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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
It is extraordinary that the text survived: probably because the monk who copied it out wasn't really reading and thinking about what he was copying. I think it's fortunate that book printing started not too much later after its discovery, so that the genie was out of the bottle well and truly.
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Not just the monk who originally copied it, but maybe Poggio didn't look too closely either. He had a lot going on, the name of the writer or the Latin of the first few lines might have been all he noticed. The multiple requests to get his hands on it after he returned to Italy could be interpreted as him wanting to read it. It is a bit funny to think that the church in the form of a monk and then a papal secretary were responsible for rubbing that bottle and letting the genie out.
It was heartbreaking to read about all the other classical literature that's been lost.
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It would be hard to deny the truth of what Greenblatt wrote about the church - I believe that everything he wrote is historically accurate - though I agree, Synamon, that some Roman Catholics could well be upset by what they read there, if they were not already aware of it.
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I suppose the subject matter of Lucretius's atheist or apatheist poem could be even more problematic. Either way, this book isn't likely to show up on church bookclub lists.
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And finally, I think that Lucretius would have had a huge impact on humanist thinking of the time. To me, what it has to say is astonishingly modern, and it's hard for us to grasp how stunningly different it was from the teachings of the time, whether it was all the hellfire and damnation, or the sun revolving around the earth (and aforesaid hellfire etc if you said that wasn't so), and the right we all have to be happy in our lives rather than being put here to suffer in the hope of a better deal in the hereafter.
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The concepts that people came up with hundreds or even thousands of years ago are impressive, but it makes me wonder if people have stopped innovating and thinking. Or maybe there really is nothing new under the sun.