Democritus’s atomic theory did, however, come down to us—but on a very slender thread: it was contained in one single volume of Lucretius’s great poem, which was held in one single German library, which one single intrepid book hunter would eventually find and save from extinction. That single volume would have an astonishing afterlife: it became a literary sensation, returned atomism to European thought, created what Stephen Greenblatt has called an explosion of interest in pagan antiquity and influenced Newton, Galileo and later Einstein.