On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World’s Classics)
Page 21
That the woman by a sudden move overcomes
The force of the man and takes control of it;
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From the mother’s seed then children like the mother
Are born; as from the father’s children like the father.
But those you see with figures like to each
And faces like both parents’, these have sprung
From the father’s body and the mother’s blood
When under the goads of Venus through the limbs
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The coursing seeds are driven, and dashed together
By two hearts breathing as one in mutual passion,
And neither masters the other nor is mastered.
It sometimes also happens that the children
May look like their grandparents or great-grandparents,
Since parents in their bodies oft conceal
Many first elements mixed in many ways,
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And these deriving from ancestral stock
Fathers transmit to fathers. From these Venus
With varying lot makes shapes and reproduces
The look, the voice, the hair of ancestors;
Since from a fixed seed all these features come
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No less than our faces and our limbs and bodies.
And female children spring from fathers’ seed
And male are made out of the mother’s substance;
For always birth derives from seeds of both.
Whichever parent the child most resembles,
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Of that it has more than half; which you can see
Whether the progeny be male or female.
And it is not the power of gods that blocks
The generating seed in any man
So that no darling children call him father
And he drags out his years in barren love,
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Which many think, and with much blood in tears
Sprinkle the altars, honour them with gifts,
To make their wives pregnant with abundant seed.
In vain do they importune gods and fates.
They are barren, some because the seed’s too thick,
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Others because it is too watery and thin.
The thin, because it can’t stick in its place,
At once runs out and so returns aborted.
The thick comes out too closely clotted, and either
Cannot fly forward with far-reaching blow,
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Or cannot penetrate the place, or else, once in,
Does not mix easily with the woman’s seed.
For sure love’s harmonies do greatly differ.
Some men more easily impregnate some women,
Some women more readily receive a man
And grow big from him. Many women barren
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In earlier marriages have later found
A source from which they could bear little children
And with sweet progeny enrich themselves.
And often men whose fruitful wives have been
Unable to bear a child, for these also
A woman of matching nature has been found
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To fortify their ageing years with children.
So much it matters that seeds can with seeds
Suited for generation be commingled,
Thick meeting watery, watery meeting thick.
It matters too what food supports the life,
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For some foods make the seeds thicken in the body
And others make them thin and waste away.
What matters most of all is the position
In which the soothing pleasure itself is taken;
For in the manner of four-footed beasts,
It is generally thought that women best conceive,
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Breast down and loins uplifted, so the seeds
Can take more easily their proper places.
Wives have no need at all of wanton movements.
For a woman avoids conception and fights against it,
If in delight she holds his penis close
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Between her buttocks, and all her body limp,
Flows with the waves and sways with every tide.
She turns the furrow from its rightful course
Under the ploughshare, makes the seed fall wide.
Whores do this for their private purposes
Lest they be filled too often and lie pregnant,
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And to make their loves more pleasing to their men.
Clearly our wives can find no use for this.
And not from power divine or Venus’ shafts
It sometimes happens that a wench is loved,
No beauty she; for sometimes she herself
By what she does, by person neat and clean,
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And gentle pleasing ways can easily
Accustom you to share your life with her.
And for the rest—by custom love is bred.
Something which feels a blow, however light,
But frequently, must in the end give way.
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Do you not see how even a drop of water
By constant dripping wears away a stone?
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BOOK FIVE
Who has the genius to build a song
Worthy of nature’s majesty, and worthy
Of these discoveries? Who can find fit words
To praise the man who left us such great treasures
Born from his breast and searched out by his mind?
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No one, I think, from mortal body sprung.
If I must speak, my noble Memmius,
As nature’s majesty now known demands,
He was a god, a god indeed, who first
Found out that rule and principle of life
Which bears the name of Wisdom, and by his skill
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Brought life out from such mighty waves and darkness
And placed it in such calm and light so clear.
Only compare the things that others found
In ancient time, and earned the name divine.
Ceres they say brought crops to mortal men
And Bacchus the vine-born liquor of the grape;
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But life without these things could still abide,
As even now they say some nations live.
But good life needs a heart that’s pure and clean.
So he more rightly earns the name of god
From whom even now through mighty nations spread
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Sweet solace comes to soothe the minds of men.
And if you think the deeds of Hercules
Can stand in rivalry with his, why then
You’ll stray much further from true reasoning.
What harm now could Nemean lion do
With gaping jaws, or bristling Arcadian boar?
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What harm the Cretan bull or Lerna’s pest,
The Hydra fenced about with poisonous snakes?
What threefold Geryon with his tripled breast?
What matter now Stymphalus’ horrid birds
And Diomed’s Thracian horses breathing fire
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In lands by Bistony and Ismara?
The golden apples of the Hesperides,
The snake that guards them with unsleeping eye,
Enormous body coiled around the tree,
What mischief by the wild Atlantic shore
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Could it now do, where no one ever comes
From lands we know, and natives fear to tread?
And all the other monsters of this kind,
All dead; but if they had not been slain, and still
Were living, why, what mischief could they do?
None as I think, seeing that even now
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Through forests and great mountains and deep thickets;
Though as a rule it lies within our power
To shun these places, and leave them unvisited.
But unless the mind is purged, what battles then
And perils must enter it against our will!
How great then the sharp cares with which lust rends
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The troubled man, how great likewise the fears!
And what of pride and filth and wantonness?
What ruin they bring! and luxury and sloth?
He therefore who has mastered all these vices
And cast them from the mind by words, not arms,
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Will it not then be right to find him worthy
To be counted in the number of the gods?
Especially since in words from heaven inspired
He used to teach about the gods themselves,
And all the nature of the world make plain.
In his footsteps I tread and his great doctrines
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I follow, and in my poem I teach how all things
Must stay within the law of their creation
And cannot annul the strong statutes of time.
And herein first of all we have found that mind
Consists of body that first itself had birth
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And cannot last intact through endless years,
But images in dreams deceive the mind
When we seem to see a man whom life has left.
Next at this point the order of my theme
Leads me to show that all the whole wide world
Came into birth and in the end must die;
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And in what ways that mass of matter founded
The earth and sky and sea and stars and sun
And the moon’s orb; and then what animals
Arose from the earth, and what were never born;
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And how men first made use of varied speech
Among themselves by finding names for things;
And how into their minds that fear of gods
Crept in, which over all the world keeps holy
Shrines, pools, groves, altars, and images of gods;
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And by what force the courses of the sun
And the moon’s movements pilot nature steers,
I shall explain, lest haply we believe
That these between the earth and sky are free
Of their own will to make their yearly courses,
Meet for the growth of crops and animals,
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Or think they are turned by some design of gods.
For men who have been well taught about the gods
That they live free from care may wonder still
By what design the world goes on, not least
Those things they see in heaven above their heads;
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And then to the old religions back they turn,
And cleave to cruel masters whom they think,
Unhappy fools, to be all-powerful,
Not knowing what can be and what cannot,
Not knowing in a word how everything
Has finite power and deep-set boundary stone.
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To proceed, and make no more delay with promises,
First please observe the earth and sea and sky;
These three, a threefold nature, Memmius,
Three forms so unalike, so interwoven,
One day will give to destruction; all the mass
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And mighty engine of the world, upheld
For many centuries, will crash in ruin.
Nor do I fail to see how strange and new
This ruin of heaven and earth must strike the mind,
How hard it is to prove by words of mine;
As happens when some unaccustomed thing
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Comes to the ears, something eyes cannot grasp
Nor hands lay hold of, hands the surest way
To bring belief to hearts and minds of men.
Yet I’ll speak out. Perhaps the facts themselves
Will bring belief and in a little time
The earth with mighty movements torn apart
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You will see, and all the world convulsed with shocks.
This far from us may pilot fortune steer,
And reason rather than the event declare
The fearful crash that brings the world’s collapse.
And now, before I utter oracles
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More holy and more surely true than those
The Pythia speaks from Phoebus’ laurelled tripod,
With words of wisdom I shall comfort you;
Lest bridled by religion you may think
That earth and sun and sky, sea, stars, and moon
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Must last for ever, their bodies being divine;
Lest you should think that for a monstrous crime
Men should, like giants, suffer punishment
Whose reason shakes the ramparts of the world,
Willing to quench the shining sun in heaven
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And stain immortal things with mortal speech.
So far these things are from divinity,
So little worthy to be counted gods,
That we should rather find in them the pattern
Of things possessing neither life nor sense.
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For clearly not in any and every body
Can mind and can intelligence exist.
There can be no trees in the sky, no clouds
In the salt sea, nor fish live in the fields,
Nor blood exist in logs nor sap in stones.
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Everything has its place, certain and fixed,
Where it must live and grow and have its being.
So the mind cannot arise without the body,
Alone, nor exist apart from blood and sinews.
But if it could, then much more easily
It would place itself in head or shoulders, or right down
In heels, or indeed in any part, provided
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It were in the same man, the same vessel, enclosed;
And since, within the body, mind and spirit
By a fixed rule and ordinance are given
The place where they can live and grow apart,
All the more strongly then must we deny
That wholly outside body or animal form
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In crumbling clods of earth or the sun’s fire
They can live, or in water or the high shores of sky.
These things therefore for sure are not endowed
With consciousness divine, since they are unable
To be animated with the breath of life.
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Another thing you cannot believe is this:
That holy dwelling places of the gods
Exist in any regions of this world.
For the nature of the gods is thin, and far removed
From our senses, and is hardly perceived by the mind.
We cannot touch it with our hands; therefore
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It cannot touch anything that we can touch.
For that cannot touch which cannot itself be touched.
Wherefore their dwelling places also must differ
From ours, being thin, like the thinness of their bodies.
This I will prove to you later at some length.
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Also, to say that for the sake of men
The gods willed the creation of the world
With all its brilliant fabric, and therefore
We ought to praise their most praiseworthy work
And think it everlasting and immortal,
And that a thing by the gods’ ancient rule
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Founded for all time for the race of men
May not by any force at any time
Be shaken, or be challenged by argument,
And turned right upside down—and to invent
Similar fictions, all this, Memmius,
Is nonsense. For what meed of gratitude
On gods immortal, blest, could we bestow
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That for our sakes they should do anything?
And what new thing after so long a time
Could tempt them in their blest tranquillity
To wish to change their old life for a new?
For to take pleasure in new things befits
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A man the old have hurt; but when past years
Have brought no ill, and life is sweet, what then
Could kindle a desire for novelty?
What ill had it been for us had we not been made?
Did our life lie in darkness and in grief
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Until creation’s light first shone abroad?
A man once born must wish to stay in life
So long as soothing pleasure keeps him there.
But he who has never tasted love of life
Or ever been enrolled among the living,
How does it hurt him not to have been made?
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Another point. The pattern of creation,
The very concept of mankind, how did it come
Into the minds of gods, that they should know
What they wanted to make, and grasp it with their minds?
How was the power of atoms ever known,
What they could do by changes of position,
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Had nature herself not given a model for creation?
So many atoms in so many ways
Smitten with blows through infinite time, and massed
By their own weights together, have combined
In every way, tried every variation,
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Of things that by them ever could be made.
No wonder then if into those positions
And into those movements they came, by which
Though always new this world is kept in being.
But even if I had no knowledge of atoms,
This from the order of the heavens itself
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And many other facts I would assert—
That in no way for us the power of gods
Fashioned the world and brought it into being;
So great the fault with which it stands endowed.
In the first place, of all that lies beneath
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The mighty sweep of sky, a greedy part
Mountains possess and forests full of wild beasts.
Rocks hold it, and vast marshes, and the sea
Which widely separates the shores of lands.
Nearly two thirds are kept from mortal use
By burning heat and constant fall of frost;
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What land is left, nature by her own power