De Rerum Natura
Lucretius
Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. William Ellery Leonard. E. P. Dutton. 1916.
- By now the shepherds and neatherds all,
- Yea, even the sturdy guiders of curved ploughs,
- Began to sicken, and their bodies would lie
- Huddled within back-corners of their huts,
- Delivered by squalor and disease to death.
- O often and often couldst thou then have seen
- On lifeless children lifeless parents prone,
- Or offspring on their fathers', mothers' corpse
- Yielding the life. And into the city poured
- O not in least part from the countryside
- That tribulation, which the peasantry
- Sick, sick, brought thither, thronging from every quarter,
- Plague-stricken mob. All places would they crowd,
- All buildings too; whereby the more would death
- Up-pile a-heap the folk so crammed in town.
- Ah, many a body thirst had dragged and rolled
- Along the highways there was lying strewn
- Besides Silenus-headed water-fountains,-
- The life-breath choked from that too dear desire
- Of pleasant waters. Ah, everywhere along
- The open places of the populace,
- And along the highways, O thou mightest see
- Of many a half-dead body the sagged limbs,
- Rough with squalor, wrapped around with rags,
- Perish from very nastiness, with naught
- But skin upon the bones, well-nigh already
- Buried- in ulcers vile and obscene filth.
- All holy temples, too, of deities
- Had Death becrammed with the carcasses;
- And stood each fane of the Celestial Ones
- Laden with stark cadavers everywhere-
- Places which warders of the shrines had crowded
- With many a guest. For now no longer men
- Did mightily esteem the old Divine,
- The worship of the gods: the woe at hand
- Did over-master. Nor in the city then
- Remained those rites of sepulture, with which
- That pious folk had evermore been wont
- To buried be. For it was wildered all
- In wild alarms, and each and every one
- With sullen sorrow would bury his own dead,
- As present shift allowed. And sudden stress
- And poverty to many an awful act
- Impelled; and with a monstrous screaming they
- Would, on the frames of alien funeral pyres,
- Place their own kin, and thrust the torch beneath
- Oft brawling with much bloodshed round about
- Rather than quit dead bodies loved in life.