Stvarjenje sveta in človeštva

Besedilo

Stvarjenje sveta in človeštva

My spirit moves me to tell of forms changed into new bodies. Gods, breathe life into my undertaking—for you have wrought these changes too—and from the world's first dawn draw out my unbroken song down to my own time. Before the sea and land and the sky that covers all, nature wore a single face throughout the universe, which men called Chaos: a crude, unordered mass, nothing but inert weight, with the conflicting seeds of ill-matched things all heaped together.

No Titan yet bestowed his light upon the world, nor did Phoebe, waxing, renew her crescent horns; the earth did not hang in the surrounding air, balanced by its own weight, nor had Amphitrite stretched her arms along the far-reaching shores of land. And though air, earth, sea, and ether were all there, the earth was unstable, the water unfit for swimming, the air without light. Nothing kept its own shape; each thing obstructed others, for within a single body cold fought with heat, moisture with dryness, soft things with hard, the weightless with things having weight.

A god, and nature grown more harmonious, resolved this strife. He parted earth from heaven and water from earth, and separated the clear heavens from the dense air. Once he had disentangled them and freed them from that blind heap, he set them in separate places, binding them in harmonious peace. The weightless, fiery force of the arching heavens leapt up and made its home upon the highest height; next came the air, nearest in lightness and in place.

The earth, denser than these, drew the heavy elements to itself and sank beneath its own weight; the encircling water took the outermost regions and enclosed the solid globe. When the god, whichever god he was, had thus divided the mass, ordered it, and shaped its separate parts, he first rounded the earth into a mighty sphere, so that it might be equal on every side.

Then he poured out the seas and commanded them to swell beneath the rushing winds and surround the shores of the encircled earth. He added springs, vast pools, and lakes, and enclosed descending rivers within winding banks. Some, in their various places, are swallowed by the earth itself; others reach the sea, and, welcomed into that expanse of freer water, beat against shores instead of banks.

He commanded plains to spread, valleys to sink, woods to be clothed in leaves, and rocky mountains to rise. And as two zones divide the heavens on the right and two on the left, with a fifth more fiercely burning between them, so the god's care divided the earth enclosed within into the same number, marking out as many regions on its surface. The middle region is uninhabitable from heat; deep snow covers two; and between these extremes he placed two more, giving them a temperate climate, blending heat with cold.

Above them hangs the air, as much heavier than fire as it is lighter than the weight of earth and water. There he commanded mists and clouds to gather, and thunder that would shake the hearts of men, and winds that bring lightning flashes and thunderbolts. Yet the world's maker did not allow these winds free possession of the air. Even now, though each directs its blasts through a separate region, they can scarcely be restrained from tearing the world apart, so great is the brothers' discord.

Eurus withdrew toward Aurora, to the Nabataean kingdoms, Persia, and the mountain ridges beneath the morning rays; the evening star and the shores warmed by the setting sun lie nearest Zephyrus; shuddering Boreas seized Scythia and the seven stars of the northern Bear; the land opposite is drenched by Auster with ceaseless clouds and rain. Above these he set the clear and weightless ether, free of every trace of earthly dross.

Scarcely had he thus confined all things within fixed bounds when the stars, long hidden, crushed beneath that mass, began to blaze throughout the heavens. And so that no region should lack its own living creatures, the stars and the forms of gods inhabit the heavenly realm; the waters became the home of gleaming fish; the earth received wild beasts, the restless air received birds.

Still lacking was a creature more sacred than these, more capable of lofty thought, and able to rule over all the rest. Man was born: either the maker of all things, the source of a better world, made him from divine seed, or the young earth, only lately parted from the lofty ether, still retained the seeds of its kindred heaven. The son of Iapetus mixed this earth with rainwater and shaped it in the image of the gods who govern all.

While other creatures bend their gaze toward the ground, he gave man an uplifted face and bade him look at heaven and raise his eyes upright toward the stars. Thus the earth, so recently crude and shapeless, was transformed and clothed in the unfamiliar forms of men.