Colossus of Rhodes or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. After
disappearing for 1,500 years, it was discovered in 1417 by an Italian scribe
and book hunter, Poggio Bracciolini, in a southern Germany monastery.
Poggio concealed himself for three weeks in the monastery and copied
its 7,400 Latin lines from ancient papyrus, returning to Rome with his
treasure. Within a few decades, Gutenberg invented the printing press, and
soon copies of Lucretius’s poem would be printed and distributed around
the Western world. The discovery of “On the Nature of Things” helped
make the world modern, turning away “from a preoccupation with angels
and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this
world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything
else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without
fearing that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets ... to
legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain ... to find the
mortal world is enough.”^3 While it is challenging to pinpoint all the causes
of the Renaissance, surely this poem, with its groundbreaking claims,
helped the world “swerve” toward modernity.
What made the poem so radical? To start with, Lucretius claims that
everything is made of invisible particles. He further postulates that these
particles are eternal (which would be a foundational claim of Antoine
Lavoisier, one of the fathers of chemistry). Harvard University
philosopher George Santayana has called this “the greatest thought that
mankind has ever hit upon.”^4 In addition, our poet tells us that humans are
not unique, we are in a primitive battle for survival, there is no afterlife,
religions are cruel, and the highest goal of life is the enhancement of
pleasure and the reduction of pain. Radical, indeed. When these assertions
were resurrected at the end of the Middle Ages, one can see why they were
so iconoclastic. As Gustave Flaubert has said, “Just when the gods had
ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment
in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.”^5
These ponderings would help transform astrology to astronomy, alchemy
to chemistry, and, eventually, Aristotelian cosmology to Newtonian
Physics.
Hippocrates’s life spans the triad of great philosophers—born ten years
after Socrates, most of Plato’s life, and overlapping Aristotle by fourteen
years. Not just a physician, Hippocrates was a renowned author, a pillar of
the culture, a patriot of Greece, and a moralist. The “Hippocratic corpus,”