The Spanish Civil War

From Richard Rhodes' Hell and Good Company:
The Spanish Filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who participated in the defense of Madrid in the first days of the rebellion, recalls another and larger oddity, one that opens a window into the depths of the conflict. “Certain exploits,” Bunuel writes of that time, “seemed to me both absurd and glorious--like the workers who climbed into a truck one day and drove out to the monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus about twenty kilometers south of the city, formed a firing squad, and executed the statue of Christ.” The London Daily Mail published a photograph of that exuberant “execution” on 7 August 1936, claiming it illustrated “the Spanish Reds’ war on religion.” Within a month, workers with Chisels and explosives had destroyed the ninety-two-foot statue at the geographic center of the country in Getafe as they were destroying similar religious monuments throughout republican Spain.

The demolitions had more to do with lighting oppression than with warring against religion. The Getafe monument had been unveiled by Alfonso XIII in May 1919, at the end of the Great War, when he reconsecrated Spain to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a long-standing Roman Catholic cult associated with royalty since before the French Revolution. With the king’s endorsement, Sacred Heart statues and plaques had proliferated all over Spain. Many of Spain’s urban and rural poor lived from season to season in abject poverty, on the raw edge of starvation. The Spanish school system in the 1930s was 17,500 schools short,

More than 30 percent of Spanish men and an even higher percentage of Spanish women were illiterate. To that exploited population, the proliferation of monuments meant no escape from the presence of a corrupt church that Haunted its wealth and power.

When the people voted for a republic in 1931, the new government Went to work reclaiming public spaces; removing religious symbols from schools, streets, and cemeteries; and opening secular equivalents. A new constitution decreed the separation of church and state and the dissolution of some religious orders and prohibited religious orders from Engaging in commerce, industry, and teaching. The Church fought its increasing disenfranchisement with new lay organizations, political action, and lawsuits. Processions, festivals, and retreats became demonstrations, which leftist groups in turn found ways to interrupt. In those years, the historian Hugh Thomas writes, the Getafe monument “became the spiritual and physical centre of Catholic mobilization.” Whatever else they were doing, the young militiamen who executed Christ at Getafe were expressing a commitment to social transformation.

With the challenge of the generals’ rebellion to the existence of the secular Spanish state, a challenge that Franco elevated to the status of a religious crusade, churches were burned, icons destroyed, religious vestments cut up and resewn into militia uniforms. More radical anticlericals went beyond slapping idols. They exhumed the desiccated bodies of priests and nuns from church crypts and put them on pub« lic display to expose their fetid mortality. In a period seemingly free of legal constraints, with bullets flying in both directions and artillery shattering buildings, the anarchist militias began killing priests, the living idols of a church that had conspired with their class enemies to oppress them. Four thousand, one hundred eighty-four priests. 283 nuns, and 2,365 other religious would be murdered in republican territory in the course of the war- significantly, half during the first six weeks. Lluis Companys, the president of Catalonia, told a French journalist that the killings represented “the explosion of an immense store of wrath, an immense need for vengeance, which had been gathering force from very early times.”

More on the Roman Empire

From Tom Holland:
Meanwhile. beyond its walls, in the teeming streets of a city whose population now numbered well over a million, many had begun to wonder what precisely it meant to talk of the Roman people. Rome, as Claudius had reminded the Senate in his speech, had been founded on immigration. Exotic languages had been heard in the city for centuries. Street names still bore witness to the settlement of foreigners on them in ancient times: the Vicus Tuscus, where Etruscans had once congregated, and the Vicus Africus. Yet even as many Romans saw in their city’s diversity the homage paid by the world to its greatness, and a potent source of renewal, so others were less convinced. All very well to host immigrants, so long as they ended up Roman; but what if they preserved their barbarous ways, infecting decent citizens with their superstitions? ‘In the capital, appalling customs and disgraceful practices from across the world are forever cross-pollinating and becoming fashionable.’ A sobering reflection, to be sure: that to serve as the capital of the world might render Rome less Roman.

Such an anxiety was nothing new. Back in the first century of the Republic, a mania for outlandish cults had seen the Senate legislate to ensure that only the traditional gods be worshipped, and only with traditional rites. Since then, there had been numerous attempts to purge the city of alien ways. In 186 BC, the Senate had even launched a campaign of suppression against the worship of Liber, on the grounds that a Greek soothsayer had perverted its rituals and fostered unspeakable orgies. Egyptians and astrologers from Mesopotamia also tended to be regarded by most right-thinking citizens with profound suspicion. More alarming yet were the Syrians, with their devotion to a goddess, lion-flanked and jewel-adorned, whose cult, sinister as only a Syrian cult could be, had long been a thing of revulsion to every decent Roman. There was no value so fundamental, no propriety so settled, that her worshippers might not trample on them, and howl in exultant frenzy as they did so. Appearing to slaves in visions, the

Syrian Goddess had been known to encourage them to rebel; driving mad her most frenzied devotees, she would inspire them to make a sacrifice of their testicles. Galli, these self-castrated priests were called: matches who, abandoning the privileges and responsibilities of manhood, had willingly chosen to become women. With their painted faces and their feminine robes, their depilated bodies and their braided hair dyed blonde, they could not possibly have been more offensive to Roman sensibilities. Unsurprisingly, then, the authorities had done all they could to prevent their fellow citizens from joining their ranks, banning the practice of self-castration outright at first, and then, from 101 BC, permitting it only under the tightest of regulations. Yet this had done nothing to diminish the popularity of the cult: disturbingly, it had turned out, some Romans quite fancied living as women. By the time that Claudius, surrendering to the inevitable, finally lifted all legal restrictions on citizens becoming Galli, processions in honour of the Syrian Goddess, complete with flutes, tambourines and spectacular displays of self-laceration, had become a common sight in Rome. Naturally, those who held fast to traditional values continued to find it all revolting. ‘If a god desires worship of this kind,’ Seneca declared flatly, ‘then she does not deserve to be worshipped in the first place?“ For those on the cutting edge of fashion, however, a protestation of devotion to the Syrian Goddess had become an easy and entertaining way to shock. Rumour had it, for instance, that she was the only deity for whose cult Nero had any respect.

Yet when it came to sheer jaw-dropping weirdness, not even the beliefs of the Syrians could compare with those of their near neigh~ hours, the Jews. Immigrants from Judaea had been settling in Rome for two centuries, mainly in the cheap housing on the far side of the Tiber, where the principal temple of the Syrian Goddess was also to be found; and in all that time, they had never lost their distinctive ness. No people in the world had customs more perverse or ludicrous. They abstained from pork; they took every seventh day off; they obstinately refused to worship any god save their own. Yer Jewish practices and beliefs, although self-evidently grotesque, were not without a certain glamour. Like the cults of the Egyptians or the star charts of the Mesopotamians, they were capable of seducing those with a taste for the exotic. This was why, from the moment that Jews had first settled in the city, the authorities had periodically sought to expel them. The policy, though, had never proven effective. Whether in 139 BC, when the Jews had been banned from Rome ‘for trying to corrupt Roman values’, or in AD 19, when Tiberius had repeated the measure, or thirty years later, when Claudius had banished them yet again for making trouble at the instigation of a sinister-sounding agitator named Chrestus they had always crept back.
(( It is possible, indeed probable, that this is an allusion to arguments in Rome‘s Jewish community about the claims to messianic status of Jesus. (Chrestus. it is true, was a common name, particularly for slaves; but against that. there is no recorded instance of a Jew in Rome ever being called
up number of scholars have suggested that Suetonius might have derived his info from a police
report. and that Chrestus’ is mistransliteration of Christus. The truth, though, is ultimately unknowable.
A decade on from their expulsion by Claudius, they had once again returned to Rome. The fascination that they were capable of exerting, and the corresponding sense of alarm that they provoked in those contemptuous of foreign rituals, reached to the very top. ‘They are the most wicked of peoples."’ Seneca’s mistrust of the Jews would only have been confirmed for him by the reported interest of Poppaea in their teachings. The appeal of alien superstitions, it seemed, reached even into Caesar’s bedroom. Many in Rome, when they contemplated the slave quarters of their own homes, or the shrines in the streets raised to mysterious gods, or the tenements crammed with immigrants from every corner of the world, dreaded what loathsome practices might be brewing in their city. Nervousness about mass immigration and the peculiar cults that it had brought to Rome came to a head in 61, when the City Prefect, the man charged with the maintenance of order in the capital, was stabbed to death. His killer was one of his own slaves -and this, by the terms of a stern law passed half a century before, required that every slave in the murdered mans household be executed. The savagery of the penalty generated widespread revulsion; and it seemed in a debate on the matter in the Senate House, that clemency might prevail. In the event what swung senators into backing the execution of hundreds of slaves owned by the murdered Prefect was a bloodcurdling reminder of the numerous alien practices that had been imported into Rome. (Nowadays, the slaves in our households come from across the world, and engage in every kind of weird cult- or none at all. Terror tactics alone can serve to keep this rabble in check. The law was duly upheld, the death sentence confirmed. Out on the streets, where many of the protestors were themselves freedmen, or else the descendants of slaves, furious demonstrations were held. Crowds armed with stones and torches sought to prevent the sentence from being carried out. Nero, rather than permit agitators to override the law, issued them with an official rebuke, and ordered soldiers to line the route along which the wretched slaves were led to their deaths. Yet there were limits to the vindictiveness that he was prepared to sanction. When it was proposed that the freedmen of the murdered Prefect be rounded up and deported, Nero vetoed the motion. ‘What mercy has failed to moderate,’ he declared, ‘should not be aggravated by savagery.

Tom Holland's Dynasty

On the House of Augustus.
Excerpts:
Augustus preferred a perpetual play of radiance and shadow to be evident across his face. His image was as tightly controlled as it was charged with ambivalence. The portrait of him fashioned by sculptors offered to the Roman people a fitting reflection of the infinite subtleties and paradoxes of the man himself. In the jug ears of his statues it was possible to catch the glimpse of a thoroughly human Princeps: one whose eyebrows met above his nose, whose teeth were bad, and whose anxieties about his height were such that he wore platform heels. Yet he was a handsome man for all that; and it was his conceit, one that plenty were willing to flatter, that he had only to fix people with ‘his clear and brilliant gaze for them to lower their eyes, as though before the sun. In his statues, the jugeared Princeps appeared as beauteous as Apollo. Suspended midway between youth and maturity, between melancholy and triumph, between the mortal and divine, he was a Roman in every sense.

There was certainly to be no place in his portraits for the thinning hair and sagging jowls that once, in the heyday of the Republic, had served as the markers of high-achieving statesmen. What need for Augustus to emphasise his experience? All stood in awe of his achievements. He had accomplished more than any number of senators scored with wrinkles. The close association between ugliness and virtus, always cherished by conservatives, was hardly one to appeal to Augustus. The Princeps, rather than reining in his taste for self-promotion, aimed instead to mould tastes to the contours of his own. Never before in history had so many portraits of a single man been manufactured, disseminated and put on public display. A new orthodoxy was being marketed to the Roman people: that power should be good-looking. Evident to all those who gazed upon the statues of Augustus, it could increasingly be read as well in an even more prominent sphere: the fabric of the city.
and
Or did it? There was, perhaps, for those up to speed with the times, something just a little bit provincial, just a little bit musty about an antique sexual taboo. ‘How like a rustic, to get upset when your wife cheats on you.’ So Ovid, a man with his finger on the pulse of high society, observed with practised smoothness....The various prohibitions and perils erected by custom in the path of the adulterer were liable to strike the seasoned connoisseur of erotic pleasure less as deterrents than as incentives, spicing up the fun. ‘We always want what we’re not allowed.’ Ovid, in offering this sage observation, was putting his finger on a mocking truth, Forbidden fruit tasted the sweetest. ‘Prohibitions, trust me, only encourage bad behaviour. This, in a city as addicted to gossip as Rome, was a paradox that plenty were prepared to swallow. Speculation as to what might be going on in the city’s most exclusive bedrooms naturally transfixed the public. That adultery was regarded by the upper classes as one tremendous game, in which the rules were there to be broken, and the measure of cool was to smuggle a lover into the marital bed, was widely taken for granted. No smoke without fire, after all. Proofs of the adulterous and effeminate character of Rome’s fast set were everywhere to be seen. In the dandyishly loose way they wore their togas; in their clean nails, sprucely clipped nasal hair and sinister lack of body odour; above all, in the oiled sheen of their limbs. For a man to shave his armpits was, everyone could agree, simply good manners; but to do as Augustus was said to have done, and depilate the legs, was disgusting, plain and simple. Body hair was the mark of a man. Everyone knew, though, that adulterers cared nothing for that. Smooth skin, not a pelt, was what they brought to seduction. It was all most deviant and alarming. Even Ovid might sometimes be provoked to pontificate: ‘Men are all such fashion victims these days that, really, we can hardly blame women for feeling the pressure.’

None of which stopped the poet himself from cheerily offering grooming tips to his male as well as his female fans. Ovid, though did not have the care of Roman morals in his charge. Frivolous metrosexuality, in the opinion of the man who did, was part of the problem, not a solution. Augustus, who had brought order where previously there was chaos, who had lavished on his fellow citizens the riches of conquered kingdoms, who had transformed their city into a capital of unrivalled beauty and splendour, did not care to think that his labours might merely have contributed to a softening of their ancestral virtues. Such a prospect was too appalling to be borne. The Romans were either the heirs of their upright forefathers or they were nothing. The Princeps’s ambition was simple: that his fellow citizens should be true to all that was best about their past. They were the Romans: the lords of the world, the people of the toga. This, in the mirror that he had set up to his fellow citizens, fashioned out of monuments, and festivals, and all the various fruits of peace, was the reflection that he wished them always to catch of themselves.

Yet what if they caught something else? Perhaps there lay a warning in a recent scandalous development in the field of interior decoration. In bedrooms across Rome, walls and ceilings were coming to be lined with mirrors. Even beyond the limits of the city, out in his rural retreat among the Sabine hills, Horace had signed up to the craze. Notoriously, so had a billionaire by the name of Hostius Quadra. The mirrors on his walls boasted a particularly distinctive feature: everything reflected in them appeared larger than .it actually was. ‘So it was that the freak made a show of his own deviancy.’As one girl gave him a blow-job, and he licked out a second, so his anus, in a hideous desecration of all that a Roman should properly be, was shafted by a man with a giant cock -which, seen in the mirror, appeared possessed of truly gargantuan size, ‘larger than his capacity to take’ To groom, depilate and titivate like a woman was one thing; but to be fucked like one was a hideous extreme of degradation. What else was it, after all, but the willing surrender of everything that made a Roman a man?

and

‘lt takes courage to advance into a forbidden realm of shadow.When Drusus, on his final campaign, had found himself hundreds of miles east of the Rhine, on the banks of a second mighty natural barrier, a river named the Elbe, a spectre in the form of a colossal woman had materialised before him and forbidden him to cross it. That the lands of the north were the haunt of phantoms and hideous monsters came as no surprise. In the gloomy forests which covered vast reaches of Germany, giant bull-like creatures roamed, and mysterious entities named elks, without ankles or knees; in the icy waters of the Ocean, which would retreat and then advance twice a day, tearing loose oak trees and engulfing entire plains beneath their flood-tides, there shimmered ‘the outline of enigmatic beings half-men, half beast’.Just as Ovid, peering askance at the Tomitans, had fingered them as lycanthropes, so in the savage reaches of Germany were the borders between animal and human even more unsettlingly blurred. Chieftains who wished for a policy briefing, it was reported by Roman scholars who had made a close study of German customs, were likeliest to consult a horse. Conversely, ‘the towering stature of the Germans, their fierce blue eyes and reddish hair’ spoke of a nature barely less bestial than that of some steel-clawed bear, padding over mountain slopes. Geography could not be bucked. Their bogs and trees shrouded in a perpetual drizzle, Germans were the spawn of their environment. The gods, who had considerately endowed Rome with a climate ideally suited to the growth of a mighty city, had doomed the inhabitants of the chilly North to a backwardness that was at once torpid and ferocious, dull and intemperate. Landscape. weather, people: Germany was unredeemably savage.

Or was it? Much the same after all could be said Gauls. Bad memories of them in Rome ran very deep. Back in 390 BC, a Gallic horde had erupted into Italy, annihilated six whole legions and sacked the city itself. Only with the conquests won by Augustus’s deified father had Gaul finally ceased to be a place of dread. Now, fifty years on. great changes were afoot beyond the Alps. Roman rule had brought to a people once notorious for their trousers and their gravy-soaked moustaches, their drunken brawling and their taste for collecting heads, a very different way of life. The grandsons of Chieftains who had hurled themselves half-naked against the invading legions now draped themselves in the toga and rejoiced in the name of ‘Julius’. Rather than guzzle wines indiscriminately, they were coming to develop a nose for the classiest Italian and Eastern grands crus and even, remarkably, to plant the odd vineyard themselves. Most promisingly of all, dotted across a landscape that had previously boasted only villages and rough stockades perched on hills, cities were starting to appear: islands of civilisation complete with flashy monuments and street-grids.

and

Bad enough as it was to be trapped on the wrong side of the Rhine, how much more terrifying was the prospect of being stranded on the wrong side of the Ocean. Few knew much about Britain --but what they did know was deeply off-putting. The natives were, if anything, even more barbarous than the Germans. They painted themselves blue; they held their wives in common; they wore hair on the upper lip, an affectation so grotesque that Latin did not even have a word for it. Nor were their women any better. They were reported to dye their bodies black, and even on occasion to go naked. Savages capable of such unspeakable customs were clearly capable of anything; and sure enough, just as it was part of the terror of the Germans that they practised murderous rites in the depths of their dripping forests, so did the Britons have priests who, in groves festooned with mistletoe, were reported to commit human sacrifice and cannibalism. These ‘Druids’, as the priests were called, had once infested Gaul as well, until their suppression on the orders of Tiberius; but across the Ocean, beyond the stern reach of Roman law, they still thrived. ‘Magic, to this very day, holds Britain in its shadow.’ No wonder. then ordered to embark for a land of such sorcery and menace, that many soldiers should have blanched.

and

The art of attracting an emperor’s attention was a fine one.

When Calpurnia came into Claudius’s presence, she was accompanied, for good measure, by a second of his concubines. Those who wanted his ear often made sure to exploit his sexual tastes, for everyone knew that he only ever slept with women. Like his concern that people should feel free to break wind at table, or his insistence on adding three new letters to the Latin alphabet, the complete lack of interest he had always shown in forcing himself on male partners marked Claudius out as a true eccentric. Not that people particularly disapproved for it was the way of the world that different men had different foibles, and just as some might prefer blondes and others brunettes, so were there a few who only ever fucked females, and a few who only ever fucked males.“ That Galba, for instance, was the mirror image of Claudius liking as he did ‘mature, hard-muscled men never did any harm to his standing as a model of martial rectitude. Seasoned soldier that he was, he well knew what it was to seize control, to thrust hard, to take possession.

Which was, it went without saying, the responsibility of every citizen who chose to have sex. Nothing was more shocking to Roman sensibilities than the man who, as Hostius Quadra had so notoriously done, submitted for his own pleasure to being fucked. The sword-stab of a penis was, of course. precisely what the female body had been shaped by the gods to receive: but the male body too was not lacking in orifices. Pay obeisance with the mouth or the anus to another man’s cock, and a citizen was doubly shamed. It was not just that in was playing the part of a woman (although that was of course bad enough) it was also that he was playing the part of a slave. Just as it was the privilege of the free-born. male and female alike. to have any violation of their bodies condemned as a monstrous crime. so was it the duty of slaves to serve a master‘s every conceivable sexual need. For some, indeed, it might be their principal responsibility. Pretty boys, long-haired, smooth-shaven and glistening with oils were must-have accessories at any fashionable soiree and all the more so if twins. One senator, in the time of Augustus. had abandoned subtlety altogether, employing waitresses who served entirely in the nude. Every slave knew, as a matter of course. that the threat of rape. like that of corporal punishment. might he realised at any moment. This did not mean that a master was necessarily incapable of tenderness: Lucius Vitellius, for instance. ended up so besotted with one of his slavegirls that not only did he free her. but he took to mixing up her spit with honey and using it as a throat medicine. Such eases. though, were the exception that proved the rule. In general. the right of a master to glut his sexual appetites on a slave. rather as he might blow his nose or use a latrine, was taken for granted. It was a perk of ownership, plain and simple. ‘No sense of shame is permitted a slave.“ Except that freedom itself, in a city where even senators had been subjected to the rack and whip was no longer all it had been. The implications, even for the grandest, were unsettling in the extreme. In AD 47, a year before Calpurnia came calling on Claudius at Ostia. one of the Senate’s most flamboyant and charismatic figures had been destroyed. Valerius Asiaticus, charged with a variety of crimes, had been arrested in the pleasure resort of Baiae and hauled hack to Rome in chains. His prosecutor had been an old associate of Germanicus's. a man as opportunistic as he was remorseless. by the name of Publius Suillius Rufus. His talent, given a victim. was for sinking his jaws deep and sure enough, at a private trial attended by both Claudius and Lucius Vitellius, Suillius had done just that. Rounding off the various charges, he had accused Asiaticus, for good measure, of the very ultimate in deviancy: of being ‘soft and giving, like a woman’. The prisoner, silent until then, had found this particular slander too much. ‘Ask your sons, Suillius,’ he had yelled. ‘They will confirm that I am all man.’ Desperate, aggressive banter -but also something more. The scorning of Suillius, a father to sons used by Asiaticus as women, had been the scorning too of an order so rotten that it had given power to such a man. Later, once Asiaticus had been sentenced to death, but permitted, on the recommendation of Lucius Vitellius, to choose how he died, he had made his contempt for Claudius’s regime even more explicit. He would rather, he had declared, have perished at the hands of Tiberius or Caligula than on the say-so of the smooth-tongued Vitellius -whose mouth was rancid from his addiction to lapping at genitals. And then, having made sure that the flames of his pyre would do no damage to the trees of his beloved garden, Asiaticus had slit his wrists.

Defiant assertion of his own masculinity and suicide: no other means had been available to him, in the final reckoning, of maintaining his dignity as a citizen. That Claudius, paranoid and insecure, had feared to let him live was clear enough; but that was hardly the Whole story. Senators, convinced as they were that the Emperor was mentally deficient, saw in Asiaticus’s fate confirmation of all their darkest suspicions: that he was the gullible plaything of perverts, and Even worse. ‘He, more conspicuously than any of his peers, was ruled by slaves -and by women." Certainly, when it came to identifying the person ultimately responsible for the downfall of Asiaticus, the consensus was clear. Messalina had envied him his gardens and wanted them for herself. Worse: he had died to satisfy her passion for Mnester, former paramour of Caligula and Rome’s most famous actor, who was rumoured to have been conducting affairs with both Messalina herself and an equally high-ranking beauty named Poppaea Sabina. The prosecution of Asiaticus had enabled two birds to be killed with one stone: for among the charges levelled against him had been one ofadultery with Poppaea. Messalina, far from keeping discreetly to the sidelines. had been present at his secret trial; and she had deployed her agents, even as Asiaticus was being condemned, to bully her rival into suicide. Nothing, in short, could possibly have been more demeaning or grotesquely sordid. One of the most eminent senators in Rome, a man who had once aspired to rule the world, had been sacrificed upon the altar of a woman’s jealousy.

‘How shaming it is to be submissive to a girl." Ovid’s maxim was one that Roman moralists had always taken for granted. Whether on the battlefield or in the bedroom, so clearly had men been intended by the gods to hold the whip-hand that very few of them ever thought to question it. ‘An unhappy state indeed it would be which saw women usurp masculine prerogatives -be it the Senate, the army or the magistracies!" The very prospect was incredible. Nevertheless, in a city where a feminine tiff over an actor appeared to have ended up destroying a two-times consul, it was clear that something had gone badly wrong. That women of wealth and breeding might exploit their influence on behalf of their menfolk was one thing; that they should openly flaunt it quite another. No matter the rumours whispered of Livia, she had always made a point, before ascending into the heavens and taking her place beside Augustus on his celestial throne. of operating from the shadows. Certainly, she had never thought to play her husband for a fool. That, though, it seemed -if the increasingly feverish swirlings of gossip were to be trusted -was precisely what Messalina was doing. A few days after the suicide of Poppae Sabina, Claudius had invited her husband to supper and asked him «here his wife was. Told that she was dead, he had simply looked bemused. Messalina, it seemed to those who despised the Emperor had him wrapped around her finger. As gullible as he was besotted. he had delivered the great and the good into her hands. Consuls, a Praetorian prefect, the granddaughter of Tiberius: all had been eliminated as a result of her manoeuvrings. Those who prized their skin5 made sure to crawl to her. Lucius Vitellius, that veteran trimmer, had even begged permission to take oil her shoes, ‘and once he had removed her right slipper. he slipped it between his toga and tunic. Carrying it round with him the whole time, and every so often kissing it'. Not merely degrading. it was emasculating in the extreme.

And perhaps, for that very reason, truth be told, just a bit erotic, Ovid, had he lived to see the former governor of Syria raining kisses on a woman's slipper. would not have been unduly surprised. He had always enjoyed exploring the paradoxes that hedged propriety about.

Don ’t be ashamed (though shameful it is which is why it's fun)
To hold a mirror in your hand as though you were a slave

As with adultery, so with role reversal: the greater the taboo, the more of a thrill it might be to break it. The pressure on a male always to take the lead, always to exact submission, served to close off whole dimensions of pleasure. That it was the responsibility of a respectable matron, while being fucked, to lie back passively and leave the action to her partner, was taken for granted by moralists; but that did not prevent some women, greatly daring, from spicing things up during sex by actually moving -almost as though they themselves were the males. Shocking, yes, and threatening to the masculinity of any self respecting citizen, to be sure; but there were, for the man who found his partner bucking her thighs in time to his thrustings. or grinding her buttocks, or sucking and licking his cock, undeniable compensations. That a woman might be so sexually aggressive as to play the role of a man was certainly, for any self-respecting citizen. a most unsettling possibility; but there was rarely anything so deviant that some would not find it exciting. A woman such as Messalina was pie tamed to be, predatory in her ambitions and demonic in her taste to: blood, was a figure fit to stalk fantasies as well as fears. Young. beautiful and dangerous. she was the very stuff of pornography.

Robinson Crusoe

As I had never read Robinson Crusoe, it was time. I'm not sure why I avoided it. It was no great pleasure and no hardship. I found a Heritage Press edition with enjoyable illustrations but none nearly as nice as the N.C. Wyeth illustrations. I carried around copies of Michel Tournier's version of Crusoe, called Friday for almost 25 years, and so read that next, and after that the Muriel Spark novel Robinson, which obliquely references Defoe.

Ugh. I can't even type the title...

I read the greatly unilluminating Luminaries and as I was predisposed to like it, I read it with care and interest. It was chock full of conceits like extraordinary chapter titles and astrological charts of the characters. I knew its reputation. It won the Man Booker prize and received rapturous reviews. I believe a respected reviewer wrote that Catton had managed to create something to that point entirely unexperienced in literature. Between raves on Amazon one review called the author a charlatan which at the time seemed like an extreme reaction but which now perfectly expresses my reaction on finishing this fraud.
The Luminaries is conceived to resemble a Victorian novel in breadth and style but feels like the sort of thing a fan might do while in thrall to authentic art. It is Victorian fan-fiction. It is the echo of an author's voice that a fan hears that convinces them they too can create as well as partake.
A noted newspaper reviewer called it a brilliant parody which I cannot see. It is humorless. It is blind to its own many faults in a way that makes me think that the author could not possibly understand the impact and significance of Victorian writers' temporal limitations. It is so heavily weighted with the author's research that it resembles the missing fortune (which.... it turns out.... was sewn into the boning of the heroine's dress all along!) It makes the decorative ponderous, the historical leaden and the inspiration and solution rather too fortunately close at hand. It seems lacking in anything but the commonest self-analysis representing itself as insight. It is so packed with characters' improbable responses that at times it seems that that lack of reasonable response is a method of pointing to the gulf in manners from the past to our own time. It's not. Many actions which define the circumstances of the mystery defy common patterns of behavior.
In the first 400 or so pages one character recounts a story which brings he and 11 others together (to pool their knowledge). It is narrated to someone who just happens to enter the lounge. This interloper has had an encounter with one of the characters in this narrative-that person was locked in a trunk in the lower decks of a ship on which the man was travelling. He drops his gloves through a hatch, climbs down, hears scratching coming from the inside of the trunk, opens it and assists the man out, sits him down and notices that he is wounded, does not ask his name or offer assistance, but after sitting next to someone who he physically lifted from a trunk becomes convinced that it is only an apparition. He then rejoins others who are disembarking above and does not mention that he either helped someone locked in a trunk who is bleeding profusely, or that he has seen an apparition.
Still one gives the story the benefit of the doubt.
The author disguises recondite facts on mining and the way of life in mining towns as glimpses of authenticity while tessellating her every scrap of dialogue and exposition with bits of research so that nothing feels actual. It is as repellent in its stratagem and as callow and unmemorable as anything I have read in years. The only parts that don't seem written during dull shifts in a museum of Victorian textiles or in a coffee-house between errands feel cadged from only slightly superior sources. The episodes are as wearying as can be imagined- what follows might be a general example, with only the felicitous phrase making these two passages notable:

But Nilssen’s longing for the button became so great that one night when Magnus was sleeping he crept in, unlatched the chest and stole it; he walked about the darkened nursery for a while, fingering the thing, testing its weight, running his finger over the body of the fox, feeling the brass take on the warmth of his hand until something overcame him, not remorse exactly, but a dawning fatigue, an emptiness, and he returned the button to the place where he had found it. Cousin Magnus never knew. Nobody knew. But for months and years and even decades afterward, long after Cousin Magnus was dead, that theft was as a splinter in his heart. He saw the moonlit nursery every time he spoke his cousin’s name; by blushed at nothing; he sometimes pinched himself, or uttered an oath, at the memory. For although a man is judged by his actions by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done wa judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

+ + +

"You’re in black,’ Mannering observed.

“Naturally,” she returned. “I am recently widowed, and therefore mourning.”

“Here’s a fact,” Mannering said. “The color black is invisible to spirits. I’ll make a bet that you didn’t know that ...did you, now! It’s why we wear black at funerals: if we dressed in color we’d attract the attention of the dead. Wearing black, they can’t make us out.”

‘What a charming piece of trivia,” said Mrs. Wells.

“Do you know what it means, though? It means that Mr. Staines won’t be able to see you. Not in that gown. You’ll be quite invisible to him‘”

The Seven Dials Mystery

The execrable The Seven Dials Mystery, a Superintendent Battle book, published in the relatively early career of Agatha Christie is a carefree caper with international espionage and a secret society (of the Seven Dials) accounting for all murders and thefts. The contrivances strain even Dame Agatha's abilities, and the explanation of why a body is found with seven alarm clocks arranged on a mantel above it with an eighth smashed on the lawn is so unconvincing that the subsequent meeting of 6 people who, invited to join a seven person society, meet with bags over their heads so they don't recognize one another seems very nearly probable. Still, I would read it a dozen times over before I would relive a chapter of The Luminaries. Dame Christie fairly romps through this.
From the 7 Dials:

Lord Caterham was happily reading a catalogue of a forthcoming sale of rare editions and was immeasurably astonished to see Bundle. ‘Even you,’ he said, “cant have been to London and back in this time:"
I haven’t been to London,” said Bundle. “I ran over a man. "
“What?"
‘Only I didn’t really. He was shot.”
“How could he have been?”
“I don’ t know how he could have been, but he was.“
“But why did you shoot him?”
“I didn’t shoot him.”
“You shouldn’t shoot people,” said Lord Caterham m a tone of mild remonstrance. “You shouldn’t really. I dare say some of them richly deserve it-but all the same it will lead to trouble."
“I tell you I didn’t shoot him.”
“Well, who did?”
“Nobody knows,” said Bundle.
“Nonsense,” said Lord Caterham. “A man can’t be shot and run over without anyone having done it.”
“He wasn’t run over, ”said Bundle.
“I thought you said he was."
“I said I thought I had.”
“A tyre burst, I suppose,” said Lord Caterham. “It does sound like a shot. It says so in detective stories."
“You really are perfectly impossible Father. You don’t seem to have the brains of a rabbit.” 
“Not at all,” said Lord Caterham. “You come in with a wildly impossible tale about men being run over and shot and I don’t know what, and then you expect me to know all about it by magic.” 

Bundle sighed wearily. “Just attend,” she said. “I’ll tell you all about it in words
of one syllable.” “There,” she said when she had concluded. “Now have
you got it?”
“Of course. I understand perfectly now I can make allowances for your being a little upset, my dear I was not far wrong when I remarked to you before starting out that people looking for trouble usually found it. I am thankful finished Lord Caterham with a slight shiver, “that I stayed quietly here."

Tallulah by Tallulah Bankhead

In late summer of ’51, idling on my acres preliminary to my return to England, I started talking into a recording machine, one of those contraptions which operates a two sided record, each faceted to absorb a half-hour monologue. The disc can be started and stopped on whim. Once a platter is completed, its content can be played back to its startled author. This device fascinated me- I could address it at length without fear of interruption or reprisal.

I poured a lot of words into that whirligig. Once I was so careless as to impose two successive recitations on each face of the record, one on top of another. Mary Resnick, who undertook to unscramble the resulting bedlam, had to be put to bed in a dark room with ice packs on her temples. More than once I set the disc to spinning, talked into it for a half hour, only to find later I had failed to release the voice intake. For thirty minutes I had been talking to myself. Conversations broke into this narrative which had nothing to do with this chronicle. An irrelevant dialogue with Edie Van Cleve took up one side of a record because I had neglected to turn off the voice inlet while we debated the advisability of bathing Doloras, my Maltese. Transcribing the records, Miss Resnick blanched when one of them erupted a long discourse on the life and times of Evelyn Nesbitt, for love of whom Harry Thaw ventilated Stanford White. “What are you going to call the Evelyn
Nesbitt book?” Miss Resnick wanted to know. Once my first sentence was waxed, I knew I’d see my life through, though the graves yawned and the heavens burst. I may temporize and back and fill on the edge of a new experience but once I’ve plunged in, I’ll wrestle it to a decision, win, lose or draw.

I muted such alarms as nibbled at me. Was I presumptuous in thinking anyone could be interested in my story? Would I be wiser to ape the shoemaker and stick to my last? How much could I tell without outraging the living or smirching the dead?

Last parts of the Swerve

The Roman curia was, from a moral perspective, a notoriously perilous place. The atmosphere he breathed is most brilliantly conveyed by a strange work of the 1430s, written when Poggio was still very much at the center of the curia. The work, entitled On the Excellence and Dignity of the Roman Court, is by a younger humanist contemporary, the Florentine Lapo da Castiglionchio. It is a dialogue, in the style of Cicero, a form much favored at the time by writers who wished to air controversial and even dangerous views without taking full responsibility for them. Hence, at the start of Lapo’s imaginary conversation, a character called Angelo-not Lapo himself, of course, heaven forbid-violently assails the moral bankruptcy of the curia, a place “in which crime, moral outrage, fraud, and deceit take the name of virtue and are held in high esteem.

And, given the huge sums that are paid for bits of paper with papal seals, What fantastic profits are reaped! The place is a gold mine. There is no need any longer to affect the poverty
of Christ: that was necessary only at the beginning in order to avoid the imputation of bribing people to believe. Times have changed. and now riches, so essential for any important enterprise. are in order for whoever can acquire them. Priests are allowed to amass all the wealth they want; they only have to be poor in spirit. To want high priests actually to be poor, rather than the immensely rich men that they are, displays a kind of "mindlessness.”

So the dialogue runs on, with deadpan seriousness and wide-eyed enthusiasm. The curia, the friends agree, is a green place not only for serious study but also for lighter amusements such as gaming, horsemanship, and hunting. Just think of the dinner parties at the papal court- witty gossip, along with fantastic food and drink served by beautiful, young, hairless boys, And for those Whose tastes do not run in the direction of Ganymede, there are the abundant pleasures of Venus. Mistresses, adulterous matrons, courtesans of all descriptions occupy a central place in the curia, and appropriately so, since the delights they offer have such a central place in human happiness. Lewd songs, naked breasts, kissing, fondling, With small white lapdogs trained to lick around your groin to excite desires and all for remarkably low prices.

This expansive enthusiasm for outrageously corrupt behavior and the frantic pursuit of wealth must be a sly satirical game. Yet On the Excellence and Dignity of the Roman Court is a very peculiar satire, and not merely because its gushing praise for what the reader is presumably meant to despise evidently took in some contemporaries. The problem is that when he wrote the work, Lapo was busily seeking appointment in the curia for himself. It is possible, of course, that he felt ambivalent about his attempt: people often despise the very institutions they are frantically trying to enter.

On More's Utopia and Bruno:

In fact, Catholic intellectuals could and did engage with Lucretian ideas through the medium of fables. Though he complained that Marullo sounded “ just like a pagan,” Erasmus note a fictional dialogue called The Epicurean in which one of the characters, Hedonius, sets out to show that “there are no people more Epicurean than godly Christians.” Christians who fast, bewail their sins, and punish their flesh may look anything but hedonist, but they are seeking to live righteously, and “none live more enjoyably than those who live righteously.”

If this paradox seems like little more than a sleight-of-hand, Erasmus’ friend Thomas More took the engagement with Epicureanism much further in his most famous work, Utopia (1516). A learned man, deeply immersed in the pagan Greek and Latin texts that Poggio and his contemporaries had returned to circulation, More was also a pious Christian ascetic who won a hair shirt under his clothes and whipped himself until the blood ran down his flesh. His speculative daring and his relentless intelligence enabled him to grasp the force of what had surged back from the ancient world and at the same time his ardent Catholic convictions led him to demarcate the boundaries beyond which he thought it was dangerous for him Or anyone else to go. That is, he brilliantly explored the hidden tensions in the identity to which he himself subscribed: "Christian humanist.”

Utopia begins with a searing indictment of England as a land where noblemen, living idly off the labor of others, bleed their tenants white by constantly raising their rents, where land enclosures for sheep-raising throw untold thousands of poor people into an existence of starvation or crime, and where the cities are ringed by gibbets on which thieves are hanged by the score without the slightest indication that the draconian punishment deters anyone from committing the same crimes.

That depiction of a ghastly reality-and the sixteenth century chronicler Holinshed reports that in the reign of Henry VIII, 72,000 thieves were hanged--is set against an imaginary island, Utopia (the name means “No-place” in Greek), whose inhabitants are convinced that “either the whole or the most part of human happiness” lies in the pursuit of pleasure. This central Epicurean tenet, the work makes clear, lies at the heart of the opposition between the good society of the Utopians and the corrupt, Vicious society of his own England. That is, More clearly grasped that the pleasure principle-the principle given its most powerful expression in Lucretius’ spectacular hymn to Venus-is not a decorative enhancement of routine existence; it is a radical idea that, if taken seriously, would change everything.

More set his Utopia in the remotest part of the world. Its discoverer, More writes at the beginning of the work, was a man who “ joined Amerigo Vespucci and was his constant companion in the last three of his four voyages, which are now universally read of, but on the final voyage he did not return with him.” He was instead one of those left behind, at his own urging in a garrison at the farthest point of the explorers’ venture into the unknown.

Reading Amerigo Vespucci and reflecting on the newfound lands known, in his honor, as “America,” More seized upon one of Vespucci’s observations about the peoples he had encountered.“Since their life is so entirely given over to pleasure,” Vespucci had written, ”I should style it Epicurean.” More must have realized with a jolt that he could use the amazing discoveries to explore some of the disturbing ideas that had returned to currency with Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. The link was not entirely surprising: the Florentine Vespucci was a part of the humanist circle in which On the Nature of Things circulated. The Utopians, More wrote, are inclined to believe “that no kind of pleasure is forbidden, provided no harm comes of it.” And their behavior is not merely a matter of custom; it is a philosophical position: “They seem to lean more than they should to the school that espouses pleasure as the object by which to define either the whole or the chief part of human happiness.” That ‘school” is the school of Epicurus and Lucretius.

The setting, in the remotest part of the remotest part of the World, enabled More to convey a sense that was extremely difficult for his contemporaries to articulate: that the pagan texts recovered by the humanists were at once compellingly vital and at the same time utterly weird. They had been reinjected into the intellectual bloodstream of Europe after long centuries in which they had been almost entirely forgotten, and they represented not continuity or recovery but rather a deep disturbance. They were in effect voices from another world, a

World as diiierent as Vespucci’s Brazil was to England, and their P power derived as much from their distance as their eloquent 1 lucidity.

The invocation of the New World allowed More to articulate a second key response to the texts that fascinated the humanists. He insisted that these texts be understood not as isolated philosophical ideas but as expressions of a whole way oflife lived in particular physical, historical, cultural, and social Cir. Cumstances. The description of the Epicureanism of the Umpi. ans only made sense for More in the larger context of an entire existence.

But that existence, More thought, would have to be for everyone. He took seriously the claim, so ardently made in On the Nature of Things, that Epicurus’ philosophy would liberate all of mankind from its abject misery. Or rather, More took seriously the universality that is the underlying Greek meaning of the word “catholic.” It would not be enough for Epicureanism to enlighten a small elite in a walled garden; it would have to apply to society as a whole. Utopia is a visionary, detailed blueprint for this application, from public housing to universal health care, from child care centers to religious toleration to the six-hour work day. The point of More’s celebrated fable is to imagine those conditions that would make it possible for an entire society to make the pursuit of happiness its collective goal.

For More, those conditions would have to begin with the abolition of private property. Otherwise the avidity of human beings, their longing for “nobility, magnificence, splendor and majesty,” would inevitably lead to the unequal distribution of wealth that consigns a large portion of the population to lives t of misery, resentment, and crime. But communism was not i, enough. Certain ideas would have to be banned. Specifically, it More wrote, the Utopians impose strict punishment, including
the harshest form of slavery, on anyone who denies the existence of divine providence or of the afterlife. The denial of Providence and the denial of the afterlife were the twin pillars of Lucretius’ whole poem. Thomas More then at once imaginatively embraced Epicureanism the most sustained and intelligent embrace since Poggio recovered De rerum natura a century earlier-and carefully cut its heart out. All citizens of his Utopia are encouraged to pursue pleasure; but those who think that the soul dies with the body or who believe ‘ that chance rules the universe, More writes, are arrested and enslaved. This harsh treatment was the only way More could conceive of the pursuit of pleasure actually being realized by more than a tiny privileged group of philosophers who have withdrawn from public life. People would have to believe, at a bare minimum, that there was an overarching providential design-not only in the state but in the very structure of the universe itself-and they would have to believe as well that the norms by which they are meant to regulate their pursuit of pleasure and hence discipline their behavior were reinforced by this providential design. The way that this reinforcement would work would be . through a belief in rewards and punishments in an afterlife. Otherwise, in More’s View, it would be impossible drastically to reduce, as he wished, both the terrible punishments and the extravagant rewards that kept his own unjust society in order.

By the standards of More’s age, the Utopians are amazingly tolerant: they do not prescribe a single official religious doctrine and then apply thumbscrews to those who do not adhere to it. Their citizens are permitted to worship any god they please

i and even to share these beliefs with others, provided that they t do so in a calm and rational manner. But in Utopia there is no it tolerance at all for those who think that their souls will disintegrate at death along with their bodies or who doubt that the gods, it they exist at all, concern themselves with the doings of mankind. These people are a threat, for what will restranl them from doing anything that they please? Utopians regard such unbelievers, More wrote, as less than human and certain}). unfit to remain in the community. For no one, in their View can be counted “among their citizens whose laws and custom; he would treat as worthless if it were not for fear.”

“If it were not for fear”: fear might be eliminated in the philosopher’s garden, among a tiny, enlightened elite, but it can. not be eliminated from an entire society, if that society is to be imagined as inhabited by the range of people who actually exist in the world as it has always been known. Even with the full force of Utopian social conditioning, human nature, More believed, would inevitably lead men to resort to force or fraud in order to get whatever they desire. More’s belief was conditioned no doubt by his ardent Catholicism, but in this same period Machiavelli, who was considerably less pious than the saintly More, came to the same conclusion. Laws and customs, the author of The Prince thought, were worthless without fear.

More tried to imagine what it would take not for certain individuals to be enlightened but for a whole commonwealth to do away with cruelty and disorder, share the goods of life equitably, organize itself around the pursuit of pleasure, and tear down the gibbets. The gibbets, all but a few, could be dismantled, More concluded, if and only if people were persuaded to imagine gibbets (and rewards) in another life. Without these imaginary supplements the social order would inevitably collapse, with each individual attempting to fulfill his wishes: “Who can doubt that he will strive either to evade by craft the public laws of his country or to break them by Violence in order to serve his private desires when he has nothing to fear but laws and no hope beyond the body?” More was fully prepared to countenance the public execution of anyone who thought and taught otherwise.

More's imaginary Utopians have a practical, instrumental motive for enforcing faith in Providence and in the afterlife: they are convinced that they cannot trust anyone who does not hold these beliefs. But More himself, as a pious Chrisrian, had another motive: jesus’ own words. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall on the ground without your Father’s will,” Jesus tells his disciples, adding that “even the hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew I0:29.30). There is, as Hamlet paraphrased the verse, “a speC131 providence in the fall of a sparrow.” Who in Christendom would dare to argue with that?

One answer in the sixteenth century was a diminutive Dominican monk, Giordano Bruno. In the mid-15805, the thirty-six-year-old Bruno, who had fled from his monastery in Naples and had wandered restlessly through Italy and France, found himself in London. Brilliant, reckless, at once charmingly charismatic and insufferably argumentative, he survived by cobbling together support from patrons, teaching the art of memory, and lecturing on various aspects of what he called the Nolan philosophy, named after the small town near Naples where he was born. That philosophy had several roots, tangled together in an exuberant and often baffling mix, but one of them was Epicureanism. Indeed, there are many indications that De rerum natum had unsettled and transformed Bruno’s whole world.

During his stay in England, Bruno wrote and published a hood of strange works. The extraordinary daring of these works may be gauged by taking in the implications of a single passage from one of them, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, printed in 1584. Mercury, the herald of the gods, is recounting to Sofia all the things Jove has assigned him to bring about.
Divine providence, at least as popularly understood, is rubbish. The details were all deliberately trivial but the stakes were extremely high: to mock Jesus’ claim that the hairs on one’s head are all numbered risked provoking an unpleasant visit from the thought police. Religion was not a laughing matter, at least for the officials assigned to enforce orthodoxy. They did not treat even trivial jokes lightly. In France, a villager named Isambard was arrested for having exclaimed, when a friar announced after mass that he would say a few words about God, "The fewer the better." In Spain, a tailor named Garcia Lopez. coming out of church just after the priest had announced the long schedule of services for the coming week, quipped that ”When we were jews, we were bored stiff by one Passover each year, and now each day seems to be a Passover and feast~day." Garcia Lopez was denounced to the Inquisition.

But Bruno was in England. Despite the vigorous efforts that Thomas More made. during his time as chancellor, to establish one, England had no Inquisition. Though it was still quite possible to get into serious trouble for unguarded speech. Bruno may have felt more at liberty to speak his mind, or, in this case. to indulge in raucous, wildly subversive laughter. That laughter had a philosophical point: once you take seriously the claim that God's providence extends to the fall of a sparrow and the number of hairs on your head, there is virtually no limit. from the agitated dust motes in a beam of sunlight to the planetary conjunctions that are occurring in the heavens above. “0 Mercury." Sofia says pityingly. “You have a lot to do.”

Sofia grasps that it would take billions of tongues to describe all that must happen even in a single moment in a tiny village in the Campagna. At this rate, no one could envy poor jove. But then Mercury admits that the whole thing does not work that way: there is no artificer god standing outside the universe barking commands. meting out rewards and punishments, determining everything. The whole idea is absurd. There is an order in the universe, but it is one built into the nature of things, into the matter that composes everything, from stars to men to bedbugs. Nature is not an abstract capacity, but a generative mother, bringing forth everything that exists. We have, in other words, entered the Lucretian universe.

That universe was not for Bruno a place of melancholy disenchantment. On the contrary, he found it thrilling to realize that the world has no limits in either space or time, that the grandest things are made of the smallest, that atoms, the building blocks of all that exists, link the one and the infinite. “The world is fine as it is,” he wrote, sweeping away as if they were so many cobwebs innumerable sermons on anguish, guilt, and repentance. It was pointless to search for divinity in the bruised and battered body of the Son and pointless to dream of finding the Father in some far-off heaven. "We have the knowledge,” he wrote, “not to search for divinity removed from us if we have it near; it is within us more than we ourselves are.” And his philosophical cheerfulness extended to his everyday life. He was, a Florentine contemporary observed, “a delightful companion at the table, much given to the Epicurean life.”

Like Lucretius, Bruno warned against focusing all of one’s capacity for love and longing on a single object of obsessive desire. It was perfectly good, he thought, to satisfy the body’s sexual cravings, but absurd to confuse those cravings with the search for ultimate truths, the truths that only philosophy-the Nolan philosophy, of course-could provide. It is not that those truths were abstract and bodiless. On the contrary, Bruno might have been the first person in more than a millennium to grasp the full force, at once philosophical and erotic, of Lucretius’ hymn to Venus. The universe, in its ceaseless process of generation and destruction and regeneration, is inherently sexual. Bruno found the militant Protestantism he encountered in England and elsewhere as bigoted and narrow-minded as the Counter-Reformation Catholicism from which he had fled The whole phenomenon of sectarian hatred tilled him With contempt. What he prized was the courage to stand up for the truth against the belligerent idiots who were always prepared to shout down what they could not understand. That courage he found preeminently in the astronomer Copernicus, who was, as he put it, “ordained by the gods to be the dawn which must precede the rising of the sun of the ancient and true philosophy, for so many centuries entombed in the dark caverns of blind, spiteful, arrogant, and envious ignorance.”

Copernicus’s assertion that the earth was not the fixed point at the center of the universe but a planet in orbit around the sun was still, when Bruno championed it, a scandalous idea, anathema both to the Church and to the academic establishment. And Bruno managed to push the scandal of Copernicanism still further: there was no center to the universe at all, he argued, neither earth nor sun. Instead, he wrote, quoting Lucretius, there were multiple worlds, where the seeds of things, in their infinite numbers, would certainly combine to form other races of men, other creatures. Each of the fixed stars observed in the sky is a sun, scattered through limitless space. Many of these are accompanied by satellites that revolve around them as the earth revolves around our sun. The universe is not all about us, about our behavior and our destiny; we are only a tiny piece of something inconceivably larger. And that should not make us shrink in fear. Rather, we should embrace the world in wonder and gratitude and awe.

These were extremely dangerous views, every one of them, and it did not improve matters when Bruno, pressed to reconcile his cosmology with Scripture, wrote that the Bible was a better guide to morality than to charting the heavens. Many people may have quietly agreed, but it was not prudent to say so in public, let alone in print.

Bruno was hardly the only brilliant scientific mind at work in Europe, rethinking the nature of things: in London he would almost certainly have met Thomas Harriot, who constructed the largest telescope in England, observed sun spots, sketched the lunar surface, observed the satellites of planets, Proposed that planets moved not in perfect circles but in elliptical orbits, worked on mathematical cartography, discovered the sine law of refraction, and achieved major breakthroughs in algebra. Many of these discoveries anticipated ones for which Galileo, Descartes, and others became famous. But Harriot is not credited with any of them: they were found only recently in the mass of unpublished papers he left at his death. Among those papers was a careful list that Harriot, an atomist, kept of the attacks upon him as a purported atheist. He knew that the attacks would only intensify if he published any of his findings, and he preferred life to fame. Who can blame him?

Bruno, however, could not remain silent. “By the light of his senses and reason,” he wrote about himself, “he opened those Cloisters of truth which it is possible for us to open with the key of most diligent inquiry, he laid bare covered and veiled nature, gave eyes to the moles and light to the blind . . . he loosed the tongues of the dumb who could not and dared not express their entangled Opinions.” As a child, he recalled in On the Immense and the Numberless, a Latin poem modeled on Lucretius, he had believed that there was nothing beyond Vesuvius, since his eye could not see beyond the volcano. Now he knew that he was part of an infinite world, and he could not enclose himself once again in the narrow mental cell his culture insisted that he inhabit.

More Swerving

Lucretius:
One simple name for the plague that Lucretius brought-«a charge frequently leveled against him, when his poem began once again to be read-is atheism. But Lucretius was not in fact an atheist. He believed that the gods existed. But he also believed that, by virtue of being gods, they could not possibly be concerned with human beings or with anything that we do. Divinity by its very nature, he thought, must enjoy eternal life and peace entirely untouched by any suffering or disturbance and indifferent to human actions.

If it gives you pleasure to call the sea Neptune or to refer to grain and wine as Ceres and Bacchus, Lucretius wrote, you should feel free to do so, just as you can dub the round world the Mother of the Gods. And if, drawn by their solemn beauty, you choose to visit religious shrines, you will be doing yourself no harm, provided that you contemplate the images of the gods “in peace and tranquillity.” (6:78) But you should not think for a minute that you can either anger or propitiate any of these deities. The processions, the animal sacrifices, the frenzied dances, the drums and cymbals and pipes, the showers of snowy rose petals, the eunuch priests, the carved images of the infant god: all of these cultic practices, though compelling and impressive in their way, are fundamentally meaningless, since the gods they are meant to reach are entirely removed and separated from our world.

It is possible to argue that, despite his profession of religious belief, Lucretius was some sort of atheist, a particularly sly one perhaps, since to almost all believers of almost all religious faiths in almost all times it has seemed pointless to worship a god without the hope of appeasing divine wrath or acquiring divine protection and favor. What is the use of a god who is uninterested in punishing or rewarding? Lucretius insisted that such hopes and anxieties are precisely a toxic form of superstition, combining in equal measure absurd arrogance and absurd fear. Imagining that the gods actually care about the fate of humans or about their ritual practices is, he observed, a particularly vulgar insult-as if divine beings depended for their happiness on our mumbled words or good behavior. But that insult is the least of the problems, since the gods quite literally could not care less. Nothing that we can do (or not do) could possibly interest them. The serious issue is that false beliefs and Observances inevitably lead to human mischief.

These views were certainly contrary to Poggio’s own Christian faith and would have led any contemporary who espoused them into the most serious trouble. But by themselves, encountered in a pagan text, they were not likely to trigger great alarm, Poggio could have told himself, as did some later sympathetic readers of On the Nature of Things, that the brilliant ancient poet simply intuited the emptiness of pagan beliefs and hence the absurdity of sacrifices to gods who did not in fact exist. Lucretius, after all, had the misfortune of living shortly before the coming of the Messiah. Had he been born a century later, he would have had the opportunity of learning the truth. As it was, he at least grasped that the practices of his own contemporaries were worthless. Hence even many modern translations of Lucretius’ poem into English reassuringly have it denounce as “superstition” what the Latin text calls simply religio.

But atheism-or, more accurately, the indifference of the gods-was not the only problem posed by Lucretius’ poem. Its main concerns lay elsewhere, in the material world we all inhabit, and it is here that the most disturbing arguments arose, arguments that lured those who were most struck by their formidable power-Machiavelli, Bruno, Galileo, and others-into strange trains of thought. Those trains of thought had once been eagerly explored in the very land to which they now returned, as a result of Poggio’s discovery. But a thousand years of virtual silence had rendered them highly dangerous.

By now much of what On the Nature of Things claims about the universe seems deeply familiar, at least among the circle of people who are likely to be reading these words. After all, many of the work’s core arguments are among the foundations on which modern life has been constructed. But it is worth remembering that some of the arguments remain alien and that others are hotly contested, often by those who gladly avail themselves of the scientific advances they helped to spawn. And to all but a few of Poggio’s contemporaries, most of what Lucretius claimed, albeit in a poem of startling, seductive beauty, seemed incomprehensible, unbelievable, or impious.

Here is a brief list, by no means exhaustive, of the elements that constituted the Lucretian challenge:

Everything is made of invisible particles. Lucretius, who disliked technical language, chose not to use the standard Greek philosophical term for these foundational particles, “atoms,” i.e., things that cannot be divided. He deployed instead a variety of ordinary Latin words: “first things,” “first beginnings,” “the bodies of matter,” “the seeds of things.” Everything is formed of these seeds and, on dissolution, returns to them in the end. Immutable, indivisible, invisible, and infinite in number, they are constantly in motion, clashing with one another, coming together to form new shapes, coming apart, recombining again, enduring.
The elementary particles of matter "the seeds of the things” are eternal. Time is not limited: a discrete substance with a beginning and an end but infinite. The invisible particles from which the entire universe is made, from the stars to the lowliest insect, are indestructible and immortal, though any particular object in the universe is transitory. That is, all the forms that we observe, even those that seem the most durable, are temporary: the building blocks from which they are composed will sooner or later be redistributed. But those building blocks themselves are permanent, as is the ceaseless process of formation, dissolution, and redistribution.

Neither creation nor destruction ever has the upperhand, the sum total of matter remains the same, and the balance between the living and the dead is always restored:

And so the destructive motions cannot hold sway eternally and bury existence forever; nor again can the motions that cause life and growth preserve created things eternally. Thus, in this war that has been waged from time everlasting, the contest between the elements is an equal one: now here, now there, the vital forces conquer and, in turn, are conquered; with the funeral dirge mingles the wail that babies raise when they reach the shores of light; no night has followed day, and no dawn has followed night, which has not heard mingled with those woeful wails the lamentations that accompany death and the black funeral. (2569-80)

The Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana called this idea-the ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances-“the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.”

The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size. They are like the letters in an alphabet, a discrete set capable of being combined in an infinite number of sentences. (2.6883,) And, with the seeds of things as with language, the combinations are made according to a code. As not all letters or all words can be coherently combined, so too not all particles can combine with all other particles in every possible manner. Some of the seeds of things routinely and easily hook onto others; some repel and resist one another. Lucretius did not claim to know the hidden code of matter. But, he argued, it is important to grasp that there is a code and that, in principle, it could be investigated and understood by human science.

All particles are in motion in an infinite void. Space, like time, is unbounded. There are no fixed points, no beginnings, middles, or ends, and no limits. Matter is not packed together in a solid mass. There is a void in things, allowing the constitutive particles to move, collide, combine, and move apart. Evidence for the void includes not only the restless motion that we observe all around us, but also such phenomena as water oozing through the walls of caves, food dispersed through bodies, sound passing through walls of closed rooms, cold permeating to the bones.

The universe consists then of matter-the primary particles and all that those particles come together to form-and space, intangible and empty. Nothing else exists.

The universe has no creator or designer. The particles themselves have not been made and cannot be destroyed. The patterns of order and disorder in the world are not the product of any divine scheme. Providence is a fantasy.

What exists is not the manifestation of any overarching plan or any intelligent design inherent in matter itself. No supreme choreographer planned their movements and the seeds of things did not have a meeting in which they decided what would go where.

But because throughout the universe from time everlasting countless numbers of them, buffeted and impelled by blows, have shifted in countless ways, experimentation with every kind of movement and combination has at last resulted in arrangements such as those that created and compose our world. (11024-28) There is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance. Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve. If all the individual particles, in their infinite numbers, fell through the void in straight lines, pulled down by their own weight like raindrops, nothing would ever exist. But the particles do not move lockstep in a preordained single direction. Instead, “at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course, to a degree that could be described as no more than a shift of movement.” (2218-20) The position of the elementary particles is thus indeterminate.

The swerve-Which Lucretius called variously declinatio, inclinatio, or clinamen~is only the most minimal of motions, nec plus quam minimum. (2.244) But it is enough to set off a ceaseless chain of collisions. Whatever exists in the universe exists because of these random collisions of minute particles. The endless combinations and recombinations, resulting from the collisions over a limitless span of time, bring it about that “the rivers replenish the insatiable sea with plentiful streams of water, that the earth, warmed by the sun’s fostering heat, renews her produce, that the family of animals springs up and thrives, and that the gliding ethereal fires have life.” (1.1031 34)

The swerve is the source of free will. In the lives of all sentient creatures, human and animal alike, the random swerve of elementary particles is responsible for the existence of free will. For if all of motion were one long predetermined chain, there would be no possibility of freedom. Cause would follow cause from eternity, as the fates decreed. Instead, we wrest free will from the fates.

But what is the evidence that the will exists? Why should we not simply think that the matter in living creatures moves because of the same blows that propel dust motes? Lucretius’ image is the split second on the race track after the starting gate is opened, before the straining horses, frantically eager to move, can actually propel their bodies forward. That split second is the thrilling spectacle of a mental act bidding a mass of matter into motion. And because this image did not quite answer to his whole purpose-because, after all, race horses are precisely creatures driven to move by the blows of their riders-Lucretius went on to observe that though an outside force may strike against a man, that man may deliberately hold himself back.

Nature ceaselessly experiments. There is no single moment of origin, no mythic scene of creation. All living beings, from plants and insects to the higher mammals and man, have evolved through a long, complex process of trial and error. The process involves many false starts and dead ends, monsters, prodigies, mistakes, creatures that were not endowed with all the features that they needed to compete for resources and to create offspring. Creatures whose combination of organs enables them to adapt and to reproduce will succeed in establishing themselves, until changing circumstnces make it impossible for them any longer to survive.

The successful adaptations, like the failures. are the result of a fantastic number of combinations that are constantly being generated (and reproduced or discarded) over an unlimited expanse of time. it is difficult to grasp this point, Lucretius acknowledged, but "what has been created gives rise to its own function.” (4.835) That is, he explained, "Sight did not exist before the birth of the eyes, nor speech before the creation of the tongue.” (4.836-37) These organs were not created in order to fulfill a purposed end; their usefulness gradually enabled the creatures in whom they emerged to survive and to reproduce their kind. The universe was not created for or about humans. The earth-with its seas and deserts, harsh climate, wild beasts, diseases-was obviously not purpose-built to make our species feel at home. Unlike many other animals, who are endowed at birth with what they need to survive, human infants are almost completely vulnerable: Consider, Lucretius wrote in a celebrated passage, how a baby, like a ship Wrecked sailor flung ashore by fierce waves, lies on the ground naked, speechless, and utterly helpless as soon as nature has cast it forth with pangs of labor from its mother’s womb into the shores of light. (5223-25)

The fate of the entire species (let alone that of any individual) is not the pole around which everything revolves. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that human beings as a species will last forever. On the contrary, it is clear that, over the infinite expanses of time, some species grow, others disappear, generated and destroyed in the ceaseless process of change. There were other forms of life before us which no longer exist; there will be other forms of life after us, when our kind has vanished.

Humans are not unique. They are part of a much larger material process that links them not only to all other life forms but to inorganic matter as well. The invisible particles out of which living things, including humans, are composed are not sentient nor do they come from some mysterious source. We are made of the same stuff that everything else is made of.

Humans do not occupy the privileged place in existence. They imagine for themselves: though they often fail to recognize the fact, they share many of their most cherished qualities with other animals. To be sure, each individual is unique, but, thanks to the abundance of matter, the same is true of virtually all creatures: how else do we imagine that a calf recognizes its dam or the cow her calf? We have only to look attentively at the world around us to grasp that many of the most intense and poignant experiences of our lives are not exclusive to our species. Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival. There was no original paradisal time of plenty, as some have dreamed, in which happy, peaceful men and women, living in security and leisure, enjoyed the fruits of nature’s abundance. Early humans, lacking lire, agriculture, and other means to soften a brutally hard existence, struggled to eat and to avoid being eaten.

There may always have been some rudimentary capacity for social cooperation in the interest of survival, but the ability to form bonds and to live in communities governed by settled customs developed slowly. At first there was only random mating-~either from mutual desire or from barter or rape-«and the hunting and gathering of food. Mortality rates were extremely high, though not, Lucretius noted wryly, as high as they currently are, inflated by warfare, shipwreck, and overeating.

The idea that language was somehow given to humans, as a miraculous invention, is absurd. Instead, Lucretius wrote, humans, who like other animals used inarticulate cries and gestures in various situations, slowly arrived at shared sounds to designate the same things. So too, long before they were able to join together to sing melodious songs, humans imitated the warbling of birds and the sweet sound of a gentle breeze in the reeds and so gradually developed a capacity to make music.

The arts of civilization-not given to man by some divine lawmaker but painstakingly fashioned by the shared talents and mental power of the species-are accomplishments worth celebrating, but they are not unmixed blessings. They arose in tandem with the fear of the gods, the desire for wealth, the pursuit of fame and power. All of these originated in a craving for security, a craving that reaches back to the earliest experiences of the human species struggling to master its natural enemies. That violent struggle-against the wild beasts that threatened human survival-was largely successful, but the anxious, acquisitive, aggressive impulses have metastasized. In consequence, human beings characteristically develop weapons that turn against themselves.

The soul dies. The human soul is made of the same material as the human body. The fact that we cannot physically locate the soul in a particular organ only means that it is made of exceedingly minute particles interlaced through the veins, flesh, and sinews. Our instruments are not line enough to weigh the soul: at the moment of death, it dissolves “like the case of a wine Whose bouquet has evaporated, or a perfume whose exquisite scent has dispersed into the air.” (3.221-2) We do not imagine that the wine or perfume contains a mysterious soul; only that the scent consists of very subtle material elements, too small to measure. So too of the human spirit: it consists of tiny elements hidden in body’s most secret recesses. When the body dies-that is, when its matter is dispersed-~the soul, which is part of the body, dies as well.

There is no afterlife. Humans have both consoled and tormented themselves with the thought that something awaits them after they have died. Either they will gather flowers for eternity in a paradisal garden where no chill wind ever blows or they will be frog-marched before a harsh judge who will condemn them, for their sins, to unending misery (misery that somewhat mysteriously requires them after dying to have heat-sensitive skin, an aversion to cold, bodily appetite and thirst, and the like). But once you grasp that your soul dies along with your body, you also grasp that there can be no posthumous punishments or rewards. Life on this earth is all that human beings have.

Death is nothing to us. When you are dead-when the particles that have been linked together, to create and sustain you, have come apart-there will be neither pleasure nor pain, longing nor fear. Mourners, Lucretius wrote, always wring their hands in anguish and say, “Never again will your dear children race for the prize of your first kisses and touch your heart with pleasure too profound for words.” (3.895-98) But they do not go on to add, “You will not care, because you will not exist.”

All organized religions are superstitious delusions. The delusions are based on deeply rooted longings, fears, and ignorance. Humans project images of the power and beauty and perfect security that they would like to possess.

Fashioning their gods accordingly, they become enslaved to their own dreams.

Everyone is subject to the feelings that generate such dreams: they wash over you when you look up at the stars and start imagining beings of immeasurable power; or when you wonder if the universe has any limits; or when you marvel at the exquisite order of things; or, less agree ably, when you experience an uncanny string of misf0r~ tunes and wonder if you are being punished; or when nature shows its destructive side. There are entirely natural explanations for such phenomena as lightning and earthquakes-Lucretius spells them out-but terrified humans instinctively respond with religious fear and start praying.

Religions are invariably cruel. Religions always promise hope and love, but their deep, underlying structure is cruelty. This is why they are drawn to fantasies of retribution and why they inevitably stir up anxiety among their adherents. The quintessential emblem of religion-and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core-is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.

Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphegenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around so BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.

There are no angels, demons, or ghosts. Immaterial spirits or any kind do not exist. The creatures with which the Greek and Roman imagination populated the world- Fates, harpies, daemons, genii, nymphs, satyrs, dryads, celestial messengers, and the spirits of the dead- are entirely unreal. Forget them.

The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be organized to serve the pursuit of happiness. There is no ethical purpose higher than facilitating this pursuit for oneself and one’s fellow creatures. All the other claims-the service of the state, the glorification of the gods or the ruler, the arduous pursuit of virtue through self-sacrifice-are secondary, misguided, or fraudulent. The militarism and the taste for violent sports that characterized his own culture seemed to Lucretius in the deepest sense perverse and unnatural. Man’s natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more.

Most people grasp rationally that the luxuries they crave are, for the most part, pointless and do little or nothing to enhance their well-being: ”Fiery fevers quit your body no quicker, if you toss in embroidered attire of blushing crimson, than if you must lie sick in a common garment.” (234-36) But, as it is difficult to resist fears of the gods and the afterlife, so too it is difficult to resist the compulsive sense that security, for oneself and one’s community, can somehow be enhanced through exploits of passionate acquisitiveness and conquest. These exploits, however, only decrease the possibility of happiness and put everyone engaged in them at the risk of shipwreck.

The goal, Lucretius wrote in a celebrated and famously disturbing passage, must be to escape from the whole mad enterprise and observe it from a position of safetv:
It is comforting when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea. to watch from land the severe trials of another person: not that anyone’s distress is a cause of agreeable pleasure; but it is comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt. It is comforting also to witness mighty clashes of warriors embattled on the plains, when you have no share in the danger. But nothing is more bliss ful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise, tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way oflife, competing for intellectual eminence, disputing about rank, and striving night and day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to secure power. (2:1-13)

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire-the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows-and gnawing fear. Even the dreaded plague, in Lucretius’ account-and his work ends with a graphic account of a catastrophic plague epidemic in Athens---is most horrible not only for the suffering and death that it brings but also and still more for the “perturbation and panic” that it triggers.

It is perfectly reasonable to seek to avoid pain: such avoidance is one ofthe pillars of his whole ethical system. But how is it possible to keep this natural aversion from turning into panic, panic that only leads to the triumph of suil'ering? And, more generally, why are humans so unhappy?

The answer, Lucretius thought, had to do with the power of the imagination. Though they are finite and

mortal, humans are gripped by illusions of the infinite-infinite pleasure and infinite pain. The fantasy ofinfmite pain helps to account for their proneness to religion: in the misguided belief that their souls are immortal and hence potentially subject to an eternity of suffering, humans imagine that they can somehow negotiate with the gods for a better outcome, an eternity of pleasure in paradise. The fantasy ofinhnite pleasure helps to account for their pronencss to romantic love: in the misguided belief that their happiness depends upon the absolute possession of some single object of limitless desire, humans are seized by a feverish, unappeasable hunger and thirst that can only bring anguish instead of happiness.

Once again it is perfectly reasonable to seek sexual pleasure: that is, after all, one of the body’s natural joys. The mistake, Lucretius thought, was to confound this joy with a delusion, the frenzied craving to possess-at once to penetrate and to consume-what is in reality a dream. Of course, the absent lover is always only a mental image and in this sense akin to a dream. But Lucretius observed in passages of remarkable frankness that in the very act of sexual consummation lovers remain in the grip of confused longings that they cannot fulfill:

Even in the hour of possession the passion of the lovers fluctuates and wanders in uncertainty: they cannot decide what to enjoy first with their eyes and hands. They tightly squeeze the object of their desire and cause bodily pain, often driving their teeth into one another's lips and crushing mouth against mouth. (41076-81)

The point of this passage-part of what W. B. Yeats called the finest description of sexual intercourse ever written - is not to urge a more decorous. tepid form of lovemaking

It is to take note of the element or unsated appetite that haunts even the fulfillment of desire_ The insatiability of sexual appetite is, in Lucretius’ view, one of Venus’ cunning strategies; it helps to account for the fact that after brief interludes, the same acts of love are performed again and again. And he understood too that these repeated acts are deeply pleasurable. But he remained troubled by the ruse, by the emotional suffering that comes in its wake by the arousal of aggressive impulses, and, above all by the sense that even the moment of ecstasy leaves something to be desired. In 1685, the great poet John Dryden brilliantly captured Lucretius’ remarkable vision;

. . . when the youthful pair more closely join, When hands in hands they lock, and thighs in thighs they twine; Just in the raging foam of full desire, When both press on, both murmur, both expire, They grip, they squeeze, their humid tongues they dart, As each would force their way to th’others heart, In vain; they only cruise about the coast. For bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost, As sure they strive to be, when both engage In that tumultuous momentary rage. So tangled in the nets of love they lie, Till man dissolves in that excess of joy.

Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder. The realization that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else, that the world was not made for us by a providential creator, that we are not the center of the universe, that our emotional lives are no more distinct than our physical lives from those of all other creatures, that our souls are as material and as mortal as our bodies-all these things are not the cause for despair. On the contrary, grasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness. Human insignificance-the fact that it is not all about us and our fate-~is, Lucretius insisted, the good news.

It is possible for human beings to live happy lives, but not because they think that they are the center of the universe or because they fear the gods or because they nobly sacrifice themselves for values that purport to transcend their mortal existence. Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the principal obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason.

The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things. All speculation-all science, all morality, all attempts to fashion a life worth living-must start and end with a comprehension of the invisible seeds of things: atoms and the void and nothing else.

It might seem at first that this comprehension would inevitably bring with it a sense of cold emptiness, as if the universe had been robbed of its magic. But being liberated from harmful illusions is not the same as disillusionment. The origin of philosophy, it was often said in the ancient world, was wonder: surprise and bafflement led to a desire to know, and knowledge in turn laid the wonder to rest. But in Lucretius’ account the process is something like the reverse: it is knowing the way things are that awakens the deepest wonder.