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well as a sense of discretion, might have dictated that Poggio request first to see unfamiliar works by one of the greatest Church Fathers, Tertullian. Then, as the manuscripts were brought to his desk, he plunged, with what must have been increasing excitement, into a series of ancient Roman authors whose works were utterly unknown to him and to any of his fellow humanists. Though Poggio did not reveal precisely where he went, he did reveal—indeed, he trumpeted—what he had found. For what all book hunters dreamed of was actually happening.
    He opened an epic poem in some 14,000 lines on the wars between Rome and Carthage. Poggio might have recognized the name of the author, Silius Italicus, though until this moment none of his works had surfaced. A canny politician and a wily, unscrupulous orator, who served as a tool in a succession of show trials, Silius had managed to survive the murderous reigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian. In retirement, the younger Pliny had written with urbane irony, he “obliterated by the praiseworthy use 25 he made of leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days.” Now Poggio and his friends would be able to savor one of the fruits of this leisure.
    He opened another long poem, this one by an author, Manilius, whose name the book hunter would certainly not have recognized, for it is not mentioned by any surviving ancient author. Poggio saw at once that it was a learned work on astronomy, and he would have been able to tell from the style and from the poet’s own allusions that it had been written at the very beginning of the empire, during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius.
    More ghosts surged up from the Roman past. An ancient literary critic who had flourished during Nero’s reign and had written notes and glosses on classical authors; another critic who quoted extensively from lost epics written in imitation of Homer ; a grammarian who wrote a treatise on spelling that Poggio knew his Latin-obsessed friends in Florence would find thrilling. Yet another manuscript was a discovery whose thrill might have been tinged for him with melancholy: a large fragment of a hitherto unknown history of the Roman Empire written by a high-ranking officer in the imperial army, Ammianus Marcellinus. The melancholy would have arisen not only from the fact that the first thirteen of the original thirty-one books were missing from the manuscript Poggio copied by hand—and these lost books have never been found—but also from the fact that the work was written on the eve of the empire’s collapse. A clearheaded, thoughtful, and unusually impartial historian, Ammianus seems to have sensed the impending end. His description of a world exhausted by crushing taxes, the financial ruin of large segments of the population, and the dangerous decline in the army’s morale vividly conjured up the conditions that made it possible, some twenty years after his death, for the Goths to sack Rome.
    Even the smallest of the finds that Poggio was making was highly significant—for anything at all to surface after so long seemed miraculous—but they were all eclipsed, from our own perspective if not immediately, by the discovery of a work still more ancient than any of the others that he had found. One of the manuscripts consisted of a long text written around 50 BCE by a poet and philosopher named Titus Lucretius Carus. The text’s title,
De rerum natura
—
On the Nature of Things
—was strikingly similar to the title of Rabanus Maurus’s celebrated encyclopedia,
De rerum naturis
. But where the monk’s work was dull and conventional, Lucretius’ work was dangerously radical.
    Poggio would almost certainly have recognized the name Lucretius from Ovid, Cicero, and other ancient sources he had painstakingly pored over, in the company of his humanist friends , but neither he nor anyone in his circle 26 had encountered more than a scrap or two of his actual writing, which had, as