[r_klancer]

That's not necessarily bad news.

Everyone interested in this story should read Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/stephen-greenblatt).

It traces the story of a Renaissance humanist who tracked down and translated the Epicurean philosopher/poet Lucretius' De Rerem Natura, which Greenblatt describes as portraying a strikingly modern way of seeing the world.

In particular Lucretius and the Epicureans denied the existence of supernatural causes, were opposed to religious fear, and posited the ideas of atomism and biological evolution. Of course they're better known for their approach to living life, which Greenblatt shows is more sophisticated than sometimes caricatured, and which he portrays as a breath of fresh air compared to the oppressive moralism and hypocrisy of the Church at the time. (Jefferson and many of the American Founders described themselves as Epicureans.)

He goes on to imply that Epicureanism was influential and widespread in the ancient world but suppressed by the early Church, so that we now know little of it.

Anyone, one of the tantalizing parts of the book is where he describes the carbonized and unreadable Herculaneum scrolls, since they were the private library of a wealthy patron of the Epicureans. I think he thinks being able to read the scrolls will really change our understanding of the ancient world.

And remember: if they hadn't been carbonized, they would have crumbled to dust. That's why we only have the texts that managed to get copied. (Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land is a novel about the survival and 21st century rediscovery of an imaginary Greek play, and ... I'll let you read it yourself - https://www.anthonydoerr.com/books/cloud-cuckoo-land)

(Apologies for any errors above, as basically all I know about this subject is what I read in the book!)

[digging]

> Everyone interested in this story should read Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/stephen-greenblatt).

It's interesting reading for a layperson, but as with any other pop-history book, one should read this with a heaping plate of salt at hand. (I'm... not sure what that metaphor actually means or if this is an appropriate way to extend it.)

Things are always more nuanced than can be laid out in a sweeping narrative format and the compression required can lose some critical information, even with the best of intentions. There's also just getting things wrong, which most non-historians do and many historians will do on topics that aren't their expertise.

I'd read this criticism from AskHistorians (not infallible, I know)

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ejfxe5/comme...

[riffraff]

The "grain of salt" reference relates to some antidote, which contained a grain of salt. The reduction to "handle with care" is modern.

So the extended metaphor makes no literal sense according to the Pliny text, but it makes sense according to our interpretation of it, which is what matters.

[akprasad]

You might also be interested in the Charvaka school of ancient India [1], which is a close counterpart to Epicureanism. The Charvaka school was likewise influential and widespread, and it likewise become obscure over time, for reasons I don't know.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka

[telotortium]

I realize citing Wikipedia risks some serious error, but my impression is that by late antiquity (after AD 200), the main philosophical systems in the Roman world were Christianity and Neoplatonism (itself heavily influenced by Christianity) and to a lesser extent Stoicism. Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Middle Platonism were more characteristic of Classical Antiquity (200 BC-200 AD). The Wikipedia page on Epicureanism[0] supports this impression: "By the late third century CE, however, there was little trace of its existence.[7] With growing dominance of Neoplatonism and Peripateticism, and later, Christianity, Epicureanism declined."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism