M. MANILIUS

ASTRONOMICON

BOOK ONE

[v. 92] ...to consult the entrails and to break snakes with voices,
to solicit the shades and move the lowest Acheron the underworld
and to turn days into night, and nights into light.
95 By trying everything, teachable skill conquered.
Nor did it impose an end and measure upon things,
until reason ascended the sky and grasped the deep
nature of things and saw the causes of whatever is anywhere:
why clouds were shaken, struck with such a crash,
100 why winter snow was softer than summer hail,
why lands burned and the solid globe trembled,
why rains rushed down, what cause moved the winds,
it saw through and solved the miracles of things for minds,
and snatched the thunderbolt from Jove Jupiter and the powers from the thunderer,
105 and granted the sound to the winds, and the fire to the clouds.
Which, after it had led each thing down into its own causes,
it intended to know the neighboring mass of the world from on high
and to comprehend the whole sky with its mind;
and it attributed its own forms, its own names to the signs,
110 and noted what turns they would perform under a certain lot,
and that all things are moved according to the divinity and face of the world,
with the stars changing fates in varied order.
This work rises for me, not consecrated by any poems
before. May fortune favor this great labor,
115 and may a long life with soft old age reach me,
so that I may be able to emerge from such great masses of things
and run through the great with the small with similar care.
And since the poem descends from the high sky,
and the ordered lot of fates has come to the lands,
120 the very form of nature itself must first be sung by me,
and the whole world must be placed under its own image.
Which, whether one pleases to say it seeks seeds from nothing,
and also lacked a birth and always existed
and will exist, lacking beginning and fate alike;
125 or whether chaotic primordia of things once mixed