Before the age of printing monks used to copy out manuscripts by hand, and their production depended on whether their hands would get stiff from the cold or if their ink would freeze. (Then they'd have to take it outside and thaw it, I guess, since no fires were allowed near the books or them when they worked in the scriptorium copying and copying). They used to write little notes on the margins, I guess I would too if I had to follow a vow of silence, with laments like "This parchment is too hairy!" (meaning the person who was supposed to have prepared the skin did a bad job preparing it) or "Thank God darkness is coming, so I don't need to write more today." In a way, these whinging monks were doing graffiti on the manuscripts, but it's the kind of graffiti that wouldn't be see for years (or centuries later).
I took an Ancient Philosophy course at USF. I'm a bit outraged in retrospect that we didn't study Democritus... but as the course what taught by conservative Catholics, so conservative that the President of USF had to close down the program and restart it again years later, they wouldn't have taught it since Democritus doesn't sit well with neo-Platonism. (Democritus never said God didn't exist, he just said that if deities did, they had better things to do than be concerned with what humans wanted or did. They would be outside of Nature and Nature, itself, was governed by certain laws.) I knew that he theorized the existence of atoms, but not that Epicureanism philosophy (derived from Democritus's teachings) was actually about. I remember being taught at USF that it meant pleasure seeking was a good thing and they were about seeking pleasure in the extreme. In this book, Greenblatt actually shows that it was early Christian groups that distorted the original meaning of this philosophy. Epicureanism advised followers to live modestly, and in that way they would get pleasure from life, which was all there was.
Anyway, I did enjoy the book, although a few chapters dragged a bit.
