On the Nature of Things · Titus Lucretius Carus
THE WORLD IS NOT ETERNAL
And first, Since body of earth and water, air's light breath, And fiery exhalations (of which four This sum of things is seen to be compact) So all have birth and perishable frame, Thus the whole nature of the world itself Must be conceived as perishable too. For, verily, those things of which we see The parts and members to have birth in time And perishable shapes, those same we mark To be invariably born in time And born to die. And therefore when I see The mightiest members and the parts of this Our world consumed and begot again, 'Tis mine to know that also sky above And earth beneath began of old in time And shall in time go under to disaster. And lest in these affairs thou deemest me To have seized upon this point by sleight to serve My own caprice--because I have assumed That earth and fire are mortal things indeed, And have not doubted water and the air Both perish too and have affirmed the same To be again begotten and wax big-- Mark well the argument: in first place, lo, Some certain parts of earth, grievously parched By unremitting suns, and trampled on By a vast throng of feet, exhale abroad A powdery haze and flying clouds of dust, Which the stout winds disperse in the whole air. A part, moreover, of her sod and soil Is summoned to inundation by the rains; And rivers graze and gouge the banks away. Besides, whatever takes a part its own In fostering and increasing [aught]...
Likewise, The abounding well-spring of the liquid light, The ethereal sun, doth flood the heaven o'er With constant flux of radiance ever new, And with fresh light supplies the place of light, Upon the instant. For whatever effulgence Hath first streamed off, no matter where it falls, Is lost unto the sun. And this 'tis thine To know from these examples: soon as clouds Have first begun to under-pass the sun, And, as it were, to rend the rays of light In twain, at once the lower part of them Is lost entire, and earth is overcast Where'er the thunderheads are rolled along-- So know thou mayst that things forever need A fresh replenishment of gleam and glow, And each effulgence, foremost flashed forth, Perisheth one by one. Nor otherwise Can things be seen in sunlight, lest alway The fountain-head of light supply new light. Indeed your earthly beacons of the night, The hanging lampions and the torches, bright With darting gleams and dense with livid soot, Do hurry in like manner to supply With ministering heat new light amain; Are all alive to quiver with their fires,-- Are so alive, that thus the light ne'er leaves The spots it shines on, as if rent in twain: So speedily is its destruction veiled By the swift birth of flame from all the fires. Thus, then, we must suppose that sun and moon And stars dart forth their light from under-births Ever and ever new, and whatso flames First rise do perish always one by one-- Lest, haply, thou shouldst think they each endure Inviolable.
Again, perceivest not How stones are also conquered by Time?-- Not how the lofty towers ruin down, And boulders crumble?--Not how shrines of gods And idols crack outworn?--Nor how indeed The holy Influence hath yet no power There to postpone the Terminals of Fate, Or headway make 'gainst Nature's fixed decrees? Again, behold we not the monuments Of heroes, now in ruins, asking us, In their turn likewise, if we don't believe They also age with eld? Behold we not The rended basalt ruining amain Down from the lofty mountains, powerless To dure and dree the mighty forces there Of finite time?--for they would never fall Rended asudden, if from infinite Past They had prevailed against all engin'ries Of the assaulting aeons, with no crash. Again, now look at This, which round, above, Contains the whole earth in its one embrace: If from itself it procreates all things-- As some men tell--and takes them to itself When once destroyed, entirely must it be Of mortal birth and body; for whate'er From out itself giveth to other things Increase and food, the same perforce must be Minished, and then recruited when it takes Things back into itself.
Besides all this, If there had been no origin-in-birth Of lands and sky, and they had ever been The everlasting, why, ere Theban war And obsequies of Troy, have other bards Not also chanted other high affairs? Whither have sunk so oft so many deeds Of heroes? Why do those deeds live no more, Ingrafted in eternal monuments Of glory? Verily, I guess, because The Sum is new, and of a recent date The nature of our universe, and had Not long ago its own exordium. Wherefore, even now some arts are being still Refined, still increased: now unto ships Is being added many a new device; And but the other day musician-folk Gave birth to melic sounds of organing; And, then, this nature, this account of things Hath been discovered latterly, and I Myself have been discovered only now, As first among the first, able to turn The same into ancestral Roman speech. Yet if, percase, thou deemest that ere this Existed all things even the same, but that Perished the cycles of the human race In fiery exhalations, or cities fell By some tremendous quaking of the world, Or rivers in fury, after constant rains, Had plunged forth across the lands of earth And whelmed the towns--then, all the more must thou Confess, defeated by the argument, That there shall be annihilation too Of lands and sky. For at a time when things Were being taxed by maladies so great, And so great perils, if some cause more fell Had then assailed them, far and wide they would Have gone to disaster and supreme collapse. And by no other reasoning are we Seen to be mortal, save that all of us Sicken in turn with those same maladies With which have sickened in the past those men Whom nature hath removed from life.
Again, since battle so fiercely one with other The four most mighty members the world, Aroused in an all unholy war, Seest not that there may be for them an end Of the long strife?--Or when the skiey sun And all the heat have won dominion o'er The sucked-up waters all?--And this they try Still to accomplish, though as yet they fail,-- For so aboundingly the streams supply New store of waters that 'tis rather they Who menace the world with inundations vast From forth the unplumbed chasms of the sea. But vain--since winds (that over-sweep amain) And skiey sun (that with his rays dissolves) Do minish the level seas and trust their power To dry up all, before the waters can Arrive at the end of their endeavouring. Breathing such vasty warfare, they contend In balanced strife the one with other still Concerning mighty issues,--though indeed The fire was once the more victorious, And once--as goes the tale--the water won A kingdom in the fields. For fire o'ermastered And licked up many things and burnt away, What time the impetuous horses of the Sun Snatched Phaethon headlong from his skiey road Down the whole ether and over all the lands.
But the omnipotent Father in keen wrath Then with the sudden smite of thunderbolt Did hurl the mighty-minded hero off Those horses to the earth. And Sol, his sire, Meeting him as he fell, caught up in hand The ever-blazing lampion of the world, And drave together the pell-mell horses there And yoked them all a-tremble, and amain, Steering them over along their own old road, Restored the cosmos,--as forsooth we hear From songs of ancient poets of the Greeks-- A tale too far away from truth, meseems. For fire can win when from the infinite Has risen a larger throng of particles Of fiery stuff; and then its powers succumb, Somehow subdued again, or else at last It shrivels in torrid atmospheres the world. And whilom water too began to win-- As goes the story--when it overwhelmed The lives of men with billows; and thereafter, When all that force of water-stuff which forth From out the infinite had risen up Did now retire, as somehow turned aside, The rain-storms stopped, and streams their fury checked.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.