Stephen Greenblatt's Swerve is Not as Accurate as One Might Wish

It's annoying, if you've spent a lot of time and effort carefully writing something, if a reviewer comments in a way which makes it clear that the reviewer has either not read your work at all carefully, or has not read it all. It's happened to me a few times. I don't like it at all.

The Recognitions, by William Gaddis,



is now generally regarded as one of the finest novels ever written by an American. But when it was published in 1955, and for some years after that, it was not generally so regarded. In 1962, a man who, under the pseudonym jack green, wrote and published an "underground" periodical called newspaper, presented in that publication his assessment of the first 55 reviews of The Recognitions. The title of the piece was green's suggestion about what should happen with these book critics: "fire the bastards!"



When green took on Gaddis' critics, he had an enormous advantage over almost all of them: he had actually read The Recognitions, carefully and all the way through. In almost half of the 55 reviews green pointed out mistaken assertions about what happened in the plot; he was even able to prove that one review had been stolen from another. "fire the bastards!" also shows that green considered The Recognitions to be a masterpiece.

In 2017, after both Gaddis and green have been dead for decades, Gaddis' reputation as a writer is as high as it can be, and green's is not bad. I would warn against taking this as proof that many people have actually read either Gaddis or green. I would not assume, necessarily, that most of the copies of their works which have been printed, have also been read. Still, however well-founded or unfounded they may be, their current high reputations are well-deserved, so, good.

The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt,



was published in 2011 and won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. It's the story of how in the early 15th century, the Italian humanist and discoverer of lost ancient texts Poggio Bracciolini -- usually referred to today by his first name only, like Dante Alighieri, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Prince Rogers Nelson and Madonna Ciccone -- discovered a manuscript of de rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), the book of Epicurean philosophy written in the 1st century BC by the Roman poet Lucretius.

Someone online -- I don't remember exactly who or where or when. It may have been on Facebook, and it may have been shortly after the book was published -- recommended The Swerve to me in rapturous tones. His description of it made me suspicious: he told me that the book told the story of how the re-discovery of Lucretius ushered in the modern age. My first reaction was that that story was a bit cuckoo-bananas. Not that I had anything against Lucretius or Poggio. On the contrary, Lucretius was and is one of my favorite authors, and Poggio was known to me as a prominent Renaissance humanist.

But I also knew that Lucretius was just one of many brilliant Classical authors, Poggio just one of the many brilliant Classical scholars of the Renaissance, and that Poggio coming across that manuscript of Lucretius was just one of many important finds of Classical literature made in the 15th century, as well as before and since.

And for some reason, just lately I started to think about Greenblatt's book again, and I searched for reviews of it, and found one layman after another, apparently trusting that Greenblatt was an authority on these matters, and astonished at how one discovery of a manuscript had changed the whole world. Let me not forget to point out that, in situations like this, when people refer to "the whole world," they mean the Western European world and its colonizing outposts.

But I hastened to remind myself that I hadn't read Greenblatt's book yet, and to ask myself whether Greenblatt had actually said anything like what these reviewers said he said.

So next I searched for reactions to The Swerve by Classicists, by the experts in the field of ancient Latin, and I found that most of those reactions were negative.

Often polite and negative, as Classicists often are when referring to written work they don't like: for example, in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Diana Robin, reviewing Gerard Passannante's book The Lucretian Renaissance, says that it "provides a counter- weight to The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt’s new and breezy but factually challenged account of the rediscovery of the De rerum natura." If there's one way in which one wouldn't want a book of history to be challenged, I think it would be factually.

Anthony Grafton, reviewing The Swerve in the New York Review of Books, politely laments: “The Swerve is not always as accurate as one would wish.”

In his review of The Swerve, the blogger known as Baerista notes that remark by Grafton, and adds: "From a world-class scholar like Grafton, who is widely known as an extremely generous man, always careful to wrap even the faintest criticism in a wadding of praise, such clear-cut words can be taken as the verbal equivalent to a bitchslap." Baerista himself is less restrained,
summing up his account of The Swerve by calling it "garbage."

Tim O'Neill's review -- not overly polite -- accuses Greenblatt of wanting to have his cake and eat it too. It contains rather more and lengthier quotations from The Swerve than any of the other reviews I've read so far, and shows how Greenblatt gives lay people those silly notions about one discovery of one ancient author changing "the whole world" (that is, Western civilization), but then claims that he never intended to spread such mistaken notions. O'Neill charges: "Greenblatt's book is full of this kind of thing. After pages and pages of making a point, often more by broad assertion, generalisation or even insinuation, he will slip in a brief 'escape clause' sentence which shows that he knows what he is saying can be challenged or which even undermines what he has just presented completely. But he does so very quietly and many or even most general readers would not notice or understand the import of these asides. Certainly few of his reviewers did so."

After reading O'Neill's review, I concluded, with very little enthusiasm, that I needed to read The Swerve myself and see if, perhaps, it was a little better than its detractors said. Which would mean that that National Book Award and that Pulitzer Prize wouldn't be so much of a joke.

It's just as bad as its detractors say.

But there's a hint of a book which might have been good: The Swerve opens with a moving account of how Greenblatt, as a student, found a copy of an English translation of de rerum natura in a campus co-op, and how its Epicurian message that there is nothing to fear in death was so transformative for Greenblatt and some of his loved ones.

Greenblatt loves Lucretius. And there's nothing wrong with love. Love is great, love is good, love is a huge positive force.

Could there have been a good book here, if Greenblatt stayed focused on his own personal story, and the importance of Lucretius in that story, instead of making silly claims about Lucretius transforming "the world" and Poggio's discovery of Lucretius miraculously saving his poem from being lost forever -- only to cover his ass again and again, just as O'Neill accuses him of doing, so that he can claim that he never meant to give all of those erroneous notions to all of those laypeople (which didn't prevent those erroneous notions from spreading)?

Some of Greenblatt's harshest critics -- Catholic clergymen in some cases -- accuse him of painting a ridiculously negative view of the Middle Ages, only to err themselves a bit by painting a too positive view. The Middle Ages were a mixed bag. Some individual people did embody the superstitious hostility to everything non-Christian which Greenblatt emphasizes in his portrayal of Poggio's view of the Middle Ages -- one of the 'escape clauses' derided by O'Neill is that Greenblatt can claim that he only said that Poggio thought that the Middle Ages were horrible and superstitious, not that he agreed with Poggio -- and some Medieval individuals exemplify the sophisticated scholarship which, according to apologists, was the essence of Medieval Christianity.

But to get away from the sweeping generalizations which have caused so much praise and so much condemnation of The Swerve, to more specific statements, the book gets low marks. Greenblatt really does completely miss much of the Classical scholarship which thrived in the Middle Ages, along with his unrelenting emphasis on the Inquisition and the flagellants. But of course, the Inquisition and the brilliant scholarship both still existed, just as people were still tried and burnt as witches, during the same Renaissance which produced all of those famous Italian geniuses, just as today there still are cultured geniuses alongside ignorant fanatics.

To Poggio and his fellow Renaissance humanists, the most important ancient writer of Latin, far more important than Vergil, who came in second there, was not Lucretius, it was Cicero. Cicero was so highly thought of that the ridiculous notion spread among Renaissance scholars that the best way to write Latin was to consciously imitate Cicero. This was the mainstream view among Poggio's contemporaries. This recent collection of letters and polemics published by the i tatti Renaissance Library, Ciceronian Controversies, with the original 15th-, 16th- and 17th-century Latin texts on the left and English translations on the facing right-hand pages,



shows how far ahead Cicero was than all the other ancients in the general opinion of Renaissance Classicists, and what an uphill battle any of them had who thought that imitating Cicero was not the best of all possible ways to write.

If Lucretius was as central to Machiavelli's work as Greenblatt claims, why did Machiavelli write an entire book about Livy and none about Lucretius? If you asked Greenblatt this, I think he might well answer that Lucretius was dangerous, so that his influence had to be hidden. Which is ridiculous, both in general and in the specific case of Machiavelli, who was anything but bashful in his writing.

Speaking of Livy, Greenblatt claims that Livy's entire work was gathered together by Petrarch (1304-74). Does Greenblatt even realize that 106.9 of the 142 books of Livy's work, ab urbe condita, a history of Rome, are missing today? Or that 5 of the books we have today were missing until 1527? Or that Petrarch, although he was a great editor of Livy, had no need to gather Livy's works together, because they -- the 30 books known at the time -- were all quite well-known? One thing's certain: laypeople won't learn any of that by reading Greenblatt.

Speaking of editing, does Greenblatt have any idea that one of the most stupendous acts of Classical editing was performed with the manuscripts of -- you guessed it -- Lucretius, in the mid-19th century, when Bernays and Lachmann proved, on the basis of the existing manuscripts of Lucretius, that they all stemmed from one 5th-century manuscript written in all caps?

Speaking of manuscripts: in another of O'Neill's "escape clauses," Greenblatt admits that he knows that two manuscripts of Lucretius' entire poem, plus additional fragments, were written in the 9th century. But did he give any thought as to why they were written then? It was because Charlemagne (742-814) began a huge program of preserving and copying Classical manuscripts. Yes, there was a huge 9th-century surge in Classical studies. It's sometimes referred to as the Carolingian Renaissance. There was another surge in the 12th century. (My theory -- supported by no-one else that I know of -- is that this 12th-century revival of Classical learning in Western Europe, also sometimes referred to as a Renaissance, occurred in part because a lot of the most pious types were far away in the Crusades, allowing those back at home much more freedom to do what they felt like, whether it was study Classical Latin or sing bawdy troubador songs or play chess, to name three things sometimes frowned upon by the more intolerant Christians.) Is Greenblatt entirely quiet about these Medieval surges in Classical scholarship because they don't fit comfortably into his narrative, or merely because he's never heard of them? [PS, 22 November 2017: I was wrong, Greenblatt does mention the Carolingian Renaissance: "In addition to the fifteenth-century Renaissance, there had been other moments of intense interest in antiquity, both throughout medieval Italy and in the kingdoms of the north, including the great Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth century" (p 116). Great, Greenblatt calls it -- but not great enough that Greenblatt describes it in any further detail. It only gets one other mention in the book, entirely in passing: "the time of Charlemagne, when there was a crucial burst of interest in ancient books" (p 12). "Moments." "a burst." Greenblatt implies that these times of interest in ancient Latin were so brief that if you blinked you might have missed them, the way that I missed Greenblatt's reference to the Carolingian Renaissance in my first reading of his book because, frankly, I was bored.]

The manuscript of Lucretius which Poggio found in 1417 has been proven -- by the Classical scholars who don't think much of Greenblatt -- to have been copied from a copy of O, one of those 9th-century manuscripts which still survive today. The manuscript Poggio found has disappeared. We don't know how many other Medieval manuscripts of Lucretius there may have been. I don't know how, in the face of these manuscripts, Greenblatt can say (p 209 of the 2011 Norton hardcover edition of The Swerve) that, in the 15th century, and all because of Poggio, "On the Nature of Things slowly made its way again into the hands of readers, about a thousand years after it had dropped out of sight." About a thousand years. How can he say that, when people today can literally hold some 9th-century evidence directly to the contrary in their hands, evidence which Greenblatt mentions in the same book? I don't know. Maybe this book was actually written by a committee, and the various members didn't read each other's work. Maybe Greenblatt thinks it was "about a thousand years" from the 9th century to the 15th. Maybe he thinks that no Medieval manuscript of Lucretius was read before 1417, that the Medieval copies were without exception simply copied and then immediately put onto shelves for rotting purposes. (He not only doesn't equate copying a manuscript with reading its text, he actually claims that it was better if scribes paid no attention to what they were copying.) You know what, I don't want to know how Greenblatt could have said that.

Speaking of things Greenblatt may or may not have heard of -- Horace, well-known throughout the Middle Ages, was an Epicurean. This significantly undercuts Greenblatt's thesis that Lucretius re-introduced Epicurianism to "the world." Cicero, overly well-known from his day to the present, if you ask me, (I don't like Cicero. Would I like him more if he weren't so ridiculously overpraised in comparison to many other ancient Latin writers? Well, that's an alternate-universe type question which may never be answered, like the one about whether Greenblatt's book might have been better if he had been more personal.) discussed Epicureanism, albeit negatively.

Oh, and just one more thing: on p 111 of Scribes & Scholars by L D Reynolds & N G Wilson, 2nd ed, 1974, it sez:

"Lovato knew Lucretius and Valerius Flaccus a century and a half before they were discovered by Poggio."

Lovato Lovati. 1241-1309.

Just because you never heard of something before you stumble across it doesn't necessarily mean you really discovered it. Boom, I'm out.

Someone Asked Me What "New Atheists" Are, And How They're Different From "Old Atheists"

Dawkins, Harris, PZ Myers and their fans are New Atheists. Hitchens and Victor Stenger were New Atheists. They combine a cluelessness about history and religion and the humanities with a propensity for making sweeping inaccurate statements about them, and don't seem interested in ideas concerning religion which are more complicated than sound bites. Some prominent examples:

Dawkins started the "Bronze Age goat herders" meme. (Coincidentally, he also coined the term "meme" in his book The Selfish Gene, back when he was doing something he did exceptionally well: writing about biology.) Point out to a typical New Atheist that the oldest parts of the Bible were written in the Iron Age, by town-dwellers, and that the Israelites' primary livestock animal was sheep, not goats, and the typical response is "So what?" So why do you keep repeating Dawkins' meme, that's what.

On p 1 of The Selfish Gene Dawkins approvingly quoted GG Simpson's pronouncement that we should completely forget about all attempts made before 1859 to answer the question, "What is man?" That should have warned me that neither Simpson nor Dawkins knew very much at all about things written up to 1859, and led me to expect things like Dawkins' activity since 2004, when he's published very little work in biology.

More recently Dawkins tweeted the fact that there were more Nobel prize winners from Trinity College than from "the entire Muslim world." Immediately I and a whole bunch of other people pointed out cultural bias, duh! in the awarding of Nobels. Last I heard Dawkins hasn't felt the need to reply to any of us about that. It's getting more and more difficult to take him seriously except in a very negative way.

Hitchens created a very popular meme in the subtitle of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.



But of course it doesn't poison EVERYthing. Life's much more complicated than that, billions of people's lives over the course of tens of thousands of years, and yes, I'm saying that if you want to say something deep about religion, you have to have at least an inkling of all of those billions of people's lives, or at the very best you're only going to say something deep every now and then, completely by accident.

Michael Paulkovich is a New Atheist, and the editors of Free Inquiry demonstrated quintessential New Atheist behavior when they published an article because they liked the sound bite: "126 ancient authors who should've mentioned Jesus but didn't," without seeming to care at all about checking into whether or not Paulkovich is making any sense. He's not.



Sam Harris is a peculiarly mid-19th-century sort of New Atheist: his moral philosophy is utilitarian, like that of John Suart Mill, as if he hadn't heard of how Mill had been thoroughly dismantled by the late 19th century by people like Nietzsche.



Dawkins has a lot of credibility in the filed of biology, richly deserved, but he's helped to give an undeserved credibility to New Atheism. It's very bad luck that these people are currently the public face of atheism, but we atheists who actually know something about history, philosophy, the arts and religion -- about the humanities -- just have to speak up louder and more persistently. That's the only way that an intelligent and informed public discussion of religion will get underway.

More Actual Yada-Yada With Real-Life Mipmipmips!

(As usual, all andsoforth guaranteed terrifyingly lalala. Pleas note, A contributed only one comment here. The rest is me and B. B is the one really making a euphemism of himself here. For all I know, A may've grasped my point right away. As I say below, it ain't rocket science.)

A: People are so desperate to try to make Jesus real, even there is no real evidence that he ever actually existed. It was over 70 years after his supposed death that anything was ever written about the guy and then 20 years after that and no accounts were actually witnessed by anyone. No historians or government accounts exist either. Its like when they found a old medium size boat in Turkey, that wouldn't even hold but a few animals and claimed that it was noah's ark...give me a break!

ME: I'm not convinced that Jesus existed, but I do know how to add and subtract. If Jesus existed and lived for 33 years, then he probably died around AD 25 to 40. Paul's earliest writings dating from the early 50's, at most 30 years after Jesus' supposed death, probably more like 20 to 25. 70 years after his supposed death would be around 95 to 110, and almost all of the New Testament was written by then.

Honestly, this stuff isn't complicated at all.

B: SO, what does any of this prove or even suggest?

ME: It proves that some people can't add and subtract 2-digit numbers.

B: yea, I got that part....but beyond the math.....what does this prove?

ME: When I first heard about the New Atheists, I assumed I was one: I'm an atheist who doesn't hide his views about religion, I'm very critical of religion. I'd also read 2 of Dawkins' books -- on BIOLOGY. So many New Atheists are scientists, and repeatedly point the importance of peer review, and quite rightly, it is very important. The thing is, it's important in other fields besides science. History, for example. corkery said: "It was over 70 years after his supposed death that anything was ever written about the guy" What's the difference between 70 years and the correct number, 20 years? What the difference between "Bronze Age goat herders" and "Iron Age city dwellers"? It's the difference between an A and an F on a History 101 exam. New Atheists don't practice peer review in each other's statements about history. And as long as they don't, they won't be taken seriously. I don't know whether Jesus existed or not, but I do know that it was about 20 years after his supposed death that the first writings about him appeared. And so does everybody else with an elementary acquaintance with the facts. And if someone doesn't see the difference between 20 years and 70 years in this case, or doesn't care what the difference might be, why should anyone take them seriously on the subject?

B: So......you didn't answer my question. Thanks anyway.

ME: I did answer it. I don't know how I possibly could've made myself clearer.

B: No, you talked about numbers and math. You didn't answer my question (maybe you should actually read it). I asked WHAT DOES THIS PROVE? Why are you so obsessed with the math? Even if you're right on the math...so what? 20 years. 70 years. WHO CARES? It means nothing.

(Terrifyingly real. What do we do in a situation like this? I thought about suggesting to B to ask a third party to explain what I said to him, since I obviously was getting nowhere. Instead I just gave up and came here and told you about it. If anyone has any other suggestions, please chime in. This stuff has to be dealt with. B is by no means unique.

Religious Images And The 2nd Commandment

I love a lot of religious images, I love them a lot. Byzantine mosaics, stained glass -- fugettaboutit. I'm sometimes almost tempted to say that the whole religious fooferah was worth it for the art, and music. Actually I'm not, that was an attempt at a joke. My actual attitude is that what happened happened, and that a lot of the art which has happened was made for religious institutions because they were running the entire society at the time, and the choice for artists was sell religious art or not sell anything. Can we really even say that the work of, for example, Fra Filippo Lippi really is religious art, from Filippo's point of view? He didn't become a monk because he was filled with the Holy Spirit, but because as a baby he was abandoned at the door of a monastery, and he didn't behave at all the way a monk was supposed to, having a stupendous number of love affairs, many of them with nuns, and his paintings have religious themes because the Church was who was paying for paintings. I don't think you can tell by Fillipo's paintings that he was less than pious, and I don't think you have to be a believer to fully appreciate any painting on any subject.

In fact, as we know, religious belief can and often does interfere with all sorts of enjoyment, and in the case of visual art there is the 2nd Commandment. Someone said that the Roman Catholic Church simply eradicated that Commandment from all texts "for many centuries." I really don't think they struck that passage for any length of time, even though Pope Gregory II immediately denounced iconoclasm as soon as the Byzantine Emperor Leo III proclaimed it. If they struck or suppressed the 2nd commandment at any time, it seems to me that this would have been the time, in the 8th or 9th century. But I don't know of a single manuscript of the Vulgate, Catholicism's official version of the Bible from the early Midlle Ages until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's, in which Exodus 20:4 is missing or altered from "non facies tibi sculptile neque omnem similitudinem quae est in caelo desuper et quae in terra deorsum nec eorum quae sunt in aquis sub terra," If anyone knows of such an altered manuscript I'd be sincerely very interested in hearing about it. Likewise if you know of a Breviary or piece of stained glass or something else which contains an altered version of the 10 Commandments.

I don't want to ask the person who asserted that this change was made "for many centuries" where he got that. Experience has taught me that people making such claims tend not to tell you where they got their info, and they do tend to get very unpleasant instead and accuse you of being an undercover Catholic spy, and I'm really over it. (Maybe I need to come up with a less unpleasant way of asking than "Where on Earth did you get that?!") But if anyone does happen to come across something which looks like a source for a "the Catholic Church struck the 2nd Commandment from the text of the Bible for" many centuries, or for a shorter period of time, I'd very much appreciate being told about it. Primitive superstitions fascinate me, whether held by religious people thousands of years ago or by atheists today. (Oh yes I did.)

Now of course, the RCC greatly decreased literacy rates among laypeople during the Middle Ages, which was probably much more effective in dealing with inconvenient Bible passages than altering them would have been.

And of course there was the very famous period of iconoclasm in the Orthodox East, although it didn't last as long as some people seem to think. Government-approved iconoclasm in the Orthodox territories actually only lasted a few decades, staring some time between 726 and 730 and ending in 787, and then being reinstated in 814 and lasting until 842 until it disappeared forever -- at least as far as Eastern Orthodoxy is concerned, and thank Euphemism, because, as I said, mosaics. There were sporadic, minor, localized tendencies before and after that to follow the 2nd Commandment, but that's been true of Christian groups in all regions and eras. Calvinists churches come to mind. By now, almost 5 centuries after Calvin, they represent a rather wide range of practices, but some of them to this day are very very free of images.

I wonder whether it's more than a coincidence that a little over a dozen years after the first period of official iconoclasm ended in the East that the Pope crowned the first Western Emperor, the first ruler of what eventually would be called the Holy Roman Empire. Could the Catholics have looked on aghast at iconoclasm, and thought, Okay, these guys are getting fanatical and crazy and it's time to break away from them? Just a thought. Maybe the timing is no more than a coincidence. Maybe Byzantine iconoclasm was just a symptom of a greater, broader social or political tendency. This is a job for a new Steven Runciman! and I'm not him, and I don't see any new Steven Runcimans anywhere, which is a real shame.

What is not a shame is that most of even the most pious Christians have just pretty much ignored the 2nd Commandment, along with many more of even the most pious Jews and Muslims than many people realize.