c. 55 BC 2026
This is an AI modernization of On the Nature of Things into contemporary English. The original is available from Perseus Digital Library. Also available as an epub.
This is a physics book written as a poem. Lucretius was a Roman who died around 55 BC, and almost nothing about his life is known — no reliable dates, no career, nothing but the six books he left, which had not been given a final revision. They are addressed throughout to one man, a Roman politician named Memmius, whom the poet argues with, coaxes, and occasionally loses patience with, as though the whole seven thousand lines were one long conversation.
The argument is Epicurus' and Lucretius says so; Epicurus is the hero of the poem the way a general is the hero of an epic. Everything that exists is atoms and empty space, and nothing else. Atoms are too small to see, they cannot be destroyed, and there is an unlimited number of them falling through the void, swerving very slightly as they fall. Everything else follows from that. The mind and the soul are made of atoms too, finer ones, and they come apart when the body does — which means there is nobody left afterwards to whom anything can happen. The gods exist, but they live in perfect quiet and have never made or managed or punished anything. Thunder, earthquakes, magnets, dreams, disease, the origin of language and of kings and of religion all have physical causes, and Lucretius works through them one at a time.
He is not doing this out of curiosity. The point of the book is to cure the reader of the fear of death and of the gods, which he thinks lies underneath most human cruelty and misery. Book One opens with Agamemnon cutting his daughter's throat to buy a fair wind, and the line that comes out of it — so much evil could religion prompt — is the one everybody quotes.
The poem very nearly did not survive. It was little read after antiquity, and Europe got it back from a single manuscript that a book-hunter, Poggio Bracciolini, found in a German monastery in 1417. Every later copy descends from what he found. Jefferson owned five copies of it.
His physics is left exactly as he gives it. The sun really is the size it looks; animals really do generate spontaneously out of the ground. Nothing has been corrected, and the places where he turns out to be right get no wink either. The poem ends on the plague at Athens, described at length, with no consolation and no summing up afterwards, exactly as the manuscripts leave it.
The translation is from the Latin, complete, and it is prose, for the reason that governs the other verse volumes in this collection: what a reader wants from this poem is to be able to follow the argument, and the argument's signposts are what make seven thousand lines followable.
Mother of the sons of Aeneas, delight of men and gods, Venus who feeds us all: under the gliding signs of heaven you fill the ship-carrying sea and the crop-bearing lands with life. Through you every kind of living thing is conceived, and rises up, and looks at the light of the sun. From you, goddess, the winds run away. From you and from your coming the clouds of heaven run. For you the crafty earth sends up sweet flowers, for you the level water of the sea laughs, and the sky goes calm and shines with light poured out everywhere.
The moment the look of a spring day is uncovered, the moment the breeding breath of the west wind is unbarred and blowing, the birds of the air are the first to signal you and your arrival, goddess, with their hearts struck through by your power. Then the wild herds go bounding over the fat pastures and swim the fast rivers. Every one of them, caught by your charm, follows you eagerly wherever you lead. Then, all through the seas and the mountains and the tearing rivers, through the leafy houses of the birds and over the green plains, striking soft love into the breast of every one of them, you make them breed, kind after kind, and want to.
Since you alone govern the nature of things, and nothing without you comes up into the shining shores of light, and nothing is made glad or lovable without you, I want you with me while I write these verses. I am trying to set down the nature of things for our friend Memmius, whom you, goddess, have always wanted to be outstanding, and dressed in every excellence. All the more, then, give my words a charm that lasts.
And while I write, make the savage business of soldiering fall asleep and lie quiet over every sea and every land. You alone can help mortals to a quiet peace, because the savage business of war is governed by Mars, who is strong in arms, and Mars throws himself into your lap again and again, beaten by the wound of love that never heals. He looks up at you with his smooth neck bent back and feeds his hungry eyes on love, gaping at you, goddess, with his breath hanging on your mouth as he lies there. Pour your sweet talk over him, glorious one, while he lies back against your holy body and you bend around him, and ask for a quiet peace for the Romans. In this bad time for our country I cannot do this work with an untroubled mind, and the famous son of the house of Memmius cannot fail the common good at a moment like this.
For it must be that the whole nature of the gods, in itself, enjoys undying life in the deepest peace, cut off from anything to do with us, far away and separate. It is free of all pain, free of all danger, strong in its own resources, in need of nothing from us. It is not won over by our good behaviour and it is not touched by anger.
Now for the rest. Empty your ears, and bring me a sharp mind cleared of its worries, and listen to true reasoning. Do not throw away my gifts, laid out for you with faithful care, before you have understood them. I am going to begin explaining to you the highest law of heaven and of the gods. I am going to unfold the first-beginnings of things: the atoms, out of which nature makes everything, and feeds it, and makes it grow, and into which the same nature breaks it all down again when it is destroyed. In setting out the argument I am used to calling them the material of things, the bodies that do the begetting, the seeds of things, and, because everything comes first from them, the first bodies.
While human life lay on the ground in front of everyone's eyes, disgusting to look at, crushed under the weight of religion, which kept showing its head from the regions of the sky and standing over mortals with a horrible face, one Greek was the first man who dared to lift his mortal eyes against it, the first to stand up to it. Stories about gods did not stop him; neither did lightning, or the sky with its threatening rumble. If anything, they sharpened the keen courage of his mind, and made him want to be the first to break the tight bars on nature's gates. So the living force of his mind won through, and he went far outside the flaming walls of the world and travelled the whole immensity in mind and spirit; and out of that he brings us back, in victory, an account of what can come to be and what cannot, and on what principle each thing has its power limited, and a boundary stone driven deep. So now religion is under our feet in its turn, and trodden down, and that victory lifts us level with the sky.
The thing I am afraid of here is that you may think you are being started on the elements of an ungodly argument, and set on the road to crime. It is the other way round. It was that religion which again and again gave birth to criminal and ungodly acts.
Think of Aulis, and how the chosen leaders of the Greeks, the first men of the army, fouled the altar of the virgin goddess of the crossroads with the blood of Iphigenia. The woollen band was tied round her girl's hair and came streaming down evenly on both sides of her cheeks. She saw her father standing sadly in front of the altar, and beside him the attendants hiding the knife, and the people of her own country in tears at the sight of her. She was dumb with fear and sank to the ground on her knees. It did not help the poor girl at that moment that she had been the first to give the king the name of father. She was lifted by men's hands and carried shaking to the altar, not so that she could be escorted by a ringing wedding song when the solemn ritual was over, but so that at the very moment for marriage she could fall, clean and unclean, a victim cut down by the hand of her father, and give the fleet a lucky and favourable send-off.
That is how much evil religion has been able to talk people into.
You yourself, sooner or later, will want to break away from me, beaten by the terrifying words of the prophets. Of course you will. Think how many dreams they can invent for you, dreams that can turn your whole plan of life upside down and stir all your fortunes about with fear. And there is good reason for it. If people could see that there is a fixed end to their troubles they would have some grounds for standing up to the religions and the threats of the prophets. As it is, there is no way of standing up to them, no chance of it, because they have to be afraid of everlasting punishments after death. And that is because they do not know what the nature of the soul is: whether it is born with us, or slips into us instead when we are being born, and whether it is torn away by death and dies along with us, or goes to see the dark places and the huge pits of the underworld, or whether by some divine arrangement it slides into other animals, as our own Ennius sang. He was the first to bring down from lovely Helicon a crown of evergreen leaves, to be famous through the peoples of Italy. And yet Ennius also sets out, in verses that will last, that there are regions of the dead where neither our souls nor our bodies stay, but a sort of image of us, strangely pale. It was from there, he says, that the ghost of Homer, who is always in flower, rose up in front of him and began to pour out salt tears and to unfold the nature of things in words.
So we have to work out an account of the things above us: on what principle the sun and the moon make their journeys, and by what force everything happens down here on earth. And first of all we have to see with sharp reasoning where the soul and the nature of the mind come from, and what it is that meets us when we are awake and terrifies our minds when we are sick or buried in sleep, so that we seem to see, and to hear standing in front of us, people whose bones the earth is holding, who have met their death.
I know perfectly well that it is hard to throw light on the dark discoveries of the Greeks in Latin verse, above all because so much has to be done with new words, given how poor our language is and how new the subject matter. Still, your excellence and the pleasure I hope for from our friendship talk me into taking on any amount of work, and make me stay awake through quiet nights, hunting for the words and the poetry that will let me hold a bright light in front of your mind, so that you can see all the way into hidden things.
So this terror of the mind and this darkness have to be scattered. Not by the rays of the sun and the bright arrows of daylight, but by looking at nature and working out how it runs.
Here is the first principle we shall take as our starting point: nothing is ever produced out of nothing by any divine power. The reason all mortals are gripped by fear like this is that they see many things happening on earth and in the sky, and cannot in any way work out what causes them, and so they think it is done by a god's will. That is why, once we have seen that nothing can be created out of nothing, we shall then see more clearly what we are looking for: what each thing can be created from, and how each thing comes about, without any work of gods.
Take it that things could come out of nothing. Then anything could be born from anything; nothing would need a seed. Men could come up out of the sea, and the scaly kind out of the earth, and birds could burst out of the sky. Cattle and other herd animals, every kind of wild animal, would hold the farmland and the wilderness alike, with no rule about what gave birth to what. The same fruit would not stay on the same trees. It would change about, and any tree could carry anything. If each thing had no bodies of its own to be begotten from, how could anything have a mother that stayed the same? As it is, each thing is created out of fixed seeds, and grows up out of them, and comes out into the shores of light where its own material and first bodies are. That is why everything cannot be produced out of everything: each particular thing holds a power that is its own and kept separate.
Then again, why do we see the rose in spring, the corn in the heat, the vines pouring out their fruit when autumn calls them, if it is not that fixed seeds of things have flowed together at their own time, and whatever is being created is uncovered then, while the seasons are there and the living earth brings tender things out into the shores of light in safety? If they came out of nothing they would spring up suddenly at unpredictable intervals in the wrong parts of the year, because there would be no atoms to be kept apart from a breeding partnership at the wrong season.
Nor, if things could grow out of nothing, would there be any need of time for the seed to come together in as they grow. Small babies would turn into young men on the spot, and trees would leap up suddenly out of the earth, fully grown. Plainly none of that happens. Everything grows little by little, as you would expect from a fixed seed, and keeps its own kind as it grows. So you can be sure that every thing gets larger and is fed out of its own material.
Add to this that the earth cannot bring up its cheerful crops without the fixed rains of the year, and that the nature of living things, kept apart from food, cannot pass on its kind or keep its own life going. It is better to think of it this way: many things have many bodies in common, as we see letters shared between words, than that anything could exist without first-beginnings.
Finally, why could nature not have produced men on a scale that let them cross the sea on foot at the shallows and tear great mountains apart with their hands and outlive many generations of life, if not because a fixed material has been assigned to things for their begetting, and that fixes what can come out of it?
So we have to admit that nothing can be made out of nothing, since things need a seed, and it is from the seed that each of them can be brought out into the soft air.
Lastly, since we see that cultivated ground does better than uncultivated and gives back better fruit for the work of our hands, it follows that there are atoms in the earth which we stir into rising up when we turn the fertile clods with the ploughshare and work the soil of the land. If there were none, you would see everything getting a great deal better on its own, without any labour of ours.
Add to this that nature breaks each thing down again into its own bodies, and does not destroy things into nothing. If anything were mortal in all its parts, everything would be snatched from our eyes and perish on the spot. There would be no need of any force to break its parts apart and untie its knots. As it is, everything consists of everlasting seed, and so, until some force comes along to knock a thing apart with a blow, or to get inside through the empty spaces and break it up, nature does not let the destruction of anything be seen.
Besides, if time completely destroys the things it takes away with age, and eats up all their material, where does Venus bring the animals back into the light of life from, kind after kind? And where does the crafty earth find what feeds them and makes them grow, kind after kind, once they are back? Where do the springs that rise in the ground and the far-off rivers keep the sea supplied from? Where does the upper air feed the stars from? Endless time and all the days that have gone by ought to have used up everything that has a mortal body. But if the things out of which this whole sum of things is remade have existed through all that stretch of time gone by, then plainly they are furnished with an undying nature. So things cannot fall back into nothing.
And one last point. The same force and the same cause would finish everything off, all together, if there were no everlasting material, tangled up more or with less. A touch would be enough to bring death, since there would be nothing made of everlasting body whose weave a force would have to break. As it is, the knots that tie the atoms together are of different kinds, and the material is everlasting, and so things stay unhurt in their bodies until a force is found sharp enough to match the weave of each. So nothing goes back to nothing. Everything goes back at the break-up into the bodies of matter.
And in the end the rains die, when father sky has thrown them down into the lap of mother earth. But the bright crops rise up and the branches go green on the trees, the trees themselves grow and are weighed down with fruit; and from that our own kind and the animals are fed; from that we see happy cities in flower with children and the leafy woods singing everywhere with new birds; from that the tired cattle lay their fat bodies down through the glad pastures and the white milky liquid runs out of their swollen udders; from that the new young play about frisking on their weak legs through the soft grass, with their new little minds struck through by neat milk. So the things we see do not utterly perish, since nature makes one thing out of another and does not let anything be born unless death has helped it, somewhere else.
Now then. I have shown you that things cannot be created out of nothing, and that once born they cannot be called back to nothing. Still, in case you begin to distrust what I say because atoms cannot be made out by the eye, take in some further bodies which you must admit exist among things and cannot be seen.
To begin with, the driving force of the wind whips the sea, wrecks huge ships and scatters the clouds; sometimes it sweeps across the plains in a tearing whirlwind and strews them with great trees, and batters the mountain tops with forest-breaking gusts. That is how it rages, with a sharp roaring, and how the sea storms with a threatening rumble. So there is no doubt: winds are invisible bodies, which sweep the sea, sweep the lands, sweep the clouds of the sky, and snatch them about with a sudden whirl and knock them to pieces. They flow and spread their wreckage exactly the way the soft nature of water does when it is suddenly carried along in an overflowing river, when a great rush of water off the high mountains swells it with heavy rains and throws in broken branches and whole trees. Strong bridges cannot stand the sudden force of the water coming at them: that is how violently the river, made muddy by the great rain, drives at the piles with all its strength. It wrecks them with a huge noise, and rolls great rocks under its waves, and tears down whatever stands in the way of its flood. So the blasts of the wind must travel in the same way. When they have come down like a strong river in whatever direction, they push things in front of them and knock them over with repeated blows, and sometimes they catch them up in a twisting eddy and carry them off fast in a spinning whirl. So again and again: winds are invisible bodies, since in their actions and their behaviour they turn out to be rivals of great rivers, which have bodies you can see.
Then, again, we smell the different smells of things and yet we never see them coming to our nostrils. We do not look at heat, we cannot take hold of cold with our eyes, and we are not used to seeing voices. But all of these must be made of bodily stuff, since they can strike the senses. Nothing can touch or be touched except body.
Then again, clothes hung up on a shore where the waves break get damp, and the same clothes spread out in the sun dry off. But it was never seen how the moisture of the water settled into them, or how it ran away again in the heat. So the moisture is scattered into small parts which the eyes cannot see in any way at all.
More than that: with the sun coming back over many years, a ring on the finger is worn thin underneath by being worn. The dripping of water hollows out a stone. The curved iron ploughshare secretly grows smaller in the fields. We see stone paving worn away by the feet of the crowd. And the bronze statues by the gates show their right hands worn thin by the touch of people greeting them and passing by. So we see that these things get smaller, since they have been rubbed down. But nature, keeping it to herself, has shut off our view of the bodies that leave at any particular moment.
Finally, whatever the days and nature add to things little by little, forcing them to grow at their measured rate, no sharpness of the eye can make out however hard it strains; and the same with whatever shrinks with age and wasting, and with the rocks that hang over the sea and are eaten away by the gnawing salt: you cannot see what each of them loses at any given time. So nature carries on her business with invisible bodies.
And yet things are not held packed tight with body on every side. There is void in things. Knowing this will be useful to you in many places. It will stop you wandering about in doubt and asking forever about the sum of things, and distrusting what I say.
There is, then, a place that cannot be touched: empty, void. If there were not, things could not move in any way at all. The job that belongs to body is to get in the way and to block, and it would be doing that to everything all the time. So nothing could go forward, because nothing would ever start by giving way. As it is, all through the seas and the lands and the heights of the sky we see many things moving in many ways for many reasons in front of our eyes, and if there were no void they would not so much lack their restless motion as never have been produced at all, since matter would be jammed tight on every side and lying still.
Besides, however solid things are thought to be, you can see from this that they are made of thin body. In rocks and caves the liquid wet of water works its way through and everything weeps with fat drops. Food spreads itself out into the whole body of every animal. Trees grow and pour out their fruit in season, because the food is spread through the whole of them, from the deepest roots up through the trunk and along every branch. Voices go through walls and fly across the shut rooms of houses; stiff cold works its way in to the bones. If there were no empty spaces for these bodies to pass through, you would see none of it happening.
And finally, why do we see some things heavier than others when their size is no bigger? If there is as much body in a ball of wool as there is in a lump of lead, they ought to weigh the same, since it is the job of body to press everything downwards, while the nature of the void stays weightless. So a thing which is just as big and yet turns out lighter plainly declares that it has more void in it; and the heavier thing announces that it has more body in it and much less emptiness inside. So there is, beyond doubt, the thing we are hunting for with careful reasoning, mixed in with things: what we call the void.
There is one point here that I am forced to get in first, in case something certain people invent leads you away from the truth. They say that the waters give way to the shining scaly kind and open liquid roads for them, because the fish leave places behind them for the water to flow together into as it gives way; and that in the same manner other things can move about among themselves and change places, even though everything is full. That whole idea has been taken up on a false argument. Where, in the end, will the fish be able to go forward to, unless the water has given them room? And where will the waves be able to give way to, when the fish cannot go? So either we have to take motion away from every body, or we have to say that void is mixed in with things, and that this is where each thing gets its first start of moving from.
Lastly, if two broad bodies quickly bounce apart after coming together, all the air has to take over the void that is made between the bodies. However fast the air rushes together from all round it, still it cannot fill the whole space at one moment. It must occupy the first place, then the next, and then take possession of the whole. If someone happens to think that this happens because the air packs itself tighter when the bodies have sprung apart, he is wrong. In that case a vacuum is being made where there was none before, and a vacuum that was there before is being filled up again; and air cannot be packed tighter on that argument, and even if it could, it could not, I think, without void draw itself into itself and bring its parts together into one.
So, however long you hold things up by finding objections, you have to admit in the end that there is void in things. And I can scrape together a great many more arguments to give you confidence in what I say. But for a sharp mind these small tracks are enough, and you can work out the rest by yourself. Just as dogs very often find, by their noses, the leaf-covered resting places of a mountain-wandering wild animal, once they have got onto its sure tracks, so you will be able to see one thing after another for yourself in matters like these, and work your way into all the hidden dens and drag the truth out of them.
And if you are lazy about it, or back off from the subject even a little, here is what I can promise you plainly, Memmius: my sweet tongue will pour you out such generous draughts from great springs, out of a rich heart, that I am afraid slow old age may creep through my limbs and undo the bars of life in me before the whole store of arguments on any single question has been sent through your ears in verse.
But now, to take up the thread and go on weaving the argument: the whole of nature, taken by itself, consists of two things. There are bodies, and there is void, in which those bodies are placed and through which they move about in different directions. That there is body is declared by the common feeling of everyone; and unless there is a first belief founded firmly on that, we shall have nothing to refer back to in matters that are hidden, and no way of confirming anything by the reasoning of the mind. Then again, if there were no place and space, which we call void, bodies could not be situated anywhere at all, and could not travel about in any direction whatsoever. I showed you that a little earlier.
Besides, there is nothing you could name which is separate from all body and cut off from void, and which might be found as a sort of third nature. Whatever exists will have to be something in itself, whether its size is great or in the end small, so long as it exists. If it can be touched, however lightly and however little, it will increase the total of body and add itself to the sum. If it cannot be touched, and cannot in any part stop anything travelling through it, then plainly it will be the empty thing we call void.
Besides, whatever exists in itself will either do something, or have to be acted on by other things acting, or it will be such that things can exist and happen in it. But nothing can do anything or be acted on without body, and nothing can provide a place except empty void. So beyond void and bodies no third nature can be left over in the total of things, not one that ever falls under our senses at any time, and not one that anybody could grasp by the reasoning of the mind.
Everything else you can name will turn out to be either attached to these two, or something that happens to them. Attached means whatever can nowhere be separated and taken away without a fatal breaking up: weight for rocks, heat for fire, wetness for water, touch for all bodies, untouchableness for void. On the other hand slavery, poverty and riches, freedom, war, peace, and the rest, whose coming and going leaves the nature of a thing unhurt: these we are used to calling, as is right, events.
Time, likewise, does not exist by itself; but from things themselves there follows a sense of what has been done in the past, and then what is upon us now, and then what will come after. Nobody, we have to admit, feels time by itself, apart from the motion of things and their quiet rest.
And in the end, when people speak of the rape of the daughter of Tyndareus, and of the peoples born in Troy being beaten down in war, we have to be careful not to be forced into saying that these things exist by themselves, since the generations of men whose events they were have already been carried off, past recall, by time gone by. Any action whatsoever could be called an event, of the lands, or of the regions themselves. And in the end, if there had been no material of things and no place and space in which things happen, the fire lit by love of the beauty of Tyndareus's daughter, growing hot under the Phrygian breast of Paris, would never have set alight the famous struggles of savage war; and the wooden horse would never have set Troy on fire without the Trojans knowing, giving birth in the night to Greeks. So you can see all the way through this: things that were done do not exist in themselves, as body does, and cannot be said to exist in the way void does. It is more correct to call them events of body, and of the place in which things happen.
Now, bodies are partly atoms and partly the things that are made out of atoms coming together. As for the atoms, no force can put them out: they win in the end by being solid body.
It does seem hard to believe that anything can be found among things with a solid body. The lightning of the sky goes through the walls of houses, as shouting and voices do. Iron glows white in the fire, and rocks split apart in the fierce boiling heat. The stiffness of gold is undone and melts away in the heat, and the ice of bronze is beaten by the flame and turns to liquid. Heat works its way through silver, and so does penetrating cold, since we feel both when we are holding cups in our hands in the usual way and the dew of water is poured in from above. So it looks as if there is nothing solid among things at all. But because true reasoning and the nature of things force it, stay with me for a few verses while I show that there are things which consist of solid and everlasting body: what we teach are the seeds of things and the atoms, out of which the whole sum of things has now been created.
To begin with, since a double nature of two things has been found, utterly unlike each other, body and place, in which things happen, each of them has to exist by itself and pure. Wherever there is space, what we call void, there is no body; and wherever body holds itself, there is certainly no empty void. So the first bodies are solid and without void.
Besides, since there is void in the things that are born, there has to be solid matter round it. And nothing can be proved by true reasoning to hide void inside its own body and hold it there, unless you allow that what confines it is solid. And that can be nothing except a gathering of matter, which is able to hold in the void of things. So matter, which consists of solid body, can be everlasting, while the rest is broken down.
Then again, if there were nothing that could be called void, everything would be solid; and unless on the other hand there were fixed bodies to fill whatever places they held, all that exists as space would be empty void. So plainly body and void alternate, marked off from each other, since the total is neither properly full nor properly empty. There are, then, fixed bodies which can mark off empty space from full. These cannot be broken up when they are struck by blows from outside, nor unravelled by anything penetrating right into them, nor made to give way by any other attack, as I showed you a little earlier. For it seems that nothing can be knocked to pieces, or broken, or cut in two by splitting, without void; and nothing can take in wet, or seeping cold, or penetrating fire, which is what finishes everything off. And the more void a thing holds inside it, the more it gives way when these things get right into it. So if the first bodies are solid and without void, as I have shown, they must be everlasting.
Besides, if matter had not been everlasting, everything would before now have gone back completely into nothing, and everything we see would have been born again out of nothing. But since I showed above that nothing can be created out of nothing and that what has been born cannot be called back to nothing, the atoms must have an undying body, into which each thing can be broken down at its last hour, so that there is material available for things to be made again. So the atoms are of solid simplicity, and there is no other way they could have been kept through the ages and made things again out of an infinite time gone by.
Besides, if nature had set no limit at all to the breaking of things, the bodies of matter would by now have been ground so far down by the breaking of ages gone by that nothing conceived out of them could reach the full end of its life at its appointed time. For we see that anything at all can be pulled apart faster than it can be put back together. So whatever the long and endless age of all past time had already broken, disturbing it and dissolving it, could never be repaired in the time that was left. As it is, plainly a fixed limit to the breaking stands where it was set, since we see each thing repaired, and see that fixed periods are laid down for things, kind by kind, in which they can come to the flower of their age.
Add this as well. Though the bodies of matter are utterly solid, we can still give an account of everything that turns out soft — air, water, earth, hot vapours — of how they come to be and by what force each of them is carried on, since void has once and for all been mixed into things. But suppose instead that the atoms were soft. Then no account could be given of where hard flint and iron come from, because their whole nature will be short of a foundation to start from. So the atoms are strong in solid simplicity, and it is by packing them into a denser combination that everything can be pulled tight and made to show unbeatable strength.
Then again, if no limit has been set to the breaking of bodies, still some bodies must have survived out of everlasting time down to this moment, bodies not yet reported to have been tried by any danger. But since the things they talk about are furnished with a breakable nature, it does not fit that they could have lasted through everlasting time, worried as they are age after age by countless blows.
And finally: since a limit has been set, kind by kind, on how far things grow and how long they keep their life; since it stands laid down what each thing can do by the laws of nature and what it cannot; since nothing is changed about, but everything holds so firm that all the different birds show, one after another, the markings of their own kind on their bodies — then they must also have a body of unchangeable matter. For if atoms could be beaten and changed in some way or other, then it would be uncertain as well what could come to be and what could not, and on what principle each thing has its power limited and a boundary stone driven deep. Nor could the generations, kind after kind, bring back so regularly the nature, the habits, the food and the movements of their parents.
Then, further. Since there is an outermost tip to each of those bodies which our senses can no longer make out, that tip plainly exists without parts and is of the smallest nature there is. It never was separate on its own, and it never will be able to be, because it is itself a part of something else, its first and single part; and after it other parts, and others like them, in order, fill out the nature of the body in a packed column. Since these cannot exist on their own, they must cling together in a way that lets nothing prise them apart.
So the atoms are of solid simplicity, packed tight and holding closely together by these least parts — not put together out of any coming together of those parts, but strong instead in an everlasting simplicity, out of which nature, keeping seeds in reserve for things, allows nothing whatever to be torn away or taken off.
Besides, if there is no least thing, the very smallest bodies will consist of infinite parts, since a half will always have a half of its half and nothing will ever set a limit to it. What difference will there be, then, between the sum of things and the smallest thing in it? None at all. However utterly infinite the whole sum is, still the smallest things there are will consist of infinite parts just the same. Since true reasoning shouts this down and denies that the mind can believe it, you have to give in and admit that there are things which have no parts and are of the smallest nature; and since these exist, you must admit that the atoms themselves are solid and everlasting too.
Finally, if nature, the creator of things, were in the habit of forcing everything to be dissolved into least parts, she would not then be able to build anything up again out of them. The reason is that things not enlarged with parts cannot have the properties that begetting material has to have: the various connections, weights, blows, meetings and motions by which everything is carried on.
So those who thought that the material of things is fire, and that the sum of things consists of fire alone, plainly slipped a long way from true reasoning. The leader who goes into that battle first is Heraclitus, famous for his dark speech more among the empty-headed than among the serious Greeks, who are looking for the truth. For fools admire and love above everything the things they see hiding under upside-down words, and they set down as true whatever can prettily tickle the ear and is painted over with a charming sound.
For how, I ask, could things be so varied, if they are created out of one pure fire? It would be no help for hot fire to be packed close or thinned out, if the parts of fire had the same nature that the whole fire above them has. The burning would be sharper with the parts drawn together and slacker with them scattered and spread apart, and that is the whole of what you can suppose might come about from causes like these. Still less could so great a variety of things arise out of fires dense and rare.
There is this too. If they allow void to be mixed into things, then fires can be packed close and left rare. But because they see plenty of things rising up against them, and shrink from leaving pure void in things, they are afraid of the steep road and lose the true way. They do not see, on the other hand, that if void is taken out of things everything is packed close and one body is made out of them all, a body with no power to shoot anything off itself quickly, the way the heat-carrying fire throws out light and warmth. That lets you see that fire is not made of parts crammed tight.
But suppose they believe that fires can be put out in some other way when they combine, and can change their body. If they will not hold back from doing so in any part at all, then plainly all the burning will die away utterly into nothing, and whatever is created will be created out of nothing. For whenever anything is changed and steps outside its own limits, that is at once the death of what it was before. So something must survive unharmed in those fires, or everything will fall back into nothing for you, and the supply of things will be born again out of nothing and flourish.
Now then, since there are certain bodies of the surest kind which keep their nature always the same, and by whose going out or coming in and change of order things change their nature and bodies are turned into other bodies, you can see that these bodies of things are not fiery. It would make no difference for some of them to withdraw and go away, and others to be added, and some to be changed in order, if they all still kept the nature of heat: whatever they created would in any case be fire. The truth, I think, is this. There are certain bodies whose meetings, motions, order, position and shapes produce fire, and which, when their order is changed, change the nature of what they make; and they are not like fire, nor like anything else which can send bodies to the senses and touch our sense of touch by striking it.
To go further and say that everything is fire, and that no true thing exists in the number of things except fire, which is what this same man does, seems raving madness. He fights against the senses out of the senses themselves, and shakes loose the very thing on which all belief hangs, and by which the thing he calls fire has become known to him in the first place. For he believes that the senses know fire truly, and does not believe them about everything else, which is no less clear. That seems to me both empty and mad. Where shall we refer things to? What can be more certain for us than the senses themselves, by which we mark off true from false?
Besides, why should anyone do away with everything else and want to leave the nature of burning standing alone, rather than deny that fire exists and leave some other nature standing? It looks like an equal madness to say either.
So those who thought that the material of things is fire, and that the sum of things can consist of fire; and those who set air up as the beginning for the begetting of things; and any who thought that water shapes things all by itself, or that earth creates everything and turns into every nature of things — all of them plainly wandered a long way off from the truth. Add as well those who double the atoms, joining air to fire and earth to water, and those who think everything can grow out of four things: out of fire, earth, breath and rain.
First among them is Empedocles of Acragas, whom that three-cornered island carried on the coasts of its lands: the island that the Ionian sea flows round in great windings, splashing salt spray from its grey-green waves, and where a narrow channel divides with its rushing water the coasts of that island's territory from the shores of Aeolia. Here is the wasting whirlpool of Charybdis, and here the rumblings of Etna threaten to gather their angry flames together again, so that its force may spew out once more the fires torn from its throat and carry the lightning of its flame up to the sky once more. Now that region seems in many ways a great wonder to the peoples of men, and is said to be worth going to see, rich in good things and fortified with a great strength of men; and yet it plainly held in it nothing more famous than this man, nothing more holy, more wonderful, more dear. What is more, the songs of his godlike heart cry out and set forth his glorious discoveries, so that he hardly seems to have been created out of human stock.
Yet he, and the men I mentioned before, who are far beneath him and much smaller in a great many ways, though they found out many fine and godlike things and gave their answers as if out of the shrine of the heart, more holy and far more surely reasoned than what the Pythia pronounces from the tripod and the laurel of Apollo, still made their ruin over the atoms; and there, great as they were, they fell greatly and heavily.
First, because they set up motion with void taken out of things, and leave things soft and rare in existence — air, sun, fire, earth, animals, crops — and yet mix no void into their bodies. Next, because they will have it that there is no end at all to the cutting of bodies, and no stopping place for the breaking, and no least thing standing firm in things at all — when we see that the outermost tip of each thing is what seems least to our senses, from which you can work out that the things whose outermost tip you cannot see have one all the same, and that there is a least standing firm among things.
Add to this that since they set up soft atoms, which we see are born and have a mortal body, the whole sum of things would have to go back utterly into nothing by now, and the supply of things be born again out of nothing and flourish. You can grasp by now how far each of those is from the truth. Then again, the four are enemies to each other in many ways and poison to each other, so that when they meet they will either die or fly apart in the way we see lightnings and rains and winds fly apart when a storm has driven them together.
Finally, if everything is created out of four things, and everything is dissolved back into those things, why should they be called the atoms of things any more than things should be thought, backwards and the other way round, the atoms of them? They are begotten out of each other by turns, and they exchange colour and their whole nature with each other, and always have.
But suppose you think that the body of fire and earth, and the breezes of air, and the dew of water can meet in such a way that nothing changes its nature in the joining. Then nothing can be created for you out of them: nothing that breathes, and nothing with a lifeless body either, like a tree. In that mixed heap each of them will show its own nature, and air will plainly be seen staying mixed with earth, and heat staying mixed with a certain dew. But atoms, in the begetting of things, must bring in a hidden and unseen nature, so that nothing sticks out that fights against it and stops whatever is created from being properly itself.
What is more, they go back to the sky and its fires. First they make fire turn itself into the breezes of air; from there rain is begotten, and earth created out of rain; and then everything goes back the other way from earth, moisture first, then air, then heat; and these never stop changing into one another and travelling from sky to earth and from earth to the stars of the world. That is exactly what atoms must never do. Something unchangeable has to survive, or everything will be brought down utterly to nothing; for whenever anything is changed and steps outside its own limits, that is at once the death of what it was before. So, since the things I named a little earlier do come into a state of change, they must consist of other things which can never be turned into anything else, or everything will fall back into nothing for you. Why not rather set up certain bodies furnished with such a nature that, if they happen to have created fire, the same bodies can make the breezes of air, with a few taken away and a few given, and their order and motion changed, and all other things be changed in the same way into all others?
Here you object. The facts, you say, plainly show that all things grow up out of the earth into the breezes of air and are fed there; and unless the weather is kind at a lucky season with rains, so that the trees rock under the melting of the storm clouds, and unless the sun for its part warms them and gives them heat, crops and trees and living things could not grow.
Quite so. And unless dry food and soft moisture helped us, our body would be lost and all our life would be loosened out of all our sinews and bones. Beyond any doubt we are helped and fed by certain things, and other things are helped and fed by others. Plainly it is because many atoms, held in common in many ways by many things, are mixed together in things that different things are fed by different things. And it often makes a great difference which other atoms the same atoms are held together with, and in what arrangement, and what motions they give and take among themselves. For the same atoms make up sky, sea, lands, rivers, sun; the same make up crops, trees, living things; but they are mixed with different atoms and in a different way and so they move differently. Indeed you can see, scattered all through these verses of mine, many letters shared by many words, and yet you have to admit that the verses and the words differ from one another both in what they mean and in the sound they make. That is how much letters can do by nothing but a change of order. But the atoms of things can bring more than that into play, and out of them all the different things there are can be created.
Now let us also examine the homoeomeria of Anaxagoras, as the Greeks call it — the poverty of our native speech does not let us say the word in our own language, though it is easy enough to set the thing itself out in words. To begin with, what he calls the homoeomeria of things is this. Bones, he thinks, are begotten out of tiny little bones; flesh out of tiny little scraps of flesh; blood is created when many drops of blood run together with each other; he supposes that gold can consist of specks of gold, and earth grow together out of little earths, fire out of fires, moisture out of moistures; and he imagines and supposes the rest on a similar principle. And yet he does not allow that there is void in any part of things, or that there is any end to the cutting of bodies. So on both counts alike he seems to me to go wrong just as much as the men I spoke of before.
Add that the atoms he imagines are far too weak, if they are atoms which are furnished with the same nature as the things themselves, and suffer and perish just as those do, with nothing to rein them back from destruction. Which of them will hold out under a hard crushing, and escape death under the very teeth of destruction? Fire? Water? Air? Which of them? Blood, or bone? Not one, I think, when everything will be, on the same footing, as utterly mortal as the things we plainly see beaten by some force and perishing in front of our eyes. But that things cannot fall back into nothing, and cannot grow out of nothing either, I call to witness what has been proved above.
Besides, since food increases the body and feeds it, you can see that our veins and blood and bones and sinews are made of particles of a different kind from themselves. Or if they will say that all foods have a mixed body and hold in themselves small bodies of sinew, and bones, and veins as well, and parts of gore, it will follow that every food, dry or liquid alike, is to be thought to consist of things of another kind: of bones and sinews and matter and blood mixed together.
Besides, whatever bodies grow out of the earth, if they are in the earth, then the earth must consist of things of another kind which rise up out of the earth. Shift the argument across, and you may use the very same words: if flame and smoke and ash lie hidden in wood, then the wood must consist of things of another kind. Besides, whatever bodies the ground feeds and increases must be of another kind, things which rise up out of the wood.
At this point a certain slender chance of hiding is left, and Anaxagoras takes it for himself. He thinks that all things lie hidden mixed in with all things, and that the one thing which shows itself is the one whose mixed particles are most numerous, and lie more ready to hand and set in the front rank. That, though, is driven far away from true reasoning. For then it would be fitting that grains of corn, when they are crushed under the threatening strength of a stone, should often let out some sign of blood, or of something else that is fed in our body; and when we grind stone on stone, gore ought to ooze out. On the same principle grasses too ought often to let out sweet drops with the same taste as the milk in the udders of woolly sheep. Certainly, when clods of earth are crumbled up, we ought to see kinds of grasses and grains and leaves hidden there, scattered small among the soil; and finally, when wood is broken apart, we ought to see ash and smoke in it, and tiny fires lying hidden. Since plain fact teaches that none of this happens, you can see that things are not mixed with things in that way, but that seeds common to many things must lie hidden in things, mixed in many ways.
Here you object again. It often happens on great mountains, you say, that the topmost tips of tall trees close to one another are rubbed together, with strong south winds forcing them to it, until the flower of flame springs up and they blaze.
Quite so. And yet fire is not planted in the wood. There are many seeds of heat, and when the rubbing has made them flow together they create the fires in the forests. If ready-made flame lay hidden away in the forests, the fires could not be kept out of sight for any length of time; they would be finishing off the woods everywhere and burning the trees up. So do you see now, as I said a little while ago, that it makes an enormous difference which other atoms these same atoms are held together with, and in what arrangement, and what motions they give and take among themselves; and that the same atoms, changed a little among themselves, create fires and create wood? It is just like the words themselves, which are made by changing their letters a little among themselves: ligna, wood, and ignes, fires, are almost the same letters, and we mark them off with different sounds.
Finally, if you think that whatever you make out among things in the open cannot happen unless you imagine bodies of matter furnished with a nature like the thing they make, then on that reckoning the atoms of things are destroyed for you. It will come about that they are shaken by fits of laughter and roar out loud, and wet their faces and cheeks with salt tears.
Now come: learn what is left, and hear it more clearly. I am not blind to how dark these matters are. But the great hope of praise has struck my heart with its sharp staff of ivy, and at the same moment struck sweet love of the Muses into my breast; and driven on by that, with my mind in full strength, I go out on the road.
I am travelling over the pathless places of the Muses, where nobody's foot has trodden before. I love coming on springs nobody has touched, and drinking them dry; I love picking new flowers, and hunting from there a glorious crown for my head, from ground where the Muses have never yet veiled anyone's temples. First, because I am teaching about great matters, and going on to loose the mind from the tight knots of religion; and then because on so dark a subject I am making verses so clear, touching everything with the charm of the Muses. That too seems to have a reason behind it. It is like doctors trying to give children foul wormwood: first they brush the rim of the cup all round with the sweet yellow liquid of honey, so that the unthinking years of childhood are fooled as far as the lips, and meanwhile the bitter draught of wormwood is drunk right down. The children are tricked, but they are not trapped; instead they are put back on their feet that way and grow strong again. In the same way now, since this reasoning generally seems rather grim to those who have not handled it, and the crowd shrinks back from it, I have wanted to set our reasoning out for you in the sweet-speaking song of the Muses, and to touch it, so to speak, with their sweet honey, in the hope of holding your mind on my verses that way, until you see right through the whole nature of things and the shape in which it is put together.
But since I have taught that the utterly solid bodies of matter fly about unbeaten through all time, come now, let us unroll the question whether there is any limit to the sum of them or not. And likewise, about the void that has been found, place and space, in which everything is carried on, let us see clearly whether the whole of it is bounded through and through, or lies open immeasurable and vastly deep.
The whole of what exists, then, is bounded in no region of its ways; because it would have to have an outermost point. And plainly nothing can have an outermost point unless there is something beyond to set the boundary, so that a place can be seen past which the nature of our sense does not follow it. Now, since we have to admit that there is nothing outside the sum of things, it has no outermost point, and so it lacks any end or limit. And it makes no difference in which of its regions you take your stand. Whatever place a man has taken, he leaves the whole infinity just as great in every direction from himself.
Besides, suppose for the moment that the whole space that exists is set down as bounded. If someone ran out to the furthest coasts, right to the edge, and threw a flying spear, would you rather have it that the spear, hurled with strong force, goes where it was sent and flies far off, or do you think something could get in the way and block it? You have to admit and take up one or the other of the two, and each of them shuts off your escape and forces you to grant that the whole lies open with its boundary taken away. For whether there is something to check the spear and stop it coming where it was sent and planting itself at the boundary, or whether it is carried on outside, it did not start from a boundary. In this way I shall follow you, and wherever you put the furthest coasts I shall ask: what in the end becomes of the spear? It will turn out that a boundary can stand nowhere, and that the chance of further flight always puts the flight off further.
Besides, if the whole space of the entire sum were shut in on every side and stood inside fixed coasts, and were bounded, the supply of matter would by now have flowed together from every side to the bottom by its solid weights, and nothing could be carried on under the roof of the sky. Indeed there would be no sky at all and no light of the sun, since all the material would be lying in a heap, having been settling for an infinity of time already. As it is, plainly there is no rest given to the bodies of the atoms, because there is no bottom at all for them to flow together to, so to speak, and no place where they might take up a seat. Everything is always carried on in ceaseless motion, in every part, and swift bodies of matter are supplied from below, out of the infinite.
Finally, in front of our eyes one thing is seen to bound another. Air walls off the hills and mountains wall off the air; land bounds the sea, and the sea in turn bounds all lands. But as for the whole, there is nothing outside it to bound it.
So the nature of place and the space of the deep is such that the bright thunderbolts could not run through it in their course, gliding along the everlasting stretch of time, and could not bring it about at all that there is less left to go as they travel. So widely, in all directions, does a huge extent lie open for things, with boundaries taken away, on every side.
Nature keeps the sum of things from being able to set a measure to itself: she forces body to be bounded by void, and what is void to be bounded by body, and so by these alternations she makes the whole of it infinite. Or else, if one of the two does not set a boundary to the other, the one that is left would still stretch out unmeasured by its own single nature. Nothing holds together in any other way. Neither sea, nor earth, nor the bright regions of the sky, nor the race of mortals, nor the holy bodies of the gods could hold their place for the smallest space of an hour. For, driven out of its own gathering, the supply of matter would be carried, dissolved, through the great void; or rather it would never have come together and created anything at all, since scattered as it was it could not have been driven together.
For certainly the atoms of things did not place themselves each in their own order by design, with a shrewd mind, and they certainly did not make a bargain about what motions each of them should make. But because many of them, changed in many ways, are knocked about and driven by blows out of the infinite through the whole, they at last, by trying out every kind of motion and combination, come into the sort of arrangements in which this created sum of things stands. And once the sum of things had been thrown into fitting motions, and kept in them through many great years, it brings it about that the rivers fill the greedy sea again with the generous waters of their streams, and that the earth, warmed by the heat of the sun, renews what it brings forth, and that the race of living things springs up and flowers, and that the gliding fires of the upper air stay alive.
They would do none of this in any way at all if a supply of matter could not rise up out of the infinite, out of which they are used to repairing their losses in due season. For just as the nature of living things, robbed of food, wastes away and loses its body, so everything must be broken up as soon as material, turned aside from its path in one way or another, fails to be supplied. Nor can blows from outside keep the whole of every sum safe, whatever has been put together. They can hammer often, certainly, and hold part of it back until others arrive and the sum can be filled up. But now and then they are forced to bounce back and, in doing it, to grant the atoms of things both room and time for flight, so that they can be carried off free of the gathering. So again and again: many atoms must rise up. And even for the blows themselves to be able to keep coming, there is need of an infinite force of matter on every side.
In these matters, Memmius, run far from believing this: that everything presses towards the centre of the sum, as they say it does, and that the nature of the world therefore stands firm with no blows from outside, and that top and bottom cannot be broken apart in any direction because everything presses towards the centre — if you believe that anything at all can rest on itself. They say that the heavy bodies under the earth all press upwards and come to rest set backwards against the earth, like the reflections of things we now see in water. On the same principle they insist that living things wander about upside down and cannot fall out of the earth into the regions of the sky below, any more than our own bodies can fly of their own accord into the regions of the sky above; that when those creatures are looking at the sun, we are looking at the stars of the night; and that they share the seasons of the sky with us turn by turn, and pass nights matched with our days.
But an empty mistake has handed these dreams to fools, who have taken them up on a crooked argument. There can be no centre, when the whole is infinite; and even if there were a centre now, nothing could stand fixed there any more than it might be driven away from there for some quite different reason. For all place and space, which we call void, has to give way through the centre and through what is not the centre alike, wherever weights are carried by their motions. There is no place where bodies, when they have come there, can lose the force of their weight and stand still in the void; and what is void must not hold anything up, but must go on giving way, as its own nature demands. So things cannot be held together in a gathering in that way, beaten by a craving for a centre.
Besides, since they do not pretend that all bodies press towards the centre, but only those of earth and water — the moisture of the sea, and the great waves off the mountains, and whatever is held in, so to speak, by an earthen body — while on the other side they set out how the thin breezes of air and the hot fires alike are carried away from the centre, and how for that reason the whole upper air trembles all round with stars and the flame of the sun is fed through the blue of the sky, because all the heat fleeing from the centre gathers itself there; and how the topmost branches on the trees could not put out leaves at all, unless food came up to each of them, little by little, from the earth — since all this is what they pretend, all of it is patched together for one reason only. It is so that the walls of the world shall not suddenly fly apart in the manner of winged flames, dissolved through the great void, and so that the rest shall not follow them in the same way; so that the thundering regions of the sky shall not rush down from above, and the earth shall not snatch itself out from under our feet, and everything shall not go off, loosing its bodies, through the deep void, among the mingled wrecks of things and of the sky, so that in a point of time nothing at all is left over except deserted space and unseen atoms. For on whatever side you decide that bodies are lacking first, that side will be the door of death for things, and through it the whole crowd of matter will hurl itself out.
You will come to know all this thoroughly, led on by a little effort. One thing will grow clear from another, and blind night will not take the road away from you and stop you seeing all the way to the last things of nature. So things will kindle lights for other things.
It is sweet, when the winds are stirring up the water on the great sea, to watch from the shore another man's hard struggle. Not because there is any pleasure in seeing somebody in trouble, but because it is sweet to make out what troubles you are free of yourself. It is sweet, too, to look at the great contests of war drawn up across the plains when you have no share in the danger. But nothing is sweeter than to hold the high calm places, well walled and fortified by the teaching of the wise, and to be able to look down from there on other people and see them wandering all over the place, off the road, hunting for a way to live: competing in talent, struggling over rank, working nights and days with enormous effort to climb to the top of wealth and take possession of the world.
What miserable minds men have, what blind hearts! In what darkness, in what dangers, this little stretch of life, whatever it comes to, is spent! Can you not see that nature barks for nothing except this: that pain should be kept away and separated from the body, and that the mind should enjoy a pleasant feeling with worry and fear taken out of the way?
So we see that the nature of the body needs very few things altogether: only whatever takes the pain away, and whatever can also spread a good many delights underneath. Sometimes that is the more agreeable arrangement, and nature herself asks for nothing more, even if there are no golden statues of young men through the halls holding out fire-bearing lamps in their right hands to supply light for feasts at night, and the house does not shine with silver or glitter with gold, and no lyres go booming back off panelled and gilded ceilings; and yet all the same, stretched out together on the soft grass beside a stream of water under the branches of a tall tree, people take care of their bodies pleasantly at no great expense, especially when the weather smiles and the seasons of the year sprinkle the green grass with flowers. And hot fevers do not leave your body any sooner if you toss about on embroidered tapestries and blushing purple than if you have to lie on a poor man's blanket.
So, since treasures do nothing for our body, and neither does noble birth nor the glory of a kingdom, the next thing to think is that they do nothing for the mind either. Unless perhaps, when you see your legions boiling over the ground of the parade field, stirring up the images of war, steadied with great reserves and a force of cavalry, and your ships fitted out with weapons and all fired with the same spirit, it is at moments like that that your religious terrors take fright and run out of your mind in a panic, and the fears of death leave your breast empty and untied from care.
But if we see that all this is ridiculous, a joke; if in real truth men's fears and the cares that follow at their heels are not afraid of the clash of weapons or savage spears, but move about boldly among kings and the men who hold power, and are not overawed by the flash of gold or the bright splendour of purple clothing — then why do you doubt that the whole of this power belongs to reasoning? Especially when the whole of life is labouring in the dark. For just as children shake and are afraid of everything in the blind dark, so we are sometimes afraid in the light of things that are no more to be feared than the things children are frightened of in the dark and make up as about to happen. So this terror of the mind and this darkness have to be scattered. Not by the rays of the sun and the bright arrows of daylight, but by looking at nature and working out how it runs.
Now then, let me set out by what motion the begetting bodies of matter give birth to the different things there are, and dissolve them again once they are born, and by what force they are made to do it, and what mobility has been given them for travelling through the great void. Remember to hand yourself over to what I say. For matter certainly does not cohere packed tightly together, since we see everything getting smaller, and we can make out that everything, so to speak, flows away over the long stretch of time and that age withdraws it from our eyes — and yet the sum total seems to stay unharmed. And the reason is this: the bodies that leave any particular thing diminish what they go away from and give increase to what they come to. They force one thing to grow old and another to flower, and they do not linger there either. So the sum of things is always being renewed, and mortal creatures live by exchanging with one another. Some kinds grow and others dwindle, and in a short space of time the generations of living things are changed, and like runners they hand on the torch of life.
If you think the atoms can come to a stop, and by stopping give birth to new motions in things, you have wandered a long way off the road, away from true reasoning. Since they travel about through the void, all the atoms of things must be carried along either by their own weight or sometimes by a blow from another. For when in their speed they often meet and collide, the result is that they leap apart suddenly in different directions. And that is no wonder: they are as hard as anything can be, with solid weights, and nothing blocks them from behind.
And so that you can see better how all the bodies of matter are tossed about, remember that there is no bottom at all in the sum of things, and that the first bodies have nowhere to settle, since space is without end or limit. I have shown you in many places, and proved by sure reasoning, that it stretches out immeasurably in every direction on all sides. Since that is settled, then obviously no rest is granted to the first bodies through the deep void. Instead, driven by constant and varied motion, some of them are jammed together and bounce back over great intervals, while others are shaken about by the blow over short ones. And whatever atoms are carried together in a denser union and bounce back over tiny intervals, tangled up by their own interlocking shapes, these make the strong roots of rock and the savage bodies of iron and everything else of that kind. The few others that wander through the great void leap far apart and run far back again over great intervals: these supply us with thin air and the shining light of the sun. And besides these, many wander through the great void which have been thrown out of the unions of things and have never anywhere been taken in and got their motions to fit with the rest.
Of the thing I am describing here, a likeness and an image is always moving in front of our eyes and pressing on us. Look at what happens whenever the sun's light and its rays are let in and pour through the dark rooms of a house: you will see many tiny bodies mixing in many ways through the void in the very light of the rays, and, as if in a war that never ends, fighting battles and skirmishes, struggling squadron against squadron and never giving it a rest, kept busy by constant meetings and partings. From this you can work out what it is like for the atoms of things to be tossed about forever in the great void — at least so far as a small thing can give a model of great ones and put you on the track of knowledge.
There is another reason why it is right for you to turn your mind to those bodies that can be seen churning about in the sun's rays. Such churning is a sign that there are hidden and invisible motions of matter underneath it. For you will see many of them there, struck by invisible blows, change course, and be driven back and return, now this way, now that, in every direction everywhere. Plainly all this wandering comes to them from the atoms. First the atoms of things move by themselves. Then the bodies that are of small combination, and are, so to speak, closest to the strength of the atoms, are set going, driven by the atoms' invisible blows, and these in their turn provoke bodies a little bigger. So motion climbs up from the atoms and comes out little by little to our senses, until those bodies too are moved which we can make out in the sun's light, though it is not obvious by what blows they are doing it.
Now, Memmius, you can learn in a few words from this what mobility has been given to the bodies of matter. When dawn first sprinkles the lands with new light and the different birds flitting through the trackless woods fill the soft air with their liquid voices, we all see plainly and obviously how suddenly at such an hour the risen sun covers everything and drenches it with its own light. But that heat the sun sends out, and its clear light, do not travel through empty void, and so they are forced to go more slowly, because they are beating their way through waves of air, as it were. And the little bodies of the heat do not travel one at a time but bound together and balled up with each other, so that they are held back by each other and blocked from outside at the same time, and that forces them to go more slowly. But the atoms, which are of solid simplicity, when they travel through the empty void with nothing outside to hold them back, and are themselves one thing made out of their own parts, and are carried, straining, to the one place they set out for — those must beyond any doubt beat everything for mobility, and be carried much faster than the light of the sun, and run across many times as much space in the same time it takes the sun's flashes to spread over the sky. People do not follow up the atoms one by one to see on what principle each thing is carried on.
But there are some who set themselves against all this, knowing nothing about matter, and say that nature cannot without the will of the gods change the seasons of the years with such adjustment to human needs, and produce the crops, and all the other things that divine pleasure, the guide of life, persuades mortals to go for and leads them to herself, coaxing them through the works of Venus to keep the generations going so that the human race will not die out. When they imagine that the gods set the whole thing up for the sake of men, they seem in every way to have slipped a long way from true reasoning. For even if I knew nothing about what the atoms of things are, I would still dare to affirm this from the very workings of the sky, and to make it out from a great many other things as well: that the nature of this world was in no way created for us by divine power — it stands there with so much wrong with it. That, Memmius, we shall make clear for you later on; now let me unfold what is left about motions.
Now is the place, I think, to establish this too for you in this business: nothing bodily can be carried upward or travel upward by its own force. Do not let the bodies of flame play a trick on you here. Flames are born growing upward and take their increase upward, and shining crops and orchards grow upward, at a time when all weights, so far as it lies in them, are carried downward. And when fires leap up to the roofs of houses and taste the beams and rafters with a quick flame, you must not think they do it of their own accord with no force underneath them. It is the same as when blood is let out of our body: it spurts up high, leaping, and scatters gore.
And do you not see, too, how much force water throws beams and rafters back with? The harder we push them straight down, and the more of us press them down with all our strength and with difficulty, the more eagerly the water pushes them up and sends them back, so that more than half their length comes out and shoots into the air. And still I do not think we doubt that all of them, so far as it lies in themselves, would be carried downward through the empty void. So in the same way flames must be able, when they are squeezed out, to rise up through the breezes of the air, although their weights, so far as it lies in them, are fighting to draw them down. Do you not see the torches of the night flying high in the sky, and the long trails of flame they draw after them in whatever direction nature has given them a way through? Do you not make out stars and constellations falling to the earth? The sun too, from the top of heaven, scatters its heat in every direction and sows the fields with light: so the sun's heat is turned toward the earth as well. And you can make out lightning flying sideways through the rain, when the fires break out of the clouds now from here, now from there, and run together. The force of flame falls to earth all the time.
There is something else in this business I am eager for you to learn. When the atoms are being carried straight downward through the void by their own weights, at quite uncertain times and in uncertain places they push a little way out of their course — just enough that you can call it a changed motion. If they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall downward like drops of rain through the deep void; no collision would ever come about, and no blow would be produced among the atoms; and so nature would never have created anything at all.
And if anyone happens to believe that heavier bodies, because they are carried faster straight down through the void, can fall from above on the lighter ones and so produce blows able to give rise to the motions that beget things, he has backed a long way off the road, away from true reasoning. Whatever falls through water or through thin air has to speed up its fall in proportion to its weight, and for this reason: the body of water and the thin nature of air cannot hold each thing back equally, but give way faster when they are beaten by heavier ones. The empty void, on the other hand, cannot support anything on any side or at any time, but goes on giving way, as its own nature demands. So everything must be carried at the same rate through the still void, even though the weights are not the same. Therefore heavier bodies will never be able to fall on the lighter ones from above, and never able to produce by themselves the blows that vary motions and let nature carry on her business.
So again and again: the atoms must swerve a little out of line. But no more than the smallest amount, or we shall look as if we are inventing sideways motions, and the facts will refute us. For this much is plain and obvious to see: weights, so far as it lies in them, cannot travel sideways when they fall headlong from above — you can make that out for yourself. But that nothing at all swerves from the straight line of its road: who is there who can make that out by his own senses?
Finally, if all motion is always linked together, and new motion arises out of old in a fixed order, and the atoms do not by swerving make some beginning of motion that breaks the laws of fate, so that cause need not follow cause from infinity — then where does this free will come from that living things all over the earth have? Where, I say, does this will torn loose from the fates come from, by which we go forward wherever pleasure leads each of us, and by which we swerve our own motions in the same way, not at a fixed time or in a fixed place, but wherever our own mind has taken us? For beyond doubt in these matters it is each man's own will that gives the start, and it is from there that motions are watered out through his limbs.
Do you not see too, when the starting gates are thrown open at a point of time, that the eager strength of the horses still cannot burst out as suddenly as the mind itself is longing to? Because the whole supply of matter through the whole body has to be roused first, so that once it is roused through every joint it can strain and follow the eagerness of the mind. So you can see that the beginning of motion is created out of the heart, and comes first from the will of the mind, and from there is passed on through the whole body and the limbs.
It is not the same as when we go forward driven by a blow, by somebody else's great strength and great compulsion. Then it is quite clear that all the matter of our whole body goes and is carried off against our will, until our will has reined it back in through the limbs. Now do you see that although an outside force pushes many people and often compels them to go forward against their will and be snatched along headlong, there is still something in our breast that can fight back and stand in the way? And at its decision the supply of matter is sometimes forced to be bent about through the limbs and the joints, and, after being thrown forward, is reined in and settles back.
So you have to admit the same thing in the seeds of things: that there is another cause of motion besides blows and weights, and that this is where this power we are born with comes from — since we see that nothing can come out of nothing. For weight prevents everything from happening through blows, by an outside force, as it were. But that the mind itself should not have an inward necessity in everything it does, and should not be forced, like a conquered thing, to bear and suffer — that is done by the tiny swerve of the atoms, at no fixed place and no fixed time.
The supply of matter was never packed more tightly than it is now, and never separated by greater intervals either. For nothing is added to it and nothing is lost from it. So the motion the bodies of the atoms are in now is the motion they were in in ages gone by, and after this they will always be carried along in the same way; and the things that have been used to being born will be born on the same terms, and will exist and grow and be strong in their force, as much as has been granted to each by the laws of nature. And no force can change the sum of things. For there is nothing outside the whole for any kind of matter to escape into out of it, and nowhere outside from which a new force could rise up and burst into the whole and change the whole nature of things and turn their motions about.
There is nothing to wonder at in this either: that while all the atoms of things are in motion, the sum total still seems to stand at absolute rest, except where something makes motions with a body of its own. For the whole nature of the atoms lies far below the reach of our senses; and so, since you cannot make out the atoms themselves, their motions must be stolen away from you as well. Especially since things we can make out often hide their motions all the same, when they are separated from us by a stretch of ground.
Often on a hillside woolly sheep crop the glad pasture and creep about wherever the grass, jewelled with fresh dew, is calling each of them and inviting her, and the well-fed lambs play and butt gently at each other; and all of it seems blurred together to us at that distance, and looks like a patch of white standing still on a green hill. Besides that, when great legions fill the ground of the plains at a run, stirring up the images of war, when the flash of them rises to the sky and the whole earth all around shines back with bronze, and beneath them a noise is struck out by the strength of the men's feet, and the mountains, hit by the shouting, throw the voices back to the stars of the world, and the cavalry fly around them and suddenly ride across the middle of the plain, shaking it with the force of their charge — even then there is a certain place up in the high mountains from which they seem to be standing still, and the flash of them to be sitting motionless on the plains.
Now then, next take in what the atoms of all things are like, and how far apart they are in their forms, and how varied they are with shapes of many kinds. Not that only a few of them are furnished with a like form, but that they are not generally all the same as one another. And that is no wonder: since there is such a supply of them that, as I taught you, they have no end and no total, they must certainly not all be spun of the same thread and marked with the same shape.
Besides, take the human race, and the mute swimming flocks of the scaly kind, and the glad herds, and the wild beasts, and the different birds — the ones that crowd the glad places of the water around the banks and the springs and the lakes, and the ones that flit about and fill the trackless woods. Go and take any one of them you like, kind by kind, and you will still find that they differ from each other in shape. There is no other way the young could recognise their mother, or the mother her young — which we see they can do, and they are known to each other no less than human beings are.
For often, in front of the beautiful shrines of the gods, a calf falls slaughtered beside the incense-burning altars, breathing out a hot river of blood from its breast. But the mother, robbed of it, ranges over the green woodland and knows the footprints pressed into the ground by cloven hoofs. She goes over every place with her eyes to see if she can catch sight anywhere of the young one she has lost, and she stands still and fills the leafy wood with her complaints, and comes back again and again to the stall, pierced through with longing for her calf. Tender willows, and grasses quickened with dew, and rivers gliding along at the top of their banks cannot give her mind any delight or turn that sudden pain away, and the other shapes of calves about the glad pastures cannot draw her mind off it or lighten her care. That is how much she is looking for something of her own that she knows.
Besides, tender kids with their trembling voices know their horned mothers, and butting lambs know the flocks of bleating sheep; and so, as nature demands, each of them runs to its own udder of milk. Lastly, take any grain you like: you will still see that not every kernel in its own kind is like the others, and that some difference of shape runs through them. In the same way we see the kinds of shells painting the lap of the earth where the sea with its soft waves feeds the thirsty sand of a curving shore. So again and again, by the same reasoning, since the atoms of things exist by nature and were not made by hand to one fixed pattern, some of them must fly about with shapes unlike each other.
It is very easy for us to work out by the reasoning of the mind why the fire of lightning is far more penetrating than our fire, which rises from pine torches on earth. You can say that the heavenly fire of the lightning is finer and is made of smaller shapes, and so passes through holes that this fire of ours, born from wood and made out of pine, cannot get through. Besides, light passes through horn, but rain is thrown back. Why, unless the bodies of light are smaller than the ones the kindly liquid of water is made of? And we see wine flow through a strainer as quickly as you like, while sluggish olive oil hangs back — no doubt because it is made either of larger elements, or of ones more hooked and folded together with each other, and so it comes about that its atoms cannot be pulled apart from one another suddenly enough to seep, one by one, through the holes of a thing, one by one.
Add to this that the liquids of honey and milk are handled with a pleasant feeling by the tongue in the mouth, while the foul nature of wormwood and of savage centaury twists the mouth up with its disgusting taste. So you can easily recognise that the things able to touch the senses pleasantly are made of smooth round atoms, while whatever seems bitter and rough is held tied together by more hooked ones, and so is in the habit of tearing open a way into our senses and breaking through the body as it comes in.
In short, everything good to the senses and everything bad to the touch are at war with each other, having been made of unlike shapes. Do not imagine, for instance, that the harsh horror of a screeching saw is made of elements as smooth as the tunes of the Muses which the players shape on the strings, woken by their moving fingers. And do not think that atoms of a like form work their way into people's nostrils when foul corpses are being burned and when the stage is freshly drenched with Cilician saffron and the altar beside it is breathing out the perfumes of Panchaia. And do not set it down that the good colours of things, the ones that can feed the eyes, are made of a like seed as the ones that stab at the eyesight and force it to water, or that look foul and ugly with a foul appearance. For everything that soothes the senses has not been created without some smoothness in its atoms; while whatever is troublesome and rough is not found without some roughness of matter.
There are some, too, which are rightly thought to be neither smooth nor altogether hooked with bent points, but rather to have little angles sticking out a little way, so that they can tickle the senses rather than hurt them. The lees of wine are of that kind by now, and the flavours of elecampane.
Finally, that hot fires and icy frost bite at the senses of the body with differently toothed atoms is shown to us by the touch of each of them. For touch — by the holy powers of the gods! — touch is the sense of the body: whether it is something from outside working its way in, or something born in the body that hurts, or that delights as it goes out through the begetting works of Venus, or whether the seeds are disturbed by a collision inside the body itself and, stirred up, confuse the sense with one another. You can find that out if you happen to strike any part of your own body with your hand and try it. So the shapes of the atoms must differ widely, since they can produce such different sensations.
Finally, whatever seems to us hardened and thick must be held together by atoms more hooked into each other and compacted deep down by ones that are, so to speak, branched. In this class, in the front rank, stand diamond stones, used to despising blows, and strong flints, and the toughness of hard iron, and the bronze bars that scream as they resist the bolts. But the things that are liquid and made of a flowing body must be made rather of smooth round atoms, because the little globes of them are not held together with each other; a drink of poppy seeds goes down as easily as a drink of water, and once it is knocked it likewise rolls away down a slope.
Finally, whatever you see scattering in a moment of time, like smoke and cloud and flame, must, if it is not made altogether of smooth round atoms, at any rate not be tangled up with interlocking ones — since they can prick the body and get through rocks, and yet do not stick to each other. Whatever you see is toothed to the senses you can easily recognise as made not of interlocking atoms but of sharp ones.
But when you see that some of the same things which are fluid are bitter as well, like the sweat of the sea, that ought not to surprise you in the least. Because it is fluid, it is made of smooth round atoms, but there are painful hooked bodies mixed in among the smooth ones. And these do not have to be hooked to be held: clearly, though they are rough, they are still round enough to roll along and hurt the senses at the same time. And so that you may believe all the more that rough atoms are mixed with smooth ones, which is where the harsh body of Neptune comes from, there is a way of separating them and seeing them apart. Sweet water, when the same water is filtered over and over again through the earth, runs into a hollow and grows mild: it leaves the atoms of the foul brine behind it up above, since the rough ones can more easily stick fast in the earth.
Now that I have taught you this, I will go on to link on to it something that follows from it and draws its credit from it: the atoms of things vary in a limited number of shapes. If that were not so, some seeds would have to be of infinite bodily size. For within one and the same small size of any body, the shapes cannot vary much from each other. Suppose the first bodies consist of three least parts, or add a few more. When you have put all the parts of one body at the top and at the bottom, swapped the right ones and the left, and tried out in every possible way what appearance of form each arrangement gives to the whole of that body, then, for what is left, if you happen to want to vary the shapes further, you will have to add other parts. After that it follows, by the same reasoning, that the arrangement demands still other parts, if you happen to want to vary the shapes further again. So an increase in the body follows on every novelty of form. Therefore you cannot believe that the seeds differ in an infinite number of forms, unless you want to force some of them to be of a monstrous hugeness, which I taught above cannot be proved.
By now barbarian robes, and the gleaming Meliboean purple touched with the Thessalian colour of the shellfish, and the golden generations of peacocks steeped in their laughing charm, would all be lying beaten by some new colour of things; the smell of myrrh and the flavours of honey would be despised; and the swan's tune and the artful songs of Apollo on the strings would be crushed in the same way and go silent. For something better than the rest would always be coming up. And in the same way everything could go backward into worse parts, just as we said it could go forward into better ones; for something more disgusting than the rest would also be coming up the other way, for the nostrils, the ears, the eyes and the taste of the mouth. Since that is not how things are, and since fixed limits have been assigned to things which hold the sum in on either side, you have to admit that matter differs in a limited number of shapes too.
Finally, from fire all the way to the icy frosts of winter is a limited distance, and it is measured back again the same way. For all the heat and cold and the middling warmths lie between the two, filling out the total in their order. So created things differ within a limited range, since they are marked off at each end by a double-headed point, plagued by flames on one side and by stiff frost on the other.
Now that I have taught you this, I will go on to link on to it something that follows from it and draws its credit from it: the atoms of things which are made of a shape like one another are infinite in number. Since the variety of forms is limited, the ones that are alike must be infinite, or else the total of matter would be finite — and I have proved that it is not. Let me show you in these verses that the little bodies of matter hold up the sum of things out of infinity, with an unbroken team of blows pulling from every side.
For although you see that some animals are rarer than others, and can make out that nature is less fruitful in them, still in another region and place, in far-off lands, there may be many of that kind and the number may be filled up. Just as among four-footed animals we see the snake-handed elephants first of all: India is walled about with many thousands of them, an ivory rampart, so that it cannot be penetrated deep inside — such is the force of those beasts, of which we see very few examples.
But even so, let me grant this as well: let there be, if you like, some one unique thing born with a body of its own, with nothing like it in the whole round of the lands. Still, unless there is an infinite force of matter for it to be conceived and produced from, it will not be able to be created, or, what is more, to grow and be fed. Suppose in fact that a limited number of the begetting bodies of one thing were tossed about through the whole: where and when and by what force and in what way would they meet and come together in such a great sea of matter and in a crowd of strangers? They have no way, I think, of coming together at all.
But just as, when great and many shipwrecks have come about, the great sea usually scatters the rowing benches, the hulls, the yardarms, the prow, the masts and the swimming oars, so that along all the shores of the lands the broken stern-fittings are seen floating and give a sign to mortals, so that they may be willing to avoid the traps and the force and the trickery of the treacherous sea, and never at any time trust it when the sly seduction of the calm water is smiling: in just the same way, if you once lay it down that certain atoms are limited in number, then the different tides of matter must scatter them and fling them apart through the whole of time, so that they can never be driven together into a union, or stay in a union once they are in it, or grow by increase. But plain fact teaches that both of these obviously happen: that things are begotten, and that once begotten they can grow. So it is plain that in every kind whatever the atoms of things are infinite, and that everything is supplied from them.
And so the motions that bring destruction cannot win forever and bury life for eternity; and, on the other hand, the motions that beget things and make them grow cannot keep what has been created forever either. So the war of the atoms, drawn out from infinite time, is fought on equal terms. Now here, now there, the life forces of things win, and are beaten in their turn. Mixed in with the funeral is the wailing that children raise as they come to see the shores of light. No night has ever followed a day, and no dawn a night, that has not heard, mixed in with those sickly cries, the sound of mourning, the companion of death and of a black funeral.
There is one more thing in all this that you should keep sealed up and stored away in a mind that does not forget. Among the things whose nature lies open in front of us, there is nothing that is made out of one kind of atom only, and nothing that is not put together out of mixed seed. And the more powers and properties a thing has in it, the more it shows you that there are many kinds of atoms inside it, and many different shapes.
Take the earth first. It has atoms in it out of which the springs, rolling their cold water, keep the measureless sea renewed without a break. It has atoms out of which fires can rise, since the ground is alight and burning in many places, and the rush of Etna rages up out of the deepest fires of all. It has atoms out of which it can raise shining crops and cheerful orchards for the human race, and out of which it can supply rivers and leaves and glad pastures to the mountain-roaming kinds of wild animals. That is why she alone has been called the great mother of the gods, and the mother of the wild animals, and the one who gave birth to our own bodies.
The old learned poets of the Greeks sang of her sitting in her chariot and driving a team of two lions, and by that they were teaching that the great earth hangs in the space of the air and that earth cannot rest on earth. They yoked wild animals to her car, because however savage the offspring, it has to be beaten down and made gentle by the services of its parents. They ringed the top of her head with a crown of city walls, because she carries cities on her, fortified in their choice positions. Decorated with that badge, the image of the divine mother is carried now through great countries, and people shudder as it goes by.
Many different nations, following the old custom of the rites, call her the Mother of Ida and give her Phrygian bands for company, because they say that it was from those lands that grain first began to be produced through the whole circle of the world. They assign to her the Galli, the castrated priests, because they want to show that men who have violated the divine power of the Mother and been found ungrateful to their parents ought to be judged unfit to bring a living child out into the shores of light. Tight drums thunder under their palms, hollow cymbals crash all round, horns threaten with a harsh-sounding song, and the hollow pipe goads their minds with a Phrygian beat. They carry weapons out in front of them, the signs of a violent madness, weapons that can terrify the ungrateful minds and ungodly hearts of the crowd with dread of the goddess and her power.
So, the moment she is driven into the great cities and, saying nothing, blesses mortals with a silent greeting, they strew the whole road she takes with bronze and silver, making her rich with lavish offerings, and they make rose petals fall like snow, shadowing the Mother and the band of her attendants. Here an armed troop, whom the Greeks call the Curetes, if it happens so, plays among the Phrygian companies and leaps in time, glad with blood, shaking the terrifying crests on their heads with a nod. They are meant to recall the Curetes of Dicte, who, so the story runs, once drowned out that crying of the infant Jupiter in Crete, when the boys, in arms, danced their quick dance around the boy and beat bronze on bronze in time, so that Saturn should not catch him and put him in his jaws and give the mother an everlasting wound deep in her heart. That is why armed men escort the great Mother. Or else it is because they mean by it that the goddess is telling men to be willing to defend the land of their fathers with weapons and with courage, and to make themselves a protection and a credit to their parents.
However well and however finely all this is arranged as it is handed down, it is a long way off from true reasoning. For it must be that the whole nature of the gods, in itself, enjoys undying life in the deepest peace, cut off from anything to do with us, far away and separate. It is free of all pain, free of all danger, strong in its own resources, in need of nothing from us. It is not won over by our good behaviour and it is not touched by anger. As for the earth, it has no sensation at any time; it is only because it holds the atoms of many things that it brings many of them out into the light of the sun in many ways. And here, if somebody decides to call the sea Neptune and the crops Ceres, and prefers to misuse the name of Bacchus rather than say the proper word for the liquid, let us allow him to go on calling the round earth the mother of the gods, as long as in real fact he keeps himself from touching his mind with a foul religion.
So it often happens that woolly sheep cropping the grass in one field, and the warlike offspring of horses, and the herds of horned cattle, under the same covering of sky, quenching their thirst out of the water of one river, live with unlike looks and keep their parents' nature and copy their parents' habits, kind by kind. So great is the difference in the material in any sort of grass you like, so great in any river too.
Then again, take any one living creature you like out of them all: bones, blood, veins, heat, moisture, flesh and sinews make it up, and these are things that differ from each other by a long way, and they are finished out of atoms of unlike shape.
Then again, whatever burns and is consumed by fire lays up in its body, if nothing else at all, at least the atoms out of which it can throw fire and send up light and drive out sparks and scatter ash far and wide. If you travel over everything else with the same reasoning of the mind, you will find that things hide the seeds of many things in their bodies and hold different shapes.
Finally, you see many things that have colour and taste given to them together with smell, and above all most of the fruits of the trees. So these must be made of different shapes. The scent gets in where the dye does not travel into our limbs, and the dye works its way into the senses one way and the taste another, so that you can know that they differ in the shapes of their atoms. So unlike forms come together into one lump, and things are made of mixed seed.
Yes, and everywhere in these very verses of mine you see many letters shared between many words, and yet you have to admit that the verses and the words are made out of different letters, each from each. It is not that few letters run through them in common, or that no two words at all are made of the same ones throughout, but that as a general rule they are not all the same as all. So it is with other things too. While many atoms are shared between many things, the things can still be made of a whole that is unlike from one to another. So it is fair to say that the human race, and the crops, and the cheerful trees are made of different atoms.
Still, you must not think that all things can be joined together in every way. If they could, you would see monsters born on every side: half-beast shapes of men coming into being, tall branches sometimes growing out of a living body, limbs of sea creatures joined to land creatures, and nature feeding Chimaeras, breathing flame out of a foul mouth, all over the earth that gives birth to everything. Plainly none of this happens. We see that everything is created out of fixed seeds and from a fixed mother, and can keep to its own kind as it grows. Of course this has to happen on a fixed principle. Out of all the food, the bodies that belong to each thing pass inside into its limbs, and there they are joined and produce the motions that suit it; while on the other side we see nature throwing back onto the ground what is foreign to it, and many bodies flee out of the body, driven by invisible blows, because they could not be joined to any part of it, or, once inside, agree with the motions of life and copy them.
And in case you happen to think that living things alone are held by these laws, the same principle sets a limit to everything. Just as all created things are unlike each other in their whole nature, so each of them must be made of atoms of an unlike shape. Not that few of them are furnished with a similar form, but that as a general rule they are not all the same as all. And since the seeds differ, there must be differences in their intervals, their paths, their connections, their weights, their blows, their meetings and their motions, which do not only keep the bodies of living creatures apart, but separate the lands and the whole sea and hold the whole sky away from the lands.
Now come and take in this teaching, hunted out by my sweet labour, in case you happen to think that the white things you see shining in front of your eyes are made of white atoms, or that the things that look black are born of black seed, or that anything steeped in any colour at all carries that colour because the bodies of its material are dyed a colour like it. For the bodies of matter have no colour at all, neither like the things nor unlike them. And if it happens to seem to you that the mind can throw no grip onto bodies of that kind, you are wandering a long way off the road. People born blind, who have never made out the light of the sun, still recognise bodies by touch, bodies that from the beginning of their lives have had no colour attached to them. So you can be sure that our minds too can come to know bodies that have no dye smeared round them. And besides, whatever we touch ourselves in blind darkness, we do not feel it dyed with any colour.
Since I am winning the point that it can be so, I shall now teach you that it is so. Every colour changes into every other colour, without exception, and atoms must not do that in any way. Something unchangeable has to survive, or everything would be reduced completely to nothing. For whatever is changed and moves outside its own limits, that is at once the death of what it was before. So take care not to touch the seeds of things with colour, or everything will go back completely to nothing for you.
Besides, if no nature of colour is given to atoms, and they are furnished instead with various forms out of which they produce and vary colours of every kind, since it makes a great difference which seeds are held with which and in what arrangement, and what motions they give and take from one another, then you could give the reason at once, and very easily, why things that were black in colour a moment ago can suddenly become as white as marble, as the sea does when great winds have stirred up its level plains and it is turned into white waves of gleaming marble. You could say that when the thing we often see as black has had its material mixed up, and the order of its atoms changed, and some added and some taken away, the immediate result is that it looks glowing and white.
But if the level waters of the sea were made of blue seeds, they could not turn white in any way. However you disturb blue things, they can never pass over into the colour of marble. And if the seeds that make the one pure sheen of the sea are dyed one colour and another, in the way that something square, one shape, is often made out of other forms and various shapes, then it would follow that, just as in the square we can see the unlike forms in it, so in the level water of the sea, or in any other single pure sheen you like, we should see colours that were far unlike one another and various. Besides, the unlike shapes do not get in the way of the whole and stop it being square on the outside, but the different colours of things do get in the way and stop the whole thing having a single sheen.
Then again, the reason that leads us on and tempts us to attribute colours to atoms sometimes falls to pieces, since white things are not created out of white things, and the things that are called black are not made out of black ones, but out of various colours. In fact white will come up far more readily born of no colour at all than born of black, or of any other colour that fights against it and stands in its way.
Besides, since colours cannot exist without light, and atoms do not come out into the light, you can be sure how little they are wrapped in any colour. What sort of colour could there be in blind darkness? In the light itself a colour changes, and for this reason: it flashes back differently as it is struck by a straight or a slanting light. Look at the feathers on a dove's neck in the sun, the ones that are set round the back of the neck and crown the throat. Sometimes they turn red as bright gold-bronze, and sometimes it happens that, to a certain feeling, they seem to mix green emeralds in among the blue. And a peacock's tail, when it is filled with plenty of light, changes its colours in the same way as it turns. And since those colours are produced by a certain blow of light, you can be sure that without that blow they cannot happen at all.
And since the pupil of the eye takes into itself one kind of blow when we say it feels the colour white, and another kind when it feels black and the rest, and since it does not matter what colour the things you touch may happen to be furnished with, but rather what shape they have, you can be sure that atoms have no need of colour: they deliver varying touches by their varying forms.
Besides, since a particular colour does not belong to a particular shape, and all the shapings of atoms can be found in any sheen you like, why are the things made out of them not equally soaked with colours of every kind in every kind of thing? It would follow that ravens, flying, should often throw off a white colour from white feathers, and that swans should turn black from black seed, or be of any other colour you like, single or various.
Yes, and the more anything is torn apart into small pieces, the more you can see the colour fading away little by little and going out. That is what happens when a piece of bright cloth is picked apart into small parts: the purple, and the scarlet, much the brightest of colours, is completely ruined when it is pulled to pieces thread by thread. From that you can know that the little parts breathe out all their colour before they break down into the atoms of things.
Lastly, since you admit that not all bodies send out a voice or a smell, it follows that you do not assign sounds and smells to all of them. In the same way, since we cannot make out everything with our eyes, you can be sure that some things are as bereft of colour as others are without any smell and far from any sound, and that a keen mind can grasp these things no less than it can note the things that lack some other quality.
But in case you happen to think that atoms are left stripped of colour alone: they are also cut off from warmth, and from cold, and from hot steam altogether, and they travel sterile of sound and starved of taste, and they throw no smell of their own off their bodies. It is like this. When you set about making the sweet liquid of marjoram and myrrh, and the flower of nard that breathes nectar to the nostrils, the first thing you have to look for is the nature of an oil of olives with no smell in it, as far as you may and can find one, which sends no breath at all to the nostrils, so that it may do as little as possible to spoil the scents mixed and cooked in its body by handling them with a strength of its own. For the same reason, atoms must not bring their own smell to the things they beget, or their own sound, since they can send nothing off themselves, nor in the same way any taste at all, nor cold either, nor heat or warm steam, nor any of the rest. All those qualities are such that they belong to mortal things: the limp with a soft body, the crumbling with a brittle one, the loose-textured with a hollow one. They must all be kept separate from atoms, if we want to lay undying foundations under things for the whole of their safety to rest on, or everything will go back completely to nothing for you.
Now, whatever we see having sensation, you must all the same admit is made out of atoms that have no sensation. The plain facts, the things known and lying open in front of us, do not refute this and do not fight against it. Instead they lead us by the hand and force us to believe that living things are born out of things without sensation, which is what I am saying. You can see living worms coming up out of foul dung when the soaked earth has caught rot from unseasonable rains.
Besides, all things in the same way turn themselves into other things. Rivers, leaves and glad pastures turn into cattle, and cattle turn their nature into our bodies, and often out of our bodies the strength of wild animals grows, and the bodies of the strong-winged birds. So nature turns all foods into living bodies and produces out of them all the sensations of living creatures, in much the same way as she unfolds dry logs into flames and turns everything into fire. Do you see now, then, that it matters a great deal in what order the atoms of things are each of them set, and mixed with which others they give and take their motions?
Then again, what is it that strikes your mind itself, and moves it and forces it to bring out all these different arguments against believing that a thing with sensation is born out of things without it? No doubt it is this: that stones and wood and earth, even when they are mixed together, cannot deliver a living sensation. So it will be right to remember this much in these matters. I do not say that sensations are produced straight away out of absolutely everything that creates things which have sensation. It matters a great deal, first, how small the atoms are that make the sensitive thing, and what shape they are furnished with, and finally what their motions, arrangements and positions are. We see none of this in logs and clods, and yet, when these have been rotted, so to speak, by the rains, they give birth to little worms, because the bodies of matter, stirred out of their old arrangements by a new circumstance, are brought together in the way that living things have to be produced.
Next there are those who lay it down that a thing with sensation can be created out of things that have sensation, and those in turn out of others that are accustomed to feel. They make their atoms soft, since all sensation is tied to flesh and sinews and veins, and we see that all such things are soft and made of a mortal body. But let us grant, for now, that these can stay everlasting. Even so, they must either have the sensation of a part, or be reckoned to be like whole living creatures. But parts cannot possibly feel by themselves, since the mind refuses all sensation to the limbs on their own, and a hand cut off from us, or any other part of the body at all, cannot hold sensation on its own. What is left is that they are like whole living creatures, so that they can share, all through, in a living sensation.
How, then, can they be called the atoms of things, and dodge the roads of death, when they are animals, and animals are one and the same thing as mortals? And even suppose they could dodge them: by meeting and combining they would make nothing but a mob and a crowd of living creatures, exactly as men and cattle and wild animals could not produce anything at all among themselves by coming together. And if by chance they let go of their own sensation inside a body and take on another, what was the use of assigning them the thing that is taken away again? Then besides, to go back to the argument we poured out before, since we see the eggs of birds turn into chicks, and worms boil up out of the earth when it has caught rot from unseasonable rains, you can be sure that sensations can be produced out of things that have no sensation.
And if somebody happens to say that sensation can arise out of what has no sensation to this extent only, by a change, or because it is brought forth by something like a birth, it will be enough to make it plain to him and prove to him that there is no birth unless a combination has been formed first, and that nothing is changed without a joining together.
To begin with, no body can have sensations before the nature of the living creature itself has been produced. Obviously that is because its material is held scattered about through air and rivers and lands and the things the land creates, and has not yet come together and brought into one the motions of life that suit it, the motions that light up the all-seeing senses which watch over every living creature.
Besides, a blow greater than its nature can stand strikes any living creature down on the spot and goes on to throw all the sensations of its body and its mind into confusion. The positions of the atoms are dissolved and the motions of life are blocked deep inside, until the material, shaken all through the limbs, unties the living knots of the soul from the body and throws the soul out, scattered, through all the passages. For what else can we suppose a blow delivered on a thing can do, except shake it apart and dissolve every bit of it?
It also often happens that, when the blow delivered is less sharp, the motions of life that are left win through. They win, and they quiet the huge uproar of the blow, and call each thing back into its own channels, and shake apart the motion of death that is already taking control in the body, and light up the senses that were almost lost. For otherwise, by what means could things gather their minds and come back to life from the very doorstep of death, rather than go on to where they have nearly finished their run, and go away?
Besides, pain is when the bodies of matter, stirred up by some force through the living flesh and through the limbs, shake in their places inside; and a soothing pleasure comes when they move back into place again. So you can be sure that atoms cannot be assaulted by any pain and cannot take any pleasure out of themselves, since they are not made of any atoms whose new motions could hurt them, or from which they could pick some fruit of kindly sweetness. So they must not be furnished with any sensation at all.
Finally, if in order for every living creature to be able to feel we now have to assign sensation to its atoms, what about the ones that the human race in particular is built out of? Naturally they laugh out loud, shaken by a shivering laughter, and sprinkle their faces and their cheeks with dewy tears, and they are clever enough to say a great deal about the mixture of things, and to go on and ask what atoms they themselves are made of. For since they are like whole mortal creatures, they too must be made out of other elements, and those out of others again, so that you would never dare to make a stop anywhere. I shall follow you wherever you go: whatever you say talks and laughs and thinks, I shall say is made of other things that do the same. But if we see that all this is raving nonsense, and that a man can laugh without being built out of laughing things, and can think and give his reasons in learned words without being made out of wise and eloquent seeds, why can the things we see having sensation not be mixed out of seeds that lack sensation altogether?
Finally, we all rise from heavenly seed. There is one father of us all, and when the kindly mother earth has taken in from him the drops of flowing moisture, she is pregnant and gives birth to the shining crops and the cheerful trees, and to the human race, and to all the generations of wild animals, since she supplies the food on which they all feed their bodies and lead a sweet life and pass their offspring on. That is why she has fairly won the name of mother. In the same way, what was earth before goes back into the earth, and what was sent down from the shores of the upper air is carried back again and taken in by the regions of the sky.
And death does not destroy things in such a way as to finish off the bodies of matter. It only scatters their combination, and then joins one thing to another and brings it about that all things change their forms and alter their colours and take on sensations and give them back in a moment of time. So you can know that it matters, for the atoms of things, which others they are held with and in what arrangement, and what motions they give and take from one another; and that you must not think that what we see floating on the surface of things, and sometimes born and suddenly dying, belongs for ever to the atoms. Why, even in these very verses of mine it matters which letters each of them is set with and in what order. The same letters mean sky, sea, lands, rivers, sun, and the same letters mean crops, trees, living creatures. If they are not all of them the same, at least much the greatest part is, and it is by their arrangement that the things they mean are told apart. It is the same in things themselves: when the intervals of the material, and the paths, the connections, the weights, the blows, the meetings, the motions, the order, the arrangement and the shapes are all changed about, then the things too must be changed.
Now bring your mind to bear on true reasoning. A new thing is struggling hard to reach your ears, and a new face of things to show itself to you. But there is nothing so easy that it is not harder to believe at first than it is afterwards, and equally there is nothing so great and nothing so wonderful that everyone does not gradually stop being amazed by it. Take the clear pure colour of the sky first, and everything it holds in it, the stars wandering all over, the moon, and the brilliance of the sun with its splendid light. If all of these were now there for mortals for the first time, if they were suddenly thrown in front of them with no warning, what could have been called more wonderful than these things, or what would the nations have dared less to believe could exist? Nothing, I think: so amazing would that sight have been. And now nobody, worn out and full up with the sight of it, thinks it worth lifting his eyes to the shining regions of the sky. So stop spitting out this reasoning from your mind, terrified by its sheer newness. Weigh it instead with a sharp judgement, and if it seems true to you, give in; and if it is false, arm yourself against it. For the mind asks for an account. Since the sum of space out there beyond the walls of this world is infinite, it asks what there is out in it, out where the mind wants to look on and on, and where the free flight of the spirit flies away by itself.
To begin with, in every direction all round us, on both flanks, above and below, through the whole, there is no end. I have shown it, and the thing itself cries it out loud of its own accord, and the nature of the deep shines out with it. Now that empty space stretches without limit in every direction, and the seeds are numberless in number and fly about in every way through the unfathomable whole, driven by an everlasting motion, there is no way at all that it can be thought likely that this one circle of earth and this one sky have been created, and that all those bodies of matter out there are doing nothing. Especially since this world was made by nature, and the seeds of things, of their own accord, by chance, knocking against each other, driven together in many ways at random, in vain and with no result, at last fell into the combinations which, once they had been suddenly thrown together, could become the beginnings of great things again and again: of earth and sea and sky and the race of living creatures. So again and again you have to admit that there are other gatherings of matter elsewhere, like this one that the upper air holds in a greedy embrace.
Besides, when there is plenty of material ready, and space to hand, and no thing and no cause holds it back, then things must certainly be carried through and completed. And now, if there is such a supply of seeds that all the lifetimes of living creatures could not count them, and if the same nature stays there, able to throw the seeds of things together into each place in the same way as they have been thrown together here, then you have to admit that there are other worlds in other parts of space, and other races of men and other generations of wild animals.
Add to this that in the sum of things there is nothing that is one alone, nothing born unique that grows up single and by itself without belonging to some kind and without there being a great many others of the same sort. Look at living creatures first, with your mind as your guide. You will find that the mountain-roaming kinds of wild animals are like this, and so is the twin offspring of men, and so, in the end, are the silent flocks of scaly fish and all the bodies of flying things. On the same principle, then, you must admit that the sky and the earth and the sun, the moon, the sea and everything else that exists are not unique, but rather beyond counting in number, since the boundary stone of life is driven just as deep and waits for them just as surely, and they are made of a body that was born just as much, as every kind here on earth that is so crowded with members of its own sort.
If you hold all this well understood, nature is seen at once to be free, rid of her proud masters, doing everything of her own accord, herself, by herself, with no gods involved. For, by the holy hearts of the gods, which pass a calm age and a serene life in a quiet peace, who has the power to rule the sum of the immeasurable? Who has the power to hold the strong reins of the deep in his hand and drive with them? Who can turn all the skies at once, and warm all the fruitful lands with the fires of the upper air, and be present in all places at all times, so as to make darkness with clouds and shake the calm parts of the sky with noise, and then throw down thunderbolts, and often knock his own temples about, and go off into the deserts and rage there, practising with the weapon that so often passes the guilty by and takes the life of people who do not deserve it and have done nothing wrong?
And long after the world's birth-time, and after the first day of the sea and the earth and the rising of the sun, many bodies have been added from outside, many seeds added all round, which the great whole brought together in its hurling, so that the sea and the lands could grow bigger from them, and the house of the sky could get more room and lift its high roofs far off the earth, and the air could rise up. For from all places the blows distribute to each thing the bodies that belong to it, and they all retire to their own kinds: moisture goes to moisture, earth grows with an earthy body, fires forge fire and the upper air forges upper air, until nature, the creator who finishes things off, has brought everything to the final limit of growing. That is what happens when there is no more being put inside the veins of life than what flows away and retires. This is the point where the age of every thing has to stop; this is the point where nature curbs the increase with her own forces.
For whatever you see growing bigger with a glad increase, climbing step by step to the stage of full growth, takes more bodies into itself than it sends out of itself, as long as all its food is easily put into its veins, and as long as it is not so widely spread out that it sends much back and spends more than its age feeds on. Certainly one must give in and admit that many bodies flow away and retire from things; but more must come in, until they have touched the highest peak of growing. From then on age breaks their strength and their full-grown vigour little by little, and melts away into the worse part. For the bigger a thing is, once its growth is taken away, and the broader it is, the more bodies it scatters in every direction all round and sends off itself. Its food is not easily distributed through all its veins, and there is not enough of it, compared with the lavish exhalations it steams off, to let it be resupplied and kept going. So things fairly perish, when they have been thinned out by all that flowing away, and when they go down under blows from outside, since at a great age the food fails at last, and bodies never stop hammering at a thing from outside and finishing it off and mastering it with hostile blows.
So in the same way the walls of the great world all round will be stormed and will give way and fall into rotting ruins. Food is what has to restore everything by making it new, food that has to prop it up, food that has to hold everything up, and it will be no use, since the veins cannot take in what is enough, and nature does not supply as much as is needed.
Even now the earth's age is broken, and the earth, worn out with childbearing, scarcely creates small animals, she who created all the generations and gave birth to the huge bodies of wild animals. It was not, I think, a golden rope that let the generations of mortals down from the sky above into the fields, and it was not the sea or the waves beating on the rocks that created them: it was the same earth that gave birth to them that now feeds them out of herself. Besides, of her own accord she first created the shining crops and the glad vineyards for mortals, and of herself she gave the sweet fruits and the glad pastures, which now scarcely grow big even when our labour is added to them. We wear out the oxen and the strength of the farmers, we use up the iron, and we are barely fed by the fields: that is how much they hold their yield back and multiply the work.
And now the old ploughman shakes his head and sighs, more and more often, that the great labours of his hands have come to nothing; and when he sets the present times beside the times gone by, he keeps praising his father's luck. The planter of a shrivelled old vine is gloomy in the same way, and blames the way the times are moving, and wears the age out with complaining, and grumbles on about how the old generation, full of respect for the gods, got through life very easily on a narrow plot, when each man's measure of land was far smaller than it is now. He does not grasp that everything is little by little wasting away and going to the grave, worn out by the long stretch of its years.
You, who first were able to raise so clear a light out of such darkness, and to light up what is good in life: you I follow, glory of the Greek people, and I set my own feet now in the marks your feet pressed into the ground. It is not so much that I want to compete with you. It is love, and the longing to copy you. What can a swallow do against swans? What could kids on their shaky legs manage in a race against the strength of a powerful horse? You are our father, the man who found out the nature of things; you supply us with a father's teaching; and out of your pages, famous one, we feed on all your golden sayings, the way bees in flowering meadows sip from everything. Golden sayings, and always the most worthy of everlasting life.
For the moment your reasoning begins to cry out and to declare the nature of things, born from a mind like a god's, the terrors of the mind scatter, the walls of the world part, and I see things going on all through the void. The divine power of the gods comes into view, and their quiet dwellings, which no winds shake, which no rain clouds spatter, which no snow packed hard by sharp frost harms as it falls white; a sky forever cloudless roofs them over and laughs with light poured out wide. Nature supplies them with everything, and nothing at any time nibbles at the peace of their minds. But the regions of Acheron are nowhere in sight, and the earth is no bar to seeing everything that goes on below, under our feet, through the void. At all this a kind of divine pleasure takes hold of me, and a shudder with it, because by your power nature has been laid open like this, so plainly, uncovered on every side.
And since I have taught you what the atoms of all things are like, how they differ in their many shapes, how they fly about of their own accord, driven by an everlasting motion, and in what way each thing can be created out of them, the next thing after that is plainly this: the nature of the mind and of the soul must now be made clear in my verses, and that fear of Acheron must be driven headlong out of doors, the fear that stirs up human life from the very bottom and washes everything over with the blackness of death, and leaves no pleasure clear and pure.
Men will often tell you that they are more afraid of diseases and of a life of disgrace than they are of the underworld of death; that they know the nature of the mind is blood, or wind if that is the way the whim takes them; and that they have no need of this reasoning of ours at all. From what follows you can see that all of this is thrown out for the sake of praise rather than because the thing itself has convinced them. Take those same men, driven out of their country, banished far from the sight of other people, fouled with some disgraceful charge, worn down in the end by every kind of misery: they go on living, and wherever the poor wretches come, they still make the offerings to their ancestors, still slaughter black sheep, still send gifts down to the gods of the dead; and in their bitter state they turn their minds far more sharply to religion.
That is why it is better to watch a man in doubt and in danger, and to learn who he is when things go against him. Only then are true words drawn up out of the bottom of his chest; the mask is torn off, and what is real is left. Then again, greed, and the blind hunger for high office, which drive miserable men to step over the boundaries of law and sometimes to be partners and servants in crime, straining night and day with enormous effort to come out on top of the heap: these wounds of life are fed in no small part by the fear of death.
For disgrace and contempt and grinding poverty generally look a long way from a sweet and settled life, and look like a kind of loitering already at the gates of death. So while men are driven by a false terror and want to escape those things and put a great distance between themselves and them, they build up a fortune out of the blood of their fellow citizens, they greedily double their riches, piling killing on killing; they take a cruel delight in the sad funeral of a brother, and they hate and fear the tables of their own kin. In just the same way, and out of the same fear, envy wastes them away: that man is powerful in front of their eyes, that man is stared at, walking in bright office, while they, they complain, are rolling about in darkness and mud. Some of them destroy themselves for the sake of statues and a name.
And often the fear of death takes such a hold on people that a hatred of living and of seeing the light comes over them, and with grief in their hearts they put themselves to death, forgetting that this fear is the spring their troubles rise from. It is this fear that eats away their sense of shame, this that talks them into breaking the ties of friendship and overturning duty altogether. Before now men have betrayed their country and their dear parents in the attempt to keep clear of the regions of Acheron. For just as children tremble and are afraid of everything in the blind dark, so we are sometimes afraid in the light of things that are no more to be feared than the ones children shudder at in the dark, and imagine are coming for them. So this terror of the mind and this darkness have to be scattered. Not by the rays of the sun and the bright arrows of daylight, but by looking at nature and working out how it runs.
First, then, I say that the mind, which we often call the intelligence, and in which the planning and the steering of life is located, is a part of a man no less than the hand and the foot and the eyes are parts of a whole living creature. There are people who hold that the mind's power of feeling is not located in any fixed part, but is a kind of living condition of the body, which the Greeks call a harmony: that this is what makes us live with feeling, though the intelligence is not in any one part. Just as we often say that a body is in good health, and yet the health is not one part of the healthy man, so they refuse to put the mind's feeling in a fixed part. In this they seem to me to go badly wrong, and in several directions at once.
For often the body, which is out where we can see it, is sick, while we are enjoying ourselves in some other part that is hidden away; and often it happens the other way round in turn, when a man who is wretched in his mind is enjoying himself all through his body. It is exactly like a sick man whose foot is in pain while his head, all the while, happens to be in no pain at all. Besides, when the limbs are given up to soft sleep, and the loaded body lies sprawled and without feeling, there is still something else in us which at that very time is stirred in all sorts of ways and takes into itself every motion of joy and all the heart's empty cares.
Now, so that you can also recognise that there is a soul in the limbs, and that the body is not in the habit of feeling by any harmony: to begin with, a great deal of the body is often taken away, and yet life stays on in what is left of the limbs. And then again, when a few bodies of heat have scattered and some air has been let out through the mouth, that same life abandons the veins on the spot and leaves the bones. From this you can see that not all the bodies in us play equal parts, or hold up our welfare equally; it is rather these, the seeds of wind and of warm vapour, that see to it that life stays in the limbs. So there is a life-giving heat and wind in the body itself, and it is this that leaves our limbs when we are dying. Therefore, since the nature of mind and of soul has been found to be a part of a man, so to speak, hand back the name harmony, which was brought down to the musicians from high Helicon; or else the musicians got it from somewhere else themselves and carried it across to this thing, which at the time had no name of its own. Whatever the truth of that is, they are welcome to it. You take in the rest of what I have to say.
Now, I say that mind and soul are held joined to each other and make one nature out of themselves, but that the head of it, so to speak, the thing that rules in the whole body, is the planning power which we call the mind and the intelligence, and that this stays fixed in the middle region of the chest. This is where fear and dread leap; around this place delight strokes us soothingly; here, then, is where the intelligence and the mind are. The rest of the soul, spread out through the whole body, obeys, and moves at the mind's nod and impulse. The mind, by itself and through itself alone, has understanding for itself and takes joy for itself, at times when nothing at all is stirring either soul or body.
And just as, when the head or an eye is hurt in us by the attack of pain, we are not tortured all through the body, so the mind is sometimes hurt on its own, or thrives with delight, while the rest of the soul through the limbs and joints is not stirred by anything new. But when the mind has been shaken by a more violent fear, we see the whole soul feeling it too, all along the limbs. Sweat and paleness break out over the whole body; the tongue is broken and the voice fails; the eyes go dark, the ears ring, the joints give way. In fact we often see men drop down from terror of the mind. So anybody can easily learn from this that the soul is joined to the mind, and that when it has been struck by the mind's force it shoves the body in turn, and hits it.
This same reasoning teaches that the nature of the mind and of the soul is bodily. For when it is seen to drive the limbs on, to snatch the body out of sleep, to change the face, to steer and turn a whole man about, and when we see that none of this can happen without touch, and no touch without a body, must we not admit that mind and soul are made of bodily stuff? Besides, you can see for yourself that the mind suffers along with the body and feels along with the body in us. If the horrible force of a weapon, driven inside, does not reach the life even though it has laid the bones and sinews open, still a faintness comes on afterwards, and a welcome sinking to the ground, and once the man is on the ground a churning that rises in his mind, and now and then a half-hearted wish to get up. So the nature of the mind must be bodily, since it suffers under bodily weapons and blows.
What sort of body this mind of yours has, and what it was put together out of, I shall now go on to explain to you. To begin with, I say that it is extremely fine and is made of extremely small bodies. That this is so you can see by turning your mind to what follows.
Nothing is seen to happen as fast as what the mind proposes to itself and starts by itself. So the mind stirs itself more quickly than any of the things whose nature is out in front of our eyes. But what is as mobile as that must be made of seeds that are exceedingly round and exceedingly small, so that they can be moved by a push that is small. Water is moved and flows at the tiniest push, because it is created of shapes that roll and are small. Honey, on the other hand, has a more settled nature; its liquid is more sluggish and its movement more hesitant, because the whole store of its material clings together more, and for the obvious reason: it is not made of bodies as light, or as fine and round.
A light breath of air, hanging over a high heap of poppy seed, is enough to make the pile pour away from the top for you; but the same breath cannot do it at all to a pile of stones or of ears of corn. So, just in proportion as bodies are the smallest and the lightest, they enjoy mobility; and on the other hand, whatever things are found to be heavier and rougher, the more stable they are. Now then: since the nature of the mind has been found to be outstandingly mobile, it must be made of bodies that are small and smooth and round. Once you know this, my good friend, you will find it useful in many matters, and it will prove to have come at a good time.
Here is one more thing that shows what the nature of the mind is: how fine the weave it is made of, and in how small a space it would hold itself if it could be rolled up into a ball. As soon as the untroubled quiet of death has taken hold of a man, and the nature of his mind and soul has gone away, you cannot make out that anything at all has been taken from the whole body, either in looks or in weight: death gives you everything except the feeling of life and the warm vapour. So the whole soul must be knitted together out of exceedingly small seeds through the veins and flesh and sinews, so much so that when the whole of it has already left the whole body, the outermost outline of the limbs still keeps itself intact and not a scrap of weight is missing.
It is the same when the bouquet of wine has faded, or when the sweet breath of a perfume has escaped into the air, or when the flavour has gone out of some body. The thing itself does not look at all smaller to the eye for that, and nothing has been taken away from its weight; and for the obvious reason, that many tiny seeds make up the flavours and the smell in the whole body of a thing. So again and again: you can know that the nature of mind and soul is created out of exceedingly tiny seeds, since when it flies away it carries off nothing of the weight.
All the same, we must not think this nature of theirs is a simple one. A thin sort of breath leaves the dying, mixed with heat, and the heat in its turn draws air along with it; and there is no heat at all which does not have air mixed into it, since its nature is loose in texture and a great many atoms of air must be moving about among it. So the nature of the mind has now been found to be threefold. And yet all these together are still not enough to create feeling, since the mind does not accept that any of them can create the motions that carry feeling, let alone the thoughts that a man turns over in his mind.
So some fourth nature has to be added to these as well. It is altogether without a name. Nothing exists more mobile than it, or finer, or made of smaller and lighter elements, and it is the first to spread the motions that carry feeling through the frame. For it is stirred first, being finished out of small shapes; then the heat and the unseen power of the wind take up the motion, then the air, then everything is set moving. The blood is shaken; then all the flesh feels it through; last of all it is handed on to the bones and the marrow, whether it is pleasure or the opposite burning. And pain cannot get in this far, nor a sharp trouble seep through, without everything being thrown into such disorder that there is no room left for life and the parts of the soul scatter away through every pore of the body. But usually these motions come to an end at about the surface of the body, and that is why we are able to keep hold of our lives.
Now, how they are mixed with each other and by what arrangement they work: the poverty of my native language drags me away from setting that out, much as I want to. Still, I shall touch on it, as far as I am able to touch on it in a summary.
For the atoms of these first things run about among each other with their own motions, so that no single one of them can be separated off, and its power cannot act divided off in a space of its own. They are like many powers in a single body. In the flesh of any living creature there is generally a smell and a certain colour and a taste, and yet out of all of these one complete bulk of body is made. In the same way, heat and air and the unseen power of the wind, mixed together, create one nature, along with that mobile force which shares out the start of motion from itself to them, and it is from there that the motion which carries feeling first rises through the flesh.
For this nature lies right down deep and underneath. There is nothing further down than this in our body, and it is itself the soul of the whole soul. Just as in our limbs and in our whole body the force of the mind and the power of the soul are mixed in and hidden, because they are created out of small and few bodies, so this nameless force, made of tiny bodies, is hidden away, and is itself the soul, so to speak, of the whole soul, and rules in the whole body. In the same way wind and air and heat must work mixed together through the limbs, with one of them sinking below the others and one standing out above them, so that some one thing seems to be made out of them all. Otherwise heat and wind separately, and the power of air separately, would kill feeling off and break it up by being pulled apart.
There is also that heat in the mind which it takes on when it boils up in anger, and the fire flashes more sharply out of the eyes. There is also a great deal of that cold breath, the companion of dread, which starts a shudder in the limbs and shakes the joints. And there is also that condition of settled air, which comes with a calm chest and a clear face. But there is more of the hot in those whose hearts are sharp and whose angry minds boil over easily into rage. The chief example of that kind is the violent strength of lions, who often burst their chests with their roaring and groaning and cannot hold the waves of anger inside them.
The cold mind of deer, on the other hand, has more wind in it, and stirs up the icy currents through their flesh more quickly, which is what makes the trembling motion rise in their limbs. But the nature of cattle lives more by quiet air. The smoking torch of anger is never put under them to prod them too far, spreading over them the shadow of a blinding fog; and they are not stiffened through by the icy weapons of fear. They stand between the two, the deer and the savage lions. The human race is like this as well. However much training may polish some men to the same finish, it still leaves behind those first traces of the nature of each man's mind. And we must not think that these faults can be pulled out by the roots, so that one man will not run downhill more readily into sharp fits of anger, and another will not be got at by fear a little sooner, and a third will not take some things more mildly than he ought.
In a great many other matters as well, the various natures of men and the habits that follow from them must differ. I cannot set out the hidden causes of these now, or find as many names for the shapes of the atoms as there are shapes, and it is from those shapes that this variety in things arises. What I can see myself able to settle here is this: the traces of these natures which reason cannot drive out of us are left so very small that there is nothing to stop a man living a life worthy of the gods.
This nature, then, is held in by the whole body, and is itself the body's guard and the cause of its welfare; for they cling to each other by roots they hold in common, and plainly cannot be torn apart without both being destroyed. It is not easy to tear the smell out of lumps of frankincense without the nature of the frankincense being destroyed as well; and in the same way it is not easy to draw the nature of mind and soul out of the whole body without everything falling to pieces. Their atoms are so interwoven from the very start that they are furnished with a life shared between them, and neither the power of the body nor that of the mind seems able to feel separately, on its own, without the other's force. Feeling is kindled in us and blown into flame through our flesh by motions that the two of them share from both sides.
Besides, the body by itself is never born, and never grows, and is not seen to last after death. It is not with the body as it is with water, which often gives off the heat that has been put into it, and is not torn apart for that reason but stays intact. It is not like that, I say. The limbs, once they have been left behind, cannot bear the tearing away of the soul; they are destroyed root and branch, torn apart and rotting away together. From the very beginning of their existence, the body and the soul learn the motions of life by touching each other, even while they are still shut away in the mother's limbs and womb, so that they cannot be separated without ruin and harm. From this you can see that, since the cause of their welfare is joined, their nature must be joined as well.
As for the rest, if anyone denies that the body feels, and believes that it is the soul, mixed through the whole body, that takes on this motion which we call feeling, then he is fighting against facts that are plain and true. For who will ever explain what it is for the body to feel, if not the thing itself, which has given it to us openly and taught it to us? "But when the soul has been sent away, the body has no feeling anywhere in it." Of course it has none: it is losing what was never its own property while it lived, and it loses a great deal else besides when it is driven out of that life.
To say, further, that the eyes cannot see anything, but that the mind looks out through them as through doors thrown open, is hard to maintain, since the feeling of the eyes leads the other way. That feeling drags us on and pushes us right out to the eyeballs themselves; and it does this especially when we often cannot look at bright things, because our eyes are blocked up by their light. That does not happen with doors: doorways, standing open, do not take on any work of the sort, because it is we ourselves who do the seeing. Besides, if our eyes are standing in for doors, then it seems the mind ought to see things better if the eyes were taken out and the doorposts themselves lifted away.
On this subject there is one thing you can in no way take up: the proposition which the holy judgement of Democritus lays down, that the atoms of the body and the atoms of the mind are set alternately, one against one, and so vary and knit our limbs together. For the elements of the soul are much smaller than the ones our body and our flesh are made of, and they are also fewer in number and scattered thinly through the frame. So much so that you can guarantee this much: the atoms of the soul keep intervals between them at least as large as the smallest bodies which, when they are thrown at us, can stir motions of feeling in the body.
For sometimes we do not feel dust clinging to the body, or chalk shaken onto the limbs and settling there. We do not feel mist at night, or the thin threads of a spider we walk into and get netted in as we go, or its withered web falling on our head. We do not feel the feathers of birds, or the flying down of plants, which are usually so exceedingly light that they fall only with difficulty. We do not feel the going of every crawling creature, or the separate footprints that gnats and the rest set down on our body. That is how much has to be stirred in us before the atoms of the soul, mixed in among the bodies of our frame, feel that they have been shaken, and before they can bang together across the gaps between them, and collide, and combine, and leap apart again.
And the mind holds the bars of life shut more firmly, and is more the master of life, than the force of the soul is. For without the intelligence and the mind, not one part of the soul can stay on in the frame for the smallest part of time. It follows easily as a companion, and goes off into the air, and leaves the limbs cold in the chill of death. But the man whose mind and intelligence have stayed stays alive, however much he is mangled, with the limbs hacked away all round him. A trunk with the soul taken away from it and the limbs removed all round still lives, and takes in the life-giving air of the sky; and even if it is robbed of the soul, not entirely but in great part, it still hangs on and clings to life.
It is like an eye that has been torn about but has kept its pupil unhurt in the middle: the living power of sight stands, provided you do not destroy the whole ball of the eye and cut round the pupil and leave that behind alone, because even that cannot be done without destroying them. But if that tiny part in the middle of the eye is eaten through, the light goes out on the spot and darkness follows, however bright and unhurt the ball may be in every other way. It is by a law like that that the soul and the mind are always bound together.
Now then, so that you can recognise that the minds and the light souls of living creatures are born and are mortal, I shall go on setting out verses worthy of your way of life, verses long hunted for and found out with sweet labour. See that you yoke the two of them together under one name; and when I go on to speak of the soul, say, and to teach that it is mortal, take it that I am speaking of the mind as well, since so far as this goes they are one thing and joined together.
To begin with, I have taught you that the soul is fine and is made of tiny bodies, and is created out of atoms much smaller than the clear wet of water, or than mist, or smoke; for it goes far beyond them in mobility and is moved by a slighter cause when it is struck, seeing that it is moved even by the images of smoke and mist, as when we are sunk in sleep and see altars breathing out steam and carrying smoke aloft, for there is no doubt that these images are being brought to us from outside. Now then: since you see that when vessels are shaken to pieces on every side the liquid flows away and the water departs, and since mist and smoke depart into the air, believe that the soul too is poured out and away, and perishes much more quickly, and is broken down more swiftly into its atoms, once it has been taken from a man's limbs and has gone. For if the body, which stood as a kind of jar for it, cannot hold it in when the body has been shattered by something or thinned out by the loss of blood from the veins, how are you to believe that it can be held in by any air, which is looser in texture than our body is and holds things in less?
Besides, we feel that the intelligence is born along with the body, grows along with it, and ages along with it. For just as children go about with a weak and tender body, so a thin power of judgement goes with it in their minds. Then, when their age has grown up into strong powers, their judgement is greater too, and the force of their minds is enlarged. Afterwards, when the body has been shaken by the strong powers of time and the limbs have collapsed with their strength blunted, the wits limp, the tongue rambles, the mind gives way; everything fails, and everything is missing at one and the same moment. So it is right that the whole nature of the soul should be dissolved as well, like smoke, into the high winds of the air, since we see it born along with the body, and grow along with it, and, as I have taught you, crack and give way along with it, worn out by age.
Add to this that we see the body itself take on monstrous diseases and hard pain, and the mind take on sharp cares and grief and fear in the same way; so it is right that the mind should have its share of death as well. What is more, in diseases of the body the mind often wanders off the road: it goes out of its senses and talks madly, and sometimes it is carried by a heavy lethargy down into a deep and unending sleep, with the eyes and the head dropping. From there it does not hear the voices, and cannot make out the faces of the people standing round calling it back to life, with tears wetting their faces and cheeks. So you must admit that the mind is dissolved too, since the infection of disease works its way into it; for pain and disease are both makers of death, as we have been well taught before now by the destruction of many.
Then again, when the strong force of wine has got into a man and its burning heat has spread and gone off into the veins, a heaviness of the limbs follows; his legs get tangled as he staggers; his tongue goes slow; his mind is soaked; his eyes swim; shouting and hiccuping and quarrelling grow. Why are these things so, and all the rest of the same kind that follows, if not because the fierce violence of the wine is in the habit of throwing the soul into confusion inside the body itself? And whatever things can be thrown into confusion and blocked show that if a slightly harder cause worked its way in, they would perish, robbed of any future life.
What is more, a man is often seized suddenly by the force of a disease and drops down in front of our eyes, as though struck by lightning. He foams at the mouth, he groans, his limbs shake, he goes out of his senses, his sinews stretch tight, he is twisted about, he gasps unevenly, and he wears out his limbs with his thrashing. Naturally: the force of the disease, pulled apart through his limbs, drives the soul about and throws it into confusion, the way the waves on the salt sea boil up and foam under the strong power of the winds. Then a groan is forced out of him, because his limbs are gripped by pain, and above all because the seeds of the voice are drawn out and carried in a mass out through the mouth, the way they are used to going, where they have a made road.
He loses his senses because the force of mind and soul is thrown into confusion and, as I have taught you, is divided and split apart and thrown about in pieces by that same poison. Then, when the cause of the disease has turned back, and the sharp fluid of the spoiled body has retreated into its hiding places, the man gets up as though staggering at first, and gradually comes back into all his senses and takes his soul back again. So when mind and soul are tossed about like this by such great diseases inside the body itself, and are torn apart and labour in such wretched ways, why do you believe that the same things could go on living without a body, out in the open air, among the strong winds?
And since we see that the mind is healed like a sick body, and see that it can be turned about by medicine, that too is a warning that the mind lives as a mortal thing. For anyone who sets about altering the mind, or tries to turn any other nature whatsoever, must add parts to it, or shift the order they are in, or take at least some little thing away from the whole. But whatever is immortal will not have its parts moved about, or anything added to it, or the slightest thing flowing away from it; for whatever is changed and passes out of its own boundaries is at that moment the death of what was there before. So the mind, whether it falls sick or is turned about by medicine, gives out signs of being mortal, as I have taught you. That is how completely a true fact runs to meet a false argument, and blocks the escape of the man who is running, and convicts him of falsehood with a two-edged refutation.
And finally, we often see a man go little by little and lose the feeling of life limb by limb: first the toes and the nails on the feet go blue, then the feet and the legs die, and after that the tracks of icy death go on step by step through the rest of the limbs. Since this nature of the soul is split up, and does not come out whole at one time, it must be counted mortal. And if you happen to think that the soul can draw itself inwards through the frame and gather its parts into one place, and that this is how it takes the feeling away from all the limbs, then the place into which such a great store of the soul is being gathered ought to be seen to have more feeling in it. There is no such place anywhere; so, as we said before, it is plainly torn to pieces and scattered abroad, and therefore it perishes.
What is more, even if I were willing to concede what is false, and to grant that the soul can be balled up inside the bodies of those who leave the light bit by bit as they die, you would still have to admit that the soul is mortal. And it makes no difference whether it perishes scattered through the air, or is drawn together out of its own parts and goes numb, since more and more feeling fails the whole man on every side, and less and less of life is left on every side.
And here is another way of putting it. The mind is one part of a man, and it stays fixed in one particular place, just as the ears are, and the eyes, and all the other senses that steer a life. And just as a hand, or an eye, or a nose, taken away and cut off from the rest of us, cannot feel anything and cannot even go on existing, but in a very short time rots away, so the mind cannot exist by itself, without the body and without the man himself, who seems to be a sort of jar for it — or anything else you like to imagine that is joined to it still more closely than that, since the body clings to the mind by a real connection.
Then again, the living powers of the body and of the mind are strong when they are joined together, and they enjoy life together. The nature of the mind cannot by itself, on its own, without a body, produce the motions of life; and the body, emptied of soul, cannot last and go on using the senses. Obviously an eye, torn out by the roots, cannot make anything out by itself once it is separated from the whole body; and in the same way soul and mind seem able to do nothing on their own. It is no wonder. They are mixed in through the veins and the flesh, through the sinews and the bones, and are held in by the whole body, and their atoms cannot go bounding freely apart across wide gaps. So, shut in as they are, they make the motions that give us feeling — motions they cannot make outside the body, thrown out into the air after death, because there they are not held in the same way. Air would have to be a body, and alive, if the soul could hold itself together in air and shut itself up in the motions it used to make a moment earlier in the sinews and in the body itself. So again and again: when the whole wrapping of the body has been undone and the breath of life has been forced out, you have to admit that the sensations of the mind dissolve, and the soul dissolves too, since the cause of life is one thing joined for the two of them.
And finally, the body cannot bear to have the soul torn away from it without rotting in a foul smell. So why do you doubt that the force of the soul has risen up out of the depths and drained away, spreading like smoke, and that the body has fallen in on itself, changed and rotten, in so complete a collapse, because its foundations have been shifted from deep inside as the soul drains out through the limbs and through every winding passage in the body and out of every opening? There are many ways, then, for you to learn that the nature of the soul went out in pieces, distributed through the limbs, and that it was already torn apart inside the body itself before it slipped out and swam away into the air.
More than that. Even while a life is still turning inside its own boundaries, the soul often seems, for one cause or another, to be shaken loose and to be going, and to be coming free of the whole body, all of it at once. The face goes slack, as if the last hour had come, and all the limbs collapse softly on the bloodless body. That is the sort of thing we mean when we say that a man has had a turn, or that his soul has left him — the moment when everyone is in a panic and wants to catch hold of the last link of life. At that moment the mind and the whole power of the soul are shaken to pieces, and they are tottering along with the body itself, so that a cause only a little stronger could dissolve them altogether.
So why do you still doubt that, once it has been thrust outside the body — a feeble thing, out in the open, with its covering stripped off — the soul could not merely fail to last through all time, but could not hold together for the shortest stretch of time you like to name?
And nobody who is dying seems to feel his soul going out of the whole body in one piece, or coming up first into his throat and the top of his gullet. He feels it failing where it is, in one particular region, just as he knows that the other senses dissolve, each in its own part of the body. If our mind were immortal, then as it died it would not complain so much of being dissolved; it would complain rather of going out and leaving its clothes behind, the way a snake does.
And why is the mind, the thinking and deciding part, never born in the head, or in the feet, or in the hands? Why does it cling in every one of us to one seat and one fixed region? It must be because definite places have been assigned for the birth of each thing, and definite places where each created thing can last, so that the limbs can be arranged in all their various ways without the order of the parts ever coming out backwards. So thoroughly does one thing follow another. Flame is not in the habit of being made in rivers, and cold is not begotten in fire.
Besides, if the nature of the soul is immortal and can feel when it has been separated from our body, then I suppose we shall have to fit it out with the five senses. There is no other way for us to picture to ourselves the souls below wandering along the Acheron. That is why painters, and the writers of earlier generations, have brought souls on stage furnished with senses. But the soul cannot have separate eyes, or a separate nose, or a hand of its own, and it cannot have a separate tongue or separate ears. So by themselves souls cannot feel, and cannot even exist.
And since we feel that the sense of life is in the whole body, and we see that the whole of it is alive, then if some force suddenly cuts it through the middle with a quick blow, so as to sever the two halves from one another, there is no doubt that the force of the soul will be divided and split as well, and flung apart along with the body. And whatever is split, and separates into parts of any kind, plainly denies that it has an everlasting nature.
They tell how chariots armed with scythes lop off limbs so suddenly, hot with the confusion of the slaughter, that the piece which falls, cut away, is seen quivering on the ground, while the man's mind and his own force cannot yet feel the pain, because the injury has been so quick; and because his mind is at the same time given over to the eagerness of the fight, he goes after the fight and the killing with what is left of his body. Often he does not notice that the wheels and the tearing scythes have dragged his left arm away among the horses, shield and all. Another does not notice that his right hand has dropped off, while he is climbing up and pressing on. Another tries to get to his feet with his leg gone, while the dying foot on the ground nearby is twitching its toes. And a head cut off from a warm, living trunk keeps the look of life on the ground, and the eyes open, until it has given up all the remnants of the soul.
Or take a snake, with its tongue flickering and its tail threatening and its long body, and suppose you took it into your head to cut it into a number of pieces with a blade. You would see every part of it separately, chopped through by the fresh wound, twisting about and spattering the ground with gore, and the front part turning back and going for the hinder part with its jaws, to clamp down on the burning bite of the wound in its pain. Shall we say, then, that there are whole souls in all those little pieces? But on that reasoning it would follow that one animal had many souls inside one body. So the soul that was one has been divided along with the body; and that is why both have to be counted mortal, since both alike are cut up into many parts.
Besides, if the nature of the soul is immortal, and slips into the body when we are being born, why can we not remember the stretch of time lived before that? Why do we hold no traces of the things we did? If the power of the mind has been changed so completely that all its hold on what it did has fallen away, then that, I think, is not so very far from death. So you have to admit that the soul which was there before has perished, and that the one which is here now has been created now.
Besides, if the living power of the mind is normally put into us when the body is already finished, at the moment when we are born and cross the threshold of life, then it would not fit for it to look as though it grows along with the body and along with the limbs, in the very blood. It ought rather to live alone, by itself, as if in a cage — and yet the whole body is flooded with sensation. So again and again: souls must not be thought to have no origin, or to be released from the law of death. It must not be thought that they could have been fastened so tightly to our bodies after slipping in from outside, since the plain facts teach us that the whole thing works the other way round. The soul is so interconnected through the veins, the flesh, the sinews and the bones that even the teeth share in sensation, as we see from toothache, and the shock of icy cold water, and a rough little stone crunched out of a mouthful of bread. And since they are woven together so closely, souls do not look as though they could go out unhurt, or work themselves free undamaged from all the sinews and bones and joints.
And if you happen to think that the soul slips in from outside and then normally seeps through our limbs, all the more will it perish, poured through the body as it is. Whatever seeps through is dissolved, and therefore dies, since it is distributed through all the little channels of the body. Food is spread out into all the limbs and members, and perishes, and supplies another nature out of itself; and in just the same way soul and mind, however whole and new they are when they go into a body, are still dissolved in the seeping through, while the particles are distributed through all the channels into the limbs — the particles out of which this nature of mind is created, the mind which now rules in our body, born out of that other one which perished when it was divided up through the limbs.
So the nature of the soul turns out to have both a birthday and a funeral.
Besides, are seeds of soul left behind in the lifeless body or not? If they are left behind and are still in it, the soul cannot fairly be held immortal, since it has withdrawn diminished, with parts of it lost. But if it has got away, carried off with its limbs so intact that it has left no parts of itself behind in the body, then where do corpses breathe out the worms from flesh that is already going rancid? And where does such a great supply of living things, boneless and bloodless, come surging up through the swollen limbs?
Perhaps you believe that souls slip in from outside to the worms, and that a separate one can come into each body, and it does not occur to you to ask why many thousands of souls should gather where one has withdrawn. Even so, here is a point that seems worth asking and worth putting to the test: do the souls hunt out the seeds of each little worm and build themselves a place to live in, or do they slip into bodies that are, so to speak, ready-made? There is no way of saying why they should do the work themselves, or why they should take the trouble. While they are without a body they do not go fluttering about troubled by disease and cold and hunger; it is the body that suffers more from these faults, by its kinship with them, and the mind that takes on many evils by contact with it. But grant, if you like, that it is useful for them to make a body to get into. There is no way visible by which they could. So souls do not make bodies and limbs for themselves. Nor is there any way for them to slip into ready-made bodies, since they will not be able to be finely interwoven with them, and no shared feeling will pass between them by contact.
Then again, why does fierce violence go with the grim breed of lions, and cunning with foxes, and running away with deer? Why is the fear of their fathers handed down and set going in their limbs? Why does everything else of this kind grow up from the very beginning of life, in the body and the character alike, if it is not because a fixed force of mind, coming from its own seed and its own stock, grows equally with the body? If the mind were immortal, and were in the habit of changing bodies, animals would have all their characters mixed up. The hound of Hyrcanian breed would often run from the charge of the antlered stag; the hawk would tremble as it fled through the air at the coming of the dove; men would be witless, and the wild breeds of wild animals would be wise.
For it is a false argument when people say that an immortal soul is altered by a change of body. Whatever is altered is dissolved, and therefore dies. The parts are shifted across and move out of their order; and so they must be able to be dissolved through the limbs as well, and in the end to perish, all of them, along with the body.
And if they say that human souls always go into human bodies, I shall still ask why a wise soul can turn into a stupid one, why no boy is prudent, and why a mare's foal is not so well schooled as the strength of a full-grown horse. Of course they will take refuge in saying that the mind grows tender in a tender body. But if that is what happens, they have to admit that the soul is mortal, since it is so completely changed through the limbs that it loses the life and the sense that it had before. And how will the force of the mind be able to grow strong along with each body and reach the flower of life it wants, unless it is a partner in that body from the first beginning? Or what does the soul mean by wanting to go out from limbs that have grown old? Is it afraid of staying shut up in a rotting body, and afraid that the house it lives in, worn out by its long span of years, will come down on top of it? But there are no dangers at all for an immortal.
Again, it seems ridiculous that souls should be standing ready for the couplings of Venus and the births of wild animals — immortals waiting for mortal limbs, in numbers past numbering, and racing each other in a great hurry to see which shall slip in first and take the best place. Unless perhaps the souls have made a treaty about it, so that whichever one comes flying up first gets in first, and they never have any trial of strength between them at all.
Then again, a tree cannot exist up in the sky, or clouds in the deep sea, and fish cannot live in the fields, and there is no blood in wood and no sap in stones. It is fixed and arranged where each thing may grow and where it may belong. In the same way the nature of the mind cannot arise on its own without a body, or be far away from the sinews and the blood. If it could, then it could much sooner be in the head, or in the shoulders, or right down in the heels; it would be in the habit of being born in whatever part you like, and would at least stay in the same man and the same jar. But since it stands fixed even in our own body, and it appears to be arranged where the soul and the mind can each of them separately exist and grow, we must all the more deny that they can last or be born entirely outside the body. So when the body has perished, you have to admit that the soul has perished too, torn apart through the whole body.
And in fact, to join the mortal to the eternal and to imagine that they feel together and can act on one another is foolishness. What could you think of that is more unlike, more disconnected, more out of tune, than a mortal thing yoked together with an immortal and everlasting one and putting up with savage storms in that partnership?
Besides, whatever stays eternal must do it in one of three ways. Either it repels blows because it is made of solid body, and lets nothing get inside it that could break up the close-packed parts within — as the bodies of matter are, whose nature I have already shown you. Or it can last through all time because it is exempt from blows, as the void is, which stays untouched and is never affected by a blow at all. Or else there is no supply of space around it into which its parts could go off and be dissolved — as the sum of all sums is eternal, with no place outside it for anything to fly apart into, and no bodies that could fall on it and break it up with a strong blow.
But perhaps the soul is to be counted immortal on this ground instead: that it is kept protected by the forces of life; or because nothing hostile to its well-being comes near it at all; or because whatever does come is somehow driven off and retreats before we can feel any harm from it. But this is very far from true. Quite apart from the fact that the mind sickens when the body is diseased, there comes upon it that thing which torments it about what is still to come, keeps it wretched in fear, and wears it out with worries; and when the wrong is already in the past, the sins of it gnaw at it still. Add the madness that belongs to the mind alone, and its forgetting of things. Add that it goes under into the black waves of lethargy.
So death is nothing to us, and does not matter in the least, since the nature of the mind is now understood to be mortal. In the time gone by we felt nothing wrong when the Carthaginians were coming from every side to fight us, when everything was shaken by the trembling uproar of war and shuddered horribly under the high shores of heaven, and it was in doubt to whose empire all human beings must fall, on land and sea alike. In the same way, when we shall not exist, when the split between body and soul has come, out of which we are put together as one thing, then plainly nothing whatever will be able to happen to us — who shall not exist then — or to move our senses: not if the earth is mixed with the sea and the sea with the sky.
And even if the nature of the mind and the power of the soul do have feeling after they have been torn away from our body, it is still nothing to us, who exist as one thing by the fitting together and the marriage of body and soul. And if time should gather our matter together again after our death, and put it back as it is placed now, and the light of life should be given to us a second time, even that would not matter to us in the least, once the thread of our memory of ourselves has been snapped. As it is, nothing about the selves we were before matters to us now, and no anguish about them touches us. When you look back at the whole stretch of measureless time gone by, and then at how many kinds of motion matter has, you can easily believe this too: that these same seeds we are made of now have often been set before in the same order they are in now. And yet we cannot get hold of that with a remembering mind, because a pause of life has been thrown in between, and all the motions have wandered away astray in every direction from the senses.
For if there is going to be misery and suffering, then the person to whom the harm can happen must also himself exist at the time. Death takes this away, and stops the man existing to whom the trouble could be given; and so we may be sure that there is nothing for us to fear in death, that a man who does not exist cannot be made miserable, and that it makes not the slightest difference whether he was ever born at any earlier time, once immortal death has taken his mortal life away.
So when you see a man resenting the thought that after death his body will be laid away and rot, or be finished off by flames or by the jaws of wild animals, you may be sure he does not ring true, and that there is some hidden sting deep in his heart, however much he denies believing that he will have any sensation in death. He does not grant, I think, what he claims to grant, or the ground it rests on. He does not pull himself up out of life by the roots and throw himself away. Without knowing it, he leaves something of himself over.
For when a man is alive and imagining that after death birds and wild animals will tear his body, he is sorry for himself. He does not separate himself from that thing, or take himself far enough away from the body flung down there. He imagines that the body is himself, and he stands beside it and infects it with his own power of feeling. That is why he resents having been created mortal, and does not see that in real death there will be no second self, alive, to mourn his own destruction, and to stand there grieving that he lies there being torn or burned. For if it is an evil in death to be pulled about by the jaws and teeth of wild animals, I cannot see why it is not bitter to be laid on hot fires and scorched in the flames, or to be laid in honey and smothered, or to go stiff with cold when a man lies on the top surface of a slab of icy stone, or to be pressed down and buried under the weight of earth from above.
"Now, now, your happy house will not welcome you any more, or your best of wives; no sweet children will run up to snatch the first kiss and touch your heart with a silent sweetness. You will not be able to make a success of your affairs, or be a protection to your own people. Poor man, poor man," they say, "one hostile day has taken away from you all these prizes of life."
What they do not add is this: "and no longing for any of those things is left sitting inside you." If they saw that clearly in their minds, and followed it up in what they say, they would set themselves free of great anguish and fear.
"You, as you are, put to sleep in death, will be like this for the rest of time, taken out of the reach of all painful suffering. But we stood next to the horrible pyre while you were being turned to ashes, and wept for you without ever having enough of it, and no day will take that everlasting grief out of our hearts."
The question to put to a man who talks like that is what is so bitter about it, if the thing comes down in the end to sleep and rest, that anyone should waste away in unending mourning.
People do this too when they have taken their places at table and are holding their cups, with their faces shaded by garlands, and they say, out of their hearts, "This pleasure is a short one for us poor little men; soon it will have been, and there will be no calling it back afterwards." As if in death the chief of their troubles would be that thirst would burn the poor things and scorch them dry, or that a longing for something else would settle on them.
For nobody misses himself and his life at the time when mind and body are both asleep and at rest. As far as we are concerned, that sleep could go on forever, and no longing for ourselves affects us. And yet at that moment those atoms of ours are not wandering at all far from the motions that make our senses, all through our limbs, since a man collects himself the moment he is snatched out of sleep. So death must be thought to be much less to us than sleep is — if there can be anything less than what we can already see to be nothing. A greater scattering of the disturbed matter follows on death, and nobody wakes up once the cold pause of life has caught him.
Finally, suppose the nature of things were suddenly to find a voice and speak up herself, and tell one of us off like this: "What is the matter with you, mortal, that is so serious that you give yourself over to this sickly grieving? Why do you groan and weep over death? If the life you have lived so far has been welcome to you, and all your good things have not been poured into you as into a leaky jar and run straight out and gone to waste, why do you not step away from the table like a guest who has had his fill of life, and take your untroubled rest with an easy mind, you fool? But if everything you have enjoyed has been poured away and lost, and life is now an offence to you, why do you look to add more, which will only perish badly again and fall away without thanks, all of it? Why not rather make an end of your life and your labour? For there is nothing further that I can contrive and discover to please you: it is all the same forever. If your body is not yet withering with the years, and your limbs are not yet worn out and slack, still everything stays the same, even if you should go on to outlive all the generations — and still more so if you were never going to die at all."
What can we answer to that, except that nature is bringing a fair suit and setting out a true case in what she says?
And if it were an older and more elderly man complaining, lamenting his own death, poor wretch, more than is fair, would she not have all the more right to shout at him, and to tell him off in a sharper voice? "Take your tears away from here, you bottomless pit, and hold in your complaints. You have used up all the prizes of life, and now you are withering. But because you always want what is not there and think nothing of what is in front of you, life has slipped out of your hands unfinished and unwelcome, and death has stood by your head before you could get up from the table full and satisfied with things. Now, come along: let go of everything that does not suit your age, and do it with an easy mind. Give way. You must."
She would be in the right, I think; she would be right to tell him off and to scold him. For the old is always thrust out and gives way to the new, and one thing has to be repaired out of another. Nobody is handed down into the pit or into black Tartarus. There has to be material so that the generations to come can grow — and all of them will follow you when they have finished their lives; and just as much as you, the generations before have fallen and the ones after will fall. So one thing will never stop rising out of another. Life is given to nobody to own outright; to everybody it is given to use.
And look back at how the past stretch of everlasting time before we were born was nothing at all to us. So nature holds this up in front of us as a mirror of the time to come after our own death. Is there anything horrible in it? Does anything about it look sad? Is it not more free of trouble than any sleep?
And of course all the things they say are down in the depths of Acheron are here in our own lives. There is no poor Tantalus, numb with an empty fear, afraid of the great rock hanging in the air over him, as the story has it. It is in life that an empty dread of the gods presses hard on mortals, and each of them fears whatever fall of fortune chance may bring him.
There are no birds getting into Tityos as he lies in Acheron, and they could not possibly find anything to search out under that great chest of his through all of everlasting time. However huge the sprawl of body he stretches out, even if the man covered with his spread limbs not just nine acres but the whole circle of the earth, he still would not be able to bear everlasting pain, or to go on supplying food out of his own body forever. Our Tityos is here: the man lying in love, torn at by birds, eaten out by anxious anguish, split apart by cares over some other craving.
Sisyphus, too, is in front of our eyes in this life. He is the man who has drunk in the wish to ask the people for the rods and the cruel axes of office, and who always retires beaten and gloomy. To seek power, which is empty and is never actually handed over, and to keep on putting up with hard labour for it — this is what it is to shove a stone with all your strength up an opposing hill, when the stone rolls straight back down from the very top and makes headlong for the levels of the flat plain.
And to be forever feeding an ungrateful nature of mind, filling it with good things and never satisfying it — which is what the seasons of the year do for us when they come round and bring their fruits and their various charms, and we are never filled up with the fruits of life — this, I think, is the story of the girls in the flower of their years carrying water into a leaky jar, which cannot be filled by any means at all.
Cerberus, and the Furies, and that lack of light, and Tartarus belching horrible waves of heat out of his throat: they exist nowhere and certainly cannot exist. But in life there is a fear of punishment for bad deeds, a fear as remarkable as the deeds are, and a paying-off for crime — prison, and the horrible throwing down from the rock, the floggings, the executioners, the rack, the pitch, the hot metal plate, the torches. And even where none of these are present, still the mind, knowing what it has done, is frightened in advance and puts the goads to itself and burns itself with whips, and it does not see meanwhile what limit there can be to its troubles or what end there is to be to its punishments, and it is afraid that the very same things will get heavier in death. So this, in the end, is how the life of fools becomes their Acheron here on earth.
Here is something else you can sometimes say to yourself. "Even good Ancus let the light go from his eyes, and he was a better man than you in a great many ways, you worthless creature. And since then many other kings and rulers have gone under, men who gave orders to great nations. Even the man who once paved a road across the great sea and gave his legions a way to march over the deep, who taught them to cross the salt lagoons on foot and treated the roaring of the sea with contempt, prancing over it with his cavalry — even he had the light taken away from him and poured his soul out of a dying body. Scipio, the thunderbolt of war, the terror of Carthage, gave his bones to the earth just as if he had been the lowest slave in the house. Add to them the men who discovered the sciences and the graces; add the companions of the Muses of Helicon, and among them Homer, who alone held the sceptre, and who is now asleep in the same rest as all the rest of them. And Democritus, when a ripe old age warned him that the remembering motions of his mind were slackening, went to meet death of his own accord and offered up his head to it. Even Epicurus himself died, when the light of his life had run its course — the man who beat the whole human race in genius and put all the others out, as the sun of heaven, when it rises, puts out the stars.
"And you are going to hesitate and resent having to die? You, whose life is as good as dead while you are still alive and looking at the world, who wear away the greater part of your time in sleep, and snore while you are awake, and never stop seeing dreams, and carry about a mind troubled with an empty dread, and often cannot even find out what is wrong with you, when you are pressed on every side, drunk and miserable, by a crowd of worries, and go drifting and wandering about with a mind that cannot hold still."
If people could learn the causes of it, in the same way that they seem to feel that there is a weight lying on the mind which wears them out with its heaviness — if they could learn where it comes from and where so great a mass of trouble, as it were, in the breast, comes to be piled up from — they would not live their lives the way we now mostly see them do: each man not knowing what he wants for himself, and looking always for a change of place, as if he could put the load down that way.
Often the man who is sick of being at home goes out of his great house, and comes straight back again, since he feels no better outside it. He runs, driving his ponies headlong out to his country place, as if he were in a hurry to bring help to a burning roof; he yawns the moment he has touched the threshold of the villa, or drops off heavily to sleep and looks for forgetfulness, or even hurries back to town and goes to look at it again. This is how each man runs away from himself; and of course, as happens, the self is the one thing he cannot escape from. He clings to it against his will and hates it, because he is a sick man who does not grasp the cause of his illness. If he saw that clearly, every one of them would drop everything else and study first of all to learn the nature of things, since what is in question here is the state of everlasting time and not of one single hour — the state in which mortals must pass the whole of the time that is left after death.
And in the end, what is this bad craving for life, and why is it so great, that it drives us to shake like this in doubtful dangers? A fixed end of life certainly stands waiting for mortals, and death cannot be dodged; we have to go and meet it. Besides, we turn about among the same things, and we stay among them, and no new pleasure is hammered out by living on. It is only while the thing we want is out of reach that it seems to beat everything else; afterwards, once we have touched it, we want something else, and one and the same thirst holds us, with our mouths open for life forever. And it is in doubt what fortune the coming years may bring, or what chance may carry to us, or what end is standing over us. Nor do we take away one bit from the time of death by drawing life out, or manage to nibble anything off it, so that we may be dead for a shorter while. So live on, and bury as many generations as you like: that everlasting death will still be waiting for you all the same, and the man who made an end of his life with today's light will be gone for no shorter a time than the man who died many months and many years before him.
I am travelling over the pathless places of the Muses, where nobody's foot has trodden before. I love coming on springs nobody has touched, and drinking them dry; I love picking new flowers, and hunting from there a glorious crown for my head, from ground where the Muses have never yet veiled anyone's temples. First, because I am teaching about great matters, and going on to loose the mind from the tight knots of religion; and then because on so dark a subject I am making verses so clear, touching everything with the charm of the Muses. That too seems to have a reason behind it. It is like doctors trying to give children foul wormwood: first they brush the rim of the cup all round with the sweet yellow liquid of honey, so that the unthinking years of childhood are fooled as far as the lips, and meanwhile the bitter draught of wormwood is drunk right down. The children are tricked, but they are not trapped; instead they are put back on their feet that way and grow strong again. In the same way now, since this reasoning generally seems rather grim to those who have not handled it, and the crowd shrinks back from it, I have wanted to set our reasoning out for you in the sweet-speaking song of the Muses, and to touch it, so to speak, with their sweet honey, in the hope of holding your mind on my verses that way, until you take in the whole nature of things and feel all the way through how much good it does you.
But I have already taught what the atoms of all things are like, and how they differ in all sorts of shapes, and how they fly about of their own accord, driven by a motion that never stops, and in what way each thing can be created out of them. And I have taught what the nature of the mind is, and out of what things it is made and keeps its strength while it is fitted together with the body, and in what way it is torn apart and goes back to its atoms. So now I shall begin on a matter that bears very heavily on all this: that there exist the things we call the images of things. They have to be named something like skins, or films, or a rind, because each one carries the same look and the same shape as the body it is said to have streamed off and gone wandering from. Like skins stripped off the outermost surface of things, they fly this way and that through the air. And it is these same images that meet us when we are awake and terrify our minds, and meet us in sleep, when we are often looking at strange shapes and at the images of people who have lost the light — images that have often startled us horribly out of a slack sleep. We must not decide, on the strength of that, that souls get out of Acheron, or that ghosts flit about among the living, or that anything of us can be left behind after death, once body and mind alike have been destroyed and each has gone off into its own atoms. So what I say is that things send off likenesses of themselves, thin shapes, off the outermost rind of their bodies. And you can learn this from what follows, however dull your wits may be.
To begin with, among the things that are out in the open we see many that send off bodies. Some send them loosely and scattered, as logs send off smoke and fires send off heat. Some send them more woven together and packed close, as the cicadas do in summer when they lay down their smooth tunics, and calves do when they are born and drop the membranes off their outermost surface, and the slippery snake does when it strips its clothing off among the thorns — for we often see the brambles made richer with those flying spoils. Since these things happen, a thin image must be sent off things as well, off the outermost surface of things. For there is no way of opening your mouth to say why those thicker coverings should drop off and leave things, rather than the ones that are thin. Especially since there are a great many tiny bodies on the surfaces of things, which can be thrown off in the same order they were in before and keep the outline of their shape, and thrown a great deal faster, since being few, and placed right at the front, they have that much less to get in their way.
For we certainly see many things throwing off and handing out a great deal, not only from deep inside them, as I said before, but often the very colour off their surfaces. The awnings do this everywhere, yellow and red and rust-coloured, when they are stretched over the great theatres and spread out along the poles and the beams and shiver and ripple. There they dye the seated crowd below in the hollow of the theatre, and the whole show of the stage, and the fathers and mothers in their places, and force it all to move in their own colour. And the more the walls of the theatre shut them in all round, the more everything inside laughs, soaked in that loveliness, with the daylight caught and held off. So, since the cloths send off a dye from their outermost body, everything must send off thin likenesses as well, since in both cases they are shot off the surface. There are, then, sure tracks of shapes flying about everywhere, furnished with a fine thread, which cannot be seen one at a time on their own.
Besides, every smell, and smoke, and heat, and other things like them stream out of things and spread, because while they are coming from deep inside and working their way out they get torn apart along a bent road, and there are no straight gateways for them to force their way out through in a body. But when the thin film of surface colour is thrown off, there is nothing that can tear it, since it is right there at the front, ready to hand.
Lastly, whatever images appear to us in mirrors, in water, in any shining surface at all, must be made of images sent off from things, since they are furnished with the same look as the things. So there are thin likenesses of shapes, resembling them, which nobody can pick out one at a time, and which all the same, being thrown back by a steady and repeated bouncing, give back a sight from the flat surface of a mirror. There seems to be no other way they could be kept so well that shapes so like each thing are given back.
Now then. Take in how thin the nature of an image is. And first of all, since the atoms are so far below our senses, and so much smaller than the objects that our eyes are first beginning to be unable to make out, let me confirm that point too. Take in, in a few words, how fine the atoms of all things are.
To begin with, some living creatures are already so tiny that a third of one of them cannot be seen in any way at all. What are we to think any inward part of one of these is like? The little ball of its heart, or its eyes? Its limbs? Its joints? How very small they are! And what about each of the atoms out of which its soul and the nature of its mind must be made — do you not see how fine and how minute they have to be?
Besides, take anything that breathes a sharp smell out of its body: all-heal, foul wormwood, strong-smelling southernwood, bitter centaury. If you happen to rub any one of them lightly between two fingers, the smell will hang about your hand for a long while, and yet you will not see anything at all leaving it. So why not learn instead that images of things go wandering about, many of them, in many ways, with no force in them and nothing for the senses to take hold of?
But do not go thinking that the only images wandering about are the ones that come away from things. There are others as well, which are born of their own accord and put themselves together in this sky of ours, the thing we call the air. Formed in many ways, they are carried up high; and, being liquid, they never stop changing their look and turning into the outlines of shapes of every kind. That is how we sometimes see clouds thickening easily up there and spoiling the calm face of the world, stroking the air with their movement. Often the faces of giants seem to fly along and draw a wide shadow after them; sometimes great mountains and rocks torn off mountains go on ahead and pass in front of the sun; and after them some beast drags along and brings on other stormclouds.
Now for how easily and how quickly these images are produced, and how they flow off things without a break and slip away as they fall. For there is always a surface streaming off things, more than enough for them to throw away. And when this surface reaches other things, it goes through them, as it does above all with cloth. But where it reaches rough rocks or the material of wood, it is torn on the spot, so that it can give back no image. But when shining, dense things have been set in the way — a mirror above all — nothing of the kind happens. It cannot go through, the way it goes through cloth, and it cannot be torn either, since the smoothness remembers to keep it safe. That is why images come streaming back to us from a mirror. And however suddenly, at whatever moment you like, you put anything in front of a mirror, the image appears. From that you can learn that thin textures of things and thin shapes are flowing continuously off their outermost body.
So a great many images are produced in a short space of time, and their origin is rightly called a fast one. And just as the sun has to send out a great many lights in a short space of time, so that everything is full of light without a break, in the same way, and for the same reason, a great many images of things must be carried off things in a point of time, in many ways, in every direction all round. For whatever face of things we turn a mirror to, things answer back there with the same shape and the same colour.
Besides, the weather of the sky may be perfectly clear one moment and turn foully thick and stormy the next, so that you would think all the darkness everywhere had left Acheron and filled up the great hollows of the sky. That is how, once the filthy night of the stormclouds has gathered, the faces of black Terror hang over us from above. And of those there is nobody who could say, or give any account of in words, how small a part an image is.
Now then. How fast the images travel, and what mobility is given them for swimming across the air, so that a short hour is worn away over a long stretch of space, whichever place each of them is making for under its own impulse — I shall set that out in sweet-speaking verses rather than in many of them, the way the swan's small song is better than the clamour of the cranes scattered high up among the south wind's clouds.
To begin with, you can very often see that light things, made of tiny bodies, are fast. In that class are the sun's light and its heat, because they are made out of small atoms, which are, so to speak, hammered along and do not hesitate to cross the stretch of air, driven on by the blow that follows behind. Light is supplied by light on the instant, and gleam is spurred on by gleam, like an ox in a team. So on the same principle the images must be able to run across an unspeakable stretch of space in a point of time. First, because there is a very small cause a long way behind them, carrying them forward and pushing them on, and because after that they are carried along with such a flying lightness. Second, because they are sent off with a texture so loosely woven that they can easily get into anything at all and, so to speak, seep through the stretch of air.
Besides, if the little bodies of things that are sent out from deep inside — the light and the heat of the sun — are seen to slip through the whole space of the sky in a point of the day, spreading themselves out, flying across sea and lands and drenching the sky, then what about the ones that are already there ready at the very front, when they are thrown off and nothing holds up their departure? Do you not see that they must go faster, and further, and run across many times the stretch of space in the same time that the sun's light takes to spread over the sky?
And here is what seems the best and truest proof of all of how fast the images of things travel. The moment a shining sheet of water is set down under the open sky, if the sky is clear and full of stars, the shining stars of the world answer back at once in the water. Now do you see in what a point of time the image falls from the shores of the upper air to the shores of the earth? So again and again you have to admit that things send off bodies that strike the eyes and rouse sight.
And smells flow continuously off certain things, as cold flows off rivers, heat off the sun, and spray off the waves of the sea, which eats away the walls along the coast. And voices of all kinds never stop flying about through the air. Then again, a damp salt taste often comes into our mouth when we are walking about beside the sea; and when we watch wormwood being thinned and mixed in front of us, the bitterness touches us. So thoroughly does every thing stream off everything and get sent out in every direction all round, with no delay and no rest allowed in the flowing — since we are feeling without a break, and are always able to see anything, and smell it, and hear it make a sound.
Besides, a shape handled with the hands in the dark is known to be the same one that is seen in the light and the bright daylight, and so touch and sight must be set going by a cause of the same kind. So if we test a square and it moves us in the dark, what thing in the light could fall on our sight and look square, unless it were the image of it? So the cause of seeing seems to lie in images, and nothing can be seen without them.
Now, the images of things I am speaking of are carried in every direction and thrown out, spread into every quarter. But because we can see with our eyes alone, it comes about that wherever we turn our sight, all things strike against it there with their shape and their colour.
And it is the image that makes us see how far off each thing is from us, and takes care that we can tell. For when it is sent off it shoves ahead at once and drives along whatever air lies between itself and our eyes, and all that air glides through our sight and, so to speak, wipes across our pupils, and passes on. That is why we see how far off each thing is. And the more air is driven along in front, and the longer the draught that wipes across our eyes, the further off each thing is seen to be. Of course all this is done at an extremely fast rate, so that we see at one and the same time what kind of thing it is and how far away it is.
And there is nothing in all this that ought to be held any sort of wonder: that although the images which strike the eyes cannot be seen one at a time, the things themselves are made out clearly. For with the wind too, when it beats on us little by little and when the sharp cold streams over us, we are not in the habit of feeling one private particle of that wind and that cold, but rather the whole of it at once; and we see the blows made on our body just as if some thing were beating on it and giving us the feel of a body outside us. Besides, when we knock a stone with a finger, we touch the very outside of the rock and its surface colour, and we do not feel that colour by touch: what we feel instead is the hardness of the stone itself, deep down inside.
Now then. Take in why the image is seen beyond the mirror, since it certainly does seem to be a long way back inside it. It is the same sort of thing as the objects out of doors that are truly seen through an opening, when a doorway offers a clear view through itself and lets many things outside be seen from the house. That sight too is made by a double, twinned air. First the air on this side of the doorposts is made out; then the doors themselves follow, on the right and the left; then the light from outside wipes across the eyes, and a second lot of air, and then the things out of doors that are truly seen through the opening.
In the same way, as soon as the image of the mirror has thrown itself forward, then, while it is coming to our sight, it shoves ahead and drives along whatever air lies between itself and our eyes, and brings it about that we can feel all this air before we feel the mirror. But once we have felt the mirror itself as well, the image that is carried from us to it gets there straight away and, thrown back, comes back to our eyes, rolling a second lot of air along in front of itself as it drives it, and brings it about that we see this air before we see the image; and that is why the image seems to stand off at just that distance behind the mirror. So again and again it is not in the least surprising that this is what happens with the images that give back a sight from the flat surface of a mirror, since both of these things are brought about by two lots of air.
Now, the part of our limbs that is on our right is seen in mirrors to be on the left, because when the image comes to the flat of the mirror and hits it, it is not turned round unhurt, but is knocked straight backwards, the way it would be if somebody dashed a plaster mask against a post or a beam before it was dry, and it kept the shape at its front straight away and moulded itself back again from being knocked into reverse. What happens is that the eye that was the right one is now the left, and the other way about, the left becomes the right.
It also happens that an image is handed on from mirror to mirror, so that five or even six images have been produced. For whatever things are hidden away back in an inner room can still be brought out from there, however twisted the way and however deeply set back, through the bending approaches, and can be seen to be in the house by means of several mirrors. That is how far an image shines through from mirror into mirror; and when it has been given as a left, it becomes a right again, and then goes back again and turns round to the side it was on before.
More than that: little curved side-mirrors, whose bend matches the bend of our own flank, send images back to us with the right on the right — either because the image is carried over from mirror to mirror and then, after being knocked off twice, flies across to us; or else because the image is spun round as it comes, since the bent shape of the mirror teaches it to turn towards us.
Again, you would believe that the images walk along beside us and put their feet down with ours and copy our movements; and the reason is that whatever part of the mirror you step away from, the images cannot come back from there any longer, since nature forces everything to be carried back and to spring off things at matching angles.
Then again, the eyes run away from bright things and avoid looking at them. The sun even blinds you, if you go on trying to strain towards it, because its own force is great and its images are carried down from high up through the pure air and strike the eyes and disturb their arrangement. Besides, any keen brightness often burns the eyes, because it holds many seeds of fire in it, which work their way in and give birth to pain in the eyes.
Besides, everything people with jaundice look at turns yellow, because many seeds of yellowness flow off their bodies to meet the images of things, and many more are mixed in their eyes as well, and these paint everything with paleness by their contact.
And we see, out of the dark, the things that stand in the light, and this is why. The nearer dark, murky air enters the open eyes first and takes possession of them, and then the shining bright air follows immediately after and, so to speak, cleans them out and scatters the black shadows of that other air, since it is many times more mobile, many times finer, and far more powerful. And the moment it has filled the pathways of the eyes with light and opened up the ways that the black air had blocked before, the images of the things that stand in the light follow straight after and provoke us into seeing. We cannot do the opposite, and see things in the dark from out of the light, because the murky air comes along behind, thicker, and fills every opening and blocks up the pathways of the eyes, so that no images of anything can be thrown in and set them moving.
And when we make out the square towers of a city a long way off, this is why they often look round. Every angle is seen blunt from far away, or rather it is not seen at all, and its blow perishes, and its stroke does not glide through to our sight, because while the images are being carried through a great deal of air, the air forces the blow to go blunt with its repeated knocks. Once every angle has slipped away from the sense in that manner, it comes about that the stonework is looked at as though it had been turned on a lathe — not the way things close at hand and truly round are looked at, but a little like them, and as if sketched in shadow.
Our shadow in the sun seems to us to move as well, and to follow our footsteps and copy our movements — if you can believe that air robbed of its light is able to walk along, following the motions and the movements of men. For what we are used to calling a shadow can be nothing else but air with its light taken away. Naturally enough: the earth loses the sun's light in one place after another in a fixed order, wherever we get in the way as we go along, and the part of it we have left behind is filled up again. That is why it comes about that what was the body's shadow seems to have followed us all the way, straight along the same line. For new lights from the rays are always pouring themselves out, and the first ones perish, the way wool is drawn into a fire. That is why the earth is easily robbed of light and easily filled up again, and washes the black shadows off itself.
And yet, for all that, we do not concede that the eyes are cheated in this by the smallest amount. It is their job to notice in what place there is light and in what place shadow. But whether the lights are the same lights or not, and whether the shadow that was here is the same one now passing over there, or whether instead what happens is what I said a little earlier — that is a thing which in the end the reasoning of the mind has to sort out, and the eyes cannot get to know the nature of things. So do not fasten this fault of the mind onto the eyes.
The ship we are sailing in is moving, at the moment when it seems to be standing still; and the one that is staying at its mooring is believed to be going past. The hills and the plains that we drive the ship past, flying along under sail, seem to be running away astern.
The stars all seem to stay still, fixed in the caverns of the upper air, and yet every one of them is in constant motion, since they rise and then go back to their far-off settings when they have measured out the sky with their bright bodies. And in the same way the sun and the moon seem to stay at their moorings, though the plain fact of the matter shows that they are being carried along.
And mountains standing up out of the middle of the water a long way off, with a huge free way out between them, wide enough for a fleet, look all the same like one single island joined together out of the two of them.
Halls seem to spin round and columns to run in a circle when children have stopped whirling themselves about — so completely that they can hardly believe the whole roof is not threatening to come down on top of them.
And now, when nature begins to lift the red blaze high up with its shaking fires and to raise it above the mountains: those mountains, which the sun then seems to you to be right on top of, touching them close up with his own burning fire — they are scarcely two thousand bowshots away from us, often scarcely five hundred casts of a javelin. But between them and the sun lie the vast level plains of the sea, spread out beneath the huge shores of the upper air, and there are many thousands of lands set in between, which all sorts of peoples and generations of wild animals hold.
Then there is the puddle. A collected splash of water no deeper than one finger, standing among the paving stones along the street, offers you a view down under the earth as deep as the high gaping of the sky opens upward away from the earth, so that you seem to be looking down on clouds and to be seeing the sky, and bodies wonderfully hidden away under the earth in a sky of their own.
Then again, when our spirited horse has stopped dead in the middle of a river and we have looked down into the fast water of the stream, a force seems to be carrying the body of the horse sideways, though he is standing still, and shoving him quickly against the current; and wherever we throw our eyes, everything seems to be carried along and flowing in the same way we are.
A colonnade, however even the line it is built on, standing unbroken on a row of matching columns, still, when the whole long thing is looked at from one end, gradually draws itself into the top of a narrow cone, joining roof to floor and everything on the right to everything on the left, until it has pulled them together into the dim point of the cone.
Out at sea, to sailors, the sun seems to come up out of the waves and to go down and bury his light in the waves, because they have nothing in view but water and sky. Do not be quick to conclude from any of this that the senses are being undermined on every side.
But to people who do not know the sea, ships in harbour look crippled, straining against the water with their sterns smashed. Whatever part of the oars is raised above the salt spray is straight, and the steering paddles are straight above the water; but the parts that are sunk and pass under the water look broken, look as if the whole of them were turned back and bent upwards and reversed, and almost floating flat on the surface of the water.
And when the winds carry thin clouds across the sky at night, then the bright signs seem to slide along against the storm clouds and to travel up there in an altogether different direction from the one they are truly carried in.
Now suppose a hand is put under one eye from below and presses on it. Then, by a certain sensation, everything we look at seems to become double as we look at it: two lamp flames flowering with fire, two sets of furniture all through the house, two faces on every man and two bodies.
Or take this. When sleep has bound the limbs in sweet drowsiness and the whole body is lying in the deepest quiet, we still seem to ourselves to be awake and to be moving our limbs, and in the blind darkness of night we suppose we are looking at the sun and the light of day. Shut up in one room, we seem to be changing our sky, our sea, our rivers, our mountains, and to be crossing the plains on foot, and to be hearing sounds when the stern silences of night stand all round us, and to be answering out loud when we are not making a sound.
There are a great many other things of this kind, all of them astonishing, and all of them, so to speak, trying to break down our trust in the senses. They fail, because the largest part of them cheats us by way of the opinions of the mind, which we add ourselves, so that things not seen by the senses at all pass for things seen. For nothing is harder than to separate the facts that are plain from the doubtful things that the mind adds to them straight away, out of its own resources.
And now, if somebody thinks that nothing can be known, he does not know whether that itself can be known, since he admits that he knows nothing. So I will not bother to argue the case against a man who has planted his own head where his feet should be. And yet, even supposing I grant that he knows this much, I would still ask him this: since he has never before seen anything true among things, where does he get his knowledge of what knowing is, and what not knowing is in its turn? What produced his idea of the true and the false? What proved to him that the doubtful is different from the certain?
You will find that the idea of what is true was created in the first place out of the senses, and that the senses cannot be refuted. What we are looking for is something that deserves greater trust, something that can beat the false with the true on its own authority. Well, what ought to be held in greater trust than the senses? Will reasoning that takes its rise from a false sense be able to speak against those senses, when the whole of it takes its rise from the senses? If they are not true, all reasoning turns false along with them.
Or will the ears be able to convict the eyes, or touch the ears? Will the taste in the mouth bring a charge against touch? Will the nostrils prove it wrong, or the eyes catch it out? That is not how it is, I think. Each of them has had its own power marked off and handed to it separately; each has its own force. And so it must be that we see separately what is soft and what is cold and what is burning hot, and separately perceive the various colours of things and whatever goes along with colours. In the same way the taste of the mouth has its power separately, smells arise separately, and sounds separately. And so it must be that one sense cannot convict another. Nor will they be able to convict themselves, either, since equal trust will always have to be placed in them. So whatever has appeared to them at any given time is true.
And if reasoning cannot untie the knot and say why a thing that was square close up looked round from far away, it is still better, when you are short of the explanation, to give a faulty account of the cause of both shapes than to let the plain facts slip anywhere out of your own hands, to break the trust that comes first, and to tear up the whole foundation that life and safety rest on. Because it is not only that all reasoning would fall down. Life itself would collapse on the spot, unless you dared to trust the senses and to keep away from sheer drops and from everything else of that kind that has to be avoided, and to go after their opposites. So the whole stock of words drawn up and marshalled against the senses is empty.
Look at it this way. In a building, if the first rule is crooked, if the square is untrue and comes away from the straight lines, if the level limps by a hair anywhere at all, then everything is bound to come out faulty and lopsided: crooked, sagging, leaning forward, leaning back, out of true, roofs that already look as though they mean to fall in, and do fall in, all of them betrayed by the first misleading measurements. In just that way, your reasoning about the world is bound to be crooked and false, whenever it has taken its rise from senses that are false.
Now for the way each of the other senses feels the thing that belongs to it. It is not a rough road at all.
To begin with, a sound and every voice is heard when they have worked their way into the ears and struck the sense with their own body. For we must admit that voice and sound are bodily too, since they are able to strike the senses.
Besides, the voice often scrapes the throat, and shouting on its way out makes the windpipe rougher. Naturally enough: when the atoms of voice have started to go out through a narrow passage in a bigger crowd than usual, the doorway of the mouth, filled to bursting, gets scraped as well. So there is no doubt about it: voices and words consist of bodily atoms, since they are able to hurt.
And it does not escape you how much bodily substance is carried off, how much is drawn out of a man's sinews and out of his strength itself, by talking without a break from the rising brightness of dawn right through to the shadow of black night, and above all if it has been poured out at the top of his voice. So the voice must be bodily, since a man who talks a great deal loses part of his body.
Roughness in the voice comes from roughness in the atoms, and smoothness in the same way is created out of smooth ones. The atoms do not enter the ears with the same shape when the trumpet bellows deep with a low rumble and the quick-strung lyre throws back a hoarse booming, and when the daughters of Daulis, out of the gardens of Helicon, lift up their clear complaint in a mourning voice.
So when we press these voices out from deep inside our body and send them out straight through the mouth, the quick tongue, that skilled craftsman, breaks them into joints, and the shaping of the lips does its share of giving them shape. When the distance is not long from where a voice sets out to where it arrives, the words themselves are bound to be heard plainly and made out joint by joint, because the voice keeps the making and keeps the shape it was given. But if the space in between is longer than it should be, the words are bound to be muddled together in all that air, and the voice thrown into confusion while it flies across the breezes. So it turns out that you can feel the sound and yet not make out what the meaning of the words is: the voice comes to you as confused and hobbled as that.
Besides, one word sent out from the mouth of a herald often sets all the ears in a crowd going. So one voice suddenly scatters into many voices, since it divides itself up among individual ears, stamping the shape of the word and its clear ring on each of them. Whatever part of the voices does not fall on the ears themselves is carried past and perishes, spread uselessly through the air. Part of it, dashed against solid places, is thrown back and gives a sound in return, and sometimes cheats you with the ghost of a word.
When you see this properly, you can give an account, to yourself and to other people, of how in lonely places the rocks give back matching shapes of words in the right order, when we are looking for companions who have straggled off among the shadowy mountains and are calling to them, scattered as they are, at the top of our voices. I have seen places give back six or seven cries when you threw out one: the hills themselves drove the words back against hills and kept repeating what had been said.
The people who live nearby make out that these places are held by goat-footed Satyrs and by Nymphs, and they say there are Fauns there, by whose night-wandering racket and joking games, they generally insist, the silences that hold their tongue are broken, and the sounds of strings are made, and the sweet complaints that the pipe pours out when the fingers of the players beat on it. The farming people hear it far and wide, they say, when Pan, shaking the pine leaves that cover his half-animal head, runs his curved lip again and again over the open reeds, so that the pipes never stop pouring out the woodland music. All the other monsters and marvels of this kind they talk about for the same reason: so that they will not be thought to live in deserted places that even the gods have left alone. That is why they throw out miracles when they talk. Or else some other reason leads them on, since the whole human race is far too greedy for something to pour into its ears.
For the rest, there is nothing to wonder at in the way voices come through places where the eyes cannot make out plain objects, and go on to trouble the ears. We often see people talking with the doors shut, and no wonder, since a voice can get through the bent channels of things unharmed, while the images refuse: they are torn to pieces unless they swim through straight channels, like the channels in glass, which every appearance flies across.
Besides, a voice divides into every direction, since one voice gives birth to others, once a single voice, having risen, has burst apart into many, the way a spark of fire will often scatter itself into fires of its own. So places hidden away round the back get filled with voices, everything about them seething and stirred up with sound. But images all make straight for where they were sent when they were once sent off; and that is why nobody can often see over a wall, though he can take in voices from outside. And even so, this voice itself, while it comes through the shut-up parts of a house, is blunted, and gets into the ears confused, and we seem to be hearing a sound rather than words.
In this business, the tongue and the palate, which are how we feel flavour, have rather more reasoning in them and more work to do. To begin with, we feel the flavour in the mouth when we squeeze it out of the food by chewing, the way somebody might start pressing and drying out a sponge full of water in his hand. Then everything we squeeze out is spread through all the little openings of the palate and through the winding channels of the loose-woven tongue. When the bodies of the running juice are smooth, they touch pleasantly and pleasantly handle everything around the moist, sweating precincts of the tongue. When they are not, they prick the sense and tear it as they rise up, and the more so the more each of them is packed with roughness.
Then again, the pleasure that comes from the flavour reaches only as far as the palate. Once it has plunged down through the throat there is no pleasure in it, while it is all being spread out into the limbs. And it makes no difference at all what food the body is fed on, provided you can digest what you take and spread it through the limbs and keep the stomach running moist and even.
Now I will set out how it is that different creatures have different food, and why what is harsh and bitter to some can still seem very sweet to others, and how great the distance and the difference is in these matters, so great that what is food to one is fierce poison to another. There is a snake, for instance, which, touched by a man's spit, wastes away and finishes itself off by chewing itself to pieces. Besides, hellebore is fierce poison to us, but it puts fat on goats and quails.
So that you can find out by what means this comes about, the first thing you should remember is what we said earlier: that the atoms are held mixed together in things in many different ways. Then, all living things that take food, as they are unlike each other on the outside and unlike kind by kind, and as the outer outline of their limbs fences each of them in, so in the same way they are made of atoms and vary in shape. And since the atoms differ, it must be that the intervals and the paths, which we call the pores, differ too, in all the limbs and in the mouth and in the palate itself. So some must be smaller and some larger, some three-cornered for one creature, square for another, many of them round, and some many-angled in many different ways. For as the arrangement and the motions of their shapes demand, so the shapes of the pores must differ, and the paths must vary according to the weave that hems them in.
So when what is sweet to some turns bitter to others, then for the one it is sweet to, the smoothest bodies must be entering the openings of the palate caressingly; while for those in whom the same thing is harsh inside, no doubt rough and hooked ones are getting into the throat.
Now it is easy to know each of these cases from all this. When a fever has come up in a man because the bile has got the upper hand, or the force of some disease has been stirred up in another way, then the whole body is thrown into disorder and all the positions of the atoms are changed. What happens is that the bodies which used to suit the sense do not suit it now, and others fit better, the ones which can produce a harsh feeling when they get in. Both sorts are mixed together in the flavour of honey, as I have often shown you above.
Now then, let me deal with the way the impact of a smell touches the nostrils. First of all, there must be many things from which a varied tide of smells rolls out flowing, and we must suppose that they flow and are sent out and scattered everywhere alike. But one is better suited to some living things and another to others, because of the differences in their shapes. And so bees are led through the air by the smell of honey however far off it is, and vultures by dead bodies. The loosed power of dogs leads the hunter wherever the split hoof of a wild animal has taken its steps, and the white goose, guardian of the citadel of the sons of Romulus, senses the smell of a human being a long way off. So a different scent given to different creatures leads each of them to its own food and makes it spring back from foul poison, and in that way the generations of wild animals are kept going.
This smell itself, then, whatever it is that troubles the nostrils, can be sent further in one case than another. Still, none of them is carried anything like as far as a sound, as a voice, to say nothing of the things that strike the sharp edge of the eyes and trouble the sight. A smell comes slowly and wandering, and it perishes first, scattered easily, little by little, into the breezes of the air. In the first place it is only with difficulty sent out from deep inside a thing: that smells do flow and come away from deep within things is shown by the fact that everything seems to smell more strongly when it is broken, when it is ground down, when it is undone by fire. Then you can see that a smell is created of larger atoms than a voice is, since it does not get through stone walls, where a voice and a sound commonly go. That is also why you will find it is not so easy to track down what region the thing that smells is sitting in: the blow cools off by dawdling through the air, and the news of things does not come running down to the sense while it is still hot. That is why dogs so often go wrong and cast about for the trail.
This does not happen in smells alone, or in the class of flavours. In the same way the appearances of things and their colours do not all suit all senses so well that there are not some which are sharper than others to look at. In fact the lions, for all their rush, cannot stand up to the cock, the bird that is used to clapping the night away with his wings and calling the dawn with his clear voice; they cannot look him in the face, and think at once about running. No doubt because there are certain atoms in the bodies of cocks which, when they are let into the eyes of lions, bore into the pupils and give such sharp pain that the fierce animals cannot hold out against them. And yet these same atoms cannot hurt our own sight at all, either because they do not get in, or because, when they do get in, they are given a free way out of the eyes, so that by hanging about they cannot injure the light of the eyes in any part.
Now then, take in what things move the mind, and learn in a few words where the things that come into the mind come from. The first thing I say is this: many images of things are wandering about in many ways in every direction, thin ones, which join easily with each other in the air when they meet, like a spider's web or gold leaf. They are far thinner in their weave than the ones that take hold of the eyes and trouble the sight, since they get in through the loose parts of the body and stir the thin nature of the mind inside and trouble the sense there.
And so we see Centaurs, and the limbs of Scyllas, and dogs with Cerberus faces, and the images of people whose bones the earth is holding in her arms, who have met their death. Images of every kind are carried about everywhere: partly those that come to be of their own accord in the air itself, partly those that come away from all sorts of things, and those that are put together out of the shapes of these. The image of a Centaur certainly is not made from a living one, since no such living nature ever existed; but when the image of a horse and the image of a man have come together by chance, they stick easily and at once, as I said before, because of their fine nature and thin weave. Everything else of this kind is created in the same way.
And since they are carried nimbly and with the greatest lightness, as I showed you earlier, any one of these fine images easily moves the mind with a single blow; for the mind is thin and itself wonderfully quick to move. That these things happen as I am telling you, you can easily learn from this: in so far as the one is like the other, what we see with the mind and what we see with the eyes must come about in the same way.
So now, since I have taught you that I perceive a lion, say, through the images that trouble the eyes, you may take it that the mind is moved in a like way, through the images of lions and of everything else that it sees, just as much as the eyes do and no less, except that what it perceives is thinner.
And it is for no other reason, when sleep has poured out the limbs, that the intelligence of the mind stays awake: it is because these same images trouble our minds that trouble them when we are awake, and so much so that we seem for certain to be seeing the man who has left life behind and whom death and the earth now hold. Nature forces this to happen because all the senses of the body are blocked and are resting throughout the limbs, and cannot convict the false with true things. Besides, memory is lying down and is faint with sleep, and does not object that the man the mind believes it is seeing alive was taken long ago by death and destruction.
For the rest, it is nothing to wonder at that the images move and throw their arms and their other limbs about in time, since an image does seem to do this in dreams. What happens is that when the first image perishes and another is born after it in a different posture, the earlier one seems to have changed its gesture. Of course we must suppose that this happens fast. There is so much mobility, and so great a store of things, and in any single moment we can feel there is so great a store of little parts, that the supply can keep up.
There is a great deal to ask about in all this, and a great deal we have to make clear, if we really want to lay the facts out plainly. The first question is why, when the fancy for something has come over a man, his mind thinks of that very thing on the spot. Do the images keep watch on what we want, so that as soon as we want one the image turns up in front of us, whether it is the sea we have set our heart on, or the land, or the sky itself? Gatherings of people, a procession, banquets, battles: does nature create and get all these ready at a word? And this when the mind of another man in the same region and the same place is thinking of things utterly unlike them.
And what about this, when we see the images step forward in time in our dreams and move their soft limbs, when they nimbly throw out first one soft arm and then the other and repeat the gesture with their eyes while the foot keeps time? Of course the images are soaked in art and have wandered off well trained, so that they can put on shows for us in the night.
Or will this be nearer the truth? In a single stretch of time, that is, in the time it takes us to feel one thing, the time it takes for a single word to be uttered, there are many times lying hidden, which reasoning finds out to be there. And that is why, at any moment you please, the various images are on hand and ready, each in its place. So great is the mobility, so great the store of things. And when the first image perishes and another is born after it in a different posture, the earlier one seems to have changed its gesture.
And because they are thin, the mind cannot see them sharply unless it strains at them. So all the others that are there besides perish, except the ones the mind has got itself ready for. It gets itself ready, and expects to see what follows in each case; and so that is what happens. Do you not see that the eyes do the same, when they set about seeing things that are fine, and strain and make themselves ready, and that without that we cannot see sharply? And yet you can find, even with plain things, that if you do not turn your mind to them it is exactly as if they had been kept away from you the whole time and put far off. So why is it a wonder if the mind loses everything except the things it has given itself up to? Then we build great opinions out of small signs, and dress ourselves up in a cheat of our own making.
It also happens now and then that an image of the same kind is not supplied, and what was a woman before seems to have turned into a man and to be there in your arms, or one face and one age follows another. Sleep and forgetting see to it that we do not wonder at that.
In all this there is one fault you must run away from with all your strength, one error you must be on your guard against and afraid of beforehand: do not suppose that the bright lights of the eyes were created so that we might see ahead of us, or that the tops of the thighs and the calves were able to be bent, set on the feet, so that we could take long strides, or again that the forearms were fitted to strong upper arms, and hands given as servants on either side, so that we could do whatever life required. Every other explanation of this kind is back to front, with the reasoning turned round the wrong way. Nothing at all was born in the body so that we might use it. What is born creates the use.
Seeing did not exist before the lights of the eyes were born, nor pleading in words before the tongue was created. On the contrary, the origin of the tongue came a long way before speech, and the ears were created much earlier than any sound was heard; and all the limbs, I think, were there before there was any use for them. So they cannot have grown for the sake of being used.
On the other hand, closing hand to hand in the struggle of a fight, and tearing men's joints apart, and fouling their limbs with gore, came long before shining spears ever flew; and nature forced men to dodge a wound before the left arm ever held up a shield made by art. Clearly, giving the tired body over to rest is far older than the soft bedding of a bed, and quenching thirst was born before cups were.
These things, then, which have been found out from use and from life, can be believed to have been discovered for the sake of use. But quite separate from them are all the things which were born first, and only afterwards gave us the knowledge of what they were good for. First among that class we see the senses and the limbs. So again and again: you are a very long way from being able to believe that these could have been created to do a useful job.
There is nothing to wonder at, either, in the fact that the very nature of the body, in every living creature, goes looking for food. I have shown you that bodies stream away and depart from things in many ways and in great numbers; but the most of them must come away from living creatures, because they are worked hard by motion. A great many are breathed out through the mouth when a tired animal is panting, and a great many are squeezed up from deep inside and carried off in sweat. So by all this the body grows thin, and its whole nature is undermined from below, and pain follows on that. That is why food is taken: to prop up the tottering limbs, and, once it has been given out among them, to make their strength again, and to stop up the craving to eat which stands open all through the limbs and the veins. Liquid, in the same way, goes off into all the places that call for liquid; and the many packed bodies of heat, which set our stomachs on fire, are scattered by the arriving drink and put out as you put out a fire, so that dry heat can no longer burn the limbs. That is how the panting thirst is washed out of our body, and that is how the starved craving is filled up.
Now I will tell you how it comes about that we can take steps forward when we want to, and why we have been given the power to move our limbs, and what it is that has got into the habit of shoving this whole great load of our body along. Take in what I say. I say that first the images of walking fall on our mind and strike the mind, as I said earlier. Then the will is formed; for nobody begins to do anything at all before the mind has seen in advance what it wants, and what it sees in advance is fixed by the image of that thing. So when the mind stirs itself in such a way that it wants to go and step forward, it strikes at once the force of the soul which is sown through the whole body, through the limbs and joints; and that is easy to do, since the soul is held joined with it. Then the soul in its turn strikes the body, and so the whole mass, little by little, is shoved along and moved. Besides, at such a time the body grows loose in its texture too, and air, being of course what it always is, forever on the move, comes in through the opened pores and works its way in in quantity and is sprinkled into every one of the small parts of the body. So by these two things, working from two directions, the body is carried along as a ship is carried by sails and wind.
And there is nothing to marvel at in this either, that bodies so tiny can swing so great a body round and turn our whole weight about; for the wind, thin as it is, with its fine body, drives and pushes a great ship of great bulk, and one hand steers it however hard it is going, and one rudder swings it wherever you like; and a machine, by its pulleys and drums, sets many things of great weight moving and lifts them with a light effort.
Now, by what means sleep floods rest through the limbs and unties the mind's worries out of the breast: I would rather set it out for you in a few sweet-spoken verses than in many, as the small song of the swan is better than the screaming of cranes scattered among the high clouds of the south wind. Give me a fine ear and a sharp mind. Do not deny that what I am going to say can happen, and do not walk off with your heart pushing the true words back, when the fault is your own and you cannot see it.
To begin with, sleep comes about when the force of the soul has been pulled apart through the limbs, and part of it has been thrown out and gone away, and part has been crowded back and gone deeper in. Only then do the limbs come undone and go slack. There is no doubt that this sense of ours is the work of the soul; so when sleep blocks that sense from existing, we have to suppose that the soul has been thrown into disorder and thrown out — not the whole of it, though, or the body would lie soaked in the everlasting cold of death. If no part of the soul were left lurking among the limbs, as fire lurks buried under a great deal of ash, where could sense be suddenly lit again from, all through the limbs, in the way flame rises out of a hidden fire?
But I will untangle for you by what means this strange new state is brought about, and what the soul can be disturbed by and the body go slack. See to it that I am not pouring my words out to the winds.
First, the body on its outer part must be beaten, and struck by the repeated blows of the air, since it is touched along its border by the gusts next to it; and that is why nearly all things are covered with hide, or else with shells, or with hard skin, or with bark. This same air beats the inner part too, in breathing creatures, when the breath is drawn in and blown out again. So, since the body is thrashed on both sides at once, and since the blows come through the small pores right in to the first parts and first atoms of our body, a kind of collapse comes about in us, little by little, all through the limbs. For the arrangements of the atoms of the body and of the mind are thrown into confusion. It comes about that part of the soul is then drawn out of us, and part retreats and hides away inside, and part, dragged apart through the limbs, cannot be joined together with itself or take and give motion in return; for nature fences off the meetings and the roads between them. So sense goes away deep inside as the motions change. And since there is nothing left, so to speak, to prop the limbs up, the body goes weak and all the limbs go slack; the arms and the eyelids drop, and often, when you are lying down, even the backs of your knees give way beneath you and let their strength go.
Then again, sleep follows food, because food does the very same thing the air does, while it is being distributed into all the veins. And by far the heaviest sleep is the one you take when you are full or tired, because that is when the greatest number of bodies are thrown into confusion, bruised by hard work. In the same way it comes about that part of the soul is driven deeper, and more of it is thrown outside, and what is left inside is more divided against itself and more pulled apart.
Whatever pursuit a man is held tight by and sticks to, whatever we have spent a long time over before, whatever it was that the mind was more taken up with, that is mostly what we seem to be busy with in our sleep. Lawyers plead their cases and put statutes together; generals fight and go into battle; sailors carry on the running war they have with the winds; and I myself am doing this work, forever hunting for the nature of things and, when I have found it, setting it down in the writing of my own country. That is how the other pursuits and skills generally seem to hold men's minds in sleep and make fools of them. And whenever people have given days on end of unbroken attention to the games, we mostly see that, even when they have stopped taking those games in with their senses, there are still roads left standing open in the mind for the same images of things to come along by. So for many days afterwards the same sights float in front of their eyes, so that even wide awake they think they can see the dancers moving their supple limbs, and can take in with their ears the clear song of the lyre and its talking strings, and can see the same crowd on the benches and all the varied splendours of the stage shining at once.
So much difference does it make what a man's enthusiasm and his will are set on, and what things he has been in the habit of working at — and not men only, but every kind of animal. You will see strong horses, when their limbs are lying still, sweating in their sleep all the same, and blowing hard again and again, and straining every muscle as though they were going for the prize, or as though the starting gates had been thrown open. And the dogs of hunting men, in their soft rest, often toss their legs suddenly and suddenly let out cries and pull the air in through their noses again and again, as though they were holding a wild animal's tracks that they had found; and once woken they often go chasing the empty images of stags, as though they saw them given over to running away, until they shake the mistake off and come back to themselves. But the fawning breed of puppies that are used to the house are all urgency to shake themselves and snatch their bodies up off the ground, exactly as if they were looking at faces and mouths they did not know. And the rougher the breed a creature comes of, the more it is bound to rage in the same way in its sleep.
But the various birds take flight, and trouble the sacred groves of the gods suddenly with their wings in the night time, when in their gentle sleep they have seen hawks flying and giving chase and offering them battle and a fight.
Then again, the minds of men, which carry out great things by great motions, often do and carry through the same things in sleep. They take kings' towns by storm, they are captured themselves, they mix in battle, they raise a shout as though their throats were being cut on the spot. Many fight it out and let out groans at the pain, and, as if they were being chewed by the bite of a panther or a savage lion, they fill everything round them with great cries. Many talk in their sleep about great matters, and have very often been the evidence that convicted them of their own doing. Many meet their death. Many are terrified as though they were falling headlong with their whole body from high mountains to the ground, and come out of sleep as though out of their minds, and hardly come back to themselves, shaken by the heaving of their bodies. A thirsty man, in the same way, sits down beside a river or a pleasant spring and all but takes the whole stream down his throat. Clean children, tied fast in sleep beside a basin or a cut-down jar, often think they are lifting their clothes, and pour out the strained water of their whole body, and soak the Babylonian coverings in all their magnificent brightness.
And there are those into whose channels the seed of manhood is first working its way, when the day itself has ripened it in their limbs. Images come to them from outside, out of some body or other, messengers of a splendid face and a lovely colour, and stir and irritate the places that are now swollen with a great deal of seed, so that often, as though the whole thing had actually been carried through, they pour out the great flood of the stream and stain their clothing.
That seed, as I said, is stirred in us when the years of full growth first put strength into the limbs. Different things stir and provoke different things, and it is the force of a human being, and only that, which draws human seed out of a man. As soon as it is driven out of its own places and comes away, it goes off through the limbs and joints out of the whole body, gathering into fixed regions of the sinews, and it stirs up at once the very parts of the body that do the begetting. Those places, irritated, swell with the seed, and there comes the will to throw it out towards whatever the terrible lust is straining after. It goads him on, irritating the places that are swollen with a great deal of seed; and the body makes for the body that the mind has its wound of love from. For as a rule everyone falls towards their wound, and the blood spurts out in the direction the blow struck us from, and if the enemy is at close quarters the red liquid covers him. So a man who takes a blow from Venus's weapons — whether it is a boy with girlish limbs who throws the spear at him, or a woman shooting love out of her whole body — strains towards the place he is struck from, and is desperate to come together with it and to throw into that body the liquid drawn out of his own. Because his speechless craving foretells the pleasure.
This is Venus for us; this is where the name of Love comes from; this is where that drop of Venus's sweetness first dripped into the heart, with cold care coming in after it. For if the thing you love is away from you, its images are there all the same, and the sweet name keeps floating about in your ears. But the right thing is to run away from those images, and to frighten off from yourself whatever feeds your love, and to turn your mind elsewhere, and to throw the collected liquid into any body at all, rather than to hold it back once it has been turned towards the love of one person, and so store up care for yourself and pain that is certain to come. The sore lives on and gets old by being fed; every day the madness swells and the misery gets heavier — unless you unsettle the first wounds with new blows, and treat them while they are still fresh by wandering after a wandering Venus, or unless you can lead the motions of your mind off somewhere else.
And the man who keeps away from love is not going without the fruit of Venus. He takes instead the advantages of it that come with no penalty. For the pleasure of it is certainly purer for people in their right minds than it is for the wretched. In the very moment of getting what they want, the heat of lovers tosses about, uncertain and astray, and they cannot make up their minds what to enjoy first with their eyes and their hands. What they went for they squeeze hard, and they hurt the body, and often they drive their teeth into the lips and press their mouths on it — because the pleasure is not pure, and there are goads underneath urging them to hurt the very thing, whatever it is, that these seeds of madness rise up from. But Venus lightly breaks the punishment in the middle of the love, and the coaxing pleasure mixed in with it reins the biting back; because in this there is a hope, that the flame can be put out by the very body it took fire from. Nature protests that the whole opposite is the case. This is the one thing where the more of it we have, the more the heart burns with the terrible longing. Food and drink are taken up inside the limbs; and since they can occupy fixed places, the craving for water and for bread is easily filled. But out of a human face and a lovely colour nothing is given to the body to enjoy except thin images — and a poor little hope that is, and the wind often snatches it away.
It is like a thirsty man who tries to drink in his sleep and gets no water that could put out the fire in his limbs; he goes for images of liquid and works at it for nothing, and stays thirsty in the middle of a rushing river even while he drinks. In the same way, in love, Venus makes fools of lovers with images. They cannot fill themselves by looking at the body in front of them, and they cannot rub anything off those tender limbs with their hands, straying uncertainly all over the body. And in the end, when they have brought their limbs together and are enjoying the flower of youth, when the body is already promising itself its delights and Venus is at the point of sowing the woman's fields, they fasten on the body greedily and join the wet of their mouths and breathe into each other, pressing teeth on mouths — and all for nothing, since they cannot rub anything off it, and cannot get inside and go away into that body with the whole of their own. For sometimes they seem to want to do exactly that, and to be fighting to do it. So greedily do they hang in the fastenings of Venus, while their limbs go weak and melt under the force of the pleasure. At last, when the gathered longing has burst out of the sinews, there is a short pause for a little while in the violent heat. Then the same madness comes back and the old frenzy returns, when they cast about for what it is they want to reach themselves, and cannot find any device that will beat that trouble down. So uncertain are they, wasting away with a hidden wound.
Add to this that they use up their strength and are worn out by the labour. Add to this that a man's life is lived under somebody else's nod. His duties go slack, his good name falls sick and staggers. Meanwhile his property slides away and turns into Babylonian perfumes; lovely Sicyonian shoes laugh on her feet; and of course great emeralds with their green light are set in gold, and the sea-coloured dress is worn out by constant use and drinks up the sweat of Venus. The good things his fathers earned turn into headbands and turbans, and sometimes into a Greek gown and stuffs from Elis and Ceos. Banquets are got ready, with rare coverings and rare food, and games, and cup after cup, and perfumes and crowns and garlands — all for nothing, since out of the middle of the fountain of charms something bitter rises up which chokes him among the very flowers: either because his own mind, knowing what it is doing, bites him for spending his life in idleness and going to ruin in brothels, or because she has thrown out some word and left it standing in doubt, and it sticks in his hungry heart and lives there like a fire, or because he thinks she is casting her eyes about too much and looking at somebody else, and sees the traces of a laugh in her face.
And these troubles are found in a love that is his own and going perfectly well. In love that is crossed and has nothing to hope for, the troubles are ones you could take hold of with your eyes shut, and there is no counting them. So it is better to keep watch beforehand, in the way I have taught you, and to take care not to be drawn in. To avoid being thrown into the snares of love is not so hard as it is to get out again once you are caught in the nets themselves, and to break through the strong knots of Venus. And yet, even tangled and tripped up, you could still get away from the danger, unless you get in your own way and stand in front of yourself, and unless you begin by passing over all the faults of mind, and all the faults of body, that belong to the woman you prefer and want. Because that is generally what men do, blind with longing, and they hand her advantages that are not really hers. That is how we see women who are crooked in a hundred ways, and ugly, kept as darlings and flourishing in the highest honour. And one man laughs at another and tells him to make his peace with Venus, since he is being knocked about by a foul love — and the poor fool very often does not look at his own troubles, which are the biggest of all.
The dark one is melichrus, honey-coloured. The dirty and rank one is acosmos, careless of her looks. The grey-eyed one is a Palladion, a little Athena. The stringy, wooden one is a dorcas, a gazelle. The tiny one, the dwarf, is chariton mia, one of the Graces, all pure wit. The huge and monstrous one is cataplexis, a knockout, and full of dignity. She stammers and cannot get a word out: she traulizei, she has a sweet lisp. The one who cannot speak at all is modest. The fiery, hateful chatterbox becomes a Lampadion, a little torch. She turns into an ischnon eromenion, a slender darling, when she is too thin to stay alive; and when she is nearly dead of a cough she is rhadine, willowy. The overgrown one with the great breasts is Ceres herself with Bacchus at the breast. The snub-nosed one is a Silena, a she-satyr. The thick-lipped one is philema, all kiss. It would take a long time if I tried to go through the rest of this kind.
But let her face have all the glory you like, and let the force of Venus rise out of every one of her limbs. There are others, all the same. We lived without her before now, all the same. She does the same things the ugly one does, and we know she does, all the same, and smokes her own wretched self with foul perfumes, while her maids run a long way off and giggle behind their hands. And the lover, shut out and in tears, often covers her doorstep with flowers and garlands, and rubs marjoram oil on her proud doorposts, and presses his kisses on the doors, poor man. Let him be let in at last, and let one single breath of air meet him as he comes; he would be looking for respectable excuses to leave, and the complaint he had worked up for so long and drawn from so deep would fall flat, and he would condemn himself for a fool on the spot, seeing that he had allowed her more than it is right to grant to any mortal woman. And this is not lost on our Venuses. All the more, then, they take enormous trouble to hide everything that goes on backstage of life from the men they want to keep hold of and to have bound down in love — and for nothing, since you can still drag it all into the light with your mind and look into all the laughing; and if she has a fine mind and is not hateful, you can pass it over in your turn and make an allowance for human things.
And a woman does not always sigh with a pretended love, when she has her arms round a man and joins her body to his and holds him and makes the kisses wet with sucking lips. Often she does it from the heart, and, looking for delights that are shared, she urges him on to run the course of love right through. There is no other way birds and cattle and wild animals and flocks and mares could give in to the males, unless it were that their own nature is on heat, and burning, and full to overflowing, and glad to take on the Venus of the ones that mount them. Do you not see, too, that those whom a shared pleasure has bound are tortured in their common bonds? How often in the crossroads dogs that are wild to get apart pull in opposite directions with all their strength, while the whole time they are stuck fast in the strong fastenings of Venus? They would never do that unless they knew the shared delights that could throw them into the trap and hold them tied there. So again and again, as I say, the pleasure belongs to both.
And when, in the mixing of the seed, the woman's force has beaten the man's by a sudden effort and caught it, then the children come out like their mothers, from the mother's seed, as from the father's seed they come out like their fathers. But those you see with the shape of both, blending the faces of their parents side by side, grow up out of the father's body and the mother's blood, when the seeds have been stirred up through the limbs by the goads of Venus and a heat breathing in both of them at once has driven them together head-on, and neither of them has won and neither has been beaten. It happens sometimes, too, that children can come out like their grandparents, and often bring back the shapes of great-grandparents, because the parents often carry many atoms hidden in their bodies, mixed in many ways, handed down by father to father from the root of the family. Out of that Venus brings out shapes by a throw that goes different ways, and brings back the faces and the voices and the hair of the ancestors; since these things come from a fixed seed no more and no less than our own faces and bodies and limbs do. And the female line rises out of the father's seed, and males come into being created out of the mother's body; for a birth always consists of a double seed, and whichever of the two the created thing is more like, it has more than an equal share from that one — which you can see for yourself, whether the offspring is male or female in origin.
And it is not that any divine power keeps the seed of begetting from a man, so that he is never called father by sweet children and has to see his life out in a childless Venus. That is what most people think, and in their gloom they sprinkle the altars with a great deal of blood and burn gifts on the high platforms, to make their wives heavy with plenty of seed. They wear out the power of the gods and the sacred lots for nothing. Some men are childless because the seed is too thick, and others, the other way about, because it is more liquid and thin than it ought to be. Because the thin cannot fasten itself and hold on to the places, it slips away at once and comes back and goes off without result. And where a seed thicker than it should be is sent out, in too solid a state, either it does not fly out with a long enough spurt, or it cannot get into the places properly, or, once it has got in, it mixes only with difficulty with the woman's seed. For the harmonies of Venus turn out to make a great deal of difference. Some men fill some women more easily, and some women take up the weight more readily from some men and grow heavy with it. Many women have been childless before, through several marriages, and afterwards have found men from whom they could take up children all the same, and grow rich with a sweet birth. And for men whose fertile wives at home have often been unable to bear for them, a matching nature has been found for them too, so that they could fortify their old age with children. It makes so much difference that seeds should be able to be mixed with seeds in a way fit for begetting, and that the thick should meet the liquid and the liquid the thick.
And in this it matters what diet a life is kept up on; for some things make the seed thicken in the limbs, and others, the other way about, thin it out and waste it away. And the ways the coaxing pleasure itself is handled — that matters enormously too. For it is generally thought that wives conceive more readily in the manner of wild animals, after the fashion of the four-footed kinds, because in that way the seeds can take their places, with the breast laid down and the loins raised. And wives have no need at all of soft movements. For a woman keeps herself from conceiving and fights against it if, in her gladness, she takes on the man's Venus with her own hips and stirs up waves with her whole breast gone boneless; because that throws the furrow out of the straight line and the track of the ploughshare, and turns the spurt of the seed away from the places. And prostitutes have made a habit of moving that way for their own reasons: not to be filled up over and over and lie heavy with child, and at the same time to make Venus more elegant for the men. Our wives plainly have no need of that.
And it is not by divine action or by the arrows of Venus, either, when a woman of poorer looks is loved. Sometimes the woman herself brings it about, by the things she does, by her obliging ways and her neat and well-kept body, so that she easily gets you used to spending your life with her. And beyond that, habit works love up. Whatever is struck by a repeated blow, however lightly, is beaten in the long run all the same, and gives way. Do you not see, too, that drops of water falling on rocks bore through the rocks in the long run?
Who is strong enough in the chest to build a song worth the majesty of the nature of things and worth these discoveries? Who is master enough of words to frame the praise that man deserves, who left us such prizes, won and hunted down by his own mind? Nobody, I think, born of a mortal body. Because if I am to speak as the known majesty of the subject itself demands, then he was a god. A god, famous Memmius: the man who first found that plan of life which is now called wisdom, and who by his skill lifted life out of such great waves and such great darkness and set it down in water so calm and light so clear.
Set the old divine discoveries of others beside that. Ceres, they say, gave mortals grain, and Bacchus the juice of the liquid the vine begets. And yet life could go on without those things, and there are peoples said to be living without them even now. But life could not be lived well without a mind that had been cleaned out. So he seems to us, with better reason, to be our god: the man from whom the sweet comforts of life, spread now through great nations, soothe men's minds.
And if you think the deeds of Hercules beat that, you will be carried much further from true reasoning. What harm would that great gaping mouth of the Nemean lion do us now, or the bristling boar of Arcadia? What real trouble could the birds that lived at Stymphalus give us? Or, for that matter, the bull of Crete, or the plague of Lerna, the hydra fenced round with poisonous snakes? Or the three-chested strength of triple Geryon, or the horses of Diomedes breathing fire out of their nostrils, off in Thrace by the Bistonian country and Ismara? Or the snake that guards the golden shining apples of the Hesperides, rough, with a bitter stare, huge in body, wound round the tree trunk? What harm could that do us out by the Atlantic shore and the grim stretches of sea, where none of our people goes and no foreigner dares to? All the other monsters of that kind that were killed off: if they had not been beaten, what damage could they be doing alive? None, I think. The earth is crawling with wild animals even now, up to the point of glut, and packed full of shivering terror through the groves and the great mountains and the deep woods. But it is generally in our own power to keep away from those places.
Whereas if the chest is not cleaned out, what battles and dangers we have to let into ourselves, whether we want them or not! How the sharp cares of appetite tear a man apart and leave him raw, and the fears with them! And pride, filth, insolence — what disasters they bring off! What about extravagance and idleness? So the man who put all of that down and drove it out of the mind with words rather than weapons: will it not be fitting to think a man like that worth counting among the gods? Especially since he was in the habit of saying a great many good things, and saying them in a divine way, about the immortal gods themselves, and of unfolding the whole nature of things in what he said.
I have set my feet in his footprints, and while I follow his reasoning through and teach in words the laws of nature under which each thing has been created, and how it has to stay under them and cannot undo the strong laws of time, I found first of all, in the class of mortal things, that the nature of the mind consists of a body that is born, and cannot last unhurt through a great stretch of time, and that it is images which regularly deceive the mind in sleep, when we seem to see somebody whom life has left. As for the rest, the order of the argument has now brought me to this point: I have to give an account of how the world consists of a mortal body and was also born; and in what ways that meeting of matter founded earth, sky, sea, stars, sun and the ball of the moon; then what living creatures came up out of the earth, and which have never at any time been born; and in what way the human race began to use names for things among themselves, with speech that varied; and in what ways that fear of the gods worked its way into people's chests, which now, all round the circle of the lands, keeps holy the shrines, the lakes, the groves, the altars and the images of the gods.
Besides that, I shall untangle by what force the steering hand of nature bends the sun through its courses and the moon through her journeys. We must not think, after all, that these run their yearly rounds freely between sky and earth, of their own accord, obliging us by making the crops and the living creatures grow, or that they are rolled along by any plan of the gods. Because even people who have learned properly that the gods pass their time free of care, if all the same they wonder in the meantime by what principle things can be carried on, above all in the things we see overhead in the regions of the upper air, are carried back to the old religions and take on harsh masters, whom the poor creatures believe can do anything, because they do not know what can be and what cannot, and on what principle each thing has its power limited, and a boundary stone driven deep.
Now for the rest, and I shall not hold you up with more promises. To begin with, look at the seas and the lands and the sky. Their triple nature, Memmius, their three bodies, three kinds of thing so unlike each other, three fabrics woven like that: one day will hand them all over to destruction, and the mass and machinery of the world, held up through so many years, will come down in ruins.
I am not blind to how new and strange it is for a mind to take in the coming destruction of sky and earth, and how hard it will be for me to win the argument in words. It always happens like that when you bring an unfamiliar thing to somebody's ears and cannot put it in front of their eyes or into their hands — and the road of sight and touch is the paved road, the one that carries belief straight into the human chest and the regions of the mind. Still, I shall speak. The event itself may give my words credit, and you may see everything shaken to pieces in a short space of time by earthquakes coming up from below. May the steering hand of fortune turn that far away from us, and may it be reasoning rather than the event itself that persuades you that everything can be beaten and collapse with a horrible crash.
Before I set out on this, and give you oracles about the matter in a holier way and with far more certain reasoning than the Pythian priestess who prophesies from Apollo's tripod and laurel, I shall unfold a good many comforts for you in learned words. I do not want you, held back by the bridle of religion, to think that the lands and the sun and the sky, the sea, the stars, the moon, have to stay everlasting because their body is divine — and then to think it right that everyone who shakes the walls of this world by their reasoning should pay the penalty for a monstrous crime, like the Giants, because they want to put out the shining sun of heaven and are branding immortal things with mortal talk. These things are so far from any divine power, and so unworthy of being counted among the gods, that they are better taken as giving you an idea of what a thing is like when it has no living motion and no sense in it.
For it simply is not the case that the nature of the mind and its judgment can be thought to exist with any body you please. A tree cannot exist in the upper air, clouds cannot exist in the salt sea, fish cannot live in the fields, there is no blood in wood and no sap in stones: where each thing can grow and have its place is fixed and laid out. In the same way the nature of the mind cannot come up on its own without a body, and cannot be far away from sinews and blood. If it could, then the force of the mind itself could much sooner be in the head or the shoulders or the bottoms of the heels, and would regularly be born in whatever part you like — but at least it would stay in the same man and the same vessel. As it is, since even in our own body it is fixed and plainly laid out where the soul and the mind can each be and grow separately, we have to deny all the more that they could last entirely outside a body and an animal shape, in the crumbling clods of the earth, or in the fire of the sun, or in water, or in the high shores of the upper air. So these things are not furnished with a divine sense, since they cannot be alive in the way a living thing is.
Here is something else you cannot believe: that there are holy seats of the gods in any parts of the world. The nature of the gods is thin, and so far removed from our senses that it is barely seen by the mind's thinking. Since it slips away from the touch and the blow of our hands, it cannot come in contact with anything that is touchable to us at all, because a thing cannot touch which itself may not be touched. So their dwellings too must be unlike our dwellings, and thin, matching their bodies. I shall prove all that to you later at length.
Then, to say that the gods wanted to prepare this splendid nature of the world for the sake of human beings, and that it is therefore right to praise their praiseworthy work and to think it everlasting and immortal, and that it is a crime ever to shake with any force out of its place what was founded for the peoples of mankind for all time by the gods' ancient plan, or to harass it with words and turn it upside down from the bottom — to invent all that, Memmius, and to pile more of the same kind on top of it, is idiocy.
What benefit could our gratitude confer on beings who are immortal and blessed, that they should undertake to manage anything for our sake? What new thing, after so long, could tempt them, when they had been at rest, into wanting to change their old way of life? A man seems bound to enjoy new things if the old ones hurt him; but for one who has met with nothing painful in the time gone by, while he was passing his life beautifully, what could ever set alight a love of novelty in a being like that? And what harm was it to us not to have been created? Were our lives lying in darkness and grief, I suppose, until the birth-dawn of things broke? Anyone who has once been born must want to stay in life so long as coaxing pleasure keeps him there. But for a man who has never tasted the love of life and never been in the count of things, what harm is it that he was never created?
Besides, where did the gods first get the model for making things, and the very notion of human beings planted in them, so that they knew what they wanted to do and saw it in their minds? How was the power of the atoms ever learned, and what they could produce among themselves by changing their order round, if nature herself had not given the pattern for creating? For so many atoms, in so many ways, struck by blows through infinite time gone by, and driven on by their own weights, have been carried along and have met each other in every possible way and tried out everything that they could create by coming together, that it is no wonder if they also fell into arrangements like these and came into motions like these, the ones by which this sum of things is now kept going by renewal.
And even if I knew nothing about what the atoms of things are, I would still dare to affirm this from the very workings of the sky, and to make it out from a great many other things as well: that the nature of things was in no way made ready for us by divine power — it stands there with so much wrong with it.
To begin with, of all the space that the huge sweep of the sky covers, a greedy share of it has been taken over by mountains and by the forests of wild animals; crags hold it, and vast marshes, and the sea, which keeps the shores of the lands far apart. Then, on top of that, burning heat and the constant fall of frost take nearly two-thirds of it away from mortals. What is left of the ploughland, nature would still cover over with brambles by her own force, if human force did not stand up to it — human force which for the sake of staying alive is used to groaning over the strong two-pronged hoe and cutting the earth open by leaning on the plough. If we did not turn the fertile clods with the ploughshare and work the soil of the ground and stir the crops into coming up, they would not be able to rise into the clear air of their own accord. And even then, sometimes, when things won by great labour are already in leaf across the land and everything is in flower, either the sun of the upper air scorches them with too much heat, or sudden rains and freezing frosts kill them, or the blasts of the winds harry them with a violent whirl.
Besides that, why does nature feed and increase the horrible breed of wild animals, an enemy to the human race by land and sea? Why do the seasons of the year bring diseases with them? Why does death go wandering about before its time? Then there is the child. Like a sailor thrown up by savage waves, he lies naked on the ground, unable to speak, in need of every kind of help for living, the moment nature has poured him out of his mother's womb with hard struggles into the shores of light. And he fills the place with a mournful wailing, which is fair enough for somebody who has so much trouble left to get through in life. But the various flocks and herds and wild animals grow up without any of that. They need no rattles, nobody has to use the coaxing broken talk of a kind nurse on them, they do not look for different clothes to suit the season of the sky, and in the end they need no weapons and no high walls to protect what is theirs, since the earth herself and the crafty nature of things bring out everything for all of them in plenty.
Now, first. Since the body of the earth and water, and the light breaths of the airs, and the hot vapours — the things out of which this whole sum of things is seen to consist — all consist of a body that was born and is mortal, the whole nature of the world has to be thought of in the same way. Where we see the parts and limbs of a thing made of a body that was born, and of mortal shapes, we as a rule see that those same things are mortal, and were born as well. So, since I see that the greatest limbs and parts of the world are used up and made again, I can be sure that there was some starting time for the sky and the earth too, and that a disaster is coming for them.
And do not think, over all this, that I have grabbed the point for myself, because I have assumed that earth and fire are mortal, and had no doubt that water and the airs perish, and said that these same things are born and grow again. Take it in order. First, some part of the earth, scorched by unrelenting suns, pounded by the force of many feet, breathes out a mist of dust and flying clouds, which strong winds scatter through the whole air. Part of its clods is called back into the flood by rains, and rivers scrape their banks and gnaw them away. Besides, whatever feeds a thing and makes it grow is paid back again for its own share; and since the mother of everything is beyond doubt also the common grave of things, then the earth, you see, is drawn down and grows back after it has been increased.
For the rest, there is no need of words to show that the sea and the rivers and the springs always overflow with new water and that the liquid runs on for ever: the great downrush of waters on all sides declares it. But the top of the water is taken off as it rises, and so it comes about that on the whole there is no excess of water. Partly this is because strong winds sweeping the level water cut it down, and the sun of the upper air unweaves it with his rays; partly because it is distributed underground through all the lands. The brine is filtered out, and the material of the water seeps back and all of it gathers at the river-heads, and from there it flows over the lands in a sweet stream, along whatever channel was cut once and has carried its waves down on liquid feet.
Now, then, I shall talk about air, which is changed in its whole body countless times, hour by hour. Whatever flows off things is always carried, all of it, into the great sea of the air; and unless the air gave bodies back to things in turn and made them up again as they stream away, everything would have been dissolved by now and turned into air. So it never stops being born out of things and falling back into things, since everything is in constant flow.
The generous spring of liquid light, too, the sun of the upper air, waters the sky constantly with fresh brightness and supplies new light on top of the light at once. Whatever is first of the brightness is lost to it, wherever it happens to fall. You can learn this from the following. The moment clouds have begun to pass under the sun and to break the rays of light in half, as it were, all the lower part of them is lost immediately, and the earth is put in shadow wherever the storm clouds are carried. So you may know that things always need a new splendour, and that each first throw of brightness perishes, and that there is no other way for things to be seen in the sun unless the fountain-head of the light keeps supplying it without a break.
In the same way, the lights we have on earth at night — hanging lamps, and torches bright with flickering flames and fat with heavy soot — hurry in exactly the same fashion, with the heat as their servant, to supply new light. They press on to tremble with fires, they press on, and the light does not leave gaps between, as though it had been broken. That is how quickly the destruction of every one of those fires is covered over by the swift birth of a new flame. So we have to think that the sun and the moon and the stars throw out their light from one rising after another, and always lose whatever is first of their flames — so that you do not happen to believe that these things flourish untouchable.
And after all, do you not see that stones too are beaten by time, that high towers fall and their rocks rot away, that the shrines and the images of the gods wear out and crack, and that a holy divine power cannot push forward the boundary marks of fate or struggle against the laws of nature? Do we not see the monuments of great men fallen to pieces, asking us, in their turn, whether we believe they grow old too? Do we not see rocks torn loose from the high mountains and coming down in ruin, unable to bear and put up with the strong forces of even a finite stretch of time? They would not be torn loose and fall so suddenly if they had endured all the torments of age through infinite time without ever breaking.
Then look at this thing which holds the whole earth in its embrace, around it and above it. If it produces everything out of itself, as some people report, and takes things back when they are destroyed, then the whole of it consists of a body that was born and is mortal. Whatever gives increase and food to other things out of itself has to be diminished, and made up again when it takes those things back.
Besides, if there was no birth and beginning of the earth and the sky, and they had always been everlasting, then why have other poets not sung of other matters before the war at Thebes and the deaths at Troy? Where have so many deeds of men fallen away to, so many times over, without flowering anywhere, planted in the everlasting monuments of fame? The truth, I think, is that the sum of things is new, and the nature of the world is recent, and took its beginnings not long ago. That is why certain skills are still being polished even now, and are still growing now: many things have been added to ships lately, and it was only the other day that instrument makers gave birth to tuneful sounds. And in the end this nature of things, this account of it, was discovered only recently, and I myself have now been discovered, the very first among the first, as a man who can turn it into the words of our own country.
And if you happen to believe that all these same things existed before this, but that the generations of men perished in a burning heat, or that cities fell in some great shaking of the world, or that after unrelenting rains greedy rivers ran out over the lands and covered the towns, then you are beaten all the more and have to admit that a destruction of the lands and the sky is coming as well. Because when things were being tried by such great diseases and such great dangers, if a grimmer cause had leaned on them then, they would have collapsed in wide disaster and great ruins. And there is no other way we can be seen to be mortal ourselves, except that we sicken among us with the same diseases as the people whom nature has already removed from life.
Besides, whatever stays everlasting must either spit back blows because it is made of solid body, and let nothing get inside it that could break up the tight-packed parts within — the way the bodies of matter are, whose nature I have set out earlier. Or it can last through all time because it is exempt from blows, as the void is, which stays untouched and is not affected by a blow in the least. Or it lasts because there is no supply of room around it for the thing to depart into, so to speak, and be dissolved — as the sum of all sums is everlasting, with no place outside it to fly apart into and no bodies that could fall on it and break it up with a strong blow.
But, as I have taught you, the nature of the world is not made of solid body, since void is mixed into things. It is not like the void either. And there is no lack of bodies which might rise up out of the infinite by chance and bring this sum of things down in a violent whirlwind, or bring some other disaster of danger on it. Nor does the nature of place fail, or the space of the deep, into which the walls of this world could be scattered — or they can be knocked to pieces and perish by some other force. So the door of death is not shut and barred against the sky, or against the sun and the earth and the deep waves of the sea. It stands open, and it looks back at them with a huge and gaping mouth. So you have to admit that these same things were born, too; because things that are made of a mortal body could not have gone on, from infinite time until now, treating the strong forces of measureless time with contempt.
And finally, since the greatest limbs of the world fight each other so hard, stirred up in a war that is in no way holy, do you not see that some end can be given to their long struggle? It may come when the sun and all the heat have won by drinking up all the moisture, which is what they are trying to do, though so far their attempts have not been brought off. The rivers supply so much, and threaten beyond that to flood everything out of the deep whirlpool of the sea. It is no use: winds sweeping the level water cut it down, and the sun of the upper air unweaves it with his rays, and they are confident of being able to dry everything up before the water can reach the end of what it has set out to do. Breathing out such a war in an even contest, they struggle to settle great matters between them — though once in the meantime fire was the stronger, and once, as the story goes, water was king in the fields.
Fire won, and burned much up as it went round, in the time when the greedy strength of the sun's horses ran away with Phaethon off his road, all through the upper air and over every land. But the almighty father, stirred up then by sharp anger, knocked great-hearted Phaethon off the horses to the earth with a sudden stroke of lightning; and the Sun, meeting him as he fell, caught the everlasting lamp of the world, and drove the scattered horses back together and yoked them trembling, and then steered them along their own road and brought everything back to life again. That is how the old poets of the Greeks sang it, and it is far too far removed from true reasoning. Fire can win when more bodies of matter have risen up out of the infinite; and then its forces fall away, beaten back somehow, or else things perish, burnt up by the scorching airs. Water, in the same way, once rose up and began to win, as the story goes, when it buried the lives of men under the waves; and then, when the force that had risen up out of the infinite was somehow turned aside and went back, the rains stopped and the rivers cut their violence down.
But I shall set out in order the ways in which that throwing together of matter founded the earth and the sky and the depths of the sea, and the courses of the sun and the moon. Certainly the atoms did not place themselves each in its own order by design, with a shrewd mind, and they certainly did not bargain over what motions each of them would make. But so many atoms, in so many ways, struck by blows through infinite time gone by, and driven on by their own weights, have been carried along and have met each other in every possible way and tried out everything that they could create by coming together; and because of that it comes about that, scattered far and wide through a great stretch of time, by trying out meetings and motions of every kind, they at last fall together into the combinations which, suddenly thrown together, often turn out to be the beginnings of great things: of earth and sea and sky and the race of living creatures.
At that time you could not have made out the wheel of the sun flying high with its generous light, or the stars of the great world, or the sea, or the sky, or the earth, or the air, or anything at all like the things we have. There was only a kind of new storm, a mass that had risen up. Then the parts of it began to fly apart in different directions, and like began to be joined to like, and to shut a world off, and divide up its limbs and lay out its great parts. This was out of atoms of every kind, whose discord was throwing their intervals, paths, connections, weights, blows, meetings, motions into confusion and mixing up battles, because of their unlike forms and their various shapes — because they could not all stay joined together like that, or give each other motions that suited. That is to say, the sorting out was this: to separate the high sky from the lands, and the sea on its own, so that it could spread with its water kept separate, and likewise, apart from both, the fires of the pure and separated upper air.
To begin with, the bodies of earth, because they were heavy and tangled, came together in the middle and all took up the lowest places; and the more they came together tangled with each other, the more they squeezed out the ones that were to make the sea, the stars, the sun and the moon and the walls of the great world. For all of these consist of smoother and rounder seeds, and of far smaller atoms than the earth. So the fire-bearing upper air was the first to break out through the loose openings of the earth and lift itself up, and it carried off many light fires with it. It is not far different from what we often see when the golden morning light of the rayed sun first goes red across the grass gemmed with dew, and the lakes and the rivers that never fail breathe out a mist, and sometimes the earth herself seems to be smoking. When all of that is gathered together up above, the clouds, with their body now packed solid, weave a covering under the sky. So in the same way, then, the light and outspreading upper air, with its body packed solid, was put round everything and fenced it in on every side, and spreading itself far and wide into all parts in every direction, fenced in everything else in a greedy embrace.
The beginnings of the sun and the moon followed it, with their globes turning in the air between the two. Neither the earth claimed them for itself nor the greatest upper air, because they were not heavy enough to be pressed down and settle, and not light enough to be able to slip along the topmost shores. And yet they are between the two in such a way that they turn living bodies round and stand out as parts of the whole world — in the same way that in us certain limbs can stay in position while there are others that move.
So when these things had been drawn out, the earth suddenly sank where the huge blue stretch of the sea now spreads itself out, and flooded the hollows with its salt whirlpool. And day by day, the more the tides of the upper air and the rays of the sun forced the earth together on all sides with repeated lashings, packed tight to its outermost edges, so that under the driving it drew together and condensed at its own centre, so much the more the salty sweat squeezed out of its body kept increasing the sea and the swimming plains by seeping out; and so much the more those many bodies of heat and air slipped out and flew away and thickened the shining high places of the sky, far from the lands. The plains sank down, and the slopes of the high mountains rose; because the rocks could not settle lower, and all the parts could not give way and sink equally.
So then the weight of the earth settled and stood firm, its body packed close, and all the heavy sludge of the world, if you like, ran together into the bottom and sank right down like the dregs in a jar. After that the sea, and after that the air, and after that the fire-carrying ether itself were left pure, with nothing in them but their own flowing bodies, and each one lighter than the one under it. Ether, the most flowing and the lightest of them all, floats along above the airy currents and does not mix its own flowing body in with the brawling gusts of the air. It lets everything down below be turned over by violent whirlwinds, lets it be knocked about by squalls that come without warning, while it carries its own fires along, gliding with one steady drive. That the ether can flow like that, quietly, on one unbroken push, is shown by the Pontus, a sea that flows with a fixed current and keeps one single set of its course the whole way.
Now let me sing what causes the movement of the stars. To begin with, if the great sphere of heaven turns round, then we have to say that a body of air presses on the axis at either end, and holds it from outside, and shuts it in at both ends; and that another current of air flows above it and drives in the same direction as the rolling stars of the everlasting world flash along; or else that another flows underneath, carrying the sphere the other way, up and on, in the way we see rivers turn wheels and water-scoops. Then again, it may also be that the whole sky stays where it is and does not move, while the bright signs are carried along inside it. That could be because rapid tides of ether are shut up in there and go whirling round looking for a way out, and roll the fires this way and that through the high precincts of the sky; or because some air flowing in from somewhere outside drives the fires and turns them; or because the fires can creep along by themselves, going wherever their food calls them and invites them as they go, grazing their flame-bodies all over the sky. Which of these is the cause in this world of ours is hard to lay down for certain. But what can happen, and does happen, right through the whole of things, in the various worlds made on various plans — that is what I am teaching, and I go on to set out several causes that might account for the motions of the stars anywhere in the whole; and one of them has to be the cause here as well, the one that puts movement into our signs. But to say in advance which of them it is, is no business at all of a man who advances one careful step at a time.
Now, for the earth to stay at rest in the middle region of the world, its weight has to fade away little by little and get less; and it has to have another kind of thing underneath it, joined to it from the very start of its life and fitted into a single whole with the airy parts of the world, in which it lives, rooted. That is why the earth is not a load and does not press down on the winds beneath. It is like the way a man's own limbs are no weight to him: the head is no load to the neck, and we do not feel the whole weight of the body sitting on the feet. But any weights that come to us from outside, weights laid on us, do hurt us, and often they are far lighter. It matters that much what each thing is able to do in itself. So the earth is not some foreign substance suddenly brought in and thrown down out of somewhere else onto air that has nothing to do with it. It was conceived alongside the air at the world's first beginning, and it is a fixed part of the world, in the way our limbs are plainly a part of us. Besides, when the earth is shaken all at once by a great clap of thunder, its movement shakes everything above it — which it could not possibly do unless it were bound fast to the airy parts of the world and to the sky. They hold together by roots they share, joined from the very start of their life and grown into a single whole. Do you not see, as well, how the extremely fine force of the soul holds up our body for us, heavy weight that it is, and does it because the two are so joined and fitted into one? And in the end, what can lift the body in a quick jump but the force of the soul, which steers the limbs? Now do you see how much a thin, fine kind of thing can do, once it is joined to a heavy body — as the air is joined to the earth, and the force of the mind to us?
The sun's wheel cannot be much bigger, and its blaze cannot be much smaller, than it looks to our senses. Whatever the distance from which fires can throw their light at us and breathe their hot vapour over our limbs, they lose nothing of their body of flame across those stretches, and the fire is not made the least bit narrower to look at. So, since the sun's heat and its poured-out light reach our senses and make our places bright, the sun's shape and its outline must be seen from here just as they really are, with nothing whatever that you could truly add or take away. And the moon, whether she travels lighting up her regions with borrowed light, or throws out a light of her own from her own body — whichever it is, she travels with a shape no bigger than the one she seems to have to the eyes we look at her with. For everything that we look at from a long way off, through a great deal of air, goes blurred in its look before it goes smaller in its outline. So, since the moon presents a clear look and a definite shape, marked all round by the exact edge she has, she must be seen up there from here as big as she is and no bigger. And finally, take any of the fires of the ether you can see from down here: you may take it that they can be a very tiny bit smaller, or bigger by a small short part, and no more. Because any fires we can make out here on earth are seen to change their outline only the least little bit one way or the other according to how far off they are, as long as their flicker and their bright burning can still be made out.
There is nothing to wonder at, either, in how so very small a sun can send out so much light — enough to fill the seas and all the lands and the sky, drenching them, and to pour warm vapour over everything. It may be that from this one point a single spring, running wide, has been opened up for the whole world, and gushes and bursts out with light, because the atoms of heat come together from every part of the world from all sides, and their gathering flows together in such a way that the burning streams out from one head. Do you not see, as well, how widely a small spring of water sometimes waters the meadows and floods the fields? It may also be that the burning heat takes hold of the air with hot fevers, even from a fire in the sun that is not large, if the air happens to be in the right condition and ready for it, so that it can be set alight when small heats strike it. That is the sort of thing we sometimes see happen with standing corn and stubble, where a single spark sets fires going everywhere. And perhaps the sun, shining high up with a rosy lamp, has a great deal of fire round about him in invisible heats, marked by no brightness at all, and that is what makes him a bringer of heat and multiplies the strike of his rays.
Nor is there one straightforward account, plain to see, of how the sun gets from his summer quarters to the winter turning-point in Capricorn and then, coming back from there, swings round to the solstice mark in Cancer; or of how the moon is seen to cross in a month the same distance the sun uses up a whole year of time in travelling. No, I say, no single cause has been given for these things. What seems most likely of all is the doctrine the holy judgement of Democritus lays down: the nearer any of the heavenly bodies are to the earth, the less they can be carried along by the whirl of the sky, because that whirl's swift, sharp forces die away and are cut down lower down, and so the sun is left behind by degrees among the signs that follow after him, since he is a great deal lower than the blazing signs. And this goes for the moon still more: the further down her course runs, away from the sky and close to the lands, the less she can keep pace with the signs. And the more slack the whirl she is carried by, being lower than the sun, the more all the signs catch her up as they circle round and go past her. That is why she seems to come back to any given sign more quickly than the sun — because the signs are coming back round to her. It can also be that two currents of air blow out at fixed times, in turn, from opposite quarters of the world: one able to shove the sun out of the summer signs all the way down to the winter turn and the freezing cold, and the other to throw him back out of the icy shadows of the cold into the heat-bearing quarters and the blazing signs. And we have to suppose that the moon and the stars work the same way — the stars that roll their great years round in great orbits — and that they can be moved by currents of air from alternating quarters. Do you not see, as well, how clouds are carried in opposite directions by opposite winds, the low ones one way and the high ones another? Why should those stars up there be any less able to be carried along their great circles of ether by tides running opposite to each other?
As for night, it buries the lands in enormous darkness either when the sun, at the end of his long course, has struck the far edge of the sky and, worn out, has breathed out his fires, shaken by the journey and weakened by all that air; or because the same force that drove his wheel over the lands makes him turn his course beneath them. And in the same way, at a fixed time, Matuta spreads the rosy dawn along the coasts of the ether and opens out the light — either because the same sun, coming back round under the lands, gets ahead of himself and tries to set the sky alight with his rays; or because fires come together, and many seeds of burning are in the habit of flowing together at a fixed time, and these make the sun's light be born new every day. In the same way, the story goes, from the high mountains of Ida scattered fires can be seen at first light, and then gather into something like a single ball and make up a disc. And there is nothing in all this that ought to seem strange: that these seeds of fire can flow together at so exact a time and make the sun's brightness over again. We see many things that happen at a fixed time in every part of nature. Trees come into flower at a fixed time, and at a fixed time they let their flowers go. Age orders the teeth to fall out at a time no less fixed, and orders the boy who is not yet a man to grow into manhood with a soft covering, and to let a soft beard down from both cheeks at the same time. And lastly, lightning, snow, rain, clouds, winds all come about at parts of the year that are not too unpredictable. Once the first beginnings of causes have been like that, and once things fell out that way from the world's first origin, they come round again, one after another, in a fixed order.
In the same way, days can grow and nights shrink, and daylight get less while the nights take on their increases. That could be because the same sun, running under the lands and above them on unequal arcs, cuts the coasts of the ether apart and divides his circle into unequal parts; and whatever he has taken off one part he puts back onto the opposite part as he is carried round, that much more, until he arrives at the sign of heaven where the year's knot makes the shadows of night equal to the daylight. For when he is halfway through his course, between the blast of the north wind and the south wind, the sky holds his two goals apart at an equal distance, because of the fixed position of the whole sign-bearing circle, the one the sun winds through as he closes up a year of time, lighting the earth and the sky with a slanting light — as the account of it is set out by the men who have mapped all the regions of the sky and marked them out with the signs laid down in order. Or it could be because the air is thicker in certain quarters, so that the trembling ray of his fire sticks under the lands and cannot easily get through and come up to the sunrise. That is why the nights hang about, long, in winter time, until the many-rayed badge of day comes. Or it could also be, as I said, that in alternating parts of the year the fires that make the sun rise from a fixed quarter are in the habit of flowing together more slowly and more quickly, and that is why the men who say a new sun is born each morning seem to be telling the truth.
The moon may shine because she is struck by the sun's rays, and turn that light towards us more and more every day for us to see, the further she moves away from the sun's disc, until, facing him, she has shone out with a full light, and, rising, has looked down on his setting from up above; and then she must hide her light back away again, bit by bit, as she slides nearer to the sun's fire round the circle from the other side of the signs. That is the account given by the men who imagine the moon is like a ball and holds her course on a path below the sun. But there is also a reason why she could roll along with a light of her own and give back the different shapes of her brightness. There may be another body carried along with her, sliding beside her, getting in her way and blocking her in every possible manner, and it cannot be seen because it travels with no light in it. Or she can turn about like a ball, if that is what she is, with half of her dyed in glowing light, and by turning that globe put out shapes that change, until she turns towards our sight and our open eyes whatever part of her has been given fire; and then, bit by bit, she twists back round and takes the light-bearing part of that sphere and ball away. That is the doctrine of the Babylonians, the teaching of the Chaldeans, refuting the art of the astronomers of Greece and setting out to prove the opposite — as if the thing each side is fighting for could not both be true, or as if there were any reason why you should dare to take up the one rather than the other. And finally, why a new moon could not be created every time, in a fixed order of shapes and with fixed forms, and why each one, once made, could not die away on its own day, with another put in its position and place, is hard to teach by argument and hard to win by words — when you can see so many things created in an order just as fixed. Spring comes, and Venus, and the winged herald of Venus goes before her; and hard on the footsteps of Zephyr, Mother Flora scatters the way ahead of them and fills it all with wonderful colours and smells. Next in the line comes dry Heat, with dusty Ceres for a companion, and the Etesian blasts of the north winds. Then Autumn arrives, and Bacchus comes striding along with him. Then other weathers and other winds follow — high-thundering Volturnus, and the south wind with its lightning strength. In the end the shortest day of the year brings the snows and gives back the numbing frost. Winter comes after it, with its teeth chattering in the cold. So it is less of a marvel if a moon is born at a fixed time and destroyed again at a fixed time, when so many things can happen at times so exactly fixed.
You must take it, too, that the failures of the sun and the hidings away of the moon come about from several causes. If the moon can shut the earth off from the sun's light, and push her high head up between the earth and him, putting her dark disc in the way of his burning rays, why should it be thought that some other body, one that slides along without any light in it for ever, could not do the same thing at the same time? And why should the sun not be able, at a fixed time, to grow weak and let his fires go, and then make his light again, once he has passed the places in the air that are hostile to flames, the ones that put fires out and kill them? And why should the earth be able, in her turn, to rob the moon of light, and to hold the sun down out of sight up above her, while the moon on her monthly journey glides through the stiff shadows of the cone — and yet, at the same time, some other body not be able to come up under the moon, or to slide along above the sun's disc, and break the rays and the poured-out light apart? And even if the moon does shine with a brightness of her own, why should she not be able to grow faint in some fixed quarter of the world, while she is passing through the regions that are unfriendly to her own light?
Now for what is left. Since I have unravelled how everything can happen through the blue reaches of the great world, so that we could know what force and what cause sets going the sun's various courses and the moon's journeys, and how the two of them can go dark when their light is blocked and draw shadow over lands that were not expecting it, and then, when they seem to blink and open the light again, look out over everything and light up all those regions with white brightness — now I go back to the newness of the world, and the soft fields of earth, and what they first decided to lift up to the shores of light in their new bearing, and to trust to the winds that come without warning. To begin with, the earth put out the kinds of grass and a green shining round the hills and over all the plains, and the flowering meadows blazed with a greening colour; and after that the various kinds of trees were given a great free-rein contest of growing, up through the air. In the way that feathers and hairs and bristles are the first things made on the limbs of four-footed animals and on the bodies of the strong-winged ones, so the new earth first raised up grasses and bushes, and then made the generations of mortal creatures, springing up in many ways and in many different fashions. Living things cannot have fallen out of the sky, and the land-dwellers cannot have come out of the salt pools. So what remains is that the earth has rightly won the name of mother, since everything was created out of the earth. Even now many living things come up out of the soil, packed together by the rains and the warm vapour of the sun. So it is less of a marvel if in those days more of them came up, and bigger ones, grown to their full size in a new earth and a new ether. To begin with, the race of winged things and the birds of many kinds left their eggs behind, hatched out in the spring, in the way that the smooth-shelled crickets nowadays leave their husks of their own accord in summer, going after food and a living. Then it was that the earth first gave you the generations of mortal creatures. For a great deal of heat and moisture was overflowing in the fields. And so, wherever a suitable patch of ground offered itself, wombs would grow, holding on to the earth by roots; and when, in the ripeness of time, the age of the young inside had broken them open — the young running away from the wet and making for the air — nature would turn the pores of the earth towards them there and force it to pour out of its opened veins a juice much like milk, in the way that any woman nowadays, once she has given birth, is filled with sweet milk, because that whole rush of nourishment is turned towards her breasts. The earth gave the children food, the warmth gave them clothing, the grass gave them a bed, thick and rich in soft down. And the newness of the world stirred up no hard frosts and no excessive heats and no winds of great force. Everything grows and takes on its strength at the same rate.
So, again and again, the earth has rightly won and keeps the name of mother, since she herself created the human race and poured out, at just about a fixed time, every kind of animal that runs wild over the great mountains, and the birds of the air at the same time, with all their varying shapes. But because she has to have some end to her child-bearing, she stopped, like a woman worn out by a long stretch of years. For time changes the nature of the whole world, and one state of things has to take over from another, and nothing stays like itself: everything moves on, nature changes everything and forces it to turn into something else. One thing rots and goes weak and slack with age; another comes up in its place and comes out of being nothing much. That, then, is how time changes the nature of the whole world: one state of the earth takes over from another, and what she could do once she cannot do now, and what she never bore before, she can bear today. In those days the earth tried to create many monsters too, which came up with strange faces and strange limbs: the man-woman, between the two and neither, kept away from both sides; some robbed of feet, some in turn deprived of hands; some found dumb without a mouth, or blind without a face; some bound fast by their limbs clinging to the whole body, so that they could not do anything, or go anywhere, or keep out of harm's way, or take what they needed. She kept creating the other monsters and freaks of this kind, and it came to nothing, because nature frightened them off from growing, and they could not reach the flower of life they wanted, or find food, or join together in the business of Venus. For we see that a great many conditions have to come together for a kind of creature to be able to hammer out generation after generation by breeding. First, there must be food. Then there must be a way for the seeds that do the begetting to run out through the frame, once the limbs are relaxed. And the female must have what she needs to be joined with the male, so that the two of them can exchange the pleasures each has for the other.
And many kinds of living thing must have died out in those days, unable to hammer out offspring by breeding. Any creature you see feeding on the breath of life has had cunning, or courage, or at any rate quickness, keeping its kind safe from the very start. And many of them survive because they are useful to us, and have been recommended to us that way, handed over to our care. The fierce breed of lions and the savage kinds have been kept safe by courage, foxes by cunning, deer by running away. But the light-sleeping hearts of dogs, with their faithful chests, and every kind born from the seed of beasts of burden, and the wool-bearing flocks along with them and the horn-bearing kinds, have all been handed over to the care of human beings, Memmius. They ran from the wild animals eagerly, and went after peace and generous fodder got without any work of their own, which we give them as a reward for being useful. But those to whom nature granted none of these things — creatures unable to live on their own account, and unable to give us any usefulness in return for which we might put up with letting their kind feed and be safe under our protection — those, plainly, lay there as prey and profit for others, all of them tangled in the bonds of their own doom, until nature reduced that kind to extinction.
But there never were any Centaurs, and there cannot ever be creatures of a double nature and a twofold body, put together out of limbs of different stock, so that the power on each side could be evenly matched. You can work this out from what follows, however dull your wits are. To begin with, a horse comes into its full vigour by the time three years have gone round, but a boy is nowhere near it; often enough he is still hunting in his sleep for the milky nipple of his mother's breast. Later, when the strong powers of the horse and its limbs give out, weak in old age, as life runs away from them, only then does youth in its flowering years begin for a boy and cover his cheeks with soft down. So do not imagine that Centaurs can be put together out of a human being and the seed of horses, the beasts of burden, or exist at all; and no more can there be Scyllas, half-sea bodies with rabid dogs belted round them, or the rest of that sort, in whom we can see the limbs at odds with each other. They do not come into flower at the same time or take on their strength together in the body, and they do not throw it off together in old age; they do not burn with the same kind of desire, and their habits do not agree, and the same foods are not pleasant to the two frames. In fact you can often see bearded goats grow fat on hemlock, which for a human being is a sharp poison. And since flame is in the habit of scorching and burning the tawny bodies of lions just as much as every other kind of flesh and blood that exists on earth, how could it have happened that one creature with a triple body — a lion in front, a snake behind, and in the middle the goat that gives her name — the Chimaera, could breathe a sharp flame out of her body and out of her mouth? So anybody who imagines that animals like that could have been born when the earth was new and the sky was fresh, leaning on nothing but that one empty word new, may as well blurt out a great many things on the same principle. He may say that in those days rivers of gold ran everywhere over the lands, that trees used to flower with jewels, or that a human being was born with such a reach of limbs that he could plant his feet across the deep seas and turn the whole sky round about him with his hands. The fact that there were many seeds of things in the earth at the time when the ground first poured out living creatures is no sign at all that animals could have been created mixed with one another, with the limbs of different creatures put together. The kinds of grasses and the crops and the flourishing trees that even now come up in plenty out of the ground cannot be created tangled into one another. Each thing goes forward in its own way, and they all keep their distinctions by the fixed laws of nature.
And the human race in those fields was far tougher, as you would expect, since a tough earth had created it, and it was built on bigger and more solid bones inside, and fitted with strong sinews through the flesh, not easily got at by heat or cold or by strange food or by any weakness of the body. Through many circuits of the sun rolling across the sky, they dragged out their lives in the wandering manner of wild animals. Nobody was the sturdy handler of the curved plough, and nobody knew how to work the fields with iron, or to dig new shoots into the ground, or to cut the old branches off tall trees with pruning hooks. What the sun and the rains had given them, what the earth had created of its own accord, was gift enough to satisfy their hearts. They looked after their bodies among the acorn-bearing oaks, for the most part; and the arbutus berries that you see now ripening to a bright red in winter time, the earth then bore in far greater numbers and far bigger. Besides that, the flowering newness of the world in those days bore many coarse foods, plenty of them for miserable mortals. And rivers and springs called them to put out their thirst, in the way that now the water rushing down from the great mountains calls the thirsty generations of wild animals from far off. And in their wanderings they kept to the woodland haunts of the nymphs that they had come to know, places from which they knew that gliding streams of water washed the wet rocks with a generous overflow — the wet rocks, dripping down over the green moss — and that in some places the water welled up and burst out across the level plain. They did not yet know how to handle things with fire, or to use skins and clothe the body with the spoils of wild animals. They lived in the groves and the hollows of the mountains and the woods, and hid their filthy limbs among the bushes when they were forced to keep out of the lashing of the winds and the rain. They could have no thought for the common good, and they did not know how to use any customs or any laws among themselves. Whatever plunder chance had put in a man's way, he carried off, each of them taught to be strong and to live for himself alone. And Venus joined the bodies of lovers in the woods, since a woman was won over either by a desire the two of them shared, or by the man's violent force and his heavy lust, or by a price — acorns and arbutus berries or choice pears. And trusting to the astonishing strength of their hands and feet, they hunted down the woodland generations of wild animals with thrown stones and with the great weight of the club. They beat many of them, and there were a few they kept out of the way of, in hiding places; and when the night caught them, they threw their wildmen's limbs down naked on the ground, like bristly boars, rolling themselves up in leaves and branches. They did not go looking for daylight and the sun over the fields with loud wailing, frightened and straying about in the shadows of the night; they waited in silence, buried in sleep, until the sun brought his light into the sky with a rosy torch. Because from the time they were small they had always been used to seeing darkness and light come about in turn, there was never any way they could be astonished by it, or be afraid that an everlasting night might hold the lands for ever with the sun's light taken away. What worried them more than that was that the generations of wild animals often made rest dangerous for those miserable people. Driven out of house and home, they would run from their shelters of rock at the arrival of a foaming boar or a strong lion, and in the dead of night they would give up their bedding of spread leaves, terrified, to those savage guests.
And yet in those days people were not letting go of the sweet light of life with cries of pain much more often than now. It is only that back then a man, caught out on his own, would more often be swallowed down by teeth and give the wild animals a living meal, and would fill the groves and the mountains and the woods with his groaning, watching his own live flesh buried in a living grave. And the ones whom flight had saved, with their bodies eaten into, would afterwards hold their shaking palms over the foul sores and call on Death with horrifying cries, until the savage twisting pains took their life away, with no help to be had and no idea what their wounds wanted. But in those days a single day did not hand thousands of men over to destruction, marched out under the standards, and the churning flats of the sea did not smash ships and crews against rocks. The sea would often get up and rage, wildly, pointlessly, to no purpose, and would lay its empty threats aside as lightly as it had made them, and the sly coaxing of a calm sea, with its laughing waves, could not lure anybody into disaster. The reckless science of sailing lay in the dark. In those days it was shortage of food that gave failing limbs over to death; now it is having too much of everything that drowns them. They used to pour out poison for themselves, not knowing what they were doing; now they hand it to other people, and they do it with more skill.
Afterwards, once they had got themselves huts and skins and fire, and once the woman was joined to the man and moved with him into one household, and the laws of marriage were learned, and they saw children born from themselves, then for the first time the human race began to grow soft. Fire saw to it that their chilled bodies could no longer bear the cold so well under the roof of the sky. Venus took the edge off their strength, and children easily broke down their parents' proud tempers with their coaxing. Then, too, neighbours began to want to bind themselves together in friendship, so as not to do harm and not to be harmed, and they asked protection for the children and the womenfolk, making it clear with cries and gestures, in their stammering way, that it is only right for everyone to have pity on the weak. All the same, harmony could not be produced in every case; but a good and large part of them kept faith honestly, or else the whole human race would have been finished off then and there and no breeding could have carried the generations down as far as us.
As for the various sounds of speech, it was nature that drove people to utter them, and usefulness that pressed out the names of things — in very much the same way that not being able to talk yet seems to push small children into gesturing, so that they point with a finger at whatever is in front of them. Every creature feels what powers it has and what it can put them to. Before a calf's horns are out and showing on his forehead, he gets angry and butts with them and shoves at you with them. Panther cubs and lion cubs fight back with claws and paws and biting when their teeth and claws have hardly been made yet. And we see every kind of winged thing trusting to its wings and asking a shaky sort of help from its feathers.
So the idea that somebody in those days handed out names to things, and that people learned their first words from him, is silly. Why should this one man have been able to mark everything with sounds and utter the various noises of the tongue, and the rest be supposed unable to do it at the same time? Besides, if the others had not already been using words among themselves, where did he get the implanted notion of what words were good for, and where was he given this first power of knowing and seeing in his mind what he wanted to do? One man could not force a crowd, or beat them down, into being willing to learn the names of things by heart. And it is not easy to teach the deaf what needs doing, or to talk them into it by any argument: they would not put up with it, and would not go on lending their ears, on any terms at all, to have sounds they had never heard hammered at them for nothing.
And after all, what is so amazing about this business — that the human race, with a voice and a tongue in full working order, should mark different things with different sounds as it felt different feelings? Dumb cattle, and even the wild kinds of animal, are in the habit of rousing unlike and varied sounds when there is fear or pain in them, and when joy is swelling up. You can see this in perfectly plain cases. When the great Molossian hounds are first provoked, and their soft lips growl and pull back off the hard teeth, the rage held in behind them threatens in a sound quite different from the sound they make once they are barking outright and filling everything with their voices. And when they set about licking their puppies fondly with the tongue, or tossing them about with their paws, and, snapping with the teeth held back, pretend to swallow them whole, they coax them with a whimper of the voice that is nothing like the way they howl when they are left alone in the house, or the way they shrink whining from a beating with their bodies low.
Again, does the neighing of a horse not plainly differ, when a young stallion in the flower of his years rages among the mares, struck by the spurs of winged Love, and blows a snort out of his wide nostrils calling to arms — and when he neighs at some other time with his limbs shaking?
Lastly, the winged kinds and the various birds — hawks and ospreys and gulls, looking for their food and their living in the salt water among the sea waves — throw out cries at one time quite unlike the cries they throw out at another, and unlike again when they are fighting over food and their prey is struggling back. And some of them change their hoarse songs along with the weather, like the long-lived families of crows and the flocks of ravens, when they are said to be asking for water and rain, and sometimes to be calling up the winds and the breezes.
So if different feelings force animals to send out different sounds, dumb as they are, how much more reasonable it is that mortals should have been able in those days to mark unlike things with one sound and another!
In case you are quietly wondering about it in the middle of all this: it was lightning that first brought fire down to earth for mortals, and it is from there that all the burning of flame is spread. We see plenty of things blaze up after they have had fire from the sky planted in them, when a stroke out of heaven has made them a present of heat. But also, when a branching tree is beaten by the winds and sways and staggers and leans on the branches of another tree, fire is squeezed and rubbed out of them by the strong force, and sometimes the burning heat of flame flashes out while the branches and the trunks are rubbing against each other. Either of the two could have given fire to mortals. Then the sun taught them to cook food and soften it in the heat of the flame, since they could see plenty of things all over the fields growing tender, beaten by the blows of its rays and overcome by the heat.
And day by day the men who stood out in ability and were strong in their wits showed the rest how to change their earlier food and way of living, with fire and with new inventions. Kings began to found cities and to plant a citadel as a defence and a bolt-hole for themselves, and they divided up the cattle and the land and handed them out according to each man's looks and strength and brains; for good looks counted for a great deal in those days, and strength was worth having. Later on property was invented and gold was discovered, and it easily stripped the honour from the strong and the handsome, because as a rule, however brave a man is and however beautiful the body he was born with, he follows the richer man's party.
And yet if a man steered his life by true reasoning, great riches for a human being consist in living simply, with a calm mind; for there is never a shortage of a little. But men wanted to be famous and powerful, so that their fortune could rest on a firm foundation and they could pass a quiet life on their wealth. All for nothing: in fighting their way up to the highest honours they made the road dangerous to travel, and even so, when they are at the top, envy sometimes strikes them like a lightning bolt and throws them down in contempt into the foul pit of Tartarus — since it is generally the highest places, and whatever stands out above the rest, that envy scorches as a thunderbolt does. So it is far better to obey quietly than to want to govern the world with power and hold kingdoms of your own. Let them go on sweating blood, worn out for nothing, struggling along the narrow path of ambition. They get their wisdom out of other people's mouths and go after things by hearsay rather than by their own senses, and that is no more true now, and will be no more true soon, than it was before.
So the kings were killed, and the old grandeur of thrones and the proud sceptres lay overturned, and the splendid crown of the highest head, bloodied under the feet of the crowd, mourned its lost greatness; for what has been feared too much beforehand gets trampled with real appetite. So things came back down to the utter dregs and to mob violence, with every man out to get command and supremacy for himself. Then some of them taught the rest to appoint magistrates and to set up rights, so that people would be willing to make use of laws. For the human race, worn out with living by force, was sick from its own feuds, and that made it all the readier to come down under laws and tight legal rights of its own accord. Because each man in his anger was setting about a fiercer revenge than fair laws now allow, people got sick of a life lived by force.
That is how fear of punishment comes to spoil the prizes of life. Violence and injustice catch a man in their own net and generally come back on the head of the man they started from, and it is not easy for someone who breaks the common agreements of peace by what he does to pass a calm and peaceful life. Even supposing he gets past the notice of gods and men alike, he still has to distrust the idea that it will stay hidden forever — since so many people, they say, have talked in their sleep, again and again, or raved in a fever, and have given themselves away and brought their hidden crimes and their sins out into the open.
Now, what it was that spread the powers of the gods abroad through great nations, and filled the cities with altars, and led to the taking up of solemn rites — rites that flourish now at great occasions and in great places — and where the dread comes from that is planted in mortals even now, the dread that raises new shrines to the gods all over the world and drives people to crowd into them on festival days: it is not so hard to give the reason for that in words.
The fact is that even in those days mortals used to see the splendid faces of gods with their minds awake, and in sleep to see them with bodies of still more astonishing size. So they credited these figures with sensation, because they seemed to move their limbs and to speak proud words that suited their glorious faces and their great strength. And they gave them everlasting life, because the faces kept being supplied and the shape stayed the same — and above all because they thought that beings built up with such great powers could not easily be overcome by any force. They thought them far better off than anyone else, because the fear of death did not trouble any of them; and at the same time because in dreams they saw them doing many wonderful things and taking no trouble over it at all.
Besides, people could see the workings of the sky going round in a fixed order, and the various seasons of the year coming round, and they could not find out what causes made it happen. So their refuge was to hand everything over to the gods and to make everything turn at their nod. They put the homes and the temples of the gods in the sky, because it is through the sky that night and the moon are seen to roll — moon, day and night, and the grave signs of the night, and the night-wandering torches of the sky, and the flying flames, the clouds, the sun, the rain, snow, winds, lightning, hail, and the sudden roars and the great mutterings of threat.
What an unlucky race we are, to have credited the gods with doings like that and to have thrown in bitter anger with them! What groans they made for themselves then, what wounds for us, what tears for our children after us! It is no piety to be seen turning again and again to a stone with your head veiled, or to go up to every altar, or to lie stretched face down on the ground with your palms spread in front of the shrines of the gods, or to spatter the altars with the blood of four-footed animals in quantity, or to tie vow on to vow. It is piety, rather, to be able to look at everything with a mind at peace.
For when we look up at the sky-regions of the great world, at the upper air fixed above with its glittering stars, and the journeys of the sun and the moon come into our minds, then in our hearts, already weighed down with other troubles, this worry too begins to wake up and lift its head: whether there may not, after all, be some measureless power of the gods above us, wheeling the white stars round in all their different motions. Not having any explanation is what troubles the doubting mind: whether there ever was a birth-time and a beginning of the world, and at the same time whether there is an end, and how long the walls of the world can stand this strain of silent motion; or whether they have been given everlasting safety by a god and can slide on through the endless stretch of time and laugh at the powerful forces of measureless age.
Besides, whose mind is not squeezed tight with fear of the gods, whose limbs do not crawl with terror, when the scorched earth shudders under the horrible stroke of the thunderbolt and the rumblings run right across the great sky? Do peoples and nations not shake? Do proud kings not draw their limbs in, struck through with fear of the gods, in case the heavy time has come round for paying for something foully done or proudly said? And when the whole violence of a raging wind sweeps the admiral of a fleet across the sea with his powerful legions and his elephants, does he not go to the gods with vows for peace, does he not beg in his fear for the winds to be quiet and for a favourable breeze? For nothing: he is caught up in the violent whirlwind all the same and carried down to the shallows of death just as much. So thoroughly does some hidden force grind human affairs down, and seem to trample the beautiful rods and the cruel axes of office underfoot and to keep them about as a joke. And lastly, when the whole earth wobbles under our feet, and shaken cities fall or stand tottering and threatening to fall, is it any wonder that mortals think little of themselves and leave room in the world for enormous and marvellous powers and forces of the gods to govern everything?
For the rest: copper and gold and iron were discovered, and with them the weight of silver and the usefulness of lead, when fire had burned up huge forests with its heat in the great mountains. Either lightning was sent down from the sky, or people fighting a war among the woods had carried fire against the enemy to frighten them, or, drawn on by the goodness of the soil, they wanted to open up rich fields and turn the country into pasture, or to kill wild animals and get rich on the spoils. For hunting with a pit and with fire arose before fencing a clearing round with nets and driving it with dogs.
Whatever the truth of that, and from whatever cause, when the flaming heat had eaten out the forests down to their deep roots with a horrible noise and had baked the earth with fire, a stream of silver and gold, and of copper and lead too, ran out of the boiling veins and gathered in the hollow places of the ground. And when they saw these afterwards set hard and shining in the earth with a bright colour, they picked them up, taken by the smooth and glossy charm of them, and they saw that each piece had been shaped into the same figure as the marks of the hollow it had lain in. Then it got through to them that these things could be melted with heat and made to run into any shape and appearance of a thing they liked, and could be hammered out and drawn to points as sharp and as fine as they wanted, so that they could get themselves weapons, and be able to cut down forests and hew timber and plane beams smooth, and to bore and punch and drill holes right through things.
And they set about doing this with silver and gold no less than with the tough violent strength of copper. For nothing: their power gave way, beaten, and they could not stand up to the hard work equally well. In those days copper was what was valued and gold lay about useless, with its blunt edge turned back; now copper lies about and gold has gone up to the highest honour. That is how the rolling years change the values of things. What was worth a great deal comes in the end to be worth no honour at all; then something else takes its place and comes up out of contempt, and is wanted more every day, and once it is found it flowers in praise and is held in wonderful honour among mortals.
Now, Memmius, how the nature of iron was discovered is easy for you to work out for yourself. The earliest weapons were hands, nails and teeth, and stones, and the broken-off branches of forest trees, and flame and fire, once these had come to be known. Afterwards the strength of iron and copper was discovered — and the use of copper was known before iron's, because its nature is easier to work and there is more of it. With copper they worked the soil of the earth; with copper they stirred up the waves of war and sowed enormous wounds and took away cattle and lands. For everything naked and unarmed gave way easily to men who were armed. Then, little by little, the iron sword came forward and the shape of the bronze sickle turned into a thing to be ashamed of, and they began to break up the soil of the earth with iron, and the contests of doubtful war were made equal.
And mounting armed on a horse's ribs, and steering him with the reins and keeping the right hand free to work, came before trying the dangers of war in a two-horse chariot. And harnessing a pair came before harnessing two pairs, and before mounting armed into chariots with scythes on them. After that the Carthaginians taught the Lucanian oxen — the hideous ones with the tower on their bodies and the snake for a hand — to bear the wounds of war and to throw the great troops of Mars into confusion. So grim discord gave birth to one thing after another, to be a horror to the nations under arms, and day after day it added to the terrors of war.
They tried bulls, too, in the business of war, and they tried sending savage boars against the enemy. Some sent powerful lions on in front of them, with armed trainers and fierce handlers who could manage them and hold them on chains. For nothing: hot with the mixed slaughter, they savagely threw the squadrons into confusion without telling one side from the other, shaking the terrifying manes on their heads in every direction, and the horsemen could not calm their horses' hearts, which were terrified by the roaring, or turn them with the reins against the enemy. The lionesses hurled their bodies in a leap on every side, and gaped in the faces of the men coming at them, and tore men down from behind who were not expecting it, and got their grip and brought them wounded to the ground, fastened on with strong bites and hooked claws. The bulls tossed their own side and trampled them underfoot, and gored the flanks and bellies of horses from below with their horns, and dug up the ground with a threatening look. The boars cut their own allies down with their strong tusks, savagely staining with their own blood the spears that had broken off in them, and brought horse and foot down in one ruin together. The animals swerved aside to escape the fierce thrust of the tusk, or reared up on end and pawed at the air. For nothing: you could see them fall with their sinews cut and cover the ground with a heavy fall. If men had thought that any of them were tame enough after being broken in at home, they saw them boil over when it came to the doing of it, from the wounds, the shouting, the running, the terror, the uproar, and they could not get any part of them back. Every different kind of wild animal scattered — just as now the Lucanian oxen, badly cut about by the steel, often scatter after they have done so much savage damage to their own side.
But they did not choose to do it so much in the hope of winning as to give the enemy something to groan about, and to die themselves, because they had no confidence in their numbers and were short of weapons — if it ever happened at all. Though I can hardly bring myself to believe that they could not foresee it and see in their minds, before it happened, what a foul and general disaster it would be. You could better argue that it happened somewhere in the universe as a whole, among the various worlds made in various ways, than on any one particular globe of earth.
Clothing knotted together came before woven covering. Woven cloth comes after iron, because a loom is made with iron, and there is no other way of making things as smooth as this: the treadles, the spindles, the shuttles, the sounding beams. And nature forced men to work wool before womankind did, since the whole male sex is far better at a craft and much cleverer at it — until the hard-headed farmers made a reproach of it, so that the men were willing to hand it over to women's hands and to take their equal share of hard labour, and to toughen their limbs and hands with hard work.
As for a pattern for sowing, and the origin of grafting, the first was nature herself, who makes things: berries and acorns falling from the trees produced swarms of shoots underneath them in due season. From that they got the idea of putting slips into branches and planting new sets in the ground about the fields. Then they tried one kind of cultivation after another on their beloved plot of land, and they saw wild fruits growing tame in the earth under kind treatment and gentle care. And day by day they forced the woods to go further up the mountain and to give up the ground below to what was cultivated, so that they could have meadows and pools and streams and crops and glad vineyards over the hills and the plains, and so that the blue-green strip of olives could run between and mark them off, spreading out over the mounds and the valleys and the fields — just as you see everything now, picked out with varied charm, set out with sweet fruit trees planted between and hedged all round with fruitful plantations.
But imitating the liquid voices of birds with the mouth came long before men could join in smooth songs with singing and please the ear. And the whistling of the west wind through the hollows of reeds first taught country people to blow into hollow stalks. Then, little by little, they learned the sweet complaints that the pipe pours out when the fingers of the players strike at it — the pipe, found out among trackless groves and woods and glades, in the deserted places of shepherds and in the god-touched quiet. So time draws each thing out little by little into the middle, and reasoning lifts it up into the shores of light.
These things soothed their minds and gave them pleasure once they had had enough food; for then everything appeals. So they would often lie about together on the soft grass beside a stream of water, under the branches of a tall tree, and give their bodies a pleasant time at no great cost — especially when the weather was smiling and the season of the year was painting the green grass with flowers. Then there would be jokes, then talk, then sweet laughing; for then the country muse was at her best. Then a happy playfulness moved them to wreathe head and shoulders with plaited garlands of flowers and leaves, and to move their limbs out of time and stamp with a clumsy foot on mother earth — and out of that came laughter and sweet peals of it, because all this was newer then, and being new it was wonderful.
And for the wakeful there were consolations for lost sleep: to run the voice up and down in all sorts of ways and bend the notes, and to run a curved lip over the reeds — which is why watchmen even now keep up these things as they received them. And people have learned to keep time as a group; and yet they get not one bit more sweetness out of it than the woodland race born of the earth used to get. For whatever we have to hand, if we have known nothing sweeter before, is what pleases us most and seems to be the strongest; and then, generally, some later and better thing gets discovered and ruins it and changes how we feel about everything that came before.
So the acorn came to be hated; so those beds strewn with grass and piled with leaves were abandoned. In the same way clothing made of animal skin fell into contempt — though I imagine that when it was first found it stirred up so much envy that the man who first wore it was killed from ambush, and even then the skin was torn to pieces among them and ruined with all that blood, and could not be turned to any use. So in those days it was skins, and now it is gold and purple, that trouble men's lives with cares and wear them out with war — and the greater blame there, I think, has settled on us. Cold used to torture the earth-born people when they had no skins and were naked; but it does us no harm at all to go without a purple robe, embroidered with gold and with enormous figures on it, so long as we have a common one that will keep the weather off.
So the human race labours for nothing and to no purpose, always, and eats up its life in empty cares — plainly because it has not learned where the limit of getting is, or how far real pleasure grows. And it is that, little by little, that has carried life out into the deep and stirred the great tides of war up from the bottom.
But the sun and the moon, the watchmen of the world, going round the great turning temple of the sky and lighting it with their own light, taught people thoroughly that the seasons of the year come round again and that things go on by a fixed plan and in a fixed order.
By now they were passing their lives fenced in behind strong towers, and the land was divided and marked off and worked; by now the sea was in flower with sail-flying ships; by now they had auxiliaries and allies under a formal treaty, when poets began to hand down famous deeds in songs — and letters had not been found out much before that. That is why our own age cannot look back at what was done earlier, except where reasoning shows us the tracks.
Ships and the cultivation of fields, walls, laws, weapons, roads, clothes and everything else of that kind, all the prizes and all the luxuries of life without exception, songs, pictures, cunningly polished statues: practice, and at the same time the experience of a mind that would not rest, taught these things to people as they went forward, one careful step at a time. So time draws each thing out little by little into the middle, and reasoning lifts it up into the shores of light. For they saw one thing become clear out of another in their minds, until they came to the highest peak of the arts.
Athens, that famous name, was the first city to hand out crops to suffering mortals long ago. Athens made life over again, and drew up laws, and Athens was the first to give life its sweet comforts, when she produced a man with a heart like that found in him, a man who once poured out everything from a mouth that told the truth. He is dead now, and still, because of the godlike things he discovered, the fame that was spread abroad in the old days is carried up to the sky.
For he saw that almost everything which our needs demand for staying alive had already been provided for mortals, and that their life stood about as safe as it could be made; he saw men powerful in riches, in public office and in reputation, well off, holding their heads high over the good name of their sons; and he saw that all the same, in his own home, not one of them had a heart any less full of anxiety, that their minds harried their lives without a pause and with no thanks for it, and were driven to rage with bitter complaints. So he understood that the fault was in the jar itself, and that everything gathered from outside and brought into it, however good it was, was spoiled inside by the jar's own defect. Partly because he could see that the thing was leaky and full of holes, so that there was no way in the world it could ever be filled; and partly because he could see that it fouled everything it took in, as if with a disgusting taste.
So he cleaned out people's hearts with words that told the truth. He set a limit to craving and to fear. He laid out what the highest good is, the thing all of us are making for, and he showed the road, a short track by which we could drive at it in a straight run. He showed what evil there is in mortal affairs, everywhere, coming about in the course of nature and flying at us in one form or another, whether by chance or by force, because that is the way nature has arranged things; and out of which gates a man should go to meet each of them. And he proved that for the most part the human race rolls the grim waves of care about in its chest for nothing.
For just as children shake and are afraid of everything in the blind dark, so we, sometimes, are afraid in broad daylight of things no more to be feared than the things children go pale over in the dark and invent for themselves as about to happen.
So this terror of the mind and this darkness have to be scattered. Not by the rays of the sun and the bright arrows of daylight, but by looking at nature and working out how it runs.
That is all the more reason to go on and finish weaving what I have begun.
And since I have taught you that the great spaces of the world are mortal, and that the sky is made of a body that had a birth, and that most of what happens in it, and must happen, has to be broken up again, take in the rest as well. Once I have climbed into that famous chariot, then you, clever Muse Calliope, rest of men and delight of the gods, mark out the ground in front of me as I run to the white line drawn at the end of the course, so that with you leading I may take the crown with famous praise.
The winds get up, and then everything is calmed down again, and all that was raging is turned about and quiet. As for the rest of what mortals see happening on the earth and in the sky, they often hang on it with frightened minds, and it makes them humble in their souls with dread of the gods and presses them down and holds them flat against the ground, because being ignorant of causes forces them to hand everything over to the command of the gods and to grant them the kingship.
For even the men who have learned properly that the gods spend their lives free of care, if they still keep wondering meanwhile by what plan things can be managed, and above all the things seen overhead along the shores of the upper air, are carried back again into the old religions and take on harsh masters, whom in their misery they believe to be capable of anything, because they do not know what can exist and what cannot, and on what principle each thing has its power limited and a boundary stone driven deep. That is all the more reason why they go wandering, carried along by blind reasoning.
Unless you spit all this out of your mind and send it a long way off, unless you stop thinking things unworthy of the gods and foreign to their peace, the holy powers of the gods will often do you harm, belittled by you. Not that the highest force of the gods can be violated so that in anger it takes a sharp revenge, but because you yourself will imagine that beings who are quiet in a settled peace are rolling great waves of anger about; and you will not go up to the shrines of the gods with a settled heart, and you will not have the strength to take in, with the mind's tranquil peace, the images carried from their holy bodies into the minds of men as messengers of a divine shape. And from that you can see what sort of life follows.
If the truest reasoning is going to drive that life far away from us, then although a great deal has already come out of me, a great deal still remains and has to be dressed in polished verse. The law and the look of the sky have to be grasped, and the storms and the bright lightnings have to be sung: what they do, and from what cause each of them is carried along, so that you do not go out of your mind with fear, dividing the sky into its regions to see which of them the flying fire came from, or which of the two halves it turned into from there, or how it worked its way into shut places, or how it took charge and then got itself out again. People cannot see the causes of these performances by any reasoning at all, and so they think they are done by a god's will.
To begin with, then. The blue deeps of the sky are shaken with thunder because the clouds of the upper air, flying high, run together against each other when the winds are fighting. No sound ever comes out of a clear part of the sky; but wherever the clouds are in a thicker column, that is where a rumbling comes with a great roar, and it comes more often. Besides, clouds cannot be of such close-packed body as stones and timbers are, nor as thin as mists and flying smoke are. If they were, they would either have to fall, pressed down by their dead weight like stones, or, like smoke, they would not be able to hold themselves together, or to keep icy snow and showers of hail inside them.
They also give out a sound over the levels of the wide-open world, the way an awning stretched over a big theatre sometimes gives out a crack as it is tossed about between the poles and the crossbeams. And sometimes, torn right through by rowdy gusts, it goes wild and copies the brittle sound of sheets of paper. You can recognise that sort of noise in thunder too, or when the lashings of the wind spin hanging clothes and flying papers about and beat them through the air.
And it happens sometimes, too, that the clouds cannot run together front to front, but travel sideways instead, with contrary motions, scraping their bodies along each other slowly; and that is where the dry sound comes from that rubs at our ears and is drawn out a long time, until they have got clear of the tight quarters.
Here is another way in which everything often seems to shake at a heavy clap of thunder, and the huge walls of the roomy world seem to be torn apart and to have suddenly sprung open. A gathered squall of strong wind twists its way all at once into a mass of cloud, and, shut up inside it there, with its whirl spinning round and round, it forces the cloud more and more, on every side, to become hollow with a thickened body round the outside. Then, when the wind's force and its sharp charge have worn that shell down, the cloud is split and gives out a crash with a sound that terrifies. And no wonder: a small bladder full of air, when it is suddenly burst, often gives out no small sound either.
There is also this way of accounting for it, that the clouds make a sound when the winds blow right through them. We often see clouds carried along branched and rough in many different shapes; and it is the same as when a north-west gale blows right through a thick wood and the leaves sough and the branches crash.
It happens sometimes, too, that the roused force of a strong wind rips a cloud right open, breaking through it with a straight charge. What a blast can do up there is plainly taught by what happens down here, where the wind is gentler and even so tears tall trees out of the ground and drags them up by their deepest roots.
There are waves running through the clouds as well, which give out a sort of rumble as they break heavily; and the same thing happens in deep rivers and in the great sea when the surf breaks.
It happens as well when the burning force of a thunderbolt falls out of one cloud into another. If the second cloud happens to have taken in a lot of moisture, it kills the fire on the spot with a great outcry, in the way that iron white-hot out of a fiery furnace hisses when we have dropped it straight into cold water. If the cloud that takes the fire is drier, then it is set alight all at once and burns with an enormous sound, as if a flame were wandering over laurel-covered mountains and burning them up with a great charge in a whirl of winds. There is nothing that burns with a more terrifying noise, with the flame crackling, than the Delphic laurel of Apollo.
And finally, the great cracking of ice and the collapse of hail often gives out a sound high up in the great clouds. For when the wind packs them tight, the mountains of storm cloud, frozen together and mixed with hail, are broken up into a small compass.
It lightens, likewise, when the clouds have struck many seeds of fire out of each other by their collision, in the way that if a stone strikes a stone, or iron does, light leaps out too and fire scatters bright sparks. But it works out that we take in the thunder with our ears after our eyes have seen the flash, because things always arrive at the ears more slowly than the things that set our sight going. You can understand this from an example as well. If you see somebody a long way off cutting down a great tree with a two-edged axe, it works out that you see the stroke before the blow gives a sound in your ears. So we see the flash as well before we take in the thunder, although the thunder is sent off at the same moment as the fire, from a like cause, and born of the same collision.
Here is another way in which the clouds stain the country with a flying light and the storm flashes with a trembling charge. When wind has got into a cloud and spun about in there and made the cloud hollow with a thickened shell round it, in the way I taught you above, it grows hot with its own speed. You see how everything gets thoroughly heated by motion and catches fire; a lead bullet, in fact, even melts when it has to travel a long course. So when this red-hot wind has ripped the black cloud apart, it scatters the seeds of burning, pressed out all at once as if by force, and those are what make the blinking flashes of flame. After that comes the sound, which reaches our ears more slowly than the things that arrive at the light of our eyes. This happens, you should know, in dense clouds, and where they are piled high, one on another, with a marvellous upward thrust.
Do not be taken in by the fact that we look at them from below and see how broad they are rather than how far up they are built. Watch them instead when the winds are carrying clouds shaped like mountains sideways through the air, or when you see them heaped along great mountain ranges, one on another and above, pressing down from over your head, anchored in position with the winds buried on every side. Then you will be able to make out the great masses of them, and to see caverns in them apparently built out of overhanging rock. When a storm has got up and the winds have filled those caverns, they are shut in there and roar around indignantly with a great rumbling and make threats in their cloud cages the way wild animals do. Now from here, now from there, they send growls through the clouds; hunting for a way out they spin round and round, and they roll the seeds of fire together out of the clouds, and gather a great many of them, and wheel flame about in the hollow furnaces inside, until they have torn the cloud open and flashed out glittering.
Here is another reason why that flying golden colour of liquid fire comes down to the earth. The clouds themselves must have a great many seeds of fire in them; for when they are without any moisture at all their colour is mostly flaming and shining. Naturally they must take a great deal from the light of the sun, so that they redden, as you would expect, and pour fires out. So when a wind has driven these clouds and packed them into one place and crushed them together and forced them, they pour out seeds squeezed from them, and those are what make the colours of flame flash.
It lightens likewise when the clouds of the sky are thinning out. For when the wind pulls them lightly apart as they travel and dissolves them, those seeds which make the flash have to fall, whether they will or not. Then it lightens without the foul terror and the noise, and with no uproar at all.
Now for what is left. What sort of nature thunderbolts are furnished with is declared by the strikes, by the branded marks of heat, and by the scars that breathe out the heavy fumes of sulphur. Those are the marks of fire, not of wind and not of rain. Besides, they often set the roofs of houses alight, too, and take charge inside the rooms themselves with a quick flame. Nature has put this fire together for you out of small and mobile bodies, and it is the most delicate of all fires: nothing whatever can stand in its way. The strong thunderbolt goes through the walls of houses, as shouting and voices do; it goes through stone, through bronze, and it turns bronze and gold to liquid in a moment. It also arranges for the wine to vanish suddenly out of jars that are still whole, because of course the heat of it, coming in, easily loosens everything around and makes the earthenware sides of the jar porous, and, once it has worked its way inside, it quickly breaks up the atoms of the wine and disperses them. And that is what the sun's heat is plainly unable to manage in a lifetime, powerful as it is with its glittering fever. So much quicker and more overpowering is this force.
Now, how these things come to be born, and how they come to be made with such a charge that with one stroke they can split towers open, knock houses to pieces, tear away rafters and beams, and heave up the monuments of great men and throw them about; how they can take the breath out of people and lay cattle flat all over the place; by what force they can do all the rest of this kind of thing: I shall set it out, and I shall not keep you waiting any longer with promises.
Thunderbolts have to be thought of as born in the thick clouds piled high up. None are ever sent out of a clear sky, or out of clouds of slight density. Beyond doubt this is so, and the plain facts teach it. At such a time the clouds thicken through the whole air, so that we suppose all the darkness has left Acheron and filled the great caverns of the sky. That is how far it goes: once the foul night of the storm clouds has got up, faces of black dread hang over us from above, at the moment when the storm begins to forge its thunderbolts.
Besides, very often a black thundercloud out at sea falls into the waves like a river of pitch let down out of the sky, stuffed with darkness far off, and drags along a black storm heavy with thunderbolts and squalls, itself crammed above all with fires and winds, so that even the people on land shiver and go looking for a roof. So the storm has to be thought of as standing high above our heads in the way I have said. The clouds would not bury the lands under so much gloom unless there were many of them built up above, one on another, with the sun shut out; nor could they, as they come, crush us with so much rain, and make the rivers overflow and the fields swim, if the upper air were not built high with clouds.
Here, then, everything is full of winds and fires, and that is why there are roars and flashes all over the place. I taught you above that hollow clouds hold a great many seeds of heat, and they must take in many from the sun's rays and their burning. So when the same wind that drives these clouds into one place, whichever place it happens to be, has squeezed many seeds of heat out of them and mixed itself in with that fire at the same time, a whirlwind works its way in and spins about there in the narrow space and sharpens the thunderbolt in hot furnaces inside. For the wind is set alight in two ways: it warms up by its own speed, and it warms up from the touch of the fire. Then, when the force of the wind has been thoroughly heated and the heavy charge of the fire has driven in, the thunderbolt, ripe by now, so to speak, suddenly splits the cloud right open, and the roused blaze is carried out lighting up every place around with its glittering. A heavy sound follows it, so that the vaults of the sky seem to have burst apart all at once and to be coming down on us from above. Then a shudder takes hold of the lands and runs deep, and rumblings run along the high sky, because at such a moment nearly the whole storm is shaken and trembles and the roarings are set going. Out of that shock comes heavy and abundant rain, so that the whole upper air seems to be turning into rain, and, as it comes down headlong, calling the world back to a flood. That is how great a downpour is sent out when the cloud is torn open and the wind squalls, once the sound has flown out on a burning stroke.
There are also times when the roused force of a wind from outside falls on a cloud that is strong and carrying a ripe bolt. When it has split that cloud open, that fiery whirl drops out on the spot, the thing we call, in our fathers' own word, a thunderbolt. The same thing happens in other directions too, wherever the force has carried it.
It also happens sometimes that the force of a wind sent off without any fire in it catches fire all the same over the distance of its long journey, losing on the way certain large bodies which cannot get through the air as well as the others can, and scraping together other tiny ones out of the air itself and carrying them along, and these mix as they fly and make fire. It is much the same way as a lead bullet often grows hot on its course, when it drops many bodies of stiff cold and takes fire into itself in the air.
It happens as well that the force of the blow itself rouses the fire, when the cold force of a wind has struck out, sent off with no fire in it. Naturally so, because when it has hit with a violent stroke the atoms of heat can flow together out of the wind itself and at the same time out of the thing that takes the stroke at that moment. It is like the fire that flies out when we cut a stone with iron: the seeds of hot brightness rush together at the stroke no less for the fact that the force of the iron is cold. So a thing must be set alight by a thunderbolt in the same way, if it happens to be convenient and suited to flames. And the cold force of the wind cannot be entirely and completely cold, not when it has been sent with such force from above: even if it is not set alight by fire on its course, all the same it arrives warmed and mixed with heat.
Now, the speed of a thunderbolt and its heavy stroke, and the fact that thunderbolts usually run their course with a quick glide, come about because the roused force always gathers itself first inside the clouds and takes up a great effort to be gone. Then, when the cloud has not been able to hold the growth of its charge, the force is squeezed out and so flies with a marvellous charge, like the shots sent from strong catapults.
Add to this that it is made of small and smooth atoms, and it is not easy for anything to stand up to a nature like that. It escapes between things and works its way through their gaps, and so it does not stick fast, held up by many collisions, and that is why it flies gliding along with a quick charge.
Then, because by nature all weights press downwards, when a blow is added on top of that the speed is doubled and the charge grows heavier, so that it knocks whatever gets in its way apart with its blows, more violently and more quickly, and keeps on its road.
And finally, because it comes on with a long charge, it must gather speed again and again, and that speed grows as it goes and increases its strong powers and toughens the stroke. It makes all its seeds, whatever they are, be carried in a straight line as if into one place, throwing them all together as they roll into that course. It may be that as it comes it drags certain bodies out of the air itself, and these fire up its speed with their blows.
It comes through many things and leaves them unhurt and passes through them whole, because the liquid fire travels through their holes. But it breaks a great many things too, when the bodies of the thunderbolt themselves have fallen on the bodies of things exactly where the weave is held together. And it easily undoes bronze and makes gold run in an instant, because its force is made of tiny small bodies and smooth atoms, which work their way in easily and, once they are in, quickly break all the knots apart and loosen the bonds.
The high house of the sky, glittering with stars, and the whole earth with it, are shaken most in autumn, and again when the flowering season of spring is opening out. For in the cold the fires are missing, and in the heat the winds fail, and the clouds are not of so dense a body. But when the seasons of the sky stand between the two, then all the different causes of a thunderbolt come together at once. The crossing-place of the year itself mixes cold with heat, and the cloud needs both of them for manufacturing thunderbolts, so that there is a quarrel among things and the air billows in a great uproar, raging with fires and winds.
For the first part of the heat is the last part of the cold, and that is springtime; so unlike things must fight each other and make a disturbance when they are mixed. And when the last of the heat comes round mixed with the first of the cold, the season that goes by the name of autumn, here too the sharp winters clash with the summers. That is why these should be called the crossing-straits of the year, and it is no wonder if at that season a very great number of thunderbolts happen and a turbulent storm is roused in the sky, since on both sides there is a doubtful war making a disturbance, on one side with flames, on the other with winds and water mixed in.
This, this is what it is to see through to the very nature of the fire-bearing thunderbolt, and to see by what force it does each thing: not to unroll Etruscan chants and hunt through them for signs of the hidden mind of the gods, for nothing, asking which quarter the flying fire came from, or which of the two halves it turned into from there, or how it worked its way into shut places, or how it took charge and then got itself out again, or what harm the stroke of the thunderbolt out of the sky can do.
And if Jupiter and the other gods shake the shining vaults of heaven with a terrifying noise, and throw the fire wherever each of them feels like it, why do they not arrange that people who have some loathsome crime on their consciences are struck and breathe out flames of lightning from a pierced chest, a sharp lesson to mortals? Why is it rather a man who knows of nothing shameful about himself who is rolled about in flames, innocent, and caught up and tangled in a heavenly whirl and in fire, all at once?
And why do they aim at empty places and work for nothing? Are they practising their arms then, and building up their muscles? And why do they allow the Father's weapon to be blunted on the ground? Why does he himself put up with that, instead of keeping it for his enemies?
And in the end, why does Jupiter never throw a thunderbolt to the earth and pour out claps of thunder when the sky is clear on every side? Or does he come down in person into the clouds as soon as they have moved in underneath, so that he can decide the stroke of his weapon from close up?
And what is his reason for throwing into the sea? What has he got against the waves and the liquid mass and the swimming plains?
Besides, if he wants us to look out for the stroke of the bolt, why does he hesitate to make it possible for us to see it thrown? And if he wants to crush us with fire when we are not expecting it, why does he thunder from that quarter, so that we can dodge it? Why does he rouse darkness first, and roars and rumbling?
And how can you believe that he shoots into many different quarters at once? Or would you dare to argue that it never happens that several strokes fall at one and the same time? It has happened again and again, and it must happen, that just as it rains in many regions and the showers fall, so many thunderbolts come at one and the same time.
And last of all, why does he knock the holy shrines of the gods apart with a hostile thunderbolt, and their own splendid seats? Why does he break up the well-made images of the gods, and take the honour away from his own likenesses with a violent wound? And why does he mostly aim at high places, and why do we see most of the tracks of that fire of his on the mountain tops?
For the rest, it is easy from all this to understand how the things the Greeks named presters — "burners," a name they took straight from the thing itself — come down out of the sky onto the sea. Sometimes what looks like a lowered column comes down from the sky onto the sea, and round it the water boils and seethes, whipped up by heavily blowing gusts, and any ships caught in that uproar at the time are knocked about and brought into the worst danger there is.
This happens when the roused force of the wind cannot break through the cloud it has started on, and presses it down instead, so that it is like a column let down from the sky onto the sea — gradually, as though something were being shoved from above by a fist and the thrust of an arm and stretched out into the waves. Then, when the wind has split the cloud, its force bursts out from there into the sea and works up an extraordinary seething among the waves. For the whirl comes down spinning, and brings that cloud down along with it, pliant body and all; and as soon as it has forced the loaded cloud right down to the level of the sea, it suddenly throws its whole self into the water and rouses the whole sea with an enormous noise, forcing it to boil.
It happens too that the whirl of the wind wraps itself in clouds on its own account, scraping together the seeds of cloud out of the air, and so imitates a prester let down from the sky. When this one has come down onto the land and broken open, it vomits out an immense force of whirlwind and squall. But since it happens rarely on the whole, and on land the mountains are bound to get in its way, the same thing is seen more often over the wide prospect of the sea, under an open sky.
Clouds thicken into being when many bodies, flying about in this space of the sky up above, have suddenly come together — rougher ones, which can be held caught in one another even though the couplings are slight. These first make small clouds form. Then those catch hold of one another and flock together, and grow by joining, and are carried along by the winds, until at last a savage storm has got up.
It happens too that the nearer a mountain's peaks are to the sky, the more steadily its heights smoke with the thick murk of a tawny cloud. That is because when clouds first form, before the eyes can see them, thin as they are, the winds are already carrying them and driving them up to the topmost peaks of the mountain. There at last, once a bigger crowd of them has gathered and packed close, they can be seen, and at the same moment they seem to be rising into the upper air out of the mountain's own summit. For the thing itself, and our own senses, declare that windy places lie open up there, whenever we climb high mountains.
Besides, that nature lifts a great many bodies off the whole sea is declared by clothes hung up on the shore, when they take up the clinging damp. So it looks all the more as though many bodies could rise from the salt heaving of the sea as well, to swell the clouds; for all moistures are of one blood.
Besides, we see mists and steam rising from all the rivers and from the earth itself, and these, squeezed up from there like a breath, are carried upward and spread their murk under the sky and, gathering little by little, keep the high clouds supplied. For the heat of the star-carrying upper air presses down on them as well, and by a sort of thickening weaves the dark storm clouds under the blue.
It happens too that the bodies which make the clouds and the flying storm clouds come into this sky of ours from outside. For I have taught you that their number is countless and that the sum of the deep is infinite, and I have shown with what speed the atoms fly and how they are used to crossing an unspeakable space in a moment. So it is no wonder if, in a short time, storm and darkness often cover sea and land with such great winds, hanging heavy overhead, since everywhere, through all the pores of the upper air and, so to speak, through the breathing holes all round this great world, an exit and an entrance stand provided for the atoms.
Now then. I will unfold how the rainy moisture thickens in the clouds high up, and how it is let down onto the lands and falls as a shower. First I shall win the point that many seeds of water rise together with the clouds themselves out of all things, and that the two grow in step, the cloud and the water that is in the cloud, just as our body grows in step with our blood, and with sweat, and with any other moisture there is in our limbs.
Clouds often take in a great deal of sea-water besides, like hanging fleeces of wool, when the winds carry them over the great sea. In the same way moisture is lifted into the clouds out of all the rivers. And when the seeds of water have come well together there, many of them, in many ways, swollen from every side, the packed clouds compete to send the moisture out in two ways at once: the force of the wind crowds them together, and the sheer quantity of storm clouds, driven into a bigger crowd, presses and bears down from above and makes the rain flow out.
Besides, when the clouds are also thinned out by the winds, or broken up by being struck from above by the heat of the sun, they let their rainy moisture go and drip, the way wax over a hot fire melts and runs freely. But a violent downpour comes when the clouds are violently weighed down by both together, by their own piled mass and by the charge of the wind. And rains are used to holding on for a long time and hanging about, when many seeds of water are stirred up, and cloud on cloud and soaking storm cloud on storm cloud are carried along on top of one another and from every quarter alike, and when the whole earth steams and breathes its moisture back out.
At such a time, when the sun's rays have flashed out through the dark weather facing the spray of the storm clouds, the colour of the rainbow appears in the black clouds.
As for the other things that grow up above and are made up above, and everything that thickens in the clouds — all of them, absolutely all: snow, winds, hail, the freezing frosts, and the great power of ice, that great hardener of water, that check which reins in the rivers everywhere as they push on — all this is perfectly easy to find out and to see with the mind, how each of them happens and why they come about, once you have properly understood what powers have been given to the atoms.
Now then, take in what the explanation of earthquakes is. And first of all make yourself think of the earth as full of windy caverns below, just as it is above, everywhere; and that it carries in its lap many lakes and many pools, and cliffs and broken rocks; and you must suppose that many hidden rivers under the earth's back roll their waves with force, and rocks sunk under them. For the thing itself demands that the earth be like itself everywhere.
With these things joined and set underneath it, then, the earth trembles up above, shaken by great collapses, when down below time has undermined huge caverns. Whole mountains fall, in fact, and from that great sudden shock the tremors creep out far and wide. And rightly so, since houses along the road shake all through when a cart of no great weight jars them, and the things in them jump just as much whenever some bit of the road jolts the iron-shod rims of the wheels on either side.
It happens too, when a huge clod of earth loosened by age rolls down into the great wide pools of water, that the wavering earth is tossed as well by the wave of the water — the way a vessel cannot stand steady among water unless the liquid inside it has stopped being tossed about in an uncertain swell.
Besides, when the wind, gathered in the hollow places under the earth, bears down from one quarter and pushes, straining against the deep caverns with great strength, the earth leans over the way the force of the wind presses it. And then the houses built on the earth above lean and threaten in that same direction, thrust forward, and the more so the higher each one is raised towards the sky; and the beams are dragged out and hang over, ready to go. And men are afraid to believe that some destroying time and disaster is waiting for the nature of the great world, when they can see so great a mass of lands leaning over.
And if the winds did not draw breath, no force would rein things in or catch them back from going to their ruin. As it is, because they draw breath by turns and grow heavy again, and, as if rallying, come back and then are driven off and give way, the earth threatens collapse more often than it brings it about. It leans, and then rocks back, and after tipping forward it takes up its own seat again under its weight. That is why every building sways, the top more than the middle, the middle more than the bottom, the bottom hardly at all.
There is this cause too for the same great shaking. When a wind, some very great force of air, gathered either from outside or out of the earth itself, has suddenly thrown itself into the hollow places of the earth, it first roars there among the great caverns in an uproar and is carried round and round; and afterwards, when its force has been driven on and lashed up, it bursts out and at the same moment splits the deep earth and works up a great gaping chasm. That is what happened at Sidon in Syria, and at Aegium in the Peloponnese, cities which this outrush of air, and the earthquake that came of it, threw down. And besides those, many walled towns have fallen in great movements of the land, and many cities have gone down into the sea and sunk together with their citizens.
And if it does not burst out, still the charge of the air itself and the wild force of the wind is dealt out through the earth's many pores like a shivering fit, and shakes a tremor into it from there, just as when cold has come right into our joints it shakes us against our will and makes us tremble and move.
So people flutter in a double terror through the cities. They are afraid of the roofs above them, and they dread the caverns underneath, in case the nature of the earth suddenly breaks them open and, pulled apart, opens its own gaping mouth wide, and, all confused, wants to fill it with its own ruins. So let them go on thinking, if they like, that heaven and earth will stay uncorrupted, entrusted to an everlasting safety. All the same, from time to time the sheer present force of the danger puts this goad of fear under them from one side or another: that the earth may suddenly be pulled out from under their feet and carried down into the pit, and the sum of things follow it, given up utterly, and the world become nothing but a confused ruin.
To begin with, people wonder that nature does not make the sea bigger, given that there is such a running-down of waters into it, and that all the rivers come to it from every quarter. Add the wandering rains and the flying storms, which sprinkle and soak every sea and every land; add its own springs. And yet, against the sum of the sea, all of these will barely amount to the addition of a single drop. So it is less of a wonder that the great sea does not grow.
Besides, the sun draws off a great part of it with its heat. We see, in fact, that the sun with its burning rays dries clothes soaked with wet; and we see that the seas are many and are spread out wide underneath. So however small a portion of the moisture the sun sips off the surface at any one place, over so great a space it will still carry off plenty from the waves.
Then again, the winds too can lift a great part of the moisture by sweeping the surface of the water, since we very often see the roads dried by the wind in a single night and the soft mud thickening into a crust.
Besides, I have taught you that the clouds also lift a great deal of moisture, taken up from the great level of the sea, and scatter it here and there over the whole circle of the lands, when it rains on the earth and the winds carry the clouds along.
Finally, since the earth's body is porous, and since it is joined to the sea and rings its shores everywhere, water must seep from the salt level into the lands, just as the moisture comes from the lands into the sea. For the brine is filtered off, and the material of the water seeps back and all runs together to the head of the rivers; and from there it comes back over the lands in a fresh-water column, along the road once cut for it, where its liquid foot carried the waves down.
Now I will unfold what the explanation is for the fires that breathe out through the throat of Mount Etna, sometimes in such a whirlwind. For the storm of flame that rose and took command through the fields of Sicily was no ordinary disaster, and it turned the faces of the neighbouring peoples towards it, when they saw all the shining high places of the sky smoking and sparking and filled their hearts with frightened worry about what new thing the nature of things was working at.
In matters like these you have to look wide and deep and peer far off in every direction, so that you remember that the sum of things is bottomless, and see how tiny a part of the whole sum this one sky of ours is — how small a fraction, not even as large a part of it as one man is of the whole earth. If you set that proposition plainly in front of you and see it plainly, you will stop wondering at a great many things.
Does any of us wonder if somebody takes a fever into his joints, gathering with a hot burning, or any other pain of disease through his limbs? A foot suddenly swells up; a sharp pain often grabs at the teeth, or gets into the eyes themselves; the holy fire breaks out and burns and crawls over the body, taking whatever part it has seized and creeping on through the limbs. And no wonder, since there are seeds of many things, and this earth and this sky carry enough of disease and harm for an immense power of illness to grow out of. So we have to suppose that to the whole sky and the whole earth everything is supplied in plenty out of the infinite: enough for the earth to be shaken and suddenly moved, for a fast whirlwind to run across the sea and the lands, for the fire of Etna to overflow, for the sky to burst into flame. For that happens too: the shining high places of the sky catch fire, and rainstorms come with a heavier gathering, when the seeds of water happen to have brought themselves together that way.
"But the roiling blaze of that burning is far too enormous." Of course it is. And a river seems enormous to a man who has never seen a bigger one before; a tree seems enormous, and a man; and of every kind whatever a man has seen the largest of, that is what he imagines to be enormous — when in fact all of them together, sky and earth and sea thrown in, are nothing against the whole sum of the total.
Now, though, I will unfold the ways in which that flame is suddenly stirred up and blows out of the vast furnaces of Etna. First, the nature of the whole mountain is hollow underneath, propped up nearly everywhere on caverns of stone. And in all the caves there is wind and air; for wind is made when air has been roused up by being stirred about. When this air has got hot through and, raging, has made all the rocks around it hot wherever it touches them, and the earth as well, and has struck out of them a hot fire with swift flames, it lifts itself up and hurls itself high, straight out through the throat. So it carries its blaze a long way, and scatters its ash a long way, and rolls out smoke in a thick murk, and at the same time shoves out rocks of astonishing weight. Leave yourself in no doubt that this is the turbulent force of the air.
Besides, over a great stretch the sea at the roots of that mountain breaks its waves and sucks its surf back again. From this sea caverns run in underneath, right up to the mountain's high throat. You have to admit that the way in goes through here, and the plain fact forces us to say that water and air get deep in from the open sea and blow out again, and so heave up the flame and throw up rocks and raise clouds of sand. For at the very summit there are what the people there call bowls; what we call them is throats and mouths.
There are also a number of things for which it is not enough to state one cause: you must state several, though only one of them is in fact the true one. Suppose you were to catch sight of a man's lifeless body lying some way off. It would be right to name all the causes of death, so that the one cause of his death might be named among them. You could not prove that he had died by the sword, or by cold, or by disease, or, as it might be, by poison; but we know that what happened to him was something of this kind. And we have to talk the same way in a great many other matters.
The Nile rises in summer and floods the fields, the only river in the world that does it, the river of the whole of Egypt. It waters Egypt right through the middle of the heat, and it may be because in summer the north winds are set against its mouths — the winds that at that season of the year are called the Etesians — and, blowing against the stream, hold it back, and by forcing its waters upstream fill it up and make it stand. For there is no doubt that these blasts, driven as they are from the cold stars of the pole, are carried against the current, while the river itself comes up from the south, out of the quarter that carries the heat, rising deep inland among the black generations of men, whose colour is baked through, out of the very middle region of the day.
It may also be that a great heap of sand piled up by the waves against it blocks its mouths, when the sea, stirred up by the winds, drives the sand inland; and by that the river's way out is less free, and the downhill charge of its waters is less as well.
It may happen too that the rains at its head are perhaps heavier at that season, because the Etesian blasts of the north winds are then throwing all the clouds into those parts. Naturally, once they have gathered there, driven out towards the middle region of the day, the clouds are at last crowded against the high mountains and packed together and pressed hard. Or perhaps the river swells far inland from the high mountains of the Ethiopians, when the sun, going over everything, drives the white snows with its melting rays to come down into the plains.
Now then, I will unfold for you what those places and lakes are that go by the name of Avernus, and what sort of nature they are furnished with. First, the fact that they are called Avernian — birdless — was laid on them from the thing itself, because they are set against all birds. For when the birds have come in their flight to a spot straight over those places, they forget the rowing of their wings, they let their sails go slack, and they fall headlong, their soft necks poured out, down to the earth if the nature of the ground happens to be like that, or into the water if an Avernian lake happens to lie beneath.
There is such a place near Cumae, where the mountains are filled with sharp sulphur and smoke, swollen with hot springs. There is another inside the walls of Athens, on the very peak of the citadel, beside the temple of Pallas Tritonis, the kindly one, where the hoarse crows never bring their bodies on their wings, not even when the altars are smoking with offerings. That is how completely they keep away — and not out of fear of Pallas's sharp anger over the crow that once kept watch on her secret and carried the tale to her, as the poets of the Greeks have sung it, but because the nature of the place does the work, all by itself.
In Syria too there is said to be a place of the same kind to be seen, where even four-footed animals, as soon as they have set their first steps in it, are forced down by its sheer power and collapse, as if they had suddenly been slaughtered as an offering to the gods below.
All these things are done by natural reasoning, and it is plain from what causes they come about. So nobody should believe that this is where the gate of Orcus is, or go on from there to suppose that the gods below drag souls down from here to the shores of Acheron, the way that swift-footed stags are so often thought to draw the crawling generations of wild snakes out of their hiding places with their nostrils. Take in how far all that is from a true account; for now I am going to try to speak about the fact itself.
To begin with, I say this, which I have often said before as well: there are shapes of things of every kind in the earth. Many of them are life-giving and good for food, and many can strike disease into us and hurry death on. And we have shown before that different things suit different living creatures for the business of life, because the nature of each is unlike the rest, and so are their textures and their basic shapes.
Many hostile things travel in through the ears; many work their way in through the nostrils themselves, dangerous and rough to the touch. There are not a few to be avoided by touch, and not a few to be run from by sight, and some that are bitter to the taste.
Then you can see how many things there are that are sharply hostile to a man's senses, filthy and hard to bear. In the first place, certain trees have been given a shade so heavy that they often bring on headaches, if a man has lain down under them, stretched out on the grass. And there is a tree on the great mountains of Helicon whose flower has a foul smell, and it is used to killing a man with it.
All these things rise out of the earth for one reason: the earth carries the seeds of many things mixed together in many ways, and hands them over separately. And when a lamp that has just been put out at night hits the nostrils with its sharp reek, it puts to sleep on the spot the man who is subject to falling down and foaming at the mouth. A woman drowses back in her chair at the heavy smell of castor, and the bright work slips out of her soft hands, if she has smelled it at the time when her monthly flow is released. And there are many things besides that loosen the limbs all through the frame and make them faint, and unsettle the soul in its seat inside.
Finally, if you linger in a hot bath when you are too full, and wash there, how easily it happens that you go down in the middle of the tub of boiling water! And how easily the heavy force and smell of charcoal works its way into the brain, unless we have taken water beforehand! But when a burning fever has got hold of a man's limbs and mastered them, then the smell of wine is like a deadly blow.
Do you not see how sulphur is bred in the earth itself, and how bitumen thickens with a foul smell? And where men follow the veins of silver and gold, searching the earth's hidden places deep down with iron, what smells does Scaptensula breathe out below? And what harm comes out of the gold mines! What faces they give men, what colours! Do you not see, or hear, how quickly those men are apt to die, and how the store of life fails in them, whom the great force of necessity keeps at such work? So the earth steams up all these vapours and breathes them out into the open and into the parts of the sky that lie exposed.
In the same way the Avernian places must send up a death-carrying force to birds, one that rises from the earth into the air and poisons a certain part of the space of the sky. As soon as a bird has been carried there on its wings, it is stopped, caught by a poison it cannot see, so that it drops straight down at the place where the vapour rises. And when it has fallen there, that same force of the vapour takes away what is left of its life from all its limbs. For it first stirs up a sort of dizziness in them; and afterwards, once they have fallen right into the very springs of the poison, they have to vomit up their life there as well, because there is so great a supply of harm all round them.
It also happens sometimes that this force and vapour of Avernus breaks up the air lying between the birds and the ground, so that the place is left very nearly empty. And when the birds have come in their flight straight over that place, at once the beat of their wings goes lame in the emptiness, and every effort of the wings on both sides is betrayed. Here, when they can neither lean on the air nor hold themselves up on their wings, of course nature forces them to slip down to the earth by their weight; and lying there through what is by now almost empty void, they scatter their souls out through all the pores of their bodies.
Well water, next, turns colder in summer. The reason is that the earth is thinned out by the heat and lets go into the air whatever seeds of heat it happens to have of its own. So the more the earth is worn out and emptied of its heat, the colder the water hidden inside it becomes. When, on the other hand, the whole earth is pressed together by cold and packs tight and, so to speak, sets hard, then plainly, in packing itself together, it squeezes out into the wells whatever heat it is carrying.
There is said to be a spring at the shrine of Ammon, out in the Libyan desert, which is cold in the daylight and hot in the night-time. People marvel at this spring far too much. They think it comes to the boil down under the earth, from the fierce sun, once night has covered the lands with its terrifying darkness. That is a very long way from true reasoning. When the sun, handling the naked body of the water from above, has not been able to make it hot even on its upper side, and the light up there enjoys such burning heat, how could the sun down below cook the water through so thick a body of earth and warm it with hot vapour? Especially when it can hardly work its heat in through the walls of a house with all its burning rays. What is the explanation, then? Obviously this. The ground round about that spring is more porous than the rest of the earth, and there are many seeds of fire close to the body of the water. So when night buries the land under its dew-bearing waves, the earth cools deep down at once and packs together. In this way, exactly as if a hand were closing on it, it squeezes into the spring whatever seeds of fire it holds, and those are what make the touch and the steam of the water hot. Then, when the sun comes up and pushes the earth apart with its rays and thins it out, mixing warm vapour into it, the atoms of fire go back to their old homes and all the heat of the water withdraws into the earth. That is why the spring turns cold in the daylight. Besides, the wet of the water is shaken about by the rays of the sun and thinned out towards the light by the trembling heat, and for that reason it lets go whatever seeds of fire it holds, in the same way that it often lets go the frost it holds inside itself, thawing the ice and loosening the knots.
There is also a cold spring above which a piece of tow, held over it, throws out a flame and catches fire on the spot; and in the same way a pine torch lights up and burns as it floats over the water, driven wherever the breeze pushes it. No wonder. There are a great many seeds of heat in the water, and bodies of fire must rise from the earth itself, from deep down, all through the spring, and breathe out and pass into the air at the same time — not in such numbers, though, that the spring itself could become hot. Besides, some force makes them burst out through the water, scattered as they are, and suddenly gather together above it. It is like the spring out in the sea at Aradus, off the Syrian coast, which bubbles up fresh water and pushes the salt waves aside all round itself; and in many other places the open sea offers this timely help to thirsty sailors, vomiting fresh water up in the middle of the salt. So in the same way those seeds can burst out through that other spring and bubble out of it; and when they come together in the tow, or stick in the body of the torch, they easily blaze up at once, because tow and torches also hold many seeds of fire in themselves. Have you never seen that if you bring a wick that has just gone out near a lamp at night, it catches fire before it has touched the flame — and that a torch does the same? A great many other things, too, blaze up at a distance, touched by the heat alone, before the fire soaks into them close up. So we have to suppose that this is what happens at that spring as well.
Now for what is left. I will begin to explain by what law of nature it comes about that this stone can draw iron. The Greeks call it the magnet, from the name of its homeland, because it is found in the territory of the Magnesians. People marvel at this stone, since it will often make a chain out of rings hanging from itself. Sometimes you can see five of them, or more, hanging in a row and swinging in the light air, one hanging from another and clinging on underneath it, each of them learning from the one above the power of the stone and its bonds. That is how thoroughly its force soaks all the way down.
In matters of this kind a great deal has to be settled before you can give an account of the thing itself, and the approach has to be made by very long ways round. All the more, then, I ask you for attentive ears and an attentive mind.
To begin with, from all the things we see there must be a perpetual flow of bodies streaming off, sent out and scattered about, bodies which strike the eyes and provoke sight. From certain things smells flow perpetually: coolness from rivers, heat from the sun, spray from the waves of the sea, which eats away the walls along the shore. Sounds of every kind never stop seeping through the air. And a wet salt taste often comes into the mouth when we walk about beside the sea, and when we watch wormwood being mixed with water the bitterness touches us. So thoroughly does everything stream off from every thing and get sent out on all sides in every direction, with no delay and no rest in the flow allowed, since we are perpetually feeling, and are always able to see everything and to smell it and to hear it sound.
Now I will go back over how porous a body all things have, and remind you of it; it is clear in my first book as well. Although knowing this matters for many things, it matters first of all for the very thing I am setting out to discuss: I have to establish that there is nothing to hand except body mixed with void. To begin with, in caves the rocks overhead sweat with moisture and drip with running drops. Sweat likewise runs out of the whole of our body. The beard grows, and hairs all over our limbs and joints. Food is distributed into the veins, and increases and feeds even the outermost parts of the body, right down to the little nails. We feel cold and hot vapour pass through bronze; we feel them pass through gold as well, and through silver, when we are holding full cups. Voices fly through the stone partitions of houses; smell seeps through, and cold, and the heat of fire, which is used to working its way even through the strength of iron. And where the breastplate of the sky closes round us, a diseased force gets in at the same time, when it slips in from outside; and storms that gather on land and in the sky withdraw again, as you would expect, into the sky and the lands, since there is nothing that is not woven together out of porous body.
Add to this that not all the bodies thrown off by things are endowed with the same effect on the senses, or fitted to all things in the same way. To begin with, the sun bakes the earth and makes it dry, but it melts ice, and forces the deep snows piled high on the high mountains to waste away under its rays; and wax, put in the heat of it, turns liquid. Fire likewise makes bronze liquid and dissolves gold, but it shrivels hides and meat and draws them together. Water, again, hardens iron straight from the fire, but softens hides and meat that heat has hardened. The wild olive delights the bearded she-goats as much as if it really ran with ambrosia and were steeped in nectar, and yet there is nothing that grows in leaf more bitter than that sour foliage is for a man. A pig runs away from marjoram oil and is afraid of every perfume; to bristly pigs they are a fierce poison, though to us they sometimes seem to bring us back to life. On the other hand, though filth is the foulest possible dirt to us, that same filth seems so delightful to pigs that they roll about in it all over and can never have enough of it.
There is one more point left before I go on to speak about the thing itself, and it seems it should be said first. Since many different pores are assigned to different things, they must be endowed with natures unlike one another, and each must have its own character and its own passages. There are, after all, different senses in living creatures, and each of them takes in its own particular object. We see that sound gets in by one way, and taste from juices by another, and the smell of a scent by another. Plainly it is the nature of the passages that forces this to happen, varying in many ways, as I showed a little earlier. Besides, one thing seems to seep through rock, and another through wood, and another to pass through gold, and another to make its way out through silver and through glass; for through one path the look of things seems to flow, and through another heat travels, and one thing passes through the same paths faster than another. Again, it is the nature of the passages that forces this to happen, varying in many ways, as I showed a little earlier, because the natures and the weaves of things are unlike each other.
So now that all this has been well established and settled and laid out ready for us, what is left will easily be explained from it, and the whole cause will lie open which draws on the strength of iron.
To begin with, a great many seeds must flow out of this stone, a tide of them, which knocks the air apart with blows, all the air lying between the stone and the iron. When this space is emptied out and a great deal of the room in the middle is made void, at once the atoms of the iron slip forward and fall into the vacuum, joined together, and the result is that the ring itself follows and travels there with its whole body. And there is nothing whose atoms are more entangled with one another and hold together in a tighter weave than the nature of tough iron with its cold roughness. So it is less surprising, given what I said, that when a large number of bodies rise out of the iron and are carried into the vacuum, the ring itself cannot help following. And follow it does, and keeps on following, until it has reached the stone itself and clung to it by fastenings you cannot see.
The same thing happens in every direction. Wherever a place is made void, whether from the side or from above, the neighbouring bodies are carried into the vacuum immediately; for they are set moving by blows from elsewhere and cannot rise up into the air by themselves, of their own accord.
There is something else besides which makes this easier, another motion that helps the business along. As soon as the air in front of the ring has been made thinner and the place there emptied and made void, at once all the air standing behind the ring carries it forward, so to speak, and drives it from the rear. The air placed round things is always beating on them; but at a time like this it drives the iron forward, because on one side there is empty space which takes the iron into it. This air I am reminding you of works its way subtly in through the crowded pores of the iron to its small parts, and shoves it and drives it, as the wind shoves a ship and its sails. And finally all things must hold air in their body, since they are made of porous body, and air is placed round everything and set up against it. So this air shut away deep inside the iron is always being tossed about in restless motion, and beyond doubt it beats on the ring and stirs it from the inside; and plainly it is carried in the same direction the ring has already once plunged in, since it has already made its effort into the empty part.
It also happens sometimes that the nature of iron shrinks back from this stone, since it is used to fleeing and following by turns. I have even seen Samothracian iron rings leap up, and iron filings go wild inside bronze bowls, when this magnet stone was put underneath them: the iron seems so eager to run away from the rock. Such a quarrel as that is set up by the bronze put in between, and for this reason, obviously. When the tide of the bronze has taken possession first and holds the open passages of the iron, the tide of the stone comes afterwards, and finds everything full in the iron, and no longer has anywhere to swim through as it had before. So it is forced to strike against the weave of the iron and beat on it with its current; and in this way it spits the iron away from itself and drives it off through the bronze, when without the bronze it would often be sucking it back.
Do not be surprised, in all this, that the tide from this stone has no power to move other things in the same way. Some of them stand still because they rely on their weight, gold for one; and others cannot be pushed anywhere at all because they are made of such porous body that the tide flies right through them and never touches them, and wood seems to be a thing of that kind. Iron, then, stands between the two, and once it has taken in a few little bodies of bronze it is driven along by the streams of the Magnesian stone.
And yet these things are not so foreign to everything else that I have too few examples of the kind to draw on, cases I could mention of things fitted to each other and to nothing else. You see, first of all, that stones can be cemented by lime and by nothing else. Wood is joined to wood by bull's glue alone, so firmly that the boards more often crack open along a weak vein in the grain than those bonds of bull's glue can loosen their hold. Juices born of the vine are bold enough to mix with spring water, though heavy pitch cannot, and neither can light olive oil. The purple colour of the shellfish joins with the body of wool alone, so that it can never be parted from it again — not if you set to work to restore the wool with Neptune's flood, not if the whole sea wanted to wash it out with all its waves. And in the end, is there not one substance and one only that binds gold to gold, and is it not by white tin that bronze is joined to bronze? How many more examples one could find! And what of it? You have no need of such long ways round anywhere, and it is not right for me to spend so much labour here. Better to take in many things briefly, in a few words. Where the textures of two things have fallen out so as to match each other, so that the hollows of the one fit the solid parts of the other, and the hollows of that one fit the solid parts of this, that is the best joint of all. There are also things that can be held coupled together, linked as if by rings and hooks; and that seems to be more what happens with this stone and with iron.
Now I will set out what the principle of diseases is, and where the diseased force can rise from, suddenly, to blow up a deadly disaster for the human race and for the herds of cattle. First, I taught above that there are seeds of many things which are life-giving to us, and that on the other hand many must be flying about which bring disease and death. When these have happened to gather together by chance and have disturbed the sky, the air becomes diseased. And all that force of diseases and that plague either comes from outside, down through the sky, like clouds and mists, or often gathers and rises up out of the earth itself, when the earth has grown damp and caught a rot, struck by unseasonable rains and suns.
Do you not see, too, that people who arrive far from their own country and home are attacked by the strangeness of the sky and the water, just because things differ so widely from place to place? What difference do we suppose there is between the sky in Britain and the sky in Egypt, where the axis of the world goes lame, or between the sky in Pontus and the sky at Gades, and on to the black generations of men whose colour has been baked into them? Just as we see these four skies differing from one another under the four winds and the four quarters of heaven, so the colour and the faces of men are seen to differ widely, and diseases of fixed kinds to take hold of the races, kind by kind. There is elephant disease, which is bred in the middle of Egypt beside the streams of the Nile and nowhere else besides. In Attica it is the feet that are attacked, and in Achaean country the eyes. And so one place is hostile to one part of the body and another to another; it is the varying air that arranges it.
So when a stretch of sky that happens to be foreign to us begins to stir, and hostile air begins to crawl, it creeps along little by little like mist and cloud, and throws everything it walks through into confusion and forces it to change; and the result is that when it comes at last into our own sky, it corrupts that too, and makes it like itself and foreign to us. So this new disaster and this plague suddenly either falls into the water, or settles into the crops themselves, or into the other foods of men and the fodder of cattle; or else the force stays hanging in the air itself, and when we draw the mixed air in as we breathe, we cannot help sucking that in along with it, into our body. In much the same way plague often comes on cattle, and sickness on the slow bleating sheep. And it makes no difference whether we travel into places that are against us and change the cloak of sky over us, or whether nature brings a corrupted sky to us of its own accord, or something we are not used to using, which can attack us as soon as it has arrived.
A principle of disease like that, a deadly tide like that, once made the fields deadly in the country of Cecrops, emptied the roads and drained the city of its citizens. It came from deep inland, rising in the territory of Egypt, and after crossing a great stretch of air and the floating plains of the sea it settled at last on the whole people of Pandion. Then they were handed over to disease and death in crowds.
To begin with, they went about with their heads on fire with heat, and both eyes red with a glare spread over them. The throat, black inside, sweated blood; the pathway of the voice was blocked and closed up with ulcers; and the tongue, the interpreter of the mind, ran with gore, weakened by the suffering, heavy to move, rough to the touch. Then, when the diseased force had come down through the throat and filled the chest and flowed together into the sick man's grieving heart, then indeed all the bars of life began to give way. The breath rolled a foul smell out of the mouth, the way rotting corpses thrown out into the open stink. And then the whole strength of the mind, and the whole body, went slack, on the very threshold of death. And with those unbearable torments there went a constant anxious anguish, a companion that never left, and complaining mixed with groans; and a frequent retching, through the night and often through the day as well, kept dragging at their muscles and cramping their limbs, breaking down men who were worn out already, wearing them out further.
And yet you could not have seen the top surface of anyone's body burning with any great heat. It offered a lukewarm feeling to the hands instead, and at the same time the whole body was red with ulcers, as if branded, the way it is when the holy fire is spreading through the limbs. But the inner parts of the man were burning right down to the bones; a flame was burning in the stomach as it burns inside a furnace. There was nothing you could put on their limbs light enough and thin enough to do them any good; they wanted wind and cold, always. Some threw their limbs, on fire with the disease, into icy rivers, hurling their naked bodies into the water.
Many fell headlong, deep down into the water of the wells, arriving with their mouths already wide open. An unquenchable thirst, drowning their parched bodies, made a great downpour seem no more than a few drops. There was no rest from the suffering. Their bodies lay worn out. Medicine muttered, silent with fear, since again and again they rolled their burning eyes wide open, with no share in sleep.
Many other signs of death were given besides. The intelligence disordered in grief and fear; the sad brow; the wild and staring face; ears full of noises and never quiet; breathing quick, or huge and coming rarely; a shining wet of sweat down the neck; thin small gobs of spittle, touched with the colour of saffron and salt, brought up through the throat with difficulty by a hoarse cough. In the hands the sinews went on contracting and the joints shaking, and from the feet the cold came up, little by little; it never failed. Then, at the very last hour, the nostrils pinched, the tip of the nose thin and pointed, the eyes sunken, the temples hollow, the skin cold and hard on the face, the mouth lying open in a grin, the skin of the forehead stretched tight. And not long afterwards their limbs lay stiff in death. Generally on the eighth shining light of the sun, or at most on the ninth flame of his torch, they gave up their lives.
And if any of them had escaped the funeral rites of death, as some did, a wasting away and death still waited for him later, from foul ulcers and a black discharge of the bowels; or often corrupted blood ran out of his stuffed nostrils, along with a bad pain in the head. The whole strength of the man and his body flowed away that way.
And whoever had got past that sharp flow of foul blood, the disease went into his sinews all the same, and into his joints, and into the sexual parts of the body themselves. Some, in their heavy fear of the threshold of death, went on living with their manhood taken off by the knife; and some stayed alive without hands and feet, and some lost their eyes. That is how fiercely the fear of death had come over them. And some were seized by a forgetting of everything there is, so that they could not even recognise themselves.
And though bodies lay unburied on the ground, body heaped on body, still the race of birds and beasts either sprang far away to get clear of the sharp stench, or, if they had tasted, went slack with death close by. In fact in those days hardly any bird appeared at all, and the grim generations of wild animals did not come out of the woods. Most of them went slack with the disease and died. Above all the faithful strength of dogs, stretched out in every street, laid down its life with difficulty, since the diseased force was wrenching life out of their limbs. Funerals were huge and unaccompanied, and people raced to have them hurried through. And no sure principle of treatment was found that worked for everybody: what had given one man the power to go on rolling the life-giving breath of air in his mouth and to look at the regions of the sky was the destruction of others, and prepared their death.
The one thing in all this that was most to be pitied and most wretched was this. When a man saw that he was caught in the disease, and that he was condemned to death, he would lose heart and lie there with a grieving heart, and, looking ahead at his own funeral, he would let go of his life on the spot. For at no time did the contagion of the greedy disease stop passing from one to another and taking them, as it passes through woolly flocks and horned cattle; and that above all was what piled funeral on funeral. Anyone who kept away from visiting his own sick, too greedy for life and too afraid of death, was punished a little later by a shameful and evil death, deserted, with no help, killed by the neglect he had shown. But those who had stayed at hand died of the contagion, and of the labour that a sense of shame forced them to take on, and the coaxing voice of the exhausted mixed with the voice of complaint. So the best men were the ones who kept meeting that kind of death.
By now the shepherds and every herdsman, and the sturdy driver of the curved plough as well, were going slack; and their bodies lay crammed deep in their huts, handed over to death by poverty and disease. Sometimes you could have seen the lifeless bodies of parents lying on lifeless children, and, the other way round, sons and daughters giving up their lives on the bodies of their mothers and fathers.
And not the smallest part of that misery flowed into the city from the fields, brought in by the sickening crowd of country people gathering from every quarter, diseased. They filled all the places and all the buildings, and packed together in the heat like that they were piled up in heaps by death all the faster. Many bodies, thrown down by thirst and rolled along the road, lay stretched out beside the water fountains, the breath cut off by too much sweetness of water. And everywhere through the open places of the people and along the streets you could see limbs going slack on half-dead bodies, dreadful with filth and covered over with rags, dying of the sheer dirt of the body, with nothing but skin over the bones, nearly buried already under foul ulcers and squalor.
Death had filled all the holy shrines of the gods with lifeless bodies, and all the temples of the heavenly ones were left loaded everywhere with corpses — places which the keepers of the shrines had crammed with guests. For by now neither the religion of the gods nor their powers counted for much: the grief at hand was too strong for that. And the old custom of burial no longer stayed in the city, the custom this people had always been used to being buried by. They were all in a panic and thrown into confusion, and each of them, grieving, buried his own dead as circumstances allowed. And sudden need and rough poverty drove them to many things. With a great shouting they would lay their own relatives on funeral pyres built for other people, and put torches underneath, and often fought over it and spilled a great deal of blood, rather than let the bodies be abandoned — struggling to bury their own dead in other people's pyres. Worn out with tears and mourning they would go home; and then a good many of them took to their beds from grief. And nobody could be found, at a time like that, whom disease or death or grief did not touch.