Democritus

In 1417, Poggio Bracciolini, the protagonist of Stephen Greenblatt’s remarkable book, The Swerve, discovered a poem, On the Nature of Things, written 1,500 years earlier by Titus Lucretius Carus (99 BCE – 55 BCE), who was virtually unknown. This poem is his only surviving work. One might think that Poggio’s discovery of a new author from [...]