![]() ![]() Its return to circulation changed the course of history. It was a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functions without the aid of gods, that religious fear is damaging to human life, that pleasure and virtue are not opposites but intertwined, and that matter is made up of very small particles in eternal motion, randomly colliding and swerving in new directions. His discovery, Lucretius' ancient poem On the Nature of Things, had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a thousand years. He was Poggio Bracciolini, the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. ![]() ![]() "In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. Greenblatt, Stephen The Swerve: How the World Became Modern ![]()
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