From where do you think Galileo Galilee, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Jefferson drew inspiration for their revolutionary scientific, psychological, or political ideas that changed modern thinking forever? Not from a sudden creative spark from out of the blue, but from a Roman philosophical poem dating back to between 100 BC and 55 BC. Copies of that poem completely vanished during the early Christian era but its manuscript was serendipitously found in 1417 in a monastery in southern Germany by an unemployed papal scribe named Poggio Bracciollini.
Check out the Forum’s “Readings on Language” now for an introduction, excerpt, and two reviews of Stephen Greenblatt’s
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, a fascinating, aesthetically enjoyable book that chronicles the profound impact of that poem, Lucretius’s
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), on the trajectory of human thought.
Click to “A recovered ancient manuscript changes the course of human thought” now!
