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

And flavours of the gummed elecampane.

Again, that glowing fire and icy rime

Are fanged with teeth unlike whereby to sting

Our body's sense, the touch of each gives proof.

For touch—by sacred majesties of Gods!—

Touch is indeed the body's only sense—

Be't that something in-from-outward works,

Be't that something in the body born

Wounds, or delighteth as it passes out

Along the procreant paths of Aphrodite;

Or be't the seeds by some collision whirl

Disordered in the body and confound

By tumult and confusion all the sense—

As thou mayst find, if haply with the hand

Thyself thou strike thy body's any part.

On which account, the elemental forms

Must differ widely, as enabled thus

To cause diverse sensations.

And, again,

What seems to us the hardened and condensed

Must be of atoms among themselves more hooked,

Be held compacted deep within, as 'twere

By branch-like atoms—of which sort the chief

Are diamond stones, despisers of all blows,

And stalwart flint and strength of solid iron,

And brazen bars, which, budging hard in locks,

Do grate and scream. But what are liquid, formed

Of fluid body, they indeed must be

Of elements more smooth and round—because

Their globules severally will not cohere:

To suck the poppy-seeds from palm of hand

Is quite as easy as drinking water down,

And they, once struck, roll like unto the same.

But that thou seest among the things that flow

Some bitter, as the brine of ocean is,

Is not the least a marvel...

For since 'tis fluid, smooth its atoms are

And round, with painful rough ones mixed therein;

Yet need not these be held together hooked:

In fact, though rough, they're globular besides,

Able at once to roll, and rasp the sense.

And that the more thou mayst believe me here,

That with smooth elements are mixed the rough

(Whence Neptune's salt astringent body comes),

There is a means to separate the twain,

And thereupon dividedly to see

How the sweet water, after filtering through

So often underground, flows freshened forth

Into some hollow; for it leaves above

The primal germs of nauseating brine,

Since cling the rough more readily in earth.

Lastly, whatso thou markest to disperse

Upon the instant—smoke, and cloud, and flame—

Must not (even though not all of smooth and round)

Be yet co-linked with atoms intertwined,

That thus they can, without together cleaving,

So pierce our body and so bore the rocks.

Whatever we see...

Given to senses, that thou must perceive

They're not from linked but pointed elements.

The which now having taught, I will go on

To bind thereto a fact to this allied

And drawing from this its proof: these primal germs

Vary, yet only with finite tale of shapes.

For were these shapes quite infinite, some seeds

Would have a body of infinite increase.

For in one seed, in one small frame of any,

The shapes can't vary from one another much.

Assume, we'll say, that of three minim parts

Consist the primal bodies, or add a few:

When, now, by placing all these parts of one

At top and bottom, changing lefts and rights,

Thou hast with every kind of shift found out

What the aspect of shape of its whole body

Each new arrangement gives, for what remains,

If thou percase wouldst vary its old shapes,

New parts must then be added; follows next,

If thou percase wouldst vary still its shapes,

That by like logic each arrangement still

Requires its increment of other parts.

Ergo, an augmentation of its frame

Follows upon each novelty of forms.

Wherefore, it cannot be thou'lt undertake

That seeds have infinite differences in form,

Lest thus thou forcest some indeed to be

Of an immeasurable immensity—

Which I have taught above cannot be proved.

And now for thee barbaric robes, and gleam

Of Meliboean purple, touched with dye

Of the Thessalian shell...

The peacock's golden generations, stained

With spotted gaieties, would lie o'erthrown

By some new colour of new things more bright;

The odour of myrrh and savours of honey despised;

The swan's old lyric, and Apollo's hymns,

Once modulated on the many chords,

Would likewise sink o'ermastered and be mute:

For, lo, a somewhat, finer than the rest,

Would be arising evermore. So, too,

Into some baser part might all retire,

Even as we said to better might they come:

For, lo, a somewhat, loathlier than the rest

To nostrils, ears, and eyes, and taste of tongue,

Would then, by reasoning reversed, be there.

Since 'tis not so, but unto things are given

Their fixed limitations which do bound

Their sum on either side, 'tmust be confessed

That matter, too, by finite tale of shapes

Does differ. Again, from earth's midsummer heats

Unto the icy hoar-frosts of the year

The forward path is fixed, and by like law

O'ertravelled backwards at the dawn of spring.

For each degree of hot, and each of cold,

And the half-warm, all filling up the sum

In due progression, lie, my Memmius, there

Betwixt the two extremes: the things create

Must differ, therefore, by a finite change,

Since at each end marked off they ever are

By fixed point—on one side plagued by flames

And on the other by congealing frosts.

The which now having taught, I will go on

To bind thereto a fact to this allied

And drawing from this its proof: those primal germs

Which have been fashioned all of one like shape

Are infinite in tale; for, since the forms

Themselves are finite in divergences,

Then those which are alike will have to be

Infinite, else the sum of stuff remains

A finite—what I've proved is not the fact,

Showing in verse how corpuscles of stuff,

From everlasting and to-day the same,

Uphold the sum of things, all sides around

By old succession of unending blows.

For though thou view'st some beasts to be more rare,

And mark'st in them a less prolific stock,

Yet in another region, in lands remote,

That kind abounding may make up the count;

Even as we mark among the four-foot kind

Snake-handed elephants, whose thousands wall

With ivory ramparts India about,

That her interiors cannot entered be—

So big her count of brutes of which we see

Such few examples. Or suppose, besides,

We feign some thing, one of its kind and sole

With body born, to which is nothing like

In all the lands: yet now unless shall be

An infinite count of matter out of which

Thus to conceive and bring it forth to life,

It cannot be created and—what's more—

It cannot take its food and get increase.

Yea, if through all the world in finite tale

Be tossed the procreant bodies of one thing,

Whence, then, and where in what mode, by what power,

Shall they to meeting come together there,

In such vast ocean of matter and tumult strange?—

No means they have of joining into one.

But, just as, after mighty ship-wrecks piled,

The mighty main is wont to scatter wide

The rowers' banks, the ribs, the yards, the prow,

The masts and swimming oars, so that afar

Along all shores of lands are seen afloat

The carven fragments of the rended poop,

Giving a lesson to mortality

To shun the ambush of the faithless main,

The violence and the guile, and trust it not

At any hour, however much may smile