Читать книгу Yale Classics - Roman Classical Literature - Луций Анней Сенека - Страница 173

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'Twas such a manner of disease, 'twas such

Mortal miasma in Cecropian lands

Whilom reduced the plains to dead men's bones,

Unpeopled the highways, drained of citizens

The Athenian town. For coming from afar,

Rising in lands of Aegypt, traversing

Reaches of air and floating fields of foam,

At last on all Pandion's folk it swooped;

Whereat by troops unto disease and death

Were they o'er-given. At first, they'd bear about

A skull on fire with heat, and eyeballs twain

Red with suffusion of blank glare. Their throats,

Black on the inside, sweated oozy blood;

And the walled pathway of the voice of man

Was clogged with ulcers; and the very tongue,

The mind's interpreter, would trickle gore,

Weakened by torments, tardy, rough to touch.

Next when that Influence of bane had chocked,

Down through the throat, the breast, and streamed had

E'en into sullen heart of those sick folk,

Then, verily, all the fences of man's life

Began to topple. From the mouth the breath

Would roll a noisome stink, as stink to heaven

Rotting cadavers flung unburied out.

And, lo, thereafter, all the body's strength

And every power of mind would languish, now

In very doorway of destruction.

And anxious anguish and ululation (mixed

With many a groan) companioned alway

The intolerable torments. Night and day,

Recurrent spasms of vomiting would rack

Alway their thews and members, breaking down

With sheer exhaustion men already spent.

And yet on no one's body couldst thou mark

The skin with o'er-much heat to burn aglow,

But rather the body unto touch of hands

Would offer a warmish feeling, and thereby

Show red all over, with ulcers, so to say,

Inbranded, like the "sacred fires" o'erspread

Along the members. The inward parts of men,

In truth, would blaze unto the very bones;

A flame, like flame in furnaces, would blaze

Within the stomach. Nor couldst aught apply

Unto their members light enough and thin

For shift of aid—but coolness and a breeze

Ever and ever. Some would plunge those limbs

On fire with bane into the icy streams,

Hurling the body naked into the waves;

Many would headlong fling them deeply down

The water-pits, tumbling with eager mouth

Already agape. The insatiable thirst

That whelmed their parched bodies, lo, would make

A goodly shower seem like to scanty drops.

Respite of torment was there none. Their frames

Forspent lay prone. With silent lips of fear

Would Medicine mumble low, the while she saw

So many a time men roll their eyeballs round,

Staring wide-open, unvisited of sleep,

The heralds of old death. And in those months

Was given many another sign of death:

The intellect of mind by sorrow and dread

Deranged, the sad brow, the countenance

Fierce and delirious, the tormented ears

Beset with ringings, the breath quick and short

Or huge and intermittent, soaking sweat

A-glisten on neck, the spittle in fine gouts

Tainted with colour of crocus and so salt,

The cough scarce wheezing through the rattling throat.

Aye, and the sinews in the fingered hands

Were sure to contract, and sure the jointed frame

To shiver, and up from feet the cold to mount

Inch after inch: and toward the supreme hour

At last the pinched nostrils, nose's tip

A very point, eyes sunken, temples hollow,

Skin cold and hard, the shuddering grimace,

The pulled and puffy flesh above the brows!—

O not long after would their frames lie prone

In rigid death. And by about the eighth

Resplendent light of sun, or at the most

On the ninth flaming of his flambeau, they

Would render up the life. If any then

Had 'scaped the doom of that destruction, yet

Him there awaited in the after days

A wasting and a death from ulcers vile

And black discharges of the belly, or else

Through the clogged nostrils would there ooze along

Much fouled blood, oft with an aching head:

Hither would stream a man's whole strength and flesh.

And whoso had survived that virulent flow

Of the vile blood, yet into thews of him

And into his joints and very genitals

Would pass the old disease. And some there were,

Dreading the doorways of destruction

So much, lived on, deprived by the knife

Of the male member; not a few, though lopped

Of hands and feet, would yet persist in life,

And some there were who lost their eyeballs: O

So fierce a fear of death had fallen on them!

And some, besides, were by oblivion

Of all things seized, that even themselves they knew

No longer. And though corpse on corpse lay piled

Unburied on ground, the race of birds and beasts

Would or spring back, scurrying to escape

The virulent stench, or, if they'd tasted there,

Would languish in approaching death. But yet

Hardly at all during those many suns

Appeared a fowl, nor from the woods went forth

The sullen generations of wild beasts—

They languished with disease and died and died.

In chief, the faithful dogs, in all the streets

Outstretched, would yield their breath distressfully

For so that Influence of bane would twist

Life from their members. Nor was found one sure

And universal principle of cure:

For what to one had given the power to take

The vital winds of air into his mouth,

And to gaze upward at the vaults of sky,

The same to others was their death and doom.

In those affairs, O awfullest of all,

O pitiable most was this, was this:

Whoso once saw himself in that disease

Entangled, ay, as damned unto death,

Would lie in wanhope, with a sullen heart,

Would, in fore-vision of his funeral,

Give up the ghost, O then and there. For, lo,

At no time did they cease one from another

To catch contagion of the greedy plague,—

As though but woolly flocks and horned herds;

And this in chief would heap the dead on dead:

For who forbore to look to their own sick,

O these (too eager of life, of death afeard)

Would then, soon after, slaughtering Neglect

Visit with vengeance of evil death and base—

Themselves deserted and forlorn of help.

But who had stayed at hand would perish there

By that contagion and the toil which then

A sense of honour and the pleading voice

Of weary watchers, mixed with voice of wail

Of dying folk, forced them to undergo.

This kind of death each nobler soul would meet.

The funerals, uncompanioned, forsaken,

Like rivals contended to be hurried through.

And men contending to ensepulchre

Pile upon pile the throng of their own dead:

And weary with woe and weeping wandered home;

And then the most would take to bed from grief.

Nor could be found not one, whom nor disease

Nor death, nor woe had not in those dread times

Attacked.

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.