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

PROEM
 Mother of Rome, delight of Gods and men,  Dear Venus that beneath the gliding stars  Makest to teem the many-voyaged main  And fruitful lands--for all of living things  Through thee alone are evermore conceived,  Through thee are risen to visit the great sun--  Before thee, Goddess, and thy coming on,  Flee stormy wind and massy cloud away,  For thee the daedal Earth bears scented flowers,  For thee waters of the unvexed deep  Smile, and the hollows of the serene sky  Glow with diffused radiance for thee!  For soon as comes the springtime face of day,  And procreant gales blow from the West unbarred,  First fowls of air, smit to the heart by thee,  Foretoken thy approach, O thou Divine,  And leap the wild herds round the happy fields  Or swim the bounding torrents. Thus amain,  Seized with the spell, all creatures follow thee  Whithersoever thou walkest forth to lead,  And thence through seas and mountains and swift streams,  Through leafy homes of birds and greening plains,  Kindling the lure of love in every breast,  Thou bringest the eternal generations forth,  Kind after kind. And since 'tis thou alone  Guidest the Cosmos, and without thee naught  Is risen to reach the shining shores of light,  Nor aught of joyful or of lovely born,  Thee do I crave co-partner in that verse  Which I presume on Nature to compose  For Memmius mine, whom thou hast willed to be  Peerless in every grace at every hour--  Wherefore indeed, Divine one, give my words  Immortal charm. Lull to a timely rest  O'er sea and land the savage works of war,  For thou alone hast power with public peace  To aid mortality; since he who rules  The savage works of battle, puissant Mars,  How often to thy bosom flings his strength  O'ermastered by the eternal wound of love--  And there, with eyes and full throat backward thrown,  Gazing, my Goddess, open-mouthed at thee,  Pastures on love his greedy sight, his breath  Hanging upon thy lips. Him thus reclined  Fill with thy holy body, round, above!  Pour from those lips soft syllables to win  Peace for the Romans, glorious Lady, peace!  For in a season troublous to the state  Neither may I attend this task of mine  With thought untroubled, nor mid such events  The illustrious scion of the Memmian house  Neglect the civic cause.
 Whilst human kind  Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed  Before all eyes beneath Religion--who  Would show her head along the region skies,  Glowering on mortals with her hideous face--  A Greek it was who first opposing dared  Raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand,  Whom nor the fame of Gods nor lightning's stroke  Nor threatening thunder of the ominous sky  Abashed; but rather chafed to angry zest  His dauntless heart to be the first to rend  The crossbars at the gates of Nature old.  And thus his will and hardy wisdom won;  And forward thus he fared afar, beyond  The flaming ramparts of the world, until  He wandered the unmeasurable All.  Whence he to us, a conqueror, reports  What things can rise to being, what cannot,  And by what law to each its scope prescribed,  Its boundary stone that clings so deep in Time.  Wherefore Religion now is under foot,  And us his victory now exalts to heaven.
 I know how hard it is in Latian verse  To tell the dark discoveries of the Greeks,  Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find  Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing;  Yet worth of thine and the expected joy  Of thy sweet friendship do persuade me on  To bear all toil and wake the clear nights through,  Seeking with what of words and what of song  I may at last most gloriously uncloud  For thee the light beyond, wherewith to view  The core of being at the centre hid.  And for the rest, summon to judgments true,  Unbusied ears and singleness of mind  Withdrawn from cares; lest these my gifts, arranged  For thee with eager service, thou disdain  Before thou comprehendest: since for thee  I prove the supreme law of Gods and sky,  And the primordial germs of things unfold,  Whence Nature all creates, and multiplies  And fosters all, and whither she resolves  Each in the end when each is overthrown.  This ultimate stock we have devised to name  Procreant atoms, matter, seeds of things,  Or primal bodies, as primal to the world.
 I fear perhaps thou deemest that we fare  An impious road to realms of thought profane;  But 'tis that same religion oftener far  Hath bred the foul impieties of men:  As once at Aulis, the elected chiefs,  Foremost of heroes, Danaan counsellors,  Defiled Diana's altar, virgin queen,  With Agamemnon's daughter, foully slain.  She felt the chaplet round her maiden locks  And fillets, fluttering down on either cheek,  And at the altar marked her grieving sire,  The priests beside him who concealed the knife,  And all the folk in tears at sight of her.  With a dumb terror and a sinking knee  She dropped; nor might avail her now that first  'Twas she who gave the king a father's name.  They raised her up, they bore the trembling girl  On to the altar--hither led not now  With solemn rites and hymeneal choir,  But sinless woman, sinfully foredone,  A parent felled her on her bridal day,  Making his child a sacrificial beast  To give the ships auspicious winds for Troy:  Such are the crimes to which Religion leads.
 And there shall come the time when even thou,  Forced by the soothsayer's terror-tales, shalt seek  To break from us. Ah, many a dream even now  Can they concoct to rout thy plans of life,  And trouble all thy fortunes with base fears.  I own with reason: for, if men but knew  Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong  By some device unconquered to withstand  Religions and the menacings of seers.  But now nor skill nor instrument is theirs,  Since men must dread eternal pains in death.  For what the soul may be they do not know,  Whether 'tis born, or enter in at birth,  And whether, snatched by death, it die with us,  Or visit the shadows and the vasty caves  Of Orcus, or by some divine decree  Enter the brute herds, as our Ennius sang,  Who first from lovely Helicon brought down  A laurel wreath of bright perennial leaves,  Renowned forever among the Italian clans.  Yet Ennius too in everlasting verse  Proclaims those vaults of Acheron to be,  Though thence, he said, nor souls nor bodies fare,  But only phantom figures, strangely wan,  And tells how once from out those regions rose  Old Homer's ghost to him and shed salt tears  And with his words unfolded Nature's source.  Then be it ours with steady mind to clasp  The purport of the skies--the law behind  The wandering courses of the sun and moon;  To scan the powers that speed all life below;  But most to see with reasonable eyes  Of what the mind, of what the soul is made,  And what it is so terrible that breaks  On us asleep, or waking in disease,  Until we seem to mark and hear at hand  Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago.
SUBSTANCE IS ETERNAL
 This terror, then, this darkness of the mind,  Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,  Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,  But only Nature's aspect and her law,  Which, teaching us, hath this exordium:  Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.  Fear holds dominion over mortality  Only because, seeing in land and sky  So much the cause whereof no wise they know,  Men think Divinities are working there.  Meantime, when once we know from nothing still  Nothing can be create, we shall divine  More clearly what we seek: those elements  From which alone all things created are,  And how accomplished by no tool of Gods.  Suppose all sprang from all things: any kind  Might take its origin from any thing,  No fixed seed required. Men from the sea  Might rise, and from the land the scaly breed,  And, fowl full fledged come bursting from the sky;  The horned cattle, the herds and all the wild  Would haunt with varying offspring tilth and waste;  Nor would the same fruits keep their olden trees,  But each might grow from any stock or limb  By chance and change. Indeed, and were there not  For each its procreant atoms, could things have  Each its unalterable mother old?  But, since produced from fixed seeds are all,  Each birth goes forth upon the shores of light  From its own stuff, from its own primal bodies.  And all from all cannot become, because  In each resides a secret power its own.  Again, why see we lavished o'er the lands  At spring the rose, at summer heat the corn,  The vines that mellow when the autumn lures,  If not because the fixed seeds of things  At their own season must together stream,  And new creations only be revealed  When the due times arrive and pregnant earth  Safely may give unto the shores of light  Her tender progenies? But if from naught  Were their becoming, they would spring abroad  Suddenly, unforeseen, in alien months,  With no primordial germs, to be preserved  From procreant unions at an adverse hour.  Nor on the mingling of the living seeds  Would space be needed for the growth of things  Were life an increment of nothing: then  The tiny babe forthwith would walk a man,  And from the turf would leap a branching tree--  Wonders unheard of; for, by Nature, each  Slowly increases from its lawful seed,  And through that increase shall conserve its kind.  Whence take the proof that things enlarge and feed  From out their proper matter. Thus it comes  That earth, without her seasons of fixed rains,  Could bear no produce such as makes us glad,  And whatsoever lives, if shut from food,  Prolongs its kind and guards its life no more.  Thus easier 'tis to hold that many things  Have primal bodies in common (as we see  The single letters common to many words)  Than aught exists without its origins.  Moreover, why should Nature not prepare  Men of a bulk to ford the seas afoot,  Or rend the mighty mountains with their hands,  Or conquer Time with length of days, if not  Because for all begotten things abides  The changeless stuff, and what from that may spring  Is fixed forevermore? Lastly we see  How far the tilled surpass the fields untilled  And to the labour of our hands return  Their more abounding crops; there are indeed  Within the earth primordial germs of things,  Which, as the ploughshare turns the fruitful clods  And kneads the mould, we quicken into birth.  Else would ye mark, without all toil of ours,  Spontaneous generations, fairer forms.  Confess then, naught from nothing can become,  Since all must have their seeds, wherefrom to grow,  Wherefrom to reach the gentle fields of air.  Hence too it comes that Nature all dissolves  Into their primal bodies again, and naught  Perishes ever to annihilation.  For, were aught mortal in its every part,  Before our eyes it might be snatched away  Unto destruction; since no force were needed  To sunder its members and undo its bands.  Whereas, of truth, because all things exist,  With seed imperishable, Nature allows  Destruction nor collapse of aught, until  Some outward force may shatter by a blow,  Or inward craft, entering its hollow cells,  Dissolve it down. And more than this, if Time,  That wastes with eld the works along the world,  Destroy entire, consuming matter all,  Whence then may Venus back to light of life  Restore the generations kind by kind?  Or how, when thus restored, may daedal Earth  Foster and plenish with her ancient food,  Which, kind by kind, she offers unto each?  Whence may the water-springs, beneath the sea,  Or inland rivers, far and wide away,  Keep the unfathomable ocean full?  And out of what does Ether feed the stars?  For lapsed years and infinite age must else  Have eat all shapes of mortal stock away:  But be it the Long Ago contained those germs,  By which this sum of things recruited lives,  Those same infallibly can never die,  Nor nothing to nothing evermore return.  And, too, the selfsame power might end alike  All things, were they not still together held  By matter eternal, shackled through its parts,  Now more, now less. A touch might be enough  To cause destruction. For the slightest force  Would loose the weft of things wherein no part  Were of imperishable stock. But now  Because the fastenings of primordial parts  Are put together diversely and stuff  Is everlasting, things abide the same  Unhurt and sure, until some power comes on  Strong to destroy the warp and woof of each:  Nothing returns to naught; but all return  At their collapse to primal forms of stuff.  Lo, the rains perish which Ether-father throws  Down to the bosom of Earth-mother; but then  Upsprings the shining grain, and boughs are green  Amid the trees, and trees themselves wax big  And lade themselves with fruits; and hence in turn  The race of man and all the wild are fed;  Hence joyful cities thrive with boys and girls;  And leafy woodlands echo with new birds;  Hence cattle, fat and drowsy, lay their bulk  Along the joyous pastures whilst the drops  Of white ooze trickle from distended bags;  Hence the young scamper on their weakling joints  Along the tender herbs, fresh hearts afrisk  With warm new milk. Thus naught of what so seems  Perishes utterly, since Nature ever  Upbuilds one thing from other, suffering naught  To come to birth but through some other's death.
 And now, since I have taught that things cannot  Be born from nothing, nor the same, when born,  To nothing be recalled, doubt not my words,  Because our eyes no primal germs perceive;  For mark those bodies which, though known to be  In this our world, are yet invisible:  The winds infuriate lash our face and frame,  Unseen, and swamp huge ships and rend the clouds,  Or, eddying wildly down, bestrew the plains  With mighty trees, or scour the mountain tops  With forest-crackling blasts. Thus on they rave  With uproar shrill and ominous moan. The winds,  'Tis clear, are sightless bodies sweeping through  The sea, the lands, the clouds along the sky,  Vexing and whirling and seizing all amain;  And forth they flow and pile destruction round,  Even as the water's soft and supple bulk  Becoming a river of abounding floods,  Which a wide downpour from the lofty hills  Swells with big showers, dashes headlong down  Fragments of woodland and whole branching trees;  Nor can the solid bridges bide the shock  As on the waters whelm: the turbulent stream,  Strong with a hundred rains, beats round the piers,  Crashes with havoc, and rolls beneath its waves  Down-toppled masonry and ponderous stone,  Hurling away whatever would oppose.  Even so must move the blasts of all the winds,  Which, when they spread, like to a mighty flood,  Hither or thither, drive things on before  And hurl to ground with still renewed assault,  Or sometimes in their circling vortex seize  And bear in cones of whirlwind down the world:  The winds are sightless bodies and naught else--  Since both in works and ways they rival well  The mighty rivers, the visible in form.  Then too we know the varied smells of things  Yet never to our nostrils see them come;  With eyes we view not burning heats, nor cold,  Nor are we wont men's voices to behold.  Yet these must be corporeal at the base,  Since thus they smite the senses: naught there is  Save body, having property of touch.  And raiment, hung by surf-beat shore, grows moist,  The same, spread out before the sun, will dry;  Yet no one saw how sank the moisture in,  Nor how by heat off-driven. Thus we know,  That moisture is dispersed about in bits  Too small for eyes to see. Another case:  A ring upon the finger thins away  Along the under side, with years and suns;  The drippings from the eaves will scoop the stone;  The hooked ploughshare, though of iron, wastes  Amid the fields insidiously. We view  The rock-paved highways worn by many feet;  And at the gates the brazen statues show  Their right hands leaner from the frequent touch  Of wayfarers innumerable who greet.  We see how wearing-down hath minished these,  But just what motes depart at any time,  The envious nature of vision bars our sight.  Lastly whatever days and nature add  Little by little, constraining things to grow  In due proportion, no gaze however keen  Of these our eyes hath watched and known. No more  Can we observe what's lost at any time,  When things wax old with eld and foul decay,  Or when salt seas eat under beetling crags.  Thus Nature ever by unseen bodies works.
THE VOID
 But yet creation's neither crammed nor blocked  About by body: there's in things a void--  Which to have known will serve thee many a turn,  Nor will not leave thee wandering in doubt,  Forever searching in the sum of all,  And losing faith in these pronouncements mine.  There's place intangible, a void and room.  For were it not, things could in nowise move;  Since body's property to block and check  Would work on all and at an times the same.  Thus naught could evermore push forth and go,  Since naught elsewhere would yield a starting place.  But now through oceans, lands, and heights of heaven,  By divers causes and in divers modes,  Before our eyes we mark how much may move,  Which, finding not a void, would fail deprived  Of stir and motion; nay, would then have been  Nowise begot at all, since matter, then,  Had staid at rest, its parts together crammed.  Then too, however solid objects seem,  They yet are formed of matter mixed with void:  In rocks and caves the watery moisture seeps,  And beady drops stand out like plenteous tears;  And food finds way through every frame that lives;  The trees increase and yield the season's fruit  Because their food throughout the whole is poured,  Even from the deepest roots, through trunks and boughs;  And voices pass the solid walls and fly  Reverberant through shut doorways of a house;  And stiffening frost seeps inward to our bones.  Which but for voids for bodies to go through  'Tis clear could happen in nowise at all.  Again, why see we among objects some  Of heavier weight, but of no bulkier size?  Indeed, if in a ball of wool there be  As much of body as in lump of lead,  The two should weigh alike, since body tends  To load things downward, while the void abides,  By contrary nature, the imponderable.  Therefore, an object just as large but lighter  Declares infallibly its more of void;  Even as the heavier more of matter shows,  And how much less of vacant room inside.  That which we're seeking with sagacious quest  Exists, infallibly, commixed with things--  The void, the invisible inane.
 Right here  I am compelled a question to expound,  Forestalling something certain folk suppose,  Lest it avail to lead thee off from truth:  Waters (they say) before the shining breed  Of the swift scaly creatures somehow give,  And straightway open sudden liquid paths,  Because the fishes leave behind them room  To which at once the yielding billows stream.  Thus things among themselves can yet be moved,  And change their place, however full the Sum--  Received opinion, wholly false forsooth.  For where can scaly creatures forward dart,  Save where the waters give them room? Again,  Where can the billows yield a way, so long  As ever the fish are powerless to go?  Thus either all bodies of motion are deprived,  Or things contain admixture of a void  Where each thing gets its start in moving on.
 Lastly, where after impact two broad bodies  Suddenly spring apart, the air must crowd  The whole new void between those bodies formed;  But air, however it stream with hastening gusts,  Can yet not fill the gap at once--for first  It makes for one place, ere diffused through all.  And then, if haply any think this comes,  When bodies spring apart, because the air  Somehow condenses, wander they from truth:  For then a void is formed, where none before;  And, too, a void is filled which was before.  Nor can air be condensed in such a wise;  Nor, granting it could, without a void, I hold,  It still could not contract upon itself  And draw its parts together into one.  Wherefore, despite demur and counter-speech,  Confess thou must there is a void in things.
 And still I might by many an argument  Here scrape together credence for my words.  But for the keen eye these mere footprints serve,  Whereby thou mayest know the rest thyself.  As dogs full oft with noses on the ground,  Find out the silent lairs, though hid in brush,  Of beasts, the mountain-rangers, when but once  They scent the certain footsteps of the way,  Thus thou thyself in themes like these alone  Can hunt from thought to thought, and keenly wind  Along even onward to the secret places  And drag out truth. But, if thou loiter loth  Or veer, however little, from the point,  This I can promise, Memmius, for a fact:  Such copious drafts my singing tongue shall pour  From the large well-springs of my plenished breast  That much I dread slow age will steal and coil  Along our members, and unloose the gates  Of life within us, ere for thee my verse  Hath put within thine ears the stores of proofs  At hand for one soever question broached.
NOTHING EXISTS per se EXCEPT ATOMS AND THE VOID
 But, now again to weave the tale begun,  All nature, then, as self-sustained, consists  Of twain of things: of bodies and of void  In which they're set, and where they're moved around.  For common instinct of our race declares  That body of itself exists: unless  This primal faith, deep-founded, fail us not,  Naught will there be whereunto to appeal  On things occult when seeking aught to prove  By reasonings of mind. Again, without  That place and room, which we do call the inane,  Nowhere could bodies then be set, nor go  Hither or thither at all--as shown before.  Besides, there's naught of which thou canst declare  It lives disjoined from body, shut from void--  A kind of third in nature. For whatever  Exists must be a somewhat; and the same,  If tangible, however fight and slight,  Will yet increase the count of body's sum,  With its own augmentation big or small;  But, if intangible and powerless ever  To keep a thing from passing through itself  On any side, 'twill be naught else but that  Which we do call the empty, the inane.  Again, whate'er exists, as of itself,  Must either act or suffer action on it,  Or else be that wherein things move and be:  Naught, saving body, acts, is acted on;  Naught but the inane can furnish room. And thus,  Beside the inane and bodies, is no third  Nature amid the number of all things--  Remainder none to fall at any time  Under our senses, nor be seized and seen  By any man through reasonings of mind.  Name o'er creation with what names thou wilt,  Thou'lt find but properties of those first twain,  Or see but accidents those twain produce.
 A property is that which not at all  Can be disjoined and severed from a thing  Without a fatal dissolution: such,  Weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow  To the wide waters, touch to corporal things,  Intangibility to the viewless void.  But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth,  Freedom, and war, and concord, and all else  Which come and go whilst nature stands the same,  We're wont, and rightly, to call accidents.  Even time exists not of itself; but sense  Reads out of things what happened long ago,  What presses now, and what shall follow after:  No man, we must admit, feels time itself,  Disjoined from motion and repose of things.  Thus, when they say there "is" the ravishment  Of Princess Helen, "is" the siege and sack  Of Trojan Town, look out, they force us not  To admit these acts existent by themselves,  Merely because those races of mankind  (Of whom these acts were accidents) long since  Irrevocable age has borne away:  For all past actions may be said to be  But accidents, in one way, of mankind,--  In other, of some region of the world.  Add, too, had been no matter, and no room  Wherein all things go on, the fire of love  Upblown by that fair form, the glowing coal  Under the Phrygian Alexander's breast,  Had ne'er enkindled that renowned strife  Of savage war, nor had the wooden horse  Involved in flames old Pergama, by a birth  At midnight of a brood of the Hellenes.  And thus thou canst remark that every act  At bottom exists not of itself, nor is  As body is, nor has like name with void;  But rather of sort more fitly to be called  An accident of body, and of place  Wherein all things go on.
CHARACTER OF THE ATOMS
 Bodies, again,  Are partly primal germs of things, and partly  Unions deriving from the primal germs.  And those which are the primal germs of things  No power can quench; for in the end they conquer  By their own solidness; though hard it be  To think that aught in things has solid frame;  For lightnings pass, no less than voice and shout,  Through hedging walls of houses, and the iron  White-dazzles in the fire, and rocks will burn  With exhalations fierce and burst asunder.  Totters the rigid gold dissolved in heat;  The ice of bronze melts conquered in the flame;  Warmth and the piercing cold through silver seep,  Since, with the cups held rightly in the hand,  We oft feel both, as from above is poured  The dew of waters between their shining sides:  So true it is no solid form is found.  But yet because true reason and nature of things  Constrain us, come, whilst in few verses now  I disentangle how there still exist  Bodies of solid, everlasting frame--  The seeds of things, the primal germs we teach,  Whence all creation around us came to be.  First since we know a twofold nature exists,  Of things, both twain and utterly unlike--  Body, and place in which an things go on--  Then each must be both for and through itself,  And all unmixed: where'er be empty space,  There body's not; and so where body bides,  There not at all exists the void inane.  Thus primal bodies are solid, without a void.  But since there's void in all begotten things,  All solid matter must be round the same;  Nor, by true reason canst thou prove aught hides  And holds a void within its body, unless  Thou grant what holds it be a solid. Know,  That which can hold a void of things within  Can be naught else than matter in union knit.  Thus matter, consisting of a solid frame,  Hath power to be eternal, though all else,  Though all creation, be dissolved away.  Again, were naught of empty and inane,  The world were then a solid; as, without  Some certain bodies to fill the places held,  The world that is were but a vacant void.  And so, infallibly, alternate-wise  Body and void are still distinguished,  Since nature knows no wholly full nor void.  There are, then, certain bodies, possessed of power  To vary forever the empty and the full;  And these can nor be sundered from without  By beats and blows, nor from within be torn  By penetration, nor be overthrown  By any assault soever through the world--  For without void, naught can be crushed, it seems,  Nor broken, nor severed by a cut in twain,  Nor can it take the damp, or seeping cold  Or piercing fire, those old destroyers three;  But the more void within a thing, the more  Entirely it totters at their sure assault.  Thus if first bodies be, as I have taught,  Solid, without a void, they must be then  Eternal; and, if matter ne'er had been  Eternal, long ere now had all things gone  Back into nothing utterly, and all  We see around from nothing had been born--  But since I taught above that naught can be  From naught created, nor the once begotten  To naught be summoned back, these primal germs  Must have an immortality of frame.  And into these must each thing be resolved,  When comes its supreme hour, that thus there be  At hand the stuff for plenishing the world.
 So primal germs have solid singleness  Nor otherwise could they have been conserved  Through aeons and infinity of time  For the replenishment of wasted worlds.  Once more, if nature had given a scope for things  To be forever broken more and more,  By now the bodies of matter would have been  So far reduced by breakings in old days  That from them nothing could, at season fixed,  Be born, and arrive its prime and top of life.  For, lo, each thing is quicker marred than made;  And so whate'er the long infinitude  Of days and all fore-passed time would now  By this have broken and ruined and dissolved,  That same could ne'er in all remaining time  Be builded up for plenishing the world.  But mark: infallibly a fixed bound  Remaineth stablished 'gainst their breaking down;  Since we behold each thing soever renewed,  And unto all, their seasons, after their kind,  Wherein they arrive the flower of their age.
 Again, if bounds have not been set against  The breaking down of this corporeal world,  Yet must all bodies of whatever things  Have still endured from everlasting time  Unto this present, as not yet assailed  By shocks of peril. But because the same  Are, to thy thinking, of a nature frail,  It ill accords that thus they could remain  (As thus they do) through everlasting time,  Vexed through the ages (as indeed they are)  By the innumerable blows of chance.
 So in our programme of creation, mark  How 'tis that, though the bodies of all stuff  Are solid to the core, we yet explain  The ways whereby some things are fashioned soft--  Air, water, earth, and fiery exhalations--  And by what force they function and go on:  The fact is founded in the void of things.  But if the primal germs themselves be soft,  Reason cannot be brought to bear to show  The ways whereby may be created these  Great crags of basalt and the during iron;  For their whole nature will profoundly lack  The first foundations of a solid frame.  But powerful in old simplicity,  Abide the solid, the primeval germs;  And by their combinations more condensed,  All objects can be tightly knit and bound  And made to show unconquerable strength.  Again, since all things kind by kind obtain  Fixed bounds of growing and conserving life;  Since Nature hath inviolably decreed  What each can do, what each can never do;  Since naught is changed, but all things so abide  That ever the variegated birds reveal  The spots or stripes peculiar to their kind,  Spring after spring: thus surely all that is  Must be composed of matter immutable.  For if the primal germs in any wise  Were open to conquest and to change, 'twould be  Uncertain also what could come to birth  And what could not, and by what law to each  Its scope prescribed, its boundary stone that clings  So deep in Time. Nor could the generations  Kind after kind so often reproduce  The nature, habits, motions, ways of life,  Of their progenitors.
 And then again,  Since there is ever an extreme bounding point
 Of that first body which our senses now  Cannot perceive: That bounding point indeed  Exists without all parts, a minimum  Of nature, nor was e'er a thing apart,  As of itself,--nor shall hereafter be,  Since 'tis itself still parcel of another,  A first and single part, whence other parts  And others similar in order lie  In a packed phalanx, filling to the full  The nature of first body: being thus  Not self-existent, they must cleave to that  From which in nowise they can sundered be.  So primal germs have solid singleness,  Which tightly packed and closely joined cohere  By virtue of their minim particles--  No compound by mere union of the same;  But strong in their eternal singleness,  Nature, reserving them as seeds for things,  Permitteth naught of rupture or decrease.
 Moreover, were there not a minimum,  The smallest bodies would have infinites,  Since then a half-of-half could still be halved,  With limitless division less and less.  Then what the difference 'twixt the sum and least?  None: for however infinite the sum,  Yet even the smallest would consist the same  Of infinite parts. But since true reason here  Protests, denying that the mind can think it,  Convinced thou must confess such things there are  As have no parts, the minimums of nature.  And since these are, likewise confess thou must  That primal bodies are solid and eterne.  Again, if Nature, creatress of all things,  Were wont to force all things to be resolved  Unto least parts, then would she not avail  To reproduce from out them anything;  Because whate'er is not endowed with parts  Cannot possess those properties required  Of generative stuff--divers connections,  Weights, blows, encounters, motions, whereby things  Forevermore have being and go on.
CONFUTATION OF OTHER PHILOSOPHERS
 And on such grounds it is that those who held  The stuff of things is fire, and out of fire  Alone the cosmic sum is formed, are seen  Mightily from true reason to have lapsed.  Of whom, chief leader to do battle, comes  That Heraclitus, famous for dark speech  Among the silly, not the serious Greeks  Who search for truth. For dolts are ever prone  That to bewonder and adore which hides  Beneath distorted words, holding that true  Which sweetly tickles in their stupid ears,  Or which is rouged in finely finished phrase.  For how, I ask, can things so varied be,  If formed of fire, single and pure? No whit  'Twould help for fire to be condensed or thinned,  If all the parts of fire did still preserve  But fire's own nature, seen before in gross.  The heat were keener with the parts compressed,  Milder, again, when severed or dispersed--  And more than this thou canst conceive of naught  That from such causes could become; much less  Might earth's variety of things be born  From any fires soever, dense or rare.  This too: if they suppose a void in things,  Then fires can be condensed and still left rare;  But since they see such opposites of thought  Rising against them, and are loath to leave  An unmixed void in things, they fear the steep  And lose the road of truth. Nor do they see,  That, if from things we take away the void,  All things are then condensed, and out of all  One body made, which has no power to dart  Swiftly from out itself not anything--  As throws the fire its light and warmth around,  Giving thee proof its parts are not compact.  But if perhaps they think, in other wise,  Fires through their combinations can be quenched  And change their substance, very well: behold,  If fire shall spare to do so in no part,  Then heat will perish utterly and all,  And out of nothing would the world be formed.  For change in anything from out its bounds  Means instant death of that which was before;  And thus a somewhat must persist unharmed  Amid the world, lest all return to naught,  And, born from naught, abundance thrive anew.  Now since indeed there are those surest bodies  Which keep their nature evermore the same,  Upon whose going out and coming in  And changed order things their nature change,  And all corporeal substances transformed,  'Tis thine to know those primal bodies, then,  Are not of fire. For 'twere of no avail  Should some depart and go away, and some  Be added new, and some be changed in order,  If still all kept their nature of old heat:  For whatsoever they created then  Would still in any case be only fire.  The truth, I fancy, this: bodies there are  Whose clashings, motions, order, posture, shapes  Produce the fire and which, by order changed,  Do change the nature of the thing produced,  And are thereafter nothing like to fire  Nor whatso else has power to send its bodies  With impact touching on the senses' touch.
 Again, to say that all things are but fire  And no true thing in number of all things  Exists but fire, as this same fellow says,  Seems crazed folly. For the man himself  Against the senses by the senses fights,  And hews at that through which is all belief,  Through which indeed unto himself is known  The thing he calls the fire. For, though he thinks  The senses truly can perceive the fire,  He thinks they cannot as regards all else,  Which still are palpably as clear to sense--  To me a thought inept and crazy too.  For whither shall we make appeal? for what  More certain than our senses can there be  Whereby to mark asunder error and truth?  Besides, why rather do away with all,  And wish to allow heat only, then deny  The fire and still allow all else to be?--  Alike the madness either way it seems.  Thus whosoe'er have held the stuff of things  To be but fire, and out of fire the sum,  And whosoever have constituted air  As first beginning of begotten things,  And all whoever have held that of itself  Water alone contrives things, or that earth  Createth all and changes things anew  To divers natures, mightily they seem  A long way to have wandered from the truth.
 Add, too, whoever make the primal stuff  Twofold, by joining air to fire, and earth  To water; add who deem that things can grow  Out of the four--fire, earth, and breath, and rain;  As first Empedocles of Acragas,  Whom that three-cornered isle of all the lands  Bore on her coasts, around which flows and flows  In mighty bend and bay the Ionic seas,  Splashing the brine from off their gray-green waves.  Here, billowing onward through the narrow straits,  Swift ocean cuts her boundaries from the shores  Of the Italic mainland. Here the waste  Charybdis; and here Aetna rumbles threats  To gather anew such furies of its flames  As with its force anew to vomit fires,  Belched from its throat, and skyward bear anew  Its lightnings' flash. And though for much she seem  The mighty and the wondrous isle to men,  Most rich in all good things, and fortified  With generous strength of heroes, she hath ne'er  Possessed within her aught of more renown,  Nor aught more holy, wonderful, and dear  Than this true man. Nay, ever so far and pure  The lofty music of his breast divine  Lifts up its voice and tells of glories found,  That scarce he seems of human stock create.
 Yet he and those forementioned (known to be  So far beneath him, less than he in all),  Though, as discoverers of much goodly truth,  They gave, as 'twere from out of the heart's own shrine,  Responses holier and soundlier based  Than ever the Pythia pronounced for men  From out the triped and the Delphian laurel,  Have still in matter of first-elements  Made ruin of themselves, and, great men, great  Indeed and heavy there for them the fall:  First, because, banishing the void from things,  They yet assign them motion, and allow  Things soft and loosely textured to exist,  As air, dew, fire, earth, animals, and grains,  Without admixture of void amid their frame.  Next, because, thinking there can be no end  In cutting bodies down to less and less  Nor pause established to their breaking up,  They hold there is no minimum in things;  Albeit we see the boundary point of aught  Is that which to our senses seems its least,  Whereby thou mayst conjecture, that, because  The things thou canst not mark have boundary points,  They surely have their minimums. Then, too,  Since these philosophers ascribe to things  Soft primal germs, which we behold to be  Of birth and body mortal, thus, throughout,  The sum of things must be returned to naught,  And, born from naught, abundance thrive anew--  Thou seest how far each doctrine stands from truth.  And, next, these bodies are among themselves  In many ways poisons and foes to each,  Wherefore their congress will destroy them quite  Or drive asunder as we see in storms  Rains, winds, and lightnings all asunder fly.
 Thus too, if all things are create of four,  And all again dissolved into the four,  How can the four be called the primal germs  Of things, more than all things themselves be thought,  By retroversion, primal germs of them?  For ever alternately are both begot,  With interchange of nature and aspect  From immemorial time. But if percase  Thou think'st the frame of fire and earth, the air,  The dew of water can in such wise meet  As not by mingling to resign their nature,  From them for thee no world can be create--  No thing of breath, no stock or stalk of tree:  In the wild congress of this varied heap  Each thing its proper nature will display,  And air will palpably be seen mixed up  With earth together, unquenched heat with water.  But primal germs in bringing things to birth  Must have a latent, unseen quality,  Lest some outstanding alien element  Confuse and minish in the thing create  Its proper being.
 But these men begin  From heaven, and from its fires; and first they feign  That fire will turn into the winds of air,  Next, that from air the rain begotten is,  And earth created out of rain, and then  That all, reversely, are returned from earth--  The moisture first, then air thereafter heat--  And that these same ne'er cease in interchange,  To go their ways from heaven to earth, from earth  Unto the stars of the aethereal world--  Which in no wise at all the germs can do.  Since an immutable somewhat still must be,  Lest all things utterly be sped to naught;  For change in anything from out its bounds  Means instant death of that which was before.  Wherefore, since those things, mentioned heretofore,  Suffer a changed state, they must derive  From others ever unconvertible,  Lest an things utterly return to naught.  Then why not rather presuppose there be  Bodies with such a nature furnished forth  That, if perchance they have created fire,  Can still (by virtue of a few withdrawn,  Or added few, and motion and order changed)  Fashion the winds of air, and thus all things  Forevermore be interchanged with all?
 "But facts in proof are manifest," thou sayest,  "That all things grow into the winds of air  And forth from earth are nourished, and unless  The season favour at propitious hour  With rains enough to set the trees a-reel  Under the soak of bulking thunderheads,  And sun, for its share, foster and give heat,  No grains, nor trees, nor breathing things can grow."  True--and unless hard food and moisture soft  Recruited man, his frame would waste away,  And life dissolve from out his thews and bones;  For out of doubt recruited and fed are we  By certain things, as other things by others.  Because in many ways the many germs  Common to many things are mixed in things,  No wonder 'tis that therefore divers things  By divers things are nourished. And, again,  Often it matters vastly with what others,  In what positions the primordial germs  Are bound together, and what motions, too,  They give and get among themselves; for these  Same germs do put together sky, sea, lands,  Rivers, and sun, grains, trees, and breathing things,  But yet commixed they are in divers modes  With divers things, forever as they move.  Nay, thou beholdest in our verses here  Elements many, common to many worlds,  Albeit thou must confess each verse, each word  From one another differs both in sense  And ring of sound--so much the elements  Can bring about by change of order alone.  But those which are the primal germs of things  Have power to work more combinations still,  Whence divers things can be produced in turn.
 Now let us also take for scrutiny  The homeomeria of Anaxagoras,  So called by Greeks, for which our pauper-speech  Yieldeth no name in the Italian tongue,  Although the thing itself is not o'erhard  For explanation. First, then, when he speaks  Of this homeomeria of things, he thinks  Bones to be sprung from littlest bones minute,  And from minute and littlest flesh all flesh,  And blood created out of drops of blood,  Conceiving gold compact of grains of gold,  And earth concreted out of bits of earth,  Fire made of fires, and water out of waters,  Feigning the like with all the rest of stuff.  Yet he concedes not any void in things,  Nor any limit to cutting bodies down.  Wherefore to me he seems on both accounts  To err no less than those we named before.  Add too: these germs he feigns are far too frail--  If they be germs primordial furnished forth  With but same nature as the things themselves,  And travail and perish equally with those,  And no rein curbs them from annihilation.  For which will last against the grip and crush  Under the teeth of death? the fire? the moist?  Or else the air? which then? the blood? the bones?  No one, methinks, when every thing will be  At bottom as mortal as whate'er we mark  To perish by force before our gazing eyes.  But my appeal is to the proofs above  That things cannot fall back to naught, nor yet  From naught increase. And now again, since food  Augments and nourishes the human frame,  'Tis thine to know our veins and blood and bones  And thews are formed of particles unlike  To them in kind; or if they say all foods  Are of mixed substance having in themselves  Small bodies of thews, and bones, and also veins  And particles of blood, then every food,  Solid or liquid, must itself be thought  As made and mixed of things unlike in kind--  Of bones, of thews, of ichor and of blood.  Again, if all the bodies which upgrow  From earth, are first within the earth, then earth  Must be compound of alien substances.  Which spring and bloom abroad from out the earth.  Transfer the argument, and thou may'st use  The selfsame words: if flame and smoke and ash  Still lurk unseen within the wood, the wood  Must be compound of alien substances  Which spring from out the wood.
 Right here remains  A certain slender means to skulk from truth,  Which Anaxagoras takes unto himself,  Who holds that all things lurk commixed with all  While that one only comes to view, of which  The bodies exceed in number all the rest,  And lie more close to hand and at the fore--  A notion banished from true reason far.  For then 'twere meet that kernels of the grains  Should oft, when crunched between the might of stones,  Give forth a sign of blood, or of aught else  Which in our human frame is fed; and that  Rock rubbed on rock should yield a gory ooze.  Likewise the herbs ought oft to give forth drops  Of sweet milk, flavoured like the uddered sheep's;  Indeed we ought to find, when crumbling up  The earthy clods, there herbs, and grains, and leaves,  All sorts dispersed minutely in the soil;  Lastly we ought to find in cloven wood  Ashes and smoke and bits of fire there hid.  But since fact teaches this is not the case,  'Tis thine to know things are not mixed with things  Thuswise; but seeds, common to many things,  Commixed in many ways, must lurk in things.
 "But often it happens on skiey hills" thou sayest,  "That neighbouring tops of lofty trees are rubbed  One against other, smote by the blustering south,  Till all ablaze with bursting flower of flame."  Good sooth--yet fire is not ingraft in wood,  But many are the seeds of heat, and when  Rubbing together they together flow,  They start the conflagrations in the forests.  Whereas if flame, already fashioned, lay  Stored up within the forests, then the fires  Could not for any time be kept unseen,  But would be laying all the wildwood waste  And burning all the boscage. Now dost see  (Even as we said a little space above)  How mightily it matters with what others,  In what positions these same primal germs  Are bound together? And what motions, too,  They give and get among themselves? how, hence,  The same, if altered 'mongst themselves, can body  Both igneous and ligneous objects forth--  Precisely as these words themselves are made  By somewhat altering their elements,  Although we mark with name indeed distinct  The igneous from the ligneous. Once again,  If thou suppose whatever thou beholdest,  Among all visible objects, cannot be,  Unless thou feign bodies of matter endowed  With a like nature,--by thy vain device  For thee will perish all the germs of things:  'Twill come to pass they'll laugh aloud, like men,  Shaken asunder by a spasm of mirth,  Or moisten with salty tear-drops cheeks and chins.
THE INFINITY OF THE UNIVERSE
 Now learn of what remains! More keenly hear!  And for myself, my mind is not deceived  How dark it is: But the large hope of praise  Hath strook with pointed thyrsus through my heart;  On the same hour hath strook into my breast  Sweet love of the Muses, wherewith now instinct,  I wander afield, thriving in sturdy thought,  Through unpathed haunts of the Pierides,  Trodden by step of none before. I joy  To come on undefiled fountains there,  To drain them deep; I joy to pluck new flowers,  To seek for this my head a signal crown  From regions where the Muses never yet  Have garlanded the temples of a man:  First, since I teach concerning mighty things,  And go right on to loose from round the mind  The tightened coils of dread religion;  Next, since, concerning themes so dark, I frame  Songs so pellucid, touching all throughout  Even with the Muses' charm--which, as 'twould seem,  Is not without a reasonable ground:  But as physicians, when they seek to give  Young boys the nauseous wormwood, first do touch  The brim around the cup with the sweet juice  And yellow of the honey, in order that  The thoughtless age of boyhood be cajoled  As far as the lips, and meanwhile swallow down  The wormwood's bitter draught, and, though befooled,  Be yet not merely duped, but rather thus  Grow strong again with recreated health:  So now I too (since this my doctrine seems  In general somewhat woeful unto those  Who've had it not in hand, and since the crowd  Starts back from it in horror) have desired  To expound our doctrine unto thee in song  Soft-speaking and Pierian, and, as 'twere,  To touch it with sweet honey of the Muse--  If by such method haply I might hold  The mind of thee upon these lines of ours,  Till thou see through the nature of all things,  And how exists the interwoven frame.
 But since I've taught that bodies of matter, made  Completely solid, hither and thither fly  Forevermore unconquered through all time,  Now come, and whether to the sum of them  There be a limit or be none, for thee  Let us unfold; likewise what has been found  To be the wide inane, or room, or space  Wherein all things soever do go on,  Let us examine if it finite be  All and entire, or reach unmeasured round  And downward an illimitable profound.
 Thus, then, the All that is is limited  In no one region of its onward paths,  For then 'tmust have forever its beyond.  And a beyond 'tis seen can never be  For aught, unless still further on there be  A somewhat somewhere that may bound the same--  So that the thing be seen still on to where  The nature of sensation of that thing  Can follow it no longer. Now because  Confess we must there's naught beside the sum,  There's no beyond, and so it lacks all end.  It matters nothing where thou post thyself,  In whatsoever regions of the same;  Even any place a man has set him down  Still leaves about him the unbounded all  Outward in all directions; or, supposing  A moment the all of space finite to be,  If some one farthest traveller runs forth  Unto the extreme coasts and throws ahead  A flying spear, is't then thy wish to think  It goes, hurled off amain, to where 'twas sent  And shoots afar, or that some object there  Can thwart and stop it? For the one or other  Thou must admit and take. Either of which  Shuts off escape for thee, and does compel  That thou concede the all spreads everywhere,  Owning no confines. Since whether there be  Aught that may block and check it so it comes  Not where 'twas sent, nor lodges in its goal,  Or whether borne along, in either view  'Thas started not from any end. And so  I'll follow on, and whereso'er thou set  The extreme coasts, I'll query, "what becomes  Thereafter of thy spear?" 'Twill come to pass  That nowhere can a world's-end be, and that  The chance for further flight prolongs forever  The flight itself. Besides, were all the space  Of the totality and sum shut in  With fixed coasts, and bounded everywhere,  Then would the abundance of world's matter flow  Together by solid weight from everywhere  Still downward to the bottom of the world,  Nor aught could happen under cope of sky,  Nor could there be a sky at all or sun--  Indeed, where matter all one heap would lie,  By having settled during infinite time.  But in reality, repose is given  Unto no bodies 'mongst the elements,  Because there is no bottom whereunto  They might, as 'twere, together flow, and where  They might take up their undisturbed abodes.  In endless motion everything goes on  Forevermore; out of all regions, even  Out of the pit below, from forth the vast,  Are hurtled bodies evermore supplied.  The nature of room, the space of the abyss  Is such that even the flashing thunderbolts  Can neither speed upon their courses through,  Gliding across eternal tracts of time,  Nor, further, bring to pass, as on they run,  That they may bate their journeying one whit:  Such huge abundance spreads for things around--  Room off to every quarter, without end.  Lastly, before our very eyes is seen  Thing to bound thing: air hedges hill from hill,  And mountain walls hedge air; land ends the sea,  And sea in turn all lands; but for the All  Truly is nothing which outside may bound.  That, too, the sum of things itself may not  Have power to fix a measure of its own,  Great nature guards, she who compels the void  To bound all body, as body all the void,  Thus rendering by these alternates the whole  An infinite; or else the one or other,  Being unbounded by the other, spreads,  Even by its single nature, ne'ertheless  Immeasurably forth....  Nor sea, nor earth, nor shining vaults of sky,  Nor breed of mortals, nor holy limbs of gods  Could keep their place least portion of an hour:  For, driven apart from out its meetings fit,  The stock of stuff, dissolved, would be borne  Along the illimitable inane afar,  Or rather, in fact, would ne'er have once combined  And given a birth to aught, since, scattered wide,  It could not be united. For of 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 since, being many and changed in many modes  Along the All, they're driven abroad and vexed  By blow on blow, even from all time of old,  They thus at last, after attempting all  The kinds of motion and conjoining, come  Into those great arrangements out of which  This sum of things established is create,  By which, moreover, through the mighty years,  It is preserved, when once it has been thrown  Into the proper motions, bringing to pass  That ever the streams refresh the greedy main  With river-waves abounding, and that earth,  Lapped in warm exhalations of the sun,  Renews her broods, and that the lusty race  Of breathing creatures bears and blooms, and that  The gliding fires of ether are alive--  What still the primal germs nowise could do,  Unless from out the infinite of space  Could come supply of matter, whence in season  They're wont whatever losses to repair.  For as the nature of breathing creatures wastes,  Losing its body, when deprived of food:  So all things have to be dissolved as soon  As matter, diverted by what means soever  From off its course, shall fail to be on hand.  Nor can the blows from outward still conserve,  On every side, whatever sum of a world  Has been united in a whole. They can  Indeed, by frequent beating, check a part,  Till others arriving may fulfil the sum;  But meanwhile often are they forced to spring  Rebounding back, and, as they spring, to yield,  Unto those elements whence a world derives,  Room and a time for flight, permitting them  To be from off the massy union borne  Free and afar. Wherefore, again, again:  Needs must there come a many for supply;  And also, that the blows themselves shall be  Unfailing ever, must there ever be  An infinite force of matter all sides round.
 And in these problems, shrink, my Memmius, far  From yielding faith to that notorious talk:  That all things inward to the centre press;  And thus the nature of the world stands firm  With never blows from outward, nor can be  Nowhere disparted--since all height and depth  Have always inward to the centre pressed  (If thou art ready to believe that aught  Itself can rest upon itself ); or that  The ponderous bodies which be under earth  Do all press upwards and do come to rest  Upon the earth, in some way upside down,  Like to those images of things we see  At present through the waters. They contend,  With like procedure, that all breathing things  Head downward roam about, and yet cannot  Tumble from earth to realms of sky below,  No more than these our bodies wing away  Spontaneously to vaults of sky above;  That, when those creatures look upon the sun,  We view the constellations of the night;  And that with us the seasons of the sky  They thus alternately divide, and thus  Do pass the night coequal to our days,  But a vain error has given these dreams to fools,  Which they've embraced with reasoning perverse  For centre none can be where world is still  Boundless, nor yet, if now a centre were,  Could aught take there a fixed position more  Than for some other cause 'tmight be dislodged.  For all of room and space we call the void  Must both through centre and non-centre yield  Alike to weights where'er their motions tend.  Nor is there any place, where, when they've come,  Bodies can be at standstill in the void,  Deprived of force of weight; nor yet may void  Furnish support to any,--nay, it must,  True to its bent of nature, still give way.  Thus in such manner not at all can things  Be held in union, as if overcome  By craving for a centre.
 But besides,  Seeing they feign that not all bodies press  To centre inward, rather only those  Of earth and water (liquid of the sea,  And the big billows from the mountain slopes,  And whatsoever are encased, as 'twere,  In earthen body), contrariwise, they teach  How the thin air, and with it the hot fire,  Is borne asunder from the centre, and how,  For this all ether quivers with bright stars,  And the sun's flame along the blue is fed  (Because the heat, from out the centre flying,  All gathers there), and how, again, the boughs  Upon the tree-tops could not sprout their leaves,  Unless, little by little, from out the earth  For each were nutriment...
 Lest, after the manner of the winged flames,  The ramparts of the world should flee away,  Dissolved amain throughout the mighty void,  And lest all else should likewise follow after,  Aye, lest the thundering vaults of heaven should burst  And splinter upward, and the earth forthwith  Withdraw from under our feet, and all its bulk,  Among its mingled wrecks and those of heaven,  With slipping asunder of the primal seeds,  Should pass, along the immeasurable inane,  Away forever, and, that instant, naught  Of wrack and remnant would be left, beside  The desolate space, and germs invisible.  For on whatever side thou deemest first  The primal bodies lacking, lo, that side  Will be for things the very door of death:  Wherethrough the throng of matter all will dash,  Out and abroad.
 These points, if thou wilt ponder,  Then, with but paltry trouble led along...
 For one thing after other will grow clear,  Nor shall the blind night rob thee of the road,  To hinder thy gaze on nature's Farthest-forth.  Thus things for things shall kindle torches new.