The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Lucretius lived his life in a culture of wealthy private book collectors, and the society into which he launched his poem was poised to expand the circle of reading to a larger public. In 40 BCE, a decade after Lucretius’ death, Rome’s first public library15 was established by a friend of the poet Virgil, Asinius Pollio. The idea seems to have originated with Julius Caesar, who admired the public libraries he had seen in Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and determined to bestow such an institution upon the Roman people. But Caesar was assassinated before he could carry out the plan, and it took Pollio, who had sided with Caesar against Pompey and then with Mark Antony against Brutus, to do so. A skillful military commander, canny (or extremely lucky) in his choice of allies, Pollio was also a man of broad literary interests. Apart from a few fragments of his speeches, all of his writings are now lost, but he composed tragedies—worthy of Sophocles, according to Virgil—histories, and literary criticism, and he was one of the first Roman authors to recite his writings to an audience of his friends.

  The library established by Pollio16 was built on the Aventine Hill and paid for, in the typical Roman way, by wealth seized from the conquered—in this case, from a people on the Adriatic coast who had made the mistake of backing Brutus against Antony. Shortly afterwards, the emperor Augustus founded two more public libraries, and many subsequent emperors followed in his wake. (Altogether, by the fourth century CE, there were twenty-eight public libraries in Rome.) The structures, all of which have been destroyed, evidently followed the same general pattern, one that would be familiar to us. There was a large reading room adjoining smaller rooms in which the collections were stored in numbered bookcases. The reading room, either rectangular or semicircular in shape and sometimes lit through a circular opening in the roof, was adorned with busts or life-sized statues of celebrated writers: Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, among others. The statues functioned, as they do for us, as an honorific, a gesture toward the canon of writers whom every civilized person should know. But in Rome they may have had an additional significance, akin to the masks of ancestors that Romans traditionally kept in their houses and that they donned on commemorative occasions. That is, they were signs of access to the spirits of the dead, symbols of the spirits that the books enabled readers to conjure up.

  Many other cities17 of the ancient world came to boast public collections, endowed by tax revenues or by the gifts of wealthy, civic-minded donors. Greek libraries had had few amenities, but throughout their territories the Romans18 designed comfortable chairs and tables where readers could sit and slowly unfold the papyrus, the left hand rolling up each column after it was read. The great architect Vitruvius—one of the ancient writers whose work Poggio recovered—advised that libraries should face toward the east, to catch the morning light and reduce the humidity that might damage books. Excavations at Pompeii and elsewhere have uncovered the plaques honoring the donors, along with statuary, writing tables, shelves to store papyrus rolls, numbered bookcases to hold the bound parchment volumes or codices that gradually began to supplement the rolls, and even graffiti scribbled on the walls. The resemblance to the design of public libraries in our own society is no accident: our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derive precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.

  Through the massive extent of the Roman world, whether on the banks of the Rhône in Gaul or near the grove and Temple of Daphne in the province of Syria, on the island of Cos, near Rhodes, or in Dyrrhkhion in what is now Albania, the houses of cultivated men and women19 had rooms set aside for quiet reading. Papyrus rolls were carefully indexed, labeled (with a protruding tag called in Greek a sillybos), and stacked on shelves or stored in leather baskets. Even in the elaborate bath complexes that Romans loved, reading rooms, decorated with busts of Greek and Latin authors, were carefully designed to make it possible for educated Romans to combine care for the body with care for the mind. By the first century CE there were distinctive signs of the emergence of what we think of as a “literary culture.” At the games in the Colosseum20 one day, the historian Tacitus had a conversation on literature with a perfect stranger who turned out to have read his works. Culture was no longer located in close-knit circles of friends and acquaintances; Tacitus was encountering his “public” in the form of someone who had bought his book at a stall in the Forum or read it in a library. This broad commitment to reading, with its roots in the everyday lives of the Roman elite over many generations, explains why a pleasure palace like the Villa of the Papyri had a well-stocked library.

  In the 1980s, modern archaeologists resumed serious work on the buried villa, in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of the whole style of life expressed in its design, a design vividly evoked in the architecture of the Getty Museum in Malibu, California, where some of the statues and other treasures found at Herculaneum now reside. The bulk of the marble and bronze masterpieces—images of gods and goddesses, portrait busts of philosophers, orators, poets, and playwrights; a graceful young athlete; a wild boar in mid-leap; a drunken satyr; a sleeping satyr; and a startlingly obscene Pan and goat in flagrante delicto—are now in the National Museum in Naples.

  The renewed exploration got off to a slow start: the rich volcanic soil covering the site was used to grow carnations, and the owners were understandably reluctant to permit excavators to disrupt their business. But after lengthy negotiations, researchers were permitted to descend the shafts and approach the villa in small gondolalike craft that could glide safely through tunnels that had been bored through the ruins. In these eerie conditions, they succeeded in mapping the villa’s layout more accurately than ever before, charting the precise dimensions of the atrium, the square and rectangular peristyles, and other structures, and locating as they did so such features as a large mosaic floor and an unusual double column. Traces of vine shoots and leaves enabled them to determine the precise site of the garden where some two thousand years ago the wealthy proprietor and his cultivated friends once came together.

  It is, of course, impossible at this great distance in time to know exactly what these particular people talked about, during the long sunlit afternoons in the colonnaded garden at Herculaneum, but an intriguing further clue turned up, also in the 1980s. Scholars, this time above ground, were at work once again on the blackened papyri that had been discovered by the eighteenth-century treasure hunters. These scrolls, hardened into lumps, had resisted the early attempts to open them and had sat for more than two centuries in the National Library of Naples. In 1987, using new techniques, Tommaso Starace managed to open two badly preserved papyri. He mounted the legible fragments from these books—unread since the ancient volcanic eruption—on Japanese paper, micro-photographed them, and undertook to decipher the contents. Two years later Knut Kleve, a distinguished Norwegian papyrologist (as those who specialize in deciphering papyri are called), made an announcement: “De rerum natura has been rediscovered21 in Herculaneum, 235 years after the papyri were found.”

  The world at large understandably took this announcement in stride—that is, ignored it altogether—and even scholars interested in ancient culture may be forgiven for giving the news, buried in volume 19 of the massive Italian Chronicles of Herculaneum, little or no attention. What Kleve and his colleagues had found were only sixteen minuscule fragments—little more than words or parts of words—that, under close analysis, could be shown to come from books 1, 3, 4, and 5 of the six-book-long Latin poem. Forlorn pieces from an enormous jigsaw puzzle, the fragments by themselves are virtually meaningless. But their range suggests that the whole of De rerum natura was in the library, and the presence of that poem in the Villa of the Papyri is tantalizing.

  The discoveries at Herculaneum enable us to glimpse the social circles where the poem that Poggio found in the monastic library had originally circulated. In the monastic library, among the missals, confessional manuals, and theological tomes, Lucretius’ work was an uncanny stranger,
a relic that had floated ashore from distant shipwreck. In Herculaneum, it was a native. The contents of the surviving rolls suggest that the villa’s collection focused precisely on the school of thought of which De rerum natura is the most remarkable surviving expression.

  Though the identity of the villa’s owner during Lucretius’ lifetime is unknown, the strongest candidate is Lucius Calpurnius Piso. This powerful politician, who had served for a time as governor of the province of Macedonia and was, among other things, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, had an interest in Greek philosophy. Cicero, a political enemy, pictured Piso singing obscene ditties and lolling naked “amid his tipsy22 and malodorous Greeks”; but, judging from the contents of the library, the guests during the afternoons in Herculaneum were likely to have been devoted to more refined pursuits.

  Piso is known to have had a personal acquaintance with Philodemus. In an epigram discovered in one of his books in the charred library, the philosopher invites Piso to join him in his own modest home to celebrate a “Twentieth”—a monthly feast observed in honor of Epicurus, born on the twentieth of the Greek month of Gamelion:

  Tomorrow, friend Piso,23 your musical comrade drags you to his modest

  digs at three in the afternoon,

  feeding you at your annual visit to the Twentieth. If you will miss udders

  and Bromian wine mis en bouteilles in Chios,

  yet you will see faithful comrades, yet you will hear things far sweeter

  than the land of the Phaeacians.

  And if you ever turn your eye our way too, Piso, instead of a modest

  Twentieth we shall lead a richer one.

  The closing lines morph into an appeal for money or perhaps express the hope that Philodemus will himself be invited to an afternoon of philosophical conversation and expensive wine at Piso’s grand villa. Half-reclining on couches, under the shade of trellised vines and silken canopies, the privileged men and women who were Piso’s guests—for it is entirely possible that some women participated in the conversation as well—had much to think about. Rome had been afflicted for years by political and social unrest, culminating in several vicious civil wars, and though the violence had abated, the threats to peace and stability were by no means safely past. Ambitious generals relentlessly jockeyed for position; murmuring troops had to be paid in cash and land; the provinces were restive, and rumors of trouble in Egypt had already caused grain prices to soar.

  But cosseted by slaves, in the comfort and security of the elegant villa, the proprietor and his guests had the temporary luxury of regarding these menaces as relatively remote, remote enough at least to allow them to pursue civilized conversations. Staring up idly24 at the plumes of smoke rising from nearby Vesuvius, they may well have felt some queasiness about the future, but they were an elite, living at the center of the world’s greatest power, and one of their most cherished privileges was the cultivation of the life of the mind.

  Romans of the late republic were remarkably tenacious about this privilege, which they clung to in circumstances that would have made others quail and run for cover. For them it seemed to function as a sign that their world was still intact or at least that they were secure in their innermost lives. Like a man who, hearing the distant sound of sirens in the street, sits down at the Bechstein to play a Beethoven sonata, the men and women in the garden affirmed their urbane security by immersing themselves in speculative dialogue.

  In the years leading up to the assassination of Julius Caesar, philosophical speculation was hardly the only available response to social stress. Religious cults originating in far-off places like Persia, Syria, and Palestine began to make their way to the capital, where they aroused wild fears and expectations, particularly among the plebs. A handful of the elite—those more insecure or simply curious—may have attended with something other than contempt to the prophecies from the east, prophecies of a saviour born of obscure parentage who would be brought low, suffer terribly, and yet ultimately triumph. But most would have regarded such tales as the over-heated fantasies of a sect of stiff-necked Jews.

  Those of a pious disposition would far more likely have gone as supplicants to the temples and chapels to the gods that dotted the fertile landscape. It was, in any case, a world in which nature seemed saturated with the presence of the divine, on mountaintops and springs, in the thermal vents that spewed smoke from a mysterious realm under the earth, in ancient groves of trees on whose branches the faithful hung colorful cloths. But though the villa in Herculaneum was in close proximity to this intense religious life, it is unlikely that many of those with the sophisticated intellectual tastes reflected in the library joined processions of pious supplicants. Judging from the contents of the charred papyrus scrolls, the villa’s inhabitants seem to have turned not to ritual but to conversation about the meaning of life.

  Ancient Greeks and Romans did not share our idealization of isolated geniuses, working alone to think through the knottiest problems. Such scenes—Descartes in his secret retreat, calling everything into question, or the excommunicated Spinoza quietly reasoning to himself while grinding lenses—would eventually become our dominant emblem of the life of the mind. But this vision of proper intellectual pursuits rested on a profound shift in cultural prestige, one that began with the early Christian hermits who deliberately withdrew from whatever it was that pagans valued: St. Anthony (250–356) in the desert or St. Symeon Stylites (390–459) perched on his column. Such figures, modern scholars have shown, characteristically had in fact bands of followers, and though they lived apart, they often played a significant role in the life of large communities. But the dominant cultural image that they fashioned—or that came to be fashioned around them—was of radical isolation.

  Not so the Greeks and Romans. As thinking and writing generally require quiet and a minimum of distraction, their poets and philosophers must have periodically pulled away from the noise and business of the world in order to accomplish what they did. But the image that they projected was social. Poets depicted themselves as shepherds singing to other shepherds; philosophers depicted themselves engaged in long conversations, often stretching out over several days. The pulling away from the distractions of the everyday world was figured not as a retreat to the solitary cell but as a quiet exchange of words among friends in a garden.

  Humans, Aristotle wrote, are social animals: to realize one’s nature as a human then was to participate in a group activity. And the activity of choice, for cultivated Romans, as for the Greeks before them, was discourse. There is, Cicero remarked at the beginning of a typical philosophical work, a wide diversity of opinion about the most important religious questions. “This has often struck me,”25 Cicero wrote,

  but it did so with especial force on one occasion, when the topic of the immortal gods was made the subject of a very searching and thorough discussion at the house of my friend Gaius Cotta.

  It was the Latin Festival, and I had come at Cotta’s express invitation to pay him a visit. I found him sitting in an alcove, engaged in debate with Gaius Velleius, a Member of the Senate, accounted by the Epicureans as their chief Roman adherent at the time. With them was Quintus Lucilius Balbus, who was so accomplished a student of Stoicism as to rank with the leading Greek exponents of that system.

  Cicero does not want to present his thoughts to his readers as a tract composed after solitary reflection; he wants to present them as an exchange of views among social and intellectual equals, a conversation in which he himself plays only a small part and in which there will be no clear victor.

  The end of this dialogue—a long work that would have filled several sizable papyrus rolls—is characteristically inconclusive: “Here the conversation ended,26 and we parted, Velleius thinking Cotta’s discourse to be the truer, while I felt that that of Balbus approximated more nearly to a semblance of the truth.” The inconclusiveness is not intellectual modesty—Cicero was not a modest man—but a strategy of civilized openness among friends. The exchange itself,
not its final conclusions, carries much of the meaning. The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views. “The one who engages27 in conversation,” Cicero wrote, “should not debar others from participating in it, as if he were entering upon a private monopoly; but, as in other things, so in a general conversation he should think it not unfair for each to have his turn.”

  The dialogues Cicero and others wrote were not transcriptions of real exchanges, though the characters in them were real, but they were idealized versions of conversations that undoubtedly occurred in places like the villa in Herculaneum. The conversations in that particular setting, to judge from the topics of the charred books found in the buried library, touched on music, painting, poetry, the art of public speaking, and other subjects of perennial interest to cultivated Greeks and Romans. They are likely to have turned as well to more troubling scientific, ethical, and philosophical questions: What is the cause of thunder or earthquakes or eclipses—are they signs from the gods, as some claim, or do they have an origin in nature? How we can understand the world we inhabit? What goals should we be pursuing in our lives? Does it make sense to devote one’s life to the pursuit of power? How are good and evil to be defined? What happens to us when we die?