The translation of the opening epigraph—lines 146-149 of Book VI of Homer’s Iliad—is sourced from the Alexander Pope translation, available from Internet Archive:[2]
Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground:
Another race the following spring supplies,
They fall successive, and successive rise;
So generations in their course decay,
So flourish these, when those are past away.
— Iliad by Homer, trans. Alexander Pope [↩]
[1. https://books.google.com/books?id=osihAqjxClEC] [↩]
[2. https://archive.org/details/iliadofhomertran00homeuoft] [↩]