If the Romans thought it was perfectly adequate in the order they used then we can make sense of it too.
😂
For an extra treat, look up the etymology of the English word 'adequate'.
After reading the thread I spotted it at once. 
Also, if someone can post the Stallings translation I'd like to see how she handles it in long lines.
...The trouble is that I can't find a way to keep the tense and the meaning, and also make it sound good in English.
"[And] his victory lifts us to heaven"
The 1st person plural packs a much better punch. In glancing over the translations, Humphries is the "worst" of the lot in keeping to the original grammar, and yet his has the better economy of language–and to my ear is more elegantly phrased.
This is a link to Latin Per Diem, in the episode in which he parses this particular passage. He gives the following translation:
"(His) victory raises us to equality with heaven"
There's your 3rd person present active indicative, Don! "[His] victory raises us | victoria exaequat nos".
Don I wonder whether you've ever seen The Browning Version? I love the 1994 production with Albert Finney. The film is set in an English boarding school (I think?) and the background of the main plot deals heavily with translation, as the title implies.
And so Religion, which we feared before, by him subdued, we tread upon in turn. His conquest makes us equal to the Gods.
It's interesting that the Brown edition alone uses 'Gods' for 'caelo', instead of heaven, stars, sky, etc.
That's a highly daring translation of the most dangerous line in a hugely subversive poem. It's no great wonder the translator remained anonymous!
This would be sort of like the word "level" in English:
Noun; "a smooth, even surface"
Verb; "level the playing field"
Adjective; "a level, easy stroll"
That looks to be a separate but related word: aequor
Aequor would be a noun adapted by metonymy from the adjective aequus, no? And aequo the same word as a verb.
1. compare
2. equal
3. level, make even/straight
4. reach as high or deep as
Don Latin-Dictionary.net has these four variants under aequo. The poet in me rather likes number 4, for the 'reach' double-entendre I mentioned above.
Edit;
I had a long-suffering English professor in college who I think grew somewhat tired of my etymological leaps (reaches? 
); but even he was impressed when he put me on the spot in a close reading of Milton's Paradise Lost, and I was able to furnish a connection extemporaneously between "malice" and "apple" in the scene in the Garden of Eden.
Malus is the Latin word, and still the scientific name for the "malicious" fruit.
As I write this I can't remember if I had a source for that particular version or just mashed them together in a way that seemed logical at the time
I suspect it was this! When I searched for the exact wording of the quote the only two results are this thread and NewEpicurean.
Aequo = level, equal
And also "plane" or "plain". In the Hymn to Venus "Aequora Ponti" is usually translated "waves [i.e. surface] of the sea". In English another word for this would be "reach", as a noun. "Sailing over a broad reach", and so forth.
Perhaps "reach the stars" is not so far out of place?
Cassius , are you certain you have the translation right?
I just received a copy of the Humphries translation in the mail this week, and my version has it;
Religion, so, is trampled underfoot,
And by his victory we reach the stars.
I remember the audible version vividly enough to know it is the same there. And I would have remembered it anyway, as his is my favored translation of this passage!
I keep writing strictest sense, but I haven't actually defined my terms. I understand humanism (lowercase) in the strictest sense to be not a philosophy, but an orientation of interest or inquiry. Art can be humanist; it needn't have anything to do with philosophy at all. I vaguely remember studying the great cathedrals of Europe in college and learning that even the hidden tops of the roofs were ornamented. "God sees the top" being the motivation. The humanist motivation in modern construction might call instead for an HVAC system up there.
I haven't read all the material here, but I will say that I think Epicurean Philosophy is definitionally humanist in the very strictest sense. Similarly, I'm nominally registered in the selective service program under the United States Government.
But I haven't reflected much on that since I turned 18, and it has no influence whatever on the way I live my life. If I was introducing a bit about myself to someone, it would be fruitless and quite odd–not to say counterproductive–to open with that fact. It just has nothing to do with who I am.
Humanism in Epicurean Philosophy (again, in the strictest sense) might well be a trivial fact, but it's not a particularly helpful or informative one. It would be strange to dwell on it. It definitely wouldn't make it into the Epicurean précis or "elevator pitch".
It does have a certain poignancy.
I actually found this because of a poem I was workshopping; I was going to use the Sarno River that flows into the Bay of Naples as a metaphor for Epicurean philosophy. Starting out muddled under the ash of Vesuvius and then slowly, and by degrees, tending toward clarity and wholesomeness.
That was until I discovered that the Sarno is the most polluted waterway in Europe... 
XLIV. ON MOUNT VESUVIUS.
This is Vesuvius, lately green with umbrageous vines; here the noble grape had pressed the dripping coolers. These are the heights which Bacchus loved more than the hills of Nysa; on this mountain the satyrs recently danced. This was the abode of Venus, more grateful to her than Lacedaemon; this was the place renowned by the divinity of Hercules. All now lies buried in flames and sad ashes. Even the gods would have wished not to have had the power to cause such a catastrophe.
He was perilously close to stumbling upon a real point in that last sentence.
Welcome Philia! Took a detour through Buddhism myself, by way of the New England Transcendentalists (mostly Thoreau) and their obsession with Eastern quasi-profoundities.
When I could not reconcile the attitude of Western Zen or the claims of Secular Buddhism with the plain reading of the sutras, especially on the question of Rebirth, I began to realize I had tarried too long "East of Suez" (metaphorically speaking). I needed to find my way home. It was Lucretius who brought me back, and Stephen Greenblatt; but above all Lucretius.
Try this on for size;
***
There's use within
A cooper's barrel,
But beauty more
In oak and ash–
The poet's verse
Was fine and subtle—
Translated in
A leaking cask.
You're spot on Don, the last line gave me by far the greatest struggle.
My original wording was:
The poet's verse
Was fine and subtle—
The translator's,
A f***ing joke!
I then switched "ash and oak" and rhymed it 'trash'...
I'll keep 'tinkering', as you like to say
I still think the topic of the poem has merit, but I'm wondering if I need another structure...
Well, I can offer my...erm...tongue-in-cheek submission 😋
___________________________
Note; on the Translator
Good friend beware
this slack apparel;
It once wore well
But no more does;
The wine is old,
But not the bottle–
T'will serve, but is
Not what it was.
There's use within
A cooper's barrel,
But beauty more
In ash and oak–
The poet's verse
Was fine and subtle—
The translator's
Is rancid yolk!
One of my favorite poems in college was Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson, and there's a great line presumed to have been drawn from Lucretius;
Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
