Concerning the Face which Appears in the Orb Of the Moon (25)

When Theon had so spoken, I said [Bravo], you have most excellently [smoothed our] brows by the sport of your speech, wherefore we have been inspired with boldness to reply, since we anticipate no very sharp or bitter scrutiny. It is, moreover, a fact that there really is [no] difference between those who in such matters are firm believers and those who are violently annoyed by them and firmly disbelieve and refuse to examine calmly what can be and what might be.[*] So, for example, in the first

place, if the moon is not inhabited by men, it is not necessary that she have come to be in vain and to no purpose, for we see that this earth of ours is not productive and inhabited throughout its whole extent either but only a small part of it is fruitful of animals and plants on the peaks, as it were, and peninsulas rising out of the deep, while of the rest some parts are desert and fruitless with winter-storms and summer-droughts and the most are sunk in the great sea. You, however, because of your constant fondness and admiration for Aristarchus, give no heed to the text that Crates read:

Ocean, that is the universal source

Of men and gods, spreads over most of earth.[*]

Yet it is by no means for nothing that these parts have come to be. The sea gives off gentle exhalations, and the most pleasant winds when summer is at its height are released and dispersed from the uninhabited and frozen region by the snows that are gradually melting there.[*] A strict guardian and artificer of day and night has according to Plato[*] been stationed in the centre. Nothing then prevents the moon too, while destitute of living beings, from providing reflections for the light that is diffused about her and for the rays of the stars a point of confluence in herself and a blending whereby she digests the exhalations from the earth and at the same time slackens the excessive torridity and harshness of the sun.[*] Moreover, conceding a point perhaps to ancient tradition also, we shall say that she was held to be Artemis on the ground that she is a virgin and sterile but is helpful and beneficial to other females.[*] In the second place, my dear Theon, nothing that has been said proves impossible the alleged inhabitation of the moon. As to the rotation, since it is very gentle and werene, it smooths the air and distributes it in settled order, so that there is no danger of falling and slipping off for those who stand there. And if it is not simple either,[*] even this complication and variation of the motion is not attributable to irregularity or confusion; but in them astronomers demonstrate a marvellous order and progression, making her revolve with circles that unroll about other circles, some assuming that she is herself motionless and others that she retrogresses smoothly and regularly with ever constant velocity,[*] for these superpositions of the circles and their rotations and relations to one another and to us combine most harmoniously to produce the apparent variations of her motion in altitude and the deviations in latitude at the same time as her revolutions in longitude.[*] As to the great heat and continual scorching of the sun, you will cease to fear it, if first of all you set the conjunctions over against the twelve summery full-moons[*] and suppose that the continuousness of the change produces in the extremes, which do not last a long time, a suitable tempering and removes the excess from either. Between these then, as is likely, they have a season most nearly approaching spring. In the second place, upon us the sun sends, through air which is turbid and which exerts a concomitant pressure, heat that is nourished by the exhalations, whereas there the air being tenuous and translucent scatters and diffuses the sun’s light, which has no tinder or body to sustain it.[*] The fruits of tree and field here in our region are nourished by rains; but elsewhere, as up in your home[*] around Thebes and Syene, the land drinking water that springs from earth instead of rain-water and enjoying breezes and dews[*] would refuse, I think, to adapt itself[*] to the fruitfulness that attends the most abundant rainfall, and that because of a certain excellence and temperament that it has. Plants of the same kind, which in our region if sharply nipped by winter bear good fruit in abundance, in Libya and in your home in Egypt are very sensitive to cold and afraid of winter.[*] And, while Gedrosia and Ethiopia which comes down to the ocean is barren and entirely treeless because of the aridity, in the adjacent and surrounding sea there grow and thrive down in the deep plants of great magnitude, some of which are called olives, some laurels, and some tresses of Isis[*]; and the plants here called love-restorers when lifted out of the earth and hung up not only live as long as you wish but sprout[*] [. . .]. Some plants are sown towards winter, and some at the height of summer as sesame and millet.[*] Thyme or centaury, if sown in good, rich soil and wetted and watered, departs from its natural quality and loses its strength, whereas drought delights it and causes it to reach its proper stature[*]; and some plants, as they say, cannot stand even dew, as is true of the majority of Arabian plants, but are blighted and destroyed by being moistened.[*] What wonder then if on the moon there grow roots and seeds and trees that have no need of rain nor yet of snow but are naturally adapted to a summery and rarefied air? And why is it unlikely that winds arise warmed by the moon and that breezes steadily accompany the rolling swell of her revolution and by scattering off and diffusing dews and light moisture suffice for the vegetation and that she herself is not fiery or dry in temperament but soft and humidifying? After all, no influence of dryness comes to us from her but much of moistness and femininity[*]: the growth of plants, the decay of meats, the souring and flattening of wine, the softening of timbers, the easy delivery of women.[*] Now that Pharnaces is quiet I am afraid of provoking and arousing him again if I cite, in the words of his own school, the flood-tides of Ocean and the swelling of the straits when they are increased and poured abroad by the liquefying action of the moon.[*] Therefore I shall rather turn to you, my dear Theon, for when you expound these words of Alcman’s,

[Such as] are nourished by Dew, daughter [of Zeus] and of [divine] Selene,[*]

you tell us that at this point he calls the air Zeus and says that it is liquefied by the moon and turns to dew-drops.[*] It is in fact probable, my friend, that the moon’s nature is contrary to that of the sun, if of herself she not only naturally softens and dissolves all that he condenses and dries but liquefies and cools even the heat that he casts upon her and imbues her with. They err then who believe the moon to be a fiery and glowing body; and those who demand that living beings there be equipped just as those here are for generation, nourishment, and livelihood seem blind to the diversities of nature, among which one can discover more and greater differences and dissimilarities between living beings than between them and inanimate objects.[*] Let there not be mouthless men nourished by odours who [Megasthenes] thinks [do exist][*]; yet the Hungerbane,[*] the virtue of which he was himself trying to explain to us, Hesiod hinted at when he said

Nor what great profit mallow has and squill[*]

and Epimenides made manifest in fact when he showed that with a very little fuel nature kindles and sustains the living creature, which needs no further nourishment if it gets as much as the size of an olive.[*] It is plausible that the men on the moon, if they do exist, are slight of body and capable of being nourished by whatever comes their way.[*] After all, they say that the moon herself, like the sun which is an animate being of fire many times as large as the earth, is nourished by the moisture on the earth, as are the rest of the stars too, though they are countless; so light and frugal of requirements do they conceive the creatures to be that inhabit the upper region.[*] We have no comprehension of these beings, however, nor of the fact that a different place and nature and temperature are suitable to them. Just as, assuming that we were unable to approach the sea or touch it but only had a view of it from afar and the information that it is bitter, unpotable, and salty water, if someone said that it supports in its depths many large animals of multifarious shapes and is full of beasts that use water for all the ends that we use air, his statements would seem to us like a tissue of myths and marvels, such appears to be our relation to the moon and our attitude towards her is apparently the same when we disbelieve that any men dwell there. Those men, I think, would be much more amazed at the earth, when they look out at the sediment and dregs[*] of the universe, as it were, obscurely visible in moisture, mists, and clouds as a lightless, low, and motionless spot, to think that it engenders and nourishes animate beings which partake of motion, breath, and warmth. If they should chance to hear somewhere these Homeric words, Dreadful and dank, which even gods abhor[*] and

Deep under Hell as far as Earth from Heaven,[*]

these they would say are simply a description of this place and Hell and Tartarus have been relegated hither while the moon alone is earth, since it is equally distant from those upper regions and these lower ones.