Mother of Aeneas and his race, darling of men and gods, nurturing Venus,^a who beneath the smooth-moving heavenly signs fill with yourself the sea full laden with ships, the earth that bears the crops, since through you every kind of living thing is conceived and rising up looks on the light of the sun: from you, O goddess, from you the winds flee away, the clouds of heaven from you and your coming; for you the wonder-working earth puts forth sweet flowers, for you the wide stretches of ocean laugh, and heaven grown peaceful glows with outpoured light. For as soon as the vernal face of day is made manifest, and the breeze of the teeming west wind blows fresh and free, first the fowls of the air proclaim you, divine one, and your advent, pierced to the heart by your might. Next wild creatures and farm animals dance over the rich pastures and swim across rapid rivers: so greedily does each one follow you, held captive by your charm, whither you go on to lead them. Then throughout seas and mountains and sweeping torrents and the leafy dwellings of birds and verdant plains, striking alluring love into the breasts of all creatures, you cause them greedily to beget their generations after their kind.

Since therefore you alone govern the nature of things, since without you nothing comes forth into the shining borders of light, nothing joyous and lovely is made, you I crave as partner in writing the verses, which I essay to fashion on the Nature of Things,^a for my friend Memmius, whom you, goddess, have willed at all times to excel, endowed with all gifts. Therefore all the more grant to my speech, goddess, an ever-living charm.

Cause meanwhile the savage works of war to sleep and be still over every sea and land. For you alone can delight mortals with quiet peace, since Mars ^b mighty in battle rules the savage works of war, who often casts himself upon your lap wholly vanquished by the ever-living wound of love, and thus looking upward, with shapely neck thrown back, feeds his eager eyes with love, gaping upon you, goddess, and, as he lies back, his breath hangs upon your lips.^c There as he reclines, goddess, upon your sacred body, do you, bending around him from above, pour from your lips sweet coaxings, and for your Romans, illustrious one, crave quiet peace. For in this time of our country’s troubles neither can I do my part with untroubled mind, nor can the noble scion of the Memmii at such a season be wanting to the common weal.^a [I pray to you for peace,] for the very nature of divinity must necessarily enjoy immortal life in the deepest peace, far removed and separated from our affairs; for without any pain, without danger, itself mighty by its own resources, needing us not at all, it is neither propitiated with services nor touched by wrath.^b

For the rest,^c ears unpreoccupied and keen intelligenceI have to explain detached from cares you should apply to true philosophy, that my gifts, set forth for you with faithful solicitude, may not by you be contemptuously discarded before they have been apprehended. For I shall begin to discourse to you upon the most(1) heaven and the gods, (2) the elements of matter. high system of heaven and of the gods, and I shall disclose the first-beginnings of things,^d from which nature makes all things and increases and nourishes them, and into which the same nature again reduces them when dissolved—which, in discussing philosophy, we are accustomed to call matter, and bodies that generate things, and seeds of things, and to entitle the same first bodies, because from them as first elements all things are.

—— Lucretius De rerum natura 1.1-50, trans. W.D. Rouse and M.F. Smith; Loeb Classical Library on-line, access provided by Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. DOI: 10.4159/DLCL.lucretius-de_rerum_natura.1924

The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 - 1990's, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.