A manuscript comes to light after being in obscurity for a thousand years, changing the way of human thought and opening the path to the evolution of the world as we know it today. Six hundred years have passed since the moment when an insightful librarian, passionate about the study of antiquity, the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini, retrieved an ancient manuscript from the shelf of a monastery library, gasped at what he had discovered, and had it copied.

The manuscript, the last one saved from the wear of time, contained a Latin philosophical epic, On Nature (De rerum natura) by Lucretius, a magnificent poem filled with the most dangerous ideas: that the universe operates without the help of the gods, that superstition harms human life, that matter consists of infinitesimal particles, invisible, indestructible, perpetual, the atoms.

Lucretius argued that in such a universe there is no reason to believe that the Earth or its inhabitants occupy a central position or to separate man from other animals. “Is it not paradoxical,” the author notes in his preface, “that the philosophical tradition from which Lucretius's poem originates, a tradition so incompatible with the worship of the gods and the worship of the state, was considered scandalous by some, even in the tolerant culture of the Mediterranean during classical times”.

The fact that this particular work was preserved while all other works of this tradition were lost “is something one might be tempted to call a miracle.” However, Lucretius did not believe in miracles. On the contrary, he believed that nothing could violate the laws of nature. Thus, he “proposed what he himself called 'deviation' (anc. parekklisis)” for the unexpected and unpredictable motion of matter, the unforeseen turn of events.

Exactly such a deviation “from the straight trajectory – in this specific case towards oblivion –” was the discovery of the last manuscript of his work. The copying, translation, and dissemination of this ancient poem fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists like Botticelli and thinkers like Giordano Bruno, shaping the thoughts of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and had a profound effect on writers from Montaigne to Thomas Jefferson.