I recently read Stephen Greenblatt's
The Swerve, a book about the hiding and finding of the 1st century poem
On the Nature of Things by
Lucretius, which is a tribute to
Epicurus and his philosophy. Lucretius writes of Epicurus, "When 'human life lay groveling ignominously in the dust, crushed beneath the grinding weight of superstition' one supremely brave man arose and became 'the first who ventured to confront it boldly'" (72). I'm not sure the poem ushered in the modern world when it was unearthed in the 15th century, as Greenblatt suggests, but the book is quite provocative nonetheless. And then I read Luc Ferry's
A Brief History of Thought - a trip through the major western philosophies, which almost completely
ignores Epicurus. Curious. I'll get to Ferry's book another day.
