[The opening chapters are lost. There must have been an introduction of
the speakers, with some explanation as to time and place, a reference to
a set discussion at which some of the speakers had been present, and a
promise of Sylla to narrate a myth, bearing upon the moon and her
markings, which he had heard in Carthage. This conversation had taken a
turn, prematurely as SYLLA thinks, towards the mythical or supernatural
aspects of the moon.] But see note (1) on p. 309.
c. 1. It is agreed that the current scientific or quasi-scientific views
on the markings of the moon’s face shall be first considered, then the
supernatural.
cc. 2-4. LAMPRIAS mentions
(i) The view that the markings are due to weakness of human eyesight.
This is easily refuted.
(ii) The view of Clearchus, the Peripatetic, that they are caused by
reflexion of the ocean on the moon’s face. But ocean is continuous, the
markings are broken; they are seen from all parts of the earth,
including ocean itself (and the earth is not a mere point in space, but
has dimensions of its own); and, thirdly, they are not seen on any other
heavenly body.
c. 3. The mention of Clearchus brings up the view, adopted from him by
the Stoics, that the moon is not a solid or earth-like body, but is fire
or air, like the stars. This view had been severely handled in the
former conference.
c. 6. PHARNACES complains that the Academics always criticize, never
submit to be criticized. Let them first answer for their own paradox in
confusing ‘up’ and ‘down’, if they place a heavy body, such as the moon
is now said to be, above. LUCIUS retorts: ‘Why not the moon as well as
the earth, a larger body, yet poised in space?’ PHARNACES is
unconvinced.
cc. 7-15. To give Lucius time to remember his points, LAMPRIAS reviews
the absurd consequences from the Stoic tenet that all weights converge
towards the centre of our earth. Why should not every heavy body, not
earth only, attract its parts towards its own centre? Again, if the moon
is a light fiery body, how do we find her placed near the earth and
immeasurably far from the sun, planets, and stars? How can we assume
that earth is the middle point of the Whole, that is, of Infinity?
Lastly, allow that the Moon, if a heavy body, is out of her natural
place. Yet why not? She may have been removed by force from the place
naturally assigned to her to one which was better. Here the tone of the
speaker rises as he lays down, often following the thought and the words
of Plato’s _Timaeus_, the theory of creative ‘Necessity’ and ‘The
Better’.
c. 16. LUCIUS is now ready to speak, but ARISTOTLE intervenes with a
reference to the view, held by his namesake, that the stars are composed
of something essentially different from the four elements, and that
their motion is naturally circular, not up or down. LUCIUS points out
that it is degrading to the moon to call her a star, being inferior to
the stars in lustre and speed, and deriving her light from the sun. For
this, the view of Anaxagoras and of Empedocles, is the only one
consistent with her phases as we see them (not that quoted from
Posidonius the Stoic).
cc. 17, 18. To an inquiry from SYLLA whether the difficulty of the
half-moon (i. e. how does reflexion, being at equal angles, then carry
sunlight to the earth, and not off into space beyond us?) had been met,
Lucius answers that it had. The answer given was: (i) Reflexion at equal
angles is not a law universally admitted or true; (ii) there may be
cross lights and a complex illumination; (iii) it may be shown by a
diagram, though this could not be done at the time (such a diagram is
supplied by Kepler), that some rays would reach the earth; (iv) the
difficulty arises at other phases also. He repeats the argument drawn
from the phases as we see them; and ends with an analogy: Sunlight acts
on the moon as it does on the earth, not as on the air; therefore the
moon resembles earth rather than air.
c. 19. This is well received, and LUCIUS refers (a second analogy) to
solar eclipses, and in particular to a recent one, to show that the
moon, like the earth, can intercept the sun’s light, and is therefore,
like it, a solid body. The fact that the track of the shadow is narrow
in a solar eclipse is explained.
c. 20. LUCIUS continues his report, and describes in detail what happens
in a lunar eclipse. If the moon, he concludes, were fiery and luminous,
we should only see her at eclipse times, i. e. at intervals, normally of
six months, occasionally of five.
c. 21. PHARNACES and APOLLONIDES both rise to speak. APOLLONIDES raises
a verbal point about the word ‘shadow’; PHARNACES observes that the moon
does show a blurred and fiery appearance during an eclipse, to which
LAMPRIAS replies by enumerating the successive colours of the moon’s
face during eclipse, that proper to herself being dark and earth-like,
not fiery. He concludes that the moon is like our earth, with a surface
broken into heights and gullies, which are the cause of the markings.
c. 22. APOLLONIDES objects that there can be no clefts on the moon with
sides high enough to cast such shadows. LAMPRIAS replies that it is the
distance and position of the light which matter, not the size of objects
which break it;
c. 23. And goes on himself to supply a stronger objection—that we do not
see the sun’s image in the moon—and the answer. This is twofold: (_a_)
general, the two cases differ in all details; (_b_) personal to those
who, like himself, believe the moon to be an earth, and to have a rough
surface. Why should we see the sun mirrored in the moon, and not
terrestrial objects or stars?
c. 24. Sylla’s myth is now called for, and the company sits down to hear
it. But THEON interposes: Can the moon have inhabitants or support any
life, animal or vegetable? If not, how is she ‘an earth’, and what is
her use?
c. 25. Theon’s sally is taken in good part, and gravely answered at some
length by LAMPRIAS.
c. 26. The mention of life on the moon calls up SYLLA, who again feels
that he has been anticipated. He begins his myth, heard from a stranger
met in Carthage, who had himself made the northward voyage and returned.
Once in every thirty years (or year of the planet Saturn) an expedition
is sent out from Carthage to certain islands in the Northern Atlantic
where Cronus (Saturn) reigns in banishment. The stranger had charged
Sylla to pay special honour to the moon,
cc. 27-29. instructing him as to the functions of Persephone in bringing
about the second death—the separation of mind from soul—which takes
place on the moon, and the genesis of ‘daemons’,
c. 30. to whom are assigned certain functions on earth. SYLLA commends
the myth to his hearers.
OF THE FACE WHICH APPEARS
ON THE ORB OF THE MOON
I. Here Sylla said:[303] ‘All this belongs to my story, and comes
[Sidenote: 920 B] out of it. But I should like to ask in the first place
whether you really backed on to those views about the moon’s face which
are in every one’s hand and on every one’s lips.’ ‘Of course we did,’ I
answered, ‘it was just the difficulty which we found in these which
thrust us off upon the others. In chronic diseases, patients grow weary
of the common remedies and plans of treatment, and turn to rites and
charms and dreams. Just so in obscure and perplexing enquiries, when the
common, received, familiar accounts are not convincing, [Sidenote: C] we
cannot but try those which lie further afield; we must not despise them,
but simply repeat to ourselves the spells which the old people used, and
use all means to elicit the truth.
II. ‘To begin, you see the absurdity of calling the figure which appears
in the moon an affection of our eyesight, too weak to resist the
brightness, or, as we say, dazzled; and of not observing that this ought
rather to happen when we look at the sun, who meets us with his fierce
strong strokes. Empedocles has a pretty line giving the difference
between the two:
_The sun’s keen shafts, and moon with kindly beams._
Thus he describes the attractive, cheerful, painless quality of her
light. Further, the reason is given why men of dim and weak eyesight do
not see any distinct figure in the moon; [Sidenote: D] her orb shines
full and smooth to them, whereas strong-sighted persons get more
details, and distinguish the features impressed there with clearer sense
of contrast. Surely the reverse should happen if it were a weakness and
affection of the eye which produced the image; the weaker the organ the
clearer should be the appearance. The very irregularity of the surface
is sufficient to refute this theory; this image is not one of continuous
and confluent shadow, but is well sketched in the words of Agesianax:
[Sidenote: E]
_All round as fire she shines, but in her midst,
Bluer than cyanus, lo, a maiden’s eye,
Her tender brow, her face in counterpart._
For the shadowy parts really pass beneath the bright ones which they
encircle, and in turn press and are cut off by them; thus light and
shade are interwoven throughout, and the face-form [Sidenote: F] is
delineated to the life. The argument was thought to meet your Clearchus
also, Aristotle, no less unanswerably; for yours he is, and an intimate
of your namesake of old, although he perverted many doctrines of the
Path.’
III. Here Apollonides interposed to ask what the view of Clearchus was.
‘No man’, I said, ‘has less good right than you to ignorance of a
doctrine which starts from geometry, [Sidenote: 921] as from its native
hearth. Clearchus says that the face, as we call it, is made up of
images of the great ocean mirrored in the moon. For our sight[304] being
reflected back from many points, is able to touch objects which are not
in its direct line; and the full moon is of all mirrors the most
beautiful and the purest in uniformity and lustre. As then you geometers
think that the rainbow is seen in the cloud when it has acquired a moist
and smooth consistence, because our vision is reflected on to the
sun,[305] so Clearchus held that the outer ocean is seen [Sidenote: B]
in the moon, not where it really is, but in the place from which
reflexion carried our sight into contact with it and its dazzle.
Agesianax has another passage:
_Or ocean’s wave that foams right opposite,
Be mirrored like a sheet of fire and flame._’
IV. This pleased Apollonides. ‘What a fresh way of putting a view; that
was a bold man, and there was poetry in him. But how did the refutation
proceed on your side?’ ‘In this way’, I answered. ‘First, the outer
ocean is uniform, a sea with one continuous stream, whereas the
appearance of the dark places in the moon is not uniform; there are
isthmuses, so to call them, where the brightness parts and [Sidenote: C]
defines the shadow; each region is marked off and has its proper
boundary, and so the places where light and shade meet assume the
appearance of height and depth, and represent very naturally human eyes
and lips. Either, therefore, we must assume that there are more oceans
than one, parted by real isthmuses and mainlands, which is absurd and
untrue; or, if there is only one, it is impossible to believe that its
image could appear thus broken up. Now comes a question which it is
safer to ask in your presence than it is to state an answer. Given that
the habitable world is “equal in breadth and length”,[306] is it
possible that the view of the sea as a whole, thus reflected from the
moon, [Sidenote: D] should reach those sailing upon the great sea
itself, yes, or living on it as the Britons do, and this even if the
earth does, as you said that it does, occupy a point central to the
sphere in which the moon moves?[307] This’, I continued, ‘is a matter
for you to consider, but the reflexion of vision from the moon is a
further question which it is not for you to decide, nor yet for
Hipparchus. I know, my dear friend [that Hipparchus is a very great
astronomer], but many people do not accept his view on the physical
nature of vision, since it is probably a sympathetic [Sidenote: E]
blending and commixture, rather than a succession of strokes and recoils
such as Epicurus devised for his atoms. Nor will you find Clearchus
ready to assume with you that the moon is a weighty and solid body. Yet
“an ethereal and luminous star”, to use your words, ought to break and
divert the vision, so there is no question of reflexion. Lastly, if any
one requires us to do so, we will put the question, how is it that only
one face is seen, the sea mirrored on the moon, and none in any of all
[Sidenote: F] the other stars? Yet reason demands that our vision should
be thus affected in the case of all or of none. But now,’ I said,
turning to Lucius, ‘remind us which of our points was mentioned first.’
V. ‘No;’ said Lucius, ‘to avoid the appearance of merely insulting
Pharnaces, if we pass over the Stoic view without a word of greeting, do
give some answer to Clearchus, and his assumption that the moon is a
mere mixture of air and mild fire, that the air grows dark on its
surface, as a ripple courses over a calm sea, and so the appearance of a
face is produced.’
‘It is kind of you, Lucius,’ I said, ‘to clothe this absurdity in
sounding terms. That is not how our comrade dealt with it. He said the
truth, that it is a slap in the face to the moon when they fill her with
smuts and blacks, addressing her in one breath [Sidenote: 922] as
Artemis and Athena,[308] and in the very same describing a caked
compound of murky air and charcoal fire, with no kindling or light of
its own, a nondescript body smoking and charred like those thunderbolts
which poets[309] address as “lightless” and “sooty”. That a charcoal
fire, such as this school makes out the moon to be, has no stability or
consistence at all, unless [Sidenote: B] it find solid fuel at once to
support and to feed it, is a point not so clearly seen by some
philosophers as it is by those who tell us in jest that Hephaestus has
been called lame because fire progresses no better without wood than
lame people without a stick! If then the moon is fire, whence has it all
this air inside it? For this upper region, always in circular motion,
belongs not to air but to some nobler substance, which has the property
of refining and kindling all things. If air has been generated, how is
it that it has not been vaporized by the fire and passed away into some
other form, but is preserved near fire all this time, like a nail fitted
into the same place and wedged there for ever? If it is rare and
diffused, [Sidenote: C] it should not remain stable, but be displaced.
On the other hand, it cannot subsist in a solidified form, because it is
mingled with fire, and has neither moisture with it nor earth, the only
agents by which air can be compacted. Again, rapid motion fires the air
which is contained in stones, and even in cold lead, much more then that
which is in fire, when whirled round with such velocity. For they are
displeased with Empedocles, when he describes the moon as a mass of air
frozen like hail and enclosed within her globe of fire. Yet they
themselves hold that the moon is a globe of fire which encloses air
variously distributed, and this though they do not allow that she has
[Sidenote: D] clefts in herself, or depths and hollows (for which those
who make her an earth-like body find room), but clearly suppose that the
air lies upon her convex surface. That it should do so is absurd in
point of stability, and impossible in view of what we see at full moon;
for we ought not to be able to distinguish black parts and shadow then;
either all should be dull and shrouded, or all should shine out together
when the moon is caught by the sun. For look at our earth; the air which
lies in her depths and hollows, where no ray penetrates, remains in
shadow unilluminated; that which is outside, diffused over the earth,
has light and brilliant colouring, because from its rarity it easily
mingles, and takes up any quality or influence. [Sidenote: E] By light,
in particular, if merely touched, or, in your words, grazed, it is
changed all through and illumined. This is at once an excellent ally to
those who thrust the air into depths and gullies on the moon, and also
quite disposes of you, who strangely compound her globe of air and fire.
For it is impossible [Sidenote: F] that shadow should be left on her
surface when the sun touches with his light all that part of the moon
which is framed within our own field of vision.’
VI. Here Pharnaces, while I was still speaking, broke in: ‘Round it goes
again, the old scene-shifter of the Academy brought out against us; they
amuse themselves with arguing against other people, but in no case
submit to be examined on their own views, they treat their opponents as
apologists, not accusers. I can speak for myself at any rate; you are
not going to draw me on to-day to answer your charges against the
Stoics, unless we first get an account of your conduct in turning the
universe upside down.’ Lucius smiled: ‘Yes, my friend,’ he said, ‘only
do not threaten us with the writ of heresy, such as Cleanthes used to
think that the Greeks should have [Sidenote: 923] had served upon
Aristarchus of Samos, for shifting the hearth of the universe, because
that great man attempted “to save phenomena” with his hypothesis that
the heavens are stationary, while our earth moves round in an oblique
orbit, at the same time whirling about her own axis. We Academics have
no view of our own finding, but do tell me this—why are those, who
assume that the moon is an earth, turning things upside down, any more
than you, who fix the earth where she is, suspended in mid air, a body
considerably larger than the moon? [Sidenote: B] At least mathematicians
tell us so, calculating the magnitude of the obscuring body from what
takes place in eclipses, and from the passages of the moon through the
shadow. For the shadow of the earth is less as it extends, because the
illuminating body is greater, and its upper extremity is fine and
narrow, as even Homer,[310] they say, did not fail to notice. He called
night “pointed” because of the sharpness of the shadow. Such, at any
rate, is the body by which the moon is caught in her eclipses, and yet
she barely gets clear by a passage equal to three of her own diameters.
Just consider how many moons go to make an earth, if the earth cast a
shadow as broad, at its shortest, as three moons. Yet you have fears for
the moon lest she should tumble, while as for our earth, Aeschylus[311]
has perhaps satisfied you that Atlas [Sidenote: C]
_Stands, and the pillar which parts Heaven and Earth
His shoulders prop, no load for arms t’ embrace._
Then, you think that under the moon there runs light air, quite
inadequate to support a solid mass, while the earth, in Pindar’s[312]
words, is compassed “by pillars set on adamant”. And this is why
Pharnaces has no fear on his own account of the earth’s falling, but
pities those who lie under the orbit of the moon, Ethiopians, say, or
Taprobanes, on whom so great a weight might fall! Yet the moon has that
which helps her against falling, in her very speed and the swing of her
passage round, as objects placed in slings are hindered from falling by
the [Sidenote: D] whirl of the rotation. For everything is borne on in
its own natural direction unless this is changed by some other force.
Therefore the moon is not drawn down by her weight, since that tendency
is counteracted by her circular movement. Perhaps it would be more
reasonable to wonder if she were entirely at rest as the earth is, and
unmoved. As things are, the moon has a powerful cause to prevent her
from being borne down upon us; but the earth, being destitute of any
other movement, might naturally be moved[313] by its own weight; being
heavier than the moon not merely in proportion to its greater bulk,
[Sidenote: E] but because the moon has been rendered lighter by heat and
conflagration. It would actually seem that the moon, if she is a fire,
is in need of earth, a solid substance whereon she moves and to which
she clings, so feeding and keeping up the force of her flame. For it is
impossible to conceive fire as maintained without fuel. But you Stoics
say that our earth stands firm without foundation or root.’ ‘Of course,’
said Pharnaces, ‘it keeps its proper and natural place, namely the
essential middle point, that place around which all weights press and
[Sidenote: F] bear, converging towards it from all sides. But all the
upper region, even if it receive any earth-like body thrown up with
force, immediately thrusts it out hitherward, or rather lets it go, to
be borne down by its own momentum.’
VII. At this point, wishing Lucius to have time to refresh his memory, I
called on Theon: ‘Theon, which of the tragic poets has said that
physicians
_Purge bitter bile with bitter remedies?_’
Theon answered that it was Sophocles.[314] ‘And physicians must be
allowed to do so,’ I said, ‘we cannot help it. But philosophers must not
be listened to, if they choose to meet paradoxes with paradoxes, and,
when contending against strange views, to invent views which are more
strange and wonderful still. [Sidenote: 924] Here are these Stoics with
their “tendency towards the middle”! Is there any paradox which is not
implicit there? That our earth, with all those depths and heights and
inequalities, is a Sphere? That there are people at our antipodes who
live like timber-worms or lizards, their lower limbs turned upper-most
as they plant them on earth? That we ourselves do not keep perpendicular
as we move, but remain on the slant, swerving like drunkards? That
masses of a thousand talents’ weight, borne through the depth of the
earth, stop when they reach the middle point, though nothing meets or
resists them; or, if mere momentum carry them down beyond the middle
point, they wheel round and turn back of themselves? That [Sidenote: B]
segments of beams[315] sawn off at the surface of the earth on either
side, do not move downwards all the way, but as they fall upon the
surface receive equal thrusts from the outside inwards and are jammed
around the middle? That water rushing violently downwards, if it should
reach this middle point—an incorporeal point as they say—would stand
balanced around it for a pivot, swinging with an oscillation which never
stops and never can be stopped? Some of these a man could not force
himself [Sidenote: C] to present to his intellect as possible, even if
untrue! This is to make
_Up down, down up, where Topsy-Turvy reigns_,[316]
all from us to the centre down, and all below the centre becoming up in
its turn! So that if a man, by the “sympathy” of earth, were to stand
with the central point of his own body touching the centre, he would
have his head up and his feet up too! And if he were to dig into the
space beyond, the down part of his body would bend upwards, and the soil
would be dug out from above to below; and if another man could be
conceived meeting him, the feet of both would be said to be up, and
would really become so!
VIII. ‘Such are the monstrous paradoxes which they shoulder and trail
along, no mere wallet, Heaven help us! but [Sidenote: D] a conjurer’s
stock-in-trade and show-booth; and then they call other men triflers,
because they place the moon, being an earth, up above, and not where the
middle point is. And yet if every weighty body converges to the same
point with all its parts, the earth will claim the heavy objects, not so
much because she is middle of the whole, as because they are parts of
herself; and the inclination of falling bodies will testify, [Sidenote:
E] not to any property of earth[317], as middle of the universe, but
rather to a community and fellowship between earth and her own parts,
once ejected, now borne back to her. For as the sun draws into himself
the parts of which he has been composed, so earth receives the stone as
belonging to her, and drawn down towards herself; and thus each of such
objects becomes united with her in time and grows into herself. If there
is any body neither assigned originally to the earth, nor torn away from
it, [Sidenote: F] but having somehow a substance and nature of its own,
such as they would describe the moon to be, what is there to prevent its
existing separately, self-centred, pressed together and compacted by its
own parts? For it is not proved that earth is the middle of the
universe, and, further, the way in which bodies here are collected and
drawn together towards the earth suggests the manner in which bodies
which have fallen together on to the moon may reasonably be supposed to
keep their place with reference to her. Why the man who forces all
earth-like and heavy objects into one place, and makes them parts of one
body, does not apply the same law of coercion to light bodies, I cannot
see, instead of allowing all those fiery structures to exist apart; nor
why he does not collect all the stars into the same place, and hold
distinctly that there must be a body common to all upward-borne and
fiery units.
[Sidenote: 925] IX. ‘But you and your friends, dear Apollonides, say
that the sun is countless millions of stades distant from the highest
circle, and that Phosphor next to him, and Stilbon, and the other
planets, move in a region below the fixed stars and at great intervals
from one another; and yet you think that the universe provides within
itself no interval in space for heavy and earth-like bodies. You see
that it is ridiculous to call the moon no earth because she stands apart
from the region below, and then to call her a star while we see her
thrust so many [Sidenote: B] myriads of stades away from the upper
circle as though sunk into an abyss. She is lower than the stars by a
distance which we cannot state in words, since numbers fail you
mathematicians when you try to reckon it, but she touches the earth in a
sense and revolves close to it,
_Like to the nave of a wagon, she glances_,
says Empedocles,[318]
_which near the mid axle...._
For she often fails to clear even the shadow of earth, rising but
little,[319] because the illuminating body is so vast. But so nearly
does she seem to graze the earth and to be almost in its embrace as she
circles round, that she is shut off from the sun by it unless [Sidenote:
C] she rises enough to clear that shaded, terrestrial region, dark as
night, which is the appanage of earth. Therefore I think we may say with
confidence that the moon is within the precincts of earth when we see
her blocked by earth’s extremities.
X. ‘Now leave the other fixed stars and planets, and consider the
conclusion proved by Aristarchus in his _Magnitudes and Distances_;[320]
that the distance of the sun is to the distance of the moon from us in a
ratio greater than eighteen to one, [Sidenote: D] less than twenty to
one. Yet the highest estimate of the distance of the moon from us makes
it fifty-six times the earth’s radius, and that is, even on a moderate
measurement, forty thousand stades. Upon this basis, the distance of the
sun from the moon works out to more than forty million three hundred
thousand stades. So far has she been settled from the sun because of her
weight, and so nearly has she approached the earth, that, if we are to
distribute estates according to localities, the “portion and inheritance
of the earth” invites the moon to join her, and the moon has a next
claim to chattels and persons [Sidenote: E] on earth, in right of
kinship and vicinity. And I think that we are not doing wrong in this,
that while we assign so great and profound an interval to what we call
the upper bodies, we also leave to bodies below as much room for
circulation as the breadth from earth to moon. For he who confines the
word “upper” to the extreme circumference of heaven, and calls all the
rest “lower”, goes too far, and on the other hand he who circumscribes
“below” to earth, or rather to her centre, is preposterous. On this side
and on that the necessary interval must be granted,[321] since the
vastness of the universe permits. Against the claim that everything
after we leave the earth is “up” and poised on high, sounds the
counterclaim that everything [Sidenote: F] after we leave the circle of
the fixed stars is “down”!
XI. ‘Look at the question broadly. In what sense is the earth “middle”,
and middle of what? For the Whole is infinite; now the Infinite has
neither beginning nor limit, so it ought not to have a middle; for a
middle is in a sense itself a limit, but infinity is a negation of
limits. It is amusing to hear a man labour to prove that the earth is
the middle of the universe, not of the Whole, forgetting that the
universe itself lies under the same difficulties; for the Whole, in its
[Sidenote: 926] turn, left no middle for the universe. “Hearthless and
homeless”[322] it is borne over an infinite void towards nothing which
it can call its own; or, if it find some other cause for remaining, it
stands still, not because of the nature of the place. Much the same can
be conjectured about the earth and the moon; if one stands here unshaken
while the other moves, it is in virtue of a difference of soul rather
than of place and of nature. Apart from all this, has not one important
point escaped them? If anything, however great, which is outside the
centre of the earth is “up”, then no part of the universe is “down”.
Earth is “up”, and so are the things on the earth, absolutely [Sidenote:
B] every body lying or standing about the earth becomes “up”; one thing
alone is “down”, that incorporeal point which has of necessity to resist
the pressure of the whole universe, if “down” is naturally opposed to
“up”. Nor is this absurdity the only one. Weights lose the cause of
their downward tendency and motion here, since there is no body below
towards which they move. That the incorporeal should have so great a
force as to direct all things towards itself, or hold them together
about itself, is not probable, nor do they mean this. No! it is found on
all grounds[323] to be irrational, and against the facts, that “up”
should be the whole universe, and “down” nothing but an incorporeal and
indivisible limit. The other view is reasonable, which we state thus,
that a large space, possessing breadth, is apportioned both to “the
above” and to “the below”.
XII. ‘However, let us assume, if you choose, that it is [Sidenote: C]
contrary to nature that earth-like bodies should have their motions in
heaven; and now let us look quietly, with no heroics, at the inference,
which is this, not that the moon is not an earth, but that she is an
earth not in its natural place. So the fire of Aetna is fire
underground, which is contrary to nature, yet is fire; and air enclosed
in bladders is light and volatile by nature, but has come perforce into
a place unnatural to it. And the soul, the soul itself,’ I went on, ‘has
it not been imprisoned in the body contrary to nature, a swift, and, as
you hold, a fiery soul in a slow, cold body, the invisible within the
sensible? Are we therefore to say that soul in body is nothing, and not
rather that Reason, that divine thing, has been made subject to weight
and density, that one which ranges all heaven [Sidenote: D] and earth
and sea in a moment’s flight has passed into flesh and sinews, marrow
and humours, wherein is the origin of countless passions?[324] Your Lord
Zeus, is he not, so long as he preserves his own nature, one great
continuous fire? Yet we see him brought down, and bent, and fashioned,
assuming, and ready to assume, any and every complexion of change. Look
well to it, my friend, whether when you shift all things [Sidenote: E]
about, and remove each to its “natural” place, you are not devising a
system to dissolve the universe and introducing Empedoclean strife, or
rather stirring up the old Titans against Nature, in your eagerness to
see once more the dreadful disorder and dissonance of the myth? All that
is heavy in a place by itself, and all that is light in another,
_Where neither sun’s bright face is separate seen,
Nor earth’s rough brood, nor ocean any more_,
[Sidenote: F] as Empedocles says! Earth had nothing to do with heat,
water with wind; nothing heavy was found above, nothing light below;
without commixture, without affection were the principles of all things,
mere units, each desiring no intercourse with each or partnership,
performing their separate scornful motions in mutual flight and
aversion, a state of things which must always be, as Plato[325] teaches,
where God is absent, the state of bodies deserted by intelligence and
soul. So it was until the day when Providence brought Desire into
Nature, and [Sidenote: 927] Friendship was engendered there, and
Aphrodite, and Eros, as Empedocles tells us and Parmenides too and
Hesiod,[326] so that things might change their places, and receive
faculties from one another in turn, and, from being bound under stress,
and forced, some to be in motion some to rest, might all begin to give
in to the Better, instead of the Natural, and shift their places and so
produce harmony and communion of the Whole.
XIII. ‘For if it be true that no other part of the universe departed
from Nature, but that each rests in its natural place, not needing any
transposition or rearrangement, and never from the first having needed
any, I am at a loss to know what there is for Providence to do, or of
what Zeus, “in art most excellent”,[327] is the maker and the
artist-father. There would [Sidenote: B] be no need of tactics in an
army if each soldier knew of himself how to take and keep place and post
at the proper time; nor of gardeners or builders if the water of its own
nature is to flow over the parts which need it, and moisten them, or if
bricks and beams should of themselves adopt the movements and
inclinations which are natural, and arrange themselves in their fitting
places. If such a theory strike out Providence [Sidenote: C] altogether,
and if it be God’s own attribute to order and discriminate things, what
marvel is it that Nature has been so disposed and partitioned that fire
is here and stars there, and again that earth is planted where it is and
the moon above, each held by a firmer bond than that of Nature, the bond
of Reason? Since, if all things are to observe natural tendencies, and
to move each according to its nature, let the sun no longer go round in
a circle, nor Phosphorus, nor any of the other stars, because it is the
nature of light and fiery bodies to move upwards, not in a circle! But
if Nature admits of such local variation as that fire, here seen to
ascend, yet when it reaches heaven, joins in the general rotation, what
marvel if heavy [Sidenote: D] and earthlike bodies too, when placed
there, assume another kind of motion, mastered by the circumambient
element? For it is not according to Nature that light things lose their
upward tendency in heaven, and yet heaven cannot prevail over those
which are heavy and incline downwards. No, heaven at some time had power
to rearrange both these and those, and turned the nature of each to what
was better.
XIV. ‘However, if we are at last to have done with notions enslaved to
usage,[328] and to state fearlessly what appears to be true, it is
probable that no part of a whole has any order, or position, or movement
of its own which can be described in absolute terms as natural. But when
each body places itself at the disposal of that on account of which it
has come into being, [Sidenote: E] and in relation to which it naturally
exists or has been created, to move as is useful and convenient to it,
actively and passively and in all its own states conforming to the
conservation, beauty, or power of that other, then, I hold, its place,
movements and disposition are according to Nature. In man certainly, who
has, if anything has, come into being according to Nature, [Sidenote: F]
the heavy and earth-like parts are found above, mostly about the head,
the hot and fiery in the middle regions; of the teeth one set grows from
above, the other from below, yet neither contrary to Nature; nor can it
be said of the fire in him that when it is above and flashes in his eyes
it is natural, but when it is in stomach or heart, unnatural; each has
been arranged as is proper and convenient.
_Mark well the tortoise and the trumpet-shell_,
says Empedocles, and, we may add, the nature of every shell-fish, and
_Earth uppermost, flesh under thou shalt see._
Yet the stony substance does not squeeze or crush the growth[329]
[Sidenote: 928] within, nor again does the heat fly off and be lost
because of its lightness; they are mingled and co-ordinated according to
the nature of each.
XV. ‘And so it is probably with the universe, if it be indeed a living
structure; in many places it contains earth, in many others fire, water,
and wind, which are not forced out under stress, but arranged on a
rational system. Take the eye; it is not where it is in the body owing
to pressure acting on its light substance, nor has the heart fallen or
slipped down [Sidenote: B] into the region of the chest because of its
weight; each is arranged where it is because it was better so. Let us
not then suppose that it is otherwise with the parts of the universe;
that earth lies here where it has fallen of its own weight, that the
sun, as Metrodorus of Chios used to think, has been pressed out into the
upper region because of his lightness, like a bladder, or that the other
stars have reached the places which they now hold as if they had been
weighed in a balance and kicked the beam. No, the rational principle
prevailed; and some, like eyes to give light, are inserted into the face
of the Whole and revolve; the sun acts as a heart, and sheds and
distributes out of himself heat and light, as it were blood and breath.
[Sidenote: C] Earth and sea are to the universe, according to Nature,
what stomach and bladder are to the animal. The moon, lying between sun
and earth, as the liver or some other soft organ between heart and
stomach, distributes here the gentle warmth from above, while she
returns to us, digested, purified, and refined in her own sphere, the
exhalations of earth. Whether her earth-like solid substance contributes
to any other useful purposes, we cannot say. We do know that universally
the Better prevails over the law of Stress. How can the view of the
Stoics lead us to any probable result? That view is, that the luminous
and subtle part of the atmosphere has by its rarity formed the
[Sidenote: D] sky, the dense and consolidated part stars, and that, of
the stars, the moon is the dullest and the grossest. However, we may see
with our eyes that the moon is not entirely separated from the
atmosphere, but moves within a great belt of it, having beneath itself a
wind-swept region, where bodies are whirled, and amongst them comets.
Thus these bodies have not been placed in the scales according to the
weight or lightness of each, but have been arranged upon a different
system.’
XVI. This said, as I was passing the turn to Lucius, the [Sidenote: E]
argument now reaching the stage of demonstration, Aristotle said with a
smile: ‘I protest that you have addressed your whole reply to those who
assume that the moon herself is half fire, and who say of all bodies in
common that they have an inclination of their own, some an upward one,
some a downward. If there is a single person who holds that the stars
move in a circle according to Nature, and are of a substance widely
[Sidenote: F] different from the four elements, it has not occurred to
our memory, even by accident; so that I am out of the discussion, and
you also, Lucius.’ ‘No, no, good friend’, said Lucius. ‘As to the other
stars, and the heaven in general, when your school asserts that they
have a nature which is pure and transparent, and removed from all
changes caused by passion, and when they introduce a circle of
eternal[330] and never-ending revolution, perhaps no one would
contradict you, at least for the present, although there are countless
difficulties. But when the theory comes down and touches the moon, it no
longer retains in her case the “freedom from passion” and the beauty of
form of that body. Leaving out of account her other irregularities and
points of difference, this very face which appears upon her has come
there either from some passion proper to herself or by admixture of some
other substance. [Sidenote: 929] Indeed, mixture implies some passion,
since there is a loss of its own purity when a body is forcibly filled
with what is inferior to itself. Consider her own torpor and dullness of
speed, and her heat, so faint and ineffectual, wherein, as Ion[331]
says—
_The black grape ripens not_;
to what are we to assign this, but to weakness in herself and passion,
if passion can have place in an eternal and Olympian body? It comes to
this, dear Aristotle; look on her as earth, and she appears a very
beautiful object, venerable and highly adorned; but as star, or light,
or any divine or heavenly body, I fear she may be found wanting in
shapeliness and grace, and do no credit to her beautiful name, if out of
all the multitude in heaven she alone goes round begging light of
others, as Parmenides says, [Sidenote: B]
_For ever peering toward the sun’s bright rays._
Now when our comrade, in his dissertation, was expounding the
proposition of Anaxagoras, that “the sun places the brightness in the
moon”, he was highly applauded. But I am not going to speak of things
which I learned from you or with you, I will gladly pass on to the
remaining points. It is then probable that the moon is illuminated not
as glass or crystal by the sunlight shining in and through her, nor yet
by way of accumulation of light and rays, as torches when they multiply
their light. For then we should have full moon at the beginning of the
month just as much as at the middle, if she does not conceal or block
the sun, but allows him[332] to pass through [Sidenote: C] because of
her rarity, or if he, by way of commixture, shines upon the light around
her and helps to kindle it with his own. For it is not possible to
allege any bending or swerving aside on her part at the time of her
conjunction, as we can when she is at the half, or is gibbous or
crescent. Being then “plumb opposite”, as Democritus puts it, to her
illuminant, she receives and admits the sun, so that we should expect to
see her shining herself and also allowing him to shine through her. Now
she is very far from doing this; she is herself invisible at those
times, and she often hides him out of our sight.
_So from above for men_,
as Empedocles says, [Sidenote: D]
_She quenched his beams, shrouding a slice of earth
Wide as the compass of the glancing moon_;
as though his light had fallen, not upon another star, but upon night
and darkness.
‘The view of Posidonius, that it is because of the depth of the moon’s
body that the light of the sun is not passed through to us, is wrong on
the face of it. For the air, which is unlimited, and has a depth many
times that of the moon, is filled throughout with sunlight and
brightness. There is left then that of Empedocles, that the illumination
which we get from the moon [Sidenote: E] arises in some way from the
reflexion of the sun as he falls upon her. Hence her light reaches us
without heat or lustre, whereas we should expect both if there were a
kindling by him or a commixture of lights. But as voices return an echo
weaker than the original sound, and missiles which glance off strike
with weaker impact,
_E’en so the ray which smote the moon’s white orb_
reaches us in a feeble and exhausted stream, because the force is
dispersed in the reflexion.’
XVII. Here Sylla broke in: ‘All these things no doubt [Sidenote: F] have
their probabilities; but the strongest point on the other side was
either explained away or it escaped our comrade’s attention; which was
it?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Lucius. ‘The problem of the half-moon, I
suppose?’
‘Precisely,’ said Sylla, ‘for as all reflexion takes place at equal
angles, there is some reason in saying that when the moon is in
mid-heaven at half-moon, the light is not carried from her on to the
earth, but glances off beyond it; for the sun, being [Sidenote: 930] on
the horizon, touches the moon with his rays, which will therefore, being
reflected at equal angles, fall on the further side and beyond us, and
will not send the light here; or else there will be a great distortion
and variation in the angle, which is impossible.’
‘I assure you’, said Lucius, ‘that point was mentioned also;’ and here
he glanced at Menelaus the mathematician, as he went on: ‘I am ashamed,
dear Menelaus,’ he said, ‘in your presence to upset a mathematical
assumption which is laid down as fundamental in all the Optics of
Mirrors. But I feel obliged to say’, he continued, ‘that the law which
requires reflexion in all cases to be at equal angles is neither
self-evident [Sidenote: B] nor admitted. It is impugned in the instance
of convex mirrors, when magnified images are reflected to the one point
of sight. It is impugned also in that of double mirrors, when they are
inclined towards one another so that there is an angle between them, and
each surface returns a double image from one face, four images in all,
two on the right, two on the left, two from the outer parts of the
surfaces, two dimmer ones deep within the mirrors.[333] Plato[334] gives
the cause why this takes place. He has told [Sidenote: C] us that if the
mirrors be raised on either side, there is a gradual shifting of the
visual reflexion as it passes from one side to the other. If then some
images proceed directly to us, while others glance to the opposite side
of the mirrors, and are returned thence to us, it is impossible that
reflexion in all cases takes place at equal angles. They observe[335]
that these images meet in one point, and further claim that the law of
equal angles is disproved by the streams of light which actually proceed
from the moon to the earth, holding the fact to be [Sidenote: D] far
more convincing than the law. However, if we are so far to indulge the
beloved geometry as to make her a present of this law, in the first
place it may be expected to hold of mirrors which have been made
accurately smooth. But the moon has many irregularities and rough parts,
so that the rays proceeding from a large body, when they fall on
considerable eminences, are exposed to counter-illuminations and
reciprocal dispersion; the cross-light is reflected, involved, and
accumulated as though it reached us from a number of mirrors. In the
next place, even if we allow that the reflexions are produced at equal
[Sidenote: E] angles upon the actual surface of the moon, yet, when the
distance is so great, it is not impossible that the rays may be broken
in their passage, or glance around, so that the light reaches us in one
composite stream. Some go further, and show by a figure that many lights
discharge their rays along a line inclined to the hypothenuse; but it
was not possible to construct the diagram while speaking, especially
before a large audience.[336]
XVIII. ‘Upon the whole question,’ he went on, ‘I am at a loss to see how
they bring up the half-moon against us; the point fails equally upon her
gibbous and crescent phases. For if the moon were a mass of air or fire
which the sun illuminated, [Sidenote: F] he would not have left half her
sphere always in shadow and darkness as seen by us; but even if he
touched her in his circuit only in a small point, the proper consequence
would follow, she would be affected all through, and her entire
substance changed by the light penetrating everywhere with ease. When
wine touches water on its extreme surface, or a drop of blood falls into
liquid, the whole is discoloured at once, and turned to crimson. But the
air itself, we are told, is not filled with sunshine by emanations or
beams actually mingling with it, but by a change and alteration caused
by something like a prick or touch. Now, how can they suppose that when
star touches star or light light, it does not mingle with or alter the
substance throughout, but only illuminates [Sidenote: 931] those points
which it touches superficially? The circular orbit of the sun as he
passes about the moon, which sometimes coincides with the line dividing
her visible and invisible parts, and at other times rises to right
angles with that line so as to cut those parts in two, and in turn be
cut by her, produces her gibbous and crescent phases by the varying
inclination and position of the bright part relatively to that in
shadow. This proves beyond all question that the illumination is contact
not commixture, not accumulation of light but its circumfusion. But the
fact that she is not only illuminated herself but also sends [Sidenote:
B] on the image of her brightness to us, allows us to insist the more
confidently on our theory of her substance. For reflexions do not take
place on a rarefied body, or one formed of subtle particles, nor is it
easy to conceive light rebounding from light, or fire from fire; the
body which is to produce recoil and reflexion must be heavy and dense,
that there may be impact upon it and resilience from it. To the sun
himself the air certainly allows a passage, offering no obstructions or
resistance; whereas if timber, stones, or woven stuffs be placed to meet
his light many cross rays are caused, and there is illumination all
[Sidenote: C] round them. We see the same thing in the way his light
reaches the earth. The earth does not pass his ray into a depth as water
does, nor yet throughout her whole substance as air does. Just as his
orbit passes round the moon, gradually cutting off a certain portion of
her, so a similar orbit passes round the earth, illuminating a similar
part of it and leaving another unilluminated, for the part of either
body which receives light appears to be a little larger than a
hemisphere. Allow me to speak geometrically in terms of proportion. Here
are three bodies approached by the sun’s light, earth, moon, air; we see
that the moon is illuminated like the earth, not like the air; but
bodies naturally affected in the same way by the same must be themselves
similar.’
XIX. When all had applauded Lucius, ‘Bravo!’ said I, [Sidenote: D] ‘a
beautiful proportion fitted to a beautiful theory; for you must not be
defrauded of your own.’ ‘In that case,’ he said, with a smile, ‘I must
employ proportion a second time, in order that we may prove the moon
like the earth, not only as being affected in the same way by the same
body, but also as producing the same effect on the same. Grant me that
no one of the phenomena relating to the sun is so like another as an
eclipse to a sunset, remembering that recent concurrence[337] of sun and
moon, which, beginning just after noon, showed us [Sidenote: E] plainly
many stars in all parts of the heavens, and produced a chill in the
temperature like that of twilight. If you have forgotten it, Theon here
will bring up Mimnermus and Cydias, and Archilochus, and Stesichorus and
Pindar[338] besides, all bewailing at eclipse time “the brightest star
stolen from the sky” [Sidenote: F] and “night with us at midday”,
speaking of the ray of the sun as “a track of darkness” and, besides all
these, Homer[339] saying that the faces of men are “bound in night and
gloom” and “the sun is perished out of the heaven”, i.e. around the
moon, and how this occurs according to Nature, “when one moon perishes
and one is born”. The remaining points have been reduced, I think, by
the accuracy of mathematical methods to the one[340] certain principle
that night is the shadow of earth, whereas an eclipse of the sun is the
shadow of the moon when it falls within our vision. When the sun sets he
is blocked from our sight by the earth; when he is eclipsed, by the
moon. [Sidenote: 932] In both cases there is overshadowing; in his
setting it is caused by the earth, in his eclipses by the moon, her
shadow intercepting our vision. From all this it is easy to draw out a
theory as to what happens. If the effect is similar, the agents are
similar; for the same effects upon the same body must be due to the same
agents. If the darkness of eclipses is not so profound, and does not
affect the atmosphere so forcibly, let us not be surprised; the bodies
which cause respectively night and eclipse are similar in nature, but
unequal in size. The Egyptians, I believe, say that the moon’s bulk is
one two-and-seventieth part of the earth’s, Anaxagoras made her as large
as Peloponnesus; but [Sidenote: B] Aristarchus[341] proves that the
diameter of the earth bears to that of the moon a ratio which is less
than sixty to nineteen, and greater than a hundred and eight to
forty-three. Hence the earth because of its size removes the sun
entirely from our sight, the obstruction is great and lasts all night;
whereas if the moon sometimes hides the sun entirely, yet the eclipse
does not last long and has no breadth; but a certain brightness is
apparent around the rim, which does not allow the shadow to be deep and
absolute. Aristotle,[342] I mean the ancient philosopher, after giving
other reasons why the moon is more [Sidenote: C] often visibly eclipsed
than the sun, adds this further one, that the sun is eclipsed by the
interposition of the moon,[343] [the moon by that of the earth and of
other bodies also.] But Posidonius gives this definition of what occurs:
an eclipse of the sun is a concurrence of the shadow of the moon with
our vision[344] ... for there is no eclipse, except to those whose view
of the sun can be intercepted by the shadow of the moon. In allowing
that the shadow of the moon reaches to us, I do not know what he has
left himself to say. There can be no shadow of a star; shadow means
absence of light, and it is the nature of light to remove shadow, not to
cause it.
XX. ‘But tell me’, he went on, ‘what proof was mentioned [Sidenote: D]
next?’ ‘That the moon was eclipsed in the same way’, I said. ‘Thank you
for reminding me’, he said. ‘But now am I to turn at once to the
argument, assuming that you are satisfied, and allow that the moon is
eclipsed when she is caught in the shadow, or do you wish me to set out
a studied proof, with all the steps in order?’ ‘By all means,’ said
Theon, ‘let us have the proof in full. For my own part, I still somehow
need to be convinced; [Sidenote: E] I have only heard it put thus, that
when the three bodies, earth, sun, and moon, come into one straight line
eclipses occur, the earth removing the sun from the moon, or the moon
the sun from the earth; that is, the sun is eclipsed when the moon, the
moon when the earth, is in the middle of the three, the first case
happening at her conjunction, the second at the half-month.’
Lucius replied: ‘These are perhaps the most important points mentioned;
but first, if you will, take the additional argument drawn from the
shape of the shadow. This is a cone, such as is caused by a large
spherical body of fire or light overlapping a smaller body also
spherical. Hence in eclipses the lines which mark off the dark portions
of the moon from the bright give circular sections. For when one round
body approaches [Sidenote: F] another, the lines of mutual intersection
are invariably circular like the bodies themselves. In the second place,
I think you are aware that the first parts of the moon to be eclipsed
are those towards the East, of the sun those towards the West,
[Sidenote: 933] and the shadow of the earth moves from East to West,
that of[345] the moon on the contrary to the East. This is made clear to
the senses by the phenomena, which may be explained quite shortly. They
go to confirm our view of the cause of the eclipse. For since the sun is
eclipsed by being overtaken, the moon by meeting the body which causes
the eclipse,[346] it is likely, or rather it is necessary, that the sun
should be overtaken from behind, the moon from the front, the
obstruction beginning from the first point of contact with the
obstructing body. The moon comes up with the sun from the West as she
races against him, the earth from the East because it is moving from the
opposite direction. As a third point, I will ask you to [Sidenote: B]
notice the duration and the magnitude of her eclipses. If she is
eclipsed when high up and far from the earth, she is hidden for a short
time; if near the earth and low down when the same thing happens to her,
she is firmly held and emerges slowly out of the shadow; and yet when
she is low her speed is greatest, when high it is least. The cause of
the difference lies in the shadow; for being broadest about the base,
like all cones, and tapering gradually, it ends in a sharp, fine head.
Hence, if the moon be low when she meets the shadow, she is caught in
the largest circles of the cone, and crosses its most profound and
darkest part; if high, she dips as into a shallow pond, because the
shadow is thin, and quickly makes her way out. [Sidenote: C] I omit the
points of detail mentioned as to bases and permeations, which can also
be rationally explained as far as the subject-matter allows. I go back
to the theory put before us founded on our senses. We see that fire
shines through more visibly and more brightly out of a place in shadow,
whether because of the density of the darkened air, which does not allow
it to stream off and be dispersed, but holds its substance compressed
where it is, or whether this is an affection of our senses; as hot
things are hotter when contrasted with cold, and pleasures are more
intense by contrast with pains, so bright things stand out more clearly
by the side of dark, setting the imagination on the alert by the
contrast. The former cause appears the more [Sidenote: D] probable, for
in the light of the sun everything in the nature of fire not only loses
its brightness, but is outmatched and becomes inactive and blunted,
since the sun’s heat scatters and dissipates its power. If then the moon
possess a faint, feeble fire, being a star of somewhat turbid substance,
as the Stoics themselves say, none of the effects which she now exhibits
ought to follow, but the opposite in all respects; she ought to appear
when she is now hidden, and be hidden when she now appears; be hidden,
that is, all the time while she is dimmed by the surrounding [Sidenote:
E] atmosphere, but shine brightly out at intervals of six months, or
occasionally at intervals of five, when she passes under the shadow of
the earth. (For of the 465 full moons at eclipse intervals, 404 give
periods of six months, the remainder periods of five.) At such intervals
then the moon ought to appear shining brightly in the shadow. But, as a
fact, she is eclipsed and loses her light in the shadow, and recovers it
when she has cleared the shadow; also she is often seen by day, which
shows that she is anything but a fiery or starlike body.’
[Sidenote: F] XXI. When Lucius had said this, Pharnaces and Apollonides
sprang forward together to oppose. Apollonides made way to Pharnaces,
who observed that this is a very strong proof that the moon is a star or
fire; for she does not disappear entirely in eclipses, but shows through
with a grim ashy hue peculiar to herself. Apollonides objected to the
word ‘shadow’, a term always applied by mathematicians to a region which
is not [Sidenote: 934] lighted, whereas the heavens admit of no shadow.
‘This objection’, I said, ‘is contentious, and addressed to the name,
not to the thing in any physical or mathematical sense. If any one
should prefer to call the region blocked by the earth not “shadow”, but
“an unlighted place”, it is still necessarily true that the moon when it
reaches that region is darkened. It is merely childish’, I went on, ‘not
to allow that the shadow of the earth reaches it, since we know that the
shadow of the moon, falling upon the sight and reaching to the earth,
causes an [Sidenote: B] eclipse of the sun. I will now turn to you,
Pharnaces. That ashy charred colour in the moon, which you say is
peculiar to her, belongs to a body which has density and depth. For no
remnant or trace of flame will remain in rarefied bodies, nor can
burning matter come into existence, without a substantial body, deep
enough to allow of ignition and to maintain it, as Homer[347] has
somewhere said:
_When fire’s red flower was flown, and spent the flames,
Which smoothed the embers._
For burning matter is evidently not fire but a body submitted to fire,
and altered by it, which fire is attached to a solid stable mass and is
permanent there, whereas flames are the kindling [Sidenote: C] and
streaming away of rarefied fuel which is quickly dissolved because it is
weak.
‘Thus no such clear proof could exist that the moon is earth-like and
dense, as this cinder-like colour, if it really were her own proper
colour. But it is not so, dear Pharnaces; in the course of an eclipse
she goes through many changes of complexion, and scientific men divide
these accordingly by time and hour. If she is eclipsed at early evening,
she appears strangely black till three and a half hours have elapsed; if
at midnight, she emits that red and flame-like hue over her surface
which we know; after seven and a half hours the redness begins to be
removed, and at last towards dawn she takes a bluish or light-grey hue,
[Sidenote: D] which is the real reason why poets and Empedocles invoke
her as “grey-eyed”. Now, people who see the moon assume so many hues as
she passes through the shadow do wrong in fastening upon one, the
cinder-like, which may be called the one most foreign to her, being
rather an admixture and remnant of light which shines round her through
the shadows, than her own peculiar complexion, which is black and
earth-like. But whereas we see on our earth that places in shadow which
are near purple or scarlet cloths, or near lakes, or rivers open to the
sun, partake in the brilliance of these colours and offer many varied
splendours because of the reflexions, what wonder [Sidenote: E] if a
great stream of shadow, falling upon a celestial sea of light, not
stable or calm but agitated by myriads of stars and admitting of
combinations and changes of every kind, presents to us different colours
at different times impressed on it by the moon? For a star or a fire
could not show when in shadow as black or grey or blue. But our hills
and plains and seas are coursed over by many-coloured shapes coming from
the sun and [Sidenote: F] by shadows also and mists, resembling the hues
produced by white light over a painter’s pigments. For those seen on the
sea Homer has endeavoured to find such names as he could, as “violet”
for the sea, and “wine-dark” and again “purple wave”, and elsewhere
“grey sea” and “white calm”. But the varying colours which appear on
land at different times he has passed over as being infinite in number.
Now, it is not likely that the moon has one surface as the sea has, but
rather that she resembles in substance the earth, of which Socrates[348]
[Sidenote: 935] of old used to tell the legend, whether he hinted at the
moon, or meant some other body. For it is nothing incredible or
wonderful if, having nothing corrupt or muddy in her, but enjoying light
from heaven, and being stored with a heat not burning or furious, but
mild and harmless and natural, she possesses regions of marvellous
beauty, hills clear as flame, and belts of purple, her gold and silver
not dispersed within her depths, but flowering forth on the plains in
plenty, or set [Sidenote: B] around smooth eminences. Now, if a varying
view of these reaches us from time to time through the shadow, owing to
some change and shifting of the surrounding air, surely the moon does
not lose her honour or her fame, nor yet her Divinity, when she is held
by men to be holy earth of a sort and not, as the Stoics say, fire which
is turbid, mere dregs of fire. Fire is honoured in barbarous fashions by
the Medes and Assyrians, who fear what injures them, and pay observance
or rites of propitiation to that, rather than to what they revere. But
the name of earth, we know, is dear and honourable to every Greek, we
reverence her as our fathers did, like any other God. But, being men, we
are very far from thinking of the moon, that [Sidenote: C] Olympian
earth, as a body without soul or mind, having no share in things which
we duly offer as first-fruits to the Gods, taught by usage to pay them a
return for the goods they give us, and by Nature to reverence that which
is above ourselves in virtue and power and honour. Let us not then think
that we offend in holding that she is an earth, and that this her
visible face, just like our earth with its great gulfs, is folded back
into great depths and clefts containing water or murky air, which the
light of the sun fails to penetrate or touch, but is obscured, and sends
back its reflexion here in shattered fragments.’
XXII. Here Apollonides broke in: ‘Then in the name of [Sidenote: D] the
moon herself,’ he said, ‘do you think it possible that shadows are
thrown there by any clefts or gullies, and from thence reach our sight,
or do you not calculate what follows, and am I to tell you? Pray hear me
out, though you know it all. The diameter of the moon shows an apparent
breadth of twelve fingers at her mean distance from us. Now, each of
those black shadowy objects appears larger than half a finger, and is
therefore more than a twenty-fourth part of the diameter. [Sidenote: E]
Very well; if we were to assume the circumference of the moon to be only
thirty thousand stades, and the diameter ten thousand, on that
assumption each of these shadowy objects on her would be not less than
five hundred stades. Now, consider first whether it be possible for the
moon to have depths and eminences sufficient to cause a shadow of that
size. Next, if they are so large, how is it that we do not see them?’
At this, I smiled on him and said, ‘Well done, Apollonides, to have
found out such a demonstration! By it you will prove that you and I too
are greater than the Aloades[349] of old, not [Sidenote: F] at any time
of day, however, but in early morning for choice, and late afternoon;
when the sun makes our shadows prodigious, and thereby presents to our
sense the splendid inference, that if the shadow thrown be great, the
object which throws it is enormous. Neither of us, I am sure, has ever
been in Lemnos, but we have both heard the familiar line,[350]
_Athos the Lemnian heifer’s flank shall shade._
For the shadow of the cliff falls, it seems, on a certain brazen
[Sidenote: 936] heifer over a stretch of sea of not less than seven
hundred stades. Will you think then that the height which casts the
shadow is the cause, forgetting that distance of the light from objects
makes their shadows many times longer? Now consider the sun at his
greatest distance from the moon, when she is at the full, and shows the
features of the face most expressly because of the depth of the shadow;
it is the mere distance of the light which has made the shadow large,
not the size of the several [Sidenote: B] irregularities on the moon.
Again, in full day the extreme brightness of the sun’s rays does not
allow the tops of mountains to be seen, but deep and hollow places
appear from a long distance, as also do those in shadow. There is
nothing strange then if it is not possible to see precisely how the moon
too is caught by the light, and illuminated, and yet if we do see by
contrast where the parts in shadow lie near the bright parts.
XXIII. ‘But here’, said I, ‘is a better point to disprove the alleged
reflexion from the moon; it is found that those who stand in reflected
rays, not only see the illuminated but also the illuminating body. For
instance, when light from water [Sidenote: C] leaps on to a wall, and
the eye is placed in the spot so illuminated by reflexion, it sees the
three objects, the reflected rays, the water which caused the reflexion,
and the sun himself, from whom proceeds the light so falling on the
water and reflected. All this being granted and apparent, people require
those who contend that the earth receives the moon’s light by reflexion,
to point out the sun appearing in the moon at night, as he appears in
the water by day when he is reflected off it. Then, as he does not so
appear, they suppose that the illumination is caused by some process
other than reflexion, and that, failing reflexion, [Sidenote: D] the
moon is no earth.’
‘What answer then is to be given to them?’ said Apollonides, ‘for the
difficulty about reflexion seems to apply equally to us.’ ‘Equally no
doubt in one sense,’ I answered, ‘but in another sense not at all so.
First look at the details of the simile, how “topsy turvy”[351] it is,
rivers flowing up stream! The water is below and on earth, the moon is
above the earth and poised aloft. So the angles of reflexion are
differently formed; in the one case the apex is above in the moon, in
the other below on the earth. They should not then require that mirrors
should produce every image and like reflexions at any distance, since
[Sidenote: E] they are fighting against clear fact. But from those like
ourselves who seek to show that the moon is not a fine smooth substance
like water, but heavy and earth-like, it is strange to ask for a visible
appearance of the sun in her. Why, milk does not return such mirrored
images, nor produce optical reflexion, the reason being the unevenness
and roughness of its parts. How can the moon possibly send back the
vision off [Sidenote: F] herself as the smoother mirrors do? We know
that even in these, if any scratch or speck or roughness is found at the
point from which the vision is naturally reflected it is obscured; the
blemishes are seen, but they do not return the light. A man who requires
that she should either turn our vision back to the sun, or else not
reflect the sun from herself to us, is a humorist; he wants our eye to
be the sun, the image light, man heaven! That the reflexion of the sun’s
light conveyed to the moon with the impact of his intense brilliance
should be borne back to us is reasonable enough, whereas our sight is
weak and slight and merely fractional. What wonder if it deliver a
stroke which has no resilience, or, if it does rebound, no continuity,
but is broken up and fails, having no store of light to make up for
dispersion about the rough and uneven [Sidenote: 937] places. For it is
not impossible that the reflexion should rebound to the sun from water
and other mirrors, being still strong and near its point of origin;
whereas from the moon, even if there are glancings of a sort, yet they
will be weak and dim, and will fail by the way because of the long
distance. Another point: concave mirrors return the reflected light in
greater strength than the original, and thus often produce [Sidenote: B]
flames; convex and spherical mirrors one which is weak and dim, because
the pressure is not returned from all parts of the surface. You have
seen, no doubt, how when two rainbows appear, one cloud enfolding
another, the enveloping bow shows the colours dim and indistinct, for
the outer cloud lying further from the eye does not return the reflexion
in strength or intensity. But enough! Whereas the light of the sun
reflected from the moon loses its heat entirely, and only a scanty and
ineffectual remnant of its brilliance reaches us, do you really think it
possible that when sight has the double course to travel, [Sidenote: C]
any remnant whatever should reach the sun from the moon? No! say I. Look
for yourselves’, I went on. ‘If the effects of the water and of the moon
on our sight were the same, the full moon ought to show us images of
earth and plants and men and stars, as other mirrors do. If, on the
other hand, our vision is never carried back on to these objects,
whether because of its own feebleness or of the roughness of the moon’s
surface, then let us never demand that it should be carried by reflexion
on to the sun.
XXIV. ‘We have now’, I said, ‘reported all that was said then, and has
not escaped our memory. It is time to call on Sylla, or rather to claim
his story, as he was allowed to be a listener on terms. So, if it meet
your approval, let us cease our walk, and take our places on the benches
and give him a seated [Sidenote: D] audience.’ This was at once agreed,
and we had taken our seats, when Theon said: ‘I want as much as any of
you, Lamprias, to hear what is now to be said, but first I should like
to hear about the alleged dwellers in the moon, not whether there are
any such, I mean, but whether there can be; for if the thing is
impossible, then it is also absurd that the moon should be an earth; it
will appear that she has been created for no end or use, if she bears no
fruit, offers no abode to human beings, no existence, no livelihood, the
very things for which we say that she has been created, in Plato’s[352]
words, “our nurse, and of [Sidenote: E] day and night the unswerving
guardian and maker”. You see that many things are said about this, some
in jest, some seriously. For instance, that the moon hangs poised over
the heads of those who dwell beneath her, as if they were so many
Tantali; while as for those who dwell on her, they are lashed on like
Ixions by the tremendous speed. Yet hers is not a single motion, but, as
[Sidenote: F] it is somewhere put, she is a Goddess of the Three Ways.
She moves in longitude over the Zodiac, in latitude, and in depth; one
movement is revolution, another a spiral, the third is strangely named
“Anomaly” by scientific men, although there is nothing irregular or
confused to be seen in her returns to her stations. Therefore it is no
wonder if a lion[353] did once fall on to Peloponnesus, owing to the
velocity; the wonder is that we do not see every day
_Fallings of men, lives trampled to the dust_,[354]
men tumbling off through the air and turning somersaults. Yet [Sidenote:
938] it is ridiculous to raise a discussion about their remaining there,
if they can neither come into being nor subsist at all. When we see
Egyptians and Troglodytes, over whose heads the sun stands for the space
of one brief day at the solstice and then passes on, all but shrivelled
up by the dryness of the air around them, is it likely, I ask you, that
people in the moon can endure twelve summers in each year, the sun
standing plumb straight above them at every full moon? Then as to winds
and clouds and [Sidenote: B] showers, without which plants can neither
receive nor maintain existence, it is out of the question to conceive of
their being formed, because the surrounding atmosphere is too hot and
too rare. For even here the highest mountain tops do not get our fierce
and conflicting storms, the air being already in turmoil from its
lightness escapes any such condensation. Or are we really to say that,
as Athena dropped a little nectar and ambrosia into Achilles’ mouth when
he was refusing nourishment, even so the moon, who is called and who is
Athena,[355] feeds man by sending up ambrosia day by day, in which form
old Pherecydes [Sidenote: C] thinks that the Gods take food! For as to
that Indian root, of which Megasthenes tells us that men, who neither
eat nor drink but are without mouths,[356] burn a little, and make a
smoke, and are nourished by the smells, how is it to be found growing
there if there is no rain on the moon?’
XXV. When Theon had finished: ‘Well and kindly done,’ I said, ‘to unbend
our brows by your witty argument; it makes us bold in reply, since we
have no very harsh or severe criticism to expect. It is a true saying
that there is little to choose between those who are vehemently
convinced in such matters and those who are vehemently offended at them
and incredulous, and will not look quietly into the possibilities. To
begin, supposing that men do not inhabit the moon, it does not follow
[Sidenote: D] that she has come into being just for nothing. Why, our
earth, as we see, is not in active use or inhabited in her whole extent;
but a small part of her only, mere promontories or peninsulas which
emerge from the abyss, is fertile in animals and plants; of the other
parts, some are desert and unfruitful owing to storms and droughts,
while most are sunk under the ocean. But you, lover and admirer of
Aristarchus that you are, do not attend to Crates and his reading:
_Ocean, the birth and being of us all,
Both men and Gods, covers the most of earth._[357]
‘However, this is a long way from saying that all has been brought into
being for nothing. The sea sends up soft exhalations, [Sidenote: E] and
delightful breezes in midsummer heat; from the uninhabited and icebound
land snows quietly melt which open and fertilize all; earth stands in
the midst, in Plato’s[358] words, “unswerving guardian and maker of day
and night”. Nothing then prevents the moon too, though barren of animal
life, from allowing the light around her to be reflected and to stream
[Sidenote: F] about, and the rays of the stars to flow together and to
be united within her; thus she combines and digests the vapours
proceeding from earth, and at the same time gets rid of what is
scorching and violent in the sun’s heat. And here we will make bold to
yield a point to ancient legend, and to say that she has been held to be
Artemis, a maiden and no mother, but in other ways helpful and
serviceable. For, surely, nothing which has been said, dear Theon,
proves it to be impossible that she is inhabited in the way alleged. For
her revolution is one very gentle and calm; which smoothes the air, and
duly [Sidenote: 939] blends and distributes it, so that there is no fear
of those who have lived there falling or slipping off her. If not this,
neither are the changes and variety of her orbit due to anomaly or
confusion, but astronomers make us see a marvellous order and progress
in it all, as they confine her within circles which roll around other
circles, according to some not herself stirring, according to others
moving gently and evenly and with uniform speeds. For these circles and
revolutions, and their relations to one another, and to us, work out
with very great accuracy the phenomena of her varying height and depth
and her [Sidenote: B] passages in latitude as well as in longitude. As
to the great heat and continuous charring caused by the sun, you will no
longer fear these if you will set against the [eleven][359] summer
conjunctions the full-moons, and the continuity of the change, which
does not allow extremes to last long, tempering both extremes, and
producing a convenient temperature, while between the two the
inhabitants enjoy a climate nearly resembling our spring. In the next
place, the sun sends down to us, and drives home through her thick and
resisting atmosphere, heat fed [Sidenote: C] by exhalations; but there a
fine and transparent air scatters and distributes the stream of light,
which has no body or fuel beneath it. As to woods and crops, here where
we live they are nourished by rains, but in other places, as far up as
round your Thebes and Syene, the earth drinks water which comes out of
herself, not from rain; it enjoys winds and dews, and would not, I
think, thank us for comparing it in fruitfulness with our own, even
where the rainfall is heaviest. With us, plants of the same order, if
severely pinched by winter frosts, [Sidenote: D] bring forth much
excellent fruit, while in Libya, and with you in Egypt, they bear cold
very badly and shrink from the winters. Again, while Gedrosia, and
Troglodytis which reaches down to ocean, are unproductive and treeless
in all parts because of the drought, yet, in the adjacent and
surrounding sea, plants grow to a marvellous size and luxuriate in its
depths; some of these called “olive-trees”, some “laurels”, some “hair
of Isis”. But the “love-come-back” as it is called, if taken out of the
earth, not only lives when hung up for as long as you please, but also
sprouts. Some are sown close on [Sidenote: E] to winter, some in the
height of summer, sesame or millet for instance; thyme or centaury, if
sown in a good rich soil and watered, changes its qualities and
strength; both rejoice in drought and reach their proper growth in it.
But if, as is said, like most Arabian plants, they do not endure even
dews, but fade and perish when moistened, what wonder, I ask, if roots
and seeds and trees grow on the moon which need no rains or snows, but
are fitted by Nature for a light and summer-like atmosphere? Why, again,
may it not be probable that breezes ascend warmed by the moon and by the
whirl of her revolution, and that she is accompanied by quiet breezes,
which shed dews and moisture around, and when [Sidenote: F] distributed
suffice for the grown plants, her own climate being neither fiery nor
dried up, but mild and engendering moisture. For no touch of dryness
reaches us from her, but many effects of moisture and fertility, as
increase of plants, putrefaction of flesh, turning of wine to flatness,
softening of wood, easy delivery to women. I am afraid of stirring
Pharnaces to the fray [Sidenote: 940] again, now that he is quiet, if I
enumerate as cases of restoring moisture the tides of the ocean (as his
own school describes them), and the fillings of gulfs when their flood
is augmented by the moon. So I will rather turn to you, dear Theon, for
you told us in explaining these words of Alcman,[360]
_Dew feeds them, born of Zeus and Lady Moon_,
that here he calls the atmosphere Zeus, and says that it is liquefied
and turned into dew by the moon. Probably, my friend, her nature is
opposite to the sun’s, since not only does he naturally consolidate and
dry things which she softens and [Sidenote: B] disperses, but she also
liquefies and cools his heat, as it falls upon her from him, and mingles
with herself. Certainly they are in error who hold that the moon is a
fiery and charred body; and those who require for animals there all the
things which they have here, seem to lack eyes for the inequalities of
Nature, since it is possible to find greater and more numerous
divergencies and dissimilarities between animals and animals than
between them and the inanimate world. And grant that men without mouths
and nourished on smells are not to be found—I do not [Sidenote: C] think
they are—, but the potency which Ammonius himself used to expound to us
has been hinted at by Hesiod[361] in the line
_Nor yet in mallow and in asphodel
How great the virtue._
But Epimenides made it plain in actual experience, teaching that Nature
always keeps the fire of life in the animal with but little fuel, for if
it get as much as the size of an olive, it needs no more sustenance. Now
men in the moon, if men there be, are compactly framed, we may believe,
and capable of being nourished on what they get; for the moon herself
they say, [Sidenote: D] like the sun who is a fiery body many times
larger than the earth, is nourished on the humours coming from the
earth, as are the other stars too in their infinite numbers. Light, like
them, and simple in their needs, may we conceive those animals to be
which the upper region produces. We do not see such animals, nor yet do
we see that they require a different region, nature, climate. Supposing
that we were unable to approach the sea or touch it, but merely caught
views of it in the distance, [Sidenote: E] and were told that its water
is bitter and undrinkable and briny, and then some one said that it
supports in its depths many great animals with all sorts of shapes, and
is full of monsters, to all of whom water is as air to us, he would seem
to be making up a parcel of fairy tales; just so is it with us, it
seems, and such is our attitude towards the moon, when we refuse to
believe that she has men dwelling on her. Her inhabitants, I think, must
wonder still more greatly at this earth, a sort of sediment and slime of
the universe appearing through damps, and mists, and clouds, a place
unlighted, low, motionless; and must ask whether it breeds and supports
animals with motion, respiration [Sidenote: F] and warmth. And if they
should anyhow have a chance of hearing those lines of Homer:[362]
_Grim mouldy regions which e’en Gods abhor_,
and—
_‘Neath hell so far as earth below high heaven_,[363]
they will say they are written about a place exactly such as this, and
that Hades is a colony planted here, and Tartarus, and that there is
only one earth—the moon—being midway between the upper regions and these
lower ones.’
XXVI. I had scarcely finished speaking when Sylla broke in: ‘Stop,
Lamprias, and shut the door on your oratory, lest you run my myth
aground before you know it, and make confusion of my drama, which
requires another stage and a different setting. Now, I am only its
actor, but I will first, if you see no objection, name the poet,
beginning in Homer’s[364] words: [Sidenote: 941]
_Far o’er the brine an isle Ogygian lies_,
distant from Britain five days’ sail to the West. There are three other
islands equidistant from Britain and from one another, in the general
direction of the sun’s summer setting. The natives have a story that in
one of these Cronus has been [Sidenote: B] confined by Zeus, but that
he, having a son for gaoler,[365] has been settled beyond those islands
and the sea, which they call the Gulf of Cronus. To the great continent
by which the ocean is fringed is a voyage of about five thousand stades,
made in row-boats, from Ogygia, of less from the other islands, the sea
being slow of passage and full of mud because of the number of streams
which the great mainland discharges, forming alluvial tracts and making
the sea heavy like land, whence an opinion prevailed that it was
actually frozen. The coasts of the mainland are inhabited by Greeks
living around a bay as large as the Maeotic, with its mouth nearly
opposite that of the Caspian [Sidenote: C] Sea. These Greeks speak of
themselves as continental, and of those who inhabit our land as
islanders, because it is washed all round by the sea. They think that
those who came with Hercules and were left behind by him, mingled later
on with the subjects of Cronus, and rekindled, so to speak, the Hellenic
life which was becoming extinguished and overborne by barbarian
languages, laws, and ways of life, and so it again became strong and
vigorous. Thus the first honours are paid to Hercules, the second to
Cronus. When the star of Cronus, called by us the Shining One, by them,
as he told us, the Night Watcher, has reached Taurus again after an
interval of thirty years, having for a long time before made preparation
for [Sidenote: D] the sacrifice and the voyage, they send forth men
chosen by lot in as many ships as are required, putting on board all the
supplies and stuff for the great rowing voyage before them, and for a
long sojourn in a strange land. They put out, and naturally do not all
fare alike; but those who come safely out of the perils of the sea land
first on the outlying islands, which are inhabited by Greeks, and day
after day, for thirty days, see the sun hidden for less than one hour.
This is the night, with a darkness which is slight and of a twilight
hue, and has a light over it from the West. There they spend ninety
days, [Sidenote: E] meeting with honourable and kindly treatment, and
being addressed as holy persons, after which they pass on, now with help
from the winds. There are no inhabitants except themselves, and those
who have been sent before them. For those who have joined in the service
of the God for thirty years are allowed to sail back home, but most
prefer to settle quietly in the place where they are, some because they
have grown used to it, some because all things are there in plenty
without pain or trouble, while their life is passed in sacrifices and
festivals, or given to literature or Philosophy. For the natural beauty
[Sidenote: F] of the isle is wonderful, and the mildness of the
environing air. Some, when they are of a mind to sail away, are actually
prevented by the God, who manifests himself to them as to familiars and
friends, not in dreams only or by signs, for many meet with shapes and
voices of spirits, openly seen and heard. Cronus himself sleeps within a
deep cave resting on rock which looks like gold, this sleep being
devised for him by Zeus in place of chains. Birds fly in at the topmost
part of the rock, and bear him ambrosia, and the whole island is
pervaded by the fragrance shed from the rock as out of a well. The
spirits of whom we hear serve and care for Cronus, having been his
comrades in [Sidenote: 942] the time when he was really king over Gods
and men. Many are the utterances which they give forth of their own
prophetic power, but the greatest and most important they announce when
they come down as dreams of Cronus; for the things which Zeus
premeditates, Cronus dreams, when sleep has stayed[366] the Titanic
motions and stirrings of the soul within him, and that which is royal
and divine alone remains, pure and unalloyed. [Sidenote: B]
‘Now the stranger, having been received here, as he told us, and serving
the God at his leisure, attained as much skill in astronomy as is
attainable by the most advanced geometry; of other Philosophy he applied
himself to the physical branches. Then, having a strange desire and
yearning to see “the Great Island” (for so it appears they call our
world), when the thirty years were passed, and the relief parties
arrived from home, he said farewell to his friends and sailed forth,
carrying a complete equipment of all kinds, and abundant store of
provision for the way in golden beakers. All the adventures which befell
him, and all the men whose lands he visited, how he met with [Sidenote:
C] holy writings and was initiated into all the mysteries, it would take
more than one day to enumerate as he did, well and carefully and with
all details. Listen now to those which concern our present discussion.
He spent a very long time in Carthage.[367]... He there discovered
certain sacred parchments which had been secretly withdrawn when the
older city was destroyed, and had lain a long time in the earth
unnoticed; and he said that of all the Gods who appear to us we ought
specially to honour the moon with all our substance (and so he charged
me to do), because she was most potent in our life.
XXVII. ‘When I marvelled at this, and asked for clearer [Sidenote: D]
statements, he went on: “Many tales, Sylla, are told among the Greeks
about the Gods, but not all are well told. For instance, about Demeter
and Cora, they are right in their names, but wrong in supposing that
they both belong to the same region; for the latter is on earth, and has
power over earthly things, the former is in the moon and is concerned
with things of the moon. The moon has been called both Cora and
Persephone, Persephone because she gives light, Cora because we also use
the same Greek word for the pupil of the eye, in which the image of the
beholder flashes back, as the sunbeam is seen in the moon. In the
stories told about [Sidenote: E] their wanderings and the search there
is an element of truth. They yearn for one another when parted, and
often embrace in shadow. And what is told of Cora, that she is sometimes
in heaven and in light, and again in night and darkness, is no untruth,
only time has brought error into the numbers; for it is not during six
months, but at intervals of six months, [Sidenote: F] that we see her
received by the earth, as by a mother, in the shadow, and more rarely at
intervals of five months; for to leave Hades is impossible to her, who
is herself a ‘bound of Hades’, as Homer[368] well hints in the words,
_Now to Elysian plains, earth’s utmost bound._
For where the shadow of the earth rests in its passage, there Homer
placed the limit and boundary of earth. To that limit comes no man that
is bad or impure, but the good after death are conveyed thither, and
pass a most easy life, not, however, one blessed or divine until the
second death.”‘
XXVIII. ‘But what is that, Sylla?’ ‘Ask me not of these things, for I am
going to tell you fully myself. The common [Sidenote: 943] view that man
is a composite creature is correct, but it is not correct that he is
composed of two parts only. For they suppose that mind is in some sense
a part of soul, which is as great a mistake as to think that soul is a
part of body; mind is as much better a thing and more divine than soul,
as soul is than body. Now the union of soul with body makes up the
passion or emotion, the further union with mind produces reason; the
former is the origin of pleasure and pain, the latter of virtue and
vice. When these three principles have been compacted, the earth
contributes body to the birth of man, the moon soul, the sun reason,
just as he contributes her light to the moon. The death which we die is
of two kinds; the one [Sidenote: B] makes man two out of three, the
other makes him one out of two; the one takes place in the earth which
is the realm of Demeter, and is initiation unto her,[369] so that the
Athenians used in ancient times to call the dead “Demetrians”, the other
is in the moon, and is of Persephone; Hermes is the associate on earth
of the one, of the other in heaven. Demeter parts soul from body quickly
and with force; Persephone parts mind from soul gently and very slowly,
and therefore has been called[370] “Of the Birth to Unity”, for the best
part of man is left in oneness, when separated by her. Each process
happens according to [Sidenote: C] Nature, as thus: It is appointed that
every soul, irrational or rational, when it has quitted the body, should
wander in the region between earth and moon, but not all for an equal
time; unjust and unchaste souls pay penalties for their wrongdoings; but
the good must for a certain appointed time, sufficient to purge away and
blow to the winds, as noxious exhalations, defilements from the body,
which is their vicious cause, be in that mildest part of the air which
they call “The Meadows of Hades”; then they return as from long and
distant exile back to their country, they taste [Sidenote: D] such joy
as men feel here who are initiated, joy mingled with much amazement and
trouble, yet also with a hope which is each man’s own. For many who are
already grasping at the moon she pushes off and washes away, and some
even of those souls which are already there and are turning round to
look below are seen to be plunged again into the abyss. But those which
have passed above, and have found firm footing, first go round like
victors wreathed with crowns of feathers called “crowns of constancy”,
because they kept the irrational part of the soul obedient to the curb
of reason, and well ordered in life. Then with countenance like a
sunbeam, and soul borne lightly upwards by fire, as here, namely that of
the air about [Sidenote: E] the moon, they receive tone and force from
it, as iron takes an edge in its bath; for that which is still volatile
and diffuse is strengthened and becomes firm and transparent, so that
they are nourished by such vapour as meets them, and well did
Heraclitus[371] say that “Souls feed on smell in Hades.”
XXIX. First they look on the moon herself, her size, her beauty, and her
nature, which is not single or unmixed, but as it were a composition of
earth and star. For as the earth has become soft by being mixed with air
and moisture, and as the blood infused into the flesh produces
sensibility, so the moon, they say, being mingled with air through all
her depth, is endowed with soul and with fertility, and at the same time
[Sidenote: F] receives a balance, lightness set against weight. Even so
the universe itself, duly framed together of things having some an
upward tendency, some a downward, is freed from all movement of place.
This Xenocrates apprehended, it would seem, by some divine reasoning,
having received the suggestion from Plato. For it is Plato[372] who
showed that every star has been compounded of earth and fire by means of
intermediate natures given in proportion, since nothing reaches the
senses into which earth and light do not enter. But Xenocrates says that
the stars and the sun are compounded out of fire and the [Sidenote: 944]
first density, the moon out of the second density and her own air, and
earth out of water, fire, and the third density; and that as an
universal law, neither the dense alone nor the rarefied alone is capable
of receiving soul. So much then for the substance of the moon. But her
breadth and bulk are not what geometricians say, but many times greater.
The reason why she but seldom measures the shadow of the earth with
[three of] her own diameters, is not its smallness, but her heat,
whereby she increases her speed that she may swiftly pass through and
beyond the dark region, bearing from out it the souls of the good, as
they hasten and cry aloud, for being in the shadow they no longer hear
the harmony of heaven. At the same [Sidenote: B] time there are borne up
from below through the shadow the souls of those who are to be punished,
with wailing and loud cries. Hence comes the widespread custom of
clanking vessels of brass during eclipses, with a din and a clatter to
reach the souls. Also the face, as we call it, terrifies them, when they
are near, so grim and weird is it to their sight. Really it is nothing
of the kind; but as our earth has gulfs deep and great, one here which
streams inwards towards us from the Pillars of Hercules, [Sidenote: C]
outwards the Caspian, and those about the Red Sea, even such are those
depths and hollows of the moon. The largest of them they call the Gulf
of Hecate, where the souls endure and exact retribution for all the
things which they have suffered or done ever since they became spirits;
two of them are long, through which the souls pass, now to the parts of
the moon which are turned toward heaven, now back to the side next to
earth. The parts of the moon toward heaven are called “the Elysian
plain”, those toward earth “the plain of Persephone Antichthon”.
XXX. ‘However, the spirits do not pass all their time upon her, they
come down here to superintend oracles, take part [Sidenote: D] in the
highest rites of initiation and mysteries, become guardian avengers of
wrongdoing, and shine forth as saving lights in war and on the sea. In
these functions, whatever they do in a way which is not right, from
anger or to win unrighteous favour, or in jealousy, they suffer for it,
being thrust down to earth again and imprisoned in human bodies. From
the better of them, the attendants of Cronus said that they are
themselves sprung, as in earlier times the Dactyli of Ida, the
Corybantes [Sidenote: E] in Phrygia, the Trophoniades in Udora of
Boeotia, and countless others in many parts of the inhabited world;
whose temples and houses and appellations remain to this day. Some there
are whose powers are failing because they have passed to another place
by an honourable exchange. This happens to some sooner, to others later,
when mind has been separated from soul; the separation comes by love for
the image which is in the sun; through it there shines upon them that
desirable, beautiful, divine, and blessed presence for which all Nature
yearns, yet in different ways. For it is through love of the sun that
the moon [Sidenote: F] herself makes her circuit, and has her meetings
with him to receive from him all fertility. That Nature which is the
soul remains on the moon, preserving traces and dreams of the former
life, and of it you may take it that it has been rightly said:
_Winged as a dream the soul takes flight away._[373]
Not at the first, and not when it is quit of the body does this happen
to it, but afterwards when it becomes deserted and solitary, set free
from mind. Of all that Homer has told us I think that there is nothing
more divine than where he speaks of those in Hades:
_Next was I ware of mighty Hercules,
His ghost—himself among the immortals dwells._[374]
For the self of each of us is not courage, nor fear, nor desire, any
more than it is a parcel of flesh and of humours; it is that whereby we
understand and think. The soul being shaped by [Sidenote: 945] the mind
and itself shaping the body and encompassing it upon all sides, stamps
its form upon it, so that even if it is separated from both for a long
time, yet it possesses the likeness and the stamp, and is rightly called
an image. Of these, the moon, as has been said, is the element, for they
are resolved into her just as are the bodies of the dead into earth; the
temperate speedily, those who embraced a life of quiet and Philosophy;
for, having been set free by mind, and having no further use for the
passions, they wither away. But of the ambitious, [Sidenote: B] and
active, and sensuous, and passionate, some are distracted as though in
sleep, dreaming out their memories of life, as the soul of Endymion; but
when their restless and susceptible nature starts them out of the moon
and draws them to another birth, she does not suffer it, but draws them
back and soothes them. For no trifling matter is it, nor quiet, nor
conventional, when in the absence of mind, they get them a body by
passionate endeavour; Tityi and Typhones, and that Typhon who seized
Delphi and confounded the oracle there by insolence and force, came of
such souls as these, deserted by reason, and left to the [Sidenote: C]
wild wanderings of their emotional part. But in course of time the moon
receives even these unto herself and brings them to order; then, when
the sun again sows mind, she receives it with vital power and makes new
souls, and, thirdly, earth provides a body; for earth gives nothing
after death of what she received for birth; the sun receives nothing,
save that he receives back the mind which he gives, but the moon both
receives and gives, and compounds, and distributes in diverse functions;
she who compounds has Ilithyia for her name, she who distributes,
Artemis. And of the three Fates Atropus has her station about the sun
and gives the first impulse of generation; Clotho moving about the moon
combines and mingles, lastly Lachesis, upon the earth, lends her hand,
and she has most to do with Fortune; for that which is without soul is
powerless in itself and is affected by others, mind is free from
affection and sovereign; soul a compound and a middle [Sidenote: D]
term, has, like the moon, been formed by the God, a blend and mixture of
things above and things below, and thus bears the same relation to the
sun which the earth does to the moon.’
‘Such’, said Sylla, ‘is the story which I heard the stranger relate, but
he had it from the chamberlains and ministers of Cronus, as he himself
used to say. But you and your friends, Lamprias, may take the story in
what way you will.’