Epimenides has made plain to us in effect, teaching us that Nature
sustains a living creature with very little food, and that, provided
it has but the quantity of an olive, it stands in need of no other
nourishment. Now, if any, those surely who dwell within the moon should
be active, light, and easy to be nourished with any thing whatsoever;
since they affirm that the moon herself, as also the sun, which is a
fiery animal, and manifoldly greater than the earth, is nourished and
maintained by the moistures that come from the earth, as are also all
the other stars, whose number is in a manner infinite; such light and
slender animals do they assign to the upper region, and with so small
necessaries do they think them contented and satisfied. But we neither
see these things, nor consider that a quite different region, nature,
and temperature is accommodated to those lunar men.
As therefore, if we were unable to come near and touch the sea, but
could only see it at a distance, and had heard that its water is
brackish, salt, and undrinkable, any one who should tell us that there
are in its depths many and great animals of various forms and shapes,
and that it is full of great and monstrous beasts who make the same
use of the water as we do of the air, would be thought only to relate
a parcel of strange and uncreditable stories, newly found out and
invented for delight and amusement; in the same manner we seem to be
affected and disposed towards the moon, not believing that there are
any who inhabit it. And I am of opinion, that they themselves do much
more wonder, when they behold the earth,—which is, as it were, the
dregs and mud of the universe, appearing to them through moist and
foggy clouds and mists, a little place, a low, abject, and immovable
thing without any brightness or light whatever,—how this pitiful
inconsiderable thing should be able to produce, nourish, and maintain
animals that have motion, respiration, and heat. And if peradventure
they had ever heard these verses of Homer,
A filthy squalid place, abhorred even by
The Gods themselves;[103]
and again,
Hell is as far beneath, as heaven above
The earth;[104]
they would certainly think them to have been written of this place
where we live, and that here is hell and Tartarus, and that the earth
which is equally distant from heaven and hell is only the moon.
26. I had not well ended my discourse, when Sylla interrupting me said:
Forbear Lamprias, and put a stop to your discourse, lest running (as
they say) the vessel of your story on ground, you confound and spoil
all the play, which has at present another scene and disposition. I
myself therefore shall be the actor, but shall, before I enter upon
my part, make known to you the poet or author; beginning, if there is
nothing to hinder, with that of Homer,