The work of the the Roman writer Lucretius was lost to the world for more than a thousand years. When his poem “De Rerum Natura” was rediscovered in the Renaissance, Lucretius’s ideas slowly started to percolate through Renaissance Europe, making it possible to imagine a world that was not shaped by everyday divine intervention, in which we could begin to study both the universe and the behavior of human beings in their own terms. Niccolo Machiavelli was among the thinkers profoundly shaped by Lucretius’s ideas. Machiavelli’s own arguments about the virtues of republican order and the proper behavior of princes are the ancestors of many of the most crucial ideas of political science today.
Ada Palmer is an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, and the author of “Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance,” as well as a science fiction novel, “Too Like the Lightning,” forthcoming from Tor in 2016. I asked her about her research on Lucretius (which uses both different editions of his work, and the annotations and marginalia that readers left in his books to understand how people read Lucretius in the centuries immediately after his work was rediscovered.
HF: Lucretius’s ideas are crucial to the creation of the modern world (even if his world view is starkly different to our modern understanding). However, when his book, “De Rerum Natura” was rediscovered in the Renaissance, he was initially read as one of many classical writers whose rhetorical skill might inspire virtue in princes, and his ideas about atomism were dismissed as errors. How did this change?
AP: There were two big changes that made it happen. First, the book became easier to access and easier to read. Before 1480, the poem existed in a few dozen hard-to-read manuscript copies riddled with transcription errors, which made its difficult archaic Latin even harder to read, confining its appeal to skilled Latinists, most of whom cared more about antiquity and literature than radical ideas. But over the course of the 1500s the Latin was corrected, the book was printed in easy-to-read text, editors added commentaries, glosses and vocabulary guides, and thirty print editions turned a few dozen copies into tens of thousands of copies.
By 1600, all you needed to do to read Lucretius was to go to the nearest decently-sized print shop or private library and pull it off the shelf. Not just philologists and classicists but all kinds of educated people could read it easily, allowing it to enter the discourse in a new way. The other major change was that new questions developed over the course of the 1600s, as discoveries such as the circulation of the blood, the New World, and magnification — poked more and more holes in the ideas about the world that had been handed down from Aristotle and Ptolemy. This created a generation of radicals and curious people actively looking for new answers since the old ones weren’t working. Thanks to the efforts of earlier philologists and printers, when they went looking, Lucretius was an easy place to look.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.