October 30, 1459

The poet we call Lucretius lived in the first century BC in a Hellenized world. His long poem we know as "On the Nature of Things," and in it he seems to look around and explain what he sees, without any traditional influences. Extraordinary really. Here is a quote, wherein he notices that all creatures exhibit a similar growth into their pre-ordained talents: We used R. L. Lathem's translation of 1949.

...babies are led by their speechless plight to employ gestures...for every creature has a sense of the purposes for which he can use his own powers...Panther kittens and lion cubs tussle with paws and jaws when their claws and teeth are scarcely yet in existence. We see every species of winged bird trust in its wings and seek unsteady help from flight....

Lucretius was not forgotten. Nobody ever paid much attention to him while he lived nor later.  But after a millenium and a half, a manuscript copy of his great poem was found stored in a German monastery. Sooner or later someone would have glanced at it. That someone was Poggio Bracciolini, (February 11, 1380 to October 30, 1459). Old manuscripts were a fad and gentleman paid handsomely to those who could find undiscovered ones to be added to a noble library. Bracciolini, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, was an

Italian humanist and calligrapher, foremost among scholars of the early Renaissance as a rediscoverer of lost, forgotten, or neglected Classical Latin manuscripts in the monastic libraries of Europe.

Another source notes:

Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (b. 1380–d. 1459) is one of the more interesting of the early Italian humanists. He spent almost fifty years in the service of the papacy but never took orders and had no hesitations about ridiculing the vices of churchmen. His literary output covered a wide range, including speeches, dialogues, translations, letters, history, and fables, but he is probably best known today for his manuscript discoveries and for his polemics, which he unleashed against several of the most famous scholars of his day. His final years suggest well the contradictions posed by his life and works: at the age of fifty-five, he left his long-term mistress to marry a young woman of eighteen and delegitimized the fourteen children he had had with the mistress, but this did not keep him from being named Chancellor of Florence in 1453 and state historian.

Lucretius looks back in history and imagines a time before agriculture. His is an amazing book. Modern historians look to him as a model, but they cannot duplicate his feat, because Lucretius looked at the world with fresh eyes.