With no surviving original manuscripts from ancient Greece and Rome, masses of text by the most celebrated and prolific authors of antiquity—from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Euripides and Aristophanes—have vanished without a trace. In his new book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton), Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt traces how one Italian book hunter’s re-discovery, in 1417, of Lucretius’s lost poem On the Nature of Things helped set the Renaissance— and a revolutionary mind frame—in motion. Below, Greenblatt masterfully explains the ancient book trade.
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