Literature and history come.

come. Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 45, The Uncutables.

This show is on the Roman author Lucretius, who lived from about 94 until 53 BC and his poem on the nature of things.

When we talk about the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, we talk about how knowledge from the classical world

started circulating again.

Mehmed the Conqueror took Constantinople in 1453, and suddenly the city,

thereafter called Istanbul,

proved amenable to all sorts of new trade with the middle and far east.

After 1453, the Bosphorus was no longer clogged up with competing civilizations,

with the ancient Byzantine seat of Christianity out of the picture, the Ottomans

and their commercial partners throughout the Black Sea and Adriatic could suddenly start

scooting goods all over the eastern Mediterranean world.

Thus began the early part of the Italian Renaissance when a small handful of opportunistic

merchant families and bankers in Italy took advantage of the Ottoman conquest of Asia Minor, became rich, bankrolled some of the greatest art ever to be produced, developed tastes for exotic and esoteric manuscripts,

and in doing so change the course of human history.

In any case, as I said before, when we talk about the Renaissance and Enlightenment, we talk about how

knowledge from the classical world started circulating again. This show is about one especially important figure whose work

began to be read and studied during the Enlightenment.

John Dryden and Michelle de Montaign admired his Enlightenment. view of the universe persuasive.

Carl Marx and Percy Shelley praised his religious iconiclasm.

Tennyson and Matthew Arnold shared his unsanimental view of man in the Cosmos, and his name again was Lucretius.

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