De Rerum Natura

Lucretius

Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. William Ellery Leonard. E. P. Dutton. 1916.

  1. By now the shepherds and neatherds all,
  2. Yea, even the sturdy guiders of curved ploughs,
  3. Began to sicken, and their bodies would lie
  4. Huddled within back-corners of their huts,
  5. Delivered by squalor and disease to death.
  6. O often and often couldst thou then have seen
  7. On lifeless children lifeless parents prone,
  8. Or offspring on their fathers', mothers' corpse
  9. Yielding the life. And into the city poured
  10. O not in least part from the countryside
  11. That tribulation, which the peasantry
  12. Sick, sick, brought thither, thronging from every quarter,
  13. Plague-stricken mob. All places would they crowd,
  14. All buildings too; whereby the more would death
  15. Up-pile a-heap the folk so crammed in town.
  16. Ah, many a body thirst had dragged and rolled
  17. Along the highways there was lying strewn
  18. Besides Silenus-headed water-fountains,-
  19. The life-breath choked from that too dear desire
  20. Of pleasant waters. Ah, everywhere along
  21. The open places of the populace,
  22. And along the highways, O thou mightest see
  23. Of many a half-dead body the sagged limbs,
  24. Rough with squalor, wrapped around with rags,
  25. Perish from very nastiness, with naught
  26. But skin upon the bones, well-nigh already
  27. Buried- in ulcers vile and obscene filth.
  28. All holy temples, too, of deities
  29. Had Death becrammed with the carcasses;
  30. And stood each fane of the Celestial Ones
  31. Laden with stark cadavers everywhere-
  32. Places which warders of the shrines had crowded
  33. With many a guest. For now no longer men
  34. Did mightily esteem the old Divine,
  35. The worship of the gods: the woe at hand
  36. Did over-master. Nor in the city then
  37. Remained those rites of sepulture, with which
  38. That pious folk had evermore been wont
  39. To buried be. For it was wildered all
  40. In wild alarms, and each and every one
  41. With sullen sorrow would bury his own dead,
  42. As present shift allowed. And sudden stress
  43. And poverty to many an awful act
  44. Impelled; and with a monstrous screaming they
  45. Would, on the frames of alien funeral pyres,
  46. Place their own kin, and thrust the torch beneath
  47. Oft brawling with much bloodshed round about
  48. Rather than quit dead bodies loved in life.