On the Nature of Things - Тит Лукреций Кар

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the altar marked her grieving sire,

           The priests beside him who concealed the knife,

           And all the folk in tears at sight of her.

           With a dumb terror and a sinking knee

           She dropped; nor might avail her now that first

           'Twas she who gave the king a father's name.

           They raised her up, they bore the trembling girl

           On to the altar—hither led not now

           With solemn rites and hymeneal choir,

           But sinless woman, sinfully foredone,

           A parent felled her on her bridal day,

           Making his child a sacrificial beast

           To give the ships auspicious winds for Troy:

           Such are the crimes to which Religion leads.

           And there shall come the time when even thou,

           Forced by the soothsayer's terror-tales, shalt seek

           To break from us. Ah, many a dream even now

           Can they concoct to rout thy plans of life,

           And trouble all thy fortunes with base fears.

           I own with reason: for, if men but knew

           Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong

           By some device unconquered to withstand

           Religions and the menacings of seers.

           But now nor skill nor instrument is theirs,

           Since men must dread eternal pains in death.

           For what the soul may be they do not know,

           Whether 'tis born, or enter in at birth,

           And whether, snatched by death, it die with us,

           Or visit the shadows and the vasty caves

           Of Orcus, or by some divine decree

           Enter the brute herds, as our Ennius sang,

           Who first from lovely Helicon brought down

           A laurel wreath of bright perennial leaves,

           Renowned forever among the Italian clans.

           Yet Ennius too in everlasting verse

           Proclaims those vaults of Acheron to be,

           Though thence, he said, nor souls nor bodies fare,

           But only phantom figures, strangely wan,

           And tells how once from out those regions rose

           Old Homer's ghost to him and shed salt tears

           And with his words unfolded Nature's source.

           Then be it ours with steady mind to clasp

           The purport of the skies—the law behind

           The wandering courses of the sun and moon;

           To scan the powers that speed all life below;

           But most to see with reasonable eyes

           Of what the mind, of what the soul is made,

           And what it is so terrible that breaks

           On us asleep, or waking in disease,

           Until we seem to mark and hear at hand

           Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago.

      SUBSTANCE IS ETERNAL

           This terror, then, this darkness of the mind,

           Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,

           Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,

           But only Nature's aspect and her law,

           Which, teaching us, hath this exordium:

           Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

           Fear holds dominion over mortality

           Only because, seeing in land and sky

           So much the cause whereof no wise they know,

           Men think Divinities are working there.

           Meantime, when once we know from nothing still

           Nothing can be create, we shall divine

           More clearly what we seek: those elements

           From which alone all things created are,

           And how accomplished by no tool of Gods.

           Suppose all sprang from all things: any kind

           Might take its origin from any thing,

           No fixed seed required. Men from the sea

           Might rise, and from the land the scaly breed,

           And, fowl full fledged come bursting from the sky;

           The horned cattle, the herds and all the wild

           Would haunt with varying offspring tilth and waste;

           Nor would the same fruits keep their olden trees,

           But each might grow from any stock or limb

           By chance and change. Indeed, and were there not

           For each its procreant atoms, could things have

           Each its unalterable mother old?

           But, since produced from fixed seeds are all,

           Each birth goes forth upon the shores of light

           From its own stuff, from its own primal bodies.

           And all from all cannot become, because

           In each resides a secret power its own.

           Again, why see we lavished o'er the lands

           At spring the rose, at summer heat the corn,

           The vines that mellow when the autumn lures,

           If not because the fixed seeds of things

           At their own season must together stream,

           And new creations only be revealed

           When the due times arrive and pregnant earth

           Safely may give unto the shores of light

           Her tender progenies? But if from naught

           Were their becoming, they would spring abroad

           Suddenly, unforeseen, in alien months,

           With no primordial germs, to be preserved

           From procreant unions at an adverse hour.

           Nor on the mingling of the living seeds

           Would space be needed for the growth of things

           Were life an increment of nothing: then

           The tiny babe forthwith would walk a man,

           And from the turf would leap a branching tree—

          

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