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far as anyone knew, been lost forever.
    Poggio may not have had time, in the gathering darkness of the monastic library, and under the wary eyes of the abbot or his librarian, to do more than read the opening lines. But he would have seen immediately that Lucretius’ Latin verses were astonishingly beautiful. Ordering his scribe to make a copy, he hurried to liberate it from the monastery. What is not clear is whether he had any intimation at all that he was releasing a book that would help in time to dismantle his entire world.

CHAPTER THREE

IN SEARCH OF LUCRETIUS
     
    SOME FOURTEEN HUNDRED and fifty years before Poggio set out to see what he could find, Lucretius’ contemporaries had read his poem, and it continued to be read 1 for several centuries after its publication. Italian humanists, on the lookout for clues to lost ancient works, would have been alert to even fleeting references in the works of those celebrated authors whose writings had survived in significant quantities. Thus, though he strongly disagreed with its philosophical principles, Cicero—Poggio’s favorite Latin writer—conceded the marvelous power of
On the Nature of Things
. “The poetry of Lucretius,” 2 he wrote to his brother Quintus on February 11, 54 BCE , “is, as you say in your letter, rich in brilliant genius, yet highly artistic.” Cicero’s turn of phrase—especially that slightly odd word “yet”—registers his surprise: he was evidently struck by something unusual. He had encountered a poem that conjoined “brilliant genius” in philosophy and science with unusual poetic power. The conjunction was as rare then as it is now.
    Cicero and his brother were not alone in grasping that Lucretius had accomplished a near-perfect integration of intellectual distinction and aesthetic mastery. The greatest Roman poet, Virgil, about fifteen years old when Lucretius died, was under the spell of
On the Nature of Things
. “Blessed is he 3 who has succeeded in finding out the causes of things,” Virgil wrote in the
Georgics
, “and has trampled underfoot all fears and inexorable fate and the roar of greedy Acheron.” Assuming that this is a subtle allusion to the title of Lucretius’ poem, the older poet in this account is a culture hero, someone who has heard the menacing roar of the underworld and triumphed over the superstitious fears that threaten to sap the human spirit. But Virgil did not mention 4 his hero by name, and, though he had certainly read the
Georgics
, Poggio was unlikely to have picked up the allusion before he had actually read Lucretius. Still less would Poggio have been able to grasp the extent to which Virgil’s great epic, the
Aeneid
, was a sustained attempt to construct an alternative to
On the Nature of Things
: pious, where Lucretius was skeptical; militantly patriotic, where Lucretius counseled pacifism; soberly renunciatory, where Lucretius embraced the pursuit of pleasure.
    What Poggio and other Italian humanists probably did notice, however, were the words of Ovid, words that were enough to send any book hunter scurrying through the catalogs of monastic libraries: “The verses of sublime Lucretius 5 are destined to perish only when a single day will consign the world to destruction.”
    It is all the more striking then that Lucretius’ verses did almost perish—the survival of his work hung by slenderest of threads—and that virtually nothing about his actual identity is reliably known. Many of the major poets and philosophers of ancient Rome had been celebrities in their own time, the objects of gossip which eager book hunters centuries later pored over for clues. But in the case of Lucretius there were almost no biographical traces. The poet must have been a very private person, living his life in the shadows, and he does not seem to have written anything apart from his one great work. That work, difficult and challenging, was hardly the kind of popular success that got diffused in so many