More than two thousand years ago, in ancient Rome lived a poet named Lucrecious whose work on the nature of things revolutionized the way people understood the universe. Lucrecious thought that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. This idea fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; it shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.
Guest: Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of many books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.
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