On the Nature of Things - Тит Лукреций Кар

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and sack

           Of Trojan Town, look out, they force us not

           To admit these acts existent by themselves,

           Merely because those races of mankind

           (Of whom these acts were accidents) long since

           Irrevocable age has borne away:

           For all past actions may be said to be

           But accidents, in one way, of mankind,—

           In other, of some region of the world.

           Add, too, had been no matter, and no room

           Wherein all things go on, the fire of love

           Upblown by that fair form, the glowing coal

           Under the Phrygian Alexander's breast,

           Had ne'er enkindled that renowned strife

           Of savage war, nor had the wooden horse

           Involved in flames old Pergama, by a birth

           At midnight of a brood of the Hellenes.

           And thus thou canst remark that every act

           At bottom exists not of itself, nor is

           As body is, nor has like name with void;

           But rather of sort more fitly to be called

           An accident of body, and of place

           Wherein all things go on.

      CHARACTER OF THE ATOMS

                                 Bodies, again,

           Are partly primal germs of things, and partly

           Unions deriving from the primal germs.

           And those which are the primal germs of things

           No power can quench; for in the end they conquer

           By their own solidness; though hard it be

           To think that aught in things has solid frame;

           For lightnings pass, no less than voice and shout,

           Through hedging walls of houses, and the iron

           White-dazzles in the fire, and rocks will burn

           With exhalations fierce and burst asunder.

           Totters the rigid gold dissolved in heat;

           The ice of bronze melts conquered in the flame;

           Warmth and the piercing cold through silver seep,

           Since, with the cups held rightly in the hand,

           We oft feel both, as from above is poured

           The dew of waters between their shining sides:

           So true it is no solid form is found.

           But yet because true reason and nature of things

           Constrain us, come, whilst in few verses now

           I disentangle how there still exist

           Bodies of solid, everlasting frame—

           The seeds of things, the primal germs we teach,

           Whence all creation around us came to be.

           First since we know a twofold nature exists,

           Of things, both twain and utterly unlike—

           Body, and place in which an things go on—

           Then each must be both for and through itself,

           And all unmixed: where'er be empty space,

           There body's not; and so where body bides,

           There not at all exists the void inane.

           Thus primal bodies are solid, without a void.

           But since there's void in all begotten things,

           All solid matter must be round the same;

           Nor, by true reason canst thou prove aught hides

           And holds a void within its body, unless

           Thou grant what holds it be a solid. Know,

           That which can hold a void of things within

           Can be naught else than matter in union knit.

           Thus matter, consisting of a solid frame,

           Hath power to be eternal, though all else,

           Though all creation, be dissolved away.

           Again, were naught of empty and inane,

           The world were then a solid; as, without

           Some certain bodies to fill the places held,

           The world that is were but a vacant void.

           And so, infallibly, alternate-wise

           Body and void are still distinguished,

           Since nature knows no wholly full nor void.

           There are, then, certain bodies, possessed of power

           To vary forever the empty and the full;

           And these can nor be sundered from without

           By beats and blows, nor from within be torn

           By penetration, nor be overthrown

           By any assault soever through the world—

           For without void, naught can be crushed, it seems,

           Nor broken, nor severed by a cut in twain,

           Nor can it take the damp, or seeping cold

           Or piercing fire, those old destroyers three;

           But the more void within a thing, the more

           Entirely it totters at their sure assault.

           Thus if first bodies be, as I have taught,

           Solid, without a void, they must be then

           Eternal; and, if matter ne'er had been

           Eternal, long ere now had all things gone

           Back into nothing utterly, and all

           We see around from nothing had been born—

           But since I taught above that naught can be

           From naught created, nor the once begotten

           To naught be summoned back, these primal germs

           Must have an immortality of frame.

           And into these must each thing be resolved,

           When comes its supreme hour, that thus there be

           At hand the stuff for plenishing the world.

           So primal germs have solid singleness

           Nor otherwise could they have been conserved

           Through aeons and infinity of time

           For the replenishment of wasted worlds.

          

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