Concerning the Face which Appears in the Orb Of the Moon (3)

Apollonides broke in and inquired what the opinion of Clearchus was. You are the last person, I said, who has any right not to know a theory of which geometry is, as it were, the very hearth and

home. The man, you see, asserts that what is called the face consists of mirrored likenesses, that is images of the great ocean reflected in the moon,[*] for the visual ray when reflected naturally reaches from many points objects which are not directly visible and the full moon is itself in uniformity and lustre[*] the finest and clearest of all mirrors. Just as you think, then, that the reflection of the visual ray to the sun accounts for the appearance of the (rainbow) in a cloud where the moisture has become somewhat smooth and (condensed),[*] so Clearchus thought that the outer ocean is seen in the moon, not in the place where it is but in the place whence the visual ray has been deflected to the ocean and the reflection of the ocean to us. So Agesianax again has somewhere said:

Or swell of ocean surging opposite

Be mirrored in a looking-glass of flame.

[*]