Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Lucretius was a Roman poet who wanted to free people from fear. In this long poem, in William Ellery Leonard's 1916 verse translation, he says the world is made of tiny atoms moving in empty space. The gods do not punish us, and the soul ends with the body, so death is nothing to dread. Some of his science is startlingly close to our own. All of it is carried in rich, singing verse.
The poem opens, surprisingly for a work that denies the gods rule our lives, with a hymn to Venus, mother of Rome, whose power fills sea, land, and sky with new life each spring. Lucretius prays to her for peace, and for charm in his verses. Then he turns to his real hero, Epicurus, the Greek who first dared to look up at religion's threatening face and break open the gates of nature.
His teaching, set out in six books, is that everything is made of atoms falling and swerving in empty space. Nothing is created from nothing, nothing is wholly destroyed, the soul is mortal, the gods live far off and untroubled, and natural wonders, thunder, plague, and the magnet among them, have natural causes. If death is the end of feeling, Lucretius argues, then fearing it makes as little sense as mourning the time before we were born.
William Ellery Leonard's metrical translation of 1916 keeps the poem in English verse, rolling and musical. It lasts because it joins two things rarely found together: hard, clear argument about the physical world, and poetry generous enough to begin with Venus.
Lucretius, the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, wrote On the Nature of Things to free readers from fear: fear of the gods and fear of death. In six books of verse he sets out the teaching of Epicurus, that everything is atoms and empty space, that the soul dies with the body, and that nature needs no miracles. This text is William Ellery Leonard's metrical translation of 1916, opening with his hymn to Venus.
This text has almost no front matter at all, and that absence is itself a fact about the edition. After the title, Titus Lucretius Carus, and the words A Metrical Translation by William Ellery Leonard, the poem begins at once with Book One and its proem, the great invocation to Venus, mother of Rome, delight of gods and men, beneath the gliding stars. Leonard, in other words, lets Lucretius open his own case, as the Latin does.
The opening hundred lines already contain the whole design. Venus stands for the life giving power of nature; Mars, lulled in her lap, for the peace Lucretius begs for Rome; Epicurus appears as the Greek hero who broke the gates of nature and reported what can arise and what cannot; and the poet names his tools plainly: atoms, matter, seeds of things, primal bodies, from which nature creates, multiplies, and into which she resolves everything at its end.
What is shelved here is the complete poem in William Ellery Leonard's verse translation of 1916: an ancient Roman work, some two thousand years old, in the English dress of an American poet and scholar.
Edition: Translated by William Ellery Leonard. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 785.
The first chapter
Mother of Rome, delight of Gods and men,
Dear Venus that beneath the gliding stars
Makest to teem the many-voyaged main
And fruitful lands--for all of living things
Through thee alone are evermore conceived,
Through thee are risen to visit the great sun--
Before thee, Goddess, and thy coming on,
Flee stormy wind and massy cloud away,
For thee the daedal Earth bears scented flowers,
For thee waters of the unvexed deep
Smile, and the hollows of the serene sky
Glow with diffused radiance for thee!
For soon as comes the springtime face of day,
And procreant gales blow from the West unbarred,
First fowls of air, smit to the heart by thee,
Foretoken thy approach, O thou Divine,
And leap the wild herds round the happy fields
Or swim the bounding torrents. Thus amain,
Seized with the spell, all creatures follow thee
Whithersoever thou walkest forth to lead,
And thence through seas and mountains and swift streams,
Through leafy homes of birds and greening plains,
Kindling the lure of love in every breast,
Thou bringest the eternal generations forth,
Kind after kind. And since 'tis thou alone
Guidest the Cosmos, and without thee naught
Is risen to reach the shining shores of light,
Nor aught of joyful or of lovely born,
Thee do I crave co-partner in that verse
Which I presume on Nature to compose
For Memmius mine, whom thou hast willed to be
Peerless in every grace at every hour--
Wherefore indeed, Divine one, give my words
Immortal charm. Lull to a timely rest
O'er sea and land the savage works of war,
For thou alone hast power with public peace
To aid mortality; since he who rules
The savage works of battle, puissant Mars,
How often to thy bosom flings his strength
O'ermastered by the eternal wound of love--
And there, with eyes and full throat backward thrown,
Gazing, my Goddess, open-mouthed at thee,
Pastures on love his greedy sight, his breath
Hanging upon thy lips. Him thus reclined
Fill with thy holy body, round, above!
Pour from those lips soft syllables to win
Peace for the Romans, glorious Lady, peace!
For in a season troublous to the state
Neither may I attend this task of mine
With thought untroubled, nor mid such events
The illustrious scion of the Memmian house
Neglect the civic cause.
Whilst human kind
Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed
Before all eyes beneath Religion--who
Would show her head along the region skies,
Glowering on mortals with her hideous face--
A Greek it was who first opposing dared
Raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand,
Whom nor the fame of Gods nor lightning's stroke
Nor threatening thunder of the ominous sky
Abashed; but rather chafed to angry zest
His dauntless heart to be the first to rend
The crossbars at the gates of Nature old.
And thus his will and hardy wisdom won;
And forward thus he fared afar, beyond
The flaming ramparts of the world, until
He wandered the unmeasurable All.
Whence he to us, a conqueror, reports
What things can rise to being, what cannot,
And by what law to each its scope prescribed,
Its boundary stone that clings so deep in Time.
Wherefore Religion now is under foot,
And us his victory now exalts to heaven.
I know how hard it is in Latian verse
To tell the dark discoveries of the Greeks,
Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find
Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing;
Yet worth of thine and the expected joy
Of thy sweet friendship do persuade me on
To bear all toil and wake the clear nights through,
Seeking with what of words and what of song
I may at last most gloriously uncloud
For thee the light beyond, wherewith to view
The core of being at the centre hid.
And for the rest, summon to judgments true,
Unbusied ears and singleness of mind
Withdrawn from cares; lest these my gifts, arranged
For thee with eager service, thou disdain
Before thou comprehendest: since for thee
I prove the supreme law of Gods and sky,
And the primordial germs of things unfold,
Whence Nature all creates, and multiplies
And fosters all, and whither she resolves
Each in the end when each is overthrown.
This ultimate stock we have devised to name
Procreant atoms, matter, seeds of things,
Or primal bodies, as primal to the world.
I fear perhaps thou deemest that we fare
An impious road to realms of thought profane;
But 'tis that same religion oftener far
Hath bred the foul impieties of men:
As once at Aulis, the elected chiefs,
Foremost of heroes, Danaan counsellors,
Defiled Diana's altar, virgin queen,
With Agamemnon's daughter, foully slain.
She felt the chaplet round her maiden locks
And fillets, fluttering down on either cheek,
And at the altar marked her grieving sire,
The priests beside him who concealed the knife,
And all the folk in tears at sight of her.
With a dumb terror and a sinking knee
She dropped; nor might avail her now that first
'Twas she who gave the king a father's name.
They raised her up, they bore the trembling girl
On to the altar--hither led not now
With solemn rites and hymeneal choir,
But sinless woman, sinfully foredone,
A parent felled her on her bridal day,
Making his child a sacrificial beast
To give the ships auspicious winds for Troy:
Such are the crimes to which Religion leads.
And there shall come the time when even thou,
Forced by the soothsayer's terror-tales, shalt seek
To break from us. Ah, many a dream even now
Can they concoct to rout thy plans of life,
And trouble all thy fortunes with base fears.
I own with reason: for, if men but knew
Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong
By some device unconquered to withstand
Religions and the menacings of seers.
But now nor skill nor instrument is theirs,
Since men must dread eternal pains in death.
For what the soul may be they do not know,
Whether 'tis born, or enter in at birth,
And whether, snatched by death, it die with us,
Or visit the shadows and the vasty caves
Of Orcus, or by some divine decree
Enter the brute herds, as our Ennius sang,
Who first from lovely Helicon brought down
A laurel wreath of bright perennial leaves,
Renowned forever among the Italian clans.
Yet Ennius too in everlasting verse
Proclaims those vaults of Acheron to be,
Though thence, he said, nor souls nor bodies fare,
But only phantom figures, strangely wan,
And tells how once from out those regions rose
Old Homer's ghost to him and shed salt tears
And with his words unfolded Nature's source.
Then be it ours with steady mind to clasp
The purport of the skies--the law behind
The wandering courses of the sun and moon;
To scan the powers that speed all life below;
But most to see with reasonable eyes
Of what the mind, of what the soul is made,
And what it is so terrible that breaks
On us asleep, or waking in disease,
Until we seem to mark and hear at hand
Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Ancient poem; author died c. 55 BC. Leonard translation published 1916. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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