The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Part 5

The difficulty would not in the least have fazed Poggio and his learned friends. They possessed wonderful Latin, rose eagerly to the challenge of solving textual riddles, and had often wandered with pleasure and interest through the still more impenetrable thickets of patristic theology. A quick glance at the first few pages of the ma.n.u.script would have sufficed to convince Poggio that he had discovered something remarkable.

What he could not have grasped, without carefully reading through the work and absorbing its arguments, was that he was unleas.h.i.+ng something that threatened his whole mental universe. Had he understood this threat, he might still have returned the poem to circulation: recovering the lost traces of the ancient world was his highest purpose in life, virtually the only principle uncontaminated by disillusionment and cynical laughter. But, as he did so, he might have uttered the words that Freud reputedly spoke to Jung, as they sailed into New York Harbor to receive the accolades of their American admirers: "Don't they know we are bringing them the plague?"

One simple name for the plague that Lucretius brought-a charge frequently leveled against him, when his poem began once again to be read-is atheism. But Lucretius was not in fact an atheist. He believed that the G.o.ds existed. But he also believed that, by virtue of being G.o.ds, they could not possibly be concerned with human beings or with anything that we do. Divinity by its very nature, he thought, must enjoy eternal life and peace entirely untouched by any suffering or disturbance and indifferent to human actions.

If it gives you pleasure to call the sea Neptune or to refer to grain and wine as Ceres and Bacchus, Lucretius wrote, you should feel free to do so, just as you can dub the round world the Mother of the G.o.ds. And if, drawn by their solemn beauty, you choose to visit religious shrines, you will be doing yourself no harm, provided that you contemplate the images of the G.o.ds "in peace and tranquillity." (6:78) But you should not think for a minute that you can either anger or propitiate any of these deities. The processions, the animal sacrifices, the frenzied dances, the drums and cymbals and pipes, the showers of snowy rose petals, the eunuch priests, the carved images of the infant G.o.d: all of these cultic practices, though compelling and impressive in their way, are fundamentally meaningless, since the G.o.ds they are meant to reach are entirely removed and separated from our world.

It is possible to argue that, despite his profession of religious belief, Lucretius was some sort of atheist, a particularly sly one perhaps, since to almost all believers of almost all religious faiths in almost all times it has seemed pointless to wors.h.i.+p a G.o.d without the hope of appeasing divine wrath or acquiring divine protection and favor. What is the use of a G.o.d who is uninterested in punis.h.i.+ng or rewarding? Lucretius insisted that such hopes and anxieties are precisely a toxic form of superst.i.tion, combining in equal measure absurd arrogance and absurd fear. Imagining that the G.o.ds actually care about the fate of humans or about their ritual practices is, he observed, a particularly vulgar insult-as if divine beings depended for their happiness on our mumbled words or good behavior. But that insult is the least of the problems, since the G.o.ds quite literally could not care less. Nothing that we can do (or not do) could possibly interest them. The serious issue is that false beliefs and observances inevitably lead to human mischief.

These views were certainly contrary to Poggio's own Christian faith and would have led any contemporary who espoused them into the most serious trouble. But by themselves, encountered in a pagan text, they were not likely to trigger great alarm. Poggio could have told himself, as did some later sympathetic readers of On the Nature of Things, that the brilliant ancient poet simply intuited the emptiness of pagan beliefs and hence the absurdity of sacrifices to G.o.ds who did not in fact exist. Lucretius, after all, had the misfortune of living shortly before the coming of the Messiah. Had he been born a century later, he would have had the opportunity of learning the truth. As it was, he at least grasped that the practices of his own contemporaries were worthless. Hence even many modern translations of Lucretius' poem into English rea.s.suringly have it denounce as "superst.i.tion" what the Latin text calls simply religio.

But atheism-or, more accurately, the indifference of the G.o.ds-was not the only problem posed by Lucretius' poem. Its main concerns lay elsewhere, in the material world we all inhabit, and it is here that the most disturbing arguments arose, arguments that lured those who were most struck by their formidable power-Machiavelli, Bruno, Galileo, and others-into strange trains of thought. Those trains of thought had once been eagerly explored in the very land to which they now returned, as a result of Poggio's discovery. But a thousand years of virtual silence had rendered them highly dangerous.

By now much of what On the Nature of Things claims about the universe seems deeply familiar, at least among the circle of people who are likely to be reading these words. After all, many of the work's core arguments are among the foundations on which modern life has been constructed. But it is worth remembering that some of the arguments remain alien and that others are hotly contested, often by those who gladly avail themselves of the scientific advances they helped to sp.a.w.n. And to all but a few of Poggio's contemporaries, most of what Lucretius claimed, albeit in a poem of startling, seductive beauty, seemed incomprehensible, unbelievable, or impious.

Here is a brief list, by no means exhaustive, of the elements that const.i.tuted the Lucretian challenge: * Everything is made of invisible particles. Lucretius, who disliked technical language, chose not to use the standard Greek philosophical term for these foundational particles, "atoms," i.e., things that cannot be divided. He deployed instead a variety of ordinary Latin words: "first things," "first beginnings," "the bodies of matter," "the seeds of things." Everything is formed of these seeds and, on dissolution, returns to them in the end. Immutable, indivisible, invisible, and infinite in number, they are constantly in motion, clas.h.i.+ng with one another, coming together to form new shapes, coming apart, recombining again, enduring.

* The elementary particles of matter-"the seeds of the things"-are eternal. Time is not limited-a discrete substance with a beginning and an end-but infinite. The invisible particles from which the entire universe is made, from the stars to the lowliest insect, are indestructible and immortal, though any particular object in the universe is transitory. That is, all the forms that we observe, even those that seem the most durable, are temporary: the building blocks from which they are composed will sooner or later be redistributed. But those building blocks themselves are permanent, as is the ceaseless process of formation, dissolution, and redistribution.

Neither creation nor destruction ever has the upper hand; the sum total of matter remains the same, and the balance between the living and the dead is always restored: And so the destructive motions cannot hold sway eternally and bury existence forever; nor again can the motions that cause life and growth preserve created things eternally. Thus, in this war that has been waged from time everlasting, the contest between the elements is an equal one: now here, now there, the vital forces conquer and, in turn, are conquered; with the funeral dirge mingles the wail that babies raise when they reach the sh.o.r.es of light; no night has followed day, and no dawn has followed night, which has not heard mingled with those woeful wails the lamentations that accompany death and the black funeral. (2.56980) The Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana called this idea-the ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances-"the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon."

* The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size. They are like the letters in an alphabet, a discrete set capable of being combined in an infinite number of sentences. (2.688ff.) And, with the seeds of things as with language, the combinations are made according to a code. As not all letters or all words can be coherently combined, so too not all particles can combine with all other particles in every possible manner. Some of the seeds of things routinely and easily hook onto others; some repel and resist one another. Lucretius did not claim to know the hidden code of matter. But, he argued, it is important to grasp that there is a code and that, in principle, it could be investigated and understood by human science.

* All particles are in motion in an infinite void. s.p.a.ce, like time, is unbounded. There are no fixed points, no beginnings, middles, or ends, and no limits. Matter is not packed together in a solid ma.s.s. There is a void in things, allowing the const.i.tutive particles to move, collide, combine, and move apart. Evidence for the void includes not only the restless motion that we observe all around us, but also such phenomena as water oozing through the walls of caves, food dispersed through bodies, sound pa.s.sing through walls of closed rooms, cold permeating to the bones.

The universe consists then of matter-the primary particles and all that those particles come together to form-and s.p.a.ce, intangible and empty. Nothing else exists.

* The universe has no creator or designer. The particles themselves have not been made and cannot be destroyed. The patterns of order and disorder in the world are not the product of any divine scheme. Providence is a fantasy.

What exists is not the manifestation of any overarching plan or any intelligent design inherent in matter itself. No supreme ch.o.r.eographer planned their movements, and the seeds of things did not have a meeting in which they decided what would go where.

But because throughout the universe from time everlasting countless numbers of them, buffeted and impelled by blows, have s.h.i.+fted in countless ways, experimentation with every kind of movement and combination has at last resulted in arrangements such as those that created and compose our world. (1.102428) There is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.

* Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve. If all the individual particles, in their infinite numbers, fell through the void in straight lines, pulled down by their own weight like raindrops, nothing would ever exist. But the particles do not move lockstep in a preordained single direction. Instead, "at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course, to a degree that could be described as no more than a s.h.i.+ft of movement." (2.21820) The position of the elementary particles is thus indeterminate.

The swerve-which Lucretius called variously declinatio, inclinatio, or clinamen-is only the most minimal of motions, nec plus quam minimum. (2.244) But it is enough to set off a ceaseless chain of collisions. Whatever exists in the universe exists because of these random collisions of minute particles. The endless combinations and recombinations, resulting from the collisions over a limitless span of time, bring it about that "the rivers replenish the insatiable sea with plentiful streams of water, that the earth, warmed by the sun's fostering heat, renews her produce, that the family of animals springs up and thrives, and that the gliding ethereal fires have life." (1.103134) * The swerve is the source of free will. In the lives of all sentient creatures, human and animal alike, the random swerve of elementary particles is responsible for the existence of free will. For if all of motion were one long predetermined chain, there would be no possibility of freedom. Cause would follow cause from eternity, as the fates decreed. Instead, we wrest free will from the fates.

But what is the evidence that the will exists? Why should we not simply think that the matter in living creatures moves because of the same blows that propel dust motes? Lucretius' image is the split second on the race track after the starting gate is opened, before the straining horses, frantically eager to move, can actually propel their bodies forward. That split second is the thrilling spectacle of a mental act bidding a ma.s.s of matter into motion. And because this image did not quite answer to his whole purpose-because, after all, race horses are precisely creatures driven to move by the blows of their riders-Lucretius went on to observe that though an outside force may strike against a man, that man may deliberately hold himself back.

* Nature ceaselessly experiments. There is no single moment of origin, no mythic scene of creation. All living beings, from plants and insects to the higher mammals and man, have evolved through a long, complex process of trial and error. The process involves many false starts and dead ends, monsters, prodigies, mistakes, creatures that were not endowed with all the features that they needed to compete for resources and to create offspring. Creatures whose combination of organs enables them to adapt and to reproduce will succeed in establis.h.i.+ng themselves, until changing circ.u.mstances make it impossible for them any longer to survive.

The successful adaptations, like the failures, are the result of a fantastic number of combinations that are constantly being generated (and reproduced or discarded) over an unlimited expanse of time. It is difficult to grasp this point, Lucretius acknowledged, but "what has been created gives rise to its own function." (4.835) That is, he explained, "Sight did not exist before the birth of the eyes, nor speech before the creation of the tongue." (4.83637) These organs were not created in order to fulfill a purposed end; their usefulness gradually enabled the creatures in whom they emerged to survive and to reproduce their kind.

* The universe was not created for or about humans. The earth-with its seas and deserts, harsh climate, wild beasts, diseases-was obviously not purpose-built to make our species feel at home. Unlike many other animals, who are endowed at birth with what they need to survive, human infants are almost completely vulnerable: Consider, Lucretius wrote in a celebrated pa.s.sage, how a baby, like a s.h.i.+pwrecked sailor flung ash.o.r.e by fierce waves, lies on the ground naked, speechless, and utterly helpless as soon as nature has cast it forth with pangs of labor from its mother's womb into the sh.o.r.es of light. (5.22325) The fate of the entire species (let alone that of any individual) is not the pole around which everything revolves. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that human beings as a species will last forever. On the contrary, it is clear that, over the infinite expanses of time, some species grow, others disappear, generated and destroyed in the ceaseless process of change. There were other forms of life before us, which no longer exist; there will be other forms of life after us, when our kind has vanished.

* Humans are not unique. They are part of a much larger material process that links them not only to all other life forms but to inorganic matter as well. The invisible particles out of which living things, including humans, are composed are not sentient nor do they come from some mysterious source. We are made of the same stuff that everything else is made of.

Humans do not occupy the privileged place in existence they imagine for themselves: though they often fail to recognize the fact, they share many of their most cherished qualities with other animals. To be sure, each individual is unique, but, thanks to the abundance of matter, the same is true of virtually all creatures: how else do we imagine that a calf recognizes its dam or the cow her calf? We have only to look attentively at the world around us to grasp that many of the most intense and poignant experiences of our lives are not exclusive to our species.

* Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival. There was no original paradisal time of plenty, as some have dreamed, in which happy, peaceful men and women, living in security and leisure, enjoyed the fruits of nature's abundance. Early humans, lacking fire, agriculture, and other means to soften a brutally hard existence, struggled to eat and to avoid being eaten.

There may always have been some rudimentary capacity for social cooperation in the interest of survival, but the ability to form bonds and to live in communities governed by settled customs developed slowly. At first there was only random mating-either from mutual desire or from barter or rape-and the hunting and gathering of food. Mortality rates were extremely high, though not, Lucretius noted wryly, as high as they currently are, inflated by warfare, s.h.i.+pwreck, and overeating.

The idea that language was somehow given to humans, as a miraculous invention, is absurd. Instead, Lucretius wrote, humans, who like other animals used inarticulate cries and gestures in various situations, slowly arrived at shared sounds to designate the same things. So too, long before they were able to join together to sing melodious songs, humans imitated the warbling of birds and the sweet sound of a gentle breeze in the reeds and so gradually developed a capacity to make music.

The arts of civilization-not given to man by some divine lawmaker but painstakingly fas.h.i.+oned by the shared talents and mental power of the species-are accomplishments worth celebrating, but they are not unmixed blessings. They arose in tandem with the fear of the G.o.ds, the desire for wealth, the pursuit of fame and power. All of these originated in a craving for security, a craving that reaches back to the earliest experiences of the human species struggling to master its natural enemies. That violent struggle-against the wild beasts that threatened human survival-was largely successful, but the anxious, acquisitive, aggressive impulses have metastasized. In consequence, human beings characteristically develop weapons that turn against themselves.

* The soul dies. The human soul is made of the same material as the human body. The fact that we cannot physically locate the soul in a particular organ only means that it is made of exceedingly minute particles interlaced through the veins, flesh, and sinews. Our instruments are not fine enough to weigh the soul: at the moment of death, it dissolves "like the case of a wine whose bouquet has evaporated, or of a perfume whose exquisite scent has dispersed into the air." (3.2212) We do not imagine that the wine or perfume contains a mysterious soul; only that the scent consists of very subtle material elements, too small to measure. So too of the human spirit: it consists of tiny elements hidden in body's most secret recesses. When the body dies-that is, when its matter is dispersed-the soul, which is part of the body, dies as well.

* There is no afterlife. Humans have both consoled and tormented themselves with the thought that something awaits them after they have died. Either they will gather flowers for eternity in a paradisal garden where no chill wind ever blows or they will be frog-marched before a harsh judge who will condemn them, for their sins, to unending misery (misery that somewhat mysteriously requires them after dying to have heat-sensitive skin, an aversion to cold, bodily appet.i.te and thirst, and the like). But once you grasp that your soul dies along with your body, you also grasp that there can be no posthumous punishments or rewards. Life on this earth is all that human beings have.

* Death is nothing to us. When you are dead-when the particles that have been linked together, to create and sustain you, have come apart-there will be neither pleasure nor pain, longing nor fear. Mourners, Lucretius wrote, always wring their hands in anguish and say, "Never again will your dear children race for the prize of your first kisses and touch your heart with pleasure too profound for words." (3.89598) But they do not go on to add, "You will not care, because you will not exist."

* All organized religions are superst.i.tious delusions. The delusions are based on deeply rooted longings, fears, and ignorance. Humans project images of the power and beauty and perfect security that they would like to possess. Fas.h.i.+oning their G.o.ds accordingly, they become enslaved to their own dreams.

Everyone is subject to the feelings that generate such dreams: they wash over you when you look up at the stars and start imagining beings of immeasurable power; or when you wonder if the universe has any limits; or when you marvel at the exquisite order of things; or, less agreeably, when you experience an uncanny string of misfortunes and wonder if you are being punished; or when nature shows its destructive side. There are entirely natural explanations for such phenomena as lightning and earthquakes-Lucretius spells them out-but terrified humans instinctively respond with religious fear and start praying.

* Religions are invariably cruel. Religions always promise hope and love, but their deep, underlying structure is cruelty. This is why they are drawn to fantasies of retribution and why they inevitably stir up anxiety among their adherents. The quintessential emblem of religion-and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core-is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.

Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphegenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have antic.i.p.ated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the b.l.o.o.d.y, murdered son.

* There are no angels, demons, or ghosts. Immaterial spirits of any kind do not exist. The creatures with which the Greek and Roman imagination populated the world-Fates, harpies, daemons, genii, nymphs, satyrs, dryads, celestial messengers, and the spirits of the dead-are entirely unreal. Forget them.

* The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be organized to serve the pursuit of happiness. There is no ethical purpose higher than facilitating this pursuit for oneself and one's fellow creatures. All the other claims-the service of the state, the glorification of the G.o.ds or the ruler, the arduous pursuit of virtue through self-sacrifice-are secondary, misguided, or fraudulent. The militarism and the taste for violent sports that characterized his own culture seemed to Lucretius in the deepest sense perverse and unnatural. 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.

Most people grasp rationally that the luxuries they crave are, for the most part, pointless and do little or nothing to enhance their well-being: "Fiery fevers quit your body no quicker, if you toss in embroidered attire of blus.h.i.+ng crimson, than if you must lie sick in a common garment." (2.3436) But, as it is difficult to resist fears of the G.o.ds and the afterlife, so too it is difficult to resist the compulsive sense that security, for oneself and one's community, can somehow be enhanced through exploits of pa.s.sionate acquisitiveness and conquest. These exploits, however, only decrease the possibility of happiness and put everyone engaged in them at the risk of s.h.i.+pwreck.

The goal, Lucretius wrote in a celebrated and famously disturbing pa.s.sage, must be to escape from the whole mad enterprise and observe it from a position of safety: It is comforting, when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person: not that anyone's distress is a cause of agreeable pleasure; but it is comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt. It is comforting also to witness mighty clashes of warriors embattled on the plains, when you have no share in the danger. But nothing is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise, tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way of life, competing for intellectual eminence, disputing about rank, and striving night and day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to secure power. (2:113) * The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The princ.i.p.al enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire-the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows-and gnawing fear. Even the dreaded plague, in Lucretius' account-and his work ends with a graphic account of a catastrophic plague epidemic in Athens-is most horrible not only for the suffering and death that it brings but also and still more for the "perturbation and panic" that it triggers.

It is perfectly reasonable to seek to avoid pain: such avoidance is one of the pillars of his whole ethical system. But how is it possible to keep this natural aversion from turning into panic, panic that only leads to the triumph of suffering? And, more generally, why are humans so unhappy?

The answer, Lucretius thought, had to do with the power of the imagination. Though they are finite and mortal, humans are gripped by illusions of the infinite-infinite pleasure and infinite pain. The fantasy of infinite pain helps to account for their p.r.o.neness to religion: in the misguided belief that their souls are immortal and hence potentially subject to an eternity of suffering, humans imagine that they can somehow negotiate with the G.o.ds for a better outcome, an eternity of pleasure in paradise. The fantasy of infinite pleasure helps to account for their p.r.o.neness to romantic love: in the misguided belief that their happiness depends upon the absolute possession of some single object of limitless desire, humans are seized by a feverish, unappeasable hunger and thirst that can only bring anguish instead of happiness.

Once again it is perfectly reasonable to seek s.e.xual pleasure: that is, after all, one of the body's natural joys. The mistake, Lucretius thought, was to confound this joy with a delusion, the frenzied craving to possess-at once to penetrate and to consume-what is in reality a dream. Of course, the absent lover is always only a mental image and in this sense akin to a dream. But Lucretius observed in pa.s.sages of remarkable frankness that in the very act of s.e.xual consummation lovers remain in the grip of confused longings that they cannot fulfill: Even in the hour of possession the pa.s.sion of the lovers fluctuates and wanders in uncertainty: they cannot decide what to enjoy first with their eyes and hands. They tightly squeeze the object of their desire and cause bodily pain, often driving their teeth into one another's lips and crus.h.i.+ng mouth against mouth. (4.107681) The point of this pa.s.sage-part of what W. B. Yeats called "the finest description of s.e.xual intercourse ever written"-is not to urge a more decorous, tepid form of lovemaking. It is to take note of the element of unsated appet.i.te that haunts even the fulfillment of desire. The insatiability of s.e.xual appet.i.te is, in Lucretius' view, one of Venus' cunning strategies; it helps to account for the fact that, after brief interludes, the same acts of love are performed again and again. And he understood too that these repeated acts are deeply pleasurable. But he remained troubled by the ruse, by the emotional suffering that comes in its wake, by the arousal of aggressive impulses, and, above all, by the sense that even the moment of ecstasy leaves something to be desired. In 1685, the great poet John Dryden brilliantly captured Lucretius' remarkable vision: . . . when the youthful pair more closely join, When hands in hands they lock, and thighs in thighs they twine; Just in the raging foam of full desire, When both press on, both murmur, both expire, They grip, they squeeze, their humid tongues they dart, As each would force their way to th'others heart.

In vain; they only cruise about the coast.

For bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost, As sure they strive to be, when both engage In that tumultuous momentary rage.

So tangled in the nets of love they lie, Till man dissolves in that excess of joy.

(4.110514) * Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder. The realization that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else, that the world was not made for us by a providential creator, that we are not the center of the universe, that our emotional lives are no more distinct than our physical lives from those of all other creatures, that our souls are as material and as mortal as our bodies-all these things are not the cause for despair. On the contrary, grasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness. Human insignificance-the fact that it is not all about us and our fate-is, Lucretius insisted, the good news.

It is possible for human beings to live happy lives, but not because they think that they are the center of the universe or because they fear the G.o.ds or because they n.o.bly sacrifice themselves for values that purport to transcend their mortal existence. Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the princ.i.p.al obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason.

The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things. All speculation-all science, all morality, all attempts to fas.h.i.+on a life worth living-must start and end with a comprehension of the invisible seeds of things: atoms and the void and nothing else.

It might seem at first that this comprehension would inevitably bring with it a sense of cold emptiness, as if the universe had been robbed of its magic. But being liberated from harmful illusions is not the same as disillusionment. The origin of philosophy, it was often said in the ancient world, was wonder: surprise and bafflement led to a desire to know, and knowledge in turn laid the wonder to rest. But in Lucretius' account the process is something like the reverse: it is knowing the way things are that awakens the deepest wonder.

On the Nature of Things is that rarest of accomplishments: a great work of philosophy that is also a great poem. Inevitably, compiling a list of propositions, as I have done, obscures Lucretius' astonis.h.i.+ng poetic power, a power he himself downplayed when he compared his verses to honey smeared around the lip of a cup containing medicine that a sick man might otherwise refuse to drink. The downplaying is not altogether surprising: his philosophical master and guide, Epicurus, was suspicious of eloquence and thought that the truth should be uttered in plain, unadorned prose.

But the poetic greatness of Lucretius' work is not incidental to his visionary project, his attempt to wrest the truth away from illusion-mongerers. Why should the tellers of fables, he thought, possess a monopoly on the means that humans have invented to express the pleasure and beauty of the world? Without those means, the world we inhabit runs the risk of seeming inhospitable, and for their comfort people will prefer to embrace fantasies, even if those fantasies are destructive. With the aid of poetry, however, the actual nature of things-an infinite number of indestructible particles swerving into one another, hooking together, coming to life, coming apart, reproducing, dying, recreating themselves, forming an astonis.h.i.+ng, constantly changing universe-can be depicted in its true splendor.

Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and that they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only sp.a.w.n in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives that they have. These lives, like all other existing forms in the universe, are contingent and vulnerable; all things, including the earth itself, will eventually disintegrate and return to the const.i.tuent atoms from which they were composed and out of which other things will form in the perpetual dance of matter. But while we are alive, we should be filled with the deepest pleasure, for we are a small part of a vast process of world-making that Lucretius celebrated as essentially erotic.

Hence it is that, as a poet, a maker of metaphors, Lucretius could do something very strange, something that appears to violate his conviction that the G.o.ds are deaf to human pet.i.tions. On the Nature of Things opens with a prayer to Venus. Once again Dryden probably best renders in English the spirit of Lucretius' ardor: Delight of humankind and G.o.ds above, Parent of Rome, propitious Queen of Love, Whose vital power, air, earth, and sea supplies, And breeds whate'er is born beneath the rolling skies; For every kind, by thy prolific might, Springs and beholds the regions of the light: Thee, G.o.ddess, thee, the clouds and tempests fear, And at thy pleasing presence disappear; For thee the land in fragrant flowers is dressed, For thee the ocean smiles and smooths her wavy breast, And heaven itself with more serene and purer light is blessed.

(1.19) The hymn pours forth, full of wonder and grat.i.tude, glowing with light. It is as if the ecstatic poet actually beheld the G.o.ddess of love, the sky clearing at her radiant presence, the awakening earth showering her with flowers. She is the embodiment of desire, and her return, on the fresh gusts of the west wind, fills all living things with pleasure and pa.s.sionate s.e.xual longing: For when the rising spring adorns the mead, And a new scene of nature stands displayed, When teeming buds and cheerful greens appear, And western gales unlock the lazy year, The joyous birds thy welcome first express Whose native songs thy genial fire confess.

Then savage beasts bound o'er their slighted food, Struck with thy darts, and tempt the raging flood.

All nature is thy gift: earth, air, and sea; Of all that breathes, the various progeny, Stung with delight, is goaded on by thee.

O'er barren mountains, o'er the flowery plain, The leafy forest, and the liquid main Extends thy uncontrolled and boundless reign.

Through all the living regions dost thou move And scatterest, where thou goest, the kindly seeds of Love.

(1.920) We do not know how the German monks who copied the Latin verses and kept them from destruction responded, nor do we know what Poggio Bracciolini, who must at least have glanced at them as he salvaged the poem from oblivion, thought they meant. Certainly almost every one of the poem's key principles was an abomination to right-thinking Christian orthodoxy. But the poetry was compellingly, seductively beautiful. And we can see with hallucinatory vividness what at least one Italian, later in the fifteenth century, made of them: we have only to look at Botticelli's great painting of Venus, ravis.h.i.+ngly beautiful, emerging from the restless matter of the sea.

CHAPTER NINE.

THE RETURN.

"LUCRETIUS HAS NOT yet come back to me," Poggio wrote to his Venetian friend, the patrician humanist Frances...o...b..rbaro, "although he has been copied." Evidently, then, Poggio had not been allowed to borrow the ancient ma.n.u.script (which he characteristically referred to as if it were the poet himself) and take it back to Constance with him. The monks must have been too wary for that and forced him instead to find someone to make a copy. He did not expect this scribe to deliver the result, important as it was, in person: "The place is rather far away and not many people come from there," Poggio wrote, "and so I shall wait until some people turn up who will bring him." How long would he be willing to wait? "If no one comes," he a.s.sured his friend, "I shall not put public duties ahead of private needs." A very strange remark, for what is public here and what is private? Poggio was, perhaps, telling Barbaro not to worry: official duties in Constance (whatever they might be) would not stand in the way of getting his hands on Lucretius.

When the ma.n.u.script of On the Nature of Things finally did reach him, Poggio evidently sent it off at once to Niccol Niccoli, in Florence. Either because the scribe's copy was crudely made or simply because he wanted a version for himself, Poggio's friend undertook to transcribe it. This transcription in Niccoli's elegant hand, together with the copy made by the German scribe, sp.a.w.ned dozens of further ma.n.u.script copies-more than fifty are known to survive-and were the sources of all fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century printed editions of Lucretius. Poggio's discovery thus served as the crucial conduit through which the ancient poem, dormant for a thousand years, reentered circulation in the world. In the cool gray and white Laurentian library that Michelangelo designed for the Medici, Niccoli's copy of the scribe's copy of the ninth-century copy of Lucretius' poem-Codex Laurentia.n.u.s 35.30-is preserved. One of the key sources of modernity, it is a modest book, bound in fading, tattered red leather inlaid with metal, a chain attached to the bottom of the back cover. There is little to distinguish it physically from many other ma.n.u.scripts in the collection, apart from the fact that a reader is given latex gloves to wear when it is delivered to the desk.

The copy that the scribe made and that Poggio sent from Constance to Florence is lost. Presumably, after completing his transcription, Niccoli sent it back to Poggio, who does not seem to have copied it in his own exquisite hand. Perhaps, confident in Niccoli's skills, Poggio or his heirs deemed the scribe's copy not worth preserving and in the end simply threw it away. Lost too is the ma.n.u.script that the scribe had copied and that presumably remained in the monastic library. Did it burn up in a fire? Was the ink carefully sc.r.a.ped off in order to make room for some other text? Did it finally molder away from neglect, the victim of damp and rot? Or did a pious reader actually take in its subversive implications and choose to destroy it? No remnants of it have been discovered. Two ninth-century ma.n.u.scripts of On the Nature of Things, unknown to Poggio or any of his humanist contemporaries, did manage to make it through the almost impenetrable barrier of time. These ma.n.u.scripts, named after their formats the Oblongus and the Quadratus, were cataloged in the collection of a great seventeenth-century Dutch scholar and collector, Isaac Voss, and have been in the Leiden University Library since 1689. Fragments of a third ninth-century ma.n.u.script, containing about 45 percent of Lucretius' poem, also turned out to survive and are now housed in collections in Copenhagen and Vienna. But by the time these ma.n.u.scripts surfaced, Lucretius' poem, thanks to Poggio's discovery, had already long been helping to unsettle and transform the world.

It is possible that Poggio sent his copy of the poem to Niccoli without having done more than look at it briefly. He had much to occupy his mind. Balda.s.sare Cossa had been stripped of the papacy and was languis.h.i.+ng in prison. The second claimant to the throne of St. Peter, Angelo Correr, who had been forced to resign his t.i.tle of Gregory XII, died in October 1417. The third claimant, Pedro de Luna, barricaded first in the fortress of Perpignan and then on the inaccessible rock of p.e.n.i.scola on the sea coast near Valencia, still tenaciously called himself Benedict XIII, but it was clear to Poggio and almost everyone else that Papa Luna's claim could not be taken seriously. The papal throne was vacant, and the council-which, like the current European Community, was riven with tensions among the English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish delegations-squabbled over the conditions that would have to be met before proceeding to elect a new pope.

In the long interval before an agreement was finally reached, many members of the curia had found paths to new employment; some, like Poggio's friend Bruni, had already returned to Italy. Poggio's own attempts were unsuccessful. The apostolic secretary to the disgraced pope had enemies, and he refused to appease them by distancing himself from his former master. Other bureaucrats in the papal court testified against the imprisoned Cossa, but Poggio's name does not appear on the list of witnesses for the prosecution. His best hope was that one of Cossa's princ.i.p.al allies, Cardinal Zabarella, would be named pope, but Zabarella died in 1417. When the electors finally met in secret conclave in the fall of 1418, they chose someone with no interest in surrounding himself with humanist intellectuals, the Roman aristocrat Oddo Colonna, who took the name Martin V. Poggio was not offered the post of apostolic secretary, though he could have stayed on at court in the lower rank of scriptor. Instead, he decided to make a very surprising and risky career move.

In 1419, Poggio accepted the post of secretary to Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. The uncle of Henry V (Shakespeare's heroic warrior of Agincourt fame), Beaufort was the leader of the English delegation to the Council of Constance, where he evidently met and was impressed by the Italian humanist. For the wealthy and powerful English bishop, Poggio represented the most advanced and sophisticated type of secretary, someone deeply versed both in the Roman curial bureaucracy and in prestigious humanist studies. For the Italian secretary, Beaufort represented the salvaging of dignity. Poggio had the satisfaction of refusing what would have been in effect a demotion, had he returned to the Roman Curia. But he knew no English, and, if that did not greatly matter in the service of an aristocratic cleric whose mother tongue was French and who was comfortable in Latin and Italian, it did mean that Poggio could never hope to feel entirely at home in England.

The decision to move, as he approached his fortieth birthday, to a land where he had no family, allies, or friends was motivated by something other than pique. The prospect of a sojourn in a distant realm-much more remote and exotic than Tasmania would now seem to a contemporary Roman-excited the book hunter in Poggio. He had had spectacular successes in Switzerland and Germany, successes that had made his name famous in humanist circles. Other great discoveries might await him now in English monastic libraries. Those libraries had not yet been thoroughly searched by humanists endowed, as Poggio was, with a careful reading of known cla.s.sical texts, an encyclopedic grasp of the clues to missing ma.n.u.scripts, and remarkable philological ac.u.men. If he had already been hailed as a demiG.o.d for his ability to resurrect the ancient dead, how would he be praised for what he might now bring to light?

In the event, Poggio remained in England for almost four years, but the stay was deeply disappointing. Bishop Beaufort was not the gold mine that Poggio, perennially short of money, had dreamed he would be. He was away much of the time-"as nomadic as a Scythian"-leaving his secretary with little or nothing to do. Except for Niccoli, his Italian friends seem all to have forgotten him: "I have been relegated to oblivion as though I were dead." The English people he met were almost uniformly disagreeable: "plenty of men given over to gluttony and l.u.s.t but very few lovers of literature and those few barbarians, trained rather in trifling debates and in quibbling than in real learning."

His letters back to Italy were a litany of complaints. There was plague; the weather was miserable; his mother and brother wrote to him only to pester him for money that he did not have; he suffered from hemorrhoids. And the truly terrible news was that the libraries-at least the ones he visited-were from Poggio's point of view almost completely uninteresting. "I saw many monasteries, all crammed with new doctors," he wrote to Niccoli in Florence, none of whom you would even have found worth listening to. There were a few volumes of ancient writings, which we have in better versions at home. Nearly all the monasteries of this island have been built within the last four hundred years and that has not been an age which produced either learned men or the books which we seek; these books were already sunk without trace.

There might, Poggio conceded, be something or other at Oxford, but his master Beaufort was not planning a visit there, and his own resources were severely strained. It was time for his humanist friends to abandon their dreams of stupendous discoveries: "you had better give up hope of books from England, for they care very little for them here."

Poggio professed to find some consolation in embarking on a serious study of the Church Fathers-there was no shortage of theological tomes in England-but he felt painfully the absence of the cla.s.sical texts he loved: "During my four years here I have paid no attention to the study of the Humanities," he complained, "and I have not read a single book that had anything to do with style. You can guess this from my letters, for they are not what they used to be."

In 1422, after ceaseless complaining, conniving, and cajoling, he finally secured for himself a new secretarial post at the Vatican. Obtaining the money for the voyage back was not easy-"I am hunting everywhere to find some means of leaving here at someone else's expense," he wrote frankly-but eventually he cobbled enough together. He returned to Italy, having uncovered no lost bibliographic treasures and having had no appreciable impact on the English intellectual scene.

On May 12, 1425, he wrote to remind Niccoli that he wished to see the text he had sent him some eight years earlier: "I wanted the Lucretius for two weeks and no more but you want to copy that and Silius Italicus, Nonius Marcellus, and Cicero's Orations all in one breath," he wrote; "because you talk of everything you will accomplish nothing." After a month had gone by, he tried again on June 14, suggesting that he was not alone in his eagerness to read the poem: "If you send me the Lucretius you will be doing a favor to many people. I promise you not to keep the book more than one month and then it will come back to you." But another year pa.s.sed without any results; the wealthy collector seemed to feel that the best place for On the Nature of Things was on his own shelf, near the ancient cameos, the fragments of statues, and the precious gla.s.sware. There it sat, perhaps unread, a trophy. It was as if the poem had been reburied, now not in a monastery but in the humanist's gilded rooms.

In a letter sent on September 12, 1426, Poggio was still trying to recover it: "Send me the Lucretius too, which I should like to see for a little while. I shall send it back to you." Three years later, Poggio's patience was understandably wearing thin: "You have now kept the Lucretius for twelve years," he wrote on December 13, 1429; "it seems to me that your tomb will be finished sooner than your books will be copied." When he wrote again, two weeks later, impatience showed signs of giving way to anger, and, in a revealing slip of the pen, he exaggerated the number of years he had been waiting: "You have now kept the Lucretius for fourteen years and the Asconius Pedia.n.u.s too. . . . Does it seem just to you that, if I sometimes want to read one of these authors, I cannot on account of your carelessness? . . . I want to read Lucretius but I am deprived of his presence; do you intend to keep him another ten years?" Then he added, in a more cajoling note, "I urge you to send me either the Lucretius or the Asconius, which I shall have copied as soon as possible and then I shall send them back to you to keep as long as you like."

But finally-the actual date is unknown-it was done. Released from the confinement of Niccoli's rooms, On the Nature of Things slowly made its way once again into the hands of readers, about a thousand years after it had dropped out of sight. There is no trace of Poggio's own response to the poem he had relaunched, nor is anything known of Niccoli's reactions, but there are signs-ma.n.u.script copies, brief mentions, allusions, subtle marks of influence-that it began quietly to circulate, at first in Florence, and then beyond.

Back in Rome, Poggio had meanwhile picked up the familiar pieces of his existence in the papal court: conducting often lucrative business, exchanging cynical jokes with his fellow secretaries at the "Lie Factory," writing to humanist friends about the ma.n.u.scripts they coveted, quarrelling bitterly with rivals. In a busy life-the court rarely stayed in place for very long-he managed to find time to translate ancient texts from Greek to Latin, to make copies of old ma.n.u.scripts, and to write moral essays, philosophical reflections, rhetorical treatises, diatribes, and funeral orations on the friends-Niccol Niccoli, Lorenzo de' Medici, Cardinal Niccol Albergati, Leonardo Bruni, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini-who were pa.s.sing away.

He also managed to father children, many children, with his mistress Lucia Pannelli: they had, if contemporary accounts are accurate, twelve sons and two daughters. To take the scandalmongering of the times at face value would be rash, but Poggio himself acknowledged the existence of illegitimate children. When a cardinal with whom he was on good terms reproached him for the irregularity of his life, Poggio conceded his fault but added acerbically, "Do we not every day, and in all countries, meet with priests, monks, abbots, bishops, and dignitaries of a still higher order, who have families of children by married women, widows, and even by virgins consecrated to the service of G.o.d?"

As Poggio acc.u.mulated more money-and his tax records suggest that he did so with increasing success after his return from England-his life slowly began to change. He remained pa.s.sionately interested in the recovery of ancient texts, but his own voyages of discovery were behind him. In their place, he began to emulate his wealthy friend Niccoli by collecting antiquities: "I have a room full of marble heads," he boasted in 1427. In that same year Poggio purchased a house in Terranuova, the small town in Tuscany where he was born and where he would over the next years gradually increase his property holdings. He raised the money for the purchase, it was said, chiefly by copying a ma.n.u.script of Livy and selling it for the princely sum of 120 gold florins.

Poggio's debt-ridden father had once been forced to flee from the town; now Poggio contemplated creating there what he called his "Academy," to which he dreamed of someday retiring and living in style. "I fished out a marble bust of a woman, wholly undamaged, which I like very much," he wrote a few years later. "It was found one day when the foundations of some house were being dug. I took care to have it brought to me here and then to my little garden at Terra Nova, which I shall decorate with antiquities." About another cache of statues he purchased, he wrote that "when they arrive, I shall place them in my little gymnasium." Academy, garden, gymnasium: Poggio was recreating, at least in his fantasy, the world of the ancient Greek philosophers. And he was eager to confer upon it a high aesthetic polish. The sculptor Donatello, he remarks, saw one of the statues "and praised it highly."

All the same, Poggio's life was not perfectly settled and secure. At one point in 1433, when he was serving as apostolic secretary to Pope Eugenius IV (who had succeeded Martin V), there was a violent popular insurrection in Rome against the papacy. Disguised as a monk and leaving his followers to fend for themselves, the pope set out in a small boat on the Tiber to reach the port at Ostia, where a s.h.i.+p belonging to his Florentine allies awaited him. A mutinous crowd along the banks of the river recognized him and showered the boat with rocks, but the pope managed to escape. Poggio was not quite as fortunate: fleeing the city, he was captured by one of the bands of the pope's enemies. Negotiations for his release broke down, and he was eventually forced to ransom himself for a substantial sum of his own money.

But somehow each of these violent disruptions of his world was righted, sooner or later, and Poggio returned to his books and statues, his scholarly translations and quarrels, and the steady acc.u.mulation of wealth. The gradual changes in his life culminated in a momentous decision: on January 19, 1436, he married Vaggia di Gino Buondelmonti. Poggio was fifty-six years old; his bride eighteen. The marriage was not contracted for money but for a different form of cultural capital. The Buondelmonti were one of the ancient feudal families in Florence, a fact that Poggio-who wrote eloquently against taking pride in aristocratic bloodlines-manifestly loved. Against those who ridiculed his decision, he wrote a dialogue, "Should an Old Man Marry?" (An seni sit uxor ducenda). The predictable arguments, most of them charged with misogyny, are rehea.r.s.ed and are met with the predictable replies, many of them equally dubious. Hence-according to the anti-marriage interlocutor, who is none other than Niccol Niccoli-it is folly for any older man, let alone a scholar, to change his well-tried style of life for one that is inescapably alien and risky. His bride may prove to be peevish, morose, intemperate, s.l.u.ttish, lazy. If she is a widow, she will inevitably dwell on the happy times she had with her late husband; if she is a young maiden, she will almost certainly prove to be temperamentally unsuited to the gravity of her aging spouse. And if there are children, the old man will experience the bitter pain of knowing that he will leave them before they reach maturity.

But no-according to the pro-marriage interlocutor-a man of mature years will compensate for the inexperience and ignorance of a young wife whom he will be able to mold like wax to his will. He will temper her impetuous sensuality with his wise restraint, and if they are blessed with children, he will enjoy the reverence due to his advanced age. Why should he a.s.sume that his life must inevitably be cut short? And, for however many years he is granted, he will experience the unspeakable pleasure of sharing his life with someone he loves, a second self. Perhaps the most convincing moment comes when Poggio speaks in his own voice to say, with unusual simplicity, that he is very happy. Niccoli concedes that there may be exceptions to the pessimistic rule.

As it turned out, in an age of what by our standards was exceedingly low life expectancy, Poggio flourished, and he and Vaggia had what seems to have been a happy marriage, one that lasted almost a quarter of a century. They had five sons-Pietro Paolo, Giovanni Battista, Jacopo, Giovanni Francesco, and Filippo-and a daughter, Lucretia, all of whom survived into adulthood. Four of the five sons embarked on ecclesiastical careers; the exception, Jacopo, became a distinguished scholar. (Jacopo made the mistake of being caught up in the Pazzi conspiracy to a.s.sa.s.sinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici and was hanged in Florence in 1478.) The fate of Poggio's mistress and their fourteen children is not known. His friends congratulated the newly married Poggio on his good fortune and his moral rect.i.tude; his enemies circulated stories of his indifference to those he had thrown off. According to Valla, Poggio cruelly rescinded the procedure by which he had pet.i.tioned that four of the sons his mistress bore him be declared legitimate. The charge may be a malicious slander, of the kind rival humanists took vindictive pleasure in, but there is no indication that Poggio went out of his way to treat those he had abandoned with particular generosity or kindness.

As a layman, Poggio was not obliged to leave the papal court after his marriage. He continued to serve the pope, Eugenius IV, through long years of bitter conflict between the papacy and the Church councils, feverish diplomatic maneuvering, denunciations of heretics, military adventures, precipitous flights, and outright war. On Eugenius's death in 1447, Poggio continued on as apostolic secretary to his successor, Nicholas V.

This was the eighth pope whom he had served in this capacity, and Poggio, now in his later sixties, may have been growing weary. He was, in any case, pulled in different directions. His writing occupied an increasing amount of his time, and he had a growing family to attend to. Moreover, his wife's deep family ties to Florence intensified the links that he had always carefully maintained to what he claimed as his native city, a city to which he returned at least once a year. But in many ways his service to the new pope must have been deeply satisfying, for prior to his election, Nicholas V-whose secular name was Tommaso da Sarzana-had distinguished himself as a learned humanist. He was the embodiment of that project of education in cla.s.sical learning and taste to which Petrarch, Salutati, and other humanists had devoted themselves.

Poggio, who had met the future pope in Bologna and had come to know him well, had in 1440 dedicated to him one of his works, On the Unhappiness of Princes. Now, in the congratulatory epistle he hastened to send after the election, he a.s.sured the new pope that not all princes needed to be completely unhappy. To be sure, in his elevated position, he would not be able any longer to indulge himself in the joys of friends.h.i.+p and literature, but at least he would be able to "become the protector of men of genius and cause the liberal arts to raise their drooping heads." "Let me now entreat you, most holy father," Poggio added, "not to forget your ancient friends, of which number I profess myself to be one."

In the event, though the reign of Nicholas V was highly gratifying, it was not perhaps as perfectly idyllic as the apostolic secretary might have dreamed. During this period Poggio had his grotesque scuffle with George of Trebizond, complete with screams and blows. He must have been vexed as well that the pope, as if taking seriously the injunction to be the patron of men of genius, chose as another of the apostolic secretaries his bitter enemy Lorenzo Valla. Poggio and Valla promptly embarked on a vitriolic public quarrel, mingling snide comments about each other's mistakes in Latin with still nastier remarks about hygiene, s.e.x, and family.

The ugliness of these quarrels must have intensified the dream of retirement that Poggio had been toying with since he had purchased the house in Terranuova and begun to collect ancient fragments. And the retirement project was not only his private fantasy; he was at this point in his life famous enough as a book hunter, scholar, writer, and papal official to command the attention of a broader public. He had carefully cultivated friends in Florence, marrying into an important family and allying himself with the interests of the Medici. Though he had lived and worked in Rome for most of his adult life, the Florentines were happy to claim him as one of their own. The Tuscan government pa.s.sed a public revenue bill in his favor, noting that he had declared his intention eventually to retire to his native land and to dedicate the remainder of his time on earth to study. Whereas his literary pursuits would not permit him to acquire the wealth that came to those engaged in commerce, the bill declared, he and his children should thenceforth be exempted from the payment of all public taxes.

In April 1453, Carlo Marsuppini, the chancellor of Florence, died. Marsuppini was an accomplished humanist; at the time of his death, he was translating the Iliad into Latin. The office was no longer the actual locus of state power: the consolidation of Medici power had reduced the political significance of the chancellors.h.i.+p. Many years had pa.s.sed since Salutati's command of cla.s.sical rhetoric had seemed critical to the survival of the republic. But the pattern had been set for the Florentine post to be held by a distinguished scholar, including two terms by Poggio's old friend, the immensely gifted historian Leonardo Bruni.

The remuneration was generous and the prestige high. Florence conferred upon its humanist chancellors all the marks of respect and honor that the buoyant, self-loving city felt were its own due. Chancellors who died in office were honored with elaborate state funerals, surpa.s.sing those of any other citizen of the republic. When Poggio, seventy-three years old, was offered the vacant position, he accepted. For more than fifty years, he had worked at the court of an absolute monarch; now he would return as the t.i.tular leader of a city that prided itself on its history of civic freedom.

Poggio served as chancellor of Florence for five years. The chancellors.h.i.+p evidently did not function entirely smoothly under his leaders.h.i.+p; he seems to have neglected the lesser duties of the office. But he attended to his symbolic role, and he made time to work on the literary projects he had pledged himself to pursue. In the first of these projects, a somber two-volume dialogue on The Wretchedness of the Human Condition, the conversation moves from a specific disaster-the fall of Constantinople to the Turks-to a general review of the catastrophes that befall virtually all men and women of every cla.s.s and profession and in all times. One of the interlocutors, Cosimo de' Medici, suggests that an exception might be made for popes and princes of the Church who certainly seem to live lives of extraordinary luxury and ease. Speaking in his own voice, Poggio replies: "I am a witness (and I lived with them for fifty years) that I have found no one who seemed in any way happy to himself, who did not bemoan that life as harmful, disquieting, anxious, oppressed with many cares."

The unremitting gloominess of the dialogue could make it seem that Poggio had entirely succ.u.mbed to late-life melancholy, but the second of the works of this period, presented to the same Cosimo de' Medici, suggests otherwise. Drawing on the Greek he had first learned more than a half century earlier, Poggio translated (into Latin) Lucian of Samosta's richly comic novel The a.s.s, a magical tale of witchcraft and metamorphosis. And for his third enterprise, moving in still a different direction, he undertook to write an ambitious, highly partisan History of Florence from the mid-fourteenth century to his own time. The remarkable range of the three projects-the first seemingly suitable for a medieval ascetic, the second for a Renaissance humanist, the third for a patriotic civic historian-suggests the complexity both of Poggio's own character and of the city he represented. To the Florentine citizens of the fifteenth century the distinct strains seemed closely bound together, parts of a single, complex cultural whole.

In April 1458, shortly after his seventy-eighth birthday, Poggio resigned, declaring that he wished to pursue his studies and writing as a private citizen. His death followed eighteen months later, on October 30, 1459. Since he had resigned his office, the Florentine government could not give him a grand state funeral, but they buried him with appropriate ceremony in the Church of Santa Croce and hung his portrait, by An