What the Ancients Knew

I read "A Postcard from the Volcano" as a memoir from the Villa of the Papyri.  I have already alluded to this event as it is described by Greenblatt in my previous post.  The volcano is of course Mt. Vesuvius, and its postcard is the blackened remains of briquettes burned to ward of the cold on that day of discovery in 1750 before their discoverers realized that these "roots" were, in fact, the bones of a long buried ancient library.  The library that contained the root of what Ovid prophetically called, "The verses of sublime Lucretius [that] are destined to perish only when a single day will consign the world to destruction" (as quoted by Greenblatt, p. 52 of The Swerve).  That single day was August 24, 79 CE in "that autumn, when the grapes/ Made sharp air sharper by their smell" (Stevens 128).  Of course Poggio had already found the copy of On the Nature of Things before the discovery of the Villa of the Papyri; but there in that long "shuttered mansion-house" where the "windy sky/ Cries out a literate despair" was found the encased and bones of Lucretius' work preserved in its cultural context.  It is a work that tells us what it is that was left by the quick inhabitants of the Villa of the Papyri on that fateful day in 79 CE:  "And least will guess that with our bones/ We left much more, left what still is/ The look of things, left what we felt/ And what we saw" (Stevens 128).  And the children (which are us) "will speak our speech and never know,/ Will say of the mansion that it seems/ As if he that lived there left behind/ A spirit (Lucretius) storming in blank walls, A dirty house (the smashed remains of the library) in a gutted world (the plundered villa),/ A tatter (the remains of the scroll of On the Nature of Things) of shadows peaked to white,/ Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun" (Stevens 129).  Ah, but the Swerve!  The swerve that allowed for the discovery of the remains of the ancient disaster; and then the specific find of the library.  The swerve that allowed for the particular scroll containing the ancient to poem to have not been burned, or accidentally disintegrated.  The story of how the world swerved in a new direction (Greenblatt 11).  It is all there packed tightly into one little piece of opaque Stevensonian imagery, so subtle so...sublime.  So much more than just merely beautiful.