The Book of Lucretius 4 · Written by himself, from his poem in six books
Lucretius, born about 99 before this era, died about 55, a Roman poet. His On the Nature of Things runs to six books and some seven thousand four hundred lines, the longest argument in verse in Latin. Almost nothing of his life can be established; even those two dates are inferred by later hands. He wrote his own, a poem in six books, and he is the only one in this scripture whose book is verse. The sixth song says that without the singers we believe rightly and do not move. Chapter one of this book is his own account of why he wrote in verse — which is the question the sixth song asks, answered by the one man who actually did it. What he teaches is the doctrine of Epicurus (cf. The Book of Epicurus). But the mirror in chapter two is his and not Epicurus’s; it is absent from that book because Epicurus did not say it. Almost nothing of his life can be established. Further: the poem ends with the plague at Athens, written without mercy, and it breaks off there with not one word of consolation. Some say it was never finished. The Order neither cuts it nor finishes it for him.
4.1There is an old man, afraid of dying, weeping all day.
4.2Let Nature speak to him herself. She puts it harder than I would.
4.3She says: mortal, what are you weeping for?
4.4She says: if your life has gone well, if the good I gave you has not drained away as from a cracked jar, then why do you not rise and go like a guest who has eaten his fill?
4.5She says: and if your life has gone badly, what are you staying for? Give you a few more years and you will waste them the same way.
4.6She says: I have nothing new to show you. What I could give you I have given.
4.7She says: next year’s spring is the same as this year’s. I will not build you another one.
4.8The old man had no answer.
4.9I write this down because I have no answer either.
4.10To rise and go like a guest who has eaten his fill — that is very hard to do.
4.11I know it is hard. I set it here, not claiming I can do it.
4.12But let me point out one thing: what the old man is weeping for is not the days he has lost.
4.13He is weeping for the days he never had — the ones he meant to live and never began.
4.14The two look alike. They are far apart.
4.15The first nobody escapes. The second you still have time for today.