Lucretius - Of the Nature of Things

They meet and clash, it comes to pass amain

They leap asunder, face to face: not strange —

Being most hard, and solid in their weights,

And naught opposing motion, from behind.

And that more clearly thou perceive how all

These mites of matter are darted round about,

Recall to mind how nowhere in the sum

Of All exists a bottom — nowhere is

A realm of rest for primal bodies; since

(As amply shown and proved by reason sure)

Space has no bound nor measure, and extends

Unmetered forth in all directions round.

Since this stands certain, thus ’tis out of doubt

No rest is rendered to the primal bodies

Along the unfathomable inane; but rather,

Inveterately plied by motions mixed,

Some, at their jamming, bound aback and leave

Huge gaps between, and some from off the blow

Are hurried about with spaces small between.

And all which, brought together with slight gaps,

In more condensed union bound aback,

Linked by their own all inter-tangled shapes —

These form the irrefragable roots of rocks

And the brute bulks of iron, and what else

Is of their kind . . .

The rest leap far asunder, far recoil,

Leaving huge gaps between: and these supply

For us thin air and splendour-lights of the sun.

And many besides wander the mighty void —

Cast back from unions of existing things,

Nowhere accepted in the universe,

And nowise linked in motions to the rest.

And of this fact (as I record it here)

An image, a type goes on before our eyes

Present each moment; for behold whenever

The sun’s light and the rays, let in, pour down

Across dark halls of houses: thou wilt see

The many mites in many a manner mixed

Amid a void in the very light of the rays,

And battling on, as in eternal strife,

And in battalions contending without halt,

In meetings, partings, harried up and down.

From this thou mayest conjecture of what sort

The ceaseless tossing of primordial seeds

Amid the mightier void — at least so far

As small affair can for a vaster serve,

And by example put thee on the spoor

Of knowledge. For this reason too ’tis fit

Thou turn thy mind the more unto these bodies

Which here are witnessed tumbling in the light:

Namely, because such tumblings are a sign

That motions also of the primal stuff

Secret and viewless lurk beneath, behind.

For thou wilt mark here many a speck, impelled

By viewless blows, to change its little course,

And beaten backwards to return again,

Hither and thither in all directions round.

Lo, all their shifting movement is of old,

From the primeval atoms; for the same

Primordial seeds of things first move of self,

And then those bodies built of unions small

And nearest, as it were, unto the powers

Of the primeval atoms, are stirred up

By impulse of those atoms’ unseen blows,

And these thereafter goad the next in size:

Thus motion ascends from the primevals on,

And stage by stage emerges to our sense,

Until those objects also move which we

Can mark in sunbeams, though it not appears

What blows do urge them.

Herein wonder not

How ’tis that, while the seeds of things are all

Moving forever, the sum yet seems to stand

Supremely still, except in cases where

A thing shows motion of its frame as whole.

For far beneath the ken of senses lies

The nature of those ultimates of the world;

And so, since those themselves thou canst not see,

Their motion also must they veil from men —

For mark, indeed, how things we can see, oft

Yet hide their motions, when afar from us

Along the distant landscape. Often thus,

Upon a hillside will the woolly flocks

Be cropping their goodly food and creeping about

Whither the summons of the grass, begemmed

With the fresh dew, is calling, and the lambs,

Well filled, are frisking, locking horns in sport:

Yet all for us seem blurred and blent afar —

A glint of white at rest on a green hill.

Again, when mighty legions, marching round,

Fill all the quarters of the plains below,

Rousing a mimic warfare, there the sheen

Shoots up the sky, and all the fields about

Glitter with brass, and from beneath, a sound

Goes forth from feet of stalwart soldiery,

And mountain walls, smote by the shouting, send

The voices onward to the stars of heaven,

And hither and thither darts the cavalry,

And of a sudden down the midmost fields

Charges with onset stout enough to rock

The solid earth: and yet some post there is

Up the high mountains, viewed from which they seem

To stand — a gleam at rest along the plains.

Now what the speed to matter’s atoms given

Thou mayest in few, my Memmius, learn from this:

When first the dawn is sprinkling with new light

The lands, and all the breed of birds abroad

Flit round the trackless forests, with liquid notes

Filling the regions along the mellow air,

We see ’tis forthwith manifest to man

How suddenly the risen sun is wont

At such an hour to overspread and clothe

The whole with its own splendour; but the sun’s

Warm exhalations and this serene light

Travel not down an empty void; and thus

They are compelled more slowly to advance,

Whilst, as it were, they cleave the waves of air;

Nor one by one travel these particles

Of the warm exhalations, but are all

Entangled and enmassed, whereby at once

Each is restrained by each, and from without

Checked, till compelled more slowly to advance.

But the primordial atoms with their old

Simple solidity, when forth they travel

Along the empty void, all undelayed

By aught outside them there, and they, each one

Being one unit from nature of its parts,

Are borne to that one place on which they strive

Still to lay hold, must then, beyond a doubt,

Outstrip in speed, and be more swiftly borne

Than light of sun, and over regions rush,

Of space much vaster, in the self-same time

The sun’s effulgence widens round the sky.

. . . . . .

Nor to pursue the atoms one by one,

To see the law whereby each thing goes on.

But some men, ignorant of matter, think,

Opposing this, that not without the gods,

In such adjustment to our human ways,

Can nature change the seasons of the years,

And bring to birth the grains and all of else

To which divine Delight, the guide of life,

Persuades mortality and leads it on,

That, through her artful blandishments of love,

It propagate the generations still,

Lest humankind should perish. When they feign

That gods have stablished all things but for man,

They seem in all ways mightily to lapse

From reason’s truth: for ev’n if ne’er I knew

What seeds primordial are, yet would I dare

This to affirm, ev’n from deep judgment based

Upon the ways and conduct of the skies —

This to maintain by many a fact besides —

That in no wise the nature of the world

For us was builded by a power divine —

So great the faults it stands encumbered with:

The which, my Memmius, later on, for thee

We will clear up. Now as to what remains

Concerning motions we’ll unfold our thought.

Now is the place, meseems, in these affairs

To prove for thee this too: nothing corporeal

Of its own force can e’er be upward borne,

Or upward go — nor let the bodies of flames

Deceive thee here: for they engendered are

With urge to upwards, taking thus increase,