De Rerum Natura

The fire was once the more victorious,

And once- as goes the tale- the water won

A kingdom in the fields. For fire o'ermastered

And licked up many things and burnt away,

What time the impetuous horses of the Sun

Snatched Phaethon headlong from his skiey road

Down the whole ether and over all the lands.

But the omnipotent Father in keen wrath

Then with the sudden smite of thunderbolt

Did hurl the mighty-minded hero off

Those horses to the earth. And Sol, his sire,

Meeting him as he fell, caught up in hand

The ever-blazing lampion of the world,

And drave together the pell-mell horses there

And yoked them all a-tremble, and amain,

Steering them over along their own old road,

Restored the cosmos,- as forsooth we hear

From songs of ancient poets of the Greeks-

A tale too far away from truth, meseems.

For fire can win when from the infinite

Has risen a larger throng of particles

Of fiery stuff; and then its powers succumb,

Somehow subdued again, or else at last

It shrivels in torrid atmospheres the world.

And whilom water too began to win-

As goes the story- when it overwhelmed

The lives of men with billows; and thereafter,

When all that force of water-stuff which forth

From out the infinite had risen up

Did now retire, as somehow turned aside,

The rain-storms stopped, and streams their fury checked.

But in what modes that conflux of first-stuff

Did found the multitudinous universe

Of earth, and sky, and the unfathomed deeps

Of ocean, and courses of the sun and moon,

I'll now in order tell. For of a 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, lo, because primordials of things,

Many in many modes, astir by blows

From immemorial aeons, in motion too

By their own weights, have evermore been wont

To be so borne along and in all modes

To meet together and to try all sorts

Which, by combining one with other, they

Are powerful to create: because of this

It comes to pass that those primordials,

Diffused far and wide through mighty aeons,

The while they unions try, and motions too,

Of every kind, meet at the last amain,

And so become oft the commencements fit

Of mighty things- earth, sea, and sky, and race

Of living creatures.

In that long-ago

The wheel of the sun could nowhere be discerned

Flying far up with its abounding blaze,

Nor constellations of the mighty world,

Nor ocean, nor heaven, nor even earth nor air.

Nor aught of things like unto things of ours

Could then be seen- but only some strange storm

And a prodigious hurly-burly mass

Compounded of all kinds of primal germs,

Whose battling discords in disorder kept

Interstices, and paths, coherencies,

And weights, and blows, encounterings, and motions,

Because, by reason of their forms unlike

And varied shapes, they could not all thuswise

Remain conjoined nor harmoniously

Have interplay of movements. But from there

Portions began to fly asunder, and like

With like to join, and to block out a world,

And to divide its members and dispose

Its mightier parts- that is, to set secure

The lofty heavens from the lands, and cause

The sea to spread with waters separate,

And fires of ether separate and pure

Likewise to congregate apart.

For, lo,

First came together the earthy particles

(As being heavy and intertangled) there

In the mid-region, and all began to take

The lowest abodes; and ever the more they got

One with another intertangled, the more

They pressed from out their mass those particles

Which were to form the sea, the stars, the sun,

And moon, and ramparts of the mighty world-

For these consist of seeds more smooth and round

And of much smaller elements than earth.

And thus it was that ether, fraught with fire,

First broke away from out the earthen parts,

Athrough the innumerable pores of earth,

And raised itself aloft, and with itself

Bore lightly off the many starry fires;

And not far otherwise we often see

. . . . . .

And the still lakes and the perennial streams

Exhale a mist, and even as earth herself

Is seen at times to smoke, when first at dawn