We are all connected, and when we die, our atoms go off to join other atoms elsewhere. We are free, liberated by the unpredictability of the swerve, as are all living things. If gods exist at all, they are uninterested in us.

Humans are made of atoms too, including our souls. (The original texts of both philosophers also didn’t make it, as a surgeon might say with a sad shake of the head in a TV drama we know them only secondhand.) We can add that he was a disciple of Epicurus, who lived 250 years earlier, and hence of the even earlier Democritus, whose theory of atoms underlay Epicurean ideas. Jerome: that he was born in 94 B.C., went mad as the result of a love potion and killed himself at 43. In “The Swerve,” the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt investigates why his book nearly died, how it was saved and what its rescue means to us.Ībout Lucretius himself, we have little more to go on than the lurid story told by the fourth-century church father St. Yet Lucretius almost went the way of Didymus. It covers philosophy, physics, optics, cosmology, sociology, psychology, religion and sex the ideas in it influenced Newton and Darwin, among others. Titus Lucretius Carus’ “De Rerum Natura,” or “On the Nature of Things,” is a 7,400-line poem in Latin hexameters written in the first century B.C. Bookworms have eaten them by the dictionary-load.Īmong the works that survived - but only just - is one so beautifully written and so uncannily prescient that it seems to come to us out of a personal dream. They have been rubbed off so that vellum and papyrus could be reused. They have been burned, thrown away, lost to mold or pulverized. Between classical antiquity and us, there has been a hecatomb of words. Didymus Chalcenterus of Alexandria reportedly wrote 3,500 books not one exists today.

Aeschylus wrote 80 or 90 plays, and Sophocles 120, yet we have just seven of each.

The swerve lucretius