, hec eminet.” 38. Petrarch, Fam. 23.19.12; ed. Rossi, 4:206: “Sed est ibi nescio quid occultum quod hanc habeat vim.” I have used my own translation for emphasis.


derivation from the subtexts they carry with them, but having done that . . . proceed to distance themselves from the subtexts and force us to recognize the poetic distance traversed.” As Greene shows, Petrarch was a master of generating and manipulating this distance, though sometimes not even the author himself was able to follow his own good advice about hiding his influences, as his precocious student was all too happy to point out to him: I was amazed, and replied, “If ever you have found such things in my works, my son, you may be sure that it is due to some oversight, and is very far from being my deliberate intention. I know that cases of this sort, where a writer makes use of another’s words, are to be found by the thousands in the poets; but I myself have always taken the utmost pains, when composing to avoid every trace both of my own work and, more particularly, of my predecessors’, difficult though such avoidance is.”

One catches a glimpse in this passage of the author’s almost compulsive desire to control his literary sources, and the anxiety that a failure to control them produced. Petrarch even laments that he can’t correct his mistake because the letter had already been sent out into the world—something that clearly bothered him. The author ends the letter by bringing us back pointedly to a question of intention. Although, he insists, he had not intended to steal (ego sibi non rapui), Virgil had “stolen [rapuerit] outright many and many a time, from Homer, and Ennius, and Lucretius, and many another poet.” This, he suggests, was one instance in which he could not follow his ancient master. 39. Greene, Light in Troy, 40. 40. Petrarch, Fam. 23.19.14–15; trans. Bernardo, 3:302; ed. Rossi, 4:206–7: “Hic ego admirans: ‘Siquid unquam, fili, tale meis in carminibus invenis, scito id non iudicii mei esse sed erroris. Etsi enim mille passim talia in poetis sint, ubi scilicet alter alterius verbis usus est, michi tamen nichil operosius in scribendo nichilque difficilius se offert, quam et mei ipsius et multo maxime precedentium vitare vestigia. Sed ubinam, queso, est unde hanc tibi licentiam ex me sumis?’ ” 41. Petrarch, Fam. 23.19.17; trans. Bernardo, 3:302; ed. Rossi, 4:207: “Postremo et mecum ipse Virgilium ores, det veniam nec moleste ferat si, cum Homero, Ennio, Lucretio multisque aliis multa sepe rapuerit, ego sibi non rapui, sed modicum aliquid inadvertens tuli.”


In absolving himself of any wrongdoing, Petrarch is again quietly leading us back to the pages of the Saturnalia, and in particular to the section where Virgil was said to have lifted whole passages from other poets such as the ones that involve the plague. There, as Macrobius had made clear, the question of Virgil’s debts was conspicuous—too conspicuous to ignore. But how was one to make sense of these debts? What did they mean for Virgil? Macrobius himself had written earlier in the Saturnalia that Virgil’s thefts “may even have the appearance of being accidental, since he sometimes skillfully conceals the debt, although at other times he imitates openly.” In the fifteenth century, Bartolomeo Scala made a similar point when he hailed “that admirable poet Lucretius—whose poem Virgil himself, the king, so to speak, of Latin writers, did not blush to integrate into his own work.” The question then becomes: if Virgil himself wasn’t particularly embarrassed by his thefts from De rerum natura, if indeed he was imitating Lucretius “openly” and he “stole outright,” what made Petrarch blush at the thought? To put the question another way, what would it mean to understand the author’s desire to render his own imitations “below the surface” in light of Virgil’s relation to the Epicurean poet? These questions might at first seem surprising because we have learned to take for granted the author’s model of imitatio, forgetting that this model was still being worked out in a fraught, sometimes contradictory, and uneven dialogue with his ancient sources. If, in the letter to Boccaccio that we just read, Petrarch draws a distinct line, insisting that Virgil’s borrowings were deliberate, in his letter to Socrates on the plague, the relation between intentionality and imitation is decidedly more ambiguous. There Petrarch appears to be disguising his debt to Lucretius, following his own advice, but he still feels ironically that his pen was somehow dragged beyond what he intended, opening up the 42. Macrobius, Sat. 1.24.18; trans. Davies, 157; ed. Willis, 131: “Maxime, inquit, praedicarem quanta de Graecis cautus et tamquam aliud agens modo artifici dissimulatione, modo professa imitatione transtulerit.” 43. Scala, Essays and Dialogues, 236: “Et Lucretius poeta admirandus, cuius etiam carmina rex ipse, ut ita dicam, Latinorum Virgilius suo inserere operi integra non erubuit.” Cited and translated in Brown, Return of Lucretius, 32.


space for another idea of influence and agency. As Petrarch departs from Virgil’s example, we are reminded that “a serious disease is not easily hidden. . . .” The literary and philosophical subtext appears to “overwhelm” the author in spite of his efforts to control or subdue it, to render it “below the surface”: an eruption that displays not the “distance traversed,” but an uncomfortable intimacy. Lucretius emerges here as another “hidden presence” that does not inhere in individual words or phrases, though in this case the hiddenness of the influence, like the hiddenness of the plague, reflects not the author’s mastery of his sources, but his vulnerability to them. The very fact that De rerum natura was not straightforwardly available to Petrarch—that the poem was experienced through the lens of Virgil—further dramatizes this play of the seen and the unseen, and the uncanny sense that a reader could be possessed by an influence that he could not entirely possess himself. In sketching these connections across Petrarch’s work, my intention is not to collapse all of the author’s imitative theory into an anxiety about Lucretius; rather, it is to show how the unexpected encounter with Lucretius creatively interrupts the familiar terms of the conversation about influence. What we discover in the shadow of Petrarch’s moving pen is an idea of contamination that silently undoes the figure of imitative control that the author wants, sometimes desperately, to maintain in his own writing. To further understand how this contamination was figured as a literary effect, I want to turn now to some other books that Petrarch had at his disposal. Macrobius, as I’ve suggested, provides a rich source for thinking through the relationship between Lucretius and Virgil, particularly on the matter of the plague. Another key source on the shelves of Petrarch’s library was Gellius’s Noctes Atticae—like the Saturnalia, a late-antique text that dealt with the problem of Virgil’s literary debts, among many other topics. In the passage from Gellius that I have in mind, the author is concerned not with Virgil’s borrowing of whole passages, but with the borrowing of a single word, in this case, the rare Latin word amaror (bitterness): 44. See Greene, Light in Troy, 45–47.


For Virgil was not the first to coin that word arbitrarily, but he found it in the poems of Lucretius and made use of it, not disdaining to follow the authority of a poet who excelled in talent and power of expression. The passage, from the fourth book of Lucretius, reads as follows: and when we see wormwood [absinthia] being mixed with water in our presence, we have a sense of bitterness [amaror].

The image that Gellius evokes here is one of a number of images used by Lucretius to demonstrate the continual flow and scattering of invisible matter from bodies—bodies that are constantly in the process of shedding their skins, or simulacra, as he calls them. According to the poet, we see wormwood (absinthia) being mixed across a room and we literally sense (tangit) its bitter presence by the journey of unseen particles traveling through the air. With the word amaror, which Gellius understands as a kind of Lucretian signature, a problem of diction in Virgil opens out into a question of “sensing” the influence of another and, as it were, rethinking the relation between presence and absence. What Gellius doesn’t mention here, though it is hard to get around, is that the word amaror, in fact, has a specific philosophical resonance in De rerum natura—one that inextricably links this problem of literary borrowing to a problem of philosophical transmission. At the start of book 4, Lucretius had already used the figure of wormwood sharply to describe his philosophical project, linking the bitter substance (amarum) to the harshness of Epicurus’s wisdom—a bitterness, he said, that could be assuaged by honey applied to the rim of the medicinal cup: nam veluti pueris absinthia taetra medentes cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore, ut puerorum aetas improvida ludificetur 45. Gellius, Noctes Atticae 1.21.5– 6: “Non enim primus finxit hoc verbum Vergilius insolenter, sed in carminibus Lucreti invento usus est, non aspernatus auctoritatem poetae ingenio et facundia praecellentis. Verba ex IV. Lucreti haec sunt: ‘dilutaque contra / cum tuimur misceri absinthia, tangit amaror.’ ” Gellius is citing Lucretius, DRN 4.223–24. Servius makes the same connection between Virgil and Lucretius in his commentary at Commentarii in Virgilium 2:247.


labrorum tenus, interea perpotet amarum absinthi laticem deceptaque non capiatur, sed potius tali pacto recreata valescat, sic ego nunc, quoniam haec ratio plerumque videtur tristior esse quibus non est tractata, retroque vulgus abhorret ab hac, volui tibi suaviloquenti carmine Pierio rationem exponere nostram et quasi musaeo dulci contingere melle. [But as with children, when their physicians try to administer rank wormwood, they first touch the rim of the cups all about with the sweet yellow fluid of honey, that unthinking childhood may be deluded as far as the lips and meanwhile that they may drink up the bitter juice of wormwood, and though beguiled be not betrayed, but rather by such means be restored and regain health, so now do I: since this doctrine commonly seems somewhat harsh to those who have not used it, and the people shrink back from it, I have chosen to set forth my doctrine to you in sweet-speaking Pierian song, and as it were to touch it with the Muses’ delicious honey.]

Petrarch might have come across this passage among the scattered fragments of Quintilian, or in the letters of Jerome, where the good Christian had used it to warn his friend against being duped by the seductions of heretical writings. For Jerome, the honey on the rim of the cup was disguising a bitter poison. In the larger context, Virgil’s borrowing of amaror poses a question of what exactly of this “bitterness” lingers. Is it possible to touch Lucretius—in this case, a single word from the poet—without being infected by his philosophy? Virgil himself gives us something like an answer in the very lines in question: “But the taste will tell its tale full plainly [indicium faciet manifestus], and with its bitter [amaro] flavour will distort the testers’ soured mouths.” We might 46. Lucretius, DRN 4.11–22. 47. Quintilian, Institutio oratorio 1:372–73; Jerome, Epistle 133.3, in Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum 56:246. On the history and reception of this topos, see esp. Prosperi, Di soavi licor gli orli del vaso, chap. 1. 48. Virgil, Georgics 2.246–47: “At sapor indicium faciet manifestus et ora / tristia temptantum sensu torquebit amaro.” Macrobius cites the same comparison at Sat. 6.1.47; trans. Davies, 393; ed. Willis, 354.


recall here that Petrarch himself had pointedly used the Lucretian word amaror to describe the “bitter sweetness” of rereading Virgil after the death of Laura. Petrarch, as we have seen, was particularly sensitive to the possibility of this kind of contamination in his letter to Socrates, where the matter of literary style had become mixed up with a troubling Epicurean idea of the world. One of the problems was trying to understand the nature of an invisible disaster, a disaster the very mechanism of which was hidden. “Yet, whatever the causes [of the plague] may be, however much you conceal them,” Petrarch addressed God again, “the effects are most visible.” How does one picture the nature of an influence, whether God’s or the plague’s, that is invisible and seemingly everywhere? Petrarch may have found one answer to this question close to home in the learned commentary by Servius that he had before his eyes when he read Virgil. I am thinking now of Servius’s response to a wellknown passage in the Georgics in which the poet explains how the presence of God “pervades all things [ire per omnia].” In Servius’s words: “In proving this by like things, [Virgil] follows Lucretius, who says that the things which are not able to be tested for themselves, must be proven by comparisons: for he teaches that the wind is corporeal, which we are not able to see or possess, but which he proves is like water, which is evidently corporeal.” At first glance, the connection that Servius is draw49. In Rime 215, Petrarch also uses the figure of the embittered honey and sweetened wormwood to describe Laura’s effect on him, possibly suggesting another Lucretian echo: “Et non so che nelli occhi che ’n un punto / po far chiara la notte, oscuro il giorno, / e ’l mel amaro, et addolcir l’assenzio” (And I know not what in her eyes, which in an instant can make bright the night, darken the day, embitter honey, and sweeten wormwood) (Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poetry, 370–71). 50. Petrarch, Fam. 8.7.19; trans. Bernardo, 1:418; ed. Rossi, 2:178: “Ceterum quecunque sint causae, quamlibet abditae, effectus apertissimi sunt.” 51. Virgil, Georgics 4.219–22: “His quidam signis atque haec exempla secuti / esse apibus partem divinae mentis et haustus / aetherios dixere; deum namque ire per omnia, / terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum” (Led by such tokens and such instances, some have taught that the bees have received a share of the divine intelligence, and a draught of heavenly ether; for God, they saw, pervades all things, earth and sea’s expanse and heaven’s depth). 52. Servius, Commentarii in Virgilium 2:295: “Ut autem hoc exemplis, id est, rebus similibus comprobaret, Lucretium secutus est: qui dicit ea quae inter se pro-


ing here makes good sense. Both Virgil and Lucretius are using analogies to deal with how to perceive invisible things—in one instance, the nature of God, in the other, the wind. In his commentary, however, Servius forgets one crucial detail. The analogy between wind and water is, in fact, only one part of Lucretius’s own master analogy, which moves the reader through various levels of perceptibility: the water is like the wind, he says, and the wind is like atoms, invisible but also embodied. Moreover, the proof that atoms are like the wind is swept through and drenched with examples of chance destruction that Lucretius deploys to argue against the idea that God is “in” everything. As Lactantius explained it in another passage Petrarch could have known, Epicurus “says that it is not the work of Providence [that governs the course of nature]. There are seeds flying about through the void, and when these have massed together at random among themselves, all things are born and grow.” When Servius (or his ancient source) appropriates a Lucretian mode of analogy making to explain the presence of the divine, he is strategically putting the destinatum back into a world of unseen atoms. It is no wonder Petrarch was so worried in the letter about both Virgil’s and his own relationship to Lucretius—a relationship that led bare non possumus, a similibus comprobanda: ventum namque docet esse corporalem, non quod eum tenere vel cernere possumus, sed quod eius similis atque aquae effectus est, quam corporalem esse manifestum est”; my translation. Cited and discussed in Setailoli, “Interpretazioni stoiche ed epicuree in Servio,” pt. 2, 37. Here Setaioli detects an “an unresolved shadow of doubt that crosses the great poem of Providence”; my translation. See also Delvigo, “Servio e la poesia della scienza.” 53. See Lucretius, DRN 1.277– 86: “Sunt igitur venti nimirum corpora caeca, / quae mare, quae terras, quae denique nubila caeli / verrunt ac subito vexantia turbine raptant; / nec ratione fluunt alia stragemque propagant / et cum mollis aquae fertur natura repente / flumine abundanti, quam largis imbribus auget / montibus ex altis magnus decursus aquai, / fragmina coniciens silvarum arbustaque tota, / nec validi possunt pontes venientis aquai / vim subitam tolerare” (Therefore undoubtedly there are unseen bodies of wind that sweep the sea, that sweep the earth, sweep the clouds of the sky also, beating them suddenly and catching them up in a hurricane; and they flow and deal devastation in the same way as water, which soft as it is, suddenly rolls in overwelling stream when a great deluge of water from the high mountains swells the flood with torrents of rain, dashing together wreckage of forests and whole trees, nor can strong bridges withstand the sudden force of the coming water). 54. Lactantius, Divine Institutes 3.17.21; trans. McDonald, 210.


either to the idea of God’s pervasive presence in everything or to the invisible disaster of the plague. This could be one of the reasons that neither the plague nor Lucretius plays any significant role in Greene’s seminal account of Petrarch’s imitative technique (still our best account). Perhaps Greene was finally too sympathetic with Petrarch as “a persistent striver asserting his personal coherence and mastery” to see him as the “helpless pawn of Fortune whirled about by a ceaseless flux.” In the letter to Socrates, we might say that Petrarch is either demonstrating the effects of this “ceaseless flux” or is staging an uncontrolled encounter with the Epicurean poet in order to exert another level of mastery. With Petrarch it is hard to tell. In either case, when the Black Death cast its long shadow backward across the world of Virgil’s Georgics, the idea of a contagious transmission lent another poignant expression to Petrarch’s anxieties and ambivalence about mastering the world through texts. In the case of Lucretius, the need to render influence “below the surface” seems to emerge at least partially out of a desire to control the unseen. If it is true, as Charles Trinkaus once suggested, “that Petrarch understood classical philosophy better through Vergil and Horace than the philosophers he came to know,” the author’s subtle engagement with the philosophy of Epicureanism was also primarily a literary affair. Sensing the “bitter” strain of Lucretian influence in the honey of Virgil’s poetry, Petrarch would rediscover the figure of the Epicurean poet in himself. One might even call it Lucretius’s first Renaissance recovery.

Digesting Lucretius In total, about forty passages of De rerum natura were transported through the seas of late antiquity and the Middle Ages via the great leaky ship of the Saturnalia. As we have seen, many of the passages from Lucretius (particularly the ones that Petrarch copied out in his own hand in Virgil) can be found in a section of the Saturnalia where the author discusses whole parts of other poems that Virgil borrows— 55. Greene, Light in Troy, 109. Here Greene himself tellingly cites Lucretius as a source for Virgil in a key passage in the Georgics. 56. Trinkaus, Poet as Philosopher, 2.


less moments of subtle transformation than glaring neon signs of imitation or theft. Presumably such passages would have presented Virgil’s ancient detractors with their most compelling evidence that he was a plagiarist who stole freely and extensively from his forebears. For the author of the Saturnalia, however, they represented something quite different: proof of the poet’s synthesizing powers, of an ability to render discordant elements into the body of a coherent whole. In turning our attention now to the context of these passages, we may begin to trace Petrarch’s anxiety about Lucretius in his letter to Socrates back to the latent tensions he found in Macrobius’s text. While attempting to capture something of Petrarch’s sensibility as a reader here, I want to explore, on the one hand, the way Virgil’s dramatic imitations of whole parts from Lucretius are explained by the Saturnalia’s logic of reading and, on the other, the way these imitations figure the very limits of that logic. Petrarch, whose love for Virgil was perhaps rivaled only by his love for Laura, could have found much to delight him in the garrulous pages of the Saturnalia and had an unusually developed sense of its peculiar jocus, or wit, as well as its serious learning. More than a mere collection of trivia (as the text is still sometimes understood), the Saturnalia is a sustained series of dialogues in the tradition of philosophical banter and dialectical quibbling made famous by Plato’s banquet of love. For 57. For example, in a letter addressed to the ghost of Homer (Fam. 24.12.18– 19), Petrarch refers directly to Macrobius’s discussion of Virgil’s literary borrowing: “Tu qui maiorem victoremque non metuis, imitatores equanimis fer; quanquam et de victoria inter te et eum de quo multa quereris Virgilium, in libris Saturnalium magna lis pendeat. . . . Que tamen ex ordine ipsis in Saturnalibus scripta sunt, quamvis hoc loco ille suus iocus innotuerit” (ed. Rossi, 4:257–58) (You who fear not that anyone be greater than you or overtake you, bear your imitators with patience, even though in the Saturnalia there is the unsettled controversy on the question of superiority between yourself and the one about whom you most complain. . . . The main points are discussed in order in the Saturnalia along with his witty report [trans. Bernardo, 3:345]). 58. On the dating of Macrobius, see the seminal piece by Cameron, “Date and Identity of Macrobius.” In Last Pagans of Rome, 243, Cameron has revised the date of Macrobius’s fictional literary gathering (from 384 to 382) but has maintained his essential position. As Cameron has argued, the Saturnalia represents a nostalgic, literary paganism that few Christians would have seen as a genuine threat to their faith.


a large part of this long dinner party, the topic of conversation is Virgil—the poet’s use of ancient astronomy, his reliance on the example of Homer, his borrowings from earlier Latin authors, and his secondhand imitation of poets who had previously sipped from the fountain of the Greeks. There was, as one might imagine, a lot to say. For Macrobius, all of this learned talk served a clear didactic function—as he explained it, to teach his son and to pass on knowledge that was already being forgotten, since “our generation has deserted . . . all our old literature.” As Alan Cameron has argued, the dialogue was put together in or around AD 430, a moment of literary nostalgia more or less fifty years after the date of its literary fiction—not a pagan machine de guerre, as historians once argued, but a backward-looking antiquarian reflection on the idea of a classical tradition itself. The various figures attending this learned gathering on the feast of the Saturnalia (from which the text borrows its name) were not Macrobius’s immediate contemporaries, but the great pagans of a previous generation who had all since died and who were chosen to reflect their associations to the author’s own living circle in the early fifth century. In this sense, the encyclopedic discussion of Virgil’s poetry by well-connected ghosts was not merely the occasion for displays of erudition, but also embodied and reflected the central aims of the Saturnalia and its author—the conservation of a once-shining literary inheritance that was now giving off the slight glow of decaying wood. Lucretius’s own guest appearance in the Saturnalia, along with the appearances of Homer, Ennius, and others, was part of Macrobius’s exhaustive documentation of Virgil’s literary debts—an index of the poet’s own careful preservation of his sources, which could serve as a kind of working model. Very little in Macrobius’s text was original in 59. Macrobius, Sat. 6.9.9; trans. Davies, 438; ed. Willis, 394: “Bene, inquit Servius: haec tibi quaestio nata est ex incuria veteris lectionis. Nam quia seculum nostrum ab Ennio et omni bibliotheca vetere descivit, multa ignoramus, quae non laterent, si veterum lectio nobis esset familiaris.” 60. On the Saturnalia as a machine de guerre, see Türk, “Les ‘Saturnales’ de Macrobe,” 348. 61. On the history and function of the late-antique grammarian, see esp. Kaster, Guardians of Language.


our sense of the word. Macrobius, in fact, had absorbed most if not all of this literary criticism from more ancient sources that are now almost entirely lost to us. Many of these critics were explicitly concerned with catching the poet in flagrante delicto, which in this case means stealing from other poets. As Donatus reminds us in his Life of Virgil, the poet “never lacked disparaging critics.” Macrobius was well aware of this tradition and frequently exploited it with a certain touch of wit. Indeed, one of Macrobius’s main interlocutors even quipped that by drawing attention to the ways Virgil had borrowed from other writers, he was providing his enemies with ammunition—making their nasty arguments for them. The punch line of the joke, of course, was that the author of the Saturnalia was already assuming the negative arguments of Virgil’s disgruntled or jealous readers, stealing their examples and wittily playing their own literary evidence against them. In rehashing the famous loci where Virgil borrowed from other ancient writers—sometimes stealing from the writings of Virgil’s worst detractors—Macrobius was ingeniously making a virtue of what others had perceived as a sin. He was also working out the logic of his own text, redirecting the barbs of this ancient tradition of criticism toward a vision of intellectual community. In the course of the dialogue, another of the guests sums up the idea: “But if all poets and other writers are allowed to act among themselves in this way, as partners holding in common, what right has anyone to accuse Vergil of dishonesty, if he has borrowed from his predecessors to embellish his poems?” The character of Albinus here describes a shift in values that epitomizes the general spirit of the text—a shift not only that Macrobius’s interlocutor explains, but also that the text enacts as a matter of instruction. 62. See Aelius Donatus, Vita Vergili 43, in Ziolkowski and Putnam, Virgilian Tradition, 186: “Obtrectatores Vergilio numquam defuerunt.” This “Life of Virgil” is sometimes attributed to Suetonius. 63. See Macrobius, Sat. 6.1.2; trans. Davies, 385; ed. Willis, 346. 64. Jocelyn, “Ancient Scholarship, Part 1,” 285–86. 65. Macrobius, Sat. 6.1.5; trans. Davies, 386; ed. Willis, 347: “Quod si haec societas et rerum communio poetis scriptoribusque omnibus inter se exercenda concessa est, quis fraudi Virgilio vortat, si ad excolendum se quaedam ab antiquioribus mutuatus sit?”


Throughout the pages of the Saturnalia, as Robert Kaster has observed, Macrobius consciously attempts to eschew the idea of poetic imitation as a form of competitive rivalry, offering in its place a “common” inheritance secured by and reflected in the grammarian’s virtues of modesty and diligence—virtues the author shares with the poet, or at least aspires to. In this idealizing vision, Virgil is held up as the gleaming star in an ancient firmament and also made transparent to a universal scheme of linguistic and cultural evolution. All the sources the poet borrows from—all the dissonances he tames—are woven into a universal fabric that represents the very fabric of tradition itself. In putting together the Saturnalia, Macrobius sought to embody this idea of intellectual harmony in the material organization of his own text, appropriating the synthesizing powers of the poet and in so doing modeling them himself. In the preface, he draws upon the language of Seneca’s eighty-fourth epistle almost verbatim, comparing his text to the work of bees digesting pollen, the happy blending of different flavors, the absorption of various foods by the stomach, the sound of a choir composed harmoniously of different voices, and, with his own flourish, the mixing of different scents to form the body of a perfume. All these images refer us back to an ordered world beyond the threshold of perception, to the mysterious processes of intellectual assimilation by which unlike elements are combined in one “invisible event.” For Macrobius, this idea of assimilation takes place on every scale—from the smallest particles combining after digestion to the organization of limbs in a body: Moreover, things worth remembering have not been heaped together in confusion, but a variety of subjects of different authorship and divers dates have been arranged to form, so to speak, a body, in such a way that the notes which I had made without plan or order, as aids to memory, came together like the parts of a coherent whole. 66. Kaster, “Macrobius and Servius,” 232. 67. See Macrobius, Sat. 1.1.6–9; trans. Davies, 27; ed. Willis, 2–3. 68. “Seneca’s analogies . . . may have had such an extraordinarily long life because he is tactful enough to leave a space for an invisible event” (Greene, Light in Troy, 74). 69. Macrobius, Sat. 1.1.3; trans. Davies, 26; ed. Willis, 2: “Nec indigeste tamquam in acervum congessimus digna memoratu: sed variarum rerum disparilitas, aucto-


As Macrobius had borrowed his bees from Seneca, here he is borrowing the image of disordered notes from Gellius’s Noctes Atticae, though once again he is being sly about it. Indeed, whereas Gellius had said that his own book was purposefully disordered and random “to divert and stimulate the mind,” Macrobius makes one minor change, turning a heap of textual confusion into a coherent and organized whole. The result is an idea of the work that resembles Plato’s vision of discourse as a harmonious symmetry of the limbs in the Phaedrus. As the philosopher imagined it there: “Every discourse must be organized, like a living creature, with a body of its own, as it were, so as not to be headless or footless, but to have a middle and members, composed in fitting relation to each other and to the whole.” As I mentioned earlier, these images of coherence and integration were for Macrobius descriptive of and modeled on Virgil’s own synthetic practice in his poetry. In reflecting the poet in this way, the author invites the readers of the Saturnalia to engage in a kind of circular logic by which the values of intellectual harmony and the common share are posited and then recognized and affirmed, as in a mirror. This ribus diversa confusa temporibus, ita in quoddam digesta corpus est, ut quae indistincte atque promiscue ad subsidium memoriae annotaveramus in ordinem instar membrorum cohaerentia convenirent.” 70. Gellius, Noctae Atticae, preface, 16: “Ad oblectandum fovendumque animum.” 71. Plato, Phaedrus 264c. If Macrobius did not have access to the Platonic dialogue, he could have found a similar description in Cicero, De officiis 1.28.98: “Ut enim pulchritudo corporis apta compositione membrorum movet oculos et delectat hoc ipso, quod inter se omnes partes cum quodam lepore consentiunt, sic hoc decorum, quod elucet in vita, movet approbationem eorum, quibuscum vivitur, ordine et constantia et moderatione dictorum omnium atque factorum” (For, as physical beauty with harmonious symmetry of the limbs engages the attention and delights the eye, for the very reason that all the parts combine in harmony and grace, so this propriety, which shines out in our conduct, engages the approbation of our fellowmen by the order, consistency, and self-control it imposes upon every word and deed). See also Pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.45: “Huic exemplum satis idoneum subici non potuit, propterea quod hic locus non est a tota causa separatus sicuti membrum aliquod, sed tamquam sanguis perfusus est per totum corpus orationis” (I have been unable to subjoin a quite appropriate example of the figure [commoratio], because this topic is not isolated from the whole cause like some limb, but like blood is spread through the whole body of the discourse).


drama of assimilation played out in a number of ways in the Saturnalia, though especially in the author’s account of how Virgil absorbed and reconciled various literary sources into the body of his own poetry. The humanist and poet Basinio Basini (1425–1457) no doubt had something like this in mind when he adapted the figure of the integral body to describe the difficulty of translating Homer into Latin and Virgil’s own role as a “translator”: “Therefore, Virgil, who was no religious translator, as they say, re-ordered the parts [of Homer], changing the themes around; he took many parts and left many by design, which, as if they were all his verses, he formed into the well-connected members of a single body.” Basini here demonstrates exactly the kind of blurring that the Saturnalia encourages and exemplifies. As he himself adapts the language of Macrobius’s preface and its ancient sources, the critic, the translator, and the poet merge in the mind of the reader. For Macrobius, Virgil’s ability to reconcile and absorb all kinds of dissonance was modeled on nature itself. In fact, the poet imitates nature so closely in his technique that his poetry might even be described as an extension of it. In a particularly rich passage from the Saturnalia, one of the speakers goes so far as to suggest that the harmony of literary styles in Virgil’s poetry mirrors the harmonious construction of the universe and even approaches the work of a divine creator: You see—do you not?—that the use of all these varied styles is a distinctive characteristic of Vergil’s language. Indeed, I think that it was not without a kind of foreknowledge that he was preparing himself to serve as a model for all, that he intentionally blended his styles, acting with a prescience born of a disposition divine rather than mortal. And 72. Basini, Le poesie liriche, 122–23: “Ergo / Virgilius partes aliena in parte reponit, / Argumenta locis mutans, non fidus, ut aiunt, / Interpres; multas rapuit multasque reliquit / Consulto partis, quas, ut sua cuncta, redegit / Carmina in unius bene iunctos corporis artus.” Cited and translated in Sowerby, “Early Humanist Failure (II),” 166–67. 73. “This is a nature recreated by the grace of intertextuality, of learned allusion: although Macrobius recommended the imitation of nature, he does not draw his inspiration any less from Virgil” (Lecompte, La chaîne d’or des poètes, 359; my translation).


thus it was that with the universal mother, Nature, for his only guide he wove the pattern of his work—just as in music different sounds are combined to form a single harmony. For in fact, if you look closely into the nature of the universe, you will find a striking resemblance between the handiwork of the divine craftsman and that of our poet. Thus, just as Vergil’s language is perfectly adapted to every kind of character, being now concise, now copious, now dry, now ornate, and now a combination of all these qualities, sometimes flowing smoothly or at other times raging like a torrent; so it is with the earth itself, for here it is rich with crops and meadows, there rough with forests and crags, here you have dry sand, here, again, flowing streams, and parts lie open to the boundless sea.

Writing loosely in the tradition of Plato’s Timaeus, Macrobius asks us to understand the ways in which Virgil’s poems reconcile competing, discordant elements—the elements of different literary styles, but also presumably the influences of other poets, such as Homer, whose swirling chaos Virgil absorbs and transforms into his own body. As God had created variety, so too Virgil was a poet of variety—another creator of a world or literary kosmos in which “good” style could be equated with natural order and “bad” style might be described as a disaster not easily assimilated into the Providential scheme. It is against the background of this Platonizing vision that the presence of Lucretius in the Saturnalia comes into high relief. If, as Macrobius claims, Virgilian poetry was a kind of engine that resolved all dissonance, a reflection of the divinely ordered universe itself, the passages from Lucretius, such as the ones concerning the plague that Petrarch 74. Macrobius, Sat. 5.1.18– 19; trans. Davies, 285; ed. Willis, 243: “Videsne eloquentiam omni varietate distinctam? quam quidem mihi videtur Virgilius non sine quodam praesagio quo se omnium profectibus praeparabat de industria permiscuisse, idque non mortali sed divino ingenio praevidisse: atque adeo non alium ducem secutus quam ipsam rerum omnium matrem naturam hanc praetexuit velut in musica concordiam dissonorum. Quippe si mundum ipsum diligenter inspicias, magnam similitudinem divini illius et huius poetici operis invenies. Nam qualiter eloquentia Maronis ad omnium mores integra est, nunc brevis nunc copiosa nunc sicca nunc florida nunc simul omnia, interdum lenis aut torrens: sic terra ipsa hic laeta segetibus et pratis ibi silvis et rupibus hispida, his sicca arenis hic irrigua fontibus, pars vasta aperitur mari.”


copied out in his margins, pose another question about the “nature” of the poet’s literary practice and about his intentions. The first comparison in the section that concerns Virgil’s borrowing of whole passages from other poets takes the form of a contest, awkwardly confusing the question of poetic debt with a slightly trickier question of poetic agon. As Macrobius shows, Virgil’s own claim for originality was lifted wholesale from the author of De rerum natura: virgil: nec sum animi dubius, verbis ea vincere magnum quam sit, et angustis hunc addere rebus honorem. sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis raptat amor: iuvat ire iugis qua nulla priorum Castaliam molli devertitur orbita clivo. lucretius: nec me animi fallit quam sint obscura; sed acri percussit thyrso laudis spes magna meum cor, et simul incussit suavem mi in pectus amorem Musarum: quo nunc instinctus mente vigenti, avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante trita solo. [virgil: “Nor am I in any doubt in my mind how great a task it is to triumph here with words and thus add dignity to a theme so slight. But a sweet desire hurries me along the lonely steeps of Parnassus, and it is my pleasure to traverse ridges where no forerunners’ track turns aside down a gentle slope to Castalia.” lucretius: “Nor do I fail to see in my mind how dark the theme is: but high hope of praise has smitten my heart with a magic wand and therewith has struck into my breast a sweet love of the Muses. This is the love which has inspired me now to traverse in eager thought the lonely haunts of the Pierides, never before trodden by the foot of man.”]

This first instance of Virgil’s imitation of whole sections from Lucretius is at once an homage to a literary predecessor and, if we take Macrobius’s ideal of verecundia (modesty) seriously, a dangerous flirtation 75. Macrobius, Sat. 6.2.1; trans. Davies, 398; ed. Willis, 357. Macrobius is citing Virgil, Georgics 3.289–93, and Lucretius, DRN 1.922–27, respectively.


with exactly the kind of poetic values that the Saturnalia seeks to replace with an appeal to cooperation and intellectual community. Virgil stares into the mirror of Lucretius, but what does he see? Has the Augustan poet yielded to a negative model of rivalry—been tempted into competition—or has he instead managed to master and assimilate the influence of the other and make conventional a claim for originality? The comparison raises the question even as it attempts to subdue or control it—an irony that an author who liked to invert the meaning of his sources could hardly have missed. Certainly Petrarch himself didn’t miss it. When, later, he rehearsed the same set of passages in his discussion of his own originality, he couldn’t help but elicit the irony in Macrobius and make a kind of serious joke: “Nor am I like Lucretius: ‘Alone do I wander over the remote pathways of the Muses, previously trodden by no man’; nor like Virgil: ‘I love to climb gentle slopes to the heights where never had earlier footsteps gone to the Castalian fount.’ ” So much for the path’s being untrodden. Unlike Petrarch, modern readers of late antiquity generally have been loath to recognize this kind of irony in such comparisons. Henri Marrou, for example, once described the “psychological atomism” of the late-antique grammarian, who used his myopic vision to read a text word for word without any sense of a larger meaning or significance. For someone like Servius, he argued, the concentration was on verbal effects and very little else. Similarly, Kaster has argued for a kind of reader for whom thematic and structural forms of literary imitation had virtually no meaning; even “if the idea of such imitation were explained to Macrobius, he would not have been much impressed.” The problem is further complicated by the arrangement of passages in this sec76. This fits nicely into the way that Jocelyn has described this section of the Sat., the sources for which he places “in the earliest period of Virgilian scholarship when, through the efforts of Horace and others, the reputation of the republican poets had sunk so low that a modern poet could be smeared by the accusation of imitating them” (Jocelyn, “Ancient Scholarship, Part 1,” 289). 77. Petrarch, Fam. 22.2.19; trans. Bernardo, 3:214; ed. Rossi, 4:107: “Nec cum Lucretio, ‘Avia Pyeridum perago loca nullius ante Trita solo’; nec cum Virgilio: ‘. . . Iuvat ire iugis qua nulla priorum / Castaliam molli divertitur orbita clivo.’ ” 78. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 25–26. 79. Kaster, “Macrobius and Servius,” 233–34.


tion, which, if we believe H. D. Jocelyn, was “established either through chance or through the agency of a plagiarist who deliberately obscured his source by arranging the parallelisms in such a way.” In other words, it is difficult, maybe even impossible, to read anything other than verbal effects when the passages themselves are taken out of context and arranged in no easily discernible order. However, meanings can emerge outside of the grammarian’s myopic gaze; associations can take shape extra destinatum and have a material history all their own. In this case, the parallel passages from Lucretius and Virgil in the Saturnalia tend to generate (or preserve) a second order of meaning perhaps even in spite of Macrobius’s intentions, at least as Kaster and the others have described them. Remembering Macrobius’s idea of Virgil’s divinely ordered poem, we might take, for example, this loaded set of passages, which explicitly concerns the formation of the universe: virgil: Namque canebat uti magnum per inane coacta semina terrarumque animaeque marisque fuissent, et liquidi simul ignis, ut his exordia primis omnia et ipse tener mundi concreverit orbis: tum durare solum, et discludere Nerea ponto coeperit, et rerum paulatim sumere formas, iamque novum terrae stupeant lucescere solem. lucretius in quinto, ubi de confusione orbis ante hunc statum loquitur: His neque tum solis rota cerni lumine claro altivolans poterat, neque magni sidera mundi; nec mare nec caelum, nec denique terra nec aer, nec similis nostris rebus res ulla videri. sed nova tempestas quaedam molesque coorta. 80. Jocelyn, “Ancient Scholarship, Part 2,” 135. 81. The friction between Lucretius and Virgil that I am describing in Macrobius has been taken up in our own time by such scholars as Philip R. Hardie and Monica Gale. See esp. Hardie, Virgil’s “Aeneid,” chap. 5; and Gale, Virgil on the Nature of Things.


diffugere inde loci partes coepere, paresque cum paribus iungi res et discludere mundum, membraque dividere et magnas disponere partes. [virgil: “For he sang how through the great void had been massed together the seeds of earth and air and sea and of liquid fire withal, how from these elements all beginnings and the world’s young orb itself grew into shape, how then the earth began to harden and to shut apart Nereus in the sea and little by little to take on the forms of things; and now in amazement the lands see the new sun shining.” lucretius (speaking of the chaos which preceded the present state of the universe) says: “Then, at that time, neither could the sun’s disk be discerned flying on high with its brilliant light, nor the stars of the great firmament nor sea nor sky, nay, nor earth nor air, nor could anything be seen like to the things we know but a certain strange and stormy disturbance and a conglomerate mass. Therefrom the parts began to fly asunder and things to be joined, like with like, and to shut apart the universe and to apportion its members and to arrange its mighty parts.”]

The comparison here is made presumably on the basis of the poet’s style, but because the passages themselves deal so explicitly with the matter of cosmogony, as Macrobius points out, it becomes difficult to quarantine the philosophical questions that underlie the matter of imitation. As Boccaccio put it later in the fourteenth century: “For who . . . will be so foolish and idiotic that, when reading in the Bucolics of Virgil: ‘For he sang how, through the great void [seeds] were thrust together’ . . . [he] would not see clearly that Virgil was a philosopher.” When Servius, in his commentary, glossed the same passage from Silenus’s inspired song, he also linked the lines explicitly to an Epicurean 82. Macrobius, Sat. 6.2.22–23; trans. Davies, 403; ed. Willis, 362–63. Macrobius is citing Virgil, Eclogues 6.31–37, and Lucretius, DRN 5.432–39, respectively. I have followed the ordering of the lines from Lucretius in the Saturnalia, which departs from the Oxford text. 83. Boccaccio, Genealogie deorum gentilium libri 2:710: “Quis enim . . . tam demens tamque vecors erit, qui, legens in Buccolicis Virgilii: ‘Namque canebat uti magnum per inane coacta’ . . . non videat liquido Virgilium fuisse phylosophum.” The translation follows Ziolkowski and Putnam, Virgilian Tradition, 467.


philosophical position, even remembering the name of Virgil’s Epicurean teacher, Siro, with whom he is said to have studied as a young man in Naples. Servius claims that in this case Virgil was speaking the wisdom of his old philosophical teacher, “almost under the guise of Silenus.” In a text that is so much about Virgil, on the one hand, and about the transmission of ancient wisdom from an earlier generation to a later one, on the other, the question of Virgil’s own Epicurean education seems relevant, though Macrobius never mentions it explicitly. 84. As the story goes, the young Virgil supposedly gave up traditional forms of education (including poetry) to pursue his study with the Epicurean Siro. In a group of poems traditionally ascribed as Virgil’s juvenilia, the author writes fondly of his teacher as he bids farewell to the world: “Nos ad beatos vela mittimus portus, / magni petentes docta dicta Sironis, / vitamque ab omni vindicabimus cura” (We are setting sail for blissful havens, in quest of noble Siro’s learned lore, and will free our life from all worries) (Catalepton 5.8–10). In another poem that is part of the same group, the author writes nostalgically of that “little villa, once Siro’s” (villula, quae Sironis eras), which he supposedly purchased for himself later on (Catalepton 8.8). Translations of the Catalepton follow the Appendix Vergiliana in Fairclough’s Loeb edition. Discussed in Armstrong, Fish, Johnston, and Skinner, Vergil, Philodemus, and the Augustans, 2. Pierre Boyancé called these poems from the Catalepton “the most precious document for Virgil’s Epicureanism” (Boyancé, “Virgile et l’epicurisme,” cited in ibid., 33). In recent years, the story of Virgil’s early interest in Epicureanism has gained some new weight in light of a carbonized papyrus recovered from Herculaneum that displays Virgil’s name among the dedicatees of a text by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. See in general Armstrong, Fish, Johnston, and Skinner, Vergil, Philodemus, and the Augustans; Gigante, Philodemus in Italy; and Gigante and Capasso, “Il ritorno di Virgilio a Ercolano.” 85. Servius, Commentarii in Virgilium 133: “Et quasi sub persona Sileni Sironem inducit loquentem.” Like so many things in Servius’s commentary, this was probably not original. On Servius’s Epicurean glosses, see Setailoli, “Interpretazioni stoiche ed epicuree in Servio,” pts. 1 and 2; and Delvigo, “Servio e la poesia della scienza.” 86. Macrobius shows little interest in the matter of the poet’s biography overall, which may have something to do with his desire to pass over the usual problems of the grammarians. We cannot, however, rule out the possibility that a discussion of Virgil’s Epicureanism came into play in the now lost part of the text where the character Eustathius is meant to speak on the subject of Virgil’s borrowing from the Greek philosophers (part of the enormous lacuna between books 2 and 3 of the Saturnalia). Interestingly, at Sat. 6.7.15, Macrobius does flirt briefly with the question of Virgil’s debt to Epicurean philosophy: “Epicurus quoque simili modo maximam


When he begins to demonstrate the poet’s literary reliance on the text of De rerum natura, however, the matter of Virgil’s Epicurean inheritance creeps in again, if silently. As Macrobius had suggested earlier with his natural description of the poet’s synthesizing powers, even the most aesthetic or literary questions concerning Virgil’s style may lead a reader to consider the structure of the world. And because we are dealing here not only with single words or phrases, but with whole passages, as Alieto Pieri has suggested, Macrobius’s comparisons bring us “by necessity” from matters of verbal formulae, clauses, and images to questions of content—in this case, philosophical content. Take, for example, these two passages from the same section of book 6 that we’ve been looking at so far. The first is Virgil’s own description of Jove from the Aeneid: tum pater omnipotens, rerum cui summa potestas, infit: eo dicente deum domus alta silescit, et tremefacta solo tellus, silet arduus aether. tum venti posuere, premit placida aequora pontus. [Then the almighty Father, to whom belongs supreme power over the world, begins; and, as he speaks, the lofty palace of the gods grows silent; the earth too grows silent, trembling from its foundations; hushed in the firmament on high; then the winds are laid, and the sea stills its waters into calm.] voluptatem privationem detractionemque omnis doloris definivit his verbis: ‘Oρος τοῦ μεγέθους τῶν ἡδονῶν παντὸς τοῦ ἀλγοῦντος ὑπεξαίρεσις.’ Eadem ratione idem Virgilius inamabilem dixit Stygiam paludem. Nam sicut inlaudatum κατὰ στέρησιν laudis, ita inamabilem per amoris στέρησιν detestatus est” (ed. Willis, 387) (Epicurus, too, in like manner defined the height of pleasure as the removal and withdrawal of all pain, in these words, “The measure of the greatness of pleasure is the removal of all that causes pain.” And it is on the same principle that Virgil has called the Stygian pool “unlovable”; for just as he has expressed his abhorrence of the “unpraised” by the negation of praise, so he has expressed his abhorrence of the “unlovable” by the negation of love [trans. Davies, 430]). Macrobius appears to have borrowed this discussion from Gellius, Noctes Atticae 2.6.12–15. I would like to thank Robert Kaster for helping me think through this set of problems. 87. Pieri, Lucrezio in Macrobio, 79. 88. Macrobius, Sat. 6.2.26; trans. Davies, 404; ed. Willis, 364. Macrobius is citing Virgil, Aeneid 10.100–103.


Jove is clearly another god in control of his natural and rhetorical effects. The idea fits nicely into Macrobius’s views about the powers of Virgil’s poem and the Providential poem that is the world. Shortly after this passage, however, Macrobius will cite a fragment from Lucretius in another comparison that presents a radically different picture of nature and influence. These are the lines from Lucretius: sed tamen interdum magno quaesita labore, cum iam per terras frondent, atque omnia florent, aut nimiis torrens fervoribus aethereus sol, aut subiti perimunt imbres gelidaeque pruinae, flabraque ventorum violento turbine vexant. [But after all, at times, when things won with great labor put forth their leaves throughout the land and are all in bloom, either the sun in heaven, burning them with too much heat, or sudden rains and chill frosts destroy them, and blasts of winds with violent storms harass them.]

Lucretius here is giving us the bad news that the objects of our labor are subject to chance and contingency, to the whims of blind fortune and the flux of matter. For the Epicurean poet, the threat of bad weather was more evidence that we don’t live in a world controlled by Jove—or by any divine intelligence, for that matter. If we introduce the question of content, it is hard not to hear the dissonance or sense the conflict in the poetry of two opposing cosmologies when they are put into such close contact with one another. Tellingly, when Virgil imitates this passage from De rerum natura, he absorbs the natural violence that Lucretius describes back into the structure of a divine plan: “The great Father himself has willed that the path of husbandry should not be smooth.” Read back into the context of the Saturnalia, passages such as these unlock a number of thorny questions about the poet’s unwavering ability to restore a divine order to the Epicurean universe he inherited from his troubled model. The explosive clash of literary style and cosmology is perhaps nowhere more pressing, finally, than where Macrobius dis89. Macrobius, Sat. 6.2.29; trans. Davies, 404–5; ed. Willis, 364–65. Macrobius is citing Lucretius, DRN 5.213–17. 90. Virgil, Georgics 1.121–22: “Pater ipse colendi / haud facilem esse viam voluit.”


cusses Lucretius’s description of the Athenian plague and Virgil’s alltoo-faithful imitation of it in the Georgics. Here again we find Macrobius’s grand ideals of intellectual and literary harmony encountering a vision of the world and its causes that is less than ideal. What, after all, does it mean to talk about the integral arrangement of limbs—the synthesis of orderly parts—in passages that deal with the ravages of the plague, the decomposition of physical bodies, and the threat of radical incoherence? As these comparisons unfold, Macrobius’s logic of assimilation labors under the weight of Lucretius’s descriptions, and the idea of an orderly body gives way to the image of an infected one: Multaque praeterea mortis tunc signa dabantur: perturbata animi mens in maerore metuque, triste supercilium, furiosus vultus et acer, sollicitae porro plenaeque sonoribus aures, creber spiritus aut ingens raroque coortus, sudorisque madens per collum splendidus umor, tenvia sputa, minuta, croci contacta colore, salsaque, per fauces rauca[s] vix edita tussi[s]. [And many another sign of death was then to be seen, a mind disordered in all this sorrow and fear, a gloomy brow, a mad and fierce look, ears also troubled and full of droning, quick pants or deep breaths rising at long intervals, dank sweat streaming and shining over the neck, fine thin spittle, salty and yellow in colour, expelled with an effort through the throat by hoarse coughing.]

Read together, the thirteen sets of passages that pertain to the plague represent in miniature a vivid picture of the reign of death that we find haunting Petrarch in his letter to Socrates: cities emptied of their people, the disgusting symptoms of contagion and decomposition, the failure of doctors in the face of the disease, and so on. “Since it would be long and tedious enough to quote the whole passage from each poet,” Macrobius says of the section concerning Virgil’s use of Lucretius’s plague, “I shall cite extracts, to show how closely the two accounts resemble one 91. On this problem, see esp. Butler, Matter of the Page, chap. 3. 92. Lucretius, DRN 6.1182–89. Cited in Macrobius, Sat. 6.2.11; trans. Davies, 400; ed. Willis, 359–60.


another.” Or, again, as Lucretius had put it for his own arguments: “But for a keen-scented mind, these little tracks are enough to enable you to recognize the others for yourself.” We have already caught a glimpse of Petrarch’s sensitivity to the idea of Lucretius’s lingering presence in these passages from the Georgics. He wasn’t the only one to feel the tension generated by this intertextual relation. For readers across many centuries, how one interpreted the nature of Lucretius’s influence in Virgil has been closely connected to how one viewed the structure of the universe itself and the tone of Virgil’s poem as a whole. Writing her dissertation in the midst of World War II, for example, Herta Klepl argued that the threat of contamination in the Georgics overshadowed Virgil’s teleological view in the poem and was given a kind of “universal” significance. In the words of another critic: “Where is the pius poeta now?” Other readers saw the picture very differently, warding off the disastrous implications of the Lucretian plague. Answering this strain of pessimism, E. L. Harrison insisted that Virgil had placed the animal plague explicitly outside of Italy, literally outside the pastoral world of the Italian farmer and, at this point historically, outside the Roman Empire: a disaster properly quarantined. For him, it was impossible to imagine that Virgil had introduced any serious trouble into his cosmology. About four centuries earlier, the philosopher Peter Ramus had taken a similar position, explaining that Virgil had “implied the plague was sent by God to punish evil.” 93. Macrobius, Sat. 6.2.8; trans. Davies, 399–400; ed. Willis, 359: “Sed quatenus totum locum utriusque ponere satis longum est, excerpam aliqua ex quibus similitudo geminae descriptionis adpareat.” 94. Lucretius, DRN 1.400–401: “Verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci / sunt, per quae possis cognoscere cetera tute.” 95. Klepl, Lucrez und Virgil, 73. Cited and translated in Harrison, “Noric Plague,” 28. 96. Wilkinson, Georgics of Virgil, 207 n. Cited in Harrison, “Noric Plague,” 27. 97. Harrison, “Noric Plague,” 23: “The view I shall be seeking to establish is that in presenting his plague account Vergil not only retained his usual orthodoxy, but actually offered the episode as a kind of working model of how Roman religion operated with regard to such disasters.” 98. Ramus, P. Vergilii Maronis Georgica, sig. R8: “Saevit [551]: Amplificatione poetica significatur pestem divinitus immissam ad ultionem malorum.” Cited and


If we believe Marrou and Kaster, however, a reader such as Macrobius would not have been particularly interested or troubled by the insidious philosophical questions that were passed on through Virgil’s acts of literary borrowing. Had he discussed these passages in Macrobius, Basinio of Parma might have said that Virgil was merely rearranging the parts of Lucretius’s poem into the body of a coherent whole, absorbing and transforming the raw material into a larger comprehensive order. Earlier in the Saturnalia, Macrobius himself had emphasized the decidedly structural role of Virgil’s endings of various books in the Georgics, endings such as the description of the plague he said that the poet inserted “to refresh . . . the reader’s mind or ear.” This is one way of explaining the problem of Lucretius’s contagion. What Macrobius’s text preserves, however—maybe even unwittingly brings to the surface—is another possibility, one that would be activated again in the minds of later readers such as Petrarch, for whom the scent and sound of intellectual assimilation found its nightmare opposite in the “invisible event” of the plague. In the hands of such a reader, the threat of Lucretian disaster appears as an attack not only on the integrity of Virgil’s great Providential machine, but, by extension, on Macrobius’s own ideals of assimilation and community. As Petrarch came to know all too well, it was not easy to have a symposium during a time of plague. translated in Mack, “Ramus Reading,” 139. See my discussion of this passage and of Ramus’s use of Lucretius in “Art of Reading Earthquakes.” 99. Macrobius, Sat. 5.16.5; trans. Davies, 354–55; ed. Willis, 311: “In omnibus vero Georgicorum libris hoc idem summa cum elegantia fecit. Nam post praecepta, quae natura res dura est, ut legentis animum vel auditum novaret, singulos libros acciti extrinsecus argumenti interpositione conclusit, primum de signis tempestatum, de laudatione rusticae vitae secundum, et tertius desinit in pestilentiam pecorum, quarti finis est de Orpheo et Aristaeo non otiosa narratio” (He has certainly used this technique with consummate taste in all the Georgics, for, after his practical instructions, which naturally make hard reading, he has inserted at the end of each book a story drawn from some outside source, to refresh the reader’s mind or ear. Thus the first Book ends with an account of the signs which foretell the weather; the second, with an eulogy of country life; the third, with a description of a cattle plague; the fourth, with the by no means inapposite story of Orpheus and Aristaeus). 100. Petrarch, indeed, would learn this the hard way in 1348 when two of his surviving friends were attacked and killed by bandits on the way back from his home, where they had hoped to live together until their death (Fam. 1.9). His other friend,


Having carefully studied Virgil’s reliance on the Lucretian plague in the margins of his manuscript copy, Petrarch clearly thought a good deal about what it meant to “digest” an influence, and about what it meant for an author such as Virgil or Macrobius to reproduce whole passages of another author. For whatever reason, however, the Macrobian or Senecan model of common property did not work in the same way for Petrarch, who was perhaps too deeply attuned to the ironies and discontinuities of the tradition to ignore them. As far as I know, Petrarch was the first to point out the latent irony in Macrobius’s use of Seneca’s famous bees: Macrobius in his Saturnalia reported not only the sense but the very words of Seneca so that to me at the very time he seemed to be following this advice in his reading and writing, he seemed to be disapproving of it by what he did. For he did not try to produce honey from the flowers culled from Seneca but instead produced them whole and in the very form in which he had found them on the stems.

By drawing our attention here to the conflict between Macrobius’s theory and practice, Petrarch registers the gulf of sensibility and intention that separates him from his late-antique forebear. Petrarch, we recall, spoke repeatedly of hiding or disguising his influences beneath the surface. Macrobius, on the other hand, was a man with his eyes trained securely on the poetry of Virgil (as he said Virgil’s were on Homer). He seemingly had nothing to hide. In showing how Macrobius was not doing what he said he was doing, Petrarch was cleverly laying the Socrates, to whom the letter is addressed, also fell silent, which naturally caused him no small anxiety: “Audio enim pestem illam anni alterius, que finita videbatur, rursum Rodani ripas invadere, unde utinam abesses!” (Fam. 8.9.27; ed. Rossi, 2:185) (For I hear that the plague of last year which seemed to have ended, is again invading the banks of the Rhone, and I certainly hope that you are not dead! [trans. Bernardo, 1:427]). 101. Petrarch, Fam. 1.8.3; trans. Bernardo, 1:41; ed. Rossi, 1:39: “Eius autem non sensum modo, sed verba Macrobius in Saturnalibus posuit; ut michi quidem uno eodemque tempore quod legendo simul ac scribendo probaverat, rebus ipsis improbare videretur; non enim flores apud Senecam lectos in favos vertere studuit, sed integros et quales in alienis ramis invenerat, protulit.” 102. George W. Pigman explains Macrobius’s practice nicely: “This coalescing is not the transformation of pollen into honey, in which the pollen loses its iden-


ground for his own idea of imitation—much, indeed, as Macrobius before him had wittily used Seneca. He was also making another serious joke at the author’s expense. In a part of the same letter that is less often quoted, Petrarch went on to nurse the irony he found in the preface to the Saturnalia by demonstrating that even this was not original. As he put it with his own touch of Macrobian wit: “Although how can I say something another wrote is not mine, when Epicurus’s opinion, as recorded by Seneca himself, is that anything said well by anyone is our own? Macrobius must therefore not be blamed because he not only reported but actually transcribed a large part of one letter in the proem of his work.” A number of problems begin to emerge as Petrarch puts pressure on Macrobius, Seneca, and their apiaries, and the question of common property that is so central to the Saturnalia becomes entangled in a discussion of a philosophical inheritance. As he reminds us, the context of Seneca’s own appeal to the common share is an apology for the use of the sayings of Epicurus. As Seneca poses the question in the place that Petrarch has in mind: “Is there any reason why you should regard them as sayings of Epicurus and not common property? How many poets give forth ideas that have been uttered, or may be uttered, by philosophers!” Here the problem of literary and intellectual borrowing leads tity and becomes something else, but the redisposition of individual excerpts in an organized collection, a florilegium. Macrobius conceives of imitation as a type of redistributive reproduction; for him making something different means setting it in a new context” (Pigman, “Versions of Imitation,” 6). We might contrast Macrobius here to Aelius Donatus, who, according to his student Saint Jerome, once said: “Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerent” (May those perish who have said our ideas before us). See Jerome, Commentarius in Ecclesiasten, in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina (hereafter cited as PL) 23:390. 103. Petrarch, Fam. 1.8.3–4; trans. Bernardo, 1:41; ed. Rossi, 1:39–40: “Quanquam quid ego alienum aliquid dixerim, licet ab aliis elaboratum, cum Epycuri sententia sit ab eodem Seneca relata, quicquid ab ullo bene dictum est, non alienum esse sed nostrum? Non est itaque cur Macrobius culpandus sit, quod magnam epystole unius partem in prohemio operis illius non tam transtulit quam transcripsit.” 104. Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales 8.8: “Potest fieri, ut me interroges, quare ab Epicuro tam multa bene dicta referam potius quam nostrorum. Quid est tamen, quare tu istas Epicuri voces putes esse, non publicas? Quam multi poetae dicunt, quae philosophis aut dicta sunt aut dicenda!” At Epistle 12.11, Seneca makes a similar point about common property: “ ‘Epicurus,’ inquis, ‘dixit. Quid tibi cum


us to consider the material that poets take from philosophers. The question is: could Seneca have avoided thinking of Lucretius or Virgil when he made this point—and in the context of thinking specifically about his own Epicurean inheritance? As Petrarch hints in drawing the connection, Seneca’s discussion of common property is particularly apt with respect to the question of assimilation. The philosopher suggests that one may borrow, pillage, and steal from another without being particularly indebted or, as it were, contaminated. Even the sayings of Epicurus may be rendered common property (though, ironically, Seneca keeps reminding us that they are Epicurean to begin with). We might compare this to the way Lucretius describes his own relationship to the “stuff ” of Epicurean philosophy. As Lucretius tells us, he too draws heavily from the example of his great master Epicurus, like a bee—though, unlike Seneca later, he is not interested in transforming the philosopher’s sayings into common property. More than “common,” the author of De rerum natura insists, Epicurus’s sayings are “golden”: tu pater es rerum inventor, tu patria nobis suppeditas praecepta, tuisque ex, inclute, chartis, floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant, omnia nos itidem depascimur aurea dicta, aurea, perpetua semper dignissima vita. [You are the father, the discoverer of truths, you supply us with a father’s precepts, from your pages, illustrious man, as bees in the flowery glade feed on all your golden words [aurea dicta], your words of gold, ever most worthy of eternal life.]

This is, of course, a very different picture of intellectual debt from the one we get in Seneca, where everything worth thinking is held in comalieno?’ Quod verum est, meum est. Perseverabo Epicurum tibi ingerere, ut isti, qui in verba iurant, nec quid dicatur aestimant, sed a quo, sciant, quae optima sunt, esse communia” (“Epicurus,” you reply, “uttered these words; what are you doing with another’s property?” Any truth I maintain, is my own property. And I shall continue to heap quotations from Epicurus upon you, so that all persons who swear by the words of another, and put a value upon the speaker and not upon the thing spoken, may understand that the best ideas are common property). 105. Lucretius, DRN 3.9–13.


mon, including the “golden sayings” of Epicurus. Lucretius, for one, is not exactly shy about being a follower of Epicurus or telling us where he gets his philosophy. What Petrarch was picking up on when he said that Macrobius was not following his own advice was a tension that was already present in the Saturnalia—a discordia that sometimes comes from a desire for too much concord. “For if the Saturnalia offers a vision of an ideal unity,” Kaster concedes, “it is a vision which exacts, as the price of that unity, an anxious defensiveness which underlies, and ultimately belies, the self-confident surface.” In the last book of the Saturnalia, Macrobius will lend a voice to any lingering doubts about the work of intellectual assimilation in the persona of Dysarius, a doctor and one of the text’s famous uninvited guests. The question is whether the body can assimilate a “variety of matter”—a question well suited to a dinner party. As the doctor explains: But the man who feeds on a number of different foods feels the effects of divers qualities, resulting from the different kinds of juice produced. There is no harmony among the fluids, seeing that they issue from a variety of matter, and the blood into which they are transformed by the agency of the liver is neither free-flowing nor pure, but they pass tumultuously into the veins. This is the source of a stream of diseases which have their origin in the discord of incompatible fluids.

For Dysarius, not all food eaten at the same time is absorbed equally; “some of it is digested more quickly and some more slowly, with the result that the sequence of the process is disarranged.” Dysarius here is, in fact, closely following the text of Plutarch, who went on in the Moralia to say that “when a number of divergent qualities of food are 106. Kaster, “Macrobius and Servius,” 239. 107. Macrobius, Sat. 7.4.11; trans. Davies, 458; ed. Willis, 410: “Qui autem multiplici cibo alitur diversas patitur qualitates ex diversitate sucorum: nec concordant humores ex materiae varietate nascentes, nec efficiunt liquidum purumve sanguinem, in quem iecoris ministerio vertuntur, et in venas cum tumultu suo transeunt. Hinc morborum scaturigo, qui ex repugnantium sibi humorum discordia nascuntur.” 108. Macrobius, Sat. 7.4.12; trans. Davies, 458; ed. Willis, 410: “Deinde quia non omnium quae esui sunt una natura est, non omnia simul coquuntur, sed alia celerius, tardius alia: et ita fit ut digestionum sequentium ordo turbetur.”


united . . . they encounter each other prematurely and are destroyed. Like a mob of ill-assorted riff-raff in a community, these elements cannot easily establish unity and harmonious order among themselves, but each pulls in its own direction and will not come to terms with an alien kind.” This is decidedly not the harmonious vision of tradition that Macrobius proposes in the Saturnalia, and in fact, Macrobius might be said to be preempting the objections of his critics by putting Plutarch into the mouth of an uninvited guest. Dysarius ends his discourse with a winking gesture that not so subtly drives home its relevance to Macrobius’s text: “But at this point, I end my argument, for I should be sorry to be thought to be finding fault with this very banquet at which we find ourselves, since—sober though it is—we are enjoying nevertheless a variety of dishes.” In raising questions about the food at Macrobius’s party, Dysarius, I would suggest, is bringing us back implicitly to the question of Virgil’s own ability to absorb and reconcile passages such as the ones from Lucretius concerning the plague. If, indeed, as Macrobius said, variety or disorder can be digested and transformed into a coherent body, by the doctor’s account too much mixed matter can lead to serious indigestion and is “the source of a stream of diseases.”

Invisible Disasters In the course of his late nineteenth-century dissertation on the idea of movement in Botticelli, Aby Warburg drew upon an example from De rerum natura to prove that the painter had been talking to his friend Angelo Poliziano: “A passage in Poliziano’s Rusticus (a bucolic poem in Latin hexameters, written in 1483) shows that Poliziano not only knew 109. Plutarch, Moralia 661c. 110. Macrobius, Sat. 7.4.33; trans. Davies, 461; ed. Willis, 413: “Sed modum disputationi facio, ne videar hoc ipsum in quo sumus, licet sobrium sit, tamen, quia varium est, accusare convivium.” 111. Macrobius, Sat. 7.4.11; trans. Davies, 458; ed. Willis, 410: “Hinc morborum scaturrigo.” Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus 2.2.3: “We must therefore reject different varieties, which engender various mischiefs, such as a depraved habit of body and disorders of the stomach. . . . Antiphanes, the Delian physician, said that this variety of viands was the one cause of disease.”


this passage in Lucretius but added to it almost exactly the same figures that are found in Botticelli’s painting. This alone would be enough to prove that Poliziano was Botticelli’s adviser for this as well as the former work.” In showing us exactly where he felt that the Renaissance poet had borrowed from Lucretius’s poem, Warburg was highlighting a persistent problem, for even though De rerum natura had been brought back into view more than fifty years earlier, it was still not easily “digested,” to borrow again the language of Macrobius and Seneca. When he writes, “this alone would be enough,” the art historian is in his own way reminding us that literary imitations of De rerum natura were still relatively rare in this period. And as he put it with a more casual authority later on, the verses of the Epicurean poet were “interpreted for [Botticelli], not by some monkish moralist, but by Poliziano.” But what did Poliziano make of the literary contagion we’ve been tracing so far? In what sense does the presence of Lucretius in Poliziano signal another kind of absence? In moving now from the worlds of Macrobius and Petrarch, I want to explore the afterlife of this figure of contagion in the mind of the Florentine poet and the ways it came to inform his own notions of literary history and poetic practice in light of Lucretius’s manuscript recovery in 1417. The poem Warburg has in mind, the Rusticus, was among only a handful of Greek and Latin compositions that Poliziano authorized for publication during his lifetime and part of a collection called the Silvae. The poem, supposedly written while Poliziano was staying in the suburbs of Florence, paints a vivid picture of the idyllic existence of the “countryman” or rural dweller. Like Petrarch, who had read the 112. Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiguity, 129–130; Gesammelte Schriften, 2:41– 42: “Aus einer Stelle in Polizians Rusticus (einem lateinischen bukolischen Gedicht in Hexametern, das er 1483 gedichtet hatte) ersieht man, daß Polizian diese Stelle des Lucrez nicht allein kannte, sondern sie fast mit denselben Figuren erweiterte, die sich auf den Bildern Botticellis finden. Diese Tatsache allein würde schon für den Beweis genügen, daß Polizian auch für das zweite Bild der Ratgebar Botticellis gewesen ist.” While E. H. Gombrich has contested the Lucretian source of the painting, Charles Dempsey has supported and enriched Warburg’s reading. See Gombrich, “Botticelli’s Mythologies,” and Dempsey, “Mercurius Ver.” 113. Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 585; Gesammelte Schriften, 2:47: “Den ihm Polizian, kein moralisierender Mönch, deutete.”


Georgics almost religiously, keeping his own daily notes on the changes in the weather, the right temperature for planting, and the phases of the moon, Poliziano’s rural dweller sought to know the physical world around him so that he might better understand and control it: Ergo in consilium maria advocat aethera terras naturamque omnem vivitque auctoribus astris, cura deum, agricola atque animo praescita recenset et rerum eventus sensu praesagit acuto. [Thus the farmer, beloved of the gods, takes counsel with the seas, the air, the lands, and all of nature, and lives by the guidance of the stars and goes over in his mind what is known of the future with acute understanding.]

The entire poem is imbued with this air of confidence in the ability of man to read and decode the signs of nature as they make themselves known to him, unfolding as in a moving picture: “He observes a flash of lightning, thunder, and fleecy clouds in the heavens, the winter solstice—in a word, the whole year.” In addition to being a kind of poetic almanac full of useful information and a lesson on the poetry of Hesiod and Virgil, the poem was dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose Golden Age ideology it celebrated in the countryman’s simplifying idea of the natural world, the causes of its phenomena, and its organic myths: a Providential vision of nature suffused with Neoplatonic undertones. To a student with an ear for the arte allusiva, however, Poliziano’s improvisational rhapsody on the bucolic life was anything but simplistic or simplifying. On the contrary, the poem was a virtuoso exercise illustrating the poet’s complex and dynamic vision of literary history, his rather terrifying erudition, and his taste for intellectual alchemy. As his rival, Paolo Cortesi, complained of the poet’s style: “It is unavoid114. Bishop, Petrarch and His World, 269–70. 115. Poliziano, Rusticus, lines 547–50. All citations and translations of the Silvae follow Fantazzi’s edition. 116. Poliziano, Rusticus, lines 502– 3: “Fulgores, tonitrus, inspersaque vellera caelo / brumalemque diem et totum semel aspicit annum.” 117. On Poliziano and his influence, see Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, vol. 1, chaps. 1–3; Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli, chaps. 1–3; Greene, Light in Troy, chap. 8; and, in general, Maïer, Ange Politien.


able that various types of food digest together badly and that, as a result of the impure mixture of dissimilar types of speech, their words clash with one another.” Here again we hear the voice of Macrobius’s doctor echoing the ancient sources. This pluralism, of course, was precisely the effect that Poliziano was after. To read or, as it were, to hear the Rusticus was to enter a world of images drawn from Hesiod, Aratus, Lucretius, Virgil, and Pliny that were unexpectedly combined with details from the contemporary Florentine landscape; Poliziano was a master of both harmony and dissonance. In this sense, the Rusticus might be said to exemplify the very nature of the Silvae, a word Poliziano would define in his commentary on Statius as indigesta materia. By reworking this “raw material,” the poet sought to correct the literary biases of his contemporaries, to cast the idea of the classical tradition under the lamps of a shining new philology. Poliziano himself explained it nicely: “New reasonings produce new examples, and new examples require new modes of thought.” Having been recovered only in 1417, De rerum natura was a prime example—a thread that had to be carefully rewoven into the fabric of literary history, discovered where it had previously been ignored or unseen. Poliziano’s own interest in De rerum natura appears to have been first and foremost as a philologist. Such a poem was, among other things, a master class in the uses of old Latin and the invention of new 118. Cortesi to Poliziano, in DellaNeva, Ciceronian Controversies, 12– 13: “Fieri enim non potest quin varia ciborum genera male concoquantur, et quin ex tanta colluvione dissimillimi generis inter se verba collidantur.” 119. On Poliziano’s literary pluralism, see esp. Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli, chap. 2. As Godman notes: “The claims of modernity demanded a pluralism that opened up a new perspective, without limits or barriers, on Latin literature” (Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli, 51). On the history of Ciceronianism and Poliziano’s reaction against it, see Sabbadini, Storia del ciceronianismo; on his argument with Cortesi, see Greene, Light in Troy, 149–51. 120. As the notes to Francesco Bausi’s edition of the Silvae show, to read the Rusticus is to be profoundly disoriented in one’s knowledge of the classical tradition. 121. See Fantazzi’s introduction to Poliziano, Silvae, xi. 122. Poliziano, I detti piacevoli, no. 384 (p. 101): “Nuovi ragionamenti fanno nuovi casi: e nuovi casi vogliono nuovi modi.” Cited and translated in Greene, Light in Troy, 149. 123. On Poliziano’s interest in the text of Lucretius, see Pizzani, “Angelo Poliziano e il testo di Lucrezio.”


words to compensate for what Lucretius described as the poverty of language. As the poet wrote: “Nor do I fail to understand that it is difficult to make clear the dark discoveries of the Greeks in Latin verses, especially since we have often to employ new words because of the poverty of language and the novelty of matters.” A scholar who “came to insist that only a critic who had mastered Greek literature could hope to deal competently with Latin” could well appreciate the ancient poet’s own transformation of the Greek poetic and philosophic traditions. More than merely a thesaurus of Epicurean philosophy (as it is still sometimes read), De rerum natura was, for such a reader as Poliziano, a poem about tradition and, moreover, a dynamic instrument for re-viewing the survival and transformation of a lost Greek wisdom through the Latin literary tradition. Like the doctus Lucretius, as Statius once called him, the author of the Rusticus was a maverick of generic manipulation and hybridity, a philosopher and historian of the Latin language, and a crucial intermediary between often conflicting cultural inheritances. Lucretius also spoke to Poliziano, the poet, as a literary example that could provide a different perspective on familiar conventions. “Let us enter new paths, virtually untrodden before, leaving behind those old and well-worn,” Poliziano wrote in his notes on Statius, invoking the words of Cicero with a touch of irony, as well as reminding us of Lucretius’s and Virgil’s own claims of blazing new ground. Slightly later in the same text, a passage from De rerum natura both provides a background for Poliziano’s own pluralistic model of literary practice and is a good example of it at work: “Since it is a very great fault to intend to imitate only one person, we shall not err if we place before us as 124. Lucretius, DRN 1.136– 39: “Nec me animi fallit Graiorum obscura reperta / difficile inlustrare Latinis versibus esse, / multa novis verbis praesertim cum sit agendum / propter egestatem linguae et rerum novitatem.” 125. Grafton, “On the Scholarship of Politian,” 172. 126. For a modern account of Lucretius’s use of Greek sources, see Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom. 127. See again Statius, Silvae 2.7.73: “Et docti furor arduus Lucreti.” 128. Poliziano, Oratio, 870: “Novas tamen quasique intactas vias ingrediamur, veteres tritasque relinquamus.” Cited, translated, and discussed in Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli, 40. See also Mengelkoch, “Mutability of Poetics,” 93.


models Quintilian and Statius as well as Cicero and Virgil, if we take from everywhere what we can use, as in Lucretius, ‘just as the bees taste everything in the flowering pastures, we likewise feed on all Epicurus’ golden sayings.’ ” Practicing the literary promiscuity he preaches, Poliziano brings the problem of literary digestion and assimilation to the surface again, slyly shifting our attention away from the usual suspects buzzing in the ears of Plato, Horace, and Seneca. By this subtle play, we find the bee, the most celebrated icon of Renaissance imitatio, sipping from flowers in the garden of an Epicurean dogmatist—an example emblematic of Poliziano’s exquisite taste for irony. What the Florentine poet learned from his Lucretius, among other things, was a habit for making the seemingly familiar strange again. But what did it mean to acknowledge the presence of an ancient author who had been nearly forgotten for centuries and, as some thought, not without good reason? Poliziano’s friend Pico della Mirandola summed up the problem when, in comparing Lucretius to Duns Scotus, he said that the honey on the rim of the poet’s cup was disguising not the bitter medicine of philosophy, as Lucretius had said, but a kind of poison. Pico here was, in fact, channeling the indignation of Saint Jerome and a long tradition of anxiety about the poet who said the soul was mortal. What did it mean to taste the bitterness in the honey? A man who could hardly resist a literary problem when he encountered one, Poliziano was among the first to take this question seriously as a 129. Poliziano, Oratio, 878: “Itaque cum maximum sit vitium unum tantum aliquem solumque imitari velle, haud ab re profecto facimus, si non minus hos nobis quam illos praeponimus, si quae ad nostrum usum faciunt undique elicimus atque, ut est apud Lucretium, Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant / omnia nos itidem depascimur aurea dicta.” Cited, translated, and discussed in Pigman, “Versions of Imitation,” 6. See Lucretius, DRN 1.11–12. 130. See Barbaro and Pico, Filosofia o eloquenza?, 50; cf. Lucretius, DRN 4.11–25. For a discussion of the exchange between Pico and Barbaro, see esp. Kraye, “Pico on the Relationship of Rhetoric and Philosophy.” In contrast to Pico, readers such as Bartolomeo Scala, Marcello Adriani, and Machiavelli were drawn to some of the more dangerous elements of De rerum natura. As Alison Brown has recently shown, these men discovered in Lucretius a potent alternative both to the Medici’s Golden Age rhetoric and the demagoguery of Savonarola. See Brown, Return of Lucretius, chaps. 3 and 4.


poet. The problem was already framed, in a sense, in the title of Poliziano’s Rusticus: An Introduction to Lectures on the Poet Hesiod and the “Georgics” of Virgil. About a century before, in a letter addressed to the ghost of Homer, Petrarch had attempted to quell Homer’s anxieties about not being acknowledged by name in the Aeneid—acknowledged, he said, as Hesiod had been recognized and celebrated in the Georgics. Had he believed in the afterlife, Lucretius might have had a similar complaint about the Renaissance poet who omitted his name from the title of his own poem. It was Lucretius, after all, who had already recast the myths of Hesiod in a sobering rational light, who literally came between the Greek didactic tradition and Virgil’s own remediation of it in the Georgics. By remembering (and forgetting) the Epicurean poet in his own poem, Poliziano was in another way dramatizing the problem of coming to terms with the long shadow of materialism Lucretius had cast across the historia litteraria. The traces of Lucretian influence in the Rusticus correspond nicely to the way Perrine Galand-Hallyn has described Poliziano’s use of literary sources to generate subtle counterpoints in what would otherwise seem a harmonious imitation. For Galand-Hallyn, this technique was a form of “equivocation” that allowed the poet to explore the meaning of different subtextual associations at once—a practice that led to sometimes potentially explosive combinations. In this case, however, the poet’s equivocation takes a slightly different form. Warburg, we recall, had pointed out where Poliziano borrowed from Lucretius; here I want to show how this imitation sheds light on a conspicuous absence 131. Poliziano, Silvae, ed. Fantazzi, 32: “Angeli Politiani silva cui titulus Rusticus in poetae Hesiodi Vergilque Georgicon enarratione pronuntiata.” 132. Petrarch, Fam. 24.12.22; ed. Rossi, 4:259: “Nempe ille Theocritum in Bucolicis ducem nactus, in Georgicis Hesiodum, quemque suis locis inseruit. ‘Et cur’ inquies, ‘tertium in heroyco carmine ducem habens, nulla eius operis in parte me posuit?” (Naturally, with Theocritus as his guide in the Bucolica and Hesiod in the Georgica, he named each in his proper place. “And why,” you will say, “having chosen me as his third guide in his heroic poem, does he make no mention of me in his work?” [trans. Bernardo, 3:346]). 133. Gale’s Virgil on the Nature of Things is in many ways a response to this very problem. 134. See Galand-Hallyn, “Ange Politien et l’équivoque intertextuelle.”


in Poliziano’s poem. In reading a poetic introduction to the Georgics, as Poliziano describes it, we might expect at least some reference to the long passages on the Noric plague that Macrobius documented at length in the Saturnalia and that dragged Petrarch’s pen beyond what he intended. What we find, however, is that this central figure of the plague is completely absent from Poliziano’s mind in the Rusticus. With almost no exaggeration, in fact, Virgil’s extensive imitation of book 6 of De rerum natura turns out to be the only section of the Georgics that Poliziano does not touch in his exhaustive rehashing of the poem. It was not, of course, that he had simply forgotten the Lucretian echoes in Virgil’s description of the plague. In fact, like Petrarch, he had scrupulously copied out all of the relevant passages from the Saturnalia in his personal manuscript. By obscuring in the Rusticus the traces of Virgil’s disaster, even attempting to write around them, Poliziano was actively avoiding the deadly strains of the Epicurean poet in Virgil—an omission as meaningful in this context as a literary allusion. In a way, this is not entirely surprising. Though Lucretius insisted that the Athenian plague reached both country and city, the plague had no place in the golden world of the Rusticus, and literally none in the allusions of Poliziano’s poem. Some men and women of Quattrocento Florence fled the city precisely to escape contagion, and Poliziano himself was no stranger to running from the plague. In a letter he wrote in 1478 to Lucrezia, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s mother, the beleaguered poet describes the less-than-ideal conditions of his stay at the suburban villa 135. Poliziano, Commento inedito, 185–88. Poliziano even copies out Macrobius’s observation that Virgil had borrowed Lucretius’s plague episode in nearly all its details. 136. As H. S. Commager Jr. has pointed out: “Thucydides records the crowding into the city of the country people, compelled, of course, by the Spartan invasion of Attica. Lucretius rather allows the plague to embrace the countryside as well, broadening its scope rather than concentrating it. Every shepherd, herdsman, and farmer is affected” (“Lucretius’ Interpretation of the Plague,” 108). 137. Ann G. Carmichael points out that “in contrast to the devastating effects of plague on rural areas in the fourteenth century, the countryside was usually spared this scourge during the fifteenth century” (Carmichael, Plague and the Poor, 1). On the experience of chance and misfortune in this period, see esp. Santoro, Fortuna, ragione e prudenza.


of Cafaggiolo, where he escaped the plague with Lorenzo’s irritable wife and children. Written several years before the publication of the Rusticus, the letter paints a very different picture of country life from the one Poliziano later imagined in the poem: Here I stand by the fireside, in my great coat and slippers, that you might take me for the very figure of melancholy. Indeed I am the same at all times; for I neither see, nor hear, nor do any thing that gives me pleasure, so much am I affected by the thoughts of our calamities; sleeping and waking they still continue to haunt me. Two days since we were all rejoicing upon hearing that the plague had ceased—now we are depressed on being informed that some symptoms of it yet remain. Were we at Florence we should have some consolation, were it only that of seeing Lorenzo when he returned to his house; but here we are in continual anxiety, and I, for my part, am half dead with solitude and weariness. The plague and the war are incessantly in my mind. I lament past misfortunes and anticipate future evils; and I have no longer at my side my dear Madonna Lucretia, to whom I might unbosom my cares.

A persistent anxiety possesses the poet, who describes himself in this letter as virtually reduced to the image of Melancholia that Dürer would engrave in the next century. Unlike the happy rural dweller of his Rusticus, Poliziano was stuck indoors, unable to get the plague off his mind. Besides this very personal experience, Poliziano gives us another ex138. Poliziano to Lucrezia de’ Medici, 18 December 1478. Translated in Roscoe, Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, 2:126; Poliziano, Prose volgari e poesie latine e greche, 67– 68: “Io mi sto in casa al fuoco in zoccoli et in palandrano, che vi parrei la malinconia, se voi mi vedessi; ma forse mi pajo io in ogni modo, et non fo, nè veggo, nè sento cosa che mi dilecti, immodo mi sono accorato per questi nostri casi. Et dormendo et vegliando sempre ho nel capo questa albagia. Eravamo due di fa tutti in su l’ale, perchè intendemo non esser costà più moria: hora tutti siamo rimasti basosi, intendendo, che pur va pizzicando qualche cosa. Quando siamo costà, habbiamo pur qualche refrigerio, quando non fussi mai altro se non vedere ritornare Lorenzo a casa. Quì tuttavia dubitiamo, et d’ogni cosa: et quanto a me vi prometto, che io affogo nell’accidia, in tanta solitudine mi truovo. . . . rimangomi solo, et quando sono restucco dello studio, mi do a razolare tra morie et guerre, et dolore del passato et paura dell’advenire. . . . Non truovo quì la mia Mona Lucretia in camera, colla quale io possi sfogarmi, et muojo di tedio.”


cuse to forget the plague when he celebrates his good friend Marsilio Ficino. Ten years before the publication of the Rusticus, in a verse letter to Bartolomeo Fonzio, Poliziano had paid homage to Ficino, the great Renaissance reviver of Platonic philosophy and the man, he said, who taught him everything he knew about the universe. At the end of describing the various achievements of his friend, Poliziano makes an implicit connection between the Epicurean philosophy of Lucretius and the threat of contamination: Hinc me digressum Marsilius excipit ingens, Non minus ingenio qui favet usque meo. Hic aperit, quanto currunt vaga sidera lapsu, Altus agit quali tramite Phoebus equos; Hic docet, undeni resecant ut sidera circi, Cur nitido tantum lacteus orbe patet, Ut cum patre Venus miseris mortalibus aequa est, Cur saepe obscuris Luna laborat equis, Aurea cur celso pendentia vincula mundo Maeonii finxit Musa beata senis, Cur saepe aerii luctantur in aequore venti, Cur glacie et saeva grandine terra riget Atque eadem Icario cur mox perrumpitur aestu, Cur pluvius madidas combibit arcus aquas, Quae causa est vernum laxari fulmine coelum, An ruat e puro stella serena polo. Et modo pallentes humano corpore morbos, Qua valeam, medica pellere monstrat ope. Impia non sani turbat modo dicta Lucreti, Imminet erratis nunc, Epicure, tuis. [From here, the great Marsilio Ficino, who always supported my talent no less, receives me as I digress. In this place, he reveals to me on what great course the errant stars run, on what kind of path lofty Phoebus drives his horses. He teaches how the eleven orbits trim the stars, 139. On Poliziano’s relation to Ficino, see Maïer, Ange Politien, 34–36. 140. The text of the poem may be found as an appendix in Maïer, Ange Politien, 72– 77; my translation. On Poliziano’s elegy to Fonzio, see Bettinzoli, Daedaleum iter, 11–37.


why the milky one stands open so far with its gleaming orbit, so that to wretched mortals Venus is equal to her father; why the moon often toils with her darkened horses; why the blessed muse of old Homer invented golden chains hanging from on high; why the airy winds often wrestle on the surface of the sea; why the earth stiffens with ice and savage hail; and why the same is broken through with Icarian heat; why the rainbow drinks up the moist waters; why the spring sky is loosened by the thunderbolt, and the skies are shaken with lightning; or why the serene star falls from the pure zone of the heavens. And now he shows how to expel diseases pallid in the human body with the help of medicine, through which I am made well. And now he overturns the impious sayings of insane Lucretius, and now, Epicurus, he threatens your errors.]

Reading this portrait of Ficino, Ida Maïer once suggested that it was reminiscent of the one Pseudo-Plutarch painted of the vates Homer, which elsewhere Poliziano drew upon to praise the bard. What is most striking here, however, is the curious sympathy between Poliziano’s portrait and his description of the countryman in the Rusticus. Both the philosopher and his poetic counterpart had read the Georgics and had been schooled in the rules of astronomy, the laws of eclipses and the phases of the moon, and the “fires” of Phoebus in the sky. Both understood the governing principles of the universe and were able to apply their practical knowledge to the divination of causes and the amelioration of man’s wretched state. Here, however, Poliziano adds one important detail to his account of Ficino that is only implicit in the Rusticus: Ficino expels (pellere) diseases of the body, driving out the author of De rerum natura and his wicked philosopher. These curious last few lines remind us that Ficino himself was something of an expert at avoiding the plague, and other dangerous influences. Indeed, just three years before the publication of the Rusticus, the Platonist had stepped down from his lofty philosophical heights to compose a practical handbook on how to recognize the signs of the plague and to avoid the threat of contamination—a text that was writ141. Maïer, Ange Politien, 35 n. 85. 142. Bettinzoli, Daedaleum iter, 33 n. 60. 143. See Poliziano, Rusticus, lines 448–550.


ten in the vernacular for the benefit of “every Tuscan person.” As a practical Ficino advised in the pages of the Consilio, “flee quickly and long and return late.” Some version of this advice seemed to apply to literary matters as well, particularly when they involved the text of De rerum natura and its wicked author. Toward the end of his life, Ficino would recount the story of how he once produced a “little commentary” (commentariolum) on Lucretius in his youth—a commentary that he was later compelled to burn, as the divine Plato was said to have burned his own juvenilia. To quote his contemporary Janus Pannonius, Ficino had done everything “within [his] power to remove [Lucretius] from men’s consideration.” 144. Ficino, Consilio contra la pestilenza, 55: “ogni persona toscana.” 145. Ficino, Consilio contra la pestilenza, 108: “Sopra tucto fuggi dal luogo pestilenziale presto et di lungi, et torna tardi.” 146. See Ficino, Opera omnia, 1:933: “Adeo ut neque commentariolis in Lucretium meis, quae puer adhuc (nescio quomodo) commentabar deinde pepercerim; haec enim, sicut et Plato tragoedias elegiasque suas, Volcano dedi” (Hence, I did not even spare the little commentary I prepared (somehow or other) on Lucretius when still a boy, but consigned it to the flames, as Plato did with his tragedies and elegies). Cited, translated, and discussed in Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2:457. We do not know the exact date of the commentary, though Kristeller has suggested it was probably written during the period of De voluptate in 1457. See Kristeller, in Ficino, Supplementum Ficinianum, 1:163. In a letter written to Poliziano, Ficino vehemently denounces epistles written in a “Lucretian” style that he insists had been wrongly attributed to him. I deal with this loaded episode in Ficino’s biography and the long history of its interpretation in more detail in a forthcoming article, “Burning Lucretius: On Ficino’s Lost Commentary.” 147. Pannonius uses Ficino’s early dalliance with Lucretius to challenge the notion that the philosopher’s revival of Platonism was divinely ordained. See Ficino, Opera omnia, 1:871: “Quod autem haec non tam providentia quam fato quodam fiant abs te illud etiam argumento est quod ante haec omnia antiquum quendam philosophum sive poetam, utpote adhuc adolescens, leviter propagasti, quem deinde meliori fretus consilio suppressisti, & (ut audio) pro viribus extraxisti, neque fuerat illud divinae providentiae munus quod ipse aetate prudentior factus merito iudicasti damnandum” (However, the argument that you did these things not guided by providence but at a time that fate alone determined is clearly demonstrated by the fact that, before you embarked on all these projects, you had rather unthinkingly championed the cause of a certain ancient philosopher and poet [i.e., Lucretius]. At the time you were still young. Subsequently, relying on better counsel


If, indeed, Ficino was one of the models for Poliziano’s Rusticus, then it would make sense that the plague would be foreign to his idealized vision of a world without the threat of uncertain disaster. Like Ficino, Poliziano would attempt to blot out the disastrous strains of Lucretius and the contagion that loomed large in the background of Virgil’s poem—something not lost on Poliziano’s early readers, some of whom were especially sensitive to it. In the preface to his commentary edition of the Rusticus (1514), Nicolas Bérault laid bare exactly what was at stake in reading Poliziano’s poem for philosophy: For what, I ask, is better suited for asserting the Providence of immortal God? What is more appropriate than to learn about the works of nature, that is to say, of Providence? For as Cicero writes in his book on the divine nature of the universe, many great and noble philosophers, who believed that the whole world is administered and ruled by divine reason, that God cares for the lives of men, that He provides them with the fruits of the earth and the changing of the seasons (by which everything that the earth brings forth and supplies for men with such generous abundance grows to fruition), took divine Providence as a first principle; and from their understanding of the works of nature, or rather the works of some heavenly intelligence, they grasped the fact that this highest nature is in no way indifferent or idle, as Epicurus had dreamed up. you withdrew your support, and since then, I hear you have done all within your power to remove him from men’s consideration. This cannot have been the gift of divine providence, if later you appropriately judged him worthy of condemnation, having arrived at an age of greater discretion). Cited, translated, and discussed in Allen, Synoptic Art, 5–6. 148. Bérault, preface to Poliziano, Rusticus, ed. Bérault, sig. A2r: “Etenim quid, obsecro, ad adserendam immortalis dei prouidentiam aptius? Quid convenientius quam naturae, id est, providentiae opera cognoscere? Nam quod Cicero de divina natura scribit, philosophi magni & nobiles, qui divina mente ac ratione mundum omne administrari ac regi censuerunt, & a deo Optimo Maximo uitae hominum consuli & provideri ex variis terrae frugibus, vicibusque temporum ac coeli mutationibus, quibus omnia, quae terra mortalibus abunde gignit, ac indulgentissime suppeditat, maturata pubescunt, divinam primum adstruxere providentiam; atque ex naturae seu coelestis cuiuspiam intelligentiae operibus primum intellexerunt supremam illam naturam neutique esse ociosam ac desidem, quod Epicurus somniabat”; my translation.


The Epicurean idea of a universe governed only by chance was the direct opposite of Bérault’s glittering vision of Providence and divine synthesis epitomized by the literary magic of Poliziano’s poem. Here again we might be reminded of Macrobius’s vision of Virgil’s poem as a reflection of divine creation and synthesis, a second nature. In digesting the poetry of Virgil, it would seem, Poliziano had inherited some of the ancient poet’s syncretic powers. Indeed, as Bérault describes it in his commentary, the Rusticus was another Neoplatonic livre du monde that signaled the presence of the divine in its spectacle of varietas, a vision embodied and reflected in the very copiousness of the poet’s literary technique. In a context such as this, where literary allusions are mapped onto philosophical ones (however imperfectly), is it a surprise that the plague went missing from the harmonious world of the Rusticus? Bérault gives us another clue to understanding this absence in Poliziano’s poem, this time in a short letter of dedication that he composed for the second edition of Giovan Battista Pio’s De rerum natura, published in Paris the same year as his commentary on the Rusticus. In 149. See Poliziano, Rusticus, ed. Bérault, sig. 4r. See also Galand-Hallyn, “Nicolas Bérault, lecteur de Politien,” 423–24. 150. For a reader such as Bérault, there was much at stake in Poliziano’s literary allusions—nothing less perhaps than the structure of the world itself. In a moment toward the end of his notes on the Rusticus, for example, Bérault would express a serious concern about the authority of the textual traditions on which the poet had based his knowledge of the natural world—and, more specifically, a concern about the didactic authority of Hesiod. In the lines in question, Poliziano is borrowing directly from Hesiod in order to discuss which days of the month are suitable for marriage—a literary allusion that left the commentator scratching his head. The “reasons” (rationes) for selecting these days might seem “ridiculous and frivolous,” Bérault wrote, and he would not “bind [his] faith” to them. As he reminds us here, even Poliziano himself had his doubts and “did not wish to uphold these things superstitiously, which to a great degree had been brought forth by the credulity of the vulgar, rather than by any causes of nature [naturae causis].” Bérault is referring us here to a well-known letter that Poliziano had written to his friend Pico della Mirandola in which the poet himself had taken another look at the Rusticus, calling into question the “laws of the ancient poets” (antiqui vatis legibus) that he had followed so closely in the poem in light of Pico’s skepticism. Poliziano, Rusticus, ed. Bérault, sig. 50v, and Opera omnia, 1:168. See Grafton, Commerce with the Classics, 124.


Bérault’s words: “Therefore it happened that those who had previously recoiled from [the poet’s] works as being overly gloomy and, in their own words, infected, as though from a disreputable and plague-ridden house, now eagerly read and welcome this new commentary on Lucretius and Lucretius himself, and they openly praise Pio for the breadth and depth of his learning and the brilliance and ease of his style.” Because Bérault was writing this dedication around the same time that he was working on Poliziano’s poem or just after, it seems very likely that he was thinking of Poliziano or Ficino when he spoke of those who were running from the plague of Lucretius. In the movement from his learned commentary on the Rusticus to his dedication in Pio’s edition of De rerum natura, Bérault himself appears to have experienced something like a change of heart. Yet if Poliziano was indeed running from the plague in the poem, as all of this suggests, he did not (and perhaps could not) forget about it entirely. This compulsive ironist knew very well that influence (like contagion itself) was not something easily controlled, and that writing around a literary problem was another way of drawing attention to it. At the end of the day, not all diseases could be predicted and cured by Platonists. According to Lucretius, not even the countryman was immune to the threat of disaster—the kind of invisible disaster that, Petrarch knew, ravages you from the inside out. As Lucretius had written it: “By this time the shepherd and the herdsman and also the brawny guide of the curved plough were all fainting; their bodies lay huddled up in the recesses of their huts, given over to death by poverty and disease.” A glance at Poliziano’s Sylva in scabiem (a poem com151. Bérault, dedication to Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Pio, 2nd ed.: “Qua re factum ut qui antehac ab eius scriptis ceu morosis nimium &, ut eorum ipsorum verbo utar, putidulis non aliter quam ab infami aliqua ac pestilente domo abhorruerant novam hanc in Lucretium interpretationem, Lucretiumque ipsum avide nunc legant & amplectantur, ingenue fatentes Pio praeter variam reconditamque doctrinam nec stili candorem facultatemque deesse”; my translation. 152. Lucretius, DRN 6.1252–55: “Praeterea iam pastor et armentarius omnis / et robustus item curvi moderator aratri / languebat, penitusque casa contrusa iacebant / corpora paupertate et morbo dedita morti.”


posed roughly between 1475 and 1478 and rediscovered by Paul Oskar Kristeller in 1952) reveals an intense preoccupation with the images of contagion that were displaced in the Rusticus. In this weird experimental poem, Poliziano records in grotesque detail the symptoms and course of scabies, which he claims to have suffered from himself, and makes a plea to Lorenzo de’ Medici to cure him. Attilio Bettinzoli has described the poem nicely as a “masterpiece of the absurd and a voyage to the limits of language”—a poem in which Poliziano’s polymorphous literary practice reaches a density that is nearly “unsustainable.” Then there was Poliziano’s meditation on contagion in an elegy written on the occasion of the death of a young woman in 1473 in which the poet lends his pen to the personification of Fever. As Alessandro Perosa has shown, it is here, finally, that Poliziano returns to the horrific images of the Athenian plague from De rerum natura that were banished from the golden world of the Rusticus, giving a new and perhaps darker valence to what scholars sometimes like to call the poet’s technique of contamination. The troubling figures of contagion in the Sylva in scabiem and the characterization of Fever are emblematic of a deeper tension in the work of a poet who frequently wavered between a fantasy of the total integration and wholeness of tradition and its seductive and terrifying opposite, the nightmare of Orpheus violently ripped apart limb from limb—as Greene has described it, “the past dismembered.” To invoke Petrarch again: “A serious disease is not easily hidden since it breaks out and becomes visible through its own peculiar features.” As a source for Poliziano, Lucretius represented at once a prophet of scientific rationalism, tranquility, and pleasure and a fierce critic of modernity whose poem ends unhappily, not in the optimism of the Rusticus, 153. Poliziano, Sylva in scabiem. 154. Bettinzoli, Daedaleum iter, 59–65. 155. Perosa, “Febris,” 93–94. On Poliziano’s contaminatio, see esp. Greene, Light in Troy, 156–62 and 168–69; and Galand-Hallyn, “Ange Politien et l’équivoque intertextuelle.” 156. “The Past Dismembered” is the title of Greene’s chapter on Poliziano in Light in Troy.


but in the horrific memory of the Athenian plague. Behind Poliziano’s own attempt to assimilate Lucretius into the texture of the Rusticus, we discover a question about the limits of the poet’s ability to be “happy” knowing the “causes of things,” to borrow the famous words from Virgil’s Georgics that Poliziano echoes loudly in the opening of his poem. What E. H. Gombrich once wrote in his intellectual biography of Aby Warburg might well be said here of the literary fiction of the Rusticus: “All these human attempts to achieve order and detachment in the welter of frightening impressions which impinge on the mind are by themselves precarious. Man is surrounded by chaos, by fear, and the serenity promised by the activity of art is no less unstable than the rationality achieved by the causal explanations of science.” Warburg himself was frequently haunted by irrational fears, including the fear of catching epidemic diseases even from vast distances. Perhaps this was part of what made him so sensitive to the presence of Lucretius in the world of the Rusticus, and to the Epicurean wind he felt blowing through the hair of Botticelli’s figures and their garments. We might observe here in passing that in his clinical notes Warburg’s psychotherapist, 157. See Virgil, Georgics 2.490–94: “Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, / atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum / subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari. / fortunatus et ille, deos qui novit agrestis, / Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores” (Blessed is he who has succeeded in learning the laws of nature’s working, has cast beneath his feet all fear and fate’s implacable decree, and the howl of insatiable Death. But happy, too, is he who knows the rural gods, Pan and aged Silvanus and the sisterhood of the Nymphs). As Monica Gale and others have argued, Virgil here is framing a tension between two incompatible worldviews: Epicurean rationalism and Hesiodic superstition. For the modern debate concerning the presence of Lucretius in these lines see Gale, “Virgil’s Metamorphosis,” 96, and Virgil on the Nature of Things, 8–11; Thomas, Virgil: Georgics, 1:253; Hardie, Virgil’s “Aeneid,” 40; and Nelis, “Georgics 2.458–542.” Cf. Poliziano, Rusticus, lines 17–22: “Felix ille animi divisque simillimus ipsis, / quem non mendaci resplendens gloria fuco / sollicitat, non fastosi mala gaudia luxus, / sed tacitos sinit ire dies et paupere cultu / exigit innocuae tranquilla silentia vitae, / urbe procul, voti exiguus” (Happy in spirit and comparable to the gods themselves is the man who is not attracted by the lure of glory with its false splendors or by the evil pleasures of haughty luxury, but allows the days to go by quietly and in his modest way of life spends his days in the silent tranquility of a blameless life, far from the city, with few desires). 158. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 79.


Ludwig Binswanger, would tellingly recall Ovid (and not Lucretius) as the source of Warburg’s great discovery. I want to end this chapter with one last figure of absent presence that both dramatizes the problem of integrating Lucretius into the classical tradition and invites us to reimagine the very idea of tradition itself in light of the Epicurean poet. The passage I have in mind is from another piece by Poliziano from the Silvae called the Nutricia, which was composed as the inaugural lecture for his course on poetics in 1486–87—a poem that celebrates the divine art of poetry in already Lucretian terms as a force “that carries off human minds with her to the secret recesses of the starry heavens.” It is here, in the context of this sweeping vision, that Poliziano vividly imagines the furor of the inspired poet—a furor he hoped to exemplify in practice in the Silvae: Ipsaque Niliacis longum mandata papyris carmina Phoebeos videas afflare furores et caeli spirare fidem; quin sancta legentem concutiunt parili turbam contagia moto deque aliis alios idem proseminat ardor pectoris instinctu vates, ceu ferreus olim anulus, arcana quem vi Magnesia cautes sustulerit, longam nexu pendente catenam implicat et caecis inter se conserit hamis. 159. Binswanger and Warburg, Die unendliche Heilung: Aby Warburgs Krankengeschichte, 261: “Studierte ziemlich lange, Examen bei Janitschek, Strassburg, Doktorarbeit über Botticelli mit erheblichen Entdeckung (Rückführung der Flora auf Stelle in Ovid). War sehr systematischer Arbeiter, minutiöses Zettelkasten” (Studied for quite a long time, took finals with Janitschek, Strassburg, Ph.D. thesis on Botticelli with important discovery (the tracing back of Flora in a passage from Ovid). Was a very systematic worker, had a most detailed system of index cards); my translation. What starts out here in the doctor’s note as a description of Warburg’s working habits quickly devolves into an account of his neuroses. 160. Poliziano, Nutricia, lines 21–22: “Humanas augusta Poetica mentes / siderei rapiens secum in penetralia caeli.” All citations and translations of the Nutricia follow Fantazzi’s edition of the Silvae. For the sustained pattern of Lucretian echoes in the Nutricia, see Pizzani, “L’erramento ferino.” 161. Poliziano, Nutricia, lines 188– 98. Cited and discussed in Coppini, “L’ispirazione per contagio,” 128.


[You could see that the poems themselves, committed long ago to the Nile’s papyruses, transmitted the Apollonian inspiration and breathed the music of the celestial lyre; indeed a sacred contagion [contagia] excites the throng of readers with a like enthusiasm and the same ardor passes from one poet to engender inspiration in the heart of others, like the iron ring lifted up by the hidden force of a Magnesian stone that attaches to itself a long chain in a pendant bond and fastens them together with invisible hooks [caecis hamis].]

The image is, as we know, highly conventional, originating in the rhapsodic singer from Plato’s Ion (533D–E). What is surprising here is that Poliziano is slyly integrating the invisible hooks of Lucretius’s description of magnetic force, in his own way recalling what Statius had once said about “the high frenzy of learned Lucretius” (docti furor arduus Lucreti). In the Platonic Theology, Ficino himself listed the author of De rerum natura among the various ancient vates who had been possessed by a divine frenzy, though later in the same text he would say that the Epicurean poet was prone to a state of melancholy rather than furor. By holding the Platonic and Lucretian traditions in a kind of invisible suspension in the passage above, Poliziano is laying bare the conflict 162. Poliziano uses this metaphor again in a letter to his friend Girolamo Donà when he describes his debt to Pico della Mirandola. See Poliziano, Letters, 1:118– 19. For Poliziano’s use and transformation of this topos, see in general Coppini, “L’ispirazione per contagio.” 163. See Lucretius, DRN 6.910– 16: “Hunc homines lapidem mirantur; quippe catenam / saepe ex anellis reddit pendentibus ex se. / Quinque etenim licet interdum plurisque videre / ordine demisso levibus iactarier auris, / unus ubi ex uno dependet subter adhaerens / ex alioque alius lapidis vim vinclaque noscit: / usque adeo permanantur vis pervalet eius” (This stone astonishes men, because it often makes a chain out of little rings hanging from it. For you may sometimes see five or more hanging in a string and swayed by a light breeze, where one hangs from another attached beneath it, and one from another learns the stone’s power and attraction: to such a distance does its power hold force, oozing through and through). Donatella Coppini notes this Lucretian contamination but suggests that it operates “exclusively on the expressive level” (Coppini, “L’ispirazione per contagio,” 128– 29). Ubaldo Pizzani has argued that the presence of Lucretius represents a kind of dialectical tension, but one that is ultimately resolved into a Christian-Platonic viewpoint (Pizzani, “L’erramento ferino,” 405). 164. Ficino, Platonic Theology, 4:126–27 and 308.


between these philosophical and literary sources even as he attempts to resolve it. In the meantime, he is also giving us another figure of contagia, here imagined as a “sacred contagion” but also pointing to a deadly one. As James I. Porter reminds us, there is only a short space in De rerum natura between Lucretius’s account of the physics of magnetism and his account of plague, the poet’s “fatal attraction.” In its own subtle way, this instance of imitative contaminatio in the Nutricia allegorizes the “hidden force” of materialism in the work of a poet transmitting his knowledge, making Poliziano the heir to the literary contagion he inherited from Virgil, Macrobius, and Petrarch. What finally surfaces in this story is not only a forgotten strain of Lucretian influence, but what we might properly call an idea of transmission itself. From the figure of Petrarch’s pen, dragged beyond what he intended, to Poliziano’s technique of contamination, we may see a form of literary materialism emerging again in the very practice of these humanists and poets, a materialism made visible in the sympathetic intercourse between one reader and another. 165. Lucretius himself uses the word contagia to describe the ravages of disease at DRN 6.1236. 166. See Porter, “Lucretius and the Sublime,” 219–20.

*2* The Philologist and the Epicurean

In 1850 Karl Lachmann dazzled his contemporaries by tracing the manuscript tradition of De rerum natura back to its lost “archetype.” Describing this phantom object with “an almost mathematical certainty,” Lachmann told his readers the number of pages the archetype contained, the lines per page, and even the kind of script that had been used to write it (a thing, he said, that can be known by its many signs). And so the philologist became another German magician—a Faustus conjuring up the ghostly remains of Helen, “the face that launched a thousand ships,” or, in this case, all of the existing manuscripts of De rerum natura. In what seems like a flash, Lachmann’s Lucretian archetype was celebrated as the glittering icon of a method of recension and emendation and thought to be, as his fellow philologist H. A. J. Munro described it, “a landmark for scholars as long as the Latin language continues to be studied, a work, perfidiae quod post nulla arguet aetas [which no subsequent age will accuse of falsehood].” Munro, it turns out, was hardly a prophet, a matter to which we will return shortly. For now, the story of Lachmann’s archetype is our point of entry into another episode in the material history of Lucretius’s poem: its physical reconstruction. In the previous chapter we looked at the ways in which the poet’s materialism crept into humanist thought and literary practice through an indirect transmission; in this chapter I want to explore how the poetry of atoms and the void came to reflect the material idea of the text itself. My question is: how did reading a poem which said that let1. On the concept of the archetype, see Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, 49–51; and Rizzo, Il lessico filologico, 308–17. 2. Hertz, Karl Lachmann, 142. Cited in Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, 108. 3. Munro, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Munro, 2:16. Munro is citing a wellknown passage from Catullus 64.321–22.

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ters are like atoms inform the practice of the philologist piecing the text back together from near ruins? This kind of question might at first seem counterintuitive with respect to our modern notion of what a philologist is or should be. In his essay on Hermann Usener, for example, Arnaldo Momigliano went out of his way to insist that Lachmann had no particular investment in De rerum natura or its philosophy and “could pass from Lucretius’s poetry to the prose of the Roman land-surveyors (agrimensores) when the task was to produce an honest text.” There were, after all, reasons for Lachmann to turn his attention to the poetry of Lucretius, even if they were not always as “honest” as the text he hoped to produce. If some readers saw the textual critic as a man unmoved and, more important, untouched by what he read, however, others discovered in Lachmann’s edition of De rerum natura the traces of an intimacy that one suspects he did not share with the Roman land surveyors. As E. J. Kenney has explained, Lachmann’s “apparently inexorable logic . . . offered the incentive to the entranced reader to see in [him] the Epicurus of his subject and to hail him in the very words of the poet, ‘O tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen / qui primus potuisti . . .’ [O you who first amid so great a darkness were able to raise aloft a light so clear].” Recalling Lachmann in the preface to his late nineteenth-century edition, Munro too had demonstrated precisely how “difficult” it was “not to be reminded of Lucretius”: [Lachmann’s] native sagacity, guided and sharpened by long and varied experience, saw at a glance [the manuscripts’] relations to each other and to the original from whence they were derived, and made clear the arbitrary way in which the common texts had been constructed. His zeal warming as he advanced, one truth after another revealed itself to 4. Momigliano, “New Paths of Classicism,” 39. 5. One of them surely was the paucity of manuscripts of De rerum natura—a fact that allowed Lachmann’s so-called method to be “fully adapted” in ways that were ultimately unfeasible for other textual traditions. Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, 123. 6. Kenney, Classical Text, 106. Kenney is citing Lucretius, DRN 3.1–2. 7. Kenney, Classical Text, 108.

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him, so that at length he obtained by successive steps a clear insight into the condition in which the poem left the hands of its author in the most essential points.”

This should sound familiar. In fact, Munro was adapting a well-known passage from De rerum natura, taking the poet’s words as much-needed advice for the self-doubting philologist. As Lucretius had explained to his readers: “So you will gain a thorough understanding of these matters led on with very little effort; for one thing will become clear by another, and blind night will not steal your path and prevent you from seeing the uttermost recesses of nature: so clearly will truths kindle light for truths.” For the Epicurean initiate, it was the truth of a nature that lay beyond the threshold of sensory perception. For the textual critic, it was the poem itself imagined beyond the oldest existing manuscript— the fantasy of the text as it left the hands of its ancient author, or at least “in the most essential points.” As we shall see, the analogy between the philologist and the Epicurean that we have begun to uncover (if imperfectly) in Lachmann has a much longer history, one that spans from the idea of the poem’s archetype in the nineteenth century back to its most ancient readers, who struggled to make it whole, or even to imagine it as whole. Saint Jerome once claimed that Cicero first “emended” or “corrected” the text of De rerum natura, though what he meant by “emend” is hard to say. Cicero 8. Munro, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Munro, 2:15. 9. Lucretius, DRN 1.1114– 17: “Haec sic pernosces parva perductus opella; / namque alid ex alio clarescet, nec tibi caeca / nox iter eripiet quin ultima naturai / pervideas: ita res accendent lumina rebus.” 10. Jerome gives the following short account of Lucretius and his poem in his continuation of the Eusebian chronicle: “Titus Lucretius poeta nascitur. Qui postea amatorio poculo in furorem versus, cum aliquot libros per intervalla insaniae conscripsisset, quos postea Cicero emendavit, propria se manu interfecit anno aetatis XLIIII” (Titus Lucretius, the poet, was born. Later he was driven mad by a lovephiltre, after he had written several books in the intervals of insanity; Cicero subsequently corrected these books; Lucretius died by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of his life) (Jerome, Interpretatio chronicae Eusebii Pamphili, in Migne, PL 27:523; trans. Hadzsits, Lucretius and His Influence, 5). Reading this passage, Lachmann insisted that it was not Cicero but rather his brother Quintus who corrected the text, for, as he explained it, Quintus was not partial to any one philosophical


himself only mentions Lucretius once, in a letter to his brother Quintus: “Lucretius’s poetry is as you say—sparkling with many lights of genius, but plenty of technical skill.” Jerome also famously reported that Lucretius composed his poem between “fits of madness,” which raises other questions about the text and its production, and about the uneasy relation between genius, madness, and technical skill. A poem written in such a haphazard way, as Luciano Canfora has wittily suggested, must have demanded some form of philological attention from its first inception. The history of philology has been entangled with the poetry of materialism ever since. In what follows in these pages, I want to explore specifically what was transacted between the Epicurean poet and his Renaissance readers at a moment when both the discipline of philology and the text of De rerum natura were beginning to take shape for the first time since antiquity. To quote one of those readers, Michel de Montaigne: “Anyone I regard with attention easily imprints on me something of himself.” This is the story of the quelque chose that was imprinted on a group of readers who beheld Lucretius with at least one form of the very closest attention.

Poeticus Afflatus The Bolognese humanist Filippo Beroaldo was famous the world over for his way of teaching ancient texts, sometimes attracting three hundred students at a time to hear his lectures in the crowded halls of the University of Bologna. It was a gift that allowed him to inhabit the school. On this point, see Butler, Matter of the Page, 37. On Lucretius’s biography, see Holford-Strevens, “Horror vacui in Lucretian Biography”; and, in general, Canfora, Vita di Lucrezio. 11. Cicero, Ad Quintum fratrem 2.10.3: “Lucreti poemata ut scribis ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis.” I have altered the Loeb translation slightly. 12. Canfora, Vita di Lucrezio, 24. 13. Montaigne, Essais 3.5; trans. Frame, 667; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 875: “Qui que je regarde avec attention m’imprime facilement quelque chose du sien.” 14. Gaisser, “Teaching Classics in the Renaissance,” 2. See also Sabbadini, Storia del ciceronianismo; and D’Amico, “The Progress of Renaissance Latin Prose.”


mind of his author and to interject himself and his city into the world of the text. Commenting on the description of the house of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius, for example, Beroaldo described in detail the architecture of a villa outside Bologna. At other times he scattered personal details such as the announcement of his marriage to his wife, Camilla, and the birth of his child. More than a mere affectation (as some inevitably complained), for Beroaldo this practice was a habit of mind that allowed him to get closer to the text he was reading, to enter into its linguistic and cultural domains and see it through his own eyes. In composing his digressions—or flosculi, as they were sometimes called— Beroaldo would even imitate the style of the author he was working on, whether it was Cicero, Apuleius, or Suetonius, exhibiting what Julia Haig Gaisser has described as “an almost necromantic ability.” For Beroaldo the cultivation of this intellectual sympathy allowed for a powerful exchange between a text and its commentator. It was a transference, he said, that reflected the inspiration of the poet, who composed his works in a state of furor—an image that looks back to the figure of the Platonic rhapsode that Poliziano had described with Lucretian undertones in the Nutricia and to the image of Bembo’s iron interpreter with which we began. “A poet is not good without divine inspiration,” Beroaldo wrote, “nor is a commentator good without a poetic spirit [poeticus afflatus].” In unwrapping the text and illuminating its obscurities, the commentator was transformed into another ring on the 15. On the history and form of Beroaldo’s literary practice of scattering anecdotes in his commentaries, see esp. Casella, “Il metodo dei commentari umanistici”; Gaisser, Fortunes of Apuleius and the “Golden Ass,” 197–242; Krautter, Philologische Methode und humanistiche Existenz; and Gombrich, “Beroaldus on Francia.” 16. Gaisser, “Teaching Classics in the Renaissance,” 4. Not everyone appreciated Beroaldo’s style of commentary. One of his less generous sixteenth-century critics, Francesco Florido Sabino (1511– 47), complained that Beroaldo’s “style” had become so popular, had spread so far and wide—like a kind of disease—that it would be almost impossible to eradicate it unless all his pupils died off or there was a law forbidding the sale of his work. See Sabino, Lectiones subcisivae II, in Gruter, Lampas, 1:1121. 17. Beroaldo, Commentarii in Propertium, fol. a2r: “Non est sine deo bonus poeta, non est sine poetico afflatu bonus interpreter.”


magnetic chain—an extension of the poet’s wisdom. Unfortunately for us, Beroaldo did not feel the pull of Lucretius’s invisible hooks—at least not entirely. Despite having borrowed extensively from the Epicurean poet in his short treatise on earthquakes and plagues in 1505, the Bolognese commentator never got around to producing his own edition of De rerum natura—a poem whose “many lights of genius,” he said, echoing Cicero, were “obscured by the all-consuming darkness of error.” But what would it mean for a reader, and in particular a Renaissance reader concerned with reconstructing the text, to absorb the afflatus of a poet who said that the soul was mortal? We come upon one kind of answer in the first commentary edition of the poem in the Renaissance by Beroaldo’s student Giovan Battista Pio, whose own scattered digressions—on earthquakes and the deaths of both his beloved parents and teacher—mark the commentary in a particularly somber way. By imitating Beroaldo’s famous anecdotal style in the service of Lucretius’s poem, Pio was putting some pressure on his teacher’s notion of the poetic afflatus, and perhaps even making a kind of serious joke in the midst of all of the somberness. If Beroaldo had said that the reader must be possessed by the “spirit” of an author, as a Platonic rhapsode was possessed by Homer, to absorb the afflatus of Lucretius, that most un-Platonic of poets, was ironically to confront 18. Beroaldo, Commentarii in Propertium, fol. a2r. On this point, Beroaldo seems to be drawing upon the Neoplatonic wells of Ficino and Poliziano. On Ficino’s active revision of the rhapsode figure, see Allen, “Soul as Rhapsode”; and Coppini, “L’ispirazione per contagio.” 19. Beroaldo, Annotationes centum (1488), in Gruter, Lampas, 1:308–9: “Sed de Lucretii locis obscurioribus alibi plura, cum eius poemata adeo mendosa circumferantur, ut non lita multis luminibus ingenii videri possint, sicut Quinto Ciceroni videbantur, sed oblita tenebris errorum, praescatentibus” (But I will have more to say elsewhere about the obscure passages in Lucretius, since his poems circulate with so many flaws that seem impossible to erase even by the ‘many lights of genius,’ as they seemed to Quintus Cicero, but instead are consigned to oblivion by the allconsuming darkness of error); my translation. 20. I treat Pio’s digressions at greater length in my forthcoming “Reading for Pleasure: Disaster and Digression in the First Lucretian Commentary.” On Pio’s commentary, see also Raimondi, “Il primo commento umanistico a Lucrezio.”


the poet’s “melancholic bent,” as Ficino once called it, and also to confront one’s own. This was one way of dressing up like a poet who supposedly went insane and committed suicide. Leaving aside Pio’s melancholy, we come across a very different answer to the question of capturing the poet’s afflatus about a half century later in Denys Lambin’s groundbreaking edition of De rerum natura. It is to that edition now that I want to turn. I am thinking in particular of one curious note in the commentary—not exactly a digression in Beroaldo’s sense, but not far from the kind of engagement the Bolognese humanist advocated and modeled for his readers. The note addresses a hypothetical question in the poem, a question that gave the commentator pause. If, after death (and presumably much time), the atoms that made up a person came together in exactly the same arrangement, would that person, suddenly recomposed in time and space, be able to mourn or remember himself? For Lucretius, who insisted that the soul dies with the body, the answer was a vehement “no.” As he explained: “Even if time should gather together our matter after death and bring it back again as it is now placed, and if once more the light of life should be given to us, yet it would not matter one bit to us that even this had been done, when the recollection of ourselves has once been broken asunder.” This was clear enough, but for the Renaissance commentator, the poet’s answer was hard to believe. As Lambin wrote in the notes that accompany the passage in question: “A Denys Lambin who is offended at having been born a mortal, who laments his condition, does not see, I repeat, does not see that in real death there will be no other Denys Lambin who—alive and standing by—could look upon him dead, and grieve over him lying there.” 21. Ficino, Platonic Theology, 4:308–9. 22. Lucretius, DRN 3.847–51: “Nec, si materiem nostram collegerit aetas / post obitum rursumque redegerit ut sita nunc est, / atque iterum nobis fuerint data lumina vitae, / pertineat quicquam tamen ad nos id quoque factum, / interrupta semel cum sit repetentia nostri.” 23. Lambin, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin, 277: “Nec videt . . . Dionysius Lambinus, qui indignatur se mortalem esse natum, suamque conditionem deplorat, non videt (inquam) in vera morte nullum alium fore Dionysium Lambinum, qui viuus & stans possit se mortuum, & iacentem lugere, &c.”; my translation.


The commentator’s note is extraordinary for a number of reasons, not least of which for the kind of engagement it represents. What we find here is Lambin actually performing the sense of disbelief that the poet describes slightly later on in the poem after he gives us the bad (or is it good?) news that we won’t keep consciously living the same existence over and over again ad infinitum. The commentator is, in fact, taking the poet’s words as if they were his own: “Hence he resents that he was born mortal, and does not see that in real death there will be no other self that could live to bewail his perished self, or stand by to feel pain.” But what exactly is Lambin doing here by mimicking the poet, and, moreover, how are we meant to understand this kind of gesture in the context of the edition? On the one hand, the answer seems very simple. We could say that the commentator is being playful by “signing” his name twice in the notes, winking at the reader, who is invited to participate and project himself or herself into the conceptual world of the poem. And, of course, he is being playful. By the same logic, however, we might say that Lambin is also making a more serious methodological point, one that is crucial for a text considered as dangerous as De rerum natura: to read the poetry of Lucretius, one first has to take his inhuman and senseless world of atoms and the void as one’s own. For the textual critic working through the troubled manuscripts of the poem, this proposition had some important consequences, which Lambin seems to have understood all too well. In being asked to imagine the Renaissance commentator recomposed or collected in time and space, for example, aren’t we also being asked to think of Lambin’s own work as a philologist piecing the text back together letter by letter, collecting Lucretius? In this context, how could we forget what the poet himself said about the letters of the alphabet being like the atoms of the universe? Lucretius, as we know, had used this analogy many times in the course of De rerum natura, calling attention to the dynamic world 24. Lucretius, DRN 3.884–87: “Hinc indignatur se mortalem esse creatum, / nec videt in vera nullum fore morte alium se / qui possit vivus sibi se lugere peremptum / stansque iacentem se lacerari urive dolere.” 25. Earlier, Pio himself had insisted that the textual critic should not be ignorant either of grammar or philosophy if he wished to emend a text such as De rerum natura. See Pio, Annotamenta (1505), in Gruter, Lampas, 1:397.


of invisible particles hiding beneath a seemingly stable act of reading. Consider this passage: quin etiam passim nostris in versibus ipsis multa elementa vides multis communia verbis, cum tamen inter se versus ac verba necessest confiteare et re et sonitu distare sonanti. tantum elementa queunt permutato ordine solo; at rerum quae sunt primordia, plura adhibere possunt unde queant variae res quaeque creari. [Moreover, all through these very lines of mine you see many elements common to many words, although you must confess that lines and words differ one from another both in meaning and in the sound of their soundings. So much can elements do, when nothing is changed but order: but the elements that are the beginnings of things can bring with them more kinds of variety, from which all the various things can be produced.]

Something startling happens here, and in other moments of De rerum natura, where the poem reflects upon its own material status as an object in time and space: suddenly the text in one’s hands begins to unsettle. If letters are like atoms and matter is always in the process of coming together and dispersing and coming together in different ways, then the text itself is vulnerable to the very physics the poet describes— we might even say, is expressive of the poet’s physics. By writing his name in the commentary, Lambin was confronting not only his own mortality, but also the inevitable mortality of the text and the threat of disintegration and nonsense. The question might be reframed now in slightly different terms: if all of the letters of De rerum natura were put back together in precisely the same arrangement, would the poem still be the same? Can a text mourn or remember itself? It seems no small irony that the rediscovery of the poem in the Renaissance occasioned the most profound vision of its loss and destruction. Lambin’s friends, indeed, made much of the pregnant irony of his working on a poet who said that every living thing was subject to death, 26. Lucretius, DRN 1.823– 29. Lucretius repeats this idea several times in the course of the poem at 1.196–98, 1.912–14, 2.688–90, and 2.1013–14.


even the lines of his own poem. In the front matter of Lambin’s edition of De rerum natura, Jean Dorat, a fellow reader and friend at the Collège Royal, described the nature of Lambin’s philological work on Lucretius in characteristically witty and loaded terms: If there is no way for immortal things to be created from mortal elements [ex elementis], and the verses which you continue composing on the nature of things are the product of your mind, learned Lucretius, then I am surprised that you were eager to prove the mind mortal which could fashion such immortal texts. For if the damaging effects of time chanced to pour some marks onto your pages, Denys Lambin, as Cicero before him, has recently washed these away in an instant with his keen-scented mind.

In these dedicatory verses, Dorat is borrowing Lucretius’s own language, breathing new life into the familiar conflict between the conventions of poetic immortality and a poem that insists that everything is subject to change. As all of the letters, if not exactly the atoms, of the text are put back together in the same arrangement, the poet is seemingly proven wrong by the French philologist. Calling the ruinous text of De rerum natura back from the jaws of oblivion, following in the very footsteps of Cicero, Lambin was able to save the Epicurean poet from his own bad news—and by virtue of his clever mind. For the literati of the 1550s and 1560s, the kind of mens sagax that Dorat praises here referred primarily to one thing: the practice of conjectural emendation. This was the practice that defined French philology at this particular moment and, according to its practitioners, made 27. See Segal, “Poetic Immortality.” Segal demonstrates how Lucretius’s desire for poetic immortality in a poem that denies it may be read as part of a process of gradual renunciation. 28. Dorat, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin (1563), sig. a1v: “Immortalia si mortalibus ex elementis, / Non est, ut possint ulla ratione creari: / Mentis opusque tuae sunt carmina, docte Lucreti, / Quae tu de rerum natura pangere pergis: / Miror, te mortalem animi studuisse probare / Mentem, talia quae scripta immortalia condat. / Nam si quas maculas iniuria temporis (ut fit) / Chartis forte tuis alleverat, ilicet illas, / Ut quondam Cicero, sic nuper mente sagaci / Detergens Lambinus, in antiquumque nitorem / Carmina restituens”; my translation. See Pantin, “Dorat et la poésie de la nature,” 350–52.


it superior to the Italian model, which represented a more careful and circumspect approach to working with manuscripts and documenting their provenance. The French were famous (or infamous) for their ability to conjure up readings from manuscripts that were seriously corrupted, sometimes even restoring whole lines of poems that had been previously lost or mangled. It was an instantaneous act of reason and will, as Dorat imagines it in the dedication above, a stroke of learned genius that pointed back to the commentator upon whose singular mind the text was dependent. In light of his work, Lambin appears as a kind of artist. No wonder he felt so comfortable signing his name. Not everyone, however, appreciated the genius of the French conjectural mind at work, or the arrogance all too frequently associated with it. And the opponents weren’t just the Italians. In a heated war of words, Peter Ramus and Omer Talon once angrily accused Lambin’s friend and collaborator Adrien Turnèbe of mangling the text of De rerum natura with specious emendations. “Here you fill two pages with other people’s things,” they wrote witheringly, “you correct Lucretius, you keep selling your old copies: and yet from these learned emendations of yours, no better book comes to light.” These, in fact, were the very same emendations that were to earn Turnèbe a place on the title page of the second edition of Lambin’s De rerum natura. For readers such as Ramus and Talon, the kind of conjectural savvy that characterized the philology of Turnèbe and Lambin was “haughty and arrogant in the extreme” (superbissimum, arrogantissimum), “covered with the skin of an elephant” (elephantis corio tectum), and, perhaps worst of all, “comparable in slowness and ignorance to Epicurus” (traditate & inscitia Epicuro similem). So much for the claim that Lambin emended Lucretius “in an instant.” In the midst of this vigorous exchange of insults, Ramus and Talon stumbled upon the analogy between the philologist and the Epicurean

29. See Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, vol. 1. 30. Talon, Admonitio, 7: “Hic rebus alienis paginas duas exples, Lucretium corrigis, vetera tua exemplaria venditas: & tamen ex his eruditis correctionibus tuis, nullus liber correctior exit in lucem”; my translation. 31. Talon, Admonitio, 22–23.


that we have been circling around. Notwithstanding the venom, their point is worth taking seriously, for the conjectural philologist and the Epicurean held a number of things in common—especially when it came to the matter of method. We might begin to make sense of this analogy with a passage from De rerum natura, in which the poet explains his own inductive procedure of scattering only a few vestigia or footprints of his arguments so that the clever reader might fill in the rest by means of his own reason. We came across a few lines of this passage earlier; here it is in full: Quapropter, quamvis causando multa moreris, esse in rebus inane tamen fateare necessest. multaque praeterea tibi possum commemorando argumenta fidem dictis corradere nostris. verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci sunt per quae possis cognoscere cetera tute. namque canes ut montivagae persaepe ferarum naribus inveniunt intectas fronde quietes, cum semel institerunt vestigia certa viai, sic alid ex alio per te tute ipse videre talibus in rebus poteris caecasque latebras insinuare omnis et verum protrahere inde. [Therefore, however you may demur by making many objections, confess you must, nevertheless, that there is a void in things. Many another proof besides I can mention to scrape together credit for my doctrines. But for a keen-scented mind, these little tracks [vestigia] are enough to enable you to recognize the others for yourself. For as hounds very often find by their scent the leaf-hidden resting-place of the mountainranging quarry, when once they have hit upon certain traces of its path, so will you be able for yourself to see one thing after another in such matters as these, and to penetrate all unseen hiding-places, and draw forth the truth from them.]

The poet will not go through exhaustive explanations to prove what he means; for those with a “keen-scented mind”—the same phrase Dorat had used to describe Lambin—the vestigia should be enough. Among 32. Lucretius, DRN 1.398–409.


other things, these vestigia represent a kind of textual insurance policy taken out by a man who knew he would need one. They also served as a means of transmitting the philosophy while teaching the way it works. Throughout the text of De rerum natura, the poet explains how to use a “keen-scented mind” to get beyond the threshold of perception—to move, for example, from the figure of dust colliding in a ray of sunlight to an unseen world of atoms. “So far as it goes,” Lucretius says, “a small thing [dust] may give an analogy of great things [atoms], and show the tracks [vestigia] of knowledge.” For the philologist, one could say, the analogy worked through the “small thing” of the text. Renaissance humanists, of course, were used to following the footsteps and footprints of reason. For readers from Petrarch onward, the figure of vestigia and the proverbial pack of hounds were Renaissance clichés that applied widely to the book hunter seeking out the remains of textual traditions or the humanist filling in the holes of corrupted manuscripts. Pierre Galland, for example, once described himself and Adrien Turnèbe as a pack of “keen-scented” dogs sniffing out the manuscripts in old monasteries in Northern France and Flanders. Galland had even supplied Lambin with one of the precious manuscripts of De rerum natura for his edition, which nicely illustrates the connection we’re pursuing here. In the place where these various kinds of footprints cross in the unstable text of Lucretius’s poem, an old metaphor is granted a new materialist life. Working on Lucretius’s poem, Lambin and his colleagues would discover that the practice of conjecture that allowed them to supplement the poet’s incomplete and scattered text was very similar to the practice that the Epicurean poet 33. Lucretius, DRN 2.121– 24: “Conicere ut possis ex hoc, primordia rerum / quale sit in magno iactari semper inani. / dumtaxat rerum magnarum parva potest res / exemplare dare et vestigia notitiai.” 34. Galland and Turnèbe, preface to De agrorum. See Lewis, Adrien Turnèbe (1512–1565), 38. In suggesting nearly eight hundred emendations (his own inflated estimate), Lambin repeatedly claims that he followed the antiquae scripturae vestigia, comparing all of the extant manuscripts of the poem and all of the available printed editions, as well as using the fragments quoted by grammarians and passages imitated by poets to establish his authoritative text. As we might expect, in certain instances he says that he employed nothing but his own reason to divine what had seemingly been lost forever. For a short history of following vestigia, see Ginzburg, “Clues.”


said would allow them to transport their minds into a world of unseen particles. Indeed, in piecing De rerum natura back together— confronting the very materiality of the poem in order to read and understand it—the commentator was being led beyond the threshold of perception. If the exchange between the text and the commentator sounds like an act of initiation, in a way it was. In the seventeenth century, the philosopher Francis Bacon explained this kind of exchange neatly in his account of the “initiative method”—a method he likened to the ancient mysteries in which an initiate suffers or experiences knowledge rather than simply being taught. As he describes it in The Advancement of Learning (1605): But knowledge that is to be delivered to others as a thread to be spun on ought to be insinuated (if it were possible) in the same method wherein it was originally invented. . . . Yet certainly it is possible for a man in a greater or less degree to revisit his own knowledge, and trace over again the footsteps [vestigia] both of his cognition and consent; and by that means to transplant it into another mind just as it grew in his own.

Bacon’s “method” here may help us to understand what is at stake in Lambin’s reading of a didactic poem such as De rerum natura. We have already seen this kind of insinuation in the poet’s description of the Epicurean initiate following vestigia, penetrating the hidden places of nature and discovering “one thing after another.” Slightly earlier in the poem, Lucretius spoke of “weaving” (pertexere) the web of his discourse, implicitly linking the act of imagining a world of invisible atoms and the void with the material composition of his verses. A poet who understood the irony of monumentality as poignantly as any Renais35. Bacon, Works, 4:449; 1:664: “Atque hoc ipsum fieri sane potest in scientia per inductionem acquisita; sed in anticipata ista et praematura scientia (qua utimur), non facile dicat quis quo itinere ad eam, quam nactus est scientiam pervenerit. Attamen sane secundum majus et minus possit quis scientiam propriam revisere, et vestigia suae cognitionis simul et consensus remetiri; atque hoc pacto scientiam sic transplantare in animum alienum sicut crevit in suo.” I have included Bacon’s Latin translation of the passage here for emphasis. 36. Lucretius, DRN 1.418: “Sed nunc ut repetam coeptum pertexere dictis” (But now to resume my task begun of weaving the web of this discourse).


sance humanist could well have anticipated the need to re-create his text from its inevitable ruins, making the poem’s physical reconstruction an extension of its philosophical method—as Bacon describes it here, “a thread to be spun on.” For Lucretius, the philology of the future was another act of Epicurean initiation. It was thus that the very reconstruction of De rerum natura as a text in the Renaissance occasioned a deep analogy between the philologist and the Epicurean. In reading De rerum natura, the commentator’s own familiar practices of conjecture were suddenly reimagined in the strange light of Epicurean philosophy, his method reflected and transformed in a mirror that called for his attention. It was this, I suspect, that the learned Hellenist Jacob Helias was playing upon when he celebrated the commentator’s acumen in his own dedicatory poem: Prodiit ante tua, Lambine, Lucretius arte, Vulgus iners quem atris obruerat tenebris . . . innumerosque locos, acri quos lumine mentis clarasti, obscurat sordibus & maculis . . . Restituisque suae una opera Carum integritati, et linguae expugnas dira venena malae. Si duplici ergo Titus Λαμπίνου lampade claret, Quae nox, quae tenebrae iam superesse queant? [By your art, Lambin, Lucretius, whom the sluggish multitude had buried in deadly shadows, has appeared in view. [Another man] obscures countless places with stains and blemishes, which you have made clear by the keen light of your mind. You restore Carus to his wholeness in one undertaking, and conquer the dreadful poisons of bad speech. If therefore by the strong light of Lampinos Titus should shine forth, what night, what darkness, is now able to survive?]

In Helias’s verses we find the humanist playing with the ancient poet’s full name, Titus Carus Lucretius, breaking it up, presumably to avoid repetition, but also to dramatize the restitution of the name itself (and, by extension, Lucretius’s poem) by Lambin’s hand. Here we also come upon another curious instance of discovering Lambin’s own name in the commentary. Indeed, the word Λάμπινος, “Lampinos,” is not a stan37. Helias, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin (1563), 2v; my translation.


dard Greek word, but a clever play on the humanist’s name that links it to the idea of light or a lamp, to the humanist’s lampas or torch by which he makes clear the obscurities of texts, and to the Greek word λαμβάνω, which means to seize or to grasp. By recasting Lambin’s name in Greek, Helias, I suspect, was also making a reference to Lucretius’s famous description of Epicurus as a bringer of light, an inventor who raised men’s eyes to the truth by reason: E tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen qui primus potuisti inlustrans commoda vitae, te sequor, o Graiae gentis decus, inque tuis nunc ficta pedum pono pressis vestigia signis, non ita certandi cupidus quam propter amorem quod te imitari aveo. [O you who first amid so great a darkness were able to raise a light so clear, illuminating the blessings of life, you I follow, O glory of the Grecian race, and now on the marks you have left I plant my own footsteps [vestigia] firm, not so much desiring to be your rival, as for love, because I yearn to copy you.]

With this passage in mind, we see that Helias’s playful Greek rendering of Lambin’s name looks both forward and backward in time—backward to Epicurus and his philosophy and forward to the commentator himself, who was the heir to what Cicero, agreeing with his brother, described as the poet’s “many lights of genius.” The “lamp” here is called duplex in the sense of “thick” or “strong,” but also in the sense of “double.” By using his reason to piece back together a fragmented tradition, “Lampinus’s” keen-scented mind borrowed and redoubled the light of Epicurus, refracted through the lens of the poem. Lucretius himself tellingly uses the word lampas in the place where he describes 38. For example, Jan Gruter’s seventeenth-century collection of scholarly contributions is called Lampas, which I’ve already cited a number of times in the notes above. I am grateful for the light of James Porter here. 39. Lucretius, DRN 3.1–6. 40. Helias may also be thinking of Lucretius, DRN 1.140– 45, where, after the poet claims to make clear the “dark discoveries of the Greeks,” he writes: “Sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas / suavis amicitiae quemvis efferre laborem / suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas / quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum / clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti, / res quibus occultas penitus


the generations of men who “pass the torch of life” (vitai lampada tradunt), a metaphor for the Epicurean cycle of life and death and a figure for tradition itself. As the poet planted his footsteps in those of his Epicurean master and the torch was passed, Lambin was practicing his own kind of imitation. In a certain light, the philologist begins to look a lot like an Epicurean.

Capta lepore As a sympathetic reader who was attempting to inhabit the world of his author, Lambin clearly got caught up in the poem. Some have said that he got carried away. Could a poeticus afflatus be felt too deeply? Could an identification with an author go too far? To understand how these questions arose in a history of method, and how they were answered, we will have to go back slightly earlier to the birth of conjectural philology in the Renaissance and the heated argument that surrounded it. In the dedication to book 4 of De rerum natura, addressed to his sometime friend (and sometime enemy) Antoine Muret, Lambin remembers his time with Muret at the Vatican Library exchanging notes, poring over old manuscripts together, and discussing the fine bones of method: two Frenchmen in Rome. For all their later disagreements and personal animosities, Lambin clearly learned a great deal from Muret about the practice of textual criticism. As he recalled: “It was you who first encouraged me, when I was in Rome, to undertake this work and see it to completion, and you helped me tirelessly as I compared the commonly accepted text of Lucretius with older editions and manuscripts. And that was not all: when I found a reading that differed from the common convisere possis” (But still it is your merit and the expected delight of your pleasant friendship, that persuades me to undergo any labour, and entices me to spend the tranquil nights in wakefulness, seeking by what words and what poetry at last I may be able to display clear lights before your mind, whereby you may see into the heart of things hidden). 41. Lucretius, DRN 2.77– 79: “Augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur, / inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum / et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt” (Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life).


text, over and over again it was you who sniffed out the true reading from the obliterated tracks [vestigia] of the old writing.” It might seem like a conventional thing for one humanist to say to another, but in the context of Lambin’s edition of De rerum natura, it was tantamount to a statement of philological allegiance in a long-running argument that Muret had started some years earlier. Thanks to Anthony Grafton, the story of that argument is wellknown among scholars of textual criticism. It begins when Muret traveled—or, rather, was forced to flee—to Italy to escape a lingering charge of sodomy. We find him in Rome cavorting with the great lights of the Vatican Library and picking a fight with Pietro Vettori, perhaps the best-known classical philologist in Italy at the time. Muret found Vettori’s work—scholarship known for its careful manuscript comparison and the attribution of sources—to be too conservative. With the help of his friend Paulo Manuzio, son of the great Venetian printer Aldo Manuzio, he sought to promote the method of conjectural emendation that he had brought with him from Paris and to embarrass his Italian rival. Aggressively criticizing Vettori’s more sober practices, Muret produced a flurry of sometimes brilliant readings, demonstrating just where and how Vettori’s lack of imagination led him far astray from an accurate reading of a text. In this bloody act of philological assassination, Muret attacked his rival directly with examples from Vettori’s own work. What is even more interesting, however, is that he attacked him indirectly too, focusing his crosshairs on Vettori’s great Florentine model, Angelo Poliziano. The target could not have been better chosen, for, as Grafton has shown, by going after Poliziano, Muret was attempting to undercut the founder 42. Lambin, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin (1563), 300– 301: “Tu enim mihi, cum Romae essem, princeps acerrimos ad hoc negotium suscipiendum, ac perficiendum stimulos admovisti, mihique vulgata Lucretii exempla cum exemplaribus antiquis, ac manuscriptis conferenti assiduam operam dedisti. Neque hoc tantum fecisti, verum etiam, cum in scripturam aliquam a vulgata discrepantem ac diversam incideremus, atque in ea haereremus: tu saepe ex obscuris, & propemodum oblitteratis veteris scripturae vestigiis veram lectionem (quo ingenio, quoque acumine es) sagacissime odorabaris”; my translation. 43. This controversy is recounted in detail in Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 1:71–100 and 170–71.


of a tradition of textual criticism that had been flourishing in Italy since his death—and to insult Vettori with a touch of irony. He was also picking up allies. Indeed, in dredging up the terms of an old argument like this, Muret discovered an imagined friend in the Greek philologist, soldier, poet, and admirer of Lucretius, Michele Marullo (ca. 1450–1500)— Poliziano’s famous rival. In Muret’s hands Marullo became a crucial forebear in the use of the conjectural method and a key point of reference in the ongoing argument against Poliziano and his Italian ilk. The connection with Marullo, of course, also proved useful for the opposition, who found in him a lot to complain about. For Vettori, the Greek poet was a prime example of the kind of bad conjectural scholar he felt was crossing the line and further corrupting ancient texts with unsound emendations: Now Marullo was a man of remarkable wit, and a most elegant poet, so ardent a student and admirer of Lucretius that he almost never put down [his work]. Furthermore, he laboured hard to cleanse [the text of] Lucretius, [which] was swarming with gross corruptions; and he restored many things successfully. Sometimes, since he indulged his own wit too much, he corrupted things which he meant to correct. For he paid little attention to manuscripts, since he found such corrupt ones everywhere. And [since he] considered correct whatever he had approved with his own judgment, he was deceived in many passages. 44. In 1490–91, after his arrival in Florence, Muret published a series of biting epigrams pointing out the errors in Poliziano’s Miscellanea (1489) and calling its author “Ecnomus” or “the outlaw.” For an account of Marullo’s life and literary production, see Kidwell, Marullus. 45. Vettori, Explicationes suarum in Ciceronem castigationum, 33: “Fuit autem Marullus admirabilis ingenii vir, et elegantissimus poëta, Lucretiique in primis ita studiosus, et admirator, ut fere nunquam e manibus dimitteret: magnam praeterea operam in eo, cum foedissimis mendis scateret, purgando collocavit, multaque foeliciter restituit. Quandoque tamen cum nimis ingenio suo indulgeret, nonnulla quae corrigere voluit, depravavit: parum enim manuscriptos codices, cum tam corruptos passim inveniret, sequebatur: quaeque suo iudicio probasset, ea recta iudicans, multis locis deceptus est.” In the eighteenth century, Friedrich Otto Mencke usefully compiled this and other relevant sources in his Historia vitae et in literas meritorum Angeli Politiani (Mencke, Historia vitae, 379–80). Cited and translated in Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 1:171.


Vettori uses Marullo to condemn the practices of men like Muret, but also to defend his own. What scholars have overlooked in this passage is the curious presence of Lucretius. Indeed, what might seem like merely a passing reference to the Epicurean poet unlocks a rich connection that is the essential background of Vettori’s critique. In the course of the sixteenth century, Marullo, who had emended the text of Lucretius and imitated him extensively in his Hymni naturales, came to be tied almost inextricably to the poet. In the preface to his 1512 edition of De rerum natura (which Vettori is quietly referencing here), Pietro Candido had reported that Marullo was never to be found without his copy of Lucretius on his person: “Marullo, once our most delightful friend, whose judgment we have followed above all in this work, was throughout his life so enthusiastic for the charms of Lucretius that he went almost nowhere without him as a companion, never took himself to bed without having read through and examined some verses of Carus. . . . Indeed, from the lamentable loss of the Latin muses in the midst of the waves of Cecina—that well-known disaster—Lucretius alone was recovered.” Lucretius was a passion that literally followed Marullo to his watery grave. 46. On Marullo’s engagement with Lucretius, see Dionigi, “Marullo e Lucrezio”; and Bollack, “Marulle, ou la correction latine.” Bollack describes both the limitations of Marullo’s practice (e.g., privileging poetic sense over philosophical consistency) and the curious interpenetration of the poem and the critic. 47. Marullo himself had supposedly meant to publish an edition of De rerum natura. Although that never materialized, his notes were later incorporated into the 1512 Juntine edition by Pietro Candido. As a young man copying out De rerum natura in his own hand, Niccolò Machiavelli had used over three-quarters of Marullo’s emendations, which at that time were quite new. The discovery of Machiavelli’s 1497 manuscript of Lucretius in the Vatican library has played a crucial role in dating Marullo’s emendations. See Finch, “Machiavelli’s Copy of Lucretius”; and Brown, Return of Lucretius, chap. 4. 48. Candido, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Candido, sig. a2v: “Marullus sane amicus olim noster iucundissimus, cuius in hoc oper censuram potissimum secuti sumus, Lucretianae adeo veneris per omnem aetatem studiosus fuit, ut nuspiam fere non eo comite itaret, numquam cubitum . . . nisi perlectis aliquot exploratisque Cari carminibus sese reciperet. Quin etiam ex miseranda illa in mediis Cecinae undis Latinarum musarum iactura, cladeque insigni, unus est Lucretius receptus”; my translation.


It is by this coincidence, if we may call it that, that the debate about conjectural emendation first became entangled with the text of De rerum natura, and that the poem became a kind of battleground once it was extracted from Marullo’s soggy pocket. For Vettori, it was a matter of Marullo’s “indulg[ing] his own wit” too much, a charge that linked Marullo implicitly to the French school of philologists who summoned up emendations seemingly out of nowhere. With access to the Juntine manuscript that Candido had used to prepare the poem, Vettori may have had the opportunity to study Marullo’s emendations with the greatest possible care. Marullo’s was no doubt an important early influence that had to be discarded once it had been absorbed and understood. Vettori, after all, was promoting a very different kind of textual criticism. If Beroaldo had earlier praised a commentator’s poeticus afflatus as an essential component of good textual criticism, Vettori thought that Marullo’s sympathy was excessive. What made him an “ardent student and admirer” of Lucretius (and consequently a good poet) was precisely what made him a bad textual critic. By forgetting the line between textual criticism and imitation, Marullo ended up corrupting what he most wanted to correct. Those who could not maintain this thin and all-too-permeable line—in other words, those who could not control themselves—were, as Willem Canter put it, being “nearly impious.” Later in the century, when Joseph Scaliger entered the fray by way 49. Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Munro, 2:11– 12. Munro recounts the discovery of three copies of the 1495 Venice edition of De rerum natura with marginal emendations by Vettori that closely follow the work of Marullo and Pontano. 50. As Munro puts it, “[Having] filled a copy of the Juntine with long parallel passages from the Greek, [Vettori] must himself at one time have contemplated an elaborate edition of the poet and has to be added to the long list of scholars with whom this has remained an unaccomplished design.” Munro, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Munro, 2:12. 51. Canter, Novarum lectionum libri octo, 15: “Nam eorum quidem audaciam, qui reiecta scriptura antiqua, sua vel aliena substituunt inventa, temerariam & propemodum impiam iudico” (For I consider reckless and nearly impious the audacity of those who throw out the ancient text and substitute their own or someone else’s inventions).


of an edition of Catullus, he was also taking sides in this long-running argument. For Scaliger, who found Marullo to be equipped with more cleverness than learning, the Lucretian emendations of the “Greekling” were the worst example of the kind of scholarship he sought to correct: But that Greekling [Marullo] thought he had the same liberty with regard to the ancient authors that he had with regard to his own verses. He also dared to attack the learned Poliziano’s note with a completely ridiculous epigram. Those who think so much of that man, and make so much of him, would have to give up some of their pride, if they examined his edition of Lucretius more carefully. For no ancient author has been treated so badly by any corrector as Lucretius has by that rash Greekling. We will not imitate him. If any traces of his and similar correctors’ audacity and temerity remain in good books, it is our plan to destroy them utterly and to expunge them completely from the midst of good authors.

Like Vettori, though with somewhat less tact, the younger Scaliger emphasized the failure of the textual critic to distinguish properly between his own verses and those of Lucretius, resulting in a kind of contamination that led inevitably to more corruptions. As Lucretius himself had been possessed by a furor, channeling the divine philosophy of Epicurus across centuries, so too had the textual critic been momentarily possessed by the force of the magnet. For Scaliger, ironically, this was the problem with taking too much liberty or, as Carlo Pascal described 52. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 1:172. 53. Scaliger, Castigationes, 80– 81; Mencke, Historia vitae, 379– 80: “At Graeculus ille putavit sibi licere in bonis auctoribus, quod ipse sibi in suis versibus voluit licere. Ausus est praeterea annotationem doctissimi Politiani ineptissimo epigrammate exagitare. Sane quibus ille vir tantus videtur, tantique fit, debebant aliquid de pertinacia remittere, si eius editionem Lucretianam diligenter perpenderent. Nullus enim veterum auctorum ita male ab ullo correctorum acceptus est, ut Lucretius ab illo audace Graeculo. At nos illum non imitabimur, et si qua extant eius ac similium correctorum in bonis libris temeritatis atque audaciae vestigia, ea prorsus abolere, atque de medio bonorum scriptorum penitus obterere nobis consilium est.” Cited and translated in Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 1:170–71.


it several centuries later, indulging too much in the “pleasure of conjecture.” And as Scaliger had put it: “We will not imitate him in this.” In the context of sixteenth-century French academic politics, Scaliger’s biting remarks, I suspect, may also have been directed specifically at Lambin, whose edition of Lucretius he had conspicuously slighted in celebrating the one of Lambin’s rival Hubert van Giffen. As Lambin complained in the third edition of De rerum natura, van Giffen had unscrupulously plagiarized almost everything from his Lucretius (though, prudently, not Lambin’s name in the passage quoted above). Unsurprisingly, Lambin admitted that he had absorbed much from the example of Marullo. In the opening verses of the poem, the commentator announced his intellectual sympathy by including a line missing in all of the manuscripts on the sole authority of the man Scaliger called the “rash Greekling.” Here are Lucretius’s verses—as rendered by Lambin, with the line in question italicized for emphasis—and Lambin’s corresponding note in the commentary: . . . ita capta lepore inlecebrisque tuis omnis natura animantum te sequitur cupide, quo quamque inducere pergis. [so greedily does the nature of all things follow you, held captive by your charm and your allurements, whither you go on to lead them.] INLECEBRISQUE TUIS &c.] This verse is missing from the four manuscripts: neither Navagero nor Pontano has it; it is absent finally from the Vicenza and Paris manuscripts. Marullo alone, learned man, from the authority of a certain ancient book (in what manner Donato Giannotti has explained to me carefully) restored it to us. A certain friend of mine, most outstanding for his talent and erudition, believes 54. Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Pascal, xvii: “Marullo was a poet and scholar of great merit; he had brilliant ideas about Lucretius and made felicitous emendations, but indulged too much in the pleasure of conjecture”; my translation. 55. As Scaliger put it: “Van Giffen was learned, his Lucretius is very good.” Cited in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Munro, 2:15; my translation. For Lambin’s impassioned condemnation of this act of plagiarism in the third edition, see Lambin, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin (1570), sig. c2r–d1r. 56. Lucretius, DRN 1.15–17. 57. I have adapted Rouse’s translation here to reflect the interpolated line.


this line to have been contrived by Marullo himself and supplied as one of Lucretius, since Marullo thought something was missing—yet nothing (so my friend thought) is missing. Thus my friend exlains this passage with the line taken out. . . . I have no opinion to report except that the verse seems to me most worthy of Lucretius.

As Lambin points out, the contested verse is conspicuously absent from the manuscripts he compared. In fact, it represents one of the most extreme cases of conjecture in the whole commentary—exactly the kind of thing Scaliger railed against in his Catullus. When Lambin says a 58. Lambin, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin (1563), 5: “INLECEBRIS QUE TUIS &c.] Hic versus abest a quattuor cod. manuscriptis: neque eum Navagerius, neque Pontanus habuerunt: desideratur denique in codicibus Vicentin. & Parisiensib. Marullus unus, vir doctus, ex auctoritate veteris cuiusdam codicis (quemadmodum mihi religiose asseveravit Donatus Ianottus) nobis eum restituit. Amicus quidam meus ingenio & doctrina praestantissimus, putat esse ab ipso Marullo factum, ac pro Lucretiano suppositum, cum putaret ille aliquid deesse, neque desit quicquam. Sic enim hunc locum hoc versu deleto explicat: ‘ita capta lepore quaeque pecus / Te sequitur cupide, quo quamque inducere pergis.’ Ego aliud, quod dicam, nihil habeo, nisi quod mihi videtur versus Lucretio dignissimus”; my translation. 59. Historically, not everyone has wanted to attribute the line in question to Marullo. As Munro notes in the preface to his edition, Poliziano had copied out the interpolated verse in the margins of a manuscript copy of De rerum natura that he owned, which is currently housed in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. Munro argues that the notes in Poliziano’s margins were composed too early for the verse to have been Marullo’s. Indeed, for him, the mere existence of the contested line in the manuscript was proof that Poliziano composed it himself and that Lambin was either mistaken or lying: “What [Lambin] there says of Marullus is mere report” (Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Munro, 1:40; 8–9). Evidence uncovered since Munro’s edition, namely, Machiavelli’s manuscript copy of De rerum natura, however, suggests an earlier date for Marullo’s engagement with Lucretius. Having likely received Marullo’s notes from Bartolomeo Scala, Marullo’s brother-in-law, Machiavelli seems to have been among the first people to have read and absorbed them. Because the manuscript says that Machiavelli copied the text out himself in 1497, then, as Finch has argued, Marullo must have been working on this project at least several years before, opening up again the possibility that he wrote the verse. See Finch, “Machiavelli’s Copy,” 31–32. For another interpretation of the authorship of the verse, see Pascal, Osservazioni, 545– 48. On Poliziano’s copy of Lucretius, see Gordon, Bibliography of Lucretius, 287. In the end, I am less interested in claiming that the line in question definitively belongs to Marullo than in understanding the context of Lambin’s remarks.


certain friend of his supposed that Marullo had substituted his own verses for those of the poet, he is bringing us back again to Vettori’s and Scaliger’s complaint that the philologist had contaminated the text, like the cunning Circe, mixing up the immortal and the mortal. Marullo himself was seemingly not unaware of the effect Lucretius had on him. The “Greekling” had imitated the very part of De rerum natura in question when he revised his own poem on Latin literature, “De poetis Latinis,” leaving another clue to the nature of his Lucretian sympathy: Amor, Tibulle, Mars tibi, Maro, debet, Terentio soccus levis. ... Natura magni versibus Lucretii Lepore museo illitis. [Love to you, Tibullus, War to you, Virgil, are indebted, Nimble comedy to you, Terence. ... Nature is indebted to the verses of great Lucretius Having been smeared with the charm of the muse.]

Here the charm of the goddess Venus, her capacity to attract and organize the world, is transmitted to Lucretius’s poem itself. We might remember again what Candido had said about Marullo’s enthusiasm for 60. In the note, Lambin tells us that the matter of Marullo’s authorship was explained to him by Donato Giannotti, a member of an old Florentine family who exchanged many letters on textual criticism with Vettori while living in exile in Rome after the fall of the Florentine Republic. Giannotti was the student of Marcello Virgilio Adriani, himself a disciple of Landino and Poliziano, and also one of Machiavelli’s teachers. If Lambin is again subtly engaging in the dialogue between Vettori and Muret—restaging the long-running argument between Marullo and Poliziano—his use of Giannotti as a witness here may be significant. By reproducing the contested verse in his edition, Lambin may even have been taking another negative criticism of Marullo and transforming it into an opportunity to praise him contra Scaliger, who seems to be the “friend” he has in mind here. On Giannotti’s relation to Vettori, see Vettori, Lettori a Pietro Vettori. For the intellectual genealogy that leads from Poliziano to Giannotti, see esp. Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli. 61. Marullo, Epigrammata et hymni, fol. 7.


the “charms of Lucretius” (Lucretinae . . . veneris), playing on Venus’s name. As Lucretius himself had written in the opening verses of book 4, the poetry he writes “touch[es] every part with the Muses’ grace [lepore].” In this context, Marullo’s use of the word lepore also powerfully recalls the Lucretian phrase “held captive by your charm” (capta lepore) in the lines that directly precede his alleged invention. When Marullo added his verse to De rerum natura, one might say that he was in his own way bearing witness to the powerful force of the poem to possess its readers—and at the very place where Lucretius himself describes that effect. Just as the Epicurean poet imagined the animals following Venus “whither [she goes] on to lead them,” so too had the textual critic been held captive by the charm of the poet in whose footsteps he followed. To quote the words of Pontano again: “[Lucretius] drags [rapit] the reader wherever he wants to go.” Having edited and imitated the poem himself, Pontano clearly knew what he was talking about. For Lambin, at least, Marullo’s added line seemed “most worthy” of Lucretius and this alone was enough—perhaps because the verse seemingly flowed from the magnetic chain of the poet himself. Although later in the commentary Lambin assures us that he felt no particular obligation to take all of Marullo’s emendations as gospel, here he stakes his ground and makes a rather controversial point about what constitutes the proper work of the textual critic. He is also making a point about the kind of transactions that take place between a good philologist and his text—the intellectual sympathy that makes conjecture, in a sense, possible. The philologist must know the poem well—as well as the ardent Marullo knew his Lucretius—so that he might inhabit or possess the text, or so that he may be possessed himself. For Lambin, as for Muret, this kind of intellectual sympathy could lead one to the reconstruction of a fragmented tradition. For others, however, it was a sympathy felt too deeply—as Lachmann hinted when he described Lambin’s work as the product of too much “levity of mind” (levitas animi). 62. Lucretius, DRN 4.8–9: “Deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango / carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore” (Next because the subject is so dark and the verses I write so clear, touching every part with the Muses’ grace). 63. Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin (1563), 223. 64. Lachmann, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lachmann, 13.


“Ut alius nascatur montanus” “So many coincidences [rencontres] are needed to build up such a friendship that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries,” wrote Michel de Montaigne of his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, whose death in August 1563 he counted among the most significant (and devastating) events of his lifetime. Like atoms colliding in a vacuum of space and historical time, the coincidence of so many rencontres, or “parts,” as John Florio rendered it in his seventeenth-century English, was random and, at least during Montaigne’s life, entirely unique. When asked, “Why?” he answered simply: “Because it was he, because it was I.” The same might be said of Montaigne and the author of De rerum natura. As fate—or, rather, chance—would have it, the death of Montaigne’s best friend occurred less than a year after the publication of Lambin’s groundbreaking edition of De rerum natura. Montaigne appears to have been among the first readers to own a copy of the text—another coincidence of so many “parts.” In 1987 Montaigne’s heavily annotated copy of Lambin’s edition of De rerum natura was recovered, his own name recognized beneath a different one scrawled violently across it. The nature of Montaigne’s engagement with the text is as dense and complex as one might expect from

65. Montaigne, Essais 1.28; trans. Frame, 136; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 184: “Il faut tant de rencontres à la bastir, que c’est beaucoup si la fortune y arrive une fois en trois siecles.” For a reading of Montaigne’s friendship of chance, see Hoffman, “Investigation of Nature,” 175. In contrast to the Epicurean reading, Hugo Friedrich sees Montaigne’s friendship with La Boétie as an expression of “the Neoplatonic idea . . . of a harmony of souls preordained in the stars.” Friedrich, Montaigne, 244. On the erotics of Montaigne’s friendship, see esp. Schachter, Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship. 66. Montaigne, Essayes of Michael, Lord of Montaigne, trans. Florio, 1.28.90. 67. Montaigne, Essais 1.28; trans. Frame, 139; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 188: “Par ce que c’estoit luy, par ce que c’estoit moy.” 68. M. A. Screech speculates that the signature refers to Jean Despagnet, the president of the Parlement de Bordeaux and a man best known for his witch hunts: a surprising owner of the copy who may have had a good reason for wanting to obscure Montaigne’s name. It does not appear that Despagnet added to the margins or flyleaves. See Screech, in Montaigne, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius, 11–14.


the author of the Essais. Throughout the various states of his evolving text, the Frenchman scattered 149 “flowers” or passages from Lucretius—only one fewer than Horace and more than any other classical author, including Virgil. How deeply the poetry of De rerum natura had “ravished” Montaigne, to use his word again, is perhaps most evident in the ways he misrepresented it, mangled its text, and exploited its seeming contradictions in the Essais. Not surprisingly, the margins and flyleaves of his copy of Lucretius are full of annotations that display the evidence of a mind at work; some places are marked by multiple readings, and in others Montaigne wrote so much that his pen got dull. The notes range from a serious attention to the poet’s use of archaic words, which might have impressed Beroaldo, to more interpretative questions about the poem’s philosophy, which might have caught the attention of Pio. In the flyleaves, Montaigne appears to have left his name for a second time in the copy in a gesture that should strike us now as familiar: Ut sunt diversi atomorum motus non incredibile est sic convenisse olim atomos aut conventuras ut alius nascatur montanus. 251/ [Since the movements of the atoms are so varied, it is not unbelievable that the atoms once came together, or will come together again in the future, so that another Montaigne be born. 251/].

The idea of being materially reborn clearly captured the imagination of Montaigne, a man who devoted a good deal of attention to the question of his legacy, whether in children or books. He even returned to the Lucretian passage in question explicitly in the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond,” where we find him reflecting on the transmigration of the soul. Comparing the Latin inscription from his 1539 Virgil, the copy’s modern editor, M. A. Screech, identifies the word montanus (“It could, 69. For Montaigne’s use of Lucretius, see Villey, Les sources & l’évolution des “Essais” de Montaigne, 1:169–71; Moore, “Lucretius and Montaigne”; Hendrick, “Montaigne and Lucretius”; Ménager, “Les citations de Lucrèce chez Montaigne”; MacPhail, “Montaigne’s New Epicureanism”; and Hoffman, “Investigation of Nature.” 70. Montaigne, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius, 134. All translations from Montaigne’s flyleaves follow M. A. Screech in his edition. 71. See Regosin, Montaigne’s Unruly Brood. 72. See Montaigne, Essais 2.12; trans. Frame, 385– 86; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 519–20.


after all, have meant mountain”) as the writer’s proper name, and here we see Montaigne deliberately imitating and engaging Lambin’s own “signature” in the commentary, suggesting the opposite of what Lucretius is telling us—that Montaigne will be reborn. That Montaigne is playing with Lambin’s name in the commentary when he writes in his own is typical, I would suggest, of a deeper engagement—an attentiveness not only to the text of the poem, but to the commentator reading it. Like Lambin, Montaigne was a highly gifted reader who liked to say that Latin was his first language—a reader who could well appreciate the subtle dramas of the textual critic and what took place between the lines of a poem and its commentary. As John Lewis reminds us, the author of the Essais even expressed “a quite exceptional admiration” for the work of Adrien Turnèbe, Lambin’s partner in conjectural crime, who, we remember, shared the title page of the second edition of his Lucretius. As Montaigne knew—and knew as well as anyone in the sixteenth century—to watch a reader such as Lambin labor over the text of De rerum natura was also to watch the ancient poet work on the commentator. As we shall see, the essayist’s own engagement with Epicureanism was something of a philological affair. There are many, occasionally contradictory, ways in which an Epicurean could speak to a Renaissance philologist. The first way, as we know, was with an air of confidence. Watching Lambin read a text so steeped in the language of method, Montaigne could not have failed to notice the strange mixture of philology and philosophy, and the way that Lambin’s commentary often conspicuously echoes and amplifies the language of the poem. Take, for example, the following passage from De rerum natura, which caught the attention of both the commentator and his reader: at contra gravius plus in se corporis esse deliquat, & multo vacui minus intus habere. 73. Screech, in Montaigne, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius, 11. 74. For Montaigne’s youth and early education, see Trinquet, La jeunesse de Montaigne. 75. On Montaigne’s relationship to Turnèbe, see Lewis, Adrien Turnèbe (1512– 1565), 57.


est igitur nimirum id, quod ratione sagaci quaerimus, admistum rebus, quod inane vocamus. [Therefore that which is equally great and is seen to be lighter without doubt shows itself to have more void; but contrariwise the heavier makes clear [deliquat] that it has more body in it, and much less void. There is therefore without doubt, intermingled with things, that which we seek with keen-scented reasoning, that which we call void.]

In his edition, Lambin uses the word deliquat (an uncommon word in Latin that means to make clear or open and, in a physical sense, to strain or refine), rejecting the manuscript evidence for the dedicat and indicat of the printed editions in favor of his own conjecture. The rehearsal of and then quick turning away from the manuscripts is another powerful demonstration of the philological acumen and conjectural savvy upon which Lambin built his reputation. Our commentator is, in fact, so entirely sure of his reading of deliquat that he condemns out of hand anyone who would disagree with it: “Therefore, moreover, the restoration of this place is certain, so that anyone who disapproves of it, shows himself to see little into letters.” Emending a word or a passage that has to do with Epicurean method, Lambin risks (or is it delights in?) being contaminated by the poem. In this particular case, the commentator’s certainty assumes its power from Lucretius’s own Epicurean bravura. As the poet was “without doubt,” Lambin here is no less sure that his divinatory reading of deliquat is correct. The poeticus afflatus seems again to have infected the commentator or, depending on how you see it, blinded him. The edition is littered with examples of an Epicurean confidence, in some cases overconfidence, in the commentator’s ability to juggle correct readings out of faulty manuscripts. If there was anything Montaigne did not like, of course, it was arrogance and dogmatism. At the 76. Lucretius, DRN 1.366–69. I have followed Lambin’s text of De rerum natura here. 77. Lambin, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin (1563), 43: “Ita autem certa est huius loci restitutio ut, qui eam improbet, se in litteris parum videre ostendat.” As Screech points out, Montaigne is interested in the use of the word delicat to mean indicat, and in Lambin’s erudite reference to the grammarian Nonnius. See Screech, in Montaigne, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius, 53.


same time, however, Lambin could be extremely forthcoming about the limits of his method. Indeed, even a commentator predisposed to Epicurean intoxication could exercise a modicum of modesty. We see this at the end of book 1, for example, where Lucretius discusses how the world is physically held together, arguing against those who say that all matter presses toward the center of the whole. It is an instance of the poet’s own conjectural mind at work, reaching out through space to explore a question and ultimately concluding against it. If matter pressed toward the center, Lucretius argues, the world would be destroyed, “so that in one moment of time not a wrack be left behind except desert space and invisible elements.” The world remains physically intact—at least for now. The same, unfortunately, could not be said of the text. As Lambin points out, this section of the poem is famously corrupt, mutilated, or missing in the manuscripts he had at his disposal. Lachmann argues that there is actual damage to a page in the archetype. The corruption begins slightly earlier at lines 1.1013–14, where the poet is discussing the infinity of the universe and the amount of stuff in it. On this crucial point of philosophy, the commentator is forced to throw up his hands: “If any place in this book is difficult and obscure, then it is this one. It may defy emendation.” A few pages later, Lambin reprises his frustration: “The entire locus is difficult and obscure for me.” Against the corresponding lines, Montaigne places a cross, presumably to signify the obscurity of the passage. In the place where the text begins to clear up again, we find his pen marks scrawled against the edge of the text, marking the last verses of book 1 with a single vertical line: 78. Lucretius, DRN 1.1109–10: “Temporis ut puncto nil extet reliquiarum / desertum praeter spatium et primordia caeca.” 79. For an account of the damage, see Lucretius, De rerum natura libri sex, ed. Bailey, 2:785–93. 80. Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lachmann, 2:72. 81. Lambin, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin (1563), 99: “Si quis locus est in hoc libro difficilis, & obscurus, hic est: neque fortasse mendo vacat.” 82. Lambin, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin (1563), 107: “Omnino locus mihi quidem difficilis, atque obscurus.”


Haec sic pernosces parva perductus opella; namque alid ex alio clarescet, nec tibi caeca nox iter eripiet quin ultima naturai pervideas: ita res accendent lumina rebus. [So you will gain a thorough understanding of these matters, led on with very little effort; for one thing will become clear by another, and blind night will not steal your path and prevent you from seeing the uttermost recesses of nature: so clearly will truths kindle light for truths.]

We may remember these lines as the very ones that Munro subtly adapts when he praises Lachmann’s achievement. It is impossible to say exactly what Montaigne meant when he highlighted the verses here, though if we understand them in dialogue with Lambin’s commentary, his scratch marks begin to assume a certain eloquence. It is as if the pen mark were saying, “Not even an Epicurean confidence in the powers of reason could rescue the text of De rerum natura from its own selffulfilling prophecy.” To the great aggravation and perhaps even embarrassment of the commentator, the poem yields to the mouth of oblivion at precisely the moment when the poet assures us that “blind night will not steal your path”—an irony, one might say, worthy of Montaigne. Between the depths of philological bravura and despair, finally, was a third position that we know interested both Lambin and the author of the Essais: the use of multiple interpretations of a word or passage. The enumeration of readings in Renaissance commentaries was a popular practice and has a long and predictably tedious history. As Grafton has shown, readers often included multiple glosses of a passage or single word in a text while suspending their critical judgment. Filippo Beroaldo explains the practice in his commentary on Propertius: But now let us begin the commentary, in which we shall set out not only our own opinions, but also those of others. For as St. Jerome says, the commentator’s duty is to set forth the opinions of many [scholars], “so that the prudent reader, after reading the different interpretations, will judge for himself which is the more correct; and like a true money83. Lucretius, DRN 1.1114–17. 84. Montaigne, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius, 247.


changer, will reject the falsely minted coin, and accept the valid and genuine one.”

Beroaldo here transforms Jerome’s defense of his exegetical work into an apology for textual criticism. Jerome says that he learned the convention from his teacher Donatus, the great Virgilian commentator. The idea is in theory a very reasonable one. In practice, however, it was often something else. Unfortunately, the enumeration of possible readings could lead to the worst kind of intellectual laziness, as many Renaissance commentators simply piled up received wisdom without much care or judgment of their own. The scrupulous Lambin is clearly not one of these lazy readers, although he does sometimes present multiple readings alongside his more certain conjectures. What is interesting is that Lambin would not have needed the authority of an anti-Epicurean such as Jerome to ponder the validity of using more than one reading. The commentator could have found a more ancient (if decidedly less Christian) authority in the text of De rerum natura itself. In book 5 the poet describes his own practice of giving multiple causes for a single phenomenon: Nam quid in hoc mundo sit eorum ponere certum difficile est; sed quid possit fiatque per omne in variis mundis varia ratione creatis, id doceo plurisque sequor disponere causas, 85. Beroaldo, Tibullus, Catullus, & Propertius, sig. 1r: “Sed iam enarrationem auspicemur, in qua non solum quid nobis placeat, sed quid aliis etiam videatur explicabimus. Nam, ut inquit divus Hieronymus, commentatoris officium est multorum sententias exponere, ut prudens lector, cum diversas explanationes legerit, iudicet quid verius sit: et quasi verus trapezita, adulterinae monetae pecuniam reprobet, et probam sinceramque recipiat.” Cited and translated in Grafton, “On the Scholarship of Politian,” 187. See also Graves, Jerome’s Hebrew Philology, 71–72. 86. For the original passage from Jerome, see Contra Rufinum 1.16, in Migne, PL 23:428–29. In the same place, Jerome says that this practice is common among not only interpreters of scripture, but also interpreters of secular Greek and Latin texts. Lucretius is mentioned in this context as one of the authors in whose text commentators have expressed multiple opinions, and it is tempting to wonder whether Jerome himself might have been thinking of the Epicurean position ironically. 87. Grafton, “On the Scholarship of Politian,” 188.


motibus astrorum quae possint esse per omne; e quibus una tamen siet hic quoque causa necessest quae vageat motum signis; sed quae sit earum praecipere haudquaquamst pedetemptim progredientis. [For which of these causes holds in our world it is difficult to say for certain; but what may be done and is done through the whole universe in the various worlds made in various ways, that is what I teach, proceeding to set forth several causes which may account for the movements of the stars throughout the whole universe; one of which, however, must be that which gives force to the movement of the signs in our world also; but which may be the true one, is not his to lay down who proceeds step by step.]

For Lucretius, different interpretations may rightly apply to the same phenomenon in a universe composed of multiple worlds. When Lambin comments on this passage, once again using the first person to paraphrase the text, he effectively blurs the lines between poet and commentator: “Lest anyone should marvel that I supply multiple interpretations of these fires, as if a thing of doubt or uncertainty, there are some things for which one single cause is not enough, but require many, and from them a single cause exists.” To choose only one cause out of many would be to misunderstand the nature of the universe and, as Epicurus said in a letter to Pythocles, “[to] tumble into myth.” This is where the Epicurean philologist must make a difficult choice. Should his “feeling” reflect the poet’s confidence about the irrefutable existence of atoms, or should it reflect the poet’s cautiousness about defining any one cause in an infinite universe where anything is possible? 88. Lucretius, DRN 5.526–33. For another example of this argument, see DRN 6.703– 4: “Sunt aliquot quoque res quarum unam dicere causam / non satis est, verum pluris, unde una tamen sit” (There are also a number of things for which it is not enough to name one cause, but many, one of which is nevertheless the true cause). 89. Lambin, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin (1563), 574: “SUNT ALI QUOT QUOQ.] ne quis miretur, me multas horum ignium rationes afferre, quasi dubium atque incertum, sunt aliquot etiam res, quarum unam causam afferre non est satis, sed plures afferendae sunt, ex quibus tamen unica causa sit idque ostendit a simili”; my translation. 90. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 10.87.


This question has been a source of substantial difficulty for many readers of De rerum natura—readers who have had trouble reconciling the different rhetorical and epistemological positions of the poem. Montaigne himself wrote of this problem in seeming frustration in the margins of his copy of De rerum natura: I do not know what Lucretius means! To unravel a matter clearly and to pick out at leisure the strongest cause does pertain to a man who proceeds not rashly but step by step. He said so on page 464. Unless he means that to explain only the cause which seems more true and to pass over the others is not for him who has set out, step by step and at leisure, to say profusely whatever seems probable and relevant.

Montaigne’s reference to page 464 indicates how closely he was following the commentator’s note, pointing to the word progrediens, which, as Lambin tells us, occurs again at the end of book 5, where the poet is celebrating man’s technological achievements: “Ships and agriculture, fortifications and laws, arms, roads, clothing and all else of this kind, all life’s prizes, its luxuries also from first to last, poetry and pictures, artfully wrought polished statues, all these as men progressed gradually step by step were taught by practice and the experiments of the active mind.” Whereas, in the earlier instance, progressing step by step does not allow the philosopher to say which of his multiple causes is certain, here we are told that reason lifts “every single thing” into the “precincts of light”: “For [men] saw one thing after another grow clear in their 91. Cyril Bailey, for example, sees Epicurus’s method of determining a plurality of causes as contradicting his certainty about the existence of atoms and the void. See Bailey, Greek Atomists and Epicurus, 265 and 426–30. Gisela Striker, on the other hand, has attempted to resolve the seeming contradiction. Striker, Essays, 48–49. 92. Montaigne, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius, 37o–71: “Nescio quid sibi velit Lucretius, Imo enim rem dilucide explicare & seligere per otium quae ex his potissi ma causa sit / muneris maxime illius est qui non raptim sed pedetentim progrediatur & id dixit 464 Nisi hoc voluit solam eam causam exprimere quae verior videatur & reliquas praete rire illius non est qui diffuse per otium & pedetentim probabilia quaeque quae ad rem faciant dicere sit aggressus.” 93. Lucretius, DRN 5.1448–53: “Navigia atque agri culturas moenia leges / arma vias vestes et cetera de genere horum, / praemia, declicias quoque vitae funditus omnis, / carmina picturas et daedala signa polita, / usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis / paulatim docuit pedetemptim progredientis.”


minds, until they attained the highest pinnacle of the arts.” This is the cause of Montaigne’s initial confusion. Presumably Lucretius did not mean these positions to be mutually exclusive (we might hear Lambin echoing again in the background, “Lest anyone should marvel . . .”). To Montaigne, however, the confusion reflected again the sense of methodological disorientation that he loved to exploit in his essays. On the one hand, the poet could authorize a certain confidence or overconfidence in the idea of method. On the other, the same poet could teach caution to the hasty system-monger— the future Lachmanns of the world drunk on the idols of the minds. Not surprisingly, Montaigne was just as critical of the first position as he was of the second. At the beginning of “Des coches,” Montaigne mischievously quotes the passage from Lucretius on providing multiple causes, writing just before it: It is very easy to demonstrate that great authors, when they write about causes, adduce not only those they think are true but also those they do not believe in, provided they have some originality and beauty. They speak truly and usefully enough if they speak ingeniously. We cannot make sure of the master cause; we pile up several of them, to see if by chance it will be found among them.

Montaigne here confuses the Epicurean method with the vain practices of “great authors”—and to devastating effect. The effect, I would suggest, takes on an added critical dimension in light of the history of philology we’ve been exploring through his annotated copy. In the end, however, it is not so much any one philological attitude or practice that interested Montaigne, but the multiple and conflicting ways Lucretius 94. Lucretius, DRN 5.1454–57: “Sic unumquicquid paulatim protrahit aetas / in medium ratioque in luminis erigit oras. / namque alid ex alio clarescere corde videbant, / artibus ad summum donec venere cacumen.” 95. Montaigne, Essais 3.6; trans. Frame, 685; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 898–99: “Il est bien aisé à verifier que les grands autheurs, escrivant des causes, ne se servent pas seulement de celles qu’ils estiment estre vraies, mais de celles encores qu’ils ne croient pas, pourveu qu’elles ayent quelque invention et beauté. Ils disent assez veritablement et utilement, s’ils disent ingenieusement. Nous ne pouvons nous asseurer de la maistresse cause; nous en entassons plusieurs, voir si par rencontre elle se trouvera en ce nombre.”


forces us to think about those attitudes and practices, and their epistemological margins. From these few examples alone we can see that in studying Lambin’s commentary, Montaigne would have had access both to some of the most extravagant claims for method in the sixteenth century and the realization of their practical limits. The heights of philological optimism and the depths of textual despair are, as we have seen, so highly condensed in the space of the commentary—almost elided with one another—that the rapid unfolding of the commentary begins to resemble the experience of reading the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond.” It is precisely this sense of disorientation—the confusion of conflicting attitudes coming up against one another—that reflects the habits of a reader such as Montaigne, who liked to make dogmatists argue with themselves. As the commentator is tested against the philosophy of the poem and the poem’s philosophy strains and bends against its philology, De rerum natura—even, perhaps especially, in its ruined form—had much to teach its Renaissance readers about the possibilities and pitfalls of system making and the self-reflexiveness of the system maker. If the Lucretian text was any kind of sympathetic mirror for the Renaissance humanist, it was a dizzy one indeed. This was clearly the way Montaigne liked it.

The Void A study of Montaigne’s reading of Lambin’s Lucretius, even a sketch as preliminary as this, brings into relief a number of questions about the relationship between textuality and matter—questions that peer deep into the heart of method. As Lucretius moves between various scales of reality, from atoms to the creation of civilization and language and back, I want, in ending this chapter, to shift the perspective again to consider the implications of the accidental meeting of the Renaissance philologist and the Epicurean, and to consider what it might mean more largely for imagining the forms of textual history. At least one aspect of what Eric MacPhail has called Montaigne’s “New Epicureanism” appears to have emerged from the explosive analogy that Montaigne found articulated in the philology of Lambin’s commentary. Aptly, it was in making a slight change to the text of De rerum natura himself that the philoso-


pher lent expression to a vision of tradition tumbling headlong into the void. I am thinking here of a well-known passage from “Des coches” in which Montaigne (mis)quotes Lucretius on imagining the time before written history: Et supera bellum Trojanum et funera Trojæ, Multi alias alii quoque res cecinere poetæ. [Before the Trojan War, before Troy fell, Were other bards with other tales to tell.]

The passage Montaigne quotes here from Lucretius comes from the center of book 5, the dominant theme of which is, as Porter has described it, the “perishability of matter, its reducibility to nonsense.” In these lines the author of the Essais subtly transforms the Epicurean’s rhetorical question (why did poets not treat subjects predating the events of the Theban and Trojan wars?) into a statement. If poets did treat events before Homer, the question suddenly becomes more troubling for a humanist who is concerned with the material recovery of the past. How much more do we not know? What has been lost? In getting Lucretius wrong, one could say, Montaigne ironically captures something of the poet’s critical spirit. As MacPhail argues, Lucretius “supplies the Essays not only with an authority of the instability of forms (and elsewhere, inadvertently, for the fallacy of sense perception) but also with a sort of temporal perspectivism.” Like the endless cycle of 96. Montaigne, Essais 3.6; trans. Frame, 692; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 907. 97. Porter, “Lucretius and the Poetics of Void,” 209. 98. See Lucretius, DRN 5.324– 27: “Praeterea si nulla fuit genitalis origo / terrarum et caeli semperque aeterna fuere / cur supera bellum Thebanum et funera Troiae / non alias alii quoque res cecinere poetae?” (Besides, if there has been no first birth-time for earth and heaven, and they have been always everlasting, why have not other poets also sung other things beyond the Theban War and the ruin of Troy?). In the same place in the Essais where he gets these lines from De rerum natura wrong, Montaigne uses a passage from Horace (this time correctly) to make a similar point. See Horace, Odes 4.9.25– 28: “Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona / multi, sed omnes illacrymabiles / urgentur, ignotique longa / nocte” (Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in unending night, unwept, unknown). Citations from the Odes follow Bennett’s Loeb edition, Odes and Epodes. 99. MacPhail, “Montaigne’s New Epicureanism,” 92.


forgetting that Plato describes when he imagines the city of Atlantis (another ghostly figure that Montaigne puts to his service here), the history of mankind is a materialist nightmare of epic proportions, a kind of never-ending story in which everything plays out in a cycle of repetition. Once again we are reminded of the idea of eternal returns and the problem of the “re-naissance” implicit in the figure of both Lambin’s and Montaigne’s names in the commentary. We can begin to see how easily a question of philology—in this case, a change of a word or two—can lead one to trip and fall into a philosophical chasm. For Montaigne, beyond the threshold of Homer’s poems was a potentially endless gap in our knowledge—a gap that came to signify the limits of human reason, and the instability of the present. Montaigne’s critique, in fact, was more or less meant as a direct affront to his contemporaries—to men such as Louis Leroy, who said they could not see beyond the great monument of Homer when they thought “attentiuely as far forth as is possible to consider all the time past, and to call to mind againe the memorie of so many yeres ouerslipped.” For Montaigne the limits of philology led one to a world of invisible matter. There was an Epicurean void seething under the shifting text of Homer, ready to pull one down into a vortex of doubt and incomprehensibility. Quoting, or rather again misquoting, another text—this time Cicero’s critique of Epicurean philosophy in De natura deorum—Montaigne follows his reflection on Atlantis and eternal returns appropriately with a figure of infinite matter and boundless, unlimited space: “If we could view that expanse of countries and ages [temporum], boundless in every direction, into which the mind, plunging and spreading itself, travels so far and wide that it can find no limit where it can stop, there would appear in that immensity an infinite capacity to produce innumerable forms.” Here again is MacPhail’s “tem100. On Montaigne’s dramatic use of Plato’s myth and its critical function, see esp. Hampton, “The Subject of America,” 89; and MacPhail, “In the Wake of Solon.” 101. MacPhail has described this critical use of Epicureanism nicely as an example of Montaigne’s “cultural atomism” (“Montaigne’s New Epicureanism,” 98). 102. Leroy, Of the Interchangeable Course, 32. 103. Montaigne, Essais 3.6; trans. Frame, 692; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 907: “Si interminatam in omnes partes magnitudinem regionum videremus, et temporum, in quam se iniiciens animus et intendens, ita late longeque peregrinatur, ut nullam


poral perspectivism.” By adding the word temporum to Cicero’s description of atomic space, Montaigne’s subtle alchemy converts a Stoic’s critique of Epicurean physics into a skeptic’s reflection on the limits of historical knowledge. In his hands the time before Homer morphs into the imagined space where letters and syllables are combined by chance ad infinitum, and any desire to “think attentively as far forth as is possible” reaches its logical conclusion in the stuff of Pascal’s nightmare: a vision of time and space, infinite and silent. Who does not feel the dissonance that atomistic temporality poses for any historical narrative? In his Lives, Diogenes Laertius reminds us that even Epicurus had trouble contemplating the void, having supposedly left his first teacher because he was unable to explain what happened before the emergence of chaos in Hesiod. Following his master in this, as in most things, Porter has argued, Lucretius too sought a form of assurance in solid atoms—a corrective to the unthinkable condition of total vacuity. As a reader of Lambin, Montaigne may be said to have realized a critique that was latent in the commentary—a commentary in which Lucretius’s poetic materialism redefined both the possibility and the radical limits of the philologist’s art. It was through the poem and the mediation of its commentary that Montaigne inherited the epistemological difficulties of Epicureanism. Perhaps nowhere is this more emblematic than in Montaigne’s use of the example of Lucretius to describe the nature of his own work, or rather the work of describing himself: At all events, in these memoirs, if you look around, you will find that I have said everything or suggested everything. What I cannot express I point to with my finger:

oram ultimi videat, in qua possit insistere: in hac immensitate infinita, vis innumerabilium appareret formarum” (emphasis in original). Cf. Cicero, De natura deorum 1.19.54. 104. MacPhail, “Montaigne’s New Epicureanism,” 99–100. 105. Pascal, Pensées et opuscules, no. 206: “Le silence eternal de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.” On Pascal’s debt to Montaigne, see Brunschwicg, Descartes et Pascal. 106. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 10.2. See Porter, “Lucretius and the Poetics of Void,” 188. 107. Porter, “Lucretius and the Poetics of Void,” 225: “Lucretius’s unique achievement may lie in the way he reminds us of the precariousness of this balance [between tranquility and horror] and its hard-won character.”


But if you have a penetrating mind, These little tracks will serve the rest to find.

Earlier we saw how following the “footprints” of reason could lead a “keen-scented” reader to the reconstruction of a mutilated text. For Lucretius, the vestigia led beyond the threshold of perception. Just as the poet himself had pointed out only a few vestigia to demonstrate the existence of the void in nature, Montaigne here adapts the same inductive reasoning to establish yet another kind of void—the void at the heart of his self-portrait. It is here at the epistemological limit of the Essais— at the place where our knowledge of history and subjectivity gives way to a world of atoms and to the sublimity of the void—that Epicurean philology finds its fitting end and, as it were, its modern beginning. Montaigne’s Epicurean transformations bring us back finally to where we began the chapter—to the figure of Lachmann’s archetype rescued from the depths of oblivion and the history of modern philology that followed. In our own time, perhaps no one has embodied the conflicting ironies of Epicurean philology more than the great Italian critic Sebastiano Timpanaro—a reader whose own sympathy for materialism is well-known and in Europe almost legendary. We see this most clearly in The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method (1963), the seminal book in which Timpanaro systematically robs Lachmann of his glory (if not his fame) by demonstrating how his groundbreaking method 108. Montaigne, Essais 3.9; trans. Frame, 751; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 983: “Tant y a qu’en ces memoires, si on y regarde, on trouvera que j’ay tout dict, ou tout designé: Ce que je ne puis exprimer, je le montre au doigt: Verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci / Sunt, per quae possis cognoscere caetera tute” (emphasis in original). 109. On Montaigne’s psychological transformation of Lucretius’s physical theories, see Hoffman, “Investigation of Nature.” 110. On the sublime in De rerum natura, see Porter, “Lucretius and the Sublime,” 167–84. 111. On Timpanaro’s materialism, see Timpanaro, La filologia di Giacomo Leopardi; Classicismo e illuminismo; Sul materialismo; “Pessimistic Materialism”; and Il lapsus freudiano. As Glenn Most writes, “In particular, Timpanaro developed a sophisticated yet highly personal philosophical position that reached back to such ancient precursors as Epicurus and, above all, Lucretius but that would have been most at home in the eighteenth century” (Most, in Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, 5).


was the “result of a collective effort,” a long evolutionary development characterized by chance, opportunity, and the subtleties of academic dishonesty rather than genius. Not unlike Montaigne, Timpanaro borrowed the weapons of materialism for his own critical ends, saving Lucretius from the “inexorable logic” of his commentator. At the same time, however, he was able to evade the siren’s song of the skeptic. Timpanaro, the philosopher, was at heart a textual critic—a man who could acknowledge the forces of chaos looming behind every conjectural emendation and claim to certainty, but also surrender himself to the necessary relativity and contingency of all rational endeavor. In his own words: “And the practical exigency remains that certain critical editions not be postponed forever for the sake of studying the history of the tradition in all its smallest details, that scholars not bury themselves so deeply in the study of medieval and Humanist culture that they forget to return to textual criticism.” It would, of course, take another materialist to know that the study of the “history of the tradition” could lead to the discovery of the void and, as Montaigne had put it in the words of Cicero, its “innumerable forms.” 112. Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, 40. 113. “For all his materialism,” writes Most, “Timpanaro seems to acknowledge a teleological force that certainly does not operate in the wider field of human history as a whole but at least seems to a certain extent to do so in this narrower, technical domain, driving his story forward as a kind of motor and endowing it with a forceful internal dynamic” (Most, in Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, 23). 114. Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, 138. 115. On the idea of “innumerable forms” in philology, see also Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis.

*3* Homer Atomized

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the German philologist Friedrich A. Wolf published his groundbreaking study A Prolegomena to Homer, demonstrating how the search for the most “ancient and genuine form” of Homer’s poems produced nothing but questions about their oral history, the precise moment of their transcription, and the elusive identity of their author. In a certain way, it was a bait-and-switch operation, for what began as the promise of an “ancient and genuine form” led its readers into an epistemological void reminiscent of something from Montaigne’s Essais. What did we actually know about Homer’s poems, or Homer himself for that matter? As Wolf pointed out again and again, very little. This was exactly the kind of iconoclasm that got him into trouble, or at least raised the suspicions of his contemporaries, most of whom preferred their poet intact and their tradition with no cracks in the foundation. For in posing questions about the composition of the poems—hinting, for example, that Homer might not have been one person or even a person at all—the philologist was raising more troubling questions about the order of the universe, though he explicitly denied it: There once were philosophers who decreed that this universal framework of all things and bodies was not made by a divine mind and will but instead was born and developed by accident and chance. I do not fear that anyone will accuse me of like temerity if I am led by the traces 1. In “La dipintura allegorica,” first printed as the frontispiece of the second edition of The New Science, Giambattista Vico pictured a statue of Homer with a visible crack in the foundation. Wolf supposedly came across Vico’s work only after he published the Prolegomena, though Vico has been said to have anticipated the general spirit of his argument. For Wolf ’s review of Vico’s work, see Wolf, “G. B. Vico über den Homer.”

* 120 *

hom e r at om i z e d * 121

of an artistic framework and by other serious considerations to think that Homer was not the creator of all his—so to speak—bodies.

This passage represents an example of the rhetorical practice of denying something that is actually affirmed. For while Wolf says he is not thinking like an impious Epicurean, the philologist is inviting us to do just that—to imagine the formation of the poems to be like the aleatory composition of the Epicurean universe, “born and developed by accident and chance.” The irony, of course, was not lost on his contemporaries, or at least those who had a good ear for it. In the words of Goethe, the author of the Prolegomena “[took] away / our former adoration” and made of the Iliad “mere conglomeration” (nur ein Flickwerk). As Nietzsche would later recall, Schiller too had charged Wolf with wickedly having “scattered Homer’s laurel crown to the winds.” Previously, we examined how the philosophy of materialism crept into philological practice through an engagement with the material text. But how did this mixing of letters and atoms transform thinking about the matter and form of intellectual history, the practice of philosophy? I have begun with Wolf ’s atomic bodies, “so to speak,” to return to the larger question of what it means to imagine a history of letters as a history of atoms—a question that was deeply entrenched in the very idea of Homer long before the Prolegomena. In what follows, we will explore how the reception of Homer became entangled with 2. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 131; Prolegomena ad Homerum, 81–82: “Fuerunt aliquando philosophi, qui hanc omnium rerum ac corporum compagem et universitatem non mente numineque divino factam, sed forte et casu natam atque concretam esse statuerent. Non metuo, ne quis me similis temeritatis accuset, quum vestigiis artificiosae compagis et aliis gravibus causis adducar, ut Homerum non universorum quasi corporum suorum opificem esse.” 3. Goethe, “Homer wieder Homer” (1821), in Goethes Werke, 3:159: “Scharfsinnig habt ihr, wie ihr seid, / Von aller Verehrung uns befreit, / Und wir bekannten überfrei, / Daß Ilias nur ein Flickwerk sei.” Cited and translated in Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 149. 4. Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 149; Nietzsches Werke, 9:5: “Den Philologen warf es Schiller vor, daß sie den Kranz des Homer zerrissen hatten.” 5. For the history of Homer as an idea, see esp. Porter, “Homer: The Very Idea.”

122 * c h a p t e r t h r e e

the language of physics at a moment when the material of texts—and of printed texts in particular—was understood by some Renaissance readers to be not so different in nature or behavior from the matter of the universe. We recall that Montaigne, in his Essais, had used a slightly altered passage from Lucretius to cast literary history into an Epicurean void, imagining the time before Homer’s poems as a potentially endless quantity of matter and expanse of space. Moving now by the slightest degree from the mental universe of Montaigne, I want to focus on another reader, also a philosopher, who exhibited a profound sympathy for the Epicurean poet and found in his verses a matter of tradition: Francis Bacon. The concept of the “matter” of tradition emerges for Bacon in a number of places at once: in the scattered fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers he collected and assembled, in the shadow of movable type, and most of all in dialogue with Montaigne and the ancient Epicurean poet, both of whom loomed large in his imagination. In watching Montaigne reading (and mangling) the verses of Lucretius, Bacon discovered his own vision of a tradition scattered and combined infinitely like the letters in a printer’s shop—a dynamic vision of atomic bodies called up from the depths of textual history. Through Bacon’s eyes we will see how the poetry of materialism transformed not only the principles of modern science, but also an understanding of intellectual debt, the technologies of transmission, and the idea of the unity and conservation of knowledge. We will also see how a problem of defining literary history and its material origins shaped the work of the natural philosopher. In the end, the way that the Lucretian analogy between atoms and letters comes together in and across texts and disciplines is itself linked to the figure of dissemination we are tracing in these pages: another embodiment of the idea. To watch Bacon atomize Homer in this sense is to watch another subtle reemergence of the logic of materialism in the history of letters—a logic that pervades Bacon’s philosophy as it continues to shape how we think about the dynamic forms of knowledge in the late age of print, and the idea of literary history itself.


Things Fall Apart Bacon and his contemporaries were no strangers to the destruction of books. John Dee, whose great house at Mortlake Bacon visited as a young man, lost more than a few nights’ sleep worrying that his library (one of the largest in Elizabethan England) was in peril. Unfortunately for Dee, his worst fears proved prophetic when the library was burned down by his jealous enemies. Despite such well-grounded anxieties, Bacon insisted that knowledge was one thing that was not so easily lost. As he wrote at the end of the first book of The Advancement of Learning (1605): Let us conclude with the dignity and excellency of knowledge and learning in that whereunto man’s nature doth most aspire, which is, immortality or continuance: for to this tendeth generation, and raising of houses and families; to this buildings, foundations, and monuments; to this tendeth the desire of memory, fame, and celebration, and in effect the strength of all other human desires. We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years, or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter?

The thought is familiar, but what did Bacon mean by loss here? It seems strange, for example, to take him literally in light of his contemporaries, 6. See Sherman, John Dee, 51–52. 7. Bacon, Works, 3:318. All references to Bacon follow the edition of the Works by Spedding et al. unless otherwise noted. The theme of the immortality of letters was a common one in antiquity and the Renaissance. See, for example, Beroaldo, Commentarii in Asinum aureum, fol. a2r: “Siquidem statuae et imagines intereunt aut vi convulsae aut vetustatis situ decoloratae, volumina vero quae sunt vera spirantiaque hominum simulacra nulla vi convelluntur, nullo senio obliterantur. Fiuntque vetustate ipsa sanctiora durabilioraque” (Indeed, statues and images may be destroyed, either demolished by force or defaced by the ruin of time, but books, which are the true and breathing likenesses of men, cannot be shattered by violence or wiped out by decay. They become more worthy of reverence and lasting with age itself). Cited and discussed in Gaisser, Fortunes of Apuleius and the “Golden Ass,” 241; my translation. Milton echoes the idea in the Areopagitica where he says that books “are not absolutely dead things” (Milton, Major Works, 239–40).


who would have found little to agree with in this commonplace about Homer. Hadn’t Bacon himself, after all, said only slightly earlier in the same book “that Homer hath given more men their livings, than either Sylla, or Caesar, or Augustus ever did”—a playful nod to the countless interpretations of the poems that had appeared since antiquity and the errors that inevitably followed? Wasn’t this the same author who explicitly called for a history of “antiquities and originals of knowledges and their sects, their inventions, their traditions, their diverse administrations and managings, their flourishings, their oppositions, decays, depressions, oblivions, removes, with the causes and occasions of them, and all other events concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world”? If this was indeed the form that Bacon thought a history should ideally take, why were the texts of Homer any different? In arguing that no Homeric “stuff ” was lost, Bacon, as we will see, was setting up a reflection on the tension between the idea of textual fixity and the perpetual evolution of knowledge, the status of printed books, and the language of letters and atoms. To begin, however, we might simply say that the author of The Advancement of Learning sounded ironically old-fashioned. As Bacon no doubt knew, the story that Homer’s verses descended from the Muses—and its philological counterpart, that the texts had remained unchanged and stable ever since—was practically as old as the poems themselves. To quote Wolf again, the generations of men who believed Homer was unchanged and unchangeable “follow[ed] the example of [those] who used to claim the same thing for their Hebrew text. They prohibited the application of any conjecture, almost of any human reason to it, revering as literally inspired by God even those passages that scholars now consider entirely corrupt.” Wolf ’s own philological call to arms had been anticipated al8. Bacon, Works, 3:317. For the long tradition of reading Homer allegorically, see Lamberton, Homer the Theologian. On the reception and transformation of this allegorical tradition in England in the sixteenth century, see Wolfe, “Spenser, Homer, and the Mythography of Strife.” 9. Bacon, Works, 3:330. 10. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 49; Prolegomena ad Homerum, 6: “Istorum exemplo Buxtorfianorum, qui eandem rem olim praedicabant de Hebraico codice suo, quum ab eo omnem ingenii et tantum non rationis humanae usum arcerent, ea quoque tanquam θεόπνευστα reveriti quae nunc a doctis vitiosissima putantur.”


most two centuries earlier by men such as Erasmus, Hubert van Giffen, Isaac Casaubon, and Joseph Scaliger—humanists who were beginning to see the Homeric tradition as fundamentally inconsistent even where it appeared on its surface most untroubled. When Erasmus, for example, introduced the concept of the textual archetype in his reading of Aristotle, one could say that he had already stumbled upon the Homeric Question in its most basic form: The agreement of the manuscripts will not seem at all astonishing to those who have even a modicum of experience in assessing and collating manuscripts. For it very often happens that an error of one archetype, so long as it has some specious appearance of the truth, goes on to propagate itself in all the books that form as it were its descendants, “and the children of its children and those who are born later.”

The quoted line is a famous one from the Iliad, though, as Timpanaro has pointed out, Erasmus adapted it grammatically to fit his context. Homer’s poetry, like all texts, transforms under the pressure of thought, and in this way Erasmus’s image actually performs what it attempts to describe: minor mistakes, the vagaries of memory and usage, are absorbed back into the flow of the tradition and propagated, as the poet put it, by “the children of its children.” Aristotle and his metaphysics were not immune to the flux of textual history, and neither was the poetry of Homer. The technology of print made matters both better and worse, depending on one’s point of view. On the one hand, print seemed to 11. See Grafton, “Renaissance Readers,” 149–72. 12. Erasmus, Adagia 209 (Chilias I, century VI, adage 36): “De codicum inter se consensu nequaquam mirandum videbitur iis qui sunt vel mediocriter in pensitandis conferendisque codicibus excercitati. Fit enim saepenumero ut unius archetypi mendum, modo veri fucum aliquem prae se ferat, in universam deinde veluti posteritatem librorum propagetur, καὶ παῖδας παίδων καὶ τοὶ μετόπισθε γένωνται.” The passage from Homer refers to the Iliad 20.308. Erasmus, cited and translated in Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, 49. See Rizzo, Il lessico filologico, 316–17. 13. See Timpanaro, Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, 49 n. 16: “The accusative παῖδας is an adaptation required by the context in Erasmus; the other changes will have been errors of citation from memory.” 14. For the modern version of the debate concerning the nature of print and fixity, see Eisenstein and Johns, “How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?”


promise stability, textual fixity, and standardization—things closely connected to the development of philology as a discipline. On the other, it was itself an instrument and promulgator of error. In the preface to his Miscellanea (1489), Angelo Poliziano lamented how bad emendations crept into good books and were reproduced a thousand times in printed editions: “I see many places where texts are forged, contaminated, defiled, rubbed out, encrusted, distorted, jumbled, discarded, and entirely altered without any sense of respect, responsibility or judgment, and what is worse, because of the circumstances occasioned by new technology, the most dim-witted opinions can be multiplied in a minute, like vines, into a thousand volumes.” In his Novarum lectionum (1571), Willem Canter complained similarly of maculae in texts that “persisted in numerous copies and were scattered throughout the world, passing on into other editions as though by hand, and with their contagion they infected the eyes and mouths of nearly everyone.” Both the promise of print and the problems it raised foregrounded an unsettling realization: by the late sixteenth century, it had become increasingly difficult to know what Homer himself had intended, or even who he was. Casaubon, a man who practiced his English by reading Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, might have worried that he was misunderstanding the passage about Homer’s syllables and letters when he came to that part of the text. Indeed, in his commentary on Diogenes’ Lives of the Philosophers, Casaubon had expressed almost the opposite opinion: If what Josephus says is true, that Homer did not leave behind his poems as written texts, but that “having been preserved by memory” 15. Poliziano, Opera omnia, 1:215: “Video multa in literis . . . supponi, pollui, adulterari, oblini, incrustari, distorqueri, confundi, praecipitari, interverti omnia, nulla fide, nullo nec pudore nec iudicio, quodque his omnibus pestilentius, occasione quoque recentis artificii, quamlibet stolidissimas opiniones in mille voluminum traduces momento propagari”; my translation. 16. Canter, Novarum lectionum libri octo, 11: “Quod erat eo gravius malum, quo pluribus exemplis auctae maculae, & per orbem totum dispersae, nec non in alias editiones quasi per manus deinceps traditae, omnium fere oculos atque ora suis inficiebant contagiis”; my translation. 17. See Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to Fortune, 302–3. Casaubon’s copy of The Advancement of Learning with his marginalia is currently at the Huntington Library.


they were written down much later, then I do not see how they could be had in a sufficiently correct form, even if we should have the most ancient manuscripts, since it is probable that they were written down quite differently from the way they had been composed by him.

For Casaubon, the entire tradition of Homeric poetry was called into question in the sobering light of an emergent textual criticism. Because the poems were first transmitted orally and later committed to writing, error naturally abounded, and the trials of philology made matters even worse. If, as it was commonly understood, Homer’s poetry was the beginning of all textual history—a monument to the invention of human writing and culture—then once you started to question the validity of his texts, you were left standing on shaky floorboards, peering down again into the void. Perhaps no one in the Renaissance understood this better than Montaigne, who transformed the doubts that men such as Casaubon were entertaining about Homer into a full-fledged crisis with the change of only a few words. In misquoting a passage from Lucretius, we recall, Montaigne had unlocked his vision of deep time—a swirling vision of the world before the birth of Homer and historical consciousness that he imagined as an Epicurean void. Like almost everything in the Essais, the passage is worth repeating, though this time in Florio’s contemporary translation, which was published in 1603: “If we behold an unlimited greatnesse on all sides both of regions and times [temporum], whereupon the mind casting it selfe and intentive doth travell farre and neare, so as it sees no bounds of what is last, whereon it may insist; in this infinite immensity there would appeare a multitude of innumerable formes.” In a way, one could say, the essayist was simply following up 18. Casaubon, in Comentarii in Diogenem Laërtium, 1:132: “Si verum est quod Iosephus ait, Homerum sua poëmata scripta non reliquisse, sed διαμνημονευóμενα multo post scripta fuisse; non video, quomodo satis emendata possint ea haberi, vel si antiquissimos habeamus codices; siquidem verisimile est, non paullo aliter ea fuisse scripta, ac essent ab ipso composita.” Cited and translated in Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 161 n. 42. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives 9.113: “Aratus is said to have asked him how he could obtain a trustworthy text of Homer, to which he replied ‘You can, if you get hold of the ancient copies, and not the corrected copies of our day.’ ” 19. Montaigne, Essais 3.6; trans. Florio, 544; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 907: “Si interminatam in omnes partes magnitudinem regionum videremus et temporum, in


on a question he had posed earlier in the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond,” where again he had adapted a Stoic commonplace for his own skeptical purposes: “If Atomes have by chance formed so many sorts of figures, why should we not . . . beleeve that an infinit number of Greek letters, confusedly scattered in some open place, might one day meet and joyne together to the contexture of the Iliads?” By the time we get to “Des coches,” this old Stoic commonplace on the absurdity of Epicurean physics had become the basis of a terrifying vision. In the end, Montaigne reminds us just how easily the textual anxieties of the philologist can become reflective of larger epistemological dilemmas—indeed, how a question of Homeric transmission can unlock a world of trouble and, as it were, “lead to atomization.”

Casting Seeds In more ways than one, Lucretius and his vision of matter became caught in the teeth of Montaigne’s critique of modernity and progress. quam se iniiciens animus et intendens ita late longeque peregrinatur, ut nullam oram ultimi videat in qua possit insistere: in hac immensitate infinita vis innumerabilium appareret formarum” (emphasis in original). I follow Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne throughout this chapter in order to place the text in the linguistic world of Bacon’s Advancement. 20. Montaigne, Essais 2.12; trans. Florio, 316; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 544–45: “Si les atomes ont, par sort, formé tant de sortes de figures, pour quoy ne se sont ils jamais rencontrez à faire une maison, un soulier? Pour quoy, de mesme, ne croid on qu’un nombre infini de lettres grecques versées emmy la place, seroyent pour arriver à la contexture de l’ Iliade?” Cf. Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, 1.6.20: “Deinde eadem illa atomorum (in quo etiam Democritus haeret) turbulenta concursio hunc mundi ornatum efficere non poterit” (while secondly (and this is a weak point with Democritus also) this riotous hurly-burly of atoms could not possibly result in the ordered beauty of the world we know). 21. I am borrowing this phrase from Adam Parry, who, in The Making of Homeric Verse, a collection of his father’s writings on Homer, describes the mistake of nineteenth-century critics who tried to separate out the strata of Homeric poetry into distinct dialects: “Their work has been judged a failure . . . because the dialectmixture of Homeric poetry goes too deep: it is pervasive in the poems, and like Anaxagoras’s elements, it seems to be found in the smallest units of them. An attempt to find chronological layers in this way would lead to atomization” (Parry,


By another turn, however, the ancient poet also became implicated in their defense. Writing a book called The Advancement of Learning in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon had much to respond to in Montaigne’s “New Epicureanism,” to borrow MacPhail’s expression again, and in the ancient poet who, with only a few modifications, had enabled the Frenchman’s critique. It hardly seems a coincidence that, in the midst of celebrating the immortality of Homer’s syllables and letters, Bacon would turn his attention to Lucretius, the poet who insisted that all “monuments of men fall to pieces.” By drawing upon the Epicurean poet to argue for the perpetual continuance of knowledge, Bacon was flirting with another irony worthy of Montaigne: But of knowledge there is no satiety, but satisfaction and appetite are perpetually interchangeable; and therefore appeareth to be good in itself simply, without fallacy or accident. Neither is that pleasure of small efficacy and contentment to the mind of man which the poet Lucretius describeth elegantly, Suave mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis, etc. it is a view of delight, saith he, to stand or walk upon the shore side, and to see a ship tossed with tempest upon the sea; or to be in a fortified tower, and to see two battles join upon a plain; but it is a pleasure incomparable, for the mind of man to be settled, landed, and fortified in the certainty of truth; and from thence to descry and behold the errors, perturbations, labours, and wanderings up and down of other men.

The passage, from Lucretius’s proem to book 2, describes the pleasure of the Epicurean removed from fear, watching from a distance. Taken out Making of Homeric Verse, xx). In this passage, Parry seems to be playing loosely with Homer’s ancient readers such as Metrodorus of Lampsacus, a student of Anaxagoras, who had interpreted the Homeric gods and heroes as allegories for the physical elements of the universe. On Metrodorus, see Califf, “Metrodorus of Lampsacus and the Problem of Allegory.” 22. Lucretius, DRN 5.311: “Denique non monumenta virum dilapsa videmus.” As if on cue, this very passage from Lucretius’s text begins to fall apart in the manuscripts. 23. Bacon, Works, 3:317.


of context, however, it is often mistaken for a pronouncement of Epicurean schadenfreude, a sentiment of profound condescension, if not outright human ugliness. As Montaigne described it: “for in the middest of compassion, we inwardly feele a kinde of bitter-sweet-pricking of malicious delight to see others suffer; and children feele it also.” Bacon himself struggled with the meaning of the verses, either quoting or paraphrasing them at least three times over the course of his career. In his first reference to them, in a device for Queen Elizabeth, he had one speaker paraphrase the Lucretian lines only to have another question their sense of assurance as nothing more than “vain chimeras and imaginations.” Years later, when he returned to the same passage in the essay “Of Truth,” he added some parentheses and two qualifications: “no pleasure is comparable to standing, upon the vantage ground of Truth: (a hill not to be commanded . . .) And to see the Errours, and Wandrings . . . in the vale below: So alwaies, that this prospect, be with Pitty.” The philosopher was still finding his footing on the proverbial hill. In the meantime, a quotation from Lucretius had become a kind of calling card for Montaigne. The Frenchman had quoted De rerum natura a dizzying number of times in the sprawling pages of the Essais (147, to be exact)—perhaps more than any other Renaissance writer not producing a commentary on the poem. This is something Bacon would not have missed. Indeed, I would suggest that when Bacon quoted De rerum natura in the passage above, he was in his own subtle way drawing attention to the skeptic who had remade the poetry of Lucretius in the image of his own wandering mind, who had attacked the foundations of written history with the change of only a few letters, and who said that printing itself had been discovered by the Chinese (and probably many times before that). Recently, Kenneth Alan Hovey has sug24. Montaigne, Essais 3.1; trans. Florio, 475; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 791: “Car, au milieu de la compassion, nous sentons au dedans je ne sçay quelle aigre-douce poincte de volupté maligne à voir souffrir autruy; et les enfans le sentent.” 25. Bacon, Works, 8:379 and 383. 26. Bacon, Works, 6:378. 27. See Barbour, “Bacon, Atomism, and Imposture.” 28. See Montaigne, Essais, 3.6; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 908: “Nous nous escriïons du miracle de l’invention de nostre artillerie, de nostre impression; d’autres


gested that by bringing us through this Lucretian passage again in the Advancement, Bacon was attempting to establish a kind of compromise, a middle way between his own Scylla and Charybdis: Lucretius’s Epicurean presumption and Montaigne’s French despair. If the philosopher was going to rest secure on the crowded hill of truth with skeptics and Epicureans, he was going to have to reimagine the relationship between pleasure and knowledge and also the literary foundations upon which all knowledge was said to rely. This meant, among other things, confronting Homer. It is clear that Bacon’s choice of the Greek bard instead of scripture to illustrate the inexhaustible pleasure of knowledge freed him to revise the ancient idea of a fixed tradition without risking the obvious charge of blasphemy. The choice of Homer, however, also permitted him to respond more directly to Montaigne in the Essais. Writing in view of the Frenchman’s bad news and the lines from De rerum natura he used in the Advancement, Bacon explained his argument about Homer’s immortal syllables and letters with his own vision of material change: But the images of men’s wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast [spargunt] their seeds [semina] in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages. hommes, un autre bout du monde à la Chine, en jouyssoit mille ans auparavant. Si nous voyons autant du monde comme nous n’en voyons pas, nous apercevrions, comme il est à croire, une perpetuele multiplication et vicissitude de formes” (We keepe a coile and wonder at the miraculous invention of our artilerie, and amazed at the rare devise of Printing; when as unknowne to us, other men, and an other end of the world named China, knew and had perfect use of both a thousand yeares before. If we sawe as much of this vaste world as wee see but a least part of it, it is very likely we should perceive a perpetuall multiplicity and over-rouling vicissitude of formes [trans. Florio, 544]). Montaigne here retraces his steps, moving us once again from an image of material transmission (printing) to a figure of “perpetuall multiplicity.” 29. See Hovey, “ ‘Mountaigny Saith Prettily,’ ” 76–77. 30. Bacon describes the scriptures similarly in The Advancement as having “in themselves not only totally or collectively, but distributively in clauses and words, infinite springs and streams of doctrine to water the church in every part” (Works, 3:487). On this passage, see Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity, 57.


So that if the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth [consociat] the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which as ships pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other?

Bacon is again generating for us a thick contexture of allusion. This idea of active knowledge in books, for example, immediately recalls Aristotle’s famous image of Homer’s words, which give “metaphorical life to lifeless things.” “All such passages,” Aristotle said, “are distinguished by the effect of activity they convey.” In this case, Bacon interprets that activity in terms of its effects on readers, who in turn generate activity of their own. In imagining Homer as a source in this regard, Bacon might have also been thinking of something Poliziano said about the poet: “I was about to speak of the poet Homer, the founder of all branches of knowledge and the foremost of learned men. . . . So it has come about that in Homer’s poetry, we see examples of all the virtues and vices, the seeds of all learning, the form and likeness of all human endeavors.” Poliziano himself, it turns out, was recycling the idea from an ancient life of Homer thought to be by Plutarch. It is within these commonplaces—or rather, we might say, between them—that Bacon sets into motion a number of materialist echoes that are amplified in the larger context of his philosophy. As the au31. Bacon, Works, 1:483 and 3:318. I have included selected words from Bacon’s 1623 Latin translation in brackets for emphasis. 32. Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.11.2: “καὶ ὡς κέχρηται Ὅμηρος πολλαχοῦ τῷ τὰ ἄψυχα ἔμψυχα λέγειν διὰ τῆς μεταφορᾶς” (trans. Roberts). 33. See Poliziano, Oratio in expositione Homeri (1486), in Opera omnia, 1:477 and 1:479: “Dicturus de Homer vate, doctrinarum omnium, atque ingeniorum auctore, et principe. . . . Quo effectum est, ut in Homeri poesi virtutum omnium, vitiorumque exempla, omnium semina disciplinarum, omnium rerum humanarum simulachra, effigiesque intueamur”; my translation. 34. On Poliziano’s use of the Life of Homer, see Mandosio, “Filosofia, arti e scienze.” 35. On the problem of defining the philosopher’s commitments to materialism, see Rees, “Atomism and ‘Subtlety’ ”; and Barbour, “Bacon, Atomism, and Imposture.”


thor of several works on matter and metaphysics, for example, Bacon knew very well that the organic metaphor of seeds was sometimes intimately tied to an atomistic idea of dissemination. He had developed the word semina in a technical way in his discussion of atoms in Cogitationes de natura rerum (1604), a work unpublished during his lifetime. There he discussed in detail the nature of semina rerum. Like the title of the work itself, the phrase “seeds of things” was unmistakably Lucretian in color—something not entirely uncommon in Bacon’s works. In general, as Benedino Gemelli has shown, Bacon’s materialist diction owes a great deal to the language of De rerum natura: “In the works of Bacon we find variously dispersed [sparsa] a terminology of a clear Lucretian-Epicurean derivation.” Gemelli here even employs the Italian equivalent of Bacon’s spargere, the Latin translation of “cast.” If indeed Lucretius’s words are scattered and dispersed throughout Bacon’s writing, one could say that the philosopher’s own subtle use of the poet actually performs the disseminating action of his metaphor. As Christopher Mienel has argued, the vivid imagery of De rerum natura came to pervade the mind of the early seventeenth-century natural philosopher “picturing material processes on the basis of everyday experience within the visual world.” Who can forget the poet’s image of dust 36. For a contemporary use of the seed image, see Leroy, Of the Interchangeable Course, 129–30: “So must learning also be provided for, by seeking of new inventions, in steede of those that are lost, by changing that which is not well. . . . So the plants, and all living creatures which cannot endure long, by the necessity of the matter whereof they are made, renew themselves continually; procreating by budds, and seeds, their like.” Bacon uses the organic image again in his description of the “initiative method” for the transmission of knowledge: “But yet nevertheless, secundum majus et minus, a man may revisit and descend unto the foundations of his knowledge and consent; and so transplant it into another as it grew in his own mind” (Bacon, Works, 3:404). On the imagery of seeds and sparks, see Horowitz, Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge. 37. See, for example, Bacon, Works, 3:18: “Duplex enim est, atque adeo esse potest, opinio de atomis sive rerum seminibus” (For there are two opinions, nor can there be more, with respect to atoms or the seeds of things [Works, 5:422]). 38. “Nell’opera di Bacone troviamo variamente sparsa una terminologia di chiara derivazione lucreziano-epicurea” (Gemelli, Aspetti dell’atomismo classico, 41; my translation). See also Harrison, “Bacon, Hobbes, Boyle, and the Ancient Atomists.” 39. Meinel, “Early Seventeenth-Century Atomism,” 103.


scattered in sunlight, an analogy that was meant to help us see a world of unseen particles? The scattering of the letters and syllables of Homer through time is another such image, bringing us from the idea of a stable text to a vision of material processes beneath the surface of perception. Moreover, in mixing the language of materialism with the rhetoric of progress, printing, and navigation, the English philosopher could have found a wealth of inspiration among those of his contemporaries who were forging similar connections in theory and practice. We might consider, for example, Thomas Harriot, a man celebrated during Bacon’s lifetime for his explorations of the New World and for his early interest in the study of atoms in England. There was also the Frenchman Jean Bodin, a crucial source for Bacon’s ideas about history and method who had dramatically linked the modern discovery of printing and navigation with an investigation into the subtlety of matter. Finally, there was Montaigne again, the writer whom Bacon appears to be addressing indirectly with the quotation of De rerum natura, as if in a silent dialogue. One can almost imagine the text of “Des coches” before Bacon’s eyes as he worked through the skeptic’s unsettling arguments about matter, colonialism, and the invention of printing. Bacon’s use of the word “cast,” for example, as in “cast their seeds in the minds of others,” recalls Florio’s translation of the passage misquoted from Cicero that we looked at earlier—a picture of textual history yielding to an Epicurean void. In that passage, we recall, the word was used to describe the action of the rational faculties plunging and spreading through space: “the mind casting it selfe and intentive doth travell farre and neare, so as it sees no bounds of what is last, whereon it may insist; in this infinite im40. See Kargon, Atomism in England; and Shirley, Thomas Harriot. 41. See Bodin, Method, 301– 2: “No one, looking closely into this matter, can doubt that the discoveries of our men ought to be compared with the discoveries of our elders; many ought to be placed first. . . . Although nothing is more remarkable in the whole nature of things than the magnet, yet the ancients were not aware of its use, clearly divine, and whereas they lived entirely within the Mediterranean basin, our men, on the other hand, traverse the whole earth every year in frequent voyages and lead colonies into another world. . . . Moreover, what is more remarkable than the abstraction and separation of forms from matter (if I may speak thus)? From this the hidden secrets of nature are revealed. . . . Printing alone can easily vie with all the discoveries of the ancients.”


mensity there would appeare a multitude of innumerable formes.” By a slightly different use of the word “cast,” Bacon too asks us to project our minds forward into the future of knowledge and backward into a distant, conjectural past, though in this instance the work takes on another feeling altogether. It is as if Bacon is revising the passage from Montaigne’s essay point by point. In his hands, the ominous figure of the skeptic’s “multitude of innumerable formes”—that image of proliferating chaos—is converted into the positive and generative image of “infinite actions and opinions.” Whereas the Frenchman had specifically added a temporal element to Cicero’s description of Epicurean space, throwing time itself into the void, Bacon envisioned men communicating and sharing opinions by ship across “vast seas of time.” In this place where Homer’s syllables and letters encounter the language of atomism and Bacon appears to be responding to Montaigne’s image of the void, we can see the philosopher working out his own physics of literary history. In the emphasis on the letters of Homer, for example, we are reminded that the art of writing itself was said to have been invented with the transcription of Homer, and that later the Alexandrians supposedly gathered each of the poems into twenty-four books to represent the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. When Bacon says that not a syllable or letter of Homer had been lost, he is in his own subtle way playing with the various elemental scales of Homer’s poems (from atoms to letters to books). He also seems to be recalling Lucretius’s own vision of the material text in flux, and the famous analogy between letters and atoms that we’ve seen again and again. Bacon himself, in fact, uses the Lucretian analogy repeatedly throughout his philosophy—in one instance describing his own investigations into the subtlety of matter as “having the same relation to things and works which the letters of the alphabet have to speech and words—which, though in themselves useless, are the elements [elementa] of which all discourse is made up.” For a seventeenth-century reader such as 42. For the modern version of the argument about Homer and the invention of writing, see Powell, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. 43. Bacon, Works, 4:30; 1:142: “Sed ita prorsus se habeant illa ad res et opera quemadmodum literae alphabeti se habeant ad orationem et verba; quae licet per se inutiles eaedem tamen omnis sermonis elementa sunt.”


Bacon, of course, the elemental pun took on yet another dimension in the world of the printing shop, where elementa were cast, set, dispersed, and recycled—a closed economy of textual matter in which a limited number of letters was made to figure the matter of “infinite actions and opinions” and ideally nothing was lost. Like the letters that made up a printed page, Homer’s poems themselves had a long history of being broken apart and recombined. One need think only of the practice of some late-antique writers who generated centos out of fragments of Homeric poetry, making the very style of these patchwork compositions a reflection of the poet’s combinatory history. As the sixteenth-century humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger had put it: “Homer scatters, [Virgil] connects; the one disperses [sparsit]; the other collects”—an acute observation that spoke perhaps equally well to the literary techniques and the material fortunes of the two poets. Moreover, the idea of a scattered and scattering Homer also had broad implications for the poem as an oral phenomenon as well. As Bacon suggests, letters may be cast, and so may syllables. Once again Lucretius provides a powerful analog to Bacon’s vision of material change in the figure of an echo: praeterea partis in cunctas dividitur vox, ex aliis aliae quoniam gignuntur, ubi una dissiluit semel in multas exorta, quasi ignis saepe solet scintilla suos se spargere in ignis. [Besides, a voice is distributed abroad in all directions, since voices beget other voices when one voice uttered has once leapt asunder into many, just as a spark of fire is often accustomed to scatter itself into fires of its own.] 44. For an example of the centos tradition, see Usher, Homeric Stitchings. The tradition has attracted some harsh criticism historically. In one particularly vivid example, Elizabeth Barrett Browning accused the Empress Eudocia of having “sat among the ruins of the holy city, addressing herself most unholily, with whatever good intentions and delicate fingers, to pulling Homer’s gold to pieces bit by bit” (quoted in Usher, Homeric Stitchings, 1). 45. Scaliger, Poetices, 4:48: “Fudit Homerus, hic collegit: ille sparsit, hic composuit.” I would like to thank Jessica Wolfe for pointing this passage out to me and for allowing me to borrow her witty translation. 46. Lucretius, DRN 4.603–6.


For a Renaissance humanist, the word spargere, which Lucretius uses here to describe the scattering of the voice, had some negative connotations, at least when it came to thinking about tradition. Philologists are usually more concerned with bringing texts back together again than breaking them apart. This is an old story. In De oratore, for example, Cicero recounts the example of Pisistratus, who is said to have been the first to bring together Homer’s “disordered books” (libros confusos) into some kind of coherent whole. Readers have been trying to collect the scattered parts of Homer ever since. For Lucretius in the passage above, however, the sense of what it means to scatter is very different. In this case, the scattering of voices through space is likened to a scattering of fire—an image that recalls the passing of the torch of life, the conservation of matter. Bacon’s own use of the word spargere for “cast” echoes this generative sense we find in Lucretius, shifting the mood again from the language of humanistic despair and skepticism to a language of hope. The very notion of Homer’s oral transmission (however vaguely conceived in the early seventeenth century) allows the English philosopher to figure a dynamic, complex system—a system, we might say, of “creative evolution.” By treating Homer’s syllables and letters as one unit—by collapsing or eliding the distinction—the philosopher is asking us to rethink the materiality of knowledge in its various forms, suggesting 47. Cicero, De oratore 3.34.137: “Quis doctior eisdem temporibus illis aut cuius eloquentia litteris instructior fuisse traditur quam Pisistrati? qui primus Homeri libros confusos antea sic disposuisse dicitur, ut nunc habemus” (Who is recorded to have been wiser, at that same period, or better equipped with eloquence informed by learning than Pisistratus? He is said to have been the first person who arranged the previously disordered books of Homer in the order in which we now have them). 48. Lucretius, DRN 2.77–79. 49. I am borrowing the phrase “creative evolution” from Henri Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice, which attempts to reimagine the notion of evolution as an élan vital of the human mind. In The Seeds of Things, Goldberg connects Bergson’s idea of “creative evolution” explicitly to Marx’s reading of Epicurus: “Marx takes from Epicurus the possibility of what can be realized even if it has never been, the possibility that is embodied in the swerve in which matter and bodies—matter embodied—comes into being (as possibility, as realizable possibility). This, I would venture to say, is also the moment when Marx most anticipates Bergson’s insistence on ongoing creativity as the evolutionary principle of the world and of its human inhabitants” (Goldberg, Seeds of Things, 61).


a kind of fluid continuity between media rather than a discrete shift. Printing here reanimates the idea of an oral tradition, of Homer spreading from town to town across Greece: a vision of social interaction across time and space. In the context of De rerum natura, Lucretius uses the word consociare (to join or make alliance) to describe the material concourse of atoms generating or not generating conglomerate matter in space. Bacon uses it in the Advancement to describe the commerce of knowledge between men communicating across “vast seas of time”—an antidote to the colonial nightmare with which Montaigne ends “Des coches.” Whereas readers such as Montaigne had imagined a tradition pulled limb from limb, full of multiplying errors and cast into an empty void, Bacon pictured a void that was full—full of meetings and coincidences, of men generating and sharing opinions, scattering fire from one to another.

The Conservation of Textual Matter The name of Homer is mentioned only twice by Lucretius, though the first appearance is a startling one. In the opening book of De rerum na50. This idea of flux and flow in Bacon’s thought fits nicely into the dynamic scheme that Ronald Levao has described in “Francis Bacon and the Mobility of Science.” 51. We may see this fantasy played out in a slightly updated form on the website for the Homeric Multitext Project, a digital presentation of Homeric manuscripts, the historical framework of which, the editors claim, “is needed to account for the full reality of a complex medium of oral performance that underwent many changes over a long period of time” (http://chs.harvard.edu/chs/homer_multitext [accessed 10 July 2009]). In this case, the dynamic notion of a digital (textual) Homer is quietly elided with the idea of an oral tradition. 52. Lucretius, DRN 2.109–11: “Multaque praeterea magnum per inane vagantur, / conciliis rerum quae sunt reiecta nec usquam / consociare etiam motus potuere recepta” (And many besides wander through the great void which have been rejected from combination with things, and have nowhere been able to gain admittance and also harmonize their motion). 53. Bacon writes in another place: “Praesto etiam est Imprimendi artificium veteribus incognitum, cuius beneficio singulorum inventa fulguris modo transcurrere possint et subito communicari, ad aliorum studia excitanda et inventa miscenda” (Works, 3:584) (By the art of printing, the discoveries of one man can pass [transcur-


tura, the poet ironically recounts the story of the old Latin poet Ennius receiving from the ghost of “deathless Homer” “the nature of things.” Like Bacon’s vision of Homeric semina casting, it was another scene of transmission: unde sibi exortam semper florentis Homeri commemorat speciem lacrimas effundere salsas coepisse et rerum naturam expandere dictis. [whence he avers that the likeness of ever deathless Homer issued forth, and began to shed salt tears and to unfold the nature of things.]

Whereas Ennius claims that Homer appeared as a ghost and explained to him the “nature of things,” Lucretius’s poem, the title of which is echoed in these lines, transforms the language of a poetic convention into the language of materialist philosophy, that is, from the idea of a simulacrum of Homer to the simulacra of atoms. Such specters, Lucretius says, may be explained by the illusion generated by the thin films of matter that are constantly emanating from the surfaces of things. In recalling Ennius’s famous vision of the ghost of Homer in a poem about atoms—a poem that says the soul is mortal—Lucretius is effectively rethinking the idea of poetic immortality in his own terms, asking us to revisit our most cherished assumptions about poetry and its afterlife. In this context we might think, for example, of Ennius’s famous epitaph as it was recorded by Cicero: “Let no one honour me with tears or on my ashes weep. / For why? from lips to lips of men I fly [volito] and living keep.” The image here is of Ennius’s own poetic continuance on the breath of men—a figure of oral transmission. For rere] like a flash of lightning and be promptly shared, thus stimulating the zeal and effecting the interchange of ideas [trans. Farrington, Philosophy of Francis Bacon, 132]). 54. Lucretius, DRN 1.124–26. 55. See Lucretius, DRN 4.26– 44. On the idea of simulacra in Lucretius, see Thury, “Lucretius’ Poem as a Simulacrum.” 56. Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes 1.15.34: “Nemo me lacrumis decoret, nec funera fletu / faxit. Cur? Volito vivus per ora virum.” I would like to thank Joseph Reed for thinking through this passage with me. I have altered a word in the translation for emphasis, changing “pass” to “fly.”


Lucretius, the image of flying evokes a vision of atoms coming together and dispersing. At the end of book 1, Lucretius recalls the image of the old Latin poet “flying” here and there when he imagines the afterlife of atomic bodies “that fly about continually unimpaired for ever” (perpetuo volitare invicta per aevom). Like everything else in the poem, Ennius’s poetic immortality is resolved into a subtle game of atoms and the void. Apparitions such as the one he describes are merely material discharges—the lingering skins sloughed off by very real bodies. When Ennius claimed in the Annales that he was the reincarnation of Homer, for the author of De rerum natura he was simply lending another expression to the material afterlife of Homer’s winged words. The atomic reimagining of Homer’s ghost sets the backdrop for a more radical critique and refiguring of the matter of tradition. For Lucretius, again, the very idea of tradition is imagined as the passing of the torch (vitai lampada tradunt), the making and unmaking of bodies. In the hands of a poetic materialist who believed the soul was mortal, the idea of Homer semper florentis (always flowering) is not only ironic, but also true in a slightly different sense. In book 2, for example, Lucretius recycles the image of flowering in his discussion of the conservation of matter, once again linking the organic metaphor of growth with the language of atoms: cum tamen incolumis videatur summa manere propterea quia, quae decedunt corpora cuique, unde abeunt minuunt, quo venere augmine donant, illa senescere, at haec contra florescere cogunt, nec remorantur ibi. [Although nevertheless the sum is seen to remain unimpaired for this reason, that whenever bodies pass away from a thing, they diminish that from which they pass and increase that to which they have come, they compel the first to fade and the second on the contrary to bloom, yet do not linger there.] 57. Lucretius, DRN 1.952. 58. On Ennius’s Homeric dream and Virgil’s transformation of it, see Hardie, Epic Successors of Virgil, 102–3. 59. Lucretius, DRN 2.71–75.


In this passage, the very image Lucretius used to celebrate the immortality of Homer semper florentis is redirected to describe a very different kind of immortality, the only kind of immortality available in the cosmic universe of De rerum natura: the eternity of matter and the void. Homer’s poetry is “always flowering,” but only in the sense that its matter is conserved—broken apart, dispersed, and gathered again. Once again we are reminded of the letters in a printer’s shop, the image of casting, the dispersing of letters, and the making of a page. Ennius’s recycling of Homeric wisdom (and Lucretius’s own use of Ennius) is part and parcel of this material recycling of letters, an idea that is perfectly embodied in Lucretius’s subtle and ironic play on the name Ennius and the word perenni, which means evergreen or perennial. Like the association between letters and atoms, the conservation of matter was a concept near and dear to Bacon’s heart. Throughout his philosophical writings, the English philosopher repeatedly argued for a materialist understanding of the processes of disintegration and recombination—an idea he inherited from Democritus and the Epicurean poet whom he quietly evokes again in the Novum organum: “For there is nothing more true in nature than the twin propositions, that ‘nothing is produced from nothing’ [ex nihilo nihil fieri], and ‘nothing is reduced to nothing’ [neque quicquam in nihilum redigi], but that 60. On the conflict between poetic conventions of immortality and the philosophy of Lucretius’s poem, see again Segal, “Poetic Immortality.” The author’s larger argument may be found in Segal, Lucretius on Death and Anxiety. 61. See Lucretius, DRN 1.112–19: “Ignoratur enim quae sit natura animai, / nata sit an contra nascentibus insinuetur, / et simul intereat nobiscum morte dirempta, / an tenebras Orci visat vastasque lacunas, / an pecudes alias divinitus insinuet se, / Ennius ut noster cecinit, qui primus amoeno / detulit ex Helicone perenni fronde coronam / per gentis Italas hominum quae clara clueret” (For there is ignorance [about] what is the nature of the soul, whether it be born or on the contrary find its way into men at birth, and whether it perish together with us when broken up by death, or whether it visit the gloom of Orcus and his vasty chasms, or by divine ordinance find its way into animals in our stead, as our own Ennius sang, who first brought down from pleasant Helicon a chaplet of evergreen leafage to win a glorious name through the nations of Italian men). As Rouse points out in a note in his edition, the pun on “eNNius . . . pereNNi . . . emphasizes the immortality of the poet’s work” (p. 12). On the nature of Lucretius’s reworking of Ennius’s influence see Harrison, “Ennius and the Prologue to Lucretius DRN 1 (1.1–148).”


the absolute quantum or sum total of matter remains unchanged, without increase or diminution.” Bacon’s use of principles such as the indestructibility and conservation of matter reflect his fundamental idea that the most basic truths about our reality are convertible and can be applied across disciplines. What the philosopher sought, as he put it, was “the same footprints of nature, treading or printing upon several subjects or matters.” To take his play on the word “print” here seriously, the conservation of matter was as appropriate to the stuff of the universe as to the stuff of books. In converting a well-worn idiom about Homeric immortality into a vision of matter, Bacon had absorbed not only Lucretius’s discourse, but also his conceit. Once we begin to recognize these strains of Lucretian influence in Bacon’s thinking, as well as his language, the tension between the fantasy of a fixed textual tradition and the idea of flux yields to a fundamental philosophical reorientation—a rethinking of the very idea of fixity itself. We see this shift played out again, for example, in the way Bacon handled the question of “form,” a term the philosopher sought to redefine for his philosophy also (in this case, explicitly) in terms of matter: The human understanding is carried away to abstractions by its own nature, and pretends that things which are in flux are unchanging. It is better to dissect nature than to abstract it as the school of Democritus did, which penetrated more deeply into nature than the others. We should study matter, and its structure, and structural change, and pure act, and the law of act or motion; for forms are figments of the human mind, unless one chooses to give the name of forms to these laws of act. 62. Bacon, Works, 4:197; 1:311: “Etenim nil verius in natura quam propositio illa gemella, ex nihilo nihil fieri, neque quicquam in nihilum redigi: verum quantum ipsum materiae sive summam totalem constare, nec augeri aut minui” (emphasis in original). For an extended discussion of the conservation of matter, see Bacon, Cogitationes de natura rerum, in Works, 5:426–29. 63. Bacon, Works, 3:349. 64. Bacon, Works, 4:158; 1:168–69: “Intellectus humanus fertur ad abstracta propter naturam propriam; atque ea, quae fluxa sunt, fingit esse constantia. Melius autem est naturam secare, quam abstrahere; id quod Democriti schola fecit, quae magis penetravit in naturam quam reliquae. Materia potius considerari debet, et ejus sche-


Bacon brings with the word form the massive baggage of Platonic and Aristotelian association. In this case, however, he says he inherits his thinking not from Plato, who posits a kind of immaterial, unchangeable idea of form, or from Aristotle, whom he is cleverly working around, but from the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, knowledge of whom he derived almost entirely from Lucretius. In revising the concept of form, Bacon is again dramatizing the shift of meaning as a process of critical displacement and appropriation—a shift that mirrors the movement from the idea of an unchanging tradition to a dynamic material one. To claim that not a syllable or letter of Homer had been lost in any meaningful way would be to observe the laws of action or motion in the history of letters—the “form” of Homer in the Baconian sense of the word. This idea of matter, structure, and structural change seems to be precisely what Bacon is thinking of when he turns to the poetry of Lucretius to wax lyrical on the unlimited pleasure of knowledge—the pleasure of imagining the material evolution of tradition or of watching with the mind’s eye the eternal flux of matter and the void. In the Novum organum, Bacon links the investigation of matter to the pursuit of tranquility, reminding us again implicitly of the poet who insisted that letters are like atoms: Nor again is there any reason to be alarmed at the subtlety of the investigation, as if it could not be disentangled; on the contrary, the nearer it approaches to simple natures, the easier and plainer will everything become; the business of being transferred from the complicated to the simple; from the incommensurable to the commensurable; from surds to rational quantities; from the infinite and vague to the finite and certain; as in the case of the letters of the alphabet. matismi et meta-schematismi, atque actus purus, et lex actus sive motus; Formae enim commenta animi humani sunt, nisi libeat leges illas actus Formas appellare.” 65. Bacon, Works, 4:126; 1:234–35: “Neque rursus est, quod exhorreat quispiam istam subtilitatem, ut inexplicabilem; sed contra, quo magis vergit inquisitio ad naturas simplices, eo magis omnia erunt sita in plano et perspicuo; translato negotio a multiplici in simplex, et ab incommensurabili ad commensurabile, et a surdo ad computabile, et ab infinito et vago ad definitum et certum; ut fit in elementis literarum.” On Bacon’s views of tranquility, particularly Epicurean ataraxia, see Barbour, “Bacon, Atomism, and Imposture,” 29–30.


Arriving at the knowledge of subtle particles was, for Bacon, also arriving at the pleasure of knowledge reduced to its most basic possible components—the elementa of a language that reflected and embodied the structure of the world. This was a vision not of chaos or dissolution, but of order and calculation—of reality revealed in all its clarity. While there remained, as always, the problem of the void, the looming threat of incomprehensibility and dissolution that lurked behind the brute matter of every syllable and letter, for Bacon, at least, the void was not a place to dwell too long. Whereas the skeptical Frenchman had imagined a horrifying display of space and time beyond the threshold of Homer’s poetry, the author of the Advancement insisted on taking his pleasure.

Democritus, Lucretius, and the Atomization of Knowledge For Bacon, the analogy between knowledge and matter was not limited to this specific tissue of verbal echoes that we have been teasing out in The Advancement of Learning. Rather, the analogy represented a pattern of thought that informed the way he imagined what an author was made of and the way he conceived of his own relationship to the scattered materia of the past. When, for example, Bacon said that “time is like a river” and that things that were “light and puffed up,” such as the philosophy of Aristotle, had risen to the top while the weightier philosophers had sunk, he was drawing upon another materialist metaphor to make his point. In his Historia densi et rari (1623), 66. Lucretius himself might have appreciated the sense of clarity and transparency that Bacon describes here, even if he could not have agreed with him on the metaphysics. 67. It is telling that in celebrating pleasure and the immortality of knowledge, Bacon makes reference to “some of the philosophers which were least divine, and most immersed in the senses, and denied generally the immortality of the soul.” Even these philosophers, he says, believed knowledge to be “so immortal and incorruptible a thing” (Works, 3:318). Bacon appears to have in mind here the Aristotelians, who rejected Plato’s understanding of the soul’s immortality, though lurking just behind “some of the philosophers which were least divine,” I would suggest, are Lucretius and Epicurus. In this sense, Bacon seems to be both acknowledging the materialism of his scheme and carefully skirting the issue. 68. Bacon, Works, 4:15; 1:127: “Tempus, tanquam fluvius, levia et inflata ad nos devexerit, gravia et solida demerserit.”


the philosopher explained the principles behind the image in technical terms, arguing (in the name of Democritus again) that matter that was packed more tightly was heavier than matter that was composed of looser atoms. When it came to the historical suppression of preSocratic philosophy—the very philosophy Bacon is making use of to argue his point—the physical behavior of atoms could once again describe the dynamics of a tradition. Bacon, as it were, took much from the bits and pieces of the preSocratics that he discovered strewn about in the pages of other people’s books. In both form and content, the fragments of the pre-Socratics represented the idea of bodies decomposing and recomposing, a scattered world of thought. Democritus—whom Bacon mentions in his discussion of form, quoted above—is one of a handful of philosophers he must recover from the ruins of time. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, he says, pre-Socratics such as Democritus were “accessible to us only at second-hand, by report and in fragments” and therefore require special care: “In pursuing any clue to information about them, [I] was scrupulously diligent. Aristotle confutes them, Cicero cites them, Plutarch made a small collection of their opinions, there are the Lives of Diogenes Laertius and the poem of Lucretius, not to mention scattered references [sparsa memoria] and mentions in other sources.” In the phrase sparsa memoria, we should be reminded of Bacon’s loaded use of the verb spargere in his translation of the word “cast” in the Advancement—and of the way the philosopher had delicately shifted the meaning of the word from its negative connotation to a positive, productive one. There seeds were cast into the minds of others, and here too, we 69. Bacon’s Historia densi et rari (1623) was published posthumously in William Rawley’s Opuscula (1658); for a modern edition, see Bacon, Philosophical Studies, 1611–1619. 70. Bacon, Philosophy, 84; Works, 3:602: “Se tamen cum summa diligentia et cura, omnem de illis opinionibus auram captasse; et quidquid de illis, vel dum ab Aristotele confutantur, vel dum a Cicerone citantur; vel in Plutarchi fasciculo, vel in Laërtii vitis, vel in Lucretii poëmate, vel alicubi in quavis alia sparsa memoria et mentione inveniri possit, evolvisse; et cum fide et judicio librato examinasse.” Bacon could have found an important precedent in Henri Estienne’s Poesis philosophica (1573), a collection of the fragments of pre-Socratic poets that included Empedocles. After Estienne’s book appeared in print, the idea of assembling pre-Socratic wisdom became more common among scholarly men of Bacon’s generation.


might say, the scattered references to these lost philosophers have the capacity to set thought into motion. These fragments certainly nourished the imagination of Bacon, who built a new world of philosophy from their ruins. In collecting them, Bacon was operating in a long tradition that we can trace back to the compositional practices of authors such as Gellius, whose writing became the source for the recovery of many ancient fragments that would have been otherwise confined to oblivion. Through Gellius’s own random quoting of “anything worth remembering . . . without any plan or order,” the parts of previously lost texts could be put back together again, as Grafton has described it, “like the pieces of a smashed mosaic.” Bacon tells us that he found his pieces in a number of places—in the writings of Aristotle, Plutarch, Diogenes, Cicero, Lucretius, and in texts such as Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis (a word that literally means a “patchwork or scattering”). In the work of Dio Chrysostom, another important source, the philosopher might have even stumbled upon a famous fragment of Democritus that described Homer’s poetry as a kosmos: “ Ὅμηρος φύσεως λαχὼν θεαζούσης ἐπέων κόσμον ἐτεκτήνατο παντοίων” (Homer, endowed with a divinely inspired nature, has crafted an ordered universe of all kinds of songs). In this notoriously difficult passage, the making of the poem is likened to the making of a world. The idea takes on another level of meaning when we consider that Democritus, as Gregory Vlastos has argued, imagined the activity of learning as a kind of material impression—a process that took place on the level of atoms colliding and reshaping a man’s soul. “These ‘discoveries’ (εὑρήματα),” Vlastos writes, change not only external arrangement, but his very life (βίος). And since we know that Democritus thinks of “life” as dependent upon 71. One might even link Bacon’s famous taste for aphorisms to his productive encounter with the fragmented sayings of the pre-Socratics. 72. Grafton, “Conflict and Harmony,” 326 and 332. 73. Diels and Kranz, Fragmente, 2:147, frag. 21. Cited, translated, and discussed in Bakker, “Homer, Hypertext, and the Web of Myth,” 155. On the transmission of Democritean fragments, see Taylor, Atomists. 74. See Vlastos, “Ethics and Physics in Democritus, Part 1,” and “Ethics and Physics in Democritus, Part 2.” For the opposite position—that Democritus’s physics and ethics are not reconcilable in this way—see Bailey, Greek Atomists and Epicurus, 522.


the form of the soul, the change goes further still: it is tantamount to a transformation of the soul. The nature of the soul is not fixed by the original pattern of soul-atoms. This pattern itself can be changed. Teaching (διδαχή) reforms (μεταρυσμοῖ) a man, and by reforming, makes his nature (φυσιοποιεῖ).

As Vlastos explains it, the act of teaching reorganizes the physical structure of atoms, making the ideal of pleasure (a certain pattern or arrangement of soul atoms) a state free from the interruption or disturbance of sensual indulgence. Bacon himself may have been drawing a similar connection when he made the analogy between the pleasure derived from the pursuit of knowledge and the pleasure of contemplating the material flux of tradition, that is, of being impacted in the most concrete sense of the term. As Bacon knew very well from his study of the fragments of Democritus, the history of philosophy and the history of literature were closely connected in the pre-Socratic imagination. In De rerum natura, Lucretius himself bears witness to this connection when he implicitly joins the death of Homer, “the one and only king,” to the sad end of the materialist philosopher who is said to have lived to at least ninety years and then taken his own life: adde repertores doctrinarum atque leporum, adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus sceptra potitus eadem aliis sopitu’ quietest. denique Democritum postquam matura vetustas admonuit memores motus languescere mentis, sponte sua leto caput obvius obtulit ipse. 75. Vlastos, “Ethics and Physics in Democritus, Part 2,” 54– 55. Vlastos is here discussing Democritus, frag. 33. 76. As Taylor suggests, “The process of discovering the real nature of the world and that of discovering the ultimate end of human conduct is one and the same, that of penetrating the shifting screen of phenomena to the underlying reality” (Taylor, “Pleasure, Knowledge and Sensation,” 10). On the whole, however, Taylor disagrees with many of Vlastos’s conclusions about our ability to reconcile Democritean physics and ethics. 77. Lucretius, DRN 3.1036–41. In the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne quotes this passage from Lucretius, after asking: “Qu’est-ce autre chose qu’une confession de son impuissance et un renvoy non seulement à l’ignorance, pour y estre à couvert, mais à la stupidité mesme, au non sentir et au non estre?” (Essais 2.12;


[Add the inventors in the worlds of science and beauty, add the companions of the Heliconian maids, whose one and only king, Homer, has been laid to rest in the same sleep with all the others. Democritus again, when ripe old age warned him that the recording motions of his mind were beginning to fail, of his own free will himself offered his head to death.]

Directly juxtaposing the mortality of Homer and Democritus in this passage, Lucretius implicitly gives us another dynamic analogy, in this case between the material transmission of ancient poetry and the “motions of the mind” (motus . . . mentis). The famous senility of Democritus was not the end of his thought or his philosophy, but simply another part of the perpetual-motion machine. Although Democritus’s own mind slowed, then halted, his philosophy continues to live on in the minds of others, decomposed and recomposed in the very contexture of Lucretius’s own poem—semper florens, as the poet had said of Homer. In light of this connection, we may begin to see Bacon’s own recycling of Democritus through Lucretius as another example of this materialist logic of conservation and intellectual debt. As Robert Schuler reminds us, Bacon often took (or mistook) the poetry of Lucretius for the philosophy of Democritus, quoting various passages of De rerum natura to stand in for the voice of the pre-Socratic philosopher. Bacon might have gotten the idea from Diogenes Laertius, who famously reported that Epicurus “put forward as his own the doctrines of Democritus about atoms.” Read one way, this statement is a story

ed. Villey and Saulnier, 496) (What is it but a confession of his insufficiency, and a sending one backe not only to ignorance, there to be shrowded, but unto stupidity it selfe, unto unsensiblenesse and not being? [trans. Florio, 287]). 78. Schuler, Francis Bacon and Scientific Poetry, 39: “While the connection between Democritus and Lucretius . . . may seem fortuitous [in Bacon’s writing], it in fact signals a habit of mind by which Bacon repeatedly relies on the Roman poet as a spokesman for the pre-Socratic who ‘penetrated more shrewdly and deeply into nature’ than Aristotle.’ ” For Nietzsche’s analogous attempt to reconstruct the philosophy of Democritus using Lucretius, see Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, chap. 2. 79. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 10.4.


of intellectual theft. Read another, it is yet one more description of the conservation of matter. Bacon seems to have adopted the latter. In making Lucretius speak for Democritus, he was again silently following the principle of the conservation of matter and knowledge. Democritus had been absorbed by Epicurus, who in turn had been cast in the mind of Lucretius. This is not to excuse Bacon of scholarly imprecision, but merely to open the possibility that his own textual practices of citation and composition were consistent with his most basic ideas about matter and material change. Bacon’s use of the pre-Socratics takes us back in a circle finally to Montaigne’s engagement with the idea of Homer and the question of what his texts contained or did not contain. “Is it possible,” Montaigne asked in the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond,” “that ever Homer meant all that which some make him to have meant? And that he prostrated himselfe to so many, and so severall shapes, as, Divines, Lawiers, Captaines, Philosophers, and all sort of people else . . . [who] wholy rely upon him, and refer themselves unto him; as . . . an universall counsellor in all enterprises?” Montaigne had an answer—though, as usual, it was a subtle one. Men, he wrote, find everything in everything, “upon the ground which Heraclitus had, and that sentence of his, that all things had those shapes in them which men found in them. And Democritus out of the very same drew a cleane contrarie conclusion, id est, that subjects had nothing at all in them of that which we found in them.” 80. Montaigne, Essais 2.12; trans. Florio, 341; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 586: “Est-il possible qu’Homere aye voulu dire tout ce qu’on luy faict dire; et qu’il se soit presté à tant et si diverses figures que les theologiens, legislateurs, capitaines, philosophes, toute sorte de gens qui traittent sciences, pour differemment et contrairement qu’ils les traittent, s’appuyent de luy, s’en rapportent à luy: maistre general à tous offices, ouvrages et artisans; General Conseillier à toutes entreprises.” Montaigne is thinking here of a famous passage from Plato’s Theaetetus 152e: “When Homer spoke of ‘Oceanus, origin of gods, and mother Tethys,’ he meant that everything is the offspring of flux and change; or don’t you think that’s what he’s saying?” For a discussion of Plato’s intentions in this passage and the attribution of this doctrine to Heraclitus, see McDowell, in Plato’s “Theaetetus,” 130 n. See also Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 15–19. 81. Montaigne, Essais 2.12; trans. Florio, 341; ed. Villey and Saulnier, 587: “Sur ce mesme fondement qu’avoit Heraclitus et cette sienne sentence, que toutes choses


In the development of his question about Homer, the Frenchman was deliberately confusing a philosophical discussion about matter with one of literary interpretation. In this sense, as Terence Cave has argued, the passage might be read as an ironic gloss on the Essais themselves, reflecting both a book “empty of all meaning” and an “extraordinarily rich compendium of epistemological and moral arguments”—a book that was paradoxically both empty and full of matter. With Montaigne, Lucretius, Plato, and the various scattered fragments of Democritus at his disposal, Bacon no doubt had some form of the original question in mind when he described the afterlife of the Homeric tradition in the stuff of “infinite actions and opinions.” His answer too was a witty one. In the end, Bacon himself could claim that not a syllable or letter of Homer or Democritus had been lost, and in a certain sense he would be right. It was, after all, from the letters and syllables of other men that Bacon had generated the matter of his own philosophical opinions, hoping to disappear into the material structure of thought. It was in this sense that Bacon urged his followers not to idolize him—not to take him as a kind of monumental or conclusive authority—but rather to use him as he had used others: “I only give you this advice,” he wrote in The Refutation of Philosophies, “that you do not promise yourself such great things from my discoveries as not to expect better from your own. I foresee for myself a destiny like that of Alexander . . . now pray do not accuse me of vanity till you have heard me out.” He explains: “While [Alexander’s] memory was fresh his exploits were regarded as portents. . . . But when admiration cooled and men looked more closely into the matter, note the sober judgment passed upon him by the Roman historian: ‘All Alexander did was dare to despise shams.’ ” Just as he had done with the immortality of Homer, avoient en elles les visages qu’on y trouvoit, Democritus en tiroit une toute contraire conclusion, c’est que les subjects n’avoient du tout rien de ce que nous y trouvions” (emphasis in Florio). Compare to Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrronism, 1.29–30. 82. Bacon, Philosophy, 132; Works, 3:584: “Illud itidem vos monentes, ne tanta vobis de nostris inventis polliceamini, quin meliora a vobis ipsis speretis. Nos enim Alexandri fortunam nobis spondemus (neque vanitatis nos arguatis antequam rei exitum audiatis).” 83. Bacon, Philosophy, 132; Works, 3:584–85: “Illius enim res gestae recenti memoria ut portentum accipiebantur. . . . Sed postquam deferbuisset ista admiratio


Bacon took the authority of Alexander and turned it on its head. The two things were, in fact, not as unrelated as they might seem. Among the many things for which Alexander was famous was his love of Homer. He was even said to have placed the poet’s compositions beneath his pillow along with his sword, and to have carefully deposited a copy of the Iliad with marginal notes by Aristotle in one of Darius’s richest caskets, seeing that the most precious of human works should be held in the most precious of boxes. In transforming the empire of Alexander into a new world of thought founded on simple principles and rooted in collective knowledge rather than the authority of a single man or text, Bacon would take Aristotle’s Homer out of the box and scatter him to a Democritean wind. It was by this atomistic logic that the philosopher could at once draw upon the authority of a fragmented inheritance and conveniently break up the authority of others. For Bacon, as we have seen, the atomization of tradition was the necessary condition of its future and its growth.

“Through Vast Seas of Time” In book 3 of De rerum natura, we remember, Lucretius poses a hypothetical question: if after death (and presumably much time) the same atoms of a person came together in exactly the same arrangement, atque homines rem attentius introspexissent, operae pretium est animadvertere, quale judicium de eo faciat scriptor Romanus, ‘Nil aliud quam bene ausus est vana contemnere.’ ” 84. See Plutarch, Lives 7:242–43. Bacon mentions Alexander and the myth of Darius’s chest specifically in the Advancement: “What price and estimation [Alexander] had learning in doth notably appear in these three particulars: first, in the envy he used to express that he bore towards Achilles, in this, that he had so good a trumpet of his praises as Homer’s verses; secondly, in the judgment or solution he gave touching that precious cabinet of Darius, which was found among his jewels; whereof question was made what thing was worthy to be put into it; and he gave his opinion for Homer’s works; thirdly, in his letter to Aristotle, after he had set forth his books of nature, wherein he expostulated with him for publishing the secrets or mysteries of philosophy; and gave him to understand that himself esteemed it more to excel other men in learning and knowledge than in power and empire” (Works, 3:308). 85. For Bacon’s strategies of displacement, see Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity.


would he be able to mourn or remember himself? As Denys Lambin found out, there are no escape clauses in De rerum natura: everyone and every living thing must one day perish—even “the verses of sublime Lucretius,” in the words of Ovid. Returning to this question in the light of Bacon, we might explore a slightly different reading of the passage. If everything must perish and there is no real “re-naissance,” at the same time, there is a certain freedom in this. The promise of mortality releases the present from the claims of the past and makes the past available for transformation. Nothing persists except atoms. Matter is conserved in new combinations. In the space of this difference the poet posits the possibility of reception. It was by a similar logic of difference, one could say, that Bacon came to resist the claims of fixity and permanence promised by print while continuing to celebrate the dynamic possibility of the medium. In closing, I want to return for a moment to Bacon’s most memorable figure for the afterlife of tradition—the image of knowledge passing like ships “through vast seas of time.” Remembering the singular importance of ships for Bacon’s philosophy, we might think again of the Lucretian image of ships disturbed at sea and the pleasure of watching them, or glance forward to the frontispiece that would adorn the title page of the Instauratio magna (1620), an image of vessels moving beyond the Pillars of Hercules that was a figure both for Bacon’s philosophy and for the philosopher’s publications themselves. These ships moving through time, however, also look backward to a more ancient story that Bacon was drawing upon in the context of thinking about Homer’s poetry: the famous anecdote about the ships arriving at the library of Alexandria that was reported by Galen in his commentary 86. Ovid, Amores 1.15.23–25: “Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti, / exitio terras cum dabit una dies” (The verses of sublime Lucretius will perish only then when a single day shall give the earth to doom). I am following Showerman’s edition of the Heroides and Amores. 87. I am reminded here of Harold Bloom’s use of the Lucretian clinamen as a figure for a poet’s swerving from his precursor in The Anxiety of Influence. Epicurus himself had introduced the clinamen into the scheme of Democritean atomism to preserve the notion of free will. For a further discussion of the clinamen and its place in intellectual history, see the epilogue.


on Hippocrates and adapted later by Erasmus in the Adagia (where Bacon presumably found it). As the ancient story goes, Ptolemy, the king of Egypt, became so greedy for books that he ordered the books of everyone who arrived by ship to be brought to him. After he had them copied, he gave the duplicates to the owners and deposited the originals in his famous library with the inscription “Of Those from the Ships.” In taking us to Egypt, to the work of the great librarian Aristarchus and the Alexandrians, Bacon is leading us back to the primal scene of Homer’s textual gathering and the birthplace of textual criticism—the perfect figure to conclude his argument that not a syllable or letter of the poet had been lost. In the shadow of the ancient library, the image of the poems’ material gathering becomes strangely literal again. Here we might imagine Homer’s corpus being recomposed as new letters and syllables “flowed together little by little from various places and cities to Alexandria,” as Friedrich Wolf imagined it, taking its “present shape little by little and as chance determined.” Wolf sounds again as if he is talking about the collision of Epicurean atoms rather than texts. Echoing Goethe’s charge that Wolf had reduced Homer to “mere conglomeration,” Nietzsche wrote simply at the end of his essay “Homer and Classical Philology,” “we are but atoms” (denn wir sind Atome). In the idea of Homer being reborn in the fabled burning library of Alexandria, in this image of collection and destruction, Bacon himself discovered another dynamic figure for the vicissitudes of tradition. For the grandfather of modern science, a new vision of natural philosophy was emerging again, literally from the dust of books. 88. See Smith, Hippocratic Tradition, 199–202. 89. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 160 and 49; Prolegomena ad Homerum, 108 and 6: “Ita ex pluribus locis et urbibus Alexandriam, etiam ad privatos, paullatim confluxisse videntur codices Homerici”; “paullatim forte fortuna factus est.” 90. Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 169. See Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 81.

*4* The Pervasive Influence

It was under the influence of electric light, with a muted hum reverberating through the crowded hall of Lorenzo de Monaco at the Uffizi, that Aby Warburg first encountered Botticelli’s Venus in person, her skin darkened slightly by the patina of years of candle smoke and emerging from the water as if for the first time. Writing his dissertation on the idea of movement in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring, Warburg stressed the dynamic painterly forms rather than the placid influence of antiquity that men such as Johann Winckelmann had described. Seen again through his eyes, the painter’s figures—billowing accessory garments, the goddess’s windswept hair—acquired new functions as weathervanes that registered a tension between the “unnatural excess” of the painter dealing with allegorical figures and the realistic representation of movement “only where the wind really might have caused such motion.” For Warburg, this figural drama was, in fact, the index to a much grander narrative. In a letter to his wife, Mary Herz, the art historian explained that these so-called decorative motifs were “rooted in the way in which we come to terms with the external world by positing reasons and causes, a process in which the creation of art is only one special stage in our attempt to bring order into the phenomena of the outside world.” In his interpretation of Botticelli’s dynamic paint1. Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 96; Gesammelte Schriften, 11: “Andererseits aber verlangt Alberti von dem Maler nachdrücklich, daß er bei der Wiedergabe solcher Motive genug vergleichende Besonnenheit besitze, um sich nicht zu widernatürlicher Häufung verleiten zu lassen, und dem Beiwerk nur da Bewegung mitteile, wo der Wind dieselbe wirklich verursacht haben könne.” On the idea of movement in Warburg, see esp. Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion; and Didi-Huberman, “Imaginary Breeze.” 2. Cited and translated in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 81: “Wie wird die Kunst ornamental, und wie ist dieser Vorgang (organisch) im Wesen der Kunst begrün-

* 154 *

t h e pe rva si v e i n f lu e nce * 155

erly forms, Warburg discovered something like an illustrated history of ideas. But what exactly was it illustrating? Earlier, we looked at the way in which the art historian had connected Poliziano’s imitation of Lucretius to Botticelli’s themes. In one of the key passages that Warburg cites in the dissertation, perhaps the most famous lines of De rerum natura, Lucretius describes the wonder of Venus and her coming like a revelation, and many a poet and lovesick humanist since have paid homage to the goddess who knew above all how to make an entrance: “From you, O goddess, from you the winds flee away, the clouds of heaven from you and your coming.” Venus has “It,” as Joseph Roach has described the phenomenon, “that certain quality, easy to perceive but hard to define, possessed by abnormally interesting people”—or, in this case, goddesses. The source of life and pleasure, Venus stands as the world is organized around her, or rather as she organizes the world. The wind flees her coming, the clouds of heaven are displaced, and her alluring love sweeps through the seas and mountains in torrents of divine nonchalance. As any reader of the poem knows, however, there is only one problem. In the universe of De rerum natura, where gods are far removed from our affairs, the poet’s invocation to Venus represents a crucial paradox—a paradox that unfolds as the poem shifts its vast machinery from the language of a traditional Roman prayer to a lesson in ancient physics. Soon enough the winds moving gently through Venus’s hair give way to the violent winds that unlock a vision of matter beyond the threshold of perception. Lucretius’s material girl becomes the stuff of a material world. The goddess’s metaphysical undressing clearly caught the imagination of Warburg, who appears to have been looking to Lucretius not det? Warum gefällt uns de Schnörkel? Warum sprechen wir vom Verfall der Kunst, sobald sie ornamental wird? Ist es etwa in der Art, wie wir uns mit der Aussenwelt durch Annahme von Grund und Ursache auseinanderzusetzen versuchen, in der Weise begründet, dass die Kunstproduktion nur eine besondere Stufe in diesem Ordnungsversuch den Ercheinungen der Aussenwelt gegenüber bildet?” 3. Lucretius, DRN 1.6–7: “Te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila coeli / Adventumque tuum.” For humanistic responses to Lucretius’s invocation of Venus, see esp. Prosperi, Di soavi licor, 97–179. 4. See Roach, It, 1.

156 * c h a p t e r fou r

only as an example to prove that Botticelli had been talking to Poliziano, but also as a kind of representational model—a model of the mind in transition from one epistemological mode to another. Many a scholar before Warburg had sought to rationalize myth and the origins of religion in the name of Epicurus. According to Gombrich, Warburg himself had acquired a distinct taste for Epicureanism early on from a book called Myth and Science by the Italian philosopher Tito Vignoli, a book that “made such a deep impression on Warburg that much of his subsequent thought is derived from it.” In a nutshell, Vignoli’s book narrates a history of progress from man’s projection of his image onto the natural world to his triumphant liberation by reason. Or, as Gombrich again put it rather bluntly, calling a spade a spade: “Vignoli had simply borrowed the Epicurean formula ‘timor facit deos,’ attributing to fear the creation of human religions.” One perhaps could say the same thing of Warburg, though the art historian, I would suggest, was being more than Epicurean in his thinking. By attending not only to the ideas themselves, but to the way in which they were transmitted, enacted, and represented, Warburg was being decidedly Lucretian. As the ancient poet had imagined his materialist philosophy playing out in the dynamics of literary history, in the very contexture of tradition 5. On this tradition, see esp. Manuel, Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. 6. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 68. Vignoli’s book was translated into German in 1880 and reviewed by Warburg’s teacher at Bonn, Hermann Usener, who was another important influence on Warburg. Usener is still best known today for his monumental edition of Epicurean fragments (published in 1887), which included the interpretation of various papyri that were discovered at Herculaneum and up until that time had not been discussed. For the review, see Usener, “Anzeige von T. Vignoli.” On Usener’s Epicurean studies, see Momigliano, “New Paths of Classicism,” 33–48; and Arrighetti, “Gli studi Epicurei,” 119–36. 7. Tellingly, Vignoli only mentions the name Lucretius once in his book, in a footnote, though arguably the poet is never too far from his mind. Take, for example, this passage, which Warburg underlined in his copy: “He who is able to solve the problem of the world correctly in a simple movement of an atom would be able to explain all laws and all phenomena, since every thing may ultimately be reduced to this movement” (Vignoli, Myth and Science, 35). Cited in Gombrich, “Aby Warburg e l’evoluzionismo ottocentesco,” 639. 8. Gombrich, “Aby Warburg e l’evoluzionismo ottocentesco,” 639; my translation.


itself, Warburg imagined the force of reason sweeping across the picture plane, bringing us again from the invisible wind in Venus’s hair to the goddess’s scattering in the physical processes of the universe—a pervasive influence. I am using the phrase “pervasive influence” here to suggest at once the diffusion of an idea—its pervasive spread or dissemination—and the ways in which an influence might be said to inhabit the structure of a body, a thought, a poem at the very deepest level, or at least claim to. In De rerum natura, these notions of pervasiveness merge as the teaching of Epicureanism reaches out and into the very core of all “things”— including, of course, the matter of literary influence that is so central to Warburg’s dissertation. When Philip Hardie, for example, says, “The pervasive influence of Lucretius on the early works of Virgil . . . has been intensively analyzed,” we might first consider how and where the Epicurean poet may be found in Virgil (or rather where we think we sense him, as in the case of Petrarch’s letter earlier). In a slightly different sense, however, we might try to understand in what ways the poet’s materialist thinking came to insinuate itself into Virgil’s poetry and practice, and how Virgil himself might be said to have imagined the force of Lucretius’s influence passing through and through. To read the figure of pervasive influence in this sense is to consider not only how and where De rerum natura traveled among its readers or where they quoted or imitated the poem, but also how it managed to get its invisible hooks in and why they took hold so deeply in the minds of some unusually sensitive readers. The pages that follow will explore the figure of this materialist diffusion in the work of three such readers who struggled with the problem of Lucretian pervasiveness in their own ways: Edmund Spenser in the Mutability Cantos, the great French reviver of Epicurean philosophy Pierre Gassendi, and the Cambridge Platonist Henry More. In each case, a few visible traces of the Epicurean poet unlock the idea of an influence that is invisible and everywhere. From the detection of a certain bitterness in Spenser’s honey to Gassendi’s scattering of De rerum natura in his own philosophy to More’s attempt to capture and 9. Hardie, Virgil’s “Aeneid,” 157.


contain Lucretius, we will look at how the ancient poet’s vision of texts and material change transformed the histories of literature and philosophy from the inside out. What we are attempting to explore here is, in its most ambitious version, nothing less than the emergence of a materialist idea of intellectual diffusion in the seventeenth century. Paradoxically, it is in the fragmentation and disappearance of De rerum natura during the period of the poem’s widest dissemination that the force of its influence may be most strongly felt. In the end, one could say, the author of De rerum natura was increasingly “in the air.”

“An Appalling Incongruity” When Edwin Greenlaw published his article on the presence of Lucretius in Spenser in 1920, he inadvertently upset a number of scholars for whom the mere idea that the Epicurean poet might be lingering in The Faerie Queene was “an appalling incongruity.” Even a trace of the poet’s influence—like the trace of wormwood being mixed across a room—seemed to suggest that England’s great Protestant poet was a closet atheist, or was palling around with one. A handful of critics attempted to explain Spenser’s debt away by suggesting either an intermediate source or an alternate source altogether. Writing in the pages of PMLA, for example, Ronald Levinson argued (with a kind of strange vehemence) that the author of The Faerie Queene had drawn his materialism not from the flowers of De rerum natura directly, but from the heretical philosophy of Giordano Bruno, whom Levinson imagines somehow to be less heterodox and dangerous. In the end, Greenlaw perhaps put it best in his summary of these arguments in the Variorum edition of Spenser: “Because most attempts to discover Spenser’s philosophical meaning in the Mutability Cantos have been based on arguments for his use of a given source, it is impossible to separate questions of philosophy and of source.” In what follows, we shall see just how true that is. 10. Levinson, “Spenser and Bruno,” 675. 11. Greenlaw, “Spenser’s ‘Mutabilitie,’ ” 688. 12. Levinson, “Spenser and Bruno.” 13. Spenser, Works, 6:389.


Greenlaw was not the first to point out the presence of Lucretius in Spenser. As early as the eighteenth century, John Upton had described a number of key places that he said reflected a Lucretian influence, such as the section in book 4 where the poet transliterates the hymn to Venus from those “well known verses of Lucretius” that open De rerum natura in a kind of ecstasy—the same passage that caught Warburg’s imagination. This was, in fact, exactly the kind of allusion that Greenlaw had in mind when he described an influence that was “apparent” in Spenser—an influence that might be easily seen and described. In the course of the essay, Greenlaw reminds us to be careful to distinguish between ideas that are common or conventional and those which give us good reason to think that “Spenser had Lucretius before him.” All too often, however, Greenlaw’s own examples are very vague, gesturing toward a general feeling that Lucretius’s influence was somehow in Spenser rather than giving us any clear sense of poetic debt. Near the end of “Spenser and Lucretius,” Greenlaw himself comes close to putting his finger on the problem, describing the presence of the Epicurean poet in slightly more oblique terms as a “difference in the point of view in regard to this philosophy of change”—a “difference,” he says, that is “something rather difficult to prove; it is a pervasive thing, not a matter of concrete illustration.” But how do we get beyond “the matter of concrete illustration”? Spenser himself gives us at least one answer. In the last and unfinished book of The Faerie Queene, the poet explores the idea of a pervasive influence in the figure of Dame Mutabilitie, daughter of the Titans, the mistress of change, who arrives on the scene from god-knows14. Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Upton, 2:603. More recently, Anthony Esolen has argued for a Lucretian influence in Spenser’s notion of eros and chaos, and Jonathan Goldberg has reconsidered the presence of Lucretian semina in the “Garden of Adonis,” following Greenlaw’s lead. Like Goldberg, I am also tracing the Lucretian analogy between matter and texts, though here I am trying to understand the analogy as it was realized in the allusive practices of Spenser’s poetry itself. See Esolen, “Spenserian Chaos”; and Goldberg, Seeds of Things, 63–121. 15. In “Spenser and Lucretius,” Greenlaw uses the word “apparent” four separate times to refer to different examples of influence. 16. Greenlaw, “Spenser’s ‘Mutabilitie,’ ” 693. 17. Greenlaw, “Spenser and Lucretius,” 458.


where to challenge the authority of Jove and claims to be “in” everything. Her reign of terror unfolds swiftly over the course of two cantos in which the Titaness attempts to dethrone the moon (in what Harry Berger has hilariously called “a scuffle between over-sized schoolgirls”), challenge the authority of the Olympian gods, and argue her case in front of a judge, in this case Dame Nature. It is in the midst of these arguments that Mutabilitie attempts to demonstrate her pervasive sway over the course of all things. In this instance she is describing her influence on the wind and water: Ne is the water in more constant case; Whether those same on high, or these belowe. For, th’Ocean moueth stil, from place to place; And euery Riuer still doth ebbe and flowe: Ne any Lake, that seems most still and slowe, Ne Poole so small, that can his smoothnesse holde, When any winde doth vnder heauen blowe; With which, the clouds are also tost and roll’d; Now like great Hills; &, streight, like sluces, them vnfold.

Commenting briefly on this passage, Greenlaw argued that “some of the details are Lucretian, not Ovidian,” though he leaves much to our imaginations. In his edition of The Faerie Queene, A. C. Hamilton does not mention Lucretius at all with regard to these lines, though he remarks that the waters “on high” and “these belowe” refer to a passage in Genesis, returning Mutabilitie’s vision of flux and change to the Old Testament. In other words, the critical waters here are decidedly murky. 18. In claiming her genealogy with the Titans, Mutabilitie was playing with an old association between the materialists and the losers of Olympian history. In De rerum natura, Lucretius himself asks explicitly not to be treated like the Giants for shaking the walls of the world with his reasoning. See DRN 5.110–22. On the history of the association, see Reiche, “Myth and Magic in Cosmological Polemics”; Bignone, L’Aristotele perduto, 2:79–81; Gale, Myth and Poetry in Lucretius, 44–45; Kronenberg, “Mezentius the Epicurean,” 407–8; and my “Art of Reading Earthquakes.” 19. Berger, Revisionary Play, 252. 20. Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, 7.7.20. All quotations of Spenser’s text follow this edition (hereafter cited as FQ). 21. Greenlaw, “Spenser and Lucretius,” 460. 22. Hamilton, in Spenser, FQ, 704 n. 20.


My own sense in this case is that Mutabilitie is giving us something much more explosive than either Greenlaw or Hamilton wants to admit, something that is deeply indebted to a Lucretian analogy not only in its details, but in its movement. We have seen the analogy between wind and water before. In his notes on the Georgics, we recall, Servius had claimed that Virgil was borrowing this figure to lend expression to God’s pervasive presence in the world. To quote him again: “In proving this by like things, [Virgil] follows Lucretius, who says that the things which are not able to be tested for themselves, must be proven by comparisons: for he teaches that the wind is corporeal, which we are not able to see or possess, but which he proves is like water, which is evidently corporeal.” As we know, Servius is thinking of the passage in De rerum natura where Lucretius had drawn a connection between the water and the wind in order to lead us by another analogy to a world of invisible atoms. If we can understand that the wind has body like water but is unseen, Lucretius says, we can begin to imagine atoms, which are also unseen but have body. In the stanza on wind and water above, Mutabilitie seems to be taking us down the same path, continuing two stanzas later when she asks pointedly, “Next is the Ayre: which who feeles not by sense . . . to flit still?” Though she does not make the mechanics of the analogy as explicit as Lucretius, the unfolding of the images in the stanza above carefully rehearses the chain of associations that lead the author of De rerum natura beyond the threshold of perception. Spenser stops her just short of arriving at atoms; yet she herself finishes the thought about thirty stanzas later, channeling the subtle violence of Lucretius’s analogy making in the form of a question addressed to Jove: . . . The things, Which we see not how they are mov’d and swayd, Ye may attribute to your selves as Kings, 23. Servius, Commentarii in Virgilium 342–43: “Ut autem hoc exemplis, id est, rebus similibus comprobaret, Lucretium secutus est: qui dicit ea quae inter se probare non possumus, a similibus comprobanda: ventum namque docet esse corporalem, non quod eum tenere vel cernere possumus, sed quod eius similis atque aquae effectus est, quam corporalem esse manifestum est.” 24. Spenser, FQ 7.7.22.


And say they by your secret power are made: But what we see not, who shall us perswade?

Like the reasoning of Lucretius—reasoning that was not easily dismissed by his Christian readers—Mutabilitie’s own arguments might be called “persuasive” and also pervasive, beginning with a few discrete instances and threatening to “penetrate all unseen hiding-places.” In his essay “Lucretius and the Poetics of Void,” Porter has described this Lucretian effect as “a kind of hidden terrorism . . . which can be superimposed upon any given perception at will, unsettling it instantly.” The Titaness is in her own way initiating us into this atomist perspective. She is also asking us to think about the nature of influence and about what lies beneath the ordered surface of Spenser’s text. In order to pursue this notion in a slightly different direction, I want to turn to the second example, though this time the presence of Lucretius not only brings us to a figure of pervasiveness but is itself a reflection of the diffusion I am describing, what we might even call again an embodiment of the idea. The passage I have in mind now comes from the place in canto 7, just before the wind-and-water passage we looked at, where Spenser’s upstart Titaness boldly asserts that the minds and souls of men are subject to change—another instance that Greenlaw identifies as pointedly “Lucretian.” As Mutabilitie has it: Ne doe their bodies only flit and fly But eeke their minds (which they immortall call) Still change and vary thoughts, as new occasions fall.

In these lines, Mutabilitie is scandalously taking up the question of a changing, mortal mind, and, as Greenlaw writes, “it may be remarked that Lucretius’s chief argument against the immortality of the soul, in his third book, is that the mind decays with the body as extreme old age comes on.” Once again we find ourselves in slippery territory. Greenlaw points us to a specific passage in De rerum natura, though there is 25. Spenser, FQ 7.7.49. 26. See again Lucretius, DRN 1:402–9. 27. Porter, “Lucretius and the Poetics of Void,” 210. 28. Spenser, FQ 7.7.19. 29. Greenlaw, “Spenser and Lucretius,” 460.


decidedly nothing concrete in this instance to suggest that Spenser had Lucretius “before him” or that he was making anything more than a vaguely materialist point on Mutabilitie’s behalf—a point that is closer to the “pervasive thing” that Greenlaw concedes. These kinds of influences are famously difficult to pin down, but maybe that is part of the point. Greenlaw is not wrong per se when he claims that the passage above is Lucretian, though I would suggest that he is describing the nature of the poet’s influence in the wrong terms. Indeed, instead of attempting to isolate Spenser’s imitations of Lucretius, what if we turn to a more dynamic model or physics of influence, one that shows how the impression of the Epicurean poet arises not so much on the surface of the poem as in the play of its simulacra? What would it mean to think about the influence of Lucretius in Spenser as Lucretius himself treated the question of influence in his own poem? To begin, we might compare the passage above on the mind’s “flitting” and “flying” to another passage, not from Lucretius, as we might expect, but from the old Latin poet Ennius in the epitaph we looked at in the previous chapter. As Cicero reports it: “Let no one honour me with tears or on my ashes weep. / For why? from lips to lips of men I fly and living keep.” In this widely imitated passage, we recall, Ennius is reflecting on the relationship between his soulful immortality and the material transmission of his poem. When we put the two passages in question together, however, Mutabilitie and Ennius appear to be saying very different things. Whereas the old Latin poet had claimed that his words would “fly” forever on the lips of men (an image of his extension and fame), Mutabilitie is using the same figure to describe the “flitting” and “flying” of the mind as a material dissolution or death: an ironic gloss on the old Latin poet’s unmaking, and perhaps on Spenser’s own unfinished poem. As Spenser knew, most of the few surviving frag30. I am indebted here to David Quint’s analysis of Lucretian echoes in a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he describes as a “network of allusion” (Quint, “Fear of Falling,” 847). In the case of Spenser, I am attempting to understand the “network” of allusions in light of Lucretius’s own material description of things. 31. Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes 1.15.34: “Nemo me lacrumis decoret, nec funera fletu / faxit. Cur? Volito vivus per ora virum.” Once again, I have altered a word in the translation for emphasis, changing “pass” to “fly.”


ments of Ennius were to be found scattered in the “bodies” of other writers, such as the epitaph in Cicero. Depending on how you see it, the ancient poet either dies or lives on in this material “flit[ting]” and “fly[ing].” The connection between Ennius’s “flying” on the lips of men and the “flitting” of the mind that Mutabilitie describes, however, might be considered a fleeting or vague one at best. Spenser, for example, could have easily been thinking of Virgil, Ovid, or the later imitations of Petrarch (to name only a few). There is no doubt that sometimes this kind of confusion of a poet’s sources is intentional. In this case, however, I think there is something more specific going on, or rather that there is specificity in the confusion. Indeed, in conjuring up the “flying” spirit of Ennius from his grave in the Mutability Cantos, Spenser appears to be indulging something like a habit of mind, reworking a distinct cluster of associations he had elaborated earlier in the poem and revising them “as new occasions fall,” to borrow Mutabilitie’s words again. He had stumbled upon the path to Ennius’s grave earlier in The Faerie Queene, for example, when he found himself discussing the mortality of Chaucer, his poetic forebear, whose unfinished (or, as he imagined it there, lost) “Squire’s Tale” he laments. The rest of Chaucer’s text is “no where to be found,” As that renowned Poet them compyled, With warlike numbers and Heroicke sound, Dan Chaucer, well of English vndefyled, On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled. 32. See, for example, Virgil, Georgics 3.8– 9: “Temptanda via est, qua me quoque possim / tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora” (I must essay a path whereby I, too, may rise from earth and fly victorious on the lips of men); and Ovid, Metamorphosis 15.875–79: “Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis / astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, / quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, / ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, / siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam” (Still in my better part I shall be borne immortal far beyond the lofty stars and I shall have an undying name. Wherever Rome’s power extends over the conquered world, I shall have mention on men’s lips, and, if the prophecies of bards have any truth, through all the ages shall I live in fame). Petrarch imitates this famous motif in several places (see Fam. 1.9.1; Fam. 24.12.37; and Sen. 9.2), as do Poliziano, Du Bellay, and Tasso. 33. Spenser, FQ 4.2.32.


The association with Ennius may not be immediately obvious, until we remember that Chaucer was sometimes directly compared to the old Latin poet for being another founder of a tradition—for Chaucer, as one writer put it in 1565, “liueth in like estimation with vs as did olde Ennius wyth the Latines.” The poet Charles Fitzgeoffrey put it in slightly more colorful terms when he addressed the memory of Spenser in 1601: “Our Virgil in Dan Chaucer dost thou see? / Badly! If ought can badly come from thee: / Chaucer our Ennius, thou our Virgil be!” By engaging Chaucer in The Faerie Queene, Spenser was also engaging the old Latin poet in his own sustained analogy. The pattern I am describing begins with the question of poetic continuance, for in addition to their roles as important forebears in this poetic genealogy, Ennius and Chaucer (at least as Spenser imagines him here) also had another important thing in common: the material loss of their poetry. Directly following the stanza celebrating the “well of English undefiled,” Spenser turns to decry the work of “wicked Time” in a passage that anticipates the poet’s lament at the end of the Mutability Cantos: But wicked Time that all good thoughts doth waste, And workes of noblest wits to nought out weare, That famous moniment hath quite defaste, And robd the world of threasure endlesse deare, The which mote haue enriched all vs heare. O cursed Eld the cankerworme of writs, How may these rimes, so rude as doth appeare, Hope to endure, sith workes of heauenly wits Are quite deuourd, and brought to nought by little bits? 34. Googe, preface to Stellato, Zodiake of Life. On Spenser’s knowledge of the Zodiake, see Tuve, “Spenser and The Zodiake of Life.” In the Ars poetica, Horace lists Ennius as an example of a poet who enriched the Latin language by the introduction of new words: “Ego cur, adquirere pauca / si possum, invideor, cum lingua Catonis et Enni / sermonem patrium ditaverit et nova rerum / nomina protulerit?” (And why should I be grudged the right of adding, if I can, my little fund, when the tongue of Cato and of Ennius has enriched our mother-speech and brought to light new terms for things?) (Horace, Ars poetica 55–58). 35. Fitzgeoffrey, Affaniae: “Nostrum Maronem EDMONDE CHAVCERUM vocas? / Male hercle! Si tu quidpiam potes male; / Namque ille noster Ennius, sed Maro”; translation from Grosart, Occassional Issues, xxiii. 36. Spenser, FQ 4.2.32–33.


That Spenser would be thinking of Ennius again here when he tells us that Chaucer is falling apart in his hands is not entirely surprising. When Spenser talks about the “famous moniment” of Chaucer’s poetry, he is quietly bringing to mind a famous set of associations that deal with Ennius and poetic immortality, one of which is a fragment of Ennius that was preserved in the shipwreck of the Saturnalia: “Kings throughout their kingdom seek statues and sepulchres; they build a name; they strive with all their might.” Montaigne himself could not have hewed the line better, for the fragment breaks off ironically just as it would have gone on to compare the mortal monuments of men to the great immortal monument of poetry. “Wicked Time” apparently has a very wicked sense of humor. In antiquity, Horace himself had recalled the general spirit of the fragment in question, connecting Ennius directly to the idea of poetic immortality. As he put it: “Not marble graven with public records, whereby breath and life return to goodly heroes after death . . . declare[s] more gloriously the fame of him who came back home, having won his name from Africa’s subjection, than do the Muses of Calabria [i.e., the poetry of the Calabrian poet Ennius].” Horace here completes the thought that did not survive for us in the Ennian fragment in Macrobius, in a way saving Ennius from the irony. In the Mutability Cantos, Spenser too was engaged in an imitation and, as it were, attempt to extend the work of his poetic forebear. Indeed, we find the author of The Faerie Queene still thinking of old Ennius in the very next stanza of the same canto, where he speaks of finishing Chaucer’s tale with “an infusion sweete / Of thine own spirit, which doth in me suruiue.” In his early edition of The Faerie Queene, Upton drew out the Ennius analogy explicitly, ex37. Macrobius, Sat. 6.1.17; trans. Davies, 388; ed. Willis, 349: “Reges per regnum statuasque sepulcraque quaerunt, / aedificant nomen, summa nituntur opum vi.” Shakespeare echoes this famous topos in Sonnet 55, which begins: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” 38. Horace, Odes 4.8.13–20: “Non incisa notis marmora publicis, / per quae spiritus et vita redit bonis / post mortem ducibus . . . qui domita nomen ab Africa / lucratus rediit, clarius indicant / laudes quam Calabrae Pierides.” 39. Spenser, FQ 4.2.34. In the next lines of the same stanza, Spenser describes his relation to Chaucer as Chaucer himself once imagined his place in an ancient genealogy of poets: “I follow here the footing of thy feete, / That with thy meaning


plaining “that Chaucer’s spirit was infused in [Spenser], according to the Pythagorean system. So Ennius said the spirit of Homer was infused into him.” It is this spiritual “infusion” that will finally allow Spenser to counteract the effects of “wicked Time” and to restore to Chaucer the immortality that is due him in the face of a material poem that was being “brought to nought by little bits”—or, as the great Titaness might have put it, “flitting” and “flying” into nothing. When Mutabilitie returns to the “flitting” and “flying” of Ennius in the Mutability Cantos, she is asking us to see the same story now through her eyes—once again, “as new occasions fall.” It is here, as we watch Spenser, in a sense, change his own mind, that we come upon the presence of Lucretius in the story. We might connect this to the “fluctuation of feeling” described earlier in Petrarch. As the poet’s attention wanders again over these commonplaces, rehearsing the connection between Ennius, Horace, Chaucer, and the mortality of poetry, the author of De rerum natura gets dragged into the tide of his thinking. Spenser’s contemporary, John Hoskins, describes this effect nicely when he imagines the metaphorical mind as being “not content to fix upon one thing, but [having to] wander . . . like the eye that cannot choose but view the whole knot when it beholds but one flower in a garden.” Hoskins’s was another figure of “flitting” and “flying” that would have been at home in Mutabilitie’s repertoire. The specter of Lucretius emerges here if only because he is already embedded in the contexture so I may the rather meete” (FQ 4.2.34). Cf. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde 5.1791– 92: “And kis the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace / Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.” In De rerum natura, Lucretius himself had used the trope to describe his relationship to Epicurus. See Lucretius, DRN 3.3–4: “Te sequor, o Graiae gentis decus, inque tuis nunc / ficta pedum pono pressis vestigia signis” (You I follow, O glory of the Grecian race, and now on the marks you have left I plant my own footsteps firm). 40. Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Upton, 2:586. As John Dryden explains it: “Spencer more than once insinuates that the Soul of Chaucer was transfus’d into his Body; and that he was begotten by him Two hundred years after his Decease” (Dryden, Works, 7:25). 41. Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, 8. Though Hoskins himself left no publications, the Directions circulated in manuscript form and was later absorbed into the works of Ben Jonson, Thomas Blount, and John Smith.


of the tradition—figured in the very “knot” of intertextual associations. As Upton reminds us, De rerum natura was, in fact, one of the few sources for the story of Ennius receiving the ghost of Homer: ignoratur enim quae sit natura animai, nata sit an contra nascentibus insinuetur et simul intereat nobiscum morte dirempta an tenebras Orci visat vastasque lacunas an pecudes alias divinitus insinuet se, Ennius ut noster cecinit qui primus amoeno detulit ex Helicone perenni fronde coronam, per gentis Italas hominum quae clara clueret; etsi praeterea tamen esse Acherusia templa Ennius aeternis exponit versibus edens, quo neque permaneant animae neque corpora nostra, sed quaedam simulacra modis pallentia miris; unde sibi exortam semper florentis Homeri commemorat speciem lacrimas effundere salsas coepisse et rerum naturam expandere dictis. [For there is ignorance [about] what is the nature of the soul, whether it be born or on the contrary find its way into men at birth, and whether it perish together with us when broken up by death, or whether it visit the gloom of Orcus and his vasty chasms, or by divine ordinance find its way into animals in our stead, as our own Ennius sang, who first brought down from pleasant Helicon a chaplet of evergreen [perenni] leafage to win a glorious name through the nations of Italian men; although nevertheless he also sets forth in everlasting verses that there exist regions of Acheron, which neither our spirits nor our bodies endure to reach, but certain similitudes of them pallid in wondrous wise; whence [Ennius] avers that the likeness of the ever deathless Homer 42. Lucretius, DRN 1.112– 26. As Upton points out in the commentary (in Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Upton, 2:586), Horace also makes reference to this episode, calling Ennius a Homerus alter or “second Homer”: “Ennius et sapiens et fortis et alter Homerus, / ut critici dicunt, leviter curare videtur / quo promissa cadant et somnia Pythagorea” (Ennius, the wise and valiant, the second Homer (as the critics style him), seems to care but little what becomes of his promises and Pythagorean dreams) (Horace, Epistles 2.1.50). The translation follows Fairclough’s Loeb edition, Satires, Epistles and Ars poetica.


issued forth, and began to shed salt tears and to unfold the nature of things.]

Like Mutabilitie, Lucretius is discussing the nature of the soul’s immortality, linking it to an idea of poetic immortality. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, the Epicurean poet here is playing fast and loose with this notion of continuance, even punning on the name Ennius and the word perenni as if to reify what was already an old association or commonplace (or ironically to undo it). In stumbling upon Lucretius, Spenser finds another idea of poetic immortality—or, rather, poetic mortality. The problem, as Lucretius describes it later on in De rerum natura, is that the very simulacrum or ghost that Ennius witnesses in this drama of poetic transmission is actually a thin film of matter constantly shedding from bodies “flit[ting] about hither and thither through the air.” The word he uses to describe these simulacra is again volitare (to fly), the same word that Virgil used in the Aeneid to imagine the forms that men see after death “as flitting shapes.” As Virgil knew, of course, the only kind of immortality available in the materialist universe of De rerum natura was the immortality of bodies that “fly about continually unimpaired for ever” (perpetuo volitare invicta per aevom). In Lucretius’s hands, the idea of Ennius’s poem “flying” from the lips of men has been reimagined in the atoms that “flit and fly” from one place to an43. Lucretius, DRN 4.36: “Volitant ultroque citroque per auras.” 44. Virgil, Aeneid 10.641– 47: “Tum dea nube cava tenuem sine viribus umbram / in faciem Aeneae (visu mirabile monstrum) / Dardaniis ornat telis, clipeumque iubasque / divini adsimulat capitis, dat inania verba, / dat sine mente sonum gressusque effingit euntis, / morte obita qualis fama est volitare figuras / aut quae sopitos deludunt somnia sensus” (Then the goddess from hollow mist fashions a thin strengthless phantom in the likeness of Aeneas, a monstrous marvel to behold, decks it with Dardan weapons, and counterfeits the shield and plumes on his godlike head, gives it unreal words, gives voice without thought, and mimics his gait as he moves; like shapes that flit, it is said, after death or like dreams that mock the slumbering senses). At Sat. 6.1.48, Macrobius links this passage from Virgil directly to the lines in Lucretius just following Ennius’s ghostly reception of Homer. See Lucretius, DRN 1.134–35: “Cernere uti videamur eos audireque coram, / morte obita quorum tellus amplectitur ossa” (So that we seem to see and to hear in very presence those who have encountered death, whose bones rest in earth’s embrace). 45. See again Lucretius, DRN 1.951–54.


other, again making the shifting of the letters in the words Ennius and perenni the perfect illustration. As Mutabilitie said, as if to gloss this play on words: “What is the same but alteration plaine?” Through this reflection on the materiality of language and tradition, we come finally to the master analogy that links the sustained pattern of influence we’ve been tracing to what Greenlaw wants to call a “pervasive thing.” In working through the dense network of associations and allusions that link Ennius, Lucretius, and Chaucer, Spenser was anticipating a subtle criticism Ben Jonson made of him only slightly later in the seventeenth century, a criticism that had to do with the poet’s use of old words. As is evident from a mere glance at his poem, Spenser traded heavily in archaisms, scattering them here and there throughout The Faerie Queene and making his verse sound strangely old-fashioned. On the matter of archaisms, Jonson said, with Spenser in his crosshairs, “Lucretius is scabrous and rough in these; hee seekes ’hem: As some doe Chaucerismes with us, which were better expung’d and banish’d.” And that wasn’t all. “In affecting the ancients,” Jonson insisted, Spenser “writ no language.” It was a typically witty move on his part, for in drawing a comparison between Lucretius and Spenser, Jonson was clearly making room for himself as the new Virgil, snatching the laurels from Spenser’s head. At the same time, he was also drawing a serious analogy between two poets who recycled the archaic language of their forebears—an analogy that would have startling consequences in the context of Mutabilitie’s arguments. As the author of De rerum natura had borrowed the old Latin words of Ennius to supplement his own impoverished vernacular, Spenser had borrowed Chaucer’s, generating an archaic texture that is everywhere in the poem. Seeing The Faerie Queene from Mutabilitie’s perspective, as she in46. Spenser, FQ 7.7.55. John E. Hankins links Spenser’s use of the word “alteration” explicitly to an atomistic (Democritean) scheme as it was explained by Thomas Aquinas. See Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory, 288. 47. On Spenser’s use of archaic diction, see Pope, “Renaissance Criticism”; McElderry, “Archaism and Innovation”; and Craig, “Secret Wit of Spenser’s Language.” 48. Jonson, Discoveries, 74–75. 49. Jonson, Discoveries, 70.


vites us to do, the analogy we are playing with here has the capacity to radically transform our idea of the poem and of Spenser’s practice more generally. What began as a revisiting of the Ennian echoes from book 4 spreads throughout the very language of The Faerie Queene. In the revisionary light of the mind turning back upon itself, perhaps beyond its own intentions again, Spenser’s archaic words flitting and flying are not the “infusion” of his earlier fancy, but the scattered dust of the dead blowing through his poem on a Lucretian wind: the simulacra of tradition. In the wake of Mutabilitie’s materialist arguments, the entire poem transforms backward into an image of flux and change, revealing the unseen influence of Lucretius in the very contexture of the poem itself, and in the contexture of tradition. Indeed, much like the Titaness when she claims that she is literally “in” the matter of everything—in effect, pointing to her pervasive powers in the universe beyond her personification—the author of De rerum natura seems now to linger in the very language of The Faerie Queene, sub tela—beneath the weaving. By activating the web of associations, Mutabilitie was, as I’ve suggested, rewriting her poet’s story again—releasing a contagious strain of materialism into the world of The Faerie Queene. If, indeed, as Harry Berger once described it, “Mutabilitie seems to rush from the remote past into the poet’s present as her influence spreads throughout the universe,” the same might be said about Lucretius in the literary universe of Spenser’s poem. It is in this sense that Greenlaw was perhaps more right than he knew when he wrote that it was “impossible to separate questions of philosophy and of source.” For here a question of source unlocks another question of philosophy, one of matter and form, which should remind us of the title page of the 1609 edition: “TWO CANTOS OF MVTABILITIE: Which, both for Forme and Matter, appeare to be parcell of some following Booke of the FAERIE QUEENE.” In this playful gesture, the printer shows us again how the relationship between the Cantos and the rest of the poem leads to an underlying problem, or rather the problem of what underlies. In the end, how one understands 50. As Spenser describes Mutabilitie’s control over the elements: “So, in them all raignes Mutabilitie” (FQ 7.7.26). 51. Berger, Revisionary Play, 248.


the nature of Spenser’s “matter” and “form” is also how one understands the nature of influence and the poet’s so-called method. Perhaps this is what Greenlaw meant when he urged his contemporaries not to “squabble over the first beginnings, the atoms, the elements which are the sources of the poem.” What Greenlaw seems to have forgotten is that this is precisely what the Mutability Cantos are all about.

Forgetting Lucretius In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud recounts a story from his time as a student at the University of Vienna. During his oral exams, his readers asked him the name of the person who had revived the philosophy of Epicurus “centuries later.” He answered, “It was Pierre Gassendi, whom two days before while in a café I had happened to hear spoken of as a follower of Epicurus. To the question of how I knew this I boldly replied that I had taken an interest in Gassendi for a long time. This resulted in a certificate magna cum laude, but later, unfortunately, also in a persistent tendency to forget the name Gassendi.” In this story about unconscious guilt, Freud casually raises a question about the relationship between intellectual genealogy and accidental encounter. If we were to indulge him, we could say something about the element of chance—the coincidence that links Freud’s story to an Epicurean cosmology, a world hinged on the swerve of an atom. We might say something else about obsolescence and the forces that made one of the seventeenth century’s foremost philosophers trivial (a development that might have worried the founder of psychoanalysis). In what follows in this section, however, I want to begin to retrace the problem of revival and amnesia back from Freud to Gassendi himself, who quoted roughly 5,300 of the 7,400 lines from De rerum natura over the course of his career, sometimes repeating passages more than once, while dismembering and scattering the poem throughout his own writing. There is, of course, another answer to the examiners’ question— one that Freud himself, in a sense, doubly displaces. 52. Greenlaw, “Spenser’s ‘Mutabilitie,’ ” 695. 53. Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 19. 54. Brundell, Pierre Gassendi, 50.


Pierre Gassendi, the “Bacon of France,” began his career as a professor of philosophy at the University of Aix, teaching Aristotle—a role that did not particularly suit him. The philosopher’s first publication was, in fact, a massive attack on Aristotle and his followers, of which, for various reasons, only the first part was finally published. It was in the context of poking holes in scholastic arguments, and at the same time becoming dissatisfied with a more thoroughgoing skepticism, that Gassendi first took an interest in the Greek philosopher with the bad reputation and got a taste of the kind of historical method he would come to use in defending him. The Life of Epicurus, the first iteration of Gassendi’s career-long Epicurean project, was finished in 1632 but published—only on the insistence of his friends—more than a decade later. What had begun as merely an offshoot of his arguments against Aristotle and his expositors, literally an appendix to the first work, began to take on a life of its own, although, as Gassendi was soon to find out, resurrecting Epicurus from the bottom of the river of time was easier said than done. Beyond defending the Greek philosopher against ancient witnesses such as Cicero and Sextus Empiricus, Gassendi had to deal with putting together the dismembered body of Epicurus’s philosophy from ruins. The letters from the period show the French philosopher becoming increasingly aware of just how difficult this task was. It was around this time that Gassendi began exploring another way of organizing his thinking in the form of a commentary on book 10 of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers—the book that deals with Epicurus. The project represented, as Lynn Joy has suggested, a “combination of rigor and folly.” Although both Greek and Latin editions of the text had been available since the Quattrocento, Gassendi found himself in a philological quagmire, with messy manuscripts that had already stumped better readers of Greek such as Henri Estienne and Isaac Casaubon. More55. On Gassendi’s early dissatisfaction with Aristotelian philosophy, see Jones, Pierre Gassendi, 1592–1655, 13. 56. Joy, Gassendi the Atomist, 66. 57. Jones, Pierre Gassendi, 1592–1655, 27–28. 58. Joy, Gassendi the Atomist, 47. 59. On editions of Diogenes Laertius in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see esp. Santinello, Models of the History of Philosophy, 1:155–60.


over, Gassendi’s ambitions extended well beyond merely producing and translating the text (daunting tasks in themselves) to commenting on it, comparing Epicurus’s views to those of other ancient philosophers and drawing connections to the ideas of his contemporaries. Gassendi finally published his commentary on Diogenes later in 1649, once again many years after the text was completed. In the end, however, the enormous, multivolume commentary was a scattered, non-uniform text that left the philosopher feeling frustrated that he had not yet found the best way to present his ideas to the world and regretting that he had published them. Between the writing and the publication of the commentary on Diogenes, Gassendi’s Epicurean revival encountered a number of setbacks, including his busy daily life as a priest, the demands of other intellectual projects, and the death of his good friend Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc in 1637, which appears to have devastated him. Gassendi eventually took another stab at the revival of Epicurus in his Syntagma philosophicum, the last (and unfinished) turn of his great Epicurean romance. It is here that Gassendi finally put aside the commentary form altogether and explored a new structure for his research, adding some material and making corrections while recycling a good deal from his earlier works. This recycling was, in fact, a very significant part of the project. As Howard Jones has described it: “Although the actual preparation of the work occupied Gassendi during the last six years before his death, much of the material . . . was compiled during the previous twenty-five years and incorporated with only slight modification.” The philosopher is imagined here as an author mixing up the matter of his own texts (and the texts of others) and generating different forms from basically the same material. Like Bacon before him, Gassendi clearly knew something about the conservation of (textual) matter. To watch Gassendi working from this long view is like watching the torturing of Proteus: to learn something from the changes. Indeed, even in this very rough picture of the philosopher’s Epicurean career, we may begin to see him as a system maker concerned with the relation between parts and the whole—a philosopher attuned to the com60. Jones, Pierre Gassendi, 1592–1655, 254.


plexities of material form in the most basic sense. It was throughout this long series of transformations that Gassendi scattered and rescattered the text of De rerum natura, reproducing nearly three-quarters of the poem throughout his own work. In the preface to his Syntagma, Gassendi even turned Lactantius’s condemnation of Lucretius into an apology for his habit of quoting the poem at such length, citing the ancient poet himself on sipping from all of Epicurus’s “golden sayings.” Glancing back over this great mass of quotations and watching Gassendi stumble through the ruins of Diogenes’ text, one might wonder why the philosopher didn’t take a less arduous path to the Epicurean Garden, why he didn’t simply write a commentary on Lucretius. Gassendi’s good friend Gabriel Naudé appears to have wondered something very similar. In a letter from 1631, Naudé hinted that the philosopher might be preparing a commentary on De rerum natura of his own and reminded him of the intentions of an Italian colleague. Gassendi’s answer is telling: It remains for me to say in few words what light of Lucretius will shine forth from these little night studies of mine, modest as they may be. What you ask for so assiduously will be especially useful to that most famous man Alsario della Croce for his new Commentaries on the Lucretian Philosophy. I should therefore be frank with you, but first having sworn that I count none of my own trifles of such worth that I think they ought to be compared with the efforts of so learned a man. . . . But perhaps we may both run in the same field, since he will interpret Lucretius in the order the poem was written [ex serie], while I myself will bring forth Lucretius hardly changing my method and confirm these Epicurean maxims. All of Lucretius will be copied out in my little work, but the order of the poem will be broken up [perturbatus] and it will be a thing completely different. 61. Gassendi, Opera omnia, 3:2. 62. Gassendi, Opera omnia, 6:49– 50: “Superest, ut indicem paucis quid lucis videatur Lucretio ex meis illis qualibuscumque lucubrationibus affulsurum. Id scilicet enixe rogas, quod res sit praesertim futura pergrata Clarissimo Viro Alsario a Cruce, bene merituro novis Commentariis de Lucretiana Philosophia. Faciam ergo ingenue, sed prius testatus me nullas meas nugas tanti ducere, ut putem illas cum vigiliis tam docti Viri comparandas. Tu me scilicet rubore suffundis, ac pene dicam, enecas, cum scribis illum ab instituto, si ego quidem credam mea sufficere posse,


What Gassendi is proposing here is not the usual work of assimilation and collection we find philologists engaged in (and that Naudé himself famously recommends for the building of a library), but a game of fragmentation and recombination. Whereas the Italian physician Vincenzo Alsario della Croce commented on the text of De rerum natura in order (Alsario della Croce, coincidentally, died the year of Gassendi’s letter to Naudé, leaving his Lucretian project presumably unfinished), Gassendi distributed all of the verses of the poem (totus Lucretius) throughout his own work as the occasion demanded. Gassendi had good reason to quote so much of the poem over the course of his evolving Epicurean project. As he explains it, Lucretius “seems to have embraced all [Epicurus’s] physical principles in the six books of his poem.” In the same context, he even quotes Ovid’s famous observation that the poetry of De rerum natura would exist until the end of the world. For Gassendi, it seems, all of this was justification enough for taking (or rather mistaking) the poet’s philosophical opinions for Epicurus’s, as if there were no difference between them. And so one finds Lucretius scattered everywhere throughout Gassendi’s writing—or perhaps everywhere and nowhere, as Sylvie Taussig has suggested, for the poet virtually disappears behind the philosopher’s

Poëtae intelligendo, destiturum. Quasi vero non ego potius retrahere pedem ab incoepto debeam, quam ut ille ab opere laudatissimo absterreatur? Sed erit forte, quod uterque in eodem campo decurramus, cum ille Lucretium ex serie contextus interpretaturus sit, ipse Methodo paullo immutata Lucretium producturus sim, ad explicationem, confirmationemque Placitorum Epicureorum hinc totus quidem Lucretius in opellam meam transferetur; sed carminum ordo mihi perturbatus, planeque varius futurus est”; my translation. See Taussig, “Gassendi et Lucrèce,” 530–31. 63. See Naudé, Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library. 64. Alsario della Croce had drawn upon the authority of De rerum natura extensively in his discourse on Vesuvius in 1632; see Alsario della Croce, Vesuvius ardens. On Alsario della Croce and Lucretius, see Beretta, “Gli scienziati e l’edizione,” 183–84. 65. Gassendi, Opera omnia, 6:137: “Quin etiam iactura tot Voluminum, quae de rerum natura Epicurus scripserat, tanto ferri facilius potest, quanto Lucretius iis sex libris, qui de eodem argumento supersunt, videtur fuisse omnia illius Physica Dogmata complexus”; my translation. 66. We might recall in this context Bacon’s similar practice of using quotations from Lucretius to represent Democritus.


image of Epicurus. In the letter to Naudé, Gassendi goes on to describe in more detail exactly how he will make Lucretius speak for the philosopher, distributing the text throughout the various sections of his philosophy. Some of it will go into his Apology, he says; other bits will find their way into the Ethics and Logic. The majority will be cast here and there throughout the text of his Physics. In the end, the text of De rerum natura would be reproduced in (almost) its entirety, but also remixed—“a thing completely different.” To understand what Gassendi meant by this curious remark and how his method works in practice, we might look at one page in the Physics where the philosopher quotes more than a hundred lines from De rerum natura—a page brimming over with poetry. Here, the danger of relying too heavily on Lucretius—that is, of being a slave to his text— is all too clear, for Gassendi’s own text is virtually swallowed up by the poet’s. The topic under discussion here is, aptly, the principle that “nothing comes from nothing.” Gassendi begins to explain the principle by following Lucretius’s text ex serie, commenting briefly passage by passage—in other words, doing exactly what he says in his letter to Naudé that he is not going to do. The critical point comes, however, in the single instance on the page where the philosopher conspicuously departs from the usual order of the poem. “With a few words having been interposed,” Gassendi writes, subtly redirecting our attention just as he reverses several lines of Lucretius’s text—the only part of the text on this page that is out of order. It is almost a kind of joke, because at this very moment when we find Gassendi “interposing,” the poet himself is in the process of describing the dissolution of all matter into “elements,” and the force that “penetrate[s] within through the void places and break[s] [a body] up” (intus penetret per inania dissoluatque). Where the material practices of the philosopher meet the materialist explanations of the poet, what begins as a seemingly meaningless 67. Taussig, “Gassendi et Lucrèce,” 531. 68. Gassendi, Opera omnia, 6:50. 69. Gassendi, Opera omnia, 1:233. 70. Gassendi, Opera omnia, 1:233: “Ac rationem, paucis interpositis, sic deducit”; my translation. 71. See Lucretius, DRN 1.221–24.


switch of a few lines turns out to be emblematic of Gassendi’s attempt to distance himself from the poet. For Lucretius, it was the switching or digression of a single atom in the slightest possible degree that set the whole machine of the universe into motion. As Richard Kroll has shown, this kind of textual play on matter and texts was hardly foreign to Gassendi. The philosopher’s extensive use of architectural and combinatory tropes dramatizes the relationship between part and whole and “preserves a sense of the atomic foundations and building blocks of experience, even as it assumes that the mind binds and abstracts them into workable structures of knowledge.” As we know, Gassendi could have learned a great deal about this “method,” as Kroll calls it, from two authors he read very closely: Montaigne and Bacon, both of whom transformed the materialist idea of the text into a vision of the past and future of knowledge. In a section of the Physics called “On Movement and Change,” Gassendi himself recycled the famous Lucretian pun on elementa that Bacon loved so much, bringing our attention again to the subtle matter of the text: Finally, just as letters with no more shapes than the ones we find in the alphabet can produce an innumerable diversity of words by the mere variation of their arrangement, so great diversity indeed that they suffice not only for all the books heretofore written, but also for all those yet to be composed, so it is logical that atoms with their innumerable shapes in various compounds may produce a diversity of qualities, or appearances, far more innumerable beyond any proportion, I might even say infinitely more. 72. See Lucretius, DRN 2.216–20. 73. Kroll, Material Word, 122. 74. Gassendi, Opera omnia, 1:367: “Et tandem sicut literae figurarum non plurium, quam quae in Alphabeto visuntur, sola ordinis varietate innumerabilem dictionum diversitatem facere possunt, tantam nempe, quae omnibus libris non modo hactenus conscriptis, sed deinceps quoque conscribendis sufficiant: ita par est, ut Atomi innumerabilium figurarum varie compositae diversitatem qualitatum, seu specierum sui longe, & absque ulla proportione, ne dicam prope infinite innumerabiliorem faciant”; trans. Brush in Gassendi, Selected Works, 427–28. On Gassendi’s use of the elemental analogy, see Kroll, Material Word, 122 and 362 n. 82.


As it was for Bacon, who also imagined the future of knowledge cast in printed books, this analogy between letters and atoms was close to Gassendi’s heart, reflecting the philosopher’s own views on textual borrowing and production, his relationship to the fragmented material traces of a lost philosophy, and the structure of his own evolving project, itself a dynamic monument to this combinatory logic. As Gassendi makes clear on the page we looked at in the Physics, even changing or varying the order of a few verses or words could alter one’s relation to the text. This idea of literary materialism is as pervasive in Gassendi’s philosophy as it is in Lucretius’s poem. How deeply it came to affect Gassendi’s own work may perhaps best be gauged by Samuel de Sorbière, who, in a prefatory letter to Gassendi’s printer, described the way the philosopher worked on the matter of other men’s opinions and, as it were, on the minds of his readers: It is necessary for [Gassendi’s work] to be taken with a certain unaccustomed effort, by which all things are overturned at their base and so are crushed to pieces, so that at no time may the ancient appearance of things be apparent; but let his certain Elements [Elementa] rise up and present themselves . . . Gassendi is ready right away for breaking up or putting together bodies, and offers the safest asylum for all images of truth.

It is worth repeating here that a printer who composed and recomposed pages of movable type would have intuitively understood the conservation of Elementa, the casting and dissemination of letters in the shop. To destroy another’s arguments—or to absorb them—is literally and figuratively to break them up, scatter them, put the pieces together, and generate one’s own opinions. 75. Sorbière, in Gassendi, Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri, sig. 3v: “Huic capiendo opus est nisu quodam insolito, quo funditus subvertuntur omnia et ita conteruntur, ut nusquam facies antiqua rerum appareat: sed nescio quaedam exoriantur Elementa, quorum indefinite facta quandocunque libet divisio, statim praesto est solvendis componendisve corporibus, et nullis non figmentis asylum praebet tutissimum”; my translation.


This Lucretian play on Elementa was no doubt on Gassendi’s own mind when he said he would break up and scatter the text of Lucretius throughout his own philosophy, generating, as he called it, “a thing completely different.” The word he uses to imagine this process, perturbare, is, in fact, the same word Lucretius uses in De rerum natura on several key occasions to describe the dispersal of atoms from their original positions and the process of transformation that takes place once the structure of something has been broken asunder, that is, after illness or death. In book 4 of De rerum natura, for example, Lucretius describes the violent effects of a fever on the position of atoms in a body: Quippe ubi cui febris bili superante coorta est aut alia ratione aliquast vis excita morbi, perturbatur ibi iam totum corpus et omnes commutantur ibi positurae principiorum. [For when fever arises in anyone, from overflow of bile, or when the energy of some disease is excited in another way, then the whole body is thrown into a riot and all the positions of the first-beginnings are changed about [perturbatur]].

Earlier, the poet had imagined the dissolution of the soul through the body as a similar kind of “perturbation”: Nec temere huc dolor usque potest penetrare neque acre Permanare malum, quin omnia perturbentur Usque adeo ut vitae desit locus atque animai Diffugiant partes per caulas corporis omnis. [Nor is it easy for pain to soak through thus far, or any violent mischief, without throwing into so great a riot [omnia perturbentur] that no place is left for life, and the particles of spirit flee abroad through all the pores of the body.]

This last passage comes in the context of book 3, where Lucretius explains that even the soul is subject to death and dissolution. Like most 76. Lucretius, DRN 4.664–67. 77. Lucretius, DRN 3.252–55.


Renaissance readers, of course, Gassendi was compelled to argue against the mortality of the soul and against this material “perturbation” that is its death—its “flitting” and “flying,” as Mutabilitie called it. At the same time, when it came to using the text of Lucretius, it appears that the philosopher was not above turning the poet’s atomistic logic against him, breaking up the spirit or afflatus of “learned Lucretius” into pieces and diffusing his authority. That the man who sought to baptize Epicureanism for his Christian contemporaries would dramatize the figurative death of Lucretius in the same way that the poet had described the death of the soul is wonderfully ironic. We might even call it poetic justice. As a seventeenth-century reviver of an infamous philosophy, Gassendi was being cautious by breaking up the authority of De rerum natura—one might even say strategic. Associating too closely with an impious, suicidal poet, after all, would probably not have helped his case. Moreover, Lucretius was clearly too much of a dogmatist at heart, modeling for his readers what was in the end a very different relation to the Greek philosopher and his so-called golden sayings: one of total reverence. Unlike the inspired zealot who broadcast his philosophy in a state of frenzy, a more sober Gassendi could not be entirely uncritical of his source. If, however, the philosopher knew very early on that a straightforward commentary on Lucretius would not work for these reasons, among others, he also recognized that the text of De rerum natura was essential to his project and could not for practical reasons be avoided. Gassendi’s practice of breaking up and scattering the text of Lucretius in his own work appears to arise from this conflicted desire both to diffuse and to absorb the authority of the “sublime” poet—the poet whose verses would prove crucial to the making of his own revival, 78. For Gassendi’s views on the soul, see LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy, chap. 10; and Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, 139–41. 79. On Gassendi’s own “mitigated skepticism,” see Popkin, History of Scepticism, chap. 5. 80. In his Life of Epicurus, Gassendi would have to confront the charge that Epicurus’s disciples had followed him with a divine reverence, explaining away Lucretius’s zealous praise as conventional. See Jones, Pierre Gassendi, 1592– 1655, 231–34.


but if followed too closely, would render it suspect or simply redundant. In a way, Gassendi was acting like a jealous poet. As the material drama of fragmentation, dispersal, and assimilation takes place through the elementa of Lucretius’s poem, a materialism emerges through Gassendi’s own practices. Interestingly, we see another version of the same story play out when Gassendi’s works themselves are condensed and translated into various languages and the issue of the philosopher’s authority resolves in the virtual disappearance of the Epicurean poet. When the philosopher’s friend and former pupil François Bernier, for example, published a French translation of his Syntagma in the 1690s, he cleverly made a point of displacing the authority of the Epicurean poet so that Gassendi himself could rise to the top: Gassendi is always the living wellspring where you must go to draw; he is the father, he is the Inventor of things, and I have done nothing but imitate the bees who collect the nectar they find here and there on the flowers in the countryside. It is as Lucretius once said of his dear Epicurus: “You are our father, the discoverer of truths, you supply us. . . .” We add in imitation that which Ovid predicted about the sublime verses of Lucretius, that they will not perish until the end of the world. . . . We might add, I say, with even more justice, that the Works of Gassendi which comprise all of Lucretius that is good, and an infinity of other incomparable things, do not have to fear the blows of Time, and they should not fear to perish except in the general ruin of the World. 81. Gassendi, Abregé de la philosophie, 1:14: “Gassendi est toûjours la source vive où vous devez aller puiser, c’est le Pere, c’est l’ Inventeur des choses, et je n’ay fait qui’imiter les Abeilles qui vont ramassant le miel qu’elles trouvent ça et là sur les fleurs dans la campagne; C’est ce que Lucrèce disoit autrefois de son cher Épicure: ‘Tu Pater, et rerum Inventor, tu patria nobis / Suppeditas. . . .’ Ajoutons a l’imitation de ce qu’Ovide a predit des sublimes Vers de Lucrèce, Qu’ils ne periront que lors que le Monde perira: ‘Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti, / Exitio terras cum dabit una dies.’ Ajoutons, dis je, à plus forte raison que les Ouvrages de Gassendi qui comprenent tout ce que Lucrèce a de bon, et un infinité d’autres choses incomparables, ne craignent point l’atteinte des Temps, et qu’ils ne sçauroient perir que dans les ruines générales du Monde”; my translation.


Bernier’s allusions allow his readers to imagine the philosopher as both Epicurus and Lucretius, a blurring of roles that makes Gassendi both the “Inventor of things” and the vehicle of their transmission. Whereas Gassendi had earlier claimed, in his letter to Naudé, to have reproduced totus Lucretius, Bernier says that the philosopher had absorbed and digested “all” of the best parts of the poet. Bernier apparently took this idea to heart, because in his translation he not only carefully excised the great majority of the lines from De rerum natura that Gassendi quoted in the Syntagma, but transferred to the French philosopher the very honors that Ovid had once conferred upon Lucretius. It is now the great Gassendi whose Epicurean revival will exist until the end of the world—a radical overreaching and absorption of Lucretius’s authority, which Bernier had decided was superfluous to his own French edition. A similar kind of disappearing act had occurred a few years earlier when Gassendi’s philosophy made its way to England. In the preface to his English adaptation of Gassendi’s Epicurean revival, Walter Charleton set out to describe the four different sects of philosophers who had repeated themselves throughout history. One of these sects he called “the renovators of knowledge,” the group in which he placed his “immortal Gassendus” and the other great men who had revived ancient philosophy for their own times: The uppermost seats in this infinitely-deserving Class justly belong to Marcilius Ficinus, who from many mouldy and worm-eaten Transcripts hath collected, and interpreted the semidivine Labors of Plato: to Copernicus, who hath rescued from the jawes of oblivion, the 82. As Joy has suggested, the kind of humanistic scholarship that Gassendi epitomized for his generation was quickly giving way to other ways of reading and knowing. Less than a hundred years after the philosopher’s death, Voltaire wrote: “God preserve me from employing three hundred pages from the history of Gassendi! Life is too short [and] time too precious to speak of useless things” (Voltaire to Jean Baptiste Dubos, 30 October 1738, in Voltaire, Correspondence, 7:426–27). Cited and discussed in Joy, Gassendi the Atomist, 199. 83. By classifying philosophers in this way, Charleton was carving out a unique role for himself, a role that allowed him to weigh both ancient and modern authorities. See Booth, “Subtle and Mysterious Machine.”


almost extinct Astrology of Samius Aristarchus: to Lucretius, who hath retrieved the lost Physiologie of Empedocles . . . and to the greatest Antiquary among them, the immortal Gassendus; who, out of a few obscure and immethodical pieces of him, scattered upon the rhapsodies of Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius, hath built up the despised Epicurus again, into one of the most profound, temperate, and voluminous among Philosophers.

Charleton describes Gassendi here as Bacon once described himself: a man who puts together “obscure and immethodical pieces,” the scattered remains of the past, from “the rhapsodies of Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius.” Strangely mischaracterized in this list of Epicurean sources is, however, Lucretius, who is celebrated for having renovated “the lost Physiologie of Empedocles” instead of the philosophy of Epicurus. In a way, Charleton had already written Lucretius’s absence into the title of his work: Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, or, A Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms Founded by Epicurus, Repaired by Petrus Gassendus, Augmented by Walter Charleton. Here Gassendi’s own practice of breaking up and scattering the text of De rerum natura has reached its logical conclusion in the disappearance of the poet into the very “fabrick” of tradition. The diffusion of Lucretius in Gassendi brings us back to the idea of textual scattering that we explored in the imaginations of Montaigne and Bacon—to the idea of a literary and philosophic history in the process of being made and unmade, a vision of “structural change.” Earlier this idea was realized in the figure of Homer atomized and cast infinitely into men’s minds. In this case it is realized again through the text of De rerum natura itself as the poem is disturbed and the authority of Epicureanism is reabsorbed into the “stuff ” of the philosopher’s seemingly endless revisions. In this way the literary materialism of Lucretius’s poem comes to inflect the practices of the humanist philosopher even as, maybe even especially as, the poem itself is being broken up. What we see in the scattered material history of the poet—what, in a 84. Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, 4. 85. The omission is all the more egregious when one considers just how often Charleton himself, following Gassendi’s example, cites verses from De rerum natura.


sense, becomes visible—is not only the circulation of Epicurean ideas, but the insinuation of the poet’s materialism into the very idea of tradition itself, its material “fabrick.” As Lucretius dissolves into the surface of Gassendi’s philosophy, his influence becomes pervasive. Ironically, one could say, it was in trying to forget the author of De rerum natura that Gassendi turned out to be most Lucretian.

“Analogies for Positions” About thirty years after the publication of the Mutability Cantos and around the same time as Gassendi was engaging Galilean physics and the principle of inertia, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More was writing poetry to defend the immortality of the soul against the rising tides of the New Philosophy. As Coleridge later described it, More’s Platonic poetry was full of a “false and fantastic Philosophy yet shot thro’ with refracted Light from the not yet risen but rising Truth.” To talk about the pervasiveness of Lucretius in the work of More might at first seem counterintuitive. More, after all, spent his career arguing against materialist philosophers, and his primary poetic model appears to have been Edmund Spenser, whose stanzaic form and archaic diction he adapted and put to the service of his own Platonic metaphysics. In his preface to John Smith’s Select Discourses (1660), John Worthington explicitly recommended reading More’s philosophy as an answer to the modernday materialists who had “craftily insinuated” themselves into men’s minds. In turning now from Gassendi, I want to look at the ways in which More’s early, often neglected poetry may be understood both as a response to the idea of Lucretian pervasiveness—to what Worthing86. Brinkley, Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, 633. 87. See Smith, Select Discourses, xx–xxii: “That our Author in these Two Treatises pursued his design in opposition to the Master-Notions and chief Principles of Epicurus and Lucretius of old: I shall only adde this, That if any of this Sect in our daies has done more than revived and repeated those Principles, if any such has superadded any thing of any seeming force and moment to the pretensions of the old Epicureans mention’d in these Tracts, the Reader may find it particularly spoken to and fully answered by One whom our Author highly esteem’d, Mr. Henry More, in his late Treatise Of the Immortality of the Soul, and in another Discourse intituled An Antidote against Atheism, and in the Appendix thereunto annexed.”


ton imagined tellingly as a problem of “insinuation”—and also as an attempt to reconcile the poetry and philosophy of Spenser and Lucretius. Returning in his own poems to the site of Mutabilitie’s arguments, More will help us to connect the dots between the latent materialism of Spenser’s literary vision and the emerging intellectual worlds of Descartes and Newton. When Henry More published his first book of poems in 1642, he found himself in the midst of a storm, tossed between the revelations of the New Science and the onset of a civil war. As King Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham, the twenty-eight-year-old poet was fighting his own battle on the frontlines of another war—a civil war of reason and faith. His enemies were the materialist philosophers—the men, both ancient and modern, who argued that the soul was mortal and could agree with John Donne when he wrote, “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.” More apparently developed a strong distaste for the philosophy of materialism early on at school, almost instinctively. In his biographical account, the poet’s friend Richard Ward reproduced an anecdote from More’s time as a student at Eton, echoing the first few lines of a poem the young poet could not get out of his head. Here is More’s first-person account: Though in that Ground mentioned, walking as my Manner was, slowly, and with my Head on one Side, and kicking now and then the Stones with my Feet, I was wont sometimes with a sort of Musical and Melancholick Murmur to repeat, or rather humm to my self, those Verses of Claudian. . . . Oft hath my anxious Mind divided stood; Whether the Gods did mind this lower World; Or whether no such Ruler (Wise and Good) We had; and all things here by Chance were hurld.

The passage is lifted from Claudian’s In Rufinum and was chosen no doubt to capture a sense of More’s precocious sensitivities. In repro88. This was the year More published his first collection of verse, Psychodia Platonica, or, A Platonicall Song of the Soul. 89. John Donne, “An Anatomy of the World,” in Donne, Major Works, 212. 90. Ward, Life of Henry More, 15–16.


ducing this story from the poet’s early life, More’s biographer was positioning him as a kind of prophet who foresaw the revival of materialism in the familiar stuff of a scholastic education. How can there be divine Providence, Claudian asks at the start of the poem, if evil men such as the tyrant Rufinus are allowed to flourish unpunished? Where is divine justice in the world? Petrarch, we recall, had posed similar questions in the wake of the Black Death. Writing in the seventeenth century, More was addressing his contemporaries who were chipping away at the foundation of faith and lending more credence to the frightening Epicurean notion that “all things here by Chance were hurld.” In fact, at the very moment that Ward was recalling this episode, in the mid-1660s, Claudian’s famous lapse into doubt reflected a more familiar concern about the revival of the ancient materialist philosophers. One man’s “Melancholik Murmur” had become something like a collective roar. Ironically, the verses More found so troubling at Eton, his contemporaries had long understood as part of a good Christian allegory. They focused on the end of the poem when all is neatly resolved into a vision of Providence; More, on the other hand, could not get past the first few lines. The poet’s hesitation was clearly part and parcel of his mythmaking—the kind of Platonic mythmaking that scholars have described in 91. As Isaac Barrow put the matter in 1665: “Of all the sects and factions which divide the world, that of Epicurean scorners is become the most formidable” (Barrow, Theological Works, 4:232). On the rise of Epicureanism in England in the seventeenth century, see esp. Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics. 92. Compare More’s response to Claudian’s poem to Peter Heylyn’s in his Theologia veterum, 314: “Add yet the Poet’s contemplation on this point was both good and pious, and such as might become a right honest Christian: had he intended that of eternal punishments which he speaks of temporal. But howsoever thus he hath it: ‘Saepe mihi dubiam traxit sententia mentem, / Curarent Superi terras, an nullus inesset / Rector, & incerto fluerent mortalia casu, &c. / Abstulit hunc tandem Ruffini poena tumultum, / Absolvitque Deos; jam non ad culmina rerum / Injustos crevisse queror; tolluntur in altum, / Vt lapsu gravore ruant.’ ‘Oft had I been perplex’d in minde, to know / Whether the Gods took charge of things below; / Or that uncertain chance the world did sway, / Finding no higher ruler to obey. / Ruffino’s fall at last, to this distraction / Gave a full end, and ample satisfaction / To the wrong’d Gods. I shall no more complain / That wicked men to great power attain; / For now I see they are advanc’d on high, / To make their ruine look more wretchedly.’ ” When


the work of Marsilio Ficino, who was very good at telling stories about himself. Departing from his contemporaries who read Claudian’s doubt as an allegory of Christian redemption, More was carefully laying the ground for his own Christian allegory, using the occasion of the poet’s seeming fall into the world of materialism to restage the shift from pagan to Christian culture—a shift exemplified by none other than Saint Augustine, Claudian’s own contemporary and the major theological source for the inward “Sense of God” that saves the episode and the poet’s faith. For the young More, it was as if the seventeenth century itself were merely a momentary lapse of doubt before another momentous revelation—the revelation of his own inspired verse. The way More handled Claudian’s poem was typical of a compulsive habit of intellectual assimilation that could sweep even the messiest texts and traditions into a coherent whole. And like the Hebrews in Augustine, More too made much of his Egyptian spoils. We see this again in the way the poet came to justify his own use of Platonic verse, in spite of the fact that Plato himself had been doubtful of the poets inside the city. To generate a new revival in verse, More cobbled together several ancient traditions, placing his work in a long and garrulous genealogy of ancients and moderns, and assimilating the stubborn materialism of Heylyn took the poet’s correction seriously, he was reading the poem as a Christian allegory. For More, however, writing in a new age of materialism, the poet’s initial doubt was not something easily resolved. In this sense, More could not have agreed with the conclusions of Alan Cameron, who has argued that Claudian’s doubt was “obviously” meant to be read as “tongue in cheek.” As Cameron writes: “If anything at all is to be deduced from the passage concerning Claudian’s true Weltanschauung, it is surely that he did believe in a just and beneficent Providence, and thought Epicureanism merely good for a laugh” (Cameron, Claudian, 330). 93. See Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 1:267–359. 94. In place of Claudian’s quick reversal, More adds his own line of ecstatic testimony: “Yet that exceeding hail and entire Sense of God, which Nature her self had planted deep in me, very easily silenced all such flight and Poetical Dubitations as these” (Ward, Life of Henry More, 16). 95. Slightly later in the century, Charles Blount would recall “a certain Critick” who recommended reading Claudian’s doubtful exordium for “he that had a mind to be a Poet” (Blount, Oracles of Reason, 179). 96. On Ficino’s answer to this question of a Platonic poetry, see Allen, Synoptic Art, 93–123.


his enemies. Cicero had already given him an important clue in his discussion of poetic furor in De oratore: “For I have often heard that—as they say Democritus and Plato have left on record—no man can be a good poet who is not on fire with passion, and inspired by something very like frenzy.” As usual More was to make much of little, transforming this casual witness in Cicero into a sweeping intellectual history. Drawing together the authority of two ancient philosophers who were usually opposed to one another allowed him a foundation upon which to build the edifice of his own intellectual project. Indeed, in bringing together the divine Plato and the grandfather of atomism by his own poetic furor, More imagined himself as reuniting two halves of a single ancient tradition that had been distorted and fragmented by the ignorance of later readers—a project that culminated explosively in the title of his poem on the infinity of worlds, Democritus Platonissans (1646). For More, this figure of the frenzied philosophic poet became the inspired conduit through which all tension and dissonance could be resolved into perfect harmony. When Plato banished some of the poets from the Republic, he could not have meant this rich, spiritual kind of poet that More fashioned himself to be and Ficino could only dream of—a poet who embodied the unifying principles of his philosophy. This, as we recall, was precisely how Macrobius, another man of Platonic 97. Cicero, De oratore 2.46.194: “Saepe enim audivi poetam bonum neminem— id quod a Democrito et Platone in scriptis relictum esse dicunt—sine inflammatione animorum existere posse, et sine quodam afflatu quasi furoris.” See also Cicero, De divinatione 1.38.80; and Horace, Ars poetica 295– 301. Ficino mentions this tradition in passing in his discussion of poetic furor in the letter to the Florentine wunderkind Peregrino Agli. Ficino, Opera omnia, 1:612–15. 98. On this synthesis of traditions, see also More, Conjectura cabbalistica, 70: “We [Descartes and More] both setting out from the same Lists, though taking several ways, the one traveling in the lower Rode of Democritism, amidst the thick dust of Atoms, and flying particles of Matter, the other tracing it o’er the high and aiery hills of Platonism, in that more thin and subtle Region of Immateriality, meet together notwithstanding at last (and certainly not without a Providence) at the same Goal.” 99. As Hankins and Allen have shown, Ficino would eventually develop a style that could serve his revival—a style, he said, that, like Plato’s, flowed somewhere between poetry and prose. See Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 1:293; and Allen, Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedran Charioteer, 12.


persuasions, once imagined his Virgil—the poet, he said, whose handiwork mirrored the very nature of the universe in all of its variety. But whereas the author of the Saturnalia, instructing his son, had discovered his vision of unity nostalgically in Virgil. More looked back to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which he said his father had read to him on cold winter nights as a child. The notion of Spenser as a kind of Platonic vates clearly appealed to a sentimental poet such as More, stumbling to find his balance on a changing intellectual ground with a copy of Descartes in one hand and Galileo in the other. Around the time that More was writing his poetry, his contemporary, Sir Kenelme Digby, was celebrating Spenser’s extraordinary ability to harmonize contradictions, the poet having been “throughly verst in the Mathematicall Sciences, in Philosophy, and in Divinity.” If More himself could absorb the deep assimilative structures of The Faerie Queene, as Macrobius had done with Virgil, he could potentially reconcile the violent intellectual crosscurrents that moved him. Tellingly, this was exactly how Edwin Greenlaw later described Spenser’s “method” in his discussion of Lucretius’s presence in The Faerie Queene: “I pass over such elementary and well known facts that just such combinations, from all sorts of sources, are of the essence of Spenser’s method; that even in his philosophical method he resembled his master Plato in making such combinations.” Imitating Spenser, More was carefully leading us back to the philosophical register of the Mutability Cantos where we found the traces of Lucretius, taking up where the Elizabethan poet had broken off. Indeed, just as the author of The Faerie Queene had channeled the afflatus of Chaucer in a language that already seemed old-fashioned to his contemporaries, More conjured Spenser’s spirit, causing at least some 100. “To His Dear Father, Alexander More, Esquire,” in More, Philosophical Poems: “You having from my childhood turned mine ears to Spenser’s rhymes, entertaining us on winter nights, with that incomparable Piece of his, The Fairy Queen, a Poem as richly fraught with divine Morality as Phansy.” 101. Digby, Observations, 4. 102. Greenlaw, “Spenser’s ‘Mutabilitie,’ ” 691. 103. In “Psychozoia,” More tells us that he is moving away from Spenser’s “Ladies loves” and “Knights brave martiall deeds,” signaling a return to Spenser’s more philosophical key. More, Platonick Song, 1.1.160.


of his contemporaries to scratch their heads in wonder. Why was More using the old (and old-sounding) poetry of Spenser to combat the modern materialists? More’s rival, Thomas Vaughan, framed the question in slightly more interesting terms: “Is this an old Song, or a new? Forgive me Sir! now at last I apprehend the mysterie; You are neither a Modern singer, nor yet an Ancient one; You live in our dayes, but you imitate Spencer, so that your song is both old and new, and Truth perhaps may be had for it.” Here More’s worst enemy turns out to be his most astute critic. In drawing our attention to the strangeness of More’s experiment to revive a Neoplatonic tradition in verse, Vaughan put his finger on something that has for the most part eluded modern readers: the relation between More’s language and his philosophy. More himself gives us another clue to this great “mysterie” in a short poem called “Cupid’s Conflict,” a dialogue in which the god of love, fed up with the poet’s stubborn resistance, accuses him of that most common of crimes in the seventeenth century, writing bad poetry: But now thy riddles all men do neglect, Thy rugged lines of all do lie forlorn. Unwelcome rymes that rudely do detect The Readers ignorance. Men holden scorn To be so often non-plusd or to spell, And on one stanza a whole age to dwell. Besides this harsh and hard obscuritie Of the hid sense, thy words are barbarous And strangely new, and yet too frequently Return, as usuall plain and obvious, So that the show of the new thick-set patch Marres all the old with which it ill doth match.

Displaying a rare sense of humor, More places the collective voices of his harshest critics in the mouth of the god of love, who takes the opportunity to critique both the form and the content of his poems on the 104. “Cupid’s Conflict,” in More, Democritus Platonissans, 7. On More’s interest in the supernatural as a way of proving the existence of the soul, see Coudert, “Henry More and Witchcraft.” 105. Vaughan, Man-Mouse, 35. 106. “Cupid’s Conflict,” in More, Democritus Platonissans, 6.


occasion of their first revision. Cupid has a number of substantial complaints—and who, having read even a little of More, could blame him? His poetry is famously difficult to read, his rhymes are “unwelcome” and “rude,” and he expects his reader, as Cupid politely puts it, to dwell forever on one stanza. Having exhausted his long list of complaints, Cupid ends with some well-meaning advice: stick with love poetry. This is, of course, not at all what More does. What interests More is the question of language that Cupid raises here, and it is to that question that he will respond at length: And what thou dost Pedantickly object Concerning my rude rugged uncouth style, As childish toy I manfully neglect, And at thy hidden snares do inly smile. How ill alas! with wisdome it accords To sell my living sense for livelesse words. My thought’s the fittest measure of my tongue, Wherefore I’ll use what’s most significant, And rather then my inward meaning wrong Or my full-shining notion trimly scant, I’ll conjure up old words out of their grave, Or call fresh forrein force in if need crave.

More here gives us justification for the weird poetic practices that led Vaughan to question whether he was being ancient or modern. In explaining this curious method of mixing old words and new words together, however, the poet is doing more than just apologizing. He is recalling the question of Spenser’s language, and Ben Jonson’s famous complaint about the poet’s archaisms. More himself would lay out this analogy explicitly in his pointed response to another of Vaughan’s complaints—this time that his “Ballad” was full of “High swoln words of vanity.” “Ballade,” he answered his rival, wittily adding an “e” to the end to make it seem old-fashioned, “is a good old English word, from which I abhorre no more then Spencer, or Lucretius from old Latine.” In this one gesture, More finally unravels the great “mysterie” of his verse for us, showing how what might appear to be an extended imita107. “Cupid’s Conflict,” in More, Democritus Platonissans, 7. 108. More, Second Lash of Alazonomastix, 102.


tion of Spenser’s diction was part and parcel of a deeper structural imitation of De rerum natura. As, indeed, the author of De rerum natura had looked back to the old Latin poet Ennius to translate an ancient Greek philosophy into the poverty of his own vernacular, the English Platonist drew upon the “archaic” language of Chaucer and Spenser to build his own case. It was in this sense that More later referred to himself jokingly as “a certain Philosophicall Poet, who writes almost as hobblingly as Lucretius.” In the same way, he also followed the Epicurean poet to justify introducing new words to the language. As he explained in the glossary to his poems (a glossary he appended to the second editions for the benefit of the uninitiated reader, which was everyone): If any man conceive I have done amisse in using such obscure words in my writings, I answer, That it is sometime fit for Poeticall pomp sake, as in my Psychozoia: Othersome time necessitie requires it, Propter egestatem linguae, rerum novitatem [because of the poverty of language and the novelty of matters], as Lucretius pleads for himself in like case.

More here shows again just how important Lucretius and his use of language were to his own philosophical revival, though this was only the beginning of More’s extended imitation of the ancient poet. Like Lucretius, the seventeenth-century Platonist embraced the difficulty of producing a vernacular revival of an ancient Greek philosophy that was famously hostile to poets. Plato, of course, had condemned the poets, like Epicurus; so did Francis Bacon. More was also, like Lucretius, trying to compose a philosophical poem in the heat of his own civil war—a coincidence that no doubt loomed large in his mind. What the 109. More, Divine Dialogues, 347. 110. More, Psychodia Platonica, Q1; The line More is referring to is Lucretius, DRN 139. Close to what More is doing in his own poetry is an anonymous prose translation of De rerum natura, currently at the Bodleian Library (MS Rawl.D.314), that also attempts to capture the effect of the poet’s language by scattering English archaisms throughout. Reid Barbour dates the manuscript to after 1659 based on evidence of an engagement with the facing-page Latin and French edition of Michael Marolles, which was published that year. See Barbour, “Anonymous Lucretius.” 111. For the argument that Lucretius was writing his poem at the beginning of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey in 48 BC, rather than in the mid-50s, see Hutchinson, “Date of De rerum natura.”


English poet discovered in “the verses of sublime Lucretius” might finally be described as not only a model of language, but also as a model of cultural translatio that allowed him to resolve the long-standing tension between the Platonists and the atomists, to fashion an intellectual genealogy that connected him both to the ancients and to an English vernacular poetic tradition, and to respond to the new revival of Epicureanism on the very terms of its old poetic argument. “But that he might not be shie of me,” More later described his habit of imitation in a different context: “I have conform’d my self as near his own Garb as I might, without partaking of his folly or wickedness.” When we peer under the surface of More’s poetry, the Platonist’s strange poetic project begins to look less and less like the bad pastiche of Spenser that Cupid describes and more like a complex and dynamic imitation of De rerum natura—an imitation that is pervasive because it resides in the very sinews of the poem and in its language. In bringing us back to the world of Mutabilitie’s arguments, More unlocks the Lucretian tensions that lingered in Spenser by realizing the analogy buried in the poet’s language. Earlier, we saw how this latent presence of Lucretius contaminated The Faerie Queene through a series of associations that point to Lucretius’s own borrowing from the poetry of the old Latin Ennius. By imitating Spenser imitating Chaucer, and thus positioning himself in this genealogy of poets, More was directly reengaging the same “knot” of associations and responding to the pervasiveness of the Epicurean poet in his own way. His poetry was, after all, designed explicitly as an antidote to the distracted thoughts of men such as Lucretius, who, he said, “Busy . . . their brains in the mysterious toyes / Of flittie motion.” The echo of Spenser here is unmistakable in light of our previous discussion. Indeed, in this loaded and allusive context, More himself is returning to the site of Ennius’s grave in the Mutability Cantos and to the image of the mind’s “flitting” and “flying,” which by the end of The Faerie Queene had become a dusty materialist vision of the poem itself. In this sense, More’s imitation might be said to embody 112. More, Antidote against Atheism, sig. B8. More writes this in regard to his later shift from poetry to prose, but the logic of imitation is clearly consistent with his earlier poetic forays. 113. “Psychathanasia,” 1.1.11, in More, Platonick Song, 263.


the figure of Lucretian pervasiveness by attempting to harness and control it. If the presence of the Epicurean poet is invisible and everywhere in his own poetry, it has been reassimilated and contained in the subtle texture. Having decoded More’s studied imitation of Lucretius, we may begin now to draw some connecting lines between the idea of a literary pervasiveness and the idea of a pervasive force in the world, starting with the word “pervade” itself, which comes into English usage surprisingly late. The first entry for “pervade” in the Oxford English Dictionary, in fact, leads us directly to More’s An Antidote against Atheism, where we find the inspired poet-turned-philosopher discussing the problem of defining the immaterial substance of the soul. “Here,” as More describes it, “union pervades through all.” As we have already begun to see, this notion of the pervasive union played a central role in More’s philosophy, beginning with his philosophical poetry. As the great Titaness had crawled out of the lines of The Faerie Queene claiming to be “in” everything, More generated his own pervasive figure to rival Lucretius and Spenser’s fast-talking Dame—a figure of unity and interconnection to answer the flux and dispersal of the materialist imagination. Over the course of his career, More would call this force the “Spirit of Nature,” though she goes by a number of different names in his poetry and philosophy, including “Physis,” “the veil of Psyche,” “spissitude,” and also the fourth dimension. As More explained, this hardworking spirit is nothing less than the force that holds all things together: Physis is nothing else but the vegetable World, the Universall comprehension of Spermaticall life dispersed throughout. . . . This enters and raiseth up into life and beauty, the whole corporeall world, . . . awakening that immense mist of Atoms into severall energies, into fiery, watery, and earthly; and placing her Magick attractive points, sucks hither and thither to every center a due proportion, and right disposed number of those Cuspidal particles, knedding them into Suns, Moons, Earths &c. 114. More, Antidote against Atheism, 312. 115. See esp. Henry, “Cambridge Platonist’s Materialism.” 116. More, Philosophical Poems, 345–46. Cited and discussed in Greene, “Henry More and Robert Boyle.”


In addition to describing the Spirit of Nature, More is, of course, describing his own synthetic mind at work, drawing together the disparate parts of a fragmented and dissonant tradition, making things whole again. As Henry Oldenburg had to assure his readers in an unsigned review of More’s Enchiridion metaphysicum, which was published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the Spirit of Nature was “not imaginary, but real . . . pervading the whole Universe and penetrating all . . . Matter” (emphasis added). Vaughan, however, probably put it best when he accused More of “mistak[ing] Analogies for Positions” and “strictly insist[ing] upon Metaphors.” If the work of allegory, as Gordon Teskey has argued, is always mixed up with the violence of preserving a sense of metaphysical order (or as More has it, of maintaining “every center a due proportion”), his pervasive Spirit of Nature has absorbed the assimilative properties of allegory, “attracting,” “sucking,” and “knedding” the material fabric of the world and the world of discourse into one “Universall comprehension.” The Spirit of Nature was clearly very busy. Moving from the idea of a pervasive literary influence in Spenser’s poetry to More’s personification of pervasiveness in the world, we have come full circle to where we began this chapter with Warburg and what he imagined as a “compromise between the anthropomorphic imagi117. [Oldenburg], review, 2183. Cited in Greene, “Henry More and Robert Boyle,” 466 n. 68. 118. Vaughan, Man-Mouse, 13. By Vaughan’s play on the word “position,” More is mistaking analogies not only for reasoned philosophical arguments, but for an idea of bodies in space. Take, for example, this use of the word “position” in a translation of Descartes’s Meditations from the 1680s: “Wax, I find there are but few things which I perceive clearly and distinctly in them, viz. Magnitude or extension in Longitude, Latitude, and Profundity, the Figure or shape which arises from the termination of that Extension, the Position or place which divers Figured Bodies have in respect of each other, their motion or change of place” (Descartes, Six Metaphysical Meditations, 41). 119. See Teskey, Allegory and Violence. Eric Havelock has described a similar effect in the writings of pre-Socratic philosophers, who, in integrating the conflicting ideas they found in Homer, discovered “the vital step of expressing the idea of integration itself as a governing principle of their method” (Havelock, Preface to Plato, 300). See also Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 95.


nation and analogical reflection.” I have lingered for so long on the seemingly arcane example of More because his poetry, like the other examples, dramatizes a much larger story about the insinuation of materialism in the seventeenth-century imagination, and about the shifting relationship between philosophy and literature. This story moves us in two directions at once—toward both a literary history of natural philosophy and what we might call a natural philosophy of literature. In glancing back for a moment, we are reminded again of the place in Servius’s commentary where the grammarian hinted that Virgil had borrowed his analogies from Lucretius to express the idea of God’s pervasive presence in the world. In glancing forward now, it seems only a short distance from Virgil’s image of a pervasive God or the pervasive idea of Dame Mutabilitie to what Catherine Gimelli Martin has described as Milton’s “penetration into the grounds of a new synthesis of vitalistic physics and organic metaphysics” in the world of Paradise Lost. In tracing this figure of pervasive influence back through the material history of Lucretius’s text, I have tried to show that a sustained literary engagement with materialism long preceded its late revival in the seventeenth century and was, in many ways, its very condition. 120. Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 96; Gesammelte Schriften, 11– 12: “Compromissproduct zwischen anthropomorphisticher Phantasie und vergleichender Reflexion.” 121. Martin, Ruins of Allegory, 13.

Epilogue

In the 1690s Isaac Newton began preparing the manuscripts of what would come to be known as the “classical scholia,” a set of notes designed to be included in the second edition of the Principia, though never actually published during his lifetime. It was, in fact, not until the twentieth century that a full edition based on Newton’s manuscripts saw the light of day. In these dense notes, Newton laid out an ancient history for the idea of universal gravitational force, arguing, for example, that Anaxagoras was hiding knowledge about the weight of the moon under the fiction of a lion falling and that the inverse-square law of gravitation was veiled beneath the Pythagorean myth of Apollo’s seven strings. The philosopher also traced the transmission of the idea through Lucretius and Epicurus, quoting about ninety lines of verse from De rerum natura. As his friend David Gregory explained after a visit in 1694, Newton “will spread himself in exhibiting the agreement of [his] philosophy with that of the Ancients. . . . The philosophy of Epi1. The notes were designed to be included specifically in Propositions IV–IX of book 3. 2. Though Newton never published the classical scholia himself, David Gregory incorporated some of their ideas in the preface to his Elementa astronomiae (1702), which in turn was paraphrased by later readers, such as Colin Maclaurin in his Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries (1748) and Louis Doutens in his Recherches sur l’origine des découvertes attribuées aux modernes (1766). See Casini, “Newton: The Classical Scholia,” 19. 3. J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi have read the scholia as proof of Newton’s interest in a prisca theologia tradition. Seeking to correct this account, Paolo Casini has argued that the scholia represent less the work of an ecstatic Platonist recovering the revealed truth of God than a familiar doxographer rehearsing “traditional texts . . . canonical—obvious, if you like, in the classical learning of the seventeenth century.” See McGuire and Rattansi, “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’ ”; and Casini, “Newton: The Classical Scholia,” 9.

* 198 *

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curus and Lucretius is true and old, but was wrongly interpreted by the ancients as atheism.” We began this book with the idea of humanists speaking with one another long-distance by means of magnets. I want to end now with Newton’s manuscripts of the classical scholia, another allegory that concerns the idea of action at a distance and the problem of reception more generally. In particular, I want to explore how one curious survival in the manuscripts—what might appear at first to be an oversight or mistake—unlocks a number of larger questions about the analogy between matter and history, and the place of Lucretius both in Newton’s intellectual genealogy and in our own. Newton’s interest in De rerum natura appears to have begun early on in his career. In his notebooks from Cambridge composed between the spring of 1664 and the summer of 1665, we find the young philosopher grappling with a proof for the existence of atoms and the void and thinking through the poet’s arguments. Nor was Newton’s interest in Lucretius limited to these notebooks. Bernard Cohen, for example, has argued that a key phrase from Lucretius, quantum in se est, helped both Descartes and Newton develop their understanding of the principle of inertia: “Every now and then in the study of the development of science, a single sentence or a phrase may yield a key to the deep recesses of the creative scientific mind.” Moreover, William L. Hine has suggested that a link between inertia and scientific law may be found specifically in the pages of Giovan Battista Pio’s 1511 commentary on De rerum natura. All of the evidence suggests that the author of the Principia knew his Lucretius well. What I am concerned with here, however, are not the ideas he may have borrowed from the ancient poet in any useful philosophic or scientific sense (as Cohen and Hine demonstrate), but rather 4. Gregory, recalling Newton’s intentions for the classical scholia from May 1694, in Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 3:335 and 338. For a discussion of the significance of Epicurus and Lucretius in the larger scope of Newton’s philosophy, see Guerlac, Newton et Epicure. 5. The notebook in question is transcribed in McGuire and Tammy, Certain Philosophical Questions. See Johnson and Wilson, “Lucretius and the History of Science,” 131. 6. Cohen, “ ‘Quantum in Se Est,’ ” 131. 7. Hine, “Inertia and Scientific Law.”

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what survives from Lucretius in the text of the classical scholia seemingly in spite of him. Once again “a single sentence or a phrase” may yield much. These are the beginning and ending lines of a long passage from De rerum natura that Newton quotes in the scholia: Illud in his quoque te rebus cognoscere avemus corpora cum deorsum rectum per inane feruntur ponderibus propriis, incerto tempora ferme incertisque locis spatio depellere paulum. . . . quare etiam atque etiam paulum inclinare necessest corpora. [One further point in this matter I desire you to understand: that while the first bodies are being carried downward by their own weight in a straight line through the void, at times quite uncertain and uncertain places, they swerve a little from their course. . . . Therefore again and again I say, the bodies must incline a little.]

The part of the passage that I have left out, marked here by the ellipsis, is the part that Newton is interested in, which he signals with a change of emphasis in the manuscripts: the poet’s discussion of the rate of atoms falling through the void. The lines I have quoted are, in other words, literally beside the point. They deal specifically with the infamous clinamen, the swerve of an atom as it falls vertically through space, setting the whole machine of the world into motion. In Epicurean physics, the clinamen is a digression of the smallest possible degree from the parallel lines of atoms raining down—a digression that opens out until one atom collides with another and sets the machine of the world into motion. The swerve is, in other words, the most minor change of position with the most universal consequences, namely the origin of all combination, the beginning of the nature of things. One of the problems with the swerve is that Lucretius doesn’t tell us how the motion originates—it just seems to happen “at times quite uncertain and uncertain places.” The other difficulty, as commentators have com8. Lucretius, DRN 2.216–19 and 243–44. The text of the classical scholia follows Volkmar Schüller’s edition in appendix 1 of Lefèvre, Between Leibniz, Newton, and Kant. In this context, Newton quotes all of DRN 2.216–45, although, curiously, he omits line 220, “tantum quod momen mutatum dicere possis.”

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plained since antiquity, is that it blatantly obviates the need for divine creation at the start, making it perhaps the most dangerous and atheistic principle in all of De rerum natura. This raises the question: what then, in God’s name, is the Epicurean swerve doing here in Newton’s classical scholia? I have asked the question somewhat glibly, but to Newton and his contemporaries the clinamen was a serious matter, one on which the whole problem of assimilating the ancient atomic philosophy of Epicurus often hung in the balance. To get a sense of what was at stake in the survival of the swerve in this particular context, we might compare, for example, the lines selected by Newton above to a statement by his good friend Richard Bentley in the Boyle lectures of 1692: For as to the Epicurean Theory, of Atoms descending down an infinite space by an inherent principle of Gravitation, which tends not toward other Matter, but toward a Vacuum or Nothing; and verging from the Perpendicular no body knows why nor when nor where; ’tis such miserable absurd stuff, so repugnant to it self, and so contrary to the known Phaenomena of Nature (yet it contented supine unthinking Atheists for a thousand years together) that we will not now honour it with a special refutation.

For Bentley, who had spent significant time correcting Lucretius’s text, the swerve not only made no sense as a physical principle of Epicurean physics, but was also a badge of atheism. While preparing his lectures 9. “From Cicero to Marx and beyond, down to us, the declination of atoms has been treated as a weakness of the atomic theory. The clinamen is an absurdity” (Serres, Birth of Physics, 3). Serres’s own book is in many ways an attempt to correct this view of the Epicurean swerve. 10. Bentley, Confutation of Atheism, 20 (emphasis in original). 11. Although Bentley’s notes on Lucretius were incomplete and left unpublished, they would later appear in the Wakefield edition in 1813 and the Creech edition in 1818. As Munro, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Munro, 2:12, has put it: “Had Bentley in 1689 or 1690 succeeded in his efforts to obtain for the Bodleian Isaac Vossius’ famous library, he might have anticipated what Lachmann did by a century and a half. As he was at that very time working hard at Lucretius, if he had once got into his hands the two mss. now at Leyden, he would at a glance have seen their importance and would scarcely have failed to complete the edition which he was then meditating.”

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for publication, Bentley had specifically sought Newton’s advice to help him bolster his arguments against the “supine unthinking Atheists.” In one of the letters he wrote to Bentley for this purpose, Newton explicitly denied that he ever believed gravity was innate to matter, an idea Bentley links to the Epicurean swerve. It is “so great an absurdity,” he said, “that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”—all gravitational puns intended. Like Bentley, Newton could not get behind the blasphemous idea of the clinamen, yet the Epicurean digression stands in his manuscripts of the scholia without any explanation—one could say, much like the physical principle itself. Let us imagine for the moment that the philosopher knew what he was doing when he let Lucretius keep his swerve in the manuscripts, deliberately repeating the principle at both the beginning and end of the passage quoted above. Paolo Casini’s general description of the author’s practice in the scholia applies well to this particular instance: “One cannot fail to note the sobriety with which Newton manipulates his authors, selecting again and again from the great mass of testimony that he had at his disposal the quotations which serve his purpose exactly. It is a work of delicate engraving, the result of many successive drafts, carried through with the skill and scrupulous care of a thoroughly experienced doxographer.” In other words, Newton could have easily cut and shaped the passage to suit his needs more “exactly.” If, indeed, he were trying to clear Lucretius of the charge of atheism, as Gregory suggests, doing so would have been to his advantage. But he decides to leave in the lines concerning the swerve “without any theological scruple,” as Casini says, which leads me to another question: if the swerve is a physical principle that Newton tells us elsewhere he could not support, could it have served another purpose for him in the scholia? Could it be part of what we might call Newton’s rhetorical intuition? To explain what I mean by rhetorical intuition, I want to digress 12. Newton to Bentley, 25 February 1692/3, in Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 3:253–54. 13. Casini, “Newton: The Classical Scholia,” 7. 14. Casini, “Newton: The Classical Scholia,” 5.

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briefly and turn to how the swerve came to acquire various and conflicted meanings in the contemporary quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, and to ask why the author of De rerum natura found himself caught in the middle of the fight. This history of swerving brings us first to another prominent Platonist at Cambridge, Ralph Cudworth, whose enormous book The True Intellectual System of the Universe Newton read at least parts of very carefully. Indeed, as we know from another surviving manuscript, the philosopher even transcribed the sections of the book that dealt with the ancient atomists. Like the classical scholia, Cudworth’s True Intellectual System might be described in the simplest terms as an attempt to follow the fortunes of an idea over time. Unlike Newton, however, Cudworth did not shy away from the usual Christian apologetics one might expect or want from a seventeenth-century theologian getting his hands dirty with atoms. With his vast if sometimes strained erudition, Cudworth followed the roots of ancient atomism back to the wisdom of Moses, arguing that its so-called inventors—Democritus and Epicurus—were hardly inventors at all, but peddlers of dust who had borrowed only “the dead carcass or skeleton of the old Moschical philosophy.” Lucretius plays an important role as a source for this lost philosophy, and Cudworth spends a good deal of time picking through De rerum natura in order to recover some vestige of it. Certain flowers of the original sacred philosophy survived among the pagan thorns, Cudworth insisted. For the Cambridge Platonist, however, the swerve was clearly an example of a later corruption: Epicurus (who was also an Atomick Atheist, as is afterwards declared, having, in all probability, therefore a Mind to Innovate Something, that he might not seem to have borrowed all from Democritus) did by violence introduce Liberty of Will, into his Hypothesis; for the solv15. See Sailor, “Newton’s Debt to Cudworth.” 16. Casini, “Newton: The Classical Scholia,” 5. Casini suggests that rather than having a direct influence on Newton’s scholia, Cudworth’s True Intellectual System was part of the same “common cultural climate.” 17. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 51. For a discussion of the tradition in which Cudworth is working, see Sailor, “Moses and Atomism.”

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ing whereof, he ridiculously devized, That his Third Motion of Atoms, called by Lucretius, —Exiguum Clinamen Principiorum.

Cudworth reminds us here of something important in Lucretius: that the swerve is described as the principle of free will at the heart of the Epicurean universe, the thing that makes innovation literally possible. “If,” as Lucretius explains it, “all motion is always one long chain, and new motion arises out of the old in order invariable,” then the clinamen interrupts the fati foedera, the order of necessity. As Diogenes Laertius recalls in the Lives, Epicurus supplied the swerve to Democritus’s physics in order to break his forebear’s deterministic scheme, making it a principle both of physics and intellectual history. This is clearly what Cudworth meant when he joked that Epicurus had “a Mind to Innovate Something” so that he might avoid the appearance of having stolen everything from Democritus. In a text like Cudworth’s that rigorously denies any notion of progress, the swerve or “declination” of atoms is understood as a figure for the corruption of ancient wisdom, a decline in the moral sense. In the preface to the book, the author himself promises “only to vindicate what was the constant doctrine of the Christian church in its greatest purity (as shall be made manifest), and not to introduce any New18. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, xxxi–xxxii. 19. Lucretius, DRN 2.251–60: “Denique si semper motus conectitur omnis / et vetere exoritur motu novus ordine certo / nec declinando faciunt primordia motus / principium quoddam quod fati foedera rumpat, / ex infinito ne causam causa sequatur, / libera per terras unde haec animantibus exstat, / unde est haec, inquam, fatis avolsa voluntas, / per quam progredimur quo ducit quemque voluptas, / declinamus item motus nec tempore certo / nec regione loci certa, sed ubi ipsa tulit mens?” (Again, if all motion is always one long chain, and new motion arises out of the old in order invariable, and if the first-beginnings do not make by swerving a beginning of motion such as to break the decrees of fate, that cause may not follow cause from infinity, whence comes this free will in living creatures all over the earth, whence I say is this will wrested from the fates by which we proceed whither pleasure leads each, swerving also our motions not at fixed times and fixed places, but just where our mind has taken us?) 20. See again Diogenes Laertius, Lives 10.4.

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fangled conceit of our own.” He even says he will try to correct various innovations that have newly crept into the texts themselves, since, as he puts it, “we neither call philology, nor yet philosophy our mistress; but serve our selves of either, as occasion requires.” In this context, it is not surprising that one of Cudworth’s most crucial philological “corrections” involves the swerve, specifically an emendation by the humanist Denys Lambin, whose habit of making conjectures we examined earlier. This is the passage that Cudworth has in mind, as Lambin rendered it in his edition: . . . sed ne mens ipsa necessum intestinum habeat cunctis in rebus agendis et devicta quasi cogatur ferre patique, id facit exiguum clinamen principiorum nec regione loci certa nec tempore certo. [But what keeps the mind [mens] itself from having necessity within it in all actions, and from being, as it were, mastered and forced to endure and to suffer, is the minute swerving of the first-beginnings at no fixed place and at no fixed time.]

In this passage Lucretius is describing how the swerve releases the mind from “intestine logic,” the inborn structure of atoms by which we are physically determined by “one long chain” of causes. This alone was enough to ruffle Cudworth’s feathers. The swerve, however, wasn’t the only thing “newly crept in.” Lambin, as it turns out, was the very first editor in the history of the poem to introduce the word mens in place of the word res, mind for matter. As he explains it: “Thus, despite the manuscripts crying out in protest, reason demanded that I restore this reading.” Hubert van Giffen, who, as we know, otherwise wildly pla21. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 7. This statement may be seen as an implicit jab at Gassendi. For a description of Gassendi’s solution to the clinamen, see Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, 137–41. 22. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, xxxvii. 23. Lucretius, DRN 2.289–93; ed. Lambin (1563), 124. 24. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 626. 25. Lambin, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Lambin (1563), 122: “Sic restitui reclamantibus libris omnibus, ratione hanc scripturam efflagitante.”

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giarized the best notes of Lambin, flatly rejected the change. Perhaps he was scared of taking credit for it himself, or of its exposing exactly how unoriginal he was. Tanaquil Faber, on the other hand, hailed the change to mens as “the masterpiece of Lambinus,” and he was not without good reason, for riding on this single word was nothing less than the idea that the clinamen actually changed the inherited composition of our minds. No wonder Cudworth was concerned. Indeed, Lambin’s textual emendation was precisely the kind of “newfangled” philology Cudworth sought to correct in his own book. When he finally came around to quoting the same passage from Lucretius on this loaded matter, he restored the word res, against Lambin’s advice, and hewed the passage to fit his own meaning exactly. He also took the opportunity to turn the words of Lucretius against him, attributing the idea of “intestine logic,” ironically, to the poet himself: “Quod res quaeque Necessum / Intestinum habeat cunctis in rebus agendas, &c.,” which he translates as, “That every thing naturally labours under an Intestine Necessity.” This, of course, is not what Lucretius intended. By a subtle turn of logic and the change of only a few words that is reminiscent of Montaigne’s technique, Cudworth has quietly transformed the great Epicurean poet of free will into the very thing he says he is not: the mouthpiece of necessity. Knowing this, the casual use of the “&c.” 26. Faber, in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Faber, 351: “Mens ipsa] Palmaria Lambini correctio. MSS enim omnes habent res.” The 1662 edition was reprinted in Cambridge in 1675. For a modern argument against Lambin’s reading of mens, see Avotins, “Question of Mens in Lucretius 2.289.” For other interpretations of this controversial passage, see Rist, Epicurus, 90–99; Bollack, “Momen mutatum”; Pancheri, “On De rerum natura 2.289”; and Furley, Two Studies, 178–82. 27. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 3. 28. Clearly, Cudworth did not want to hand over the idea of free will to the atomists or to ascribe to it a mechanical origin. In the preface to the reader, Cudworth gives us a clue to what he was thinking when he made the change: “Forasmuch as when Epicurus derived liberty of will in men, merely from that motion of senseless atoms declining uncertainly from the perpendicular, it is evident that, according to him, volition itself must be really local motion. As indeed in the Democritick fate, and material necessity of things, it is implied, that human cogitations are but mechanism and motion. Notwithstanding which, both Democritus and Epicurus supposed, that the world was made without cogitation, though by local motion” (Cudworth, True Intellectual System, xxxix).

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tacked on at the end of the lines is not without a certain sense of humor, for it is precisely the swerve—the ancient figure of dynamic instability and freedom of will—that is obscured by this partial quotation of Lucretius’s text. Cudworth’s aggressive textual editing of this passage, and his anxieties about innovation, show just how unusual Newton’s own inclusion of the swerve in the scholia was—and how conspicuous its presence would have seemed to those of his contemporaries who were especially sensitive to it. As we will find, however, not everyone saw in the Epicurean poet or his philosophy a figure of corruption. In the wake of Cudworth’s True Intellectual System, the author of De rerum natura had assumed a polemical charge in the famous quarrel between the ancients and the moderns that produced a diversity of opinions. For Cudworth’s student and Newton’s friend Thomas Burnet, for example, Lucretius and Epicurus were advocates for a modern idea of progress, which Burnet himself defended vigorously in his Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684– 90). In making his case for modernity and advancement, Burnet adopted a position that “was paradoxically an ancient one, the view of Epicurus-Lucretius, dusted off now and elaborated—modernized, if you will—to meet the needs of the late seventeenth century.” This was one way of being Lucretian. Lucretius, however, was a double agent, working both ends of the argument about modernity and progress. On the opposite side was another student of Cudworth’s from Cambridge, William Temple, who, objecting to Burnet’s sharp jabs at men who followed the ancients with an almost “superstitious veneration,” responded with his own interpretation of Lucretius and the Greek philosopher. In advocating a position of total reverence for the ancients, Temple recommended that we follow closely in the footsteps of the poet who had worshiped his master as a kind of god: As I believe, there may have been giants at some time, and some place or other in the world, of such a stature, as may not have been equaled 29. Levine, Battle of the Books, 22–23. 30. Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth, 2:566. Cited in Levine, Battle of the Books, 22.

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perhaps again, in several thousands of years, or in any other parts; so there may be giants in wit and knowledge, of so over-grown a size, as not to be equaled again in many successions of ages, or any compass of place or country. Such, I am sure, Lucretius esteems and describes Epicurus to have been, and to have risen, like a prodigy of invention and knowledge, such as had not been before, nor was like to be again.

Despite Lucretius’s dangerous leanings toward atheism, the poet’s esteem for Epicurus was instructive and, for a reader such as Temple, was a good example to be followed. If, indeed, Epicurus was a kind of modern (as Burnet had wittily suggested), then Lucretius was decidedly on the ancient side of things, following in the shadow of the Greek philosopher, drinking from all of his “golden sayings,” proselytizing his philosophy with an almost slavish devotion to antiquity that Burnet might have called “superstitious” had he seen the irony. Perhaps no one understood the irony of being a modern Lucretian better than Jonathan Swift, who is said to have read De rerum natura at least three times at Temple’s house and was himself a great admirer of the poem. Swift, indeed, had a very keen sense of the peculiar slipperiness of Lucretius and his philosophy in this context and understood that to invoke the author of De rerum natura was to pick a fight in one direction or the other. Putting his hat in the ring, Swift turned the Lucretian analogy on its head again, making the poet sound like a modern and the moderns sound like a bunch of squealing Epicureans. The great Lucretius, he said, stood not so much on the shoulders of a giant, but “a Tip toe on Religion, Religio pedibus Subjecta, and by that rising Ground, had the Advantage of all the Poets of his own, or following Times, which were not mounted to the same Pedestal.” The moderns, Swift added, were most like Lucretius, “their great idol,” when their zeal for all things present became a kind of religion, another instance of Epicurean impiety. As for Epicurus himself, he joked in “A Digression on 31. Temple, “Of Ancient and Modern Learning,” in Miscellanea, 18–19. 32. For Swift’s use of Lucretius, see Quehen, “Lucretius and Swift’s Tale of a Tub.” 33. Swift, “A Letter of Advice,” in Miscellanies, 78. 34. Swift may have been thinking specifically of Richard Bentley in A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris (1699). In order to defend his frequent use of the phrase “first inventor,” Bentley cited a passage from Lucretius about Epicurus’s origi-

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Madness,” the ancient philosopher had “modestly hoped, that one time or other’s certain fortuitous concourse of all men’s opinions, after perpetual justlings, the sharp with the smooth, the light and the heavy, the round and the square, would by certain clinamina unite in the notions of atoms and void, as these did in the originals of all things.” And so the figure of free will became a figure of Epicurean dogmatism. The heated controversy surrounding the example of Lucretius and his philosophy, which finds its endpoint here in Swift, may have been one of the reasons that Newton had decided not to publish the scholia and enter into the fray of what had already become a very ugly argument. As Casini has suggested: “The classical Scholia, if they had been inserted in the Principia, would have carried the flavour of a paradox.” Even if Newton himself shied away from this kind of controversy, however, it did not stop his contemporaries from drawing connections and making much of them. In the preface to the first edition of the Principia, for example, Newton’s friend and student Edmond Halley praised the philosopher’s mathematical innovations in a Latin dedicatory poem that was self-consciously modeled on Lucretius’s praise of Epicurus— a loaded association that Richard Bentley would anxiously attempt to stamp out in subsequent editions of the text. Taking up the Lucretian nality. In this context, Bentley was adapting the Lucretian rhetoric of invention to justify his own claims about modernity (Bentley, Dissertation, xciv–xcv). 35. Swift, Tale of a Tub, 131. A Tale of a Tub was first published anonymously in 1704, though it was written around 1696 or 1697. 36. Casini, “Newton: The Classical Scholia,” 16. 37. See Albury, “Halley’s Ode on the Principia of Newton.” For a discussion of this tradition of praising Newton, see also Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse. In 1713 Bentley responded to Anthony Collins’s book A Discourse of Free-thinking, demonstrating exactly what was at stake in a trace of Lucretian intertextuality: “To return now to our Learned Writer, how dextrously has he manag’d his Game; to bring a Passage that bears full against all Religion whatever, as level’d against some small Bigotries and Superstitious fear? . . . For that, as I have said, is the thought of the poet, and is borrowed from these lines of Lucretius: Quare RELIGIO PEDIBUS SUBJECTA vicissim / Obteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo” (emphasis in original). Here Bentley is discussing Collins’s use of Virgil’s famous lines, “Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, / Atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum / Subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari (Blessed is he who has succeeded in learning the laws of nature’s working, has cast beneath his feet all fear and fate’s implacable

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topos again in the wake of Newton’s death, James Thomson described the philosopher as another Epicurus, “first of men,” who “with awful wing pursued / The comet through the long elliptic curve, / As round innumerous worlds he wound his way.” In the eighteenth century, the sculptor Louis François Roubiliac even fashioned his statue of Newton in marble with an inscription from De rerum natura on the pedestal just beneath the philosopher’s feet: “Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit” (he whose intellect surpassed humanity). These, of course, were the very words that Lucretius had used to praise his Greek philosopher. They represented exactly the kind of unthinking dogmatism that Swift was trying to debunk. Looking back on this complex and shifting set of analogies that link Newton to Epicurus and Lucretius, we may begin now to reflect on what the swerve may have meant to Newton, and why he may have seen himself in the image of the poet rather than the philosopher. In the commentary that immediately follows the verses he quotes from De rerum natura on the swerve, Newton gives us another clue, pausing to explain the line of transmission that would lead ultimately to himself: “Lucretius taught this from the mind of Epicurus, Epicurus from the mind of Democritus and the older philosophers.” The statement might seem straightforward enough at first, until we remember the intended meaning of the swerve and its place in this particular story. It was the clinamen, as we recall, that differentiated Epicurus from Democritus, decree, and the howl of insatiable Death [Virgil, Georgics 2.490–92]). Bentley, Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-thinking, 42–43. 38. Thomson, “To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton.” Cited in Baker, “Lucretius in the European Enlightenment,” 275. 39. See Lucretius, DRN 3.1043. 40. In Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, Swift has the ghost of Aristotle wittily predict the obsolescence of Newton’s theory of “Attraction, which is so much in Vogue at present.” As Aristotle sharply observes, the “Systems of Nature were like Fashions, which would vary in every Age; and that those who pretend to demonstrate them from Mathematical Principles would flourish but for a short time.” Aristotle, of course, would know. Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations, 2:73–74. 41. Newton, in Lefèvre, Between Leibniz, Newton, and Kant, 228–29: “Haec Lucretius ex mente Epicuri Epicurus ex mente Democriti et antiquiorum docuit.”

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that released him from a predetermined cosmological system and intellectual scheme. By including the swerve twice in the passage he quotes in the scholia, Newton was reminding us of this turn. He was also reminding us what exactly was original about Lucretius and the way he “taught.” In De rerum natura, the poet had no trouble celebrating his own originality in bringing Greek philosophy over into the poverty of Latin and translating the wisdom of Epicurus into verse—and in spite of that philosopher’s objections to poetry. As Lucretius explained it, he was not only transmitting the philosophy of his master, but also making “clear the dark discoveries of the Greeks.” Something very similar may be said of Newton in the Principia, for, like the ancient author of De rerum natura, Newton was in his own way attempting to translate the wisdom of Epicurus into the language of another ancient discipline of which Epicurus famously did not approve. Waging war against the proponents of the ancients, Bentley’s friend William Wotton no doubt took a certain pleasure in pointing out to his enemies that Epicurus was said to have “despised all manner of Learning, even Mathematics themselves, and glorified in his having spun all his Thoughts out of his own Brain.” The ancient philosopher had supposedly even once instructed a student to “unlearn” 42. See again Lucretius, DRN 1.136–39: “Nec me animi fallit Graiorum obscura reperta / difficile inlustrare Latinis versibus esse, / multa novis verbis praesertim cum sit agendum / propter egestatem linguae et rerum novitatem” (Nor do I fail to understand that it is difficult to make clear the dark discoveries of the Greeks in Latin verses, especially since we have often to employ new words because of the poverty of language and the novelty of matters). 43. Wotton, Reflections, 168. The anecdote that Epicurus instructed his colleague Polyaenus to “unlearn” (dedocere) geometry comes to us from the anti-Epicurean polemics of Cicero. See Cicero, De finibus 1.6.20: “Ne illud quidem physici, credere aliquid esse minimum; quod profecto numquam putavisset si a Polyaeno familiari suo geometrica discere maluisset quam illum etiam ipsum dedocere” (It is also unworthy of a natural philosopher to deny the infinite divisibility of matter; an error that assuredly Epicurus would have avoided, if he had been willing to let his friend Polyaenus teach him geometry instead of making Polyaenus himself unlearn it). In book 1 of Against the Professors, Sextus Empiricus too had criticized Epicurus for trying “to cover up his own lack of culture” and declaring war upon the mathematici so that “he might be thought to be a self-taught and original philosopher” (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 1.1–5).

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geometry—something not even Gassendi could defend. If, indeed, the author of De rerum natura had translated the wisdom of Epicurean philosophy into the subtlety of verse in spite of the philosopher’s distrust of poetry, then, by recasting a strain of Epicureanism into the form of mathematical demonstrations, Newton was making “clear the dark discoveries of the Greeks” in his own way. As Bentley explained it in the Boyle lectures: “the constant Property of Gravitation . . . is the ancient Doctrine of the Epicurean Physiology, then and since very probably indeed, but yet precariously asserted: But it is lately demonstrated and put beyond controversy by that very excellent and divine Theorist Mr. Isaac Newton.” The transparency of mathematics promised to be the ultimate answer to the poverty of language, the egestas linguae, that the poet had described at the start of De rerum natura, though at the same time it made the clarifying function of Lucretius’s poetry appear obsolete. In other words, in drawing upon the example of Lucretius, Newton in effect displaced him. When Voltaire responded slightly later to the use of Newton’s discoveries in Cardinal Polignac’s didactic poem AntiLucretius, he explained why poetry had no place in the discussion of mathematical principles: Cardinal Polignac has inserted very good verses in his poem, respecting the discoveries of Newton: but unfortunately for himself, he combats demonstrated truths. The philosophy of Newton does not admit of being discussed in verse; with difficulty it is treated of in prose; for it is all founded in geometry. The genius of poetry will reap no laurels 44. In his De vita et moribus Epicuri, Gassendi attempted to defend Epicurus against the charge of neglecting mathematics by comparing him to the other ancient philosophers with no skill in numbers. See Gassendi, Opera omnia, 5:235–36. As Jones writes, however, “Gassendi is too much aware of the importance of mathematics in his own age (by the time De vita et moribus Epicuri was published he himself held the position of Professor of Mathematics at the Collège Royal for two years) to go too far with Epicurus, and concludes by expressing the wish that as a serious philosopher Epicurus had recognized more fully the value of mathematical studies” (Jones, Pierre Gassendi, 1592–1655, 241). 45. Bentley, Confutation of Atheism, 8 (emphasis in original). 46. On Voltaire’s use of De rerum natura, see Redshaw, “Voltaire and Lucretius.” On the neo-Latin reception of Lucretius, see Haskell, “Religion and Enlightenment.”

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here. The external part of these truths may be adorned by verse; but to go deep into things, calculation and not verse is necessary.

If Newton was being Lucretian by translating Epicurean philosophy into geometry, there was, for Voltaire, no looking back. Between the time of Gassendi’s Epicurean revival in the seventeenth century and the age of Voltaire, mathematics seems to have subverted the ancient poet’s claim to authority—ironically, by following the example of the poet himself. Among other things, the swerve that survives in Newton’s manuscripts might be said to represent the very possibility of this displacement. Newton’s scholia are, of course, not all about Lucretius. In fact, they deal in large part with the pre-Socratics, the Platonists, the Pythagoreans, and the idea of a Providential “world soul.” It is in spite of all this that I would suggest that the mere presence of the Epicurean poet, like the presence of the swerve in the manuscripts, sets Newton’s scholia in dramatic relief. We might call this presence another small detail with a big effect. For in tracing the thread of the story backward through the mediation of De rerum natura, the philosopher was forced to reflect on the nature of his own originality and his relationship to what might be called the gravity of thought. I would add that it was through the mediation of Lucretian physics that the stable idea of the genealogy was itself transformed from the inside out—a transformation that mirrors the very history we have been recovering in this book on a larger scale. In The Light in Troy, Greene usefully draws upon Derrida’s pun on the word dérive to express the conflict between an idea of drift and a desire for origins in language. As Greene reminds us, to trace the etymology of dérive itself—to seek the word’s own derivation—is to discover an almost antithetical meaning, to wander, in the end revealing “a force for alteration playing against a stabilizing, retrospective fabrication.” In attempting to recover the origins of the idea of gravity—that seemingly most constant of forces—Newton stumbles upon the figure of 47. Voltaire, Philosophical, Literary, and Historical Pieces, 178. Voltaire is referring here to Melchior de Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius, sive De Deo et natura (1747), a poetic defense of Christian orthodoxy that is designed to use Lucretius’s own poetic weapons against him. 48. Greene, Light in Troy, 16.

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instability in the text and a more complex, dynamic vision of intellectual history that enables the idea of his own innovation. Perhaps this is what Michel Serres meant when he said that “history is a physics, and not the other way around.” We may find another figure of this instability later in Nietzsche’s encounter with the atomism of Democritus and the question of genealogy that encounter raises. As Porter explains: “The ends of philosophical discourse, Nietzsche seems to be saying, can be viewed only by considering the history of its obliterations, and—perhaps nowhere more urgently than in the present case [of Democritus]—by confronting philosophy with its own (abnegated) philology, its denied origins.” For Porter, Nietzsche’s radical philology activates an unresolved tension within atomism itself. The denied origins of Democritus in the history of philosophy yield to a more unsettling question about the “the internal debt-structure of philosophy, its historical conditions, and its innermost rivalries”— in other words, the “impossibility of any absolute philosophical beginning.” After Democritus, this problem of origins is in its very essence reinscribed for Epicurean philosophy in the idea of the swerve, that figure of innovation which embodies and reflects both the possibility and limits of philology. When Newton says in the scholia that “Lucretius taught this from the mind of Epicurus, Epicurus from the mind of Democritus and the older philosophers,” he is in his own way bearing witness to the tensions inherent in his own genealogy and the meaning of that subtle movement of atoms that was seemingly without cause or origin. At the end of this book, the unexpected presence of the swerve in Newton’s manuscripts stands in for the seemingly smallest change such as the shift from res to mens, and adumbrates the flux embodied in the material history of Lucretius’s text itself. Emerging from this story is, finally, what we might call a distinctly Lucretian perspective—a perspective that shuttles, like Bembo’s iron interpreter, between the phenomenological world and the invisible one, between the ancient and the modern. In a preface to Hermann Diels’s 1922 German translation of De rerum natura, Albert Einstein described this Lucretian perspec49. Serres, Birth of Physics, 150. 50. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 115–16. 51. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 114.

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tive as a kind of “magic”: “The poetry of Lucretius works its magic on everyone who is not quite immersed in the spirit of our time, but rather who sees himself occasionally as an observer of his contemporaries and their mental attitude.” Einstein’s reader is that rare reader with double vision, the one who sees the stabilizing forms of intellectual history and at the same time understands the nature of their contingency. In this sense, Einstein could well have been describing himself, glancing back over the void of historical time and watching Newton. Had he known about the scholia, he could have been describing Newton, cast among the great turba of these ancient philosophers. The poet’s “magic,” as he hints in this short preface, remains a kind of delirious sympathy— a sympathy that binds invisibly across great distances as it invites us to see our own modernity in the very disturbance that the poem both describes and enacts. Even if Newton could not quite absorb the meaning of this flux for his physical theories in the seventeenth century, he might have intuited something of it from the history of letters. 52. Einstein, introductory note to vol. 2 of Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Diels, 2: “Auf jeden, der nicht ganz im Geiste unserer Zeit aufgeht, sondern seiner Mitwelt und speziell der geistigen Einstellung der Zeitgenossen gegenüber sich gelegentlich als Zuschauer fühlt, wird das Werk von Lukrez seinen Zauber ausüben”; my translation. 53. In his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein pays homage to Newton, the man he perceived as his greatest forebear: “All who share humbly in pondering over the secrets of physical events are with you in spirit, and love that binds us to Newton.” “It is only in the quantum theory,” Einstein said, “that Newton’s differential method becomes inadequate, and indeed strict causality fails us” (Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes,” 31). 54. Newton uses the word turba in the scholia to describe the “crowd” or “multitude” of ancient atomic philosophers (see Casini, “Newton: The Classical Scholia,” 36), though here I am deliberately making a pun on the turba of atoms that Lucretius imagines in De rerum natura. In book 2, for example, just before he explains the swerve, Lucretius uses the image of the turba to lend expression to the material disturbances of dust cast in a ray of sunlight and the turmoil of unseen atoms: “Hoc etiam magis haec animum te advertere par est / corpora quae in solis radiis turbare videntur, / quod tales turbae motus quoque materiai / significant clandestinos caecosque subesse” (DRN 2.125– 28) (Even more for another reason it is proper that you give attention to these bodies which are seen to be in turmoil within the sun’s rays, because such turmoil indicates that here are secret and unseen motions also hidden in matter).

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This book is in so many ways about material encounters and the communities of people and ideas that arise from them. Over the years, I have been extremely lucky in both my material encounters and friends. I would like to thank first and foremost my teachers, Leonard Barkan, Anthony Grafton, and Nigel Smith, who unlocked a universe of scholarly pleasure early on and nurtured my thinking, writing, and me ever since. I simply cannot imagine a better group of mentors, interlocutors, or friends. I would also like to thank Jim Porter, whose work I had admired long before we met and who responded to my clumsy overtures of intellectual sympathy with a rare generosity. I am happily in the debt of both Reid Barbour and Jessica Wolfe, whose great passion for ideas is matched only by their great spiritedness. At the University of Maryland, I have benefited enormously from my colleagues in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, who have provided a rich and thriving community in which to teach and write, and from my wonderful students. I thank them all. I have spent many an afternoon at the Folger talking ideas with Marshall Grossman and, like everyone who had the pleasure of doing so, am smarter and better for it. He will be greatly missed. Ted Leinwand has helped me sharpen my thinking and writing, and has been a mentor in the best sense of that word. Elizabeth Bearden and I met years ago at a graduate conference and have never stopped talking. I am grateful to the many other wonderful friends and colleagues, both near and far, who have read and commented on various drafts and shaped this project in countless ways, particularly Michael J. Allen, J. K. Barret, Ralph Bauer, Harry Berger, Lina Bolzoni, Shane Butler, Kent Cartwright, Kim Coles, Theresa Coletti, Bradin Cormack, Jeff Dolven, Jim Engell, Angus Fletcher, Carmela Franklin, Julia Haig Gaisser, Hilary Gatti, Robert Goulding, Tobias Gregory, Amber Gross, Ken Gross, * 217 *

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Yasmin Haskell, Kristine Haugen, Abigail Heald, Adair Iacono, Ena Jung, Bob Kaster, Sean Keilen, Matt Kirchenbaum, Timothy Kircher, Laura King, Ron Levao, John Logan, Sandy Mack, Catherine Gimelli Martin, Jeff Masten, Eric MacPhail, David Lee Miller, Molly Murray, David Norbrook, Sangeeta Ray, Eileen Reeves, François Rigolot, Joseph Roach, Elizabeth Sears, Susan Stewart, Brian Stock, John Sweet, Henry Turner, Orrin Wang, Josh Weiner, and Ron Witt. Special thanks to Brooke Belisle, Stephen Campbell, Beth Johnston, Andre Mura, Josiah Osgood, Jay Reed, Nicholas Rynearson, David Sartorius, Marc Schachter, Alan Stewart, and Will Slauter, who have talked atoms with me over the course of many years and humored my Lucretian furor. Brooke Holmes continues to be an inspiration in all things materialist. Leah Whittington lent her philological grace to every page. This book was utterly transformed by a year at the American Academy in Rome and by the friends and colleagues I met during my time in Italy. It would not have been the same without Tom Bissell, Allan Christensen, Patricia Cronin, Julia Fish, Reggie Foster, Flora Ghezzo, Meisha Hunter, John Kelly, Dave King, Margaret Meserve, Andrew Norman, Hilary Porris, Dana Prescott, Cristina Puglisi, Philip Rand, Richard Rezac, Ingrid Rowland, Jay Rubenstein, Marina Rustow, Arman Schwartz, Thomas Tsang, and Gregory Waldrop. I want to thank especially David García Cueto and Lisa Mignone, who have been an endless source of laughter, friendship, and intellectual support. Chapter 2 of this book was presented at the Scuola Normale Superiore, and I am grateful to Glenn Most and his students at Pisa for their incisive commentary. I would also like to thank the Homeridae of the NEH seminar, “Homer’s Readers, Ancient and Modern,” and the audiences at Duke University, the University of North Carolina, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the Renaissance Society of America. The book was completed at that most wonderful of Epicurean gardens, the National Humanities Center, and I have benefited immensely from the scholarly community there, the time, and the support. I am indebted to all of the fellows in my year, my friends on the staff, and especially Karen Caroll for lending her expertise at a crucial moment. Along the way, I have been fortunate enough to get lost in some of the best libraries in the world. I would like to thank especially the Fol-

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ger Shakespeare library, which supported my work with a short-term fellowship and has been like a second home to me since I was an intern there many years ago. I am grateful to Carol Brobeck and Kathleen Lynch for their continued friendship, and to the librarians, who make working there such a pleasure. I also want to thank the wonderful staff of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Biblioteca Casanatense, the Biblioteca Vallicelliana, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, the École française de Rome, the British Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Princeton Rare Books and Special Collections, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and the Library of Congress. I extend my most sincere thanks to everyone at the University of Chicago Press, particularly Alan Thomas and Randy Petilos for seeing the potential of this project and for helping me realize it. Randy has been more than a great editor—a friend. Finally, I would like to express my deep gratitude to the many other people who have been a critical part of the making of this book. My sister, Lyndsay Adesso, has been a model of strength and generosity, and I thank her and her husband, Patrick, and my beautiful niece, Gabriella. After fifteen years of friendship, Thom Cantey continues to be a brilliant force in my life. In Wesley Yu I have found the rarest of intellectual companions and the best of friends. His influence is pervasive. This book is dedicated to my parents, Louis and Maria Passannante, who inspire me every day to be a better teacher, brother, friend, and son. Whatever errors have crept into this book I blame on the Epicurean clinamen or acknowledge as my own. *

*

*

Chapter 3 was published previously in a slightly different form in English Literary History 76, no. 4 (2009): 1015– 47, as “Homer Atomized: Francis Bacon and the Matter of Tradition,” copyright © 2009 Johns Hopkins University Press. I thank Johns Hopkins University Press for their permission to recycle the textual matter.

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i n de x

Addison, Joseph, 1–2 Adriani, Marcello, 63n130, 102n60 Alberti, Leon Battista, 1n1 Alexander, 150–51 Alexandria, Alexandrians, 135, 152–53 Alsario della Croce, Vincenzo, 175–76 Althusser, Louis, 6, 23 amaror, 31–34 Anaxagoras, 128–29n21, 198 Apuleius, 82 Aratus, 61 archetype (manuscript of DRN), 12, 78, 80, 108, 118 Aristarchus, 153 Aristotle, 125, 132, 143, 144, 145–46, 151, 173 Atlantis, 116 atoms, atomism: and conservation of matter, 140–42; dispersal of bodies, 171, 177, 180–81; invisible, 35, 161; as letters, 3–4, 5, 12, 13, 85–86, 121–22, 124, 135, 141, 153, 178–79; philosophical origins of, 203–5, 214–15; in Spenser, 161–62; the swerve, 137n49, 152n87, 172, 178, 200–207, 210–15; and textual criticism, 89–92, 114–19, 172 Auerbach, Erich, 5, 8 Augustine, Saint, 188 Bacon, Francis, 13, 91–92, 122–53, 178–79, 184; and conservation of matter, 141–42, 149, 174; and

Democritus, 145–50; on form, 142– 44; on Homer, 123– 24, 131– 32, 135–38; materialism of, 13, 132– 38, 141– 45; and Montaigne, 13, 129–31, 134–38, 144; and pleasure, 129– 30, 143– 44; vs. the poets, 193; on tradition, 13, 122, 131, 137– 38, 142– 44, 148– 51; and the void, 134– 35, 138 Barrow, Isaac, 187n91 Basini, Basinio, 42, 53 Bembo, Pietro, 1–3, 7, 82, 214 Bentley, Richard, 201–2, 208–9n34, 209, 212 Bérault, Nicolas, 70–72 Berger, Harry, 160, 171 Bergson, Henri, 137n49 Bernier, François, 182–83 Beroaldo, Filippo, 24n26, 81–84, 98, 105, 109–10, 123n7 Bettinzoli, Attilio, 73 Binswanger, Ludwig, 74–75 Black Death, 15–16, 17, 18, 36, 187 Bloom, Harold, 152n87 Blount, Charles, 188n95 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 26, 28, 47 Bodin, Jean, 134 Botticelli, 58–59, 74, 154–56 Boyle, Robert, 4 Braccilioni, Poggio, 17 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 136n44 Bruno, Giordano, 10–11, 158 Burnet, Thomas, 207–8

* 245 *

246 * i n de x Cameron, Alan, 38 Candido, Pietro, 97–98, 102 Canfora, Luciano, 81 Canter, Willem, 98, 126 Casaubon, Isaac, 125, 126–27, 173 Casini, Paolo, 202, 209 Catullus, 78n3, 99, 101 Cave, Terence, 150 Charleton, Walter, 183–84 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 164–67, 170, 190, 193 Cicero, 19–20, 21, 22, 41n71, 62, 63, 70, 82, 83, 87, 93, 116–17, 119, 128n20, 134–35, 137, 145–46, 173, 189, 211n43; and correction of DRN, 80–81; and epitaph of Ennius, 139, 163–64 Claudian, 25–26n30, 186–88 Clement of Alexandria, 58n111, 146 Cohen, Bernard, 199 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 185 consociare, 132, 138 contamination as figure of literary influence, 31, 33–34, 36, 72–74, 77 Cortesi, Paolo, 60–61 Cudworth, Ralph, 203–7 Dante, 26 Dee, John, 123 deliquat, 107 Democritus, 128n20, 141, 142–43, 145–49, 150, 189, 203–4, 206n28, 210, 214; Bacon and, 145–50; death of, 147–48; Lucretius as source for, 143, 145, 148, 176n66 de Mussis, Gabriele, 15–16, 17–18 de Nolhac, Pierre, 27 Derrida, Jacques, 213 Descartes, René, 4, 186, 189n98, 196n118, 199 Despagnet, Jean, 104n68 destinatum, 21–22

digestion and intellectual assimilation, 57–58, 63 Dio Chrysostom, 146 Diogenes Laertius, 117, 126, 127n18, 145–46, 148, 173–75, 184, 204 Donatus, 39, 110 Donne, John, 7–8, 186 Dorat, Jean, 87–88 Dryden, John, 167n40 Duns Scotus, 63 Dysarius (Macrobius), 57–58 Einstein, Albert, 214–15 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 8 elementa, 135–36, 144, 178–80 Empedocles, 145, 184 Ennius, 29, 38, 139–41, 163–70, 193, 194; and Chaucer, 164–66; epitaph of, 139, 163–64 Epicurus, 2, 4, 5, 21n14, 55–57, 68, 79, 88, 144n67, 148– 49, 156, 198– 215 passim; Epicurean method, 107, 111–13; Gassendi’s revival of, 13, 172–85; influence on Virgil, 47– 50; Lucretius on, 32– 33, 56– 57, 63, 79, 93, 167n39, 181, 182, 207– 8, 209– 10; Marx’s reading of, 137n49; on mathematics, 211–12; vs. the poets, 193, 211; on Providence, 35, 70; on the swerve, 137n49, 152n87, 203–4, 206n28; on the void, 117 Erasmus, 125, 153 Estienne, Henri, 145n70, 173 Faber, Tanaquil, 206 Ficino, Marsilio, 2n6, 67–70, 72, 76, 83n18, 84, 183, 188, 189; on the plague, 68–69 Fitzgeoffrey, Charles, 165 Florio, John, 104, 127, 134 free will, 152n87, 204–7, 209

i n de x * 247 Freud, Sigmund, 172 furor, 75–76, 82, 99, 189 Gaisser, Julia Haig, 82 Galand-Hallyn, Perrine, 64 Galen, 152 Galland, Pierre, 90 Gassendi, Pierre, 13, 157, 172–85, 205n21, 212; use of commentary form, 173–74, 175, 181; literary materialism in, 182–85; on mortality of the soul, 181 Gellius, Aulus, 31–32, 41, 49n86, 146 Gemelli, Benedino, 133 Giannotti, Donato, 100, 102n60 Giffen, Hubert van, 100, 125, 205–6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 121, 153 Goldberg, Jonathan, 5 Gombrich, E. H., 74, 156 Grafton, Anthony, 95, 109, 146 Greene, Thomas, 28–29, 36, 73, 213 Greenlaw, Edwin, 158–63 passim, 170, 171–72, 190 Gregory, David, 198 Haeser, Heinrich, 15 Halley, Edmond, 209 Hamilton, A. C., 160–61 Hardie, Philip, 157 Harriot, Thomas, 134 Harrison, E. L., 52 Helias, Jacob, 92–94 Heraclitus, 149 Hesiod, 60–61, 64, 71n150, 74n157, 117 Heylyn, Peter, 187–88n92 Hine, William L., 199 Homer, 7, 115–16, 120–53 passim; and Alexander, 150–51; Aristotle on, 132; Bacon on, 123–24, 131–32, 135–38; dissemination of, 136–38; Democritus on, 146; and Ennius,

139, 167–68; and the invention of writing, 135; as literary foundation, 131; in Lucretius, 138–41, 147– 48, 168–69; Montaigne on, 115–16, 127–28, 149–50; Petrarch on, 64; Poliziano on, 132; preservation of, 123–28, 143; and Virgil, 29, 38, 42–43 Horace, 36, 63, 105, 115n98, 165n34, 166, 168n42 Hoskins, John, 167 Hovey, Kenneth Alan, 130 imitation: Macrobius on, 40–43, 45; Petrarch on, 28–36, 54 Jerome, Saint, 33, 63, 80–81, 109–10 Jocelyn, H. D., 46 Johns, Adrian, 8 Jones, Howard, 174 Jonson, Ben, 170, 192 Josephus, 126 Jove, 49–50, 160, 161 Joy, Lynn, 173 Kaffa, 16 Kaster, Robert, 40, 45, 53, 57 Kenney, E. J., 79 Kircher, Timothy, 22 Klepl, Herta, 52 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 73 Kroll, Richard, 178 La Boétie, Étienne de, 104 Lachmann, Karl, 12, 78–80, 103, 108, 109, 118 Lactantius, 35, 175 Lambin, Denys, 84–94, 152, 205–6; influence of Marullo on, 100–103; Montaigne’s engagement with, 104–14, 116, 117 lampas, 93–94

248 * i n de x lepore, 100–103 Leroy, Louis, 116, 133n36 Levinson, Ronald, 158 Lewis, John, 106 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 9 Lucretius: alleged insanity of, 81, 84; in ancients vs. moderns controversy, 207–9; atheism of, 9, 67–68, 158, 181, 199, 201–2; cosmogony, 46–47; on Epicurus, 32–33, 56–57, 63, 79, 93, 167n39, 181, 182, 207–8, 209–10; Homer in, 138–41, 147– 48, 168–69; on mortality of soul, 84, 139, 151–52, 162, 168–69, 180; on multiplicity of causes, 110–11; on plague at Athens, 12, 24–27, 51, 65, 72; on poetic immortality, 139–41, 168–69; on poetry and language, 62, 93–94n40, 193, 211– 12; and rationalization of religion, 156; on simulacra, 32, 139, 169; as source for Democritus (Bacon), 143, 145, 148, 176n66; as source for Epicurus (Gassendi), 176; on voice, 136. See also under Macrobius; Petrarch; Virgil Machiavelli, Niccolò, 63n130, 97n47, 101n59 MacPhail, Eric, 114, 115, 116–17, 129 Macrobius, 12, 17, 36–58, 71, 169n44, 189–90; aims in the Saturnalia, 37–41; on imitation, 40–43, 45; irony of, 45, 54–55; and Petrarch, 26–27, 37n57, 54–57; on Virgil’s use of Lucretius, 26–27, 30, 43–45, 50–52 magnets, magnetism, 1–3, 7, 75–76, 199, 134n41, 199 Maïer, Ida, 68 Manuzio, Paulo, 95 Marrou, Henri, 45, 53 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 197

Marullo, Michele, 12, 96–103; influence on Lambin, 100–103 materialism: and literary history, 6–7, 122, 132–38, 142–44, 148–49, 156–58, 171–72, 178–79, 184–85, 197; More’s response to, 185–87, 195–96; Poliziano and, 64, 77; and textual criticism, 117–19, 121 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 60, 65–66, 73 Mencke, Friedrich Otto, 96n45 Metrodorus, 129n21 Mienel, Christopher, 133 Milton, John, 3, 123n7, 197 Mirandola, Pico della, 63, 71n150, 76n162 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 79 Montaigne, Michel de, 9– 10, 12, 13, 81, 104–19, 120, 122, 127–31, 147n77, 178, 184; Bacon’s response to, 13, 129– 31, 134– 38, 144; Epicureanism of, 106, 114–19, 129; his frequent quotation of DRN, 105, 130; on Homer, 115–16, 127–28, 149–50; and philological method, 113–14; use of Lambin, 104–14, 116, 117; and the void, 114–19, 122, 127, 144 More, Henry, 13–14, 157, 185–97; imitation of DRN, 193–95; response to materialism, 185–86, 195–96; Spenser as model for, 185–86, 190–95 Munro, H. A. J., 78–80, 109 Muret, Antoine, 94–97, 102n60, 103 Mutabilitie (Spenser), 159–64, 170– 71, 181, 186, 194, 197 Naudé, Gabriel, 175–77, 183 Newton, Isaac, 4, 186, 198–203, 207, 209–15 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 121, 148n78, 153, 214 Nonnius, 107n77

i n de x * 249 Oldenburg, Henry, 196 Ovid, 75, 152, 160, 164n32, 176, 182–83 Pannonius, Janus, 69 Parry, Adam, 128–29n21 Pascal, Blaise, 117 Pascal, Carlo, 99–100 perenni, 141, 169–70 Perosa, Alessandro, 73 perturbare, 175, 180–81 pervasiveness, 157–58, 196–97; in More, 194–96; in Spenser, 159, 160–62, 170–72 Petrarch, 12, 17, 18–37, 45, 52, 54–57, 59–60, 64, 167, 187; and Cicero, 18–21; on imitation, 28–36, 54; and Lucretius, 24–27, 29, 30–31, 35–36; and Macrobius, 26–27, 37n57, 54– 57; and the plague, 18–19, 23–25, 27, 34, 51; and Virgil, 18–20, 26–31 Philo, 2 philology, 5–6, 12, 78–119, 205–7, 214; conjectural emendation and the text of DRN, 98–103; enumeration of readings, 109–11; and error, 126–27; French vs. Italian models, 87–88, 95–103; and intellectual sympathy, 103; and materialism, 117–19, 121 Pieri, Alieto, 49 Pio, Giovan Battista, 71–72, 83–84, 85n25, 105, 199 Pisistratus, 137 plague, 12, 15–77 passim. See also under Ficino; Lucretius; Petrarch; Poliziano; Virgil Plato, 37, 63, 69, 116, 143, 144n67, 145, 150, 183, 190; vs. the poets, 188–89, 193; Ion, 2, 76; Phaedrus, 41; Theaetetus, 149n80; Timaeus, 43 Pliny, 61 Plutarch, 57–58, 132, 145–46, 184 Polignac, Melchior de, 212–13

Poliziano, Angelo, 12, 17, 58–77, 82, 101n59, 126, 132; on contagion, 59, 72–74, 76–77; and Ficino, 67–68, 70; and Marullo, 99; the plague absent from the Rusticus, 65–73; as target of Muret, 95–96; on tradition, 73–77; his view of DRN, 61–64, 73–74; and Virgil, 60–65 passim, 70, 74; Warburg’s use of, 58–59, 155–56 Pontano, Giovanni, 3, 98n49, 100, 103 Porter, James I., 77, 115, 117, 162, 214 pre-Socratic fragments, 145–46 print, printing, 4, 8, 122, 125–26, 134, 136, 138, 141–42, 152, 179 progrediens, 112 Propertius, 109 Providence, 9, 16, 22, 35, 50–53, 60, 69n147, 70–71, 187 Ptolemy, 153 Quintilian, 33, 63 Ramus, Peter, 52, 88 Ranke, Leopold von, 15 rebirth, 84–85, 105–6, 116, 151–52 Roach, Joseph, 155 Roubiliac, Louis François, 210 Sabino, Francesco, 82n16 Scala, Bartolomeo, 30, 63n130, 101n59 Scaliger, Joseph, 98–102, 125 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 136 Schiller, Friedrich, 15n3, 121 Schuler, Robert, 148 Screech, M. A., 105–6 semina, 8, 131, 133, 139 Seneca, 40–41, 54–57, 63 Serres, Michel, 7, 214 Servius, 26, 32n45, 34–35, 45, 47–48, 161, 197 Sextus Empiricus, 173, 211n43 Siro, 48

250 * i n de x Smith, John, 185 Sorbière, Samuel de, 179 spargere, sparsa, 131, 133, 136–37, 145 Spenser, Edmund, 13–14, 157, 158–72, 196; and atomism, 161–62; and Chaucer, 164–67; Lucretian influence in, 158–62, 167–72, 190; as model for More, 185–86, 190–95; and the nature of influence, 162, 170–72; and poetic immortality, 163–66, 169; his use of archaisms, 170, 190, 192 Statius, 2n6, 61, 62, 63, 76 Strabo, 16 Strada, Famiano, 1–3 Suetonius, 39n62, 82 swerve. See under atoms Swift, Jonathan, 208–9, 210 Talon, Omer, 88 Taussig, Sylvie, 176 Temple, William, 207–8 Teskey, Gordon, 196 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 170n46 Thomson, James, 210 Thucydides, 24, 65n136 Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 118–19, 125 Trinkaus, Charles, 36 Trojan War, 115 Turnèbe, Adrien, 88, 90, 106 Upton, John, 159, 166–67, 168 Usener, Hermann, 79, 156n6

Vaughan, Thomas, 191–92, 196 Venus, 67–68, 103, 154–55, 157, 159 vestigia, 89–95 passim, 118 Vettori, Pietro, 95–99, 102 Vico, Giambattista, 5, 120n1 Vignoli, Tito, 156 Virgil, 3, 10n21, 12, 17, 18–20, 26–58, 60– 61, 63, 105, 136, 157, 169, 190; ancient critics of, 37, 39; Epicureanism of, 47– 50; and Homer, 29, 38, 42–43; on immortality, 169; and nature, 42–43, 49–52, 71; on Noric plague, 51–52, 65; and Petrarch, 18–20, 26–31; and Poliziano, 60– 65 passim, 70, 74; his powers of synthesis, 40–43, 49–51, 71; Servius on, 34–35, 161, 197; his use of Lucretius, 26– 27, 30, 43– 52 Vlastos, Gregory, 146–47 void, 8, 13, 114–19; and knowledge (Bacon), 134–35, 138; and skepticism (Montaigne), 115–17, 122, 127 volitare, 139–40, 164n32, 169 Voltaire, 183n82, 212–13 Warburg, Aby, 10–11, 58–59, 64, 74– 75, 154–57, 159, 196 Ward, Richard, 186–87 Wolf, Friedrich A., 120–21, 124, 153 Worthington, John, 185–86 Wotton, William, 211

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