The Dream of Resurrecting Rome
What if the scientific revolution — the greatest intellectual transformation in human history — began not with a breakthrough in physics or mathematics, but with a medieval poet's desperate longing to bring back the Roman Empire?
That is the provocative thesis at the heart of Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, and the subject of a wide-ranging conversation between Palmer, a Renaissance historian and novelist at the University of Chicago, and Dwarkesh Patel on the Dwarkesh Podcast. What unfolds is a story that stretches across centuries, connecting the Black Death to Francis Bacon, Florentine bankers to the germ theory of disease, and the invention of the printing press to the fake news crisis of the Enlightenment. It is a story about how civilizations change — not through singular genius, but through long chains of intention, failure, adaptation, and unintended consequence.
Petrarch's Grief and the Birth of a Project
The story begins with Francesco Petrarch, the 14th-century Italian scholar who survived the Black Death after losing nearly everyone he knew. Italy in his time was wracked by civil war, foreign mercenaries, and bandits so dangerous that two of Petrarch's friends, having survived the plague, were attacked on their way to visit him — one killed, the other lost and wounded in the mountains for over a year.
Petrarch looked at the chaos around him and arrived at a diagnosis: the problem was leadership. Italy's rulers were selfish, consumed by family feuds and personal power rather than the public good. Palmer illustrates the point vividly:
"Lord Montague and Lord Capulet, as their goons are knifing each other in the street, they care about defeating each other. Do they care about the good of Italy? Do they care about the good of the city of Verona? No. Their feud is harming the city of Verona and they don't care."
Petrarch's solution was to look backward. He read about the ancient Roman Brutus — not the assassin of Caesar, but his ancestor, the consul who executed his own sons for plotting to overthrow the republic. Could modern leaders be made to act like that? Petrarch believed they could, if only they were raised on the same texts that had shaped the great Romans. The educational program he proposed was simple in concept: find the books that Cicero and Brutus had read, build libraries, and surround young princes with classical learning.
His students and successors poured money into the project, traveling across the Alps and to Constantinople to hunt for manuscripts. They hired tutors like Marsilio Ficino, who could teach Greek and Latin, and they embedded these scholars in the courts of Europe's rulers.
Cosplaying Legitimacy: How Tyrants Dressed as Caesars
The uptake of Petrarch's program was enthusiastic — but not always for the reasons he intended. Italy was full of upstart rulers who had seized power through coups and had no legitimacy. For them, the trappings of antiquity offered something invaluable: the appearance of rightful authority.
"They can dress up like a Roman emperor and they can have a parade with allegorical figures of the virtues next to them, and they can invest in an impressive palace that has a pediment on the front and looks like a Roman building... and then people might look at them and say, 'Oh, this guy is different from what we've had. This guy is like the Caesars.'"
Palmer's most dazzling illustration of this dynamic is an extended thought experiment about a French nobleman visiting Florence. You're a count's son, on your way to congratulate a new pope, passing through what you regard as a pit of merchant scum. Florence has no nobility, no meaningful allies, and a reputation so disreputable that in several European languages, "to Florentine" is the verb for anal sex.
But then you arrive, and you encounter statues so lifelike they seem about to breathe, a cathedral dome bigger than anything built since Rome, and a banker's palace filled with busts of Roman emperors and men speaking Ancient Greek. A ten-year-old boy recites a poem about the three parts of the soul in a language you thought was lost to history.
"And now there's a 10-year-old boy reciting a poem at you in Ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul, and you're like, 'Where am I?' None of this is possible. None of this has existed for a thousand years."
The power dynamic flips. The condescending nobleman is suddenly in awe of the merchant scum. And the banker — Cosimo de' Medici — offers an alliance. You can refuse and come back with an army to sack the city, or you can say yes and take home a bronze smith, an architect, and a Greek teacher to transform your own court. Most chose the latter.
The First Dream Fails
Petrarch's project reached its maximum expression within about a century. Princes across Italy were raised on Cicero and Plato, surrounded by classical learning, immersed in the values of republican virtue. And then they fought bigger, nastier, worse wars than any that had come before.
"The first generations raised by this are supposed to be philosopher princes, and instead we get Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, both of whom had Latin and Greek and Cicero and Plato when they were kids, and then it grows up and Valentino sets fire to half the world."
This was the world Niccolò Machiavelli watched. He was himself a product of Petrarch's educational program — he famously described coming home from his exile in the countryside, changing into his court robes, and entering his library "to hold commerce with the ancients." He loved the classics the way Petrarch wanted him to. But he watched virtuous princes who did everything right lose everything, while terrible people like Cesare Borgia succeeded through ruthlessness.
Machiavelli's response was not to abandon the classical project but to transform it. Instead of absorbing virtue by osmosis, he proposed using history as a casebook of examples — comparing battles fought near rivers, analyzing which decisions worked and which didn't. This was, Palmer argues, the invention of political science.
"He says, 'We need to use history and use the classics differently.' He proposes that. He isn't very popular in his own day."
From Political Science to Natural Science
The chain of causation Palmer traces is long and winding, but its logic is clear. Petrarch's call to build libraries led to the recovery of ancient texts. The printing press — invented in response to a library-building boom, not out of nowhere — made those texts available to ever wider audiences. Micro-technologies of book production like footnotes and glossaries meant that texts once readable only by a handful of expert classicists could be understood by medical students and lawyers.
"When Poggio found it, there were two dozen people in the world who could read it. A hundred years later, 30,000 people can read it in the 30 print editions that are printed before 1600."
When all different kinds of people read Lucretius's materialist philosophy — med students, law students, people in different countries — they asked new questions. They wondered whether they could test the hypotheses. They did test them. They discovered that the heart is a pump. They took seriously the question of whether there are atoms, and whether that's how diseases work.
By 1600, approximately two centuries after Petrarch's original call, a new generation emerged — the generation of Francis Bacon and Galileo — who proposed using nature itself as a casebook of examples, just as Machiavelli had proposed using history.
Palmer emphasizes how long this process took:
"From Petrarch's first call to Machiavelli writing that is as long as from Yuri Gagarin's space flight back to Napoleon... We think of it as one time period, but a lot changed."
The Printing Press as a Parallel to the Digital Revolution
One of Palmer's most striking arguments is that the printing press revolution and the digital revolution are structurally identical — not as separate events, but as single technological transformations that unfold through successive applications over decades.
Gutenberg himself went bankrupt. His apprentices went bankrupt. The problem was not the technology but the absence of distribution networks for mass-produced goods.
"The problem is printed books are a mass-produced commodity in a world that does not have distribution networks for mass-produced commodities."
Gutenberg printed 300 Bibles but could only sell seven to the seven people in his small German town legally allowed to read the Bible. His apprentices fled to Venice — the airport hub of the Mediterranean — where ship captains could carry ten books each to thirty different cities. Book fairs like Frankfurt developed as distribution mechanisms. The economic sustainability of printing took forty years to achieve.
Then came pamphlets, enabling rapid news distribution and political coordination. Then newspapers, which offered serial accountability as a check on pamphlet sensationalism. Then magazines like The Gentleman's Magazine, invented specifically to fact-check newspapers that contradicted each other.
"The newspaper is a way of fact-checking the pamphlet. The pamphlet is a way of making money while you're printing your longer book."
Palmer draws the parallel explicitly: the printing press enabled the Reformation the same way cell phones enabled the Arab Spring. Each was a deeper penetration of the same underlying information revolution.
Florence's Bizarre Republic and the Medici Capture
The conversation takes a fascinating detour into the peculiarities of Florentine government. Unlike other Italian republics modeled on ancient Rome's oligarchic senate, Florence had massacred its nobility after a near-coup and established a commoner republic run by merchant guild leaders.
Government officials were selected by lottery — names drawn from a bag — and locked in a tower for two or three months at a time while they ruled by consensus. The system was designed to be tyrant-proof.
But the Medici, as papal bankers employing a third of the city, could guarantee that a plurality of any randomly selected council would be their men. When bad luck gave them a hostile council, Cosimo was arrested and locked in a tower — and bribed his way out.
"He wrote in a letter later that they were the two most foolish men he'd ever met because he was Cosimo de' Medici and he would happily have paid them tens of millions of dollars to let him out of there, but they weren't ambitious enough to think to ask for more than a few hundred thousand."
Even after the republic fell and the Medici became dukes, the strength of republican tradition constrained their tyranny. The famous Vasari Corridor — an overhead walkway built so the duke could cross the city without being assassinated — takes an awkward detour around a tower belonging to a family that could trace its lineage to peers of Julius Caesar and simply refused to let the duke demolish it.
"These are monarchs who know that they are weak and are therefore careful, and therefore more rights, like property rights, exist."
Palmer contrasts this with the Duke of Ferrara, who wandered his city naked with a sword to demonstrate his absolute power, and whose family recreationally murdered each other's servants during sibling disputes. Florence's resistance failed in black-and-white terms — the republic fell — but the culture of resistance produced a less tyrannical tyranny. "It's a great example," Palmer observes, "of how even when resistance loses, resistance wins."
Why They're Always Wrong About What Matters
Perhaps the conversation's most profound theme is the consistent inability of any era to correctly identify which developments will prove most consequential. The discovery of the Americas in 1492? Europe was too busy with three simultaneous wars and the imminent French invasion of Italy to care much about what seemed like a few Caribbean islands. The Inquisition's censors? They were obsessed with Jansenist treatises about the nature of the Trinity while waving through Voltaire and the Encyclopédie.
"An era is always wrong about what ideas and what circulation and what changes are the really big ones, and are always much, much more worried about, 'Oh my God, the Prince of Spain. Which princess is he gonna marry?'"
When Milton published Paradise Lost under England's new censorship regime — a work featuring Satan as a charismatic protagonist spouting revolutionary anti-monarchical rhetoric — the censors demanded he change one line. About astrology.
Of the twelve total trials of scientists by the Inquisition for science-related matters, only three resulted in convictions. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands were tried for "Judaizing" or practicing Indigenous religions in colonized spaces.
Leonardo Was Not a Scientist
Palmer delivers one of her most deliberately provocative claims: Leonardo da Vinci was not a scientist. Not because he lacked genius, but because he wrote everything in coded mirror writing specifically so no one else could use his discoveries. Brunelleschi, who built Florence's magnificent dome, burned all his notes and schematics.
"Leonardo does not want to contribute to human progress. Leonardo wants to make unique masterpieces so that hundreds of years later people will see them and marvel and say, 'How did he do it?'"
This was the standard in the 1400s and 1500s: the inventor as jealous guardian of secrets. The transformation came with Francis Bacon, whose metaphor of three insects — the ant who merely hoards knowledge, the spider who spins beautiful but empty theories, and the honeybee who gathers from nature to produce "something sweet and useful for humankind" — became the founding rhetoric of the English Academy of Sciences.
"Bacon says if we do this, if we make academies of sciences, we can make sure that every human generation lives in a better condition than the past... He says that to be a scientist is the ultimate act of charity because there is no greater act of charity than to give a gift to every human who will ever live after you."
The Long Arc of Unintended Consequences
The deepest lesson of Palmer's history is about the relationship between intention and outcome. Petrarch wanted to recreate the Roman Empire's virtues within a Catholic framework. He was sure that ancient philosophy would confirm Christianity, that Plato would need only "a little shaker of the Trinity on top." Instead, the recovered texts turned out to contain hedonists, Epicureans, and Stoics — a pluralism far more chaotic than he anticipated.
The project he launched produced not philosopher-princes but the Borgias, not peace but the Wars of Italy, not a confirmation of Christianity but the Reformation, and eventually a scientific revolution grounded in empiricism that would have been alien to everything Petrarch believed.
"Petrarch thought he would make a world which shared his values. Instead, he made a world that doesn't share his values, but that is capable of curing a disease he never imagined would be curable. And if you showed him this future, it would be scary."
He would be horrified by democracy. He believed only a tiny elite could rule. But he would weep for joy seeing that the Black Death — the catastrophe that had defined his life — was now curable.
Palmer draws a direct line from Petrarch's library-building project through Machiavelli's political science through Bacon's scientific method through Voltaire's campaigns for smallpox inoculation to modern medicine. The chain is long, full of failures and redirections, and its final destination was invisible to everyone involved at every step.
"He did not create a world that went as he wanted, but he created a world that went well."
History Has Always Moved Fast
When Patel observes that history in this period seems to be moving remarkably fast, Palmer pushes back against the premise — not to deny the acceleration, but to challenge the assumption that earlier periods were slow.
"History has always moved fast. But when we teach it in high school, we're trying to move over large chunks of time quickly. And so we pretend that it moved slowly."
She points to the video game Civilization, which she calls "the number one teacher of history in the world" with 70 million copies shipped, and which encodes the lie that a turn in antiquity represents 50 years while a turn in modernity represents one. Zoom in on any decade in any period, Palmer insists, and it always feels as fast as our present.
The technologies were different — the invention of chairs with backs, scissors, improved metallurgy, eleven successive revolutions in pigment processing that made Raphael's colors glow like gemstones — but they were real, and the people living through them felt the same vertigo of constant change that we do.
The Lesson for Our Age
The conversation circles back, inevitably, to the present. Palmer's history offers a sobering but ultimately hopeful framework for thinking about our own era of technological disruption. Nobody — not Petrarch, not Gutenberg, not the Inquisition — correctly predicted which changes would matter most. The people who set great transformations in motion never got the future they imagined. But the futures they got were often better than anything they could have dreamed.
The printing press produced pamphlets that produced the Reformation that produced religious wars that produced demands for tolerance that produced the Enlightenment. Along the way, the Inquisition accidentally invented peer review, trying to censor books they were reading in their own experimental laboratory — the most extensive in Europe.
In a world consumed by debates over how to make AI go well, Palmer's Renaissance offers a bracing reminder: the most transformative consequences of any technology are precisely the ones nobody anticipates. The best we can do is build the libraries, share the knowledge, and trust that even when resistance fails, it constrains the tyrants who follow. Even when the dream dies, its children inherit the earth.