News at Eleven: As a moralist, Lucretius thus argues

for a tepid sort of vegetable life, an almost quietist routine that might appeal to a sexagenarian but hardly at all to a 20-year-old. Certainly, his conviction that one should "live unknown" is fundamentally at odds with the entire Renaissance, the motto of which might be, as art historian Michael Levey once remarked, "Every man his own Tamburlaine." Despite the impulse to flee the madding crowd, a pastoral ideal that runs throughout history, from Theocritus to Thoreau, shouldn't a fully human life actually embrace a whole lot of interesting trouble? We strive, struggle and suffer because we are engaged, or ought to be engaged, with enterprises that demand our all. Humankind's great heroes are overreachers, not retirees.

from The Washington Post: Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve," reviewed

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