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On the Nature of Things

Titus Lucretius Carus · c. 60–55 BCE (books composed over this period) primary

passage 136 of 143 · BOOK I > BOOK VI (19/26)

in brief
He explains that birdless fumes can dispel air near the ground, leaving birds unable to stay aloft; their weight forces them down into the near-empty space where they die.

dizziness, And then thereafter, when they're once down-fallen Into the poison's very fountains, then Life, too, they vomit out perforce, because So thick the stores of bane around them fume.

Again, at times it happens that this power, This exhalation of the Birdless places, Dispels the air betwixt the ground and birds, Leaving well-nigh a void. And thither when In horizontal flight the birds have come, Forthwith their buoyancy of pennons limps, All useless, and each effort of both wings Falls out in vain. Here, when without all power To buoy themselves and on their wings to lean, Lo, nature constrains them by their weight to slip Down to the earth, and lying prostrate there Along the well-nigh empty void, they spend Their souls through all the openings of their frame.


Further, the water of wells is colder then At summer time, because the earth by heat Is rarefied, and sends abroad in air Whatever seeds it peradventure have Of its own fiery exhalations. The more, then, the telluric ground is drained Of heat, the colder grows the water hid Within the earth. Further, when all the earth Is by the cold compressed, and thus contracts And, so to say, concretes, it happens, lo, That by contracting it expresses then Into the wells what heat it bears itself.

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topics: courage and cowardice · matter, motion, and cause · medicine, disease, and healing

On the Nature of Things · Titus Lucretius Carus · 60–55 BCE