Concerning the Face which Appears in the Orb Of the Moon (24)

So we for our part, said I, have now reported as much of that conversation[*] as has not slipped our mind; and it is high time to summon Sulla or rather to demand his narrative as the agreed condition upon which he was admitted as a listener. So, if it is agreeable, let us stop our promenade and sit down upon the benches, that we may provide him with a settled audience. To this then they agreed; and, when we had sat down, Theon said: Though, as you know, Lamprias, I am as eager as any of you to hear what is going to be said, I should like before that to hear about the beings that are said to dwell on the moon[*] — not whether any really do inhabit it but whether habitation there is possible. If it is not possible, the assertion that the moon is an earth is itself absurd, for she would then appear to have come into existence vainly and to no purpose, neither bringing forth fruit nor providing for men of some kind an origin, an abode, and a means of life, the purposes for which this earth of ours came into being, as we say with Plato, our nurse, strict guardian and artificer of day and night. [*] You see that there is

much talk about these things both in jest and seriously. It is said that those who dwell under the moon have her suspended overhead like the stone of Tantalus[*] and on the other hand that those who dwell upon her, fast bound like so many Ixions[*] by such great velocity, [are kept from falling by being whirled round in a circle]. Yet it is not with a single motion that she moves; but she is, as somewhere she is in fact called, the goddess of three ways,[*] for she moves on the zodiac against the signs in longitude and latitude and in depth at the same time. Of these movements the mathematicians call the first revolution, the second spiral, and the third, I know not why, anomaly, although they see that she has no motion at all that is uniform and fixed by regular recurrences,[*] There is reason to wonder then not that the velocity caused a lion to fall on the Peloponnesus[*] but how it is that we are not forever seeing countless

Men falling headlong and lives spurned away,[*]

tumbling off the moon, as it were, and turned head over heels. It is moreover ridiculous to raise the question how the inhabitants of the moon remain there, if they cannot come to be or exist. Now, when Egyptians and Troglodytes,[*] for whom the sun stands in the zenith one moment of one day at the solstice and then departs, are all but burnt to a cinder by the dryness of the atmosphere, is it really likely that the men on the moon endure twelve summers every year, the sun standing fixed vertically above them each month at the full moon? Yet winds and clouds and rains, without which plants can neither arise nor having arisen be preserved, because of the heat and tenuousness of the atmosphere cannot possibly be imagined as forming there, for not even here on earth do the lofty mountains admit fierce and contrary storms[*] but the air, [being tenuous] already and having a rolling swell[*] as a result of its lightness, escapes this compaction and condensation. Otherwise, by Heaven, we shall have to say that, as Athena when Achilles was taking no food instilled into him some nectar and ambrosia,[*] so the moon, which is Athena in name and fact,[*] nourishes her men by sending up ambrosia for them day by day, the food of [the] gods themselves as the ancient Pherecydes believes.[*] For even the Indian root which according to Megasthenes the Mouthless Men, who [neither eat] nor drink, kindle and cause to smoulder and inhale for their nourishment,[*] how could it be supposed to grow there if the moon is not moistened by rain ?