The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (review)

Lucretius’s De rerum natura (“On the nature of things”), the subject of Gerard Passannante’s new book, has a unique history beginning with its creation in the first century BC where it began its first of two incarnations. During its first life it was highly influential on both Cicero and Virgil. It disappeared, however, into a few dark libraries in the ninth century and did not resurface into the light to live its second life until the fifteenth century where it again had tremendous influence on its readers. These readers saw De rerum natura as a rare commentary on and champion of Epicurean philosophy, epicurean physics (atoms and voids), and materialism. But De rerum natura’s promotion of chance over divine intervention and death over immortality complicated its reception in the fifteenth century. Gerard Passannante’s The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition traces the influence and life of De rerum natura from its birth to Virgil and through the modern era touching on such disparate writers as Homer, Petrarch, Macrobius, Angelo Poliziano, Michel de Montaigne, and Edmund Spenser.

The Lucretian Renaissance takes its place among other works exploring materiality and Epicureanism in Lucretius’s De rerum natura, a text with its “invisible hooks” clinging to the material and the immaterial throughout history. It begins with a description of a fantasy of “co-presence” (21) or synchronic time from the imagination of the Jesuit Famiano Strada encapsulated, as Passannante points out, in Raphael’s painting The School of Athens. As a fantasy it presents an idealized view of the transmission of art and knowledge where all transmission is clear and primary. Texts, however, change physically and are changed by writers over the course of their material life. It then becomes the task of the philologist to reconstruct the lost text in an effort to better transmit its message. The word “reborn” haunts Passannante’s book. This is a fitting way to begin a book that confronts the materiality of texts. Various writers separated by time and space, change, manipulate and incorporate texts like De rerum natura which are, through this process, reborn over the course of their ghostly existence.

The Lucretian Renaissance is also about imitation, a type of control of the unseen (26, 36), and incorporation, a type of “competitive rivalry” (40). The first chapter, “Extra Destinatum,” explores questions on the mind of writers like Petrarch and Poliziano. What, for example, is the best way to integrate one author into the work of another? Or the best way for a critic or artist to undergo the “mysterious process of intellectual assimilation” (40)? How does one avoid spreading the pervasive ideas of an author who argued the soul was mortal? Transmission is not always positive. The metaphor of the transmission of Lucretius as the spreading of “the Lucretian plague” (52), a plague in which Virgil serves as a type of patient zero, is an apt one. It is used to demonstrate how a text, like a magnet simultaneously attractive and repulsive or a virus invisible and toxic, moved from writer to writer.

In the second chapter, “The Philologist and the Epicurean,” Passannante looks at the physical reconstruction of De rerum natura. This too was prompted by a fantasy, that of the search for and recreation of “the text as it left the hands of its ancient author” (80). This question is fitting in light of Lucretius’s belief that when a body died the soul died with it. With this in mind, even if the atoms (letters) of the poem were reconstructed in precisely the same way as the original, its soul remains lost. This chapter, too, is a commentary on emendations, additions and variations of a recovered and republished text. Passannante spends a great deal of time looking at Montaigne’s copy of Lambin’s edition of Lucretius. The chapter quietly becomes a commentary on reading and criticism, on “The heights of philological optimism and the depths of textual despair” (114...