As a moralist, Lucretius thus argues for a tepid sort of vegetable life, an almost quietist routine that might appeal to a sexagenarian but hardly at all to a 20-year-old. Certainly, his conviction that one should “live unknown” is fundamentally at odds with the entire Renaissance, the motto of which might be, as art historian Michael Levey once remarked, “Every man his own Tamburlaine.” Despite the impulse to flee the madding crowd, a pastoral ideal that runs throughout history, from Theocritus to Thoreau, shouldn’t a fully human life actually embrace a whole lot of interesting trouble? We strive, struggle and suffer because we are engaged, or ought to be engaged, with enterprises that demand our all. Humankind’s great heroes are overreachers, not retirees.
To those who have never read much classical literature or know little about the Renaissance, “The Swerve” may well seem fresh, even though it trots out one historical golden oldie after another: an account of the destruction of the ancient library at Alexandria, the organization of a monastic scriptorium, a lengthy summary of Thomas More’s “Utopia.” While one can usually see the connection to Lucretius (or to the book hunter Bracciolini), a sense of the scattershot, of elegant padding, remains: Greenblatt tells us more than seems relevant concerning, say, the Roman book trade, as he takes every possible opportunity to meander away from his thesis about “how the world became modern.”
The true heart of “The Swerve” lies in three chapters, two focused on Bracciolini’s life and the other a list — in bold face, with bullets — of Lucretius’s major philosophical assertions, with a declamatory emphasis on their apparent modernity. Good stuff certainly, and yet one might do just as well to read Bracciolini’s own letters in the semi-classic “Two Renaissance Book Hunters” (edited and translated by Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan), while most of what Greenblatt says about Lucretius can be found in the introduction to any good English version of “On the Nature of Things.” (That by the poet A.E. Stallings is particularly engaging.) One could even go to the source and read Lucretius directly, the best plan of all. Greenblatt’s excellent notes and bibliography can be relied upon as guides to the scholarship.
It’s doubtless clear that “The Swerve” rubbed me wrong, and, as I read, I kept wondering why, since this is just the sort of cultural history I usually like. Some reasons have already been mentioned, but ultimately I found the book strangely unserious. The prose was clear but lacking energy, the covered material largely consisted of borrowed finery, and the whole felt uncomfortably like an attempt to create a nonfiction pot-boiler in the shallow mold of “How the Irish Saved Civilization.” By no means a bad book, “The Swerve” simply sets its intellectual bar too low, complacently relying on commonplaces in its historical sections and never engaging in an imaginative or idiosyncratic way with Lucretius’s great poem as a work of art.
Dirda reviews books for The Post every Thursday. Join his discussion at wapo.st/reading-room.
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