# Of the Nature of Things (Leonard)/Book V

PROEM
 O WHO can build with puissant breast a song  Worthy the majesty of these great finds?  Or who in words so strong that he can frame  The fit laudations for deserts of him  Who left us heritors of such vast prizes,  By his own breast discovered and sought out?--  There shall be none, methinks, of mortal stock.  For if must needs be named for him the name  Demanded by the now known majesty  Of these high matters, then a god was he,--  Hear me, illustrious Memmius--a god;  Who first and chief found out that plan of life  Which now is called philosophy, and who  By cunning craft, out of such mighty waves,  Out of such mighty darkness, moored life  In havens so serene, in light so clear.  Compare those old discoveries divine  Of others: lo, according to the tale,  Ceres established for mortality  The grain, and Bacchus juice of vine-born grape,  Though life might yet without these things abide,  Even as report saith now some peoples live.  But man's well-being was impossible  Without a breast all free. Wherefore the more  That man doth justly seem to us a god,  From whom sweet solaces of life, afar  Distributed o'er populous domains,  Now soothe the minds of men. But if thou thinkest  Labours of Hercules excel the same,  Much farther from true reasoning thou farest.  For what could hurt us now that mighty maw  Of Nemeaean Lion, or what the Boar  Who bristled in Arcadia? Or, again,  O what could Cretan Bull, or Hydra, pest  Of Lerna, fenced with vipers venomous?  Or what the triple-breasted power of her  The three-fold Geryon...  The sojourners in the Stymphalian fens  So dreadfully offend us, or the Steeds  Of Thracian Diomedes breathing fire  From out their nostrils off along the zones  Bistonian and Ismarian? And the Snake,  The dread fierce gazer, guardian of the golden  And gleaming apples of the Hesperides,  Coiled round the tree-trunk with tremendous bulk,  O what, again, could he inflict on us  Along the Atlantic shore and wastes of sea?--  Where neither one of us approacheth nigh  Nor no barbarian ventures. And the rest  Of all those monsters slain, even if alive,  Unconquered still, what injury could they do?  None, as I guess. For so the glutted earth  Swarms even now with savage beasts, even now  Is filled with anxious terrors through the woods  And mighty mountains and the forest deeps--  Quarters 'tis ours in general to avoid.  But lest the breast be purged, what conflicts then,  What perils, must bosom, in our own despite!  O then how great and keen the cares of lust  That split the man distraught! How great the fears!  And lo, the pride, grim greed, and wantonness--  How great the slaughters in their train! and lo,  Debaucheries and every breed of sloth!  Therefore that man who subjugated these,  And from the mind expelled, by words indeed,  Not arms, O shall it not be seemly him  To dignify by ranking with the gods?--  And all the more since he was wont to give,  Concerning the immortal gods themselves,  Many pronouncements with a tongue divine,  And to unfold by his pronouncements all  The nature of the world.
ARGUMENT OF THE BOOK AND NEW PROEM  AGAINST A TELEOLOGICAL CONCEPT
 And walking now  In his own footprints, I do follow through  His reasonings, and with pronouncements teach  The covenant whereby all things are framed,  How under that covenant they must abide  Nor ever prevail to abrogate the aeons'  Inexorable decrees,--how (as we've found),  In class of mortal objects, o'er all else,  The mind exists of earth-born frame create  And impotent unscathed to abide  Across the mighty aeons, and how come  In sleep those idol-apparitions,  That so befool intelligence when we  Do seem to view a man whom life has left.  Thus far we've gone; the order of my plan  Hath brought me now unto the point where I  Must make report how, too, the universe  Consists of mortal body, born in time,  And in what modes that congregated stuff  Established itself as earth and sky,  Ocean, and stars, and sun, and ball of moon;  And then what living creatures rose from out  The old telluric places, and what ones  Were never born at all; and in what mode  The human race began to name its things  And use the varied speech from man to man;  And in what modes hath bosomed in their breasts  That awe of gods, which halloweth in all lands  Fanes, altars, groves, lakes, idols of the gods.  Also I shall untangle by what power  The steersman nature guides the sun's courses,  And the meanderings of the moon, lest we,  Percase, should fancy that of own free will  They circle their perennial courses round,  Timing their motions for increase of crops  And living creatures, or lest we should think  They roll along by any plan of gods.  For even those men who have learned full well  That godheads lead a long life free of care,  If yet meanwhile they wonder by what plan  Things can go on (and chiefly yon high things  Observed o'erhead on the ethereal coasts),  Again are hurried back unto the fears  Of old religion and adopt again  Harsh masters, deemed almighty,--wretched men,  Unwitting what can be and what cannot,  And by what law to each its scope prescribed,  Its boundary stone that clings so deep in Time.
 But for the rest,--lest we delay thee here  Longer by empty promises--behold,  Before all else, the seas, the lands, the sky:  O Memmius, their threefold nature, lo,  Their bodies three, three aspects so unlike,  Three frames so vast, a single day shall give  Unto annihilation! Then shall crash  That massive form and fabric of the world  Sustained so many aeons! Nor do I  Fail to perceive how strange and marvellous  This fact must strike the intellect of man,--  Annihilation of the sky and earth  That is to be,--and with what toil of words  'Tis mine to prove the same; as happens oft  When once ye offer to man's listening ears  Something before unheard of, but may not  Subject it to the view of eyes for him  Nor put it into hand--the sight and touch,  Whereby the opened highways of belief  Lead most directly into human breast  And regions of intelligence. But yet  I will speak out. The fact itself, perchance,  Will force belief in these my words, and thou  Mayst see, in little time, tremendously  With risen commotions of the lands all things  Quaking to pieces--which afar from us  May she, the steersman Nature, guide: and may  Reason, O rather than the fact itself,  Persuade us that all things can be o'erthrown  And sink with awful-sounding breakage down!
 But ere on this I take a step to utter  Oracles holier and soundlier based  Than ever the Pythian pronounced for men  From out the tripod and the Delphian laurel,  I will unfold for thee with learned words  Many a consolation, lest perchance,  Still bridled by religion, thou suppose  Lands, sun, and sky, sea, constellations, moon,  Must dure forever, as of frame divine--  And so conclude that it is just that those,  (After the manner of the Giants), should all  Pay the huge penalties for monstrous crime,  Who by their reasonings do overshake  The ramparts of the universe and wish  There to put out the splendid sun of heaven,  Branding with mortal talk immortal things--  Though these same things are even so far removed  From any touch of deity and seem  So far unworthy of numbering with the gods,  That well they may be thought to furnish rather  A goodly instance of the sort of things  That lack the living motion, living sense.  For sure 'tis quite beside the mark to think  That judgment and the nature of the mind  In any kind of body can exist--  Just as in ether can't exist a tree,  Nor clouds in the salt sea, nor in the fields  Can fishes live, nor blood in timber be,  Nor sap in boulders: fixed and arranged  Where everything may grow and have its place.  Thus nature of mind cannot arise alone  Without the body, nor have its being far  From thews and blood. Yet if 'twere possible?--  Much rather might this very power of mind  Be in the head, the shoulders, or the heels,  And, born in any part soever, yet  In the same man, in the same vessel abide  But since within this body even of ours  Stands fixed and appears arranged sure  Where soul and mind can each exist and grow,  Deny we must the more that they can dure  Outside the body and the breathing form  In rotting clods of earth, in the sun's fire,  In water, or in ether's skiey coasts.  Therefore these things no whit are furnished  With sense divine, since never can they be  With life-force quickened.
 Likewise, thou canst ne'er  Believe the sacred seats of gods are here  In any regions of this mundane world;  Indeed, the nature of the gods, so subtle,  So far removed from these our senses, scarce  Is seen even by intelligence of mind.  And since they've ever eluded touch and thrust  Of human hands, they cannot reach to grasp  Aught tangible to us. For what may not  Itself be touched in turn can never touch.  Wherefore, besides, also their seats must be  Unlike these seats of ours,--even subtle too,  As meet for subtle essence--as I'll prove  Hereafter unto thee with large discourse.  Further, to say that for the sake of men  They willed to prepare this world's magnificence,  And that 'tis therefore duty and behoof  To praise the work of gods as worthy praise,  And that 'tis sacrilege for men to shake  Ever by any force from out their seats  What hath been stablished by the Forethought old  To everlasting for races of mankind,  And that 'tis sacrilege to assault by words  And overtopple all from base to beam,--  Memmius, such notions to concoct and pile,  Is verily--to dote. Our gratefulness,  O what emoluments could it confer  Upon Immortals and upon the Blessed  That they should take a step to manage aught  For sake of us? Or what new factor could,  After so long a time, inveigle them--  The hitherto reposeful--to desire  To change their former life? For rather he  Whom old things chafe seems likely to rejoice  At new; but one that in fore-passed time  Hath chanced upon no ill, through goodly years,  O what could ever enkindle in such an one  Passion for strange experiment? Or what  The evil for us, if we had ne'er been born?--  As though, forsooth, in darkling realms and woe  Our life were lying till should dawn at last  The day-spring of creation! Whosoever  Hath been begotten wills perforce to stay  In life, so long as fond delight detains;  But whoso ne'er hath tasted love of life,  And ne'er was in the count of living things,  What hurts it him that he was never born?  Whence, further, first was planted in the gods  The archetype for gendering the world  And the fore-notion of what man is like,  So that they knew and pre-conceived with mind  Just what they wished to make? Or how were known  Ever the energies of primal germs,  And what those germs, by interchange of place,  Could thus produce, if nature's self had not  Given example for creating all?  For in such wise primordials of things,  Many in many modes, astir by blows  From immemorial aeons, in motion too  By their own weights, have evermore been wont  To be so borne along and in all modes  To meet together and to try all sorts  Which, by combining one with other, they  Are powerful to create, that thus it is  No marvel now, if they have also fallen  Into arrangements such, and if they've passed  Into vibrations such, as those whereby  This sum of things is carried on to-day  By fixed renewal. But knew I never what  The seeds primordial were, yet would I dare  This to affirm, even from deep judgments based  Upon the ways and conduct of the skies--  This to maintain by many a fact besides--  That in no wise the nature of all things  For us was fashioned by a power divine--  So great the faults it stands encumbered with.  First, mark all regions which are overarched  By the prodigious reaches of the sky:  One yawning part thereof the mountain-chains  And forests of the beasts do have and hold;  And cliffs, and desert fens, and wastes of sea  (Which sunder afar the beaches of the lands)  Possess it merely; and, again, thereof  Well-nigh two-thirds intolerable heat  And a perpetual fall of frost doth rob  From mortal kind. And what is left to till,  Even that the force of nature would o'errun  With brambles, did not human force oppose,--  Long wont for livelihood to groan and sweat  Over the two-pronged mattock and to cleave  The soil in twain by pressing on the plough.
 Unless, by the ploughshare turning the fruitful clods  And kneading the mould, we quicken into birth,  [The crops] spontaneously could not come up  Into the free bright air. Even then sometimes,  When things acquired by the sternest toil  Are now in leaf, are now in blossom all,  Either the skiey sun with baneful heats  Parches, or sudden rains or chilling rime  Destroys, or flaws of winds with furious whirl  Torment and twist. Beside these matters, why  Doth nature feed and foster on land and sea  The dreadful breed of savage beasts, the foes  Of the human clan? Why do the seasons bring  Distempers with them? Wherefore stalks at large  Death, so untimely? Then, again, the babe,  Like to the castaway of the raging surf,  Lies naked on the ground, speechless, in want  Of every help for life, when nature first  Hath poured him forth upon the shores of light  With birth-pangs from within the mother's womb,  And with a plaintive wail he fills the place,--  As well befitting one for whom remains  In life a journey through so many ills.  But all the flocks and herds and all wild beasts  Come forth and grow, nor need the little rattles,  Nor must be treated to the humouring nurse's  Dear, broken chatter; nor seek they divers clothes  To suit the changing skies; nor need, in fine,  Nor arms, nor lofty ramparts, wherewithal  Their own to guard--because the earth herself  And nature, artificer of the world, bring forth  Aboundingly all things for all.
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]...
 Is rendered back; and since, beyond a doubt,  Earth, the all-mother, is beheld to be  Likewise the common sepulchre of things,  Therefore thou seest her minished of her plenty,  And then again augmented with new growth.
 And for the rest, that sea, and streams, and springs  Forever with new waters overflow,  And that perennially the fluids well,  Needeth no words--the mighty flux itself  Of multitudinous waters round about  Declareth this. But whatso water first  Streams up is ever straightway carried off,  And thus it comes to pass that all in all  There is no overflow; in part because  The burly winds (that over-sweep amain)  And skiey sun (that with his rays dissolves)  Do minish the level seas; in part because  The water is diffused underground  Through all the lands. The brine is filtered off,  And then the liquid stuff seeps back again  And all regathers at the river-heads,  Whence in fresh-water currents on it flows  Over the lands, adown the channels which  Were cleft erstwhile and erstwhile bore along  The liquid-footed floods.
 Now, then, of air  I'll speak, which hour by hour in all its body  Is changed innumerably. For whatso'er  Streams up in dust or vapour off of things,  The same is all and always borne along  Into the mighty ocean of the air;  And did not air in turn restore to things  Bodies, and thus recruit them as they stream,  All things by this time had resolved been  And changed into air. Therefore it never  Ceases to be engendered off of things  And to return to things, since verily  In constant flux do all things stream.
 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.
 *****  gain,  Whatever abides eternal must indeed  Either repel all strokes, because 'tis made  Of solid body, and permit no entrance  Of aught with power to sunder from within  The parts compact--as are those seeds of stuff  Whose nature we've exhibited before;  Or else be able to endure through time  For this: because they are from blows exempt,  As is the void, the which abides untouched,  Unsmit by any stroke; or else because  There is no room around, whereto things can,  As 'twere, depart in dissolution all,--  Even as the sum of sums eternal is,  Without or place beyond whereto things may  Asunder fly, or bodies which can smite,  And thus dissolve them by the blows of might.  But not of solid body, as I've shown,  Exists the nature of the world, because  In things is intermingled there a void;  Nor is the world yet as the void, nor are,  Moreover, bodies lacking which, percase,  Rising from out the infinite, can fell  With fury-whirlwinds all this sum of things,  Or bring upon them other cataclysm  Of peril strange; and yonder, too, abides  The infinite space and the profound abyss--  Whereinto, lo, the ramparts of the world  Can yet be shivered. Or some other power  Can pound upon them till they perish all.  Thus is the door of doom, O nowise barred  Against the sky, against the sun and earth  And deep-sea waters, but wide open stands  And gloats upon them, monstrous and agape.  Wherefore, again, 'tis needful to confess  That these same things are born in time; for things  Which are of mortal body could indeed  Never from infinite past until to-day  Have spurned the multitudinous assaults  Of the immeasurable aeons old.
 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.
FORMATION OF THE WORLD AND  ASTRONOMICAL QUESTIONS
 But in what modes that conflux of first-stuff  Did found the multitudinous universe  Of earth, and sky, and the unfathomed deeps  Of ocean, and courses of the sun and moon,  I'll now in order tell. For of a truth  Neither by counsel did the primal germs  'Stablish themselves, as by keen act of mind,  Each in its proper place; nor did they make,  Forsooth, a compact how each germ should move;  But, lo, because primordials of things,  Many in many modes, astir by blows  From immemorial aeons, in motion too  By their own weights, have evermore been wont  To be so borne along and in all modes  To meet together and to try all sorts  Which, by combining one with other, they  Are powerful to create: because of this  It comes to pass that those primordials,  Diffused far and wide through mighty aeons,  The while they unions try, and motions too,  Of every kind, meet at the last amain,  And so become oft the commencements fit  Of mighty things--earth, sea, and sky, and race  Of living creatures.
 In that long-ago  The wheel of the sun could nowhere be discerned  Flying far up with its abounding blaze,  Nor constellations of the mighty world,  Nor ocean, nor heaven, nor even earth nor air.  Nor aught of things like unto things of ours  Could then be seen--but only some strange storm  And a prodigious hurly-burly mass  Compounded of all kinds of primal germs,  Whose battling discords in disorder kept  Interstices, and paths, coherencies,  And weights, and blows, encounterings, and motions,  Because, by reason of their forms unlike  And varied shapes, they could not all thuswise  Remain conjoined nor harmoniously  Have interplay of movements. But from there  Portions began to fly asunder, and like  With like to join, and to block out a world,  And to divide its members and dispose  Its mightier parts--that is, to set secure  The lofty heavens from the lands, and cause  The sea to spread with waters separate,  And fires of ether separate and pure  Likewise to congregate apart.
 For, lo,  First came together the earthy particles  (As being heavy and intertangled) there  In the mid-region, and all began to take  The lowest abodes; and ever the more they got  One with another intertangled, the more  They pressed from out their mass those particles  Which were to form the sea, the stars, the sun,  And moon, and ramparts of the mighty world--  For these consist of seeds more smooth and round  And of much smaller elements than earth.  And thus it was that ether, fraught with fire,  First broke away from out the earthen parts,  Athrough the innumerable pores of earth,  And raised itself aloft, and with itself  Bore lightly off the many starry fires;  And not far otherwise we often see
 And the still lakes and the perennial streams  Exhale a mist, and even as earth herself  Is seen at times to smoke, when first at dawn  The light of the sun, the many-rayed, begins  To redden into gold, over the grass  Begemmed with dew. When all of these are brought  Together overhead, the clouds on high  With now concreted body weave a cover  Beneath the heavens. And thuswise ether too,  Light and diffusive, with concreted body  On all sides spread, on all sides bent itself  Into a dome, and, far and wide diffused  On unto every region on all sides,  Thus hedged all else within its greedy clasp.  Hard upon ether came the origins  Of sun and moon, whose globes revolve in air  Midway between the earth and mightiest ether,--  For neither took them, since they weighed too little  To sink and settle, but too much to glide  Along the upmost shores; and yet they are  In such a wise midway between the twain  As ever to whirl their living bodies round,  And ever to dure as parts of the wide Whole;  In the same fashion as certain members may  In us remain at rest, whilst others move.  When, then, these substances had been withdrawn,  Amain the earth, where now extend the vast  Cerulean zones of all the level seas,  Caved in, and down along the hollows poured  The whirlpools of her brine; and day by day  The more the tides of ether and rays of sun  On every side constrained into one mass  The earth by lashing it again, again,  Upon its outer edges (so that then,  Being thus beat upon, 'twas all condensed  About its proper centre), ever the more  The salty sweat, from out its body squeezed,  Augmented ocean and the fields of foam  By seeping through its frame, and all the more  Those many particles of heat and air  Escaping, began to fly aloft, and form,  By condensation there afar from earth,  The high refulgent circuits of the heavens.  The plains began to sink, and windy slopes  Of the high mountains to increase; for rocks  Could not subside, nor all the parts of ground  Settle alike to one same level there.
 Thus, then, the massy weight of earth stood firm  With now concreted body, when (as 'twere)  All of the slime of the world, heavy and gross,  Had run together and settled at the bottom,  Like lees or bilge. Then ocean, then the air,  Then ether herself, the fraught-with-fire, were all  Left with their liquid bodies pure and free,  And each more lighter than the next below;  And ether, most light and liquid of the three,  Floats on above the long aerial winds,  Nor with the brawling of the winds of air  Mingles its liquid body. It doth leave  All there--those under-realms below her heights--  There to be overset in whirlwinds wild,--  Doth leave all there to brawl in wayward gusts,  Whilst, gliding with a fixed impulse still,  Itself it bears its fires along. For, lo,  That ether can flow thus steadily on, on,  With one unaltered urge, the Pontus proves--  That sea which floweth forth with fixed tides,  Keeping one onward tenor as it glides.
 And that the earth may there abide at rest  In the mid-region of the world, it needs  Must vanish bit by bit in weight and lessen,  And have another substance underneath,  Conjoined to it from its earliest age  In linked unison with the vasty world's  Realms of the air in which it roots and lives.  On this account, the earth is not a load,  Nor presses down on winds of air beneath;  Even as unto a man his members be  Without all weight--the head is not a load  Unto the neck; nor do we feel the whole  Weight of the body to centre in the feet.  But whatso weights come on us from without,  Weights laid upon us, these harass and chafe,  Though often far lighter. For to such degree  It matters always what the innate powers  Of any given thing may be. The earth  Was, then, no alien substance fetched amain,  And from no alien firmament cast down  On alien air; but was conceived, like air,  In the first origin of this the world,  As a fixed portion of the same, as now  Our members are seen to be a part of us.
 Besides, the earth, when of a sudden shook  By the big thunder, doth with her motion shake  All that's above her--which she ne'er could do  By any means, were earth not bounden fast  Unto the great world's realms of air and sky:  For they cohere together with common roots,  Conjoined both, even from their earliest age,  In linked unison. Aye, seest thou not  That this most subtle energy of soul  Supports our body, though so heavy a weight,--  Because, indeed, 'tis with it so conjoined  In linked unison? What power, in sum,  Can raise with agile leap our body aloft,  Save energy of mind which steers the limbs?  Now seest thou not how powerful may be  A subtle nature, when conjoined it is  With heavy body, as air is with the earth  Conjoined, and energy of mind with us?
 Now let us sing what makes the stars to move.  In first place, if the mighty sphere of heaven  Revolveth round, then needs we must aver  That on the upper and the under pole  Presses a certain air, and from without  Confines them and encloseth at each end;  And that, moreover, another air above  Streams on athwart the top of the sphere and tends  In same direction as are rolled along  The glittering stars of the eternal world;  Or that another still streams on below  To whirl the sphere from under up and on  In opposite direction--as we see  The rivers turn the wheels and water-scoops.  It may be also that the heavens do all  Remain at rest, whilst yet are borne along  The lucid constellations; either because  Swift tides of ether are by sky enclosed,  And whirl around, seeking a passage out,  And everywhere make roll the starry fires  Through the Summanian regions of the sky;  Or else because some air, streaming along  From an eternal quarter off beyond,  Whileth the driven fires, or, then, because  The fires themselves have power to creep along,  Going wherever their food invites and calls,  And feeding their flaming bodies everywhere  Throughout the sky. Yet which of these is cause  In this our world 'tis hard to say for sure;  But what can be throughout the universe,  In divers worlds on divers plan create,  This only do I show, and follow on  To assign unto the motions of the stars  Even several causes which 'tis possible  Exist throughout the universal All;  Of which yet one must be the cause even here  Which maketh motion for our constellations.  Yet to decide which one of them it be  Is not the least the business of a man  Advancing step by cautious step, as I.
 Nor can the sun's wheel larger be by much  Nor its own blaze much less than either seems  Unto our senses. For from whatso spaces  Fires have the power on us to cast their beams  And blow their scorching exhalations forth  Against our members, those same distances  Take nothing by those intervals away  From bulk of flames; and to the sight the fire  Is nothing shrunken. Therefore, since the heat  And the outpoured light of skiey sun  Arrive our senses and caress our limbs,  Form too and bigness of the sun must look  Even here from earth just as they really be,  So that thou canst scarce nothing take or add.  And whether the journeying moon illuminate  The regions round with bastard beams, or throw  From off her proper body her own light,--  Whichever it be, she journeys with a form  Naught larger than the form doth seem to be  Which we with eyes of ours perceive. For all  The far removed objects of our gaze  Seem through much air confused in their look  Ere minished in their bigness. Wherefore, moon,  Since she presents bright look and clear-cut form,  May there on high by us on earth be seen  Just as she is with extreme bounds defined,  And just of the size. And lastly, whatso fires  Of ether thou from earth beholdest, these  Thou mayst consider as possibly of size  The least bit less, or larger by a hair  Than they appear--since whatso fires we view  Here in the lands of earth are seen to change  From time to time their size to less or more  Only the least, when more or less away,  So long as still they bicker clear, and still  Their glow's perceived.
 Nor need there be for men  Astonishment that yonder sun so small  Can yet send forth so great a light as fills  Oceans and all the lands and sky aflood,  And with its fiery exhalations steeps  The world at large. For it may be, indeed,  That one vast-flowing well-spring of the whole  Wide world from here hath opened and out-gushed,  And shot its light abroad; because thuswise  The elements of fiery exhalations  From all the world around together come,  And thuswise flow into a bulk so big  That from one single fountain-head may stream  This heat and light. And seest thou not, indeed,  How widely one small water-spring may wet  The meadow-lands at times and flood the fields?  'Tis even possible, besides, that heat  From forth the sun's own fire, albeit that fire  Be not a great, may permeate the air  With the fierce hot--if but, perchance, the air  Be of condition and so tempered then  As to be kindled, even when beat upon  Only by little particles of heat--  Just as we sometimes see the standing grain  Or stubble straw in conflagration all  From one lone spark. And possibly the sun,  Agleam on high with rosy lampion,  Possesses about him with invisible heats  A plenteous fire, by no effulgence marked,  So that he maketh, he, the Fraught-with-fire,  Increase to such degree the force of rays.
 Nor is there one sure cause revealed to men  How the sun journeys from his summer haunts  On to the mid-most winter turning-points  In Capricorn, the thence reverting veers  Back to solstitial goals of Cancer; nor  How 'tis the moon is seen each month to cross  That very distance which in traversing  The sun consumes the measure of a year.  I say, no one clear reason hath been given  For these affairs. Yet chief in likelihood  Seemeth the doctrine which the holy thought  Of great Democritus lays down: that ever  The nearer the constellations be to earth  The less can they by whirling of the sky  Be borne along, because those skiey powers  Of speed aloft do vanish and decrease  In under-regions, and the sun is thus  Left by degrees behind amongst those signs  That follow after, since the sun he lies  Far down below the starry signs that blaze;  And the moon lags even tardier than the sun:  In just so far as is her course removed  From upper heaven and nigh unto the lands,  In just so far she fails to keep the pace  With starry signs above; for just so far  As feebler is the whirl that bears her on,  (Being, indeed, still lower than the sun),  In just so far do all the starry signs,  Circling around, o'ertake her and o'erpass.  Therefore it happens that the moon appears  More swiftly to return to any sign  Along the Zodiac, than doth the sun,  Because those signs do visit her again  More swiftly than they visit the great sun.  It can be also that two streams of air  Alternately at fixed periods  Blow out from transverse regions of the world,  Of which the one may thrust the sun away  From summer-signs to mid-most winter goals  And rigors of the cold, and the other then  May cast him back from icy shades of chill  Even to the heat-fraught regions and the signs  That blaze along the Zodiac. So, too,  We must suppose the moon and all the stars,  Which through the mighty and sidereal years  Roll round in mighty orbits, may be sped  By streams of air from regions alternate.  Seest thou not also how the clouds be sped  By contrary winds to regions contrary,  The lower clouds diversely from the upper?  Then, why may yonder stars in ether there  Along their mighty orbits not be borne  By currents opposite the one to other?
 But night o'erwhelms the lands with vasty murk  Either when sun, after his diurnal course,  Hath walked the ultimate regions of the sky  And wearily hath panted forth his fires,  Shivered by their long journeying and wasted  By traversing the multitudinous air,  Or else because the self-same force that drave  His orb along above the lands compels  Him then to turn his course beneath the lands.  Matuta also at a fixed hour  Spreadeth the roseate morning out along  The coasts of heaven and deploys the light,  Either because the self-same sun, returning  Under the lands, aspires to seize the sky,  Striving to set it blazing with his rays  Ere he himself appear, or else because  Fires then will congregate and many seeds  Of heat are wont, even at a fixed time,  To stream together--gendering evermore  New suns and light. Just so the story goes  That from the Idaean mountain-tops are seen  Dispersed fires upon the break of day  Which thence combine, as 'twere, into one ball  And form an orb. Nor yet in these affairs  Is aught for wonder that these seeds of fire  Can thus together stream at time so fixed  And shape anew the splendour of the sun.  For many facts we see which come to pass  At fixed time in all things: burgeon shrubs  At fixed time, and at a fixed time  They cast their flowers; and Eld commands the teeth,  At time as surely fixed, to drop away,  And Youth commands the growing boy to bloom  With the soft down and let from both his cheeks  The soft beard fall. And lastly, thunder-bolts,  Snow, rains, clouds, winds, at seasons of the year  Nowise unfixed, all do come to pass.  For where, even from their old primordial start  Causes have ever worked in such a way,  And where, even from the world's first origin,  Thuswise have things befallen, so even now  After a fixed order they come round  In sequence also.
 Likewise, days may wax  Whilst the nights wane, and daylight minished be  Whilst nights do take their augmentations,  Either because the self-same sun, coursing  Under the lands and over in two arcs,  A longer and a briefer, doth dispart  The coasts of ether and divides in twain  His orbit all unequally, and adds,  As round he's borne, unto the one half there  As much as from the other half he's ta'en,  Until he then arrives that sign of heaven  Where the year's node renders the shades of night  Equal unto the periods of light.  For when the sun is midway on his course  Between the blasts of northwind and of south,  Heaven keeps his two goals parted equally,  By virtue of the fixed position old  Of the whole starry Zodiac, through which  That sun, in winding onward, takes a year,  Illumining the sky and all the lands  With oblique light--as men declare to us  Who by their diagrams have charted well  Those regions of the sky which be adorned  With the arranged signs of Zodiac.  Or else, because in certain parts the air  Under the lands is denser, the tremulous  Bright beams of fire do waver tardily,  Nor easily can penetrate that air  Nor yet emerge unto their rising-place:  For this it is that nights in winter time  Do linger long, ere comes the many-rayed  Round Badge of the day. Or else because, as said,  In alternating seasons of the year  Fires, now more quick, and now more slow, are wont  To stream together,--the fires which make the sun  To rise in some one spot--therefore it is  That those men seem to speak the truth [who hold  A new sun is with each new daybreak born].
 The moon she possibly doth shine because  Strook by the rays of sun, and day by day  May turn unto our gaze her light, the more  She doth recede from orb of sun, until,  Facing him opposite across the world,  She hath with full effulgence gleamed abroad,  And, at her rising as she soars above,  Hath there observed his setting; thence likewise  She needs must hide, as 'twere, her light behind  By slow degrees, the nearer now she glides,  Along the circle of the Zodiac,  From her far place toward fires of yonder sun,--  As those men hold who feign the moon to be  Just like a ball and to pursue a course  Betwixt the sun and earth. There is, again,  Some reason to suppose that moon may roll  With light her very own, and thus display  The varied shapes of her resplendence there.  For near her is, percase, another body,  Invisible, because devoid of light,  Borne on and gliding all along with her,  Which in three modes may block and blot her disk.  Again, she may revolve upon herself,  Like to a ball's sphere--if perchance that be--  One half of her dyed o'er with glowing light,  And by the revolution of that sphere  She may beget for us her varying shapes,  Until she turns that fiery part of her  Full to the sight and open eyes of men;  Thence by slow stages round and back she whirls,  Withdrawing thus the luminiferous part  Of her sphered mass and ball, as, verily,  The Babylonian doctrine of Chaldees,  Refuting the art of Greek astrologers,  Labours, in opposition, to prove sure--  As if, forsooth, the thing for which each fights,  Might not alike be true,--or aught there were  Wherefore thou mightest risk embracing one  More than the other notion. Then, again,  Why a new moon might not forevermore  Created be with fixed successions there  Of shapes and with configurations fixed,  And why each day that bright created moon  Might not miscarry and another be,  In its stead and place, engendered anew,  'Tis hard to show by reason, or by words  To prove absurd--since, lo, so many things  Can be create with fixed successions:  Spring-time and Venus come, and Venus' boy,  The winged harbinger, steps on before,  And hard on Zephyr's foot-prints Mother Flora,  Sprinkling the ways before them, filleth all  With colours and with odours excellent;  Whereafter follows arid Heat, and he  Companioned is by Ceres, dusty one,  And by the Etesian Breezes of the north;  Then cometh Autumn on, and with him steps  Lord Bacchus, and then other Seasons too  And other Winds do follow--the high roar  Of great Volturnus, and the Southwind strong  With thunder-bolts. At last earth's Shortest-Day  Bears on to men the snows and brings again  The numbing cold. And Winter follows her,  His teeth with chills a-chatter. Therefore, 'tis  The less a marvel, if at fixed time  A moon is thus begotten and again  At fixed time destroyed, since things so many  Can come to being thus at fixed time.  Likewise, the sun's eclipses and the moon's  Far occultations rightly thou mayst deem
 As due to several causes. For, indeed,  Why should the moon be able to shut out  Earth from the light of sun, and on the side  To earthward thrust her high head under sun,  Opposing dark orb to his glowing beams--  And yet, at same time, one suppose the effect  Could not result from some one other body  Which glides devoid of light forevermore?  Again, why could not sun, in weakened state,  At fixed time for-lose his fires, and then,  When he has passed on along the air  Beyond the regions, hostile to his flames,  That quench and kill his fires, why could not he  Renew his light? And why should earth in turn  Have power to rob the moon of light, and there,  Herself on high, keep the sun hid beneath,  Whilst the moon glideth in her monthly course  Athrough the rigid shadows of the cone?--  And yet, at same time, some one other body  Not have the power to under-pass the moon,  Or glide along above the orb of sun,  Breaking his rays and outspread light asunder?  And still, if moon herself refulgent be  With her own sheen, why could she not at times  In some one quarter of the mighty world  Grow weak and weary, whilst she passeth through  Regions unfriendly to the beams her own?
ORIGINS OF VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL LIFE
 And now to what remains!--Since I've resolved  By what arrangements all things come to pass  Through the blue regions of the mighty world,--  How we can know what energy and cause  Started the various courses of the sun  And the moon's goings, and by what far means  They can succumb, the while with thwarted light,  And veil with shade the unsuspecting lands,  When, as it were, they blink, and then again  With open eye survey all regions wide,  Resplendent with white radiance--I do now  Return unto the world's primeval age  And tell what first the soft young fields of earth  With earliest parturition had decreed  To raise in air unto the shores of light  And to entrust unto the wayward winds.  In the beginning, earth gave forth, around  The hills and over all the length of plains,  The race of grasses and the shining green;  The flowery meadows sparkled all aglow  With greening colour, and thereafter, lo,  Unto the divers kinds of trees was given  An emulous impulse mightily to shoot,  With a free rein, aloft into the air.  As feathers and hairs and bristles are begot  The first on members of the four-foot breeds  And on the bodies of the strong-y-winged,  Thus then the new Earth first of all put forth  Grasses and shrubs, and afterward begat  The mortal generations, there upsprung--  Innumerable in modes innumerable--  After diverging fashions. For from sky  These breathing-creatures never can have dropped,  Nor the land-dwellers ever have come up  Out of sea-pools of salt. How true remains,  How merited is that adopted name  Of earth--"The Mother!"--since from out the earth  Are all begotten. And even now arise  From out the loams how many living things--  Concreted by the rains and heat of the sun.  Wherefore 'tis less a marvel, if they sprang  In Long Ago more many, and more big,  Matured of those days in the fresh young years  Of earth and ether. First of all, the race  Of the winged ones and parti-coloured birds,  Hatched out in spring-time, left their eggs behind;  As now-a-days in summer tree-crickets  Do leave their shiny husks of own accord,  Seeking their food and living. Then it was  This earth of thine first gave unto the day  The mortal generations; for prevailed  Among the fields abounding hot and wet.  And hence, where any fitting spot was given,  There 'gan to grow womb-cavities, by roots  Affixed to earth. And when in ripened time  The age of the young within (that sought the air  And fled earth's damps) had burst these wombs, O then  Would Nature thither turn the pores of earth  And make her spurt from open veins a juice  Like unto milk; even as a woman now  Is filled, at child-bearing, with the sweet milk,  Because all that swift stream of aliment  Is thither turned unto the mother-breasts.  There earth would furnish to the children food;  Warmth was their swaddling cloth, the grass their bed  Abounding in soft down. Earth's newness then  Would rouse no dour spells of the bitter cold,  Nor extreme heats nor winds of mighty powers--  For all things grow and gather strength through time  In like proportions; and then earth was young.
 Wherefore, again, again, how merited  Is that adopted name of Earth--The Mother!--  Since she herself begat the human race,  And at one well-nigh fixed time brought forth  Each breast that ranges raving round about  Upon the mighty mountains and all birds  Aerial with many a varied shape.  But, lo, because her bearing years must end,  She ceased, like to a woman worn by eld.  For lapsing aeons change the nature of  The whole wide world, and all things needs must take  One status after other, nor aught persists  Forever like itself. All things depart;  Nature she changeth all, compelleth all  To transformation. Lo, this moulders down,  A-slack with weary eld, and that, again,  Prospers in glory, issuing from contempt.  In suchwise, then, the lapsing aeons change  The nature of the whole wide world, and earth  Taketh one status after other. And what  She bore of old, she now can bear no longer,  And what she never bore, she can to-day.
 In those days also the telluric world  Strove to beget the monsters that upsprung  With their astounding visages and limbs--  The Man-woman--a thing betwixt the twain,  Yet neither, and from either sex remote--  Some gruesome Boggles orphaned of the feet,  Some widowed of the hands, dumb Horrors too  Without a mouth, or blind Ones of no eye,  Or Bulks all shackled by their legs and arms  Cleaving unto the body fore and aft,  Thuswise, that never could they do or go,  Nor shun disaster, nor take the good they would.  And other prodigies and monsters earth  Was then begetting of this sort--in vain,  Since Nature banned with horror their increase,  And powerless were they to reach unto  The coveted flower of fair maturity,  Or to find aliment, or to intertwine  In works of Venus. For we see there must  Concur in life conditions manifold,  If life is ever by begetting life  To forge the generations one by one:  First, foods must be; and, next, a path whereby  The seeds of impregnation in the frame  May ooze, released from the members all;  Last, the possession of those instruments  Whereby the male with female can unite,  The one with other in mutual ravishments.
 And in the ages after monsters died,  Perforce there perished many a stock, unable  By propagation to forge a progeny.  For whatsoever creatures thou beholdest  Breathing the breath of life, the same have been  Even from their earliest age preserved alive  By cunning, or by valour, or at least  By speed of foot or wing. And many a stock  Remaineth yet, because of use to man,  And so committed to man's guardianship.  Valour hath saved alive fierce lion-breeds  And many another terrorizing race,  Cunning the foxes, flight the antlered stags.  Light-sleeping dogs with faithful heart in breast,  However, and every kind begot from seed  Of beasts of draft, as, too, the woolly flocks  And horned cattle, all, my Memmius,  Have been committed to guardianship of men.  For anxiously they fled the savage beasts,  And peace they sought and their abundant foods,  Obtained with never labours of their own,  Which we secure to them as fit rewards  For their good service. But those beasts to whom  Nature has granted naught of these same things--  Beasts quite unfit by own free will to thrive  And vain for any service unto us  In thanks for which we should permit their kind  To feed and be in our protection safe--  Those, of a truth, were wont to be exposed,  Enshackled in the gruesome bonds of doom,  As prey and booty for the rest, until  Nature reduced that stock to utter death.
 But Centaurs ne'er have been, nor can there be  Creatures of twofold stock and double frame,  Compact of members alien in kind,  Yet formed with equal function, equal force  In every bodily part--a fact thou mayst,  However dull thy wits, well learn from this:  The horse, when his three years have rolled away,  Flowers in his prime of vigour; but the boy  Not so, for oft even then he gropes in sleep  After the milky nipples of the breasts,  An infant still. And later, when at last  The lusty powers of horses and stout limbs,  Now weak through lapsing life, do fail with age,  Lo, only then doth youth with flowering years  Begin for boys, and clothe their ruddy cheeks  With the soft down. So never deem, percase,  That from a man and from the seed of horse,  The beast of draft, can Centaurs be composed  Or e'er exist alive, nor Scyllas be--  The half-fish bodies girdled with mad dogs--  Nor others of this sort, in whom we mark  Members discordant each with each; for ne'er  At one same time they reach their flower of age  Or gain and lose full vigour of their frame,  And never burn with one same lust of love,  And never in their habits they agree,  Nor find the same foods equally delightsome--  Sooth, as one oft may see the bearded goats  Batten upon the hemlock which to man  Is violent poison. Once again, since flame  Is wont to scorch and burn the tawny bulks  Of the great lions as much as other kinds  Of flesh and blood existing in the lands,  How could it be that she, Chimaera lone,  With triple body--fore, a lion she;  And aft, a dragon; and betwixt, a goat--  Might at the mouth from out the body belch  Infuriate flame? Wherefore, the man who feigns  Such beings could have been engendered  When earth was new and the young sky was fresh  (Basing his empty argument on new)  May babble with like reason many whims  Into our ears: he'll say, perhaps, that then  Rivers of gold through every landscape flowed,  That trees were wont with precious stones to flower,  Or that in those far aeons man was born  With such gigantic length and lift of limbs  As to be able, based upon his feet,  Deep oceans to bestride or with his hands  To whirl the firmament around his head.  For though in earth were many seeds of things  In the old time when this telluric world  First poured the breeds of animals abroad,  Still that is nothing of a sign that then  Such hybrid creatures could have been begot  And limbs of all beasts heterogeneous  Have been together knit; because, indeed,  The divers kinds of grasses and the grains  And the delightsome trees--which even now  Spring up abounding from within the earth--  Can still ne'er be begotten with their stems  Begrafted into one; but each sole thing  Proceeds according to its proper wont  And all conserve their own distinctions based  In nature's fixed decree.
ORIGINS AND SAVAGE PERIOD OF MANKIND
 But mortal man  Was then far hardier in the old champaign,  As well he should be, since a hardier earth  Had him begotten; builded too was he  Of bigger and more solid bones within,  And knit with stalwart sinews through the flesh,  Nor easily seized by either heat or cold,  Or alien food or any ail or irk.  And whilst so many lustrums of the sun  Rolled on across the sky, men led a life  After the roving habit of wild beasts.  Not then were sturdy guiders of curved ploughs,  And none knew then to work the fields with iron,  Or plant young shoots in holes of delved loam,  Or lop with hooked knives from off high trees  The boughs of yester-year. What sun and rains  To them had given, what earth of own accord  Created then, was boon enough to glad  Their simple hearts. Mid acorn-laden oaks  Would they refresh their bodies for the nonce;  And the wild berries of the arbute-tree,  Which now thou seest to ripen purple-red  In winter time, the old telluric soil  Would bear then more abundant and more big.  And many coarse foods, too, in long ago  The blooming freshness of the rank young world  Produced, enough for those poor wretches there.  And rivers and springs would summon them of old  To slake the thirst, as now from the great hills  The water's down-rush calls aloud and far  The thirsty generations of the wild.  So, too, they sought the grottos of the Nymphs--  The woodland haunts discovered as they ranged--  From forth of which they knew that gliding rills  With gush and splash abounding laved the rocks,  The dripping rocks, and trickled from above  Over the verdant moss; and here and there  Welled up and burst across the open flats.  As yet they knew not to enkindle fire  Against the cold, nor hairy pelts to use  And clothe their bodies with the spoils of beasts;  But huddled in groves, and mountain-caves, and woods,  And 'mongst the thickets hid their squalid backs,  When driven to flee the lashings of the winds  And the big rains. Nor could they then regard  The general good, nor did they know to use  In common any customs, any laws:  Whatever of booty fortune unto each  Had proffered, each alone would bear away,  By instinct trained for self to thrive and live.  And Venus in the forests then would link  The lovers' bodies; for the woman yielded  Either from mutual flame, or from the man's  Impetuous fury and insatiate lust,  Or from a bribe--as acorn-nuts, choice pears,  Or the wild berries of the arbute-tree.  And trusting wondrous strength of hands and legs,  They'd chase the forest-wanderers, the beasts;  And many they'd conquer, but some few they fled,  A-skulk into their hiding-places...
 With the flung stones and with the ponderous heft  Of gnarled branch. And by the time of night  O'ertaken, they would throw, like bristly boars,  Their wildman's limbs naked upon the earth,  Rolling themselves in leaves and fronded boughs.  Nor would they call with lamentations loud  Around the fields for daylight and the sun,  Quaking and wand'ring in shadows of the night;  But, silent and buried in a sleep, they'd wait  Until the sun with rosy flambeau brought  The glory to the sky. From childhood wont  Ever to see the dark and day begot  In times alternate, never might they be  Wildered by wild misgiving, lest a night  Eternal should possess the lands, with light  Of sun withdrawn forever. But their care  Was rather that the clans of savage beasts  Would often make their sleep-time horrible  For those poor wretches; and, from home y-driven,  They'd flee their rocky shelters at approach  Of boar, the spumy-lipped, or lion strong,  And in the midnight yield with terror up  To those fierce guests their beds of out-spread leaves.
 And yet in those days not much more than now  Would generations of mortality  Leave the sweet light of fading life behind.  Indeed, in those days here and there a man,  More oftener snatched upon, and gulped by fangs,  Afforded the beasts a food that roared alive,  Echoing through groves and hills and forest-trees,  Even as he viewed his living flesh entombed  Within a living grave; whilst those whom flight  Had saved, with bone and body bitten, shrieked,  Pressing their quivering palms to loathsome sores,  With horrible voices for eternal death--  Until, forlorn of help, and witless what  Might medicine their wounds, the writhing pangs  Took them from life. But not in those far times  Would one lone day give over unto doom  A soldiery in thousands marching on  Beneath the battle-banners, nor would then  The ramping breakers of the main seas dash  Whole argosies and crews upon the rocks.  But ocean uprisen would often rave in vain,  Without all end or outcome, and give up  Its empty menacings as lightly too;  Nor soft seductions of a serene sea  Could lure by laughing billows any man  Out to disaster: for the science bold  Of ship-sailing lay dark in those far times.  Again, 'twas then that lack of food gave o'er  Men's fainting limbs to dissolution: now  'Tis plenty overwhelms. Unwary, they  Oft for themselves themselves would then outpour  The poison; now, with nicer art, themselves  They give the drafts to others.
BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION
 Afterwards,  When huts they had procured and pelts and fire,  And when the woman, joined unto the man,  Withdrew with him into one dwelling place,
 Were known; and when they saw an offspring born  From out themselves, then first the human race  Began to soften. For 'twas now that fire  Rendered their shivering frames less staunch to bear,  Under the canopy of the sky, the cold;  And Love reduced their shaggy hardiness;  And children, with the prattle and the kiss,  Soon broke the parents' haughty temper down.  Then, too, did neighbours 'gin to league as friends,  Eager to wrong no more or suffer wrong,  And urged for children and the womankind  Mercy, of fathers, whilst with cries and gestures  They stammered hints how meet it was that all  Should have compassion on the weak. And still,  Though concord not in every wise could then  Begotten be, a good, a goodly part  Kept faith inviolate--or else mankind  Long since had been unutterably cut off,  And propagation never could have brought  The species down the ages.
 Lest, perchance,  Concerning these affairs thou ponderest  In silent meditation, let me say  'Twas lightning brought primevally to earth  The fire for mortals, and from thence hath spread  O'er all the lands the flames of heat. For thus  Even now we see so many objects, touched  By the celestial flames, to flash aglow,  When thunderbolt has dowered them with heat.  Yet also when a many-branched tree,  Beaten by winds, writhes swaying to and fro,  Pressing 'gainst branches of a neighbour tree,  There by the power of mighty rub and rub  Is fire engendered; and at times out-flares  The scorching heat of flame, when boughs do chafe  Against the trunks. And of these causes, either  May well have given to mortal men the fire.  Next, food to cook and soften in the flame  The sun instructed, since so oft they saw  How objects mellowed, when subdued by warmth  And by the raining blows of fiery beams,  Through all the fields.
 And more and more each day  Would men more strong in sense, more wise in heart,  Teach them to change their earlier mode and life  By fire and new devices. Kings began  Cities to found and citadels to set,  As strongholds and asylums for themselves,  And flocks and fields to portion for each man  After the beauty, strength, and sense of each--  For beauty then imported much, and strength  Had its own rights supreme. Thereafter, wealth  Discovered was, and gold was brought to light,  Which soon of honour stripped both strong and fair;  For men, however beautiful in form  Or valorous, will follow in the main  The rich man's party. Yet were man to steer  His life by sounder reasoning, he'd own  Abounding riches, if with mind content  He lived by thrift; for never, as I guess,  Is there a lack of little in the world.  But men wished glory for themselves and power  Even that their fortunes on foundations firm  Might rest forever, and that they themselves,  The opulent, might pass a quiet life--  In vain, in vain; since, in the strife to climb  On to the heights of honour, men do make  Their pathway terrible; and even when once  They reach them, envy like the thunderbolt  At times will smite, O hurling headlong down  To murkiest Tartarus, in scorn; for, lo,  All summits, all regions loftier than the rest,  Smoke, blasted as by envy's thunderbolts;  So better far in quiet to obey,  Than to desire chief mastery of affairs  And ownership of empires. Be it so;  And let the weary sweat their life-blood out  All to no end, battling in hate along  The narrow path of man's ambition;  Since all their wisdom is from others' lips,  And all they seek is known from what they've heard  And less from what they've thought. Nor is this folly  Greater to-day, nor greater soon to be,  Than' twas of old.
 And therefore kings were slain,  And pristine majesty of golden thrones  And haughty sceptres lay o'erturned in dust;  And crowns, so splendid on the sovereign heads,  Soon bloody under the proletarian feet,  Groaned for their glories gone--for erst o'er-much  Dreaded, thereafter with more greedy zest  Trampled beneath the rabble heel. Thus things  Down to the vilest lees of brawling mobs  Succumbed, whilst each man sought unto himself  Dominion and supremacy. So next  Some wiser heads instructed men to found  The magisterial office, and did frame  Codes that they might consent to follow laws.  For humankind, o'er wearied with a life  Fostered by force, was ailing from its feuds;  And so the sooner of its own free will  Yielded to laws and strictest codes. For since  Each hand made ready in its wrath to take  A vengeance fiercer than by man's fair laws  Is now conceded, men on this account  Loathed the old life fostered by force. 'Tis thence  That fear of punishments defiles each prize  Of wicked days; for force and fraud ensnare  Each man around, and in the main recoil  On him from whence they sprung. Not easy 'tis  For one who violates by ugly deeds  The bonds of common peace to pass a life  Composed and tranquil. For albeit he 'scape  The race of gods and men, he yet must dread  'Twill not be hid forever--since, indeed,  So many, oft babbling on amid their dreams  Or raving in sickness, have betrayed themselves  (As stories tell) and published at last  Old secrets and the sins.
 But nature 'twas  Urged men to utter various sounds of tongue  And need and use did mould the names of things,  About in same wise as the lack-speech years  Compel young children unto gesturings,  Making them point with finger here and there  At what's before them. For each creature feels  By instinct to what use to put his powers.  Ere yet the bull-calf's scarce begotten horns  Project above his brows, with them he 'gins  Enraged to butt and savagely to thrust.  But whelps of panthers and the lion's cubs  With claws and paws and bites are at the fray  Already, when their teeth and claws be scarce  As yet engendered. So again, we see  All breeds of winged creatures trust to wings  And from their fledgling pinions seek to get  A fluttering assistance. Thus, to think  That in those days some man apportioned round  To things their names, and that from him men learned  Their first nomenclature, is foolery.  For why could he mark everything by words  And utter the various sounds of tongue, what time  The rest may be supposed powerless  To do the same? And, if the rest had not  Already one with other used words,  Whence was implanted in the teacher, then,  Fore-knowledge of their use, and whence was given  To him alone primordial faculty  To know and see in mind what 'twas he willed?  Besides, one only man could scarce subdue  An overmastered multitude to choose  To get by heart his names of things. A task  Not easy 'tis in any wise to teach  And to persuade the deaf concerning what  'Tis needful for to do. For ne'er would they  Allow, nor ne'er in anywise endure  Perpetual vain dingdong in their ears  Of spoken sounds unheard before. And what,  At last, in this affair so wondrous is,  That human race (in whom a voice and tongue  Were now in vigour) should by divers words  Denote its objects, as each divers sense  Might prompt?--since even the speechless herds, aye, since  The very generations of wild beasts  Are wont dissimilar and divers sounds  To rouse from in them, when there's fear or pain,  And when they burst with joys. And this, forsooth,  'Tis thine to know from plainest facts: when first  Huge flabby jowls of mad Molossian hounds,  Baring their hard white teeth, begin to snarl,  They threaten, with infuriate lips peeled back,  In sounds far other than with which they bark  And fill with voices all the regions round.  And when with fondling tongue they start to lick  Their puppies, or do toss them round with paws,  Feigning with gentle bites to gape and snap,  They fawn with yelps of voice far other then  Than when, alone within the house, they bay,  Or whimpering slink with cringing sides from blows.  Again the neighing of the horse, is that  Not seen to differ likewise, when the stud  In buoyant flower of his young years raves,  Goaded by winged Love, amongst the mares,  And when with widening nostrils out he snorts  The call to battle, and when haply he  Whinnies at times with terror-quaking limbs?  Lastly, the flying race, the dappled birds,  Hawks, ospreys, sea-gulls, searching food and life  Amid the ocean billows in the brine,  Utter at other times far other cries  Than when they fight for food, or with their prey  Struggle and strain. And birds there are which change  With changing weather their own raucous songs--  As long-lived generations of the crows  Or flocks of rooks, when they be said to cry  For rain and water and to call at times  For winds and gales. Ergo, if divers moods  Compel the brutes, though speechless evermore,  To send forth divers sounds, O truly then  How much more likely 'twere that mortal men  In those days could with many a different sound  Denote each separate thing.
 And now what cause  Hath spread divinities of gods abroad  Through mighty nations, and filled the cities full  Of the high altars, and led to practices  Of solemn rites in season--rites which still  Flourish in midst of great affairs of state  And midst great centres of man's civic life,  The rites whence still a poor mortality  Is grafted that quaking awe which rears aloft  Still the new temples of gods from land to land  And drives mankind to visit them in throngs  On holy days--'tis not so hard to give  Reason thereof in speech. Because, in sooth,  Even in those days would the race of man  Be seeing excelling visages of gods  With mind awake; and in his sleeps, yet more--  Bodies of wondrous growth. And, thus, to these  Would men attribute sense, because they seemed  To move their limbs and speak pronouncements high,  Befitting glorious visage and vast powers.  And men would give them an eternal life,  Because their visages forevermore  Were there before them, and their shapes remained,  And chiefly, however, because men would not think  Beings augmented with such mighty powers  Could well by any force o'ermastered be.  And men would think them in their happiness  Excelling far, because the fear of death  Vexed no one of them at all, and since  At same time in men's sleeps men saw them do  So many wonders, and yet feel therefrom  Themselves no weariness. Besides, men marked  How in a fixed order rolled around  The systems of the sky, and changed times  Of annual seasons, nor were able then  To know thereof the causes. Therefore 'twas  Men would take refuge in consigning all  Unto divinities, and in feigning all  Was guided by their nod. And in the sky  They set the seats and vaults of gods, because  Across the sky night and the moon are seen  To roll along--moon, day, and night, and night's  Old awesome constellations evermore,  And the night-wandering fireballs of the sky,  And flying flames, clouds, and the sun, the rains,  Snow and the winds, the lightnings, and the hail,  And the swift rumblings, and the hollow roar  Of mighty menacings forevermore.
 O humankind unhappy!--when it ascribed  Unto divinities such awesome deeds,  And coupled thereto rigours of fierce wrath!  What groans did men on that sad day beget  Even for themselves, and O what wounds for us,  What tears for our children's children! Nor, O man,  Is thy true piety in this: with head  Under the veil, still to be seen to turn  Fronting a stone, and ever to approach  Unto all altars; nor so prone on earth  Forward to fall, to spread upturned palms  Before the shrines of gods, nor yet to dew  Altars with profuse blood of four-foot beasts,  Nor vows with vows to link. But rather this:  To look on all things with a master eye  And mind at peace. For when we gaze aloft  Upon the skiey vaults of yon great world  And ether, fixed high o'er twinkling stars,  And into our thought there come the journeyings  Of sun and moon, O then into our breasts,  O'erburdened already with their other ills,  Begins forthwith to rear its sudden head  One more misgiving: lest o'er us, percase,  It be the gods' immeasurable power  That rolls, with varied motion, round and round  The far white constellations. For the lack  Of aught of reasons tries the puzzled mind:  Whether was ever a birth-time of the world,  And whether, likewise, any end shall be  How far the ramparts of the world can still  Outstand this strain of ever-roused motion,  Or whether, divinely with eternal weal  Endowed, they can through endless tracts of age  Glide on, defying the o'er-mighty powers  Of the immeasurable ages. Lo,  What man is there whose mind with dread of gods  Cringes not close, whose limbs with terror-spell  Crouch not together, when the parched earth  Quakes with the horrible thunderbolt amain,  And across the mighty sky the rumblings run?  Do not the peoples and the nations shake,  And haughty kings do they not hug their limbs,  Strook through with fear of the divinities,  Lest for aught foully done or madly said  The heavy time be now at hand to pay?  When, too, fierce force of fury-winds at sea  Sweepeth a navy's admiral down the main  With his stout legions and his elephants,  Doth he not seek the peace of gods with vows,  And beg in prayer, a-tremble, lulled winds  And friendly gales?--in vain, since, often up-caught  In fury-cyclones, is he borne along,  For all his mouthings, to the shoals of doom.  Ah, so irrevocably some hidden power  Betramples forevermore affairs of men,  And visibly grindeth with its heel in mire  The lictors' glorious rods and axes dire,  Having them in derision! Again, when earth  From end to end is rocking under foot,  And shaken cities ruin down, or threaten  Upon the verge, what wonder is it then  That mortal generations abase themselves,  And unto gods in all affairs of earth  Assign as last resort almighty powers  And wondrous energies to govern all?
 Now for the rest: copper and gold and iron  Discovered were, and with them silver's weight  And power of lead, when with prodigious heat  The conflagrations burned the forest trees  Among the mighty mountains, by a bolt  Of lightning from the sky, or else because  Men, warring in the woodlands, on their foes  Had hurled fire to frighten and dismay,  Or yet because, by goodness of the soil  Invited, men desired to clear rich fields  And turn the countryside to pasture-lands,  Or slay the wild and thrive upon the spoils.  (For hunting by pit-fall and by fire arose  Before the art of hedging the covert round  With net or stirring it with dogs of chase.)  Howso the fact, and from what cause soever  The flamy heat with awful crack and roar  Had there devoured to their deepest roots  The forest trees and baked the earth with fire,  Then from the boiling veins began to ooze  O rivulets of silver and of gold,  Of lead and copper too, collecting soon  Into the hollow places of the ground.  And when men saw the cooled lumps anon  To shine with splendour-sheen upon the ground,  Much taken with that lustrous smooth delight,  They 'gan to pry them out, and saw how each  Had got a shape like to its earthy mould.  Then would it enter their heads how these same lumps,  If melted by heat, could into any form  Or figure of things be run, and how, again,  If hammered out, they could be nicely drawn  To sharpest points or finest edge, and thus  Yield to the forgers tools and give them power  To chop the forest down, to hew the logs,  To shave the beams and planks, besides to bore  And punch and drill. And men began such work  At first as much with tools of silver and gold  As with the impetuous strength of the stout copper;  But vainly--since their over-mastered power  Would soon give way, unable to endure,  Like copper, such hard labour. In those days  Copper it was that was the thing of price;  And gold lay useless, blunted with dull edge.  Now lies the copper low, and gold hath come  Unto the loftiest honours. Thus it is  That rolling ages change the times of things:  What erst was of a price, becomes at last  A discard of no honour; whilst another  Succeeds to glory, issuing from contempt,  And day by day is sought for more and more,  And, when 'tis found, doth flower in men's praise,  Objects of wondrous honour.
 Now, Memmius,  How nature of iron discovered was, thou mayst  Of thine own self divine. Man's ancient arms  Were hands, and nails and teeth, stones too and boughs--  Breakage of forest trees--and flame and fire,  As soon as known. Thereafter force of iron  And copper discovered was; and copper's use  Was known ere iron's, since more tractable  Its nature is and its abundance more.  With copper men to work the soil began,  With copper to rouse the hurly waves of war,  To straw the monstrous wounds, and seize away  Another's flocks and fields. For unto them,  Thus armed, all things naked of defence  Readily yielded. Then by slow degrees  The sword of iron succeeded, and the shape  Of brazen sickle into scorn was turned:  With iron to cleave the soil of earth they 'gan,  And the contentions of uncertain war  Were rendered equal.
 And, lo, man was wont  Armed to mount upon the ribs of horse  And guide him with the rein, and play about  With right hand free, oft times before he tried  Perils of war in yoked chariot;  And yoked pairs abreast came earlier  Than yokes of four, or scythed chariots  Whereinto clomb the men-at-arms. And next  The Punic folk did train the elephants--  Those curst Lucanian oxen, hideous,  The serpent-handed, with turrets on their bulks--  To dure the wounds of war and panic-strike  The mighty troops of Mars. Thus Discord sad  Begat the one Thing after other, to be  The terror of the nations under arms,  And day by day to horrors of old war  She added an increase.
 Bulls, too, they tried  In war's grim business; and essayed to send  Outrageous boars against the foes. And some  Sent on before their ranks puissant lions  With armed trainers and with masters fierce  To guide and hold in chains--and yet in vain,  Since fleshed with pell-mell slaughter, fierce they flew,  And blindly through the squadrons havoc wrought,  Shaking the frightful crests upon their heads,  Now here, now there. Nor could the horsemen calm  Their horses, panic-breasted at the roar,  And rein them round to front the foe. With spring  The infuriate she-lions would up-leap  Now here, now there; and whoso came apace  Against them, these they'd rend across the face;  And others unwitting from behind they'd tear  Down from their mounts, and twining round them, bring  Tumbling to earth, o'ermastered by the wound,  And with those powerful fangs and hooked claws  Fasten upon them. Bulls would toss their friends,  And trample under foot, and from beneath  Rip flanks and bellies of horses with their horns,  And with a threat'ning forehead jam the sod;  And boars would gore with stout tusks their allies,  Splashing in fury their own blood on spears  Splintered in their own bodies, and would fell  In rout and ruin infantry and horse.  For there the beasts-of-saddle tried to scape  The savage thrusts of tusk by shying off,  Or rearing up with hoofs a-paw in air.  In vain--since there thou mightest see them sink,  Their sinews severed, and with heavy fall  Bestrew the ground. And such of these as men  Supposed well-trained long ago at home,  Were in the thick of action seen to foam  In fury, from the wounds, the shrieks, the flight,  The panic, and the tumult; nor could men  Aught of their numbers rally. For each breed  And various of the wild beasts fled apart  Hither or thither, as often in wars to-day  Flee those Lucanian oxen, by the steel  Grievously mangled, after they have wrought  Upon their friends so many a dreadful doom.  (If 'twas, indeed, that thus they did at all:  But scarcely I'll believe that men could not  With mind foreknow and see, as sure to come,  Such foul and general disaster.--This  We, then, may hold as true in the great All,  In divers worlds on divers plan create,--  Somewhere afar more likely than upon  One certain earth.) But men chose this to do  Less in the hope of conquering than to give  Their enemies a goodly cause of woe,  Even though thereby they perished themselves,  Since weak in numbers and since wanting arms.
 Now, clothes of roughly inter-plaited strands  Were earlier than loom-wove coverings;  The loom-wove later than man's iron is,  Since iron is needful in the weaving art,  Nor by no other means can there be wrought  Such polished tools--the treadles, spindles, shuttles,  And sounding yarn-beams. And nature forced the men,  Before the woman kind, to work the wool:  For all the male kind far excels in skill,  And cleverer is by much--until at last  The rugged farmer folk jeered at such tasks,  And so were eager soon to give them o'er  To women's hands, and in more hardy toil  To harden arms and hands.
 But nature herself,  Mother of things, was the first seed-sower  And primal grafter; since the berries and acorns,  Dropping from off the trees, would there beneath  Put forth in season swarms of little shoots;  Hence too men's fondness for ingrafting slips  Upon the boughs and setting out in holes  The young shrubs o'er the fields. Then would they try  Ever new modes of tilling their loved crofts,  And mark they would how earth improved the taste  Of the wild fruits by fond and fostering care.  And day by day they'd force the woods to move  Still higher up the mountain, and to yield  The place below for tilth, that there they might,  On plains and uplands, have their meadow-plats,  Cisterns and runnels, crops of standing grain,  And happy vineyards, and that all along  O'er hillocks, intervales, and plains might run  The silvery-green belt of olive-trees,  Marking the plotted landscape; even as now  Thou seest so marked with varied loveliness  All the terrain which men adorn and plant  With rows of goodly fruit-trees and hedge round  With thriving shrubberies sown.
 But by the mouth  To imitate the liquid notes of birds  Was earlier far 'mongst men than power to make,  By measured song, melodious verse and give  Delight to ears. And whistlings of the wind  Athrough the hollows of the reeds first taught  The peasantry to blow into the stalks  Of hollow hemlock-herb. Then bit by bit  They learned sweet plainings, such as pipe out-pours,  Beaten by finger-tips of singing men,  When heard through unpathed groves and forest deeps  And woodsy meadows, through the untrod haunts  Of shepherd folk and spots divinely still.  Thus time draws forward each and everything  Little by little unto the midst of men,  And reason uplifts it to the shores of light.  These tunes would soothe and glad the minds of mortals  When sated with food,--for songs are welcome then.  And often, lounging with friends in the soft grass  Beside a river of water, underneath  A big tree's branches, merrily they'd refresh  Their frames, with no vast outlay--most of all  If the weather were smiling and the times of the year  Were painting the green of the grass around with flowers.  Then jokes, then talk, then peals of jollity  Would circle round; for then the rustic muse  Was in her glory; then would antic Mirth  Prompt them to garland head and shoulders about  With chaplets of intertwined flowers and leaves,  And to dance onward, out of tune, with limbs  Clownishly swaying, and with clownish foot  To beat our mother earth--from whence arose  Laughter and peals of jollity, for, lo,  Such frolic acts were in their glory then,  Being more new and strange. And wakeful men  Found solaces for their unsleeping hours  In drawing forth variety of notes,  In modulating melodies, in running  With puckered lips along the tuned reeds,  Whence, even in our day do the watchmen guard  These old traditions, and have learned well  To keep true measure. And yet they no whit  Do get a larger fruit of gladsomeness  Than got the woodland aborigines  In olden times. For what we have at hand--  If theretofore naught sweeter we have known--  That chiefly pleases and seems best of all;  But then some later, likely better, find  Destroys its worth and changes our desires  Regarding good of yesterday.
 And thus  Began the loathing of the acorn; thus  Abandoned were those beds with grasses strewn  And with the leaves beladen. Thus, again,  Fell into new contempt the pelts of beasts--  Erstwhile a robe of honour, which, I guess,  Aroused in those days envy so malign  That the first wearer went to woeful death  By ambuscades,--and yet that hairy prize,  Rent into rags by greedy foemen there  And splashed by blood, was ruined utterly  Beyond all use or vantage. Thus of old  'Twas pelts, and of to-day 'tis purple and gold  That cark men's lives with cares and weary with war.  Wherefore, methinks, resides the greater blame  With us vain men to-day: for cold would rack,  Without their pelts, the naked sons of earth;  But us it nothing hurts to do without  The purple vestment, broidered with gold  And with imposing figures, if we still  Make shift with some mean garment of the Plebs.  So man in vain futilities toils on  Forever and wastes in idle cares his years--  Because, of very truth, he hath not learnt  What the true end of getting is, nor yet  At all how far true pleasure may increase.  And 'tis desire for better and for more  Hath carried by degrees mortality  Out onward to the deep, and roused up  From the far bottom mighty waves of war.
 But sun and moon, those watchmen of the world,  With their own lanterns traversing around  The mighty, the revolving vault, have taught  Unto mankind that seasons of the years  Return again, and that the Thing takes place  After a fixed plan and order fixed.
 Already would they pass their life, hedged round  By the strong towers; and cultivate an earth  All portioned out and boundaried; already  Would the sea flower and sail-winged ships;  Already men had, under treaty pacts,  Confederates and allies, when poets began  To hand heroic actions down in verse;  Nor long ere this had letters been devised--  Hence is our age unable to look back  On what has gone before, except where reason  Shows us a footprint.
 Sailings on the seas,  Tillings of fields, walls, laws, and arms, and roads,  Dress and the like, all prizes, all delights  Of finer life, poems, pictures, chiselled shapes  Of polished sculptures--all these arts were learned  By practice and the mind's experience,  As men walked forward step by eager step.  Thus time draws forward each and everything  Little by little into the midst of men,  And reason uplifts it to the shores of light.  For one thing after other did men see  Grow clear by intellect, till with their arts  They've now achieved the supreme pinnacle.