One specific detail from the preface that I found interesting was, “The finder of the manuscript could not, of course, have fully grasped the implications of its vision or anticipated its influence, which took centuries to unfold” (Page 12). This quote was interesting to me and caught my attention because it expressed how valuable this manuscript was, by saying it had a great influence. The thing that interested me the most about the quote though, was how it took centuries to unfold and how it took a long time for it to be influential. One detail from chapter one that I thought was interesting was how they were describing how Poggio was a masterless man. “The pope who had called himself John XXIII no longer existed; the man who had borne that title was now once again what he had been christened, Baldassare Cossa. And Poggio was now a masterless man” (Page 20). This interested me because even though he is a “masterless man”, he wants to go explore and find these manuscripts from Ancient Rome.
Something that I connected from this text to this world, was that he had a role model (his “master” pope John XXIII). Most people throughout life have one person they look up to and if something happens and that person is gone, they need something that can keep give them some sort of closure. I feel Poggio needed to go look for pieces of the Ancient Rome manuscripts as a way to deal with the fact that he was now “masterless”.
How did the poem that Lucretius’s really influence the thought process of a lot of human beings, and if the finder of the manuscript couldn’t fully grasp the implications, then how we know it didn’t get very modified overtime?
