Lucius Seneca - Yale Required Reading - Collected Works (Vol. 2)

For then, by such bright circumstance abashed,

Religion pales and flees thy mind; O then

The fears of death leave heart so free of care.

But if we note how all this pomp at last

Is but a drollery and a mocking sport,

And of a truth man's dread, with cares at heels,

Dreads not these sounds of arms, these savage swords

But among kings and lords of all the world

Mingles undaunted, nor is overawed

By gleam of gold nor by the splendour bright

Of purple robe, canst thou then doubt that this

Is aught, but power of thinking?—when, besides

The whole of life but labours in the dark.

For just as children tremble and fear all

In the viewless dark, so even we at times

Dread in the light so many things that be

No whit more fearsome than what children feign,

Shuddering, will be upon them in the dark.

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.

Table of Contents

Now come: I will untangle for thy steps

Now by what motions the begetting bodies

Of the world-stuff beget the varied world,

And then forever resolve it when begot,

And by what force they are constrained to this,

And what the speed appointed unto them

Wherewith to travel down the vast inane:

Do thou remember to yield thee to my words.

For truly matter coheres not, crowds not tight,

Since we behold each thing to wane away,

And we observe how all flows on and off,

As 'twere, with age-old time, and from our eyes

How eld withdraws each object at the end,

Albeit the sum is seen to bide the same,

Unharmed, because these motes that leave each thing

Diminish what they part from, but endow

With increase those to which in turn they come,

Constraining these to wither in old age,

And those to flower at the prime (and yet

Biding not long among them). Thus the sum

Forever is replenished, and we live

As mortals by eternal give and take.

The nations wax, the nations wane away;

In a brief space the generations pass,

And like to runners hand the lamp of life

One unto other.

But if thou believe

That the primordial germs of things can stop,

And in their stopping give new motions birth,

Afar thou wanderest from the road of truth.

For since they wander through the void inane,

All the primordial germs of things must needs

Be borne along, either by weight their own,

Or haply by another's blow without.

For, when, in their incessancy so oft

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