The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

"Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us." Alain de Botton

Lucretius has been on my mind a lot in the past few days since I finished reading "The Swerve." Mind you, I haven't read a word of "The Nature of Things" outside of the quotations in the book, but clearly, he has had a fairly significant impact on my thought. I guess that's because death has been on my mind a lot for the past few weeks. I've just kind of developed the, what, feeling?, attitude?, premonition?, that I'm not going to live much longer. And here comes Lucretius, saying, in effect, "What, me worry? We're all going to get the chop some day and it will be sooner rather than later for some of us, and that's just the nature of things." Or as Goldblatt puts it, "Death is nothing to us. To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed."

So really, he nails it completely. Is that spot on your face cancerous? Is that rattling in your lungs another clot forming? Is the fact that your piss barely dribbles out a sign of prostate cancer or bladder failure? Is some drunk roughneck not gonna see you in time on the side of the highway and take you out? Is it today, tomorrow, next week, next year, next decade? Whatever. Don't get hung up on it. Enjoy the wonder and the weirdness of it, from that fact that anything exists. to our own consciousness of existence and of ourselves. I mean, it is all too weird and incomprehensible that I'm here, sitting in this chair, writing down thoughts about Lucretius and anxiety over death.

And especially weird that a book comes along taking on the issues that I've been pondering for some time, but in a format of historical nonfiction about a "book finder"--Poggio Bracciolini-- who rediscovered Lucretius' poem "The Nature of Things" in a southern German monastery about 1500 years after it had been written. The way that Goldblatt tells the story, it's really improbable that the poem came to light at all, and yet it has made all the difference to the history of western thought since it began to recirculate in humanist circles. To tell that story, Goldblatt covers the development of literate culture in late republican Rome, the demise of literacy in Europe in the aftermath of the Gothic wars and the "decline of the Roman empire," the "revaluation of all values" as both learning and pleasure were both radically devalued by Christianity, the monastic culture that kept reading alive for its spiritual benefit but that paradoxically kept some of the texts of the ancient literate culture that diametrically opposed the values of the monastery.

To make the story even more intriguing is Poggio's role in the debacle of the Papal schism. It makes a grand narrative built around Poggio's discovery of the manuscript shortly after he lost his job and his livelihood as the secretary to Pope John XXII, who was forced to abdicate, along with two other claimants to the Papacy, by the council called by the Holy Roman Emperor. This was the same council that captured and burned Jan Hus at the stake after luring him with promises of safe conduct. (And it was the memory of this betrayal that forced Charles V to allow Martin Luther to leave the Diet of Worms unharmed a little over a hundred years later, a move which Charles later greatly regretted.)

In the midst of this ecclesiastical maneuvering, Poggio discovers the text of a 1500 year old poem that is totally secular. How did it make it through the years of neglect, being recopied again and again--for that is what it took to have lasted that long--when its message was totally antithetical to what the church, the monasteries, and the monks believed? The copyists must have not read the texts that they so painstakingly reproduced.

"There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design," is how Goldblatt summarizes Lucretius' message. Lucretius traces his views back to Epicurus, who in turn looks back to Democritus' atoms as the stuff of all the universe. "You needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything....That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat it to yourself the simplest fact of existence--atoms and void and nothing else...your life will change." Everything that is is just a temporary recombination of atoms, and that's all there is. There is no immaterial soul that survives the body, there is no afterlife with rewards and punishments. And so, the only thing left to us, then, is to enjoy it while we've got it, 'cause it ain't gonna last very long. For Epicurus and Lucretius, it was in physical pleasure, but also, or even mainly, in friendships and contemplation that life finds its highest meaning. 

The life of simple pleasures was all that matter: "Man's natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more." So think: Epicurus--and then think Henry David Thoreau? More weirdness? It turns out that the church naturally did a hatchet job on Epicurus as well as Lucretius, the idea that epicurean means nothing more than overwrought sensual pleasure and debauchery. As Tertullian--he who would enjoy watching the souls of the unsaved burning in hell, even though he also said, "Credo quia absurdum," I believe because it is absurd--said, "If you grant Epicurus his claim that the soul is mortal....the whole fabric of Christian morality unravels." So morality depends on rewards and punishments in the afterlife.

But then I guess Thomas More and Machiavelli thought so as well. Goldblatt writes that More composed Utopia in response to Lucretius to show what a society could look life if it adopted a free-thinking philosophy devoted to the pursuit of happiness for all. But he insisted that belief in a soul and in an afterlife were absolutely necessary to make it work--which of course totally contradicts the intention of what Epicurus and Lucretius had to say. Machiavelli pronounced that laws and customs were worthless without fear of what might happen in the afterlife. More's friend Giordano Bruno had a much better handle on Lucretius, "Bruno might have been the first person in more than a millennium to grasp the full force, at once philosophical and erotic, of Lucretius' hymn to Venus. The universe, in its ceaseless process of generation and destruction, is inherently sexual."

(I do have trouble reconciling this view of Bruno with the Bruno of the Kabbalah/Trismegistus theme given him by Dame Francis Yates. Somehow, calling down mystical influences through the stars or helping the Sefiroth piece itself back together doesn't quite gibe with which I hear Lucretius saying. Somehow, Bruno is the heir of Lucretius/Copernicus on the one had and Ficino/Pico on the other. Dame Yates saw this strain leading eventually to Newton and the Royal Society. Goldblatt also traces a lineage from Lucretius to Newton.)

And once the cat was out of the bag, it seems, Lucretius became one of the founders of the modern age, not only in Bruno and More and Newton, but in Shakespeare and Montaigne as well. "Montaigne articulates what it feels like from the inside to think, write, live in an Epicurean universe." Of course, the parallels between Lucretius and Spinoza are obvious, but Goldblatt doesn't go there. He does point out that "Lucretius' materialism helped to generate and support the skepticism of the likes of Dryden and Voltaire and the programmatic disbelief expressed in Diderot, Hume, and many other enlightenment figures," including, most notably, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the pursuit of happiness into the Declaration of Independence, and who finally described himself as "an Epicurean." Of course, what we know about Jefferson's habits make him an epicurean of the old school as well.

Ultimately, Goldblatt is probably a better story teller than an accurate historian. His story has all the earmarks of being a pivotal moment in the history of western thinking. It seems like there is a straight line from Poggio's discovery of the manuscript to Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Would the thinking of western science have turned out all that much differently if Poggio had not made his his discovery in 1417? I'm not sure that I'm convinced that it would have. But, really, when you come down to it, that's not all that relevant to me right now. What is important is that "The Swerve" has given me another handle on the thoughts and issues that seem to dominate my life these days. It turned out to be the right book at the right time.

Author: Greenblatt, Steven

Date Published: 2011

Length: 284 pp

electronic print

Egypt, Greece and Rome

One of my fantasies is to come back as a born again history teacher. I would love to teach a two year advanced placement sequence on Mediterranean and European history stretching from the dawn of agriculture in Syria and Turkey to the latest conflicts over the European Union and Greek debt. Well, maybe not that contemporary, but at least through World War II. This book by Charles Freeman could serve as a good text underlying the first half of the course on the Mediterranean worlds.

The book cover such a wide time--from about 4000 BC until the Islamic invasions of Syria and Spain in the seventh century--and a wide area--all of the Mediterranean civilizations--that there can be little unity of theme to it. It falls in five major areas: the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, the Hellenistic city-states, and Rome, which really ought to be subdivided into the rise of the Roman republic and the establishment and eventual decline of the Roman empire. But really, while the book covers the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, the Israelite, the Gauls, the Germans, etc., etc., the emphasis of the book is in the title--Egypt, Greece, and Rome, with well over half of the book devoted to Rome.

The book is really about the rise of city culture in the different Mediterranean civilizations. Cities in the Tigris-Euphrates valley center on the control of water and the creation of surplus grain. With the incipient cities of the ancient near east--Uruk, Ur, Eridu--by about 3000 BC, also come the first kings that we know of, although it is interesting to note that these kings often shared power with the merchant classes as trading became widespread. Egypt was a bit different in its development as abundance was created by the natural cycle of flooding of the Nile river, and the Pharaoh became a symbol of the cosmic harmony that enabled this cycle. The infamous Sargon subjugated a large portion of the Tigris-Euphrates valley in establishing the first known empire in about 2300 BC, and the even more famous Hamurabi promulgated his law code some 500 years later. But something brought these civilizations to a screeching halt about 1100 BC or so--volcanic eruptions?, new methods of warfare?, the sea people? Freeman doesn't go into any depth for the reasons for the decline. Out of the ruins of this "Dark Age" appear the neo-Assyrians, the Israelites, and a bit later, the Greeks. Egypt appears to get back on track, and the Babylonians appear again as power players. Soon enough, new bad boys--at least to the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians--take over the Near East, the Persians.

For me, things take off with the late archaic culture of the Greek peoples who begin populating first the eastern Mediterranean with colonies that eventually spread across north Africa and as far west as Spain as well as across the Black Sea. Then begins the "power to the people" movement that eventually led to the rise and spread of democracy. Freeman characterizes Greek cities as a place where people could hammer out the rules of living together--the rise of politics. This was "the dawning of a new age, that of the city state, where justice can perhaps be made a reality," and the city becomes a place of communal bonding contrasted to earlier cities which served more to glorify the ruler. In Athens, especially, this came about with the reforms of Salon as order threatened to break down under the increasing debts owed by the lower classes to the aristocrats. This was also a time when wealth and opportunity were spread to a lot more people with the massive migrations of Greeks throughout the Mediterranean world. Aristocrats were becoming more and more dependent on the citizens to serve as soldiers, first with the small land owners becoming hoplites and later with even poorer citizens needed to row the triremes of the Athenian navies.

This need to hammer out disputes in the public forums also led to the "incentive to find first principles from which debate could begin." The ability to speak and argue in public forums put an increasing premium on the facility of reasoning, especially in the cities of the Ionian coast, probably the richest cities in the Greek world at the time, and led to searching for the underlying forces of the universe. "This attempt to give a single, rational account of the natural order can be seen as a key movement in the evolution of western culture, and eventually the first formulations of philosophy. "The archaic age deserves to be seen as one where a particular attitude of mind took root, perhaps, as been suggested, because of the intensity of life in the polis. It involved the search for an understanding of the physical world free of restraints imposed by those cultures which still lived in the shadow of threatening gods." At the same time, a revival of aristocratic values in the face of threats from the Persian empire--arete, glory, manliness, and valor--become important in the defense of liberty. Now man and his freedom become the measure of all things.

This could not last. Hubris, or overweening pride, brought about the fall of the Athenian empire, and the rise of Macedonia put a demise to the independence of the Greek polis. At the same time, however, Alexander and his armies spread Greek culture and city life, along with the development and glorification of the individual, throughout the region.  Alexander's tutor, Aristotle, suggests "that there is an underlying purpose to nature, that of the fulfillment of every living being through the correct use of the attributes it possesses....the highest state that all human beings should aim for, is eudaemonia, happiness."

Macedonia also established a new political system for the polis, however, the monarchy. The army and the nobility owed loyalty to the king, not to the city or the state, and the divine right of kings became the norm in the Hellenistic empires. Alexander's legacy was "a form of monarchy, based on absolute power, an aura of divinity, and conspicuous consumption," a legacy later picked up by the Roman emperors and eventually most of the rulers of Europe until the French revolution.

Then come the Romans. To tell the truth, I'm beginning to lose steam on them. They are the baddest bullies of the ancient world--in a world full of bullies--and probably most responsible for who we have become. There are just times when I find myself pulling for Hannibal or the Gauls or Philip, knowing the outcome in advance. There's the dreadful certainty of a militaristic group first conquering Latium, then the Etruscans, the Samnites, the Carthaginians, Asia Minor, Greece, and Egypt: from Britain to Mesopotamia and essentially all points in between. And somewhere along the way the Romans decide to take on each other. When the Gracchi brothers try to reform the practices of the aristocracy seeking to hoard the new found wealth of the republic, violence takes over the politics of the city leading first to Sulla, then Pompey, Julius Caesar, and Augustus, who establishes a military dictatorship. Short intervals of peace and order give way to more civil wars and military dictatorships, interspersed with emperors who border on the criminally insane--Caligula, Nero, Commodus, Caracalla, etc--with the famed Roman legions running amok on occasion. Eventually the price of keeping the empire was just too great--over 70% of the state's resources went to the military. By the time that Constantine pulled out of Rome in 325, a general "systems collapse" appears to have begun, at least in the west.

When you get down to it, the development of western civilization in the Mediterranean basin really seems to be about the rich wanting to continually line their own pockets. Greed drives the world, whether its Sargon demanding tribute from the conquered cities of Sumer or Roman emperors plundering the continents for lavish shows of consumption and wealth. The same greed also drives the development of the best and the brightest--the sudden influx of wealth built the glories of Athens and Rome. But maybe its also when the wealth and glory and power begin to recede that the impulse to look inward and individual growth takes over. Or, maybe, the politics of scarcity lead just to meanness and strife. In any case, it seems to be where our civilization is headed these days.

Author: Freeman, Charles

Date Published: 2004

Length: 736 pp

electronic print

Hannibal: One Man Against Rome

It was not a great book, but it was both enjoyable and informative for me. I had a vague knowledge that Hannibal used the wealth of the Spanish (rather, Iberian) silver mines to build up the Carthaginians militarily, cross the Alps, defeat the Romans decisively at Cannae in the single deadliest day of combat in history and then hang around southern Italy for a while before being chased around the Mediterranean by the Romans. Now his story is much clearer to me.

With Rome's growth through the defeat of most of the different cities and tribes of central Italy, and with its vested interests in maintaining client relations with those states it conquered, it was probably inevitable that Rome and Carthage would clash. And it was probably inevitable that Hannibal would eventually lose. But he came as close as he could to making it work. As it was, he hung on for close to 15 years in southern Italy, terrorizing the Romans and hampering their grain supply. But since he could not control the seas--and it had only been fairly recently that Rome became a naval power--he could not land supplies and reinforcements. Had he been able to join forces with his brothers as planned, then perhaps he could have broken the Roman domination of the cities and ports that he needed, especially Tarentum.

But Hannibal was at the mercy, really, of the mercenary army that he built from the various tribes and peoples of Africa and Europe, and he convinced most of them that he offered them freedom from domination from Rome. Roman treatment of these various peoples that they conquered--for example, the Ligurians, the Brutians, the Capuans, the Macedonians, the tribes of Portugal and Span, shows how determined and ruthless the Romans were: 80,000 Macedonians sold into slavery from one city; all the males of Portugal massacred.

And who knows what history would have been like if Hannibal had been able to force Rome into some kind of peace? Lamb certainly takes a sympathetic tone towards Hannibal, maintaining that he was really a freedom fighter against the Roman juggernaut, banding together diverse peoples who would all stand to regain their independence should Rome capitulate in some way. But it seems far fetched that Hannibal wasn't as merciless or as imperialist as the Romans he fought. Lamb maintains that Hannibal's destiny came from the pledge that he took at his father's insistence that he never become a "friend"--an amicus--of Rome. This came at the conclusion of the "first" Punic War when Rome and Carthage clashed over trading rights in Sardinia and Sicily. The Roman response to this clash had been to build a navy from scratch--with scenes of building a fleet based on a captured Carthaginian vessel and then teaching men to row from dry land mockups--and establish dominance in the Mediterranean. It was like, "game over, man" from that point on for Carthage as a sea power.

Author: Lamb, Harold

Date Published: 1958

Length: 11 hr 12 min

Narrator: Griffin, Charlton