Present-Day Epicureans and Stoics in Academia

At around 6:45 in this podcast of The Majority Report with Sam Seder,



Nathan J Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs (a wonderful magazine, by the way) says:

"There is a kind of sense among many academics that engaging with the public is something that is at best optional, and at worst, actually, almost anti-intellectual."

Sam and Nathan are discussing how it is that pseudo-intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are able to pass themselves off as geniuses and have great success engaging with the public. Nathan points to the disconnect between academic journals and more popular media, and the resulting lack of push-back against frauds and/or fools (it isn't always easy to see which is which) like Peterson and Harris. Many academics, Nathan is saying, see their task as involving academic journals and book publishers in their specialty, and their lives as being located in somewhat closed communities of their peers, and are quite simply not particularly interested in, or are even disdainful of, the wider public. Their ivory towers can be quite comfortable, quite blissfully calm compared to the strife of public life and politics, and they can see little reason to venture outside.

In short, many of them are Epicureans.

There are other academics who actively fight against the sort of nonsense being spread by people like Peterson and Harris, and like Stephen Greenblatt, at least when Greenblatt ventures outside of his specialty of English Renaissance literature, and spreads sheer hair-raising nonsense about ancient Latin literature and its transmission, as he does in his huge bestseller The Swerve. The ones who try to stand up for academia in public, who denounce the charlatans and half-wits posing as intellectuals, are thoroughly Stoic in their outlook: the work of their disciplines is important, they feel, and it is important that the public not be grossly misinformed about it.

Nathan J Robinson, somewhat plugged into the academic world, has spoken to neuroscientists and asked them what they think of Sam Harris, and found that often they have never heard of Harris. This is somewhat surprising in that Harris is the most famous living neuroscientist in the world, and somewhat distressing in that he has sold millions of copies of books full of positions on neuroscience which have little to no credibility among those neuroscientists who have bothered to look into Harris' work. (Harris, with a BA in philosophy from Stanford in 2000 and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA in 2009, has published a total of 2 peer-reviewed papers as well as his 7 "popular" books.) Similarly, Jordan Peterson has sold millions of books in which he pretends to be expert not only in his academic specialty of psychology, but also in philosophy and evolutionary biology and other fields as well, and, similar to Harris when it comes to philosophy or neuroscience, and similar to Greenblatt on the subject of ancient Latin literature and its transmission, Peterson rarely says or writes anything with which a scholar competent in those fields would agree.

Some academics seem, at least at first blush, to be Epicureans and Stoics at the same time. For example, Bart Ehrman is a respected specialist in the history of early Christianity who has published well-received scholarly papers and books, and has also published "popular" books aimed at the general public, which offer a sort of watered-down version of his "academic" books: no footnotes, less detail.

Such a split of one and the same scholar into "academic" and "popular" publishing, gives short shrift to the Stoic side. It implies that the public can't really handle the good stuff, unadulterated. It contains a bit of the contemptuousness of the Epicurean.

I have often been greatly tempted to follow the Epicurean path, and leave the big dumb ugly world to blow itself up. And perhaps I'm a fool not to have followed that path. Who can truly say how much we change the world, how much of the grim effort to change the world is a waste? Be that as it may: as a Stoically-minded person outside of academia, but with great interest in academia, I wish more academics would attempt to shine more of the full light of their learning into the public arena, both to expose pseudo-intellectuals to whom many of them have until now abandoned the stoa, the public marketplace of ideas, and also to be more sharing with the full delight of truly learned discourse.

Stephen Greenblatt and New Atheism

It took me a while, but I finally noticed the link between a recent source of aggravation, Stephen Greenblatt

and his profoundly misinformative and hugely popular book The Swerve,



and that earlier source of annoyance, those avid consumers and champions of misinformation, the New Atheists.

I had separated myself from the New Atheists. It was amazingly easy to do: I simply stopped seeking them out, and, to my amazement and immense relief, I rarely came across any of them any more. There was a whole big wonderful world out there which was almost entirely free of them. Almost.

New Atheists are atheists who believe that religion is the source of most or actually all of the world's problems, and who constantly talk and write about religion in this vein while being very careful never to learn anything about it. The classic example is Richard Dawkins, who is constantly going on and on about how Islam is the greatest threat to the world, and has never read the Koran and never will and is freakin' proud of it. New Atheists are constantly discussing a fictitious story about early Christianity and the creation of the Bible, while being very careful never to read more than a dozen or so verses of the Bible specially selected for their awfulness, or to learn anything about the ancient Mediterranean world in which Christianity and the Bible first arose. They live in an echo chamber, only "learning" about the ancient Mediterranean world from each other, distrusting any and all actual experts.

I don't know whether Stephen Greenblatt is a New Atheist or has even heard of New Atheism, but how could New Atheists not love Stephen Greenblatt and his book The Swerve, which is so full of inaccurately hostile denunciations of Christianity?

I don't mind denunciations of Christianity -- I've written a few myself -- but I greatly prefer those which are factually accurate. Like this one, a positively furious book-length denunciation of Christianty which cuts much deeper than any New Atheists have dreamed of doing, although it is much less clumsily broad than their attacks: Der Antichrist,



written by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had been appointed a full professor of Classics at the University of Basel at the astonishingly young age of 24. He was very well-versed in the literature of the ancient world in which Christianity and the Bible arose. At age 44, writing Der Antichrist, Nietzsche referred often to the New Testament in the original ancient Greek, although he found the Greek New Testament to be very badly-written, and reading it to be a very unpleasant experience. Nietzsche never was interested in taking the easy path, or so his writings make it seem. He was a scrupulous author, concerned, to a very unusual degree, that the things he wrote made sense. He wanted to make sure that his book about Christianity contained no inaccurately hostile denunciations, only accurate ones.

Nietzsche wrote Der Antichrist in 1888, an extraordinarily productive year for him as a writer. (Was he hurrying because he felt the end of his sanity approaching?) This one book was written between the 3rd and the 30th of September, and then he went right on to other things, until the 3rd day of January, 1889, when he went suddenly, thoroughly and permanently insane, perhaps from the effects of a decades-old case of syphilis overpowering his brain at last. Or perhaps he went mad from exasperation at so many people who spoke and wrote on the topics he cared about, without bothering to be well-informed. Like the many people who've been glad to discuss Nietzsche with me, who've never read anything Nietzsche wrote. (What on Earth did they suppose they were discussing?) Like Greenblatt and the New Atheists, so eager to discuss things like Medieval monasteries and atheist philosophy, and so determined not to learn about them. What do they actually imagine they're talking about?

And what should I do about it? Simply avoiding New Atheism certainly has been comfortable. But maybe, ultimately, as thoroughly atheist as I am, I can't be completely comfortable just sitting back and watching religious forms of stupidity be replaced by equally stupid atheist ones. Maybe, as sweetly tempting as it is, I'm just not as Epicurean as that.

Gee, I hope this doesn't drive me completely and permanently mad.

Mary Beard and Stephen Greenblatt

This has been bothering me ever since I first held in my hands a copy of The Swerve, the hugely-acclaimed book by Stephen Greenblatt about the ancient Roman Epicurian philosopher Lucretius and his book-length poem de rerum natura, and Poggio, the 15th-century scribe who stumbled across a copy of it, and noticed one of the blurbs on the dust jacket.

I do not know very much about Mary Beard. She is Professor of Classics at Cambridge, Professor of Ancient Literature at the Royal Academy, and the Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Many of her fellow Classicists revere and positively adore her.

On the other hand -- if we may believe the dust jacket of The Swerve --



-- she is the person who wrote:

“A wonderfully engaging book starring two often forgotten heroes of Western culture: the Roman poet Lucretius, who argued that the world was made up of atoms and that fear of death was foolish, and Poggio Bracciolini, whose rediscovery of Lucretius's great poem launched all kinds of radical intellectual inquiry into the modern world. Another triumph for Stephen Greenblatt."

Alright: Lucretius, often forgotten? Onward.

I have long known that not every blurb on every dust jacket was written by someone who actually read the book in question. In the past several years I have had to accept the fact that such mendacity is perpetrated not only by hack book reviewers in mainstream media, but also occasionally by academics whom I greatly respect. In Robinson Jeffer's words: "Be angry at the sun for setting/If these things anger you."

I do get angry at the sun for setting, now and then. I wonder whether Jeffers sometimes did too.

I'm sure that Mary Beard is not the only Classicist ever to have accorded The Swerve more than very faint praise -- in fact, I have a feeling that if I continue to carry on in this manner, I may hear directly from some others -- but she is the only one I can think of, and I have looked around a bit.

The problem is, I'm not sure which should upset me more: that Professor Beard would write such a thing about a book she hadn't read, or that she would write such a thing about The Swerve after actually having read it.

No, that's a lie: the latter would upset me much, much more. It would be a great relief to learn that Beard had not read The Swerve, that compendium of completely misleading assertions about Epicurism, atomism, Lucretius, Poggio, textual transmission and many other things, at the time when the above blurb was written. Or that she had authorized someone else to write the blurb in her name, and then forgot about the matter entirely.

It was with tremendous reluctance, after years' worth of acquaintances telling me all sorts of absurd things which they had "learned" from The Swerve -- Lucretius and Poggio ushered in the Renaissance?! De rerum natura came within a hair's breadth of being lost forever?! -- that I finally read it myself. I really ought to read an entire book or two by Beard before I diss her -- but that blurb on Greenblatt's book makes me really, really not want to.

There are -- how many? hundreds of thousands? millions? of people running around loose today, who believe that Epicurus came up with the theory of atoms, that Epicurian philosophy would have been forgotten without Lucretius, that atomism would have been forgotten without Lucretius, that the ancient Classics were not studied in the Middle Ages, that Lucretius's book went unread for a thousand years, that it would be unknown today except for Poggio, that it only just barely survived, and other things which are completely, 100% untrue, all because of that one God-damned, best-selling, hugely-awarded book by Greenblatt, with that blurb on its dust jacket by perhaps the single most pre-eminent Classical scholar living today.

I am angry at the sun. I am angry at the world and the way that it is.

David Butterfield on the Early Textual Transmission of Lucretius

Textual transmission is the means by which a text -- for example, de rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), a book-length Latin poem of Epicurian philosophy written in the 1st century BC by a man named Lucretius, his only surviving work -- has been passed along -- in Lucretius' case, manuscripts written in the 9th century BC were copied into other manuscripts in the 15th century, and printed editions have been made based on various manuscripts. This is called the direct tradition. In addition, other authors have quoted or described passages from Lucretius poem: this is referred to as the indirect tradition.

In this blog post, I criticized Stephen Greenblatt for including grossly misleading and just plain inaccurate statements about the textual transmission of de rerum natura in his book The Swerve.



Although reading The Swerve was a very disappointing and upsetting experience for me, all the more so because so very many readers who know even less about ancient Latin literature than I do have assumed that Greenblatt knows much more about it than he obviously does, it led me eventually to another book which I positively love: The Early Textual History of Lucretuius' De Rerum Natura.



It is hard to imagine 2 books about the same book which would be more dissimilar than Greenblatt's book and Butterfield's. The Swerve is a very popular book, full of wild exaggerations, reckless speculation and plain inaccuracies, while The Early Textual History of Lucretuius' De Rerum Natura is definitely not for most readers. It is very radically limited to statements which Butterfield can support with exhaustive evidence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I'm sure Butterfield would agree; however, in this book he strictly limits himself to that for which he build a solid case. It seems that even compared to many of his colleagues in Classical Studies, Butterfield is very conservative in stating evidence for the transmission of Lucretius.

And yet, what is left over after Butterfield is done rejecting evidence which he deems not sound enough, still presents a picture of a much greater readership of and interaction with Lucretius' poem than that presented by Greenblatt, who carelessly dismisses a thousand years between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance in which, he says, Lucretius was forgotten.

First of all, there are the manuscripts, both those which we still have, and those whose existence the extremely-cautious Butterfield confidently posits.

And I must not go any further before assuring you that I am not a Classicist, nor a scholarly editor, and cannot yet follow Butterfield in all the details of his arguments for the previous existence of manuscripts of de rerum natura. (I've included the modifier "yet" because I intend to re-read Butterfield's book over and over, because I enjoy doing so, and also to consult many of the works Butterfield mentions in his footnotes, so that I may eventually understand him more fully than I now do.) Rather than go into too much detail and risk mis-representing what Butterfield says, I will try to keep it simple, and if there's actually anyone reading this who cares to investigate the matter further, but hasn't yet read Butterfield's book, he or she can read Butterfield's book.

And yes: some of the Latin names of codices below are abbreviated, in the same form as they appear on p 32 of Butterfield, because after I thought it over, I decided that if I tried to write out the full names I would probably mis-spell some. I admit it. I ain't frontin'.

First, the direct transmission: We currently have 3 9th-century manuscripts of Lucretius: the most significant one was written early in the 9th century, on pages which are oblong in shape, and has therefore come to be referred to as O; another, from the late 9th century, is written on square pages and is called Q, from the Latin quadratus, meaning square; and finally there are 3 fragments of another manuscript from the late 9th century, fragments which, together, Butterfield calls S, after the Latin schedae, meaning fragments.

In addition, Butterfield feels that 6 more manuscripts, now missing, written between the 8th and around the 12th century, can be confidently posited:

-- Ω, an 8th-century manuscript from which O was copied;

-- Ψ, also called the Cod. Sang. mid-9th century, copied from Ω, and from which in turn both Q and S were copied;

-- the Codex Dungali, copied from O in the 9th or 10th century;

-- the Cod. Murbac., or Poggianus, the copy which Poggio, a hero of Greenblatt's, found in "some German monastery" (Poggie was not more specific than that in his letter describing the find), copied from O in the 9th or 10th century;

-- the Cod. Corb., copied from Q, possibly in the 12th century; and

-- the Cod. Lobbes, unrelated to any of the others, copied in the 12th century.

So, there are 9 manuscripts of Lucretious' poem, right smack in the middle of the era when, according to Greenblatt, Lucretius was unknown. Plus whatever the Cod. Lobbes was copied from.

In Butterfield's opinion, all of the manuscripts from the 15th century or later were copies, or copies of copies, etc, of Poggianus, although one of them could have been correcting using O.

Next, the indirect transmission: Between the 1st century BC and the 10th century AD, Butterfield says (p 100), "Fifty-five different Latin authors cited 492 different Lucretian verses in full or in part."

In addition, there are 16 fragments which at various times have been thought to have been parts of Lucretius' poem not found in the direct transmission. The skeptical Butterfield says we do have sufficient evidence to regard any of them as actual quotations from Lucretius.

And then there is a very long and very remarkable footnote, pp 286-288, note 1 of Appendix II, in which Butterfiled discusses about a dozen authors who quote Lucretius between the end of the 10th century and Poggio's discovery in 1417, who in Butterfield's opinion could have been quoting from the indirect tradition and not from manuscripts of the entire poem; and about a dozen more who other scholars have said were acquainted with Lucretius, but, according to Butterfield, with insufficient evidence.

The more I learn about Poggio, who according to Greenblatt ushered in the Renaissance by discovering the Poggianus or Cod. Murbac., the less I like him. He seems to me to have been pathologically ill-mannered. Many have taken him to have been badly-disposed toward monks and monasteries, but maybe he just hated everybody, and it only seems that he hated monks because he had mostly to do with monks and monasteries, because monasteries were where most of the manuscripts were which he was looking for. Maybe if he had been a clockmaker instead of a Classical scholar, he would've poured all of that verbal abuse onto his customers, and we never would have heard about it because he would have written far fewer letters, and they all would have been lost.

Speaking of pieces of writing being lost: for a while I thought of accusing Poggio of actually having impeded the process of Classical Studies, because again and again I read of him finding some old manuscript (old in his own time) which was then lost. But as I studied further I saw that Poggio was hardly unique in this regard. For example, look at the 6 now-lost Lucretian manuscripts described above: only 1 passed through Poggio's hands before being lost.

Reviewing Butterfield's book in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Lisa Piazzi remarks, "Probably only a few specialists will read it from beginning to end." A few specialists and at least 1 oddball autistic blogger. And perhaps 2 or 3 of you will have found this blog post interesting.

Stephen Greenblatt's Swerve is Not as Accurate as One Might Wish

It's annoying, if you've spent a lot of time and effort carefully writing something, if a reviewer comments in a way which makes it clear that the reviewer has either not read your work at all carefully, or has not read it all. It's happened to me a few times. I don't like it at all.

The Recognitions, by William Gaddis,



is now generally regarded as one of the finest novels ever written by an American. But when it was published in 1955, and for some years after that, it was not generally so regarded. In 1962, a man who, under the pseudonym jack green, wrote and published an "underground" periodical called newspaper, presented in that publication his assessment of the first 55 reviews of The Recognitions. The title of the piece was green's suggestion about what should happen with these book critics: "fire the bastards!"



When green took on Gaddis' critics, he had an enormous advantage over almost all of them: he had actually read The Recognitions, carefully and all the way through. In almost half of the 55 reviews green pointed out mistaken assertions about what happened in the plot; he was even able to prove that one review had been stolen from another. "fire the bastards!" also shows that green considered The Recognitions to be a masterpiece.

In 2017, after both Gaddis and green have been dead for decades, Gaddis' reputation as a writer is as high as it can be, and green's is not bad. I would warn against taking this as proof that many people have actually read either Gaddis or green. I would not assume, necessarily, that most of the copies of their works which have been printed, have also been read. Still, however well-founded or unfounded they may be, their current high reputations are well-deserved, so, good.

The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt,



was published in 2011 and won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. It's the story of how in the early 15th century, the Italian humanist and discoverer of lost ancient texts Poggio Bracciolini -- usually referred to today by his first name only, like Dante Alighieri, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Prince Rogers Nelson and Madonna Ciccone -- discovered a manuscript of de rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), the book of Epicurean philosophy written in the 1st century BC by the Roman poet Lucretius.

Someone online -- I don't remember exactly who or where or when. It may have been on Facebook, and it may have been shortly after the book was published -- recommended The Swerve to me in rapturous tones. His description of it made me suspicious: he told me that the book told the story of how the re-discovery of Lucretius ushered in the modern age. My first reaction was that that story was a bit cuckoo-bananas. Not that I had anything against Lucretius or Poggio. On the contrary, Lucretius was and is one of my favorite authors, and Poggio was known to me as a prominent Renaissance humanist.

But I also knew that Lucretius was just one of many brilliant Classical authors, Poggio just one of the many brilliant Classical scholars of the Renaissance, and that Poggio coming across that manuscript of Lucretius was just one of many important finds of Classical literature made in the 15th century, as well as before and since.

And for some reason, just lately I started to think about Greenblatt's book again, and I searched for reviews of it, and found one layman after another, apparently trusting that Greenblatt was an authority on these matters, and astonished at how one discovery of a manuscript had changed the whole world. Let me not forget to point out that, in situations like this, when people refer to "the whole world," they mean the Western European world and its colonizing outposts.

But I hastened to remind myself that I hadn't read Greenblatt's book yet, and to ask myself whether Greenblatt had actually said anything like what these reviewers said he said.

So next I searched for reactions to The Swerve by Classicists, by the experts in the field of ancient Latin, and I found that most of those reactions were negative.

Often polite and negative, as Classicists often are when referring to written work they don't like: for example, in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Diana Robin, reviewing Gerard Passannante's book The Lucretian Renaissance, says that it "provides a counter- weight to The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt’s new and breezy but factually challenged account of the rediscovery of the De rerum natura." If there's one way in which one wouldn't want a book of history to be challenged, I think it would be factually.

Anthony Grafton, reviewing The Swerve in the New York Review of Books, politely laments: “The Swerve is not always as accurate as one would wish.”

In his review of The Swerve, the blogger known as Baerista notes that remark by Grafton, and adds: "From a world-class scholar like Grafton, who is widely known as an extremely generous man, always careful to wrap even the faintest criticism in a wadding of praise, such clear-cut words can be taken as the verbal equivalent to a bitchslap." Baerista himself is less restrained,
summing up his account of The Swerve by calling it "garbage."

Tim O'Neill's review -- not overly polite -- accuses Greenblatt of wanting to have his cake and eat it too. It contains rather more and lengthier quotations from The Swerve than any of the other reviews I've read so far, and shows how Greenblatt gives lay people those silly notions about one discovery of one ancient author changing "the whole world" (that is, Western civilization), but then claims that he never intended to spread such mistaken notions. O'Neill charges: "Greenblatt's book is full of this kind of thing. After pages and pages of making a point, often more by broad assertion, generalisation or even insinuation, he will slip in a brief 'escape clause' sentence which shows that he knows what he is saying can be challenged or which even undermines what he has just presented completely. But he does so very quietly and many or even most general readers would not notice or understand the import of these asides. Certainly few of his reviewers did so."

After reading O'Neill's review, I concluded, with very little enthusiasm, that I needed to read The Swerve myself and see if, perhaps, it was a little better than its detractors said. Which would mean that that National Book Award and that Pulitzer Prize wouldn't be so much of a joke.

It's just as bad as its detractors say.

But there's a hint of a book which might have been good: The Swerve opens with a moving account of how Greenblatt, as a student, found a copy of an English translation of de rerum natura in a campus co-op, and how its Epicurian message that there is nothing to fear in death was so transformative for Greenblatt and some of his loved ones.

Greenblatt loves Lucretius. And there's nothing wrong with love. Love is great, love is good, love is a huge positive force.

Could there have been a good book here, if Greenblatt stayed focused on his own personal story, and the importance of Lucretius in that story, instead of making silly claims about Lucretius transforming "the world" and Poggio's discovery of Lucretius miraculously saving his poem from being lost forever -- only to cover his ass again and again, just as O'Neill accuses him of doing, so that he can claim that he never meant to give all of those erroneous notions to all of those laypeople (which didn't prevent those erroneous notions from spreading)?

Some of Greenblatt's harshest critics -- Catholic clergymen in some cases -- accuse him of painting a ridiculously negative view of the Middle Ages, only to err themselves a bit by painting a too positive view. The Middle Ages were a mixed bag. Some individual people did embody the superstitious hostility to everything non-Christian which Greenblatt emphasizes in his portrayal of Poggio's view of the Middle Ages -- one of the 'escape clauses' derided by O'Neill is that Greenblatt can claim that he only said that Poggio thought that the Middle Ages were horrible and superstitious, not that he agreed with Poggio -- and some Medieval individuals exemplify the sophisticated scholarship which, according to apologists, was the essence of Medieval Christianity.

But to get away from the sweeping generalizations which have caused so much praise and so much condemnation of The Swerve, to more specific statements, the book gets low marks. Greenblatt really does completely miss much of the Classical scholarship which thrived in the Middle Ages, along with his unrelenting emphasis on the Inquisition and the flagellants. But of course, the Inquisition and the brilliant scholarship both still existed, just as people were still tried and burnt as witches, during the same Renaissance which produced all of those famous Italian geniuses, just as today there still are cultured geniuses alongside ignorant fanatics.

To Poggio and his fellow Renaissance humanists, the most important ancient writer of Latin, far more important than Vergil, who came in second there, was not Lucretius, it was Cicero. Cicero was so highly thought of that the ridiculous notion spread among Renaissance scholars that the best way to write Latin was to consciously imitate Cicero. This was the mainstream view among Poggio's contemporaries. This recent collection of letters and polemics published by the i tatti Renaissance Library, Ciceronian Controversies, with the original 15th-, 16th- and 17th-century Latin texts on the left and English translations on the facing right-hand pages,



shows how far ahead Cicero was than all the other ancients in the general opinion of Renaissance Classicists, and what an uphill battle any of them had who thought that imitating Cicero was not the best of all possible ways to write.

If Lucretius was as central to Machiavelli's work as Greenblatt claims, why did Machiavelli write an entire book about Livy and none about Lucretius? If you asked Greenblatt this, I think he might well answer that Lucretius was dangerous, so that his influence had to be hidden. Which is ridiculous, both in general and in the specific case of Machiavelli, who was anything but bashful in his writing.

Speaking of Livy, Greenblatt claims that Livy's entire work was gathered together by Petrarch (1304-74). Does Greenblatt even realize that 106.9 of the 142 books of Livy's work, ab urbe condita, a history of Rome, are missing today? Or that 5 of the books we have today were missing until 1527? Or that Petrarch, although he was a great editor of Livy, had no need to gather Livy's works together, because they -- the 30 books known at the time -- were all quite well-known? One thing's certain: laypeople won't learn any of that by reading Greenblatt.

Speaking of editing, does Greenblatt have any idea that one of the most stupendous acts of Classical editing was performed with the manuscripts of -- you guessed it -- Lucretius, in the mid-19th century, when Bernays and Lachmann proved, on the basis of the existing manuscripts of Lucretius, that they all stemmed from one 5th-century manuscript written in all caps?

Speaking of manuscripts: in another of O'Neill's "escape clauses," Greenblatt admits that he knows that two manuscripts of Lucretius' entire poem, plus additional fragments, were written in the 9th century. But did he give any thought as to why they were written then? It was because Charlemagne (742-814) began a huge program of preserving and copying Classical manuscripts. Yes, there was a huge 9th-century surge in Classical studies. It's sometimes referred to as the Carolingian Renaissance. There was another surge in the 12th century. (My theory -- supported by no-one else that I know of -- is that this 12th-century revival of Classical learning in Western Europe, also sometimes referred to as a Renaissance, occurred in part because a lot of the most pious types were far away in the Crusades, allowing those back at home much more freedom to do what they felt like, whether it was study Classical Latin or sing bawdy troubador songs or play chess, to name three things sometimes frowned upon by the more intolerant Christians.) Is Greenblatt entirely quiet about these Medieval surges in Classical scholarship because they don't fit comfortably into his narrative, or merely because he's never heard of them? [PS, 22 November 2017: I was wrong, Greenblatt does mention the Carolingian Renaissance: "In addition to the fifteenth-century Renaissance, there had been other moments of intense interest in antiquity, both throughout medieval Italy and in the kingdoms of the north, including the great Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth century" (p 116). Great, Greenblatt calls it -- but not great enough that Greenblatt describes it in any further detail. It only gets one other mention in the book, entirely in passing: "the time of Charlemagne, when there was a crucial burst of interest in ancient books" (p 12). "Moments." "a burst." Greenblatt implies that these times of interest in ancient Latin were so brief that if you blinked you might have missed them, the way that I missed Greenblatt's reference to the Carolingian Renaissance in my first reading of his book because, frankly, I was bored.]

The manuscript of Lucretius which Poggio found in 1417 has been proven -- by the Classical scholars who don't think much of Greenblatt -- to have been copied from a copy of O, one of those 9th-century manuscripts which still survive today. The manuscript Poggio found has disappeared. We don't know how many other Medieval manuscripts of Lucretius there may have been. I don't know how, in the face of these manuscripts, Greenblatt can say (p 209 of the 2011 Norton hardcover edition of The Swerve) that, in the 15th century, and all because of Poggio, "On the Nature of Things slowly made its way again into the hands of readers, about a thousand years after it had dropped out of sight." About a thousand years. How can he say that, when people today can literally hold some 9th-century evidence directly to the contrary in their hands, evidence which Greenblatt mentions in the same book? I don't know. Maybe this book was actually written by a committee, and the various members didn't read each other's work. Maybe Greenblatt thinks it was "about a thousand years" from the 9th century to the 15th. Maybe he thinks that no Medieval manuscript of Lucretius was read before 1417, that the Medieval copies were without exception simply copied and then immediately put onto shelves for rotting purposes. (He not only doesn't equate copying a manuscript with reading its text, he actually claims that it was better if scribes paid no attention to what they were copying.) You know what, I don't want to know how Greenblatt could have said that.

Speaking of things Greenblatt may or may not have heard of -- Horace, well-known throughout the Middle Ages, was an Epicurean. This significantly undercuts Greenblatt's thesis that Lucretius re-introduced Epicurianism to "the world." Cicero, overly well-known from his day to the present, if you ask me, (I don't like Cicero. Would I like him more if he weren't so ridiculously overpraised in comparison to many other ancient Latin writers? Well, that's an alternate-universe type question which may never be answered, like the one about whether Greenblatt's book might have been better if he had been more personal.) discussed Epicureanism, albeit negatively.

Oh, and just one more thing: on p 111 of Scribes & Scholars by L D Reynolds & N G Wilson, 2nd ed, 1974, it sez:

"Lovato knew Lucretius and Valerius Flaccus a century and a half before they were discovered by Poggio."

Lovato Lovati. 1241-1309.

Just because you never heard of something before you stumble across it doesn't necessarily mean you really discovered it. Boom, I'm out.