Concerning the Face which Appears in the Orb Of the Moon (5-9)

Whereat Lucius said: Nay, lest we give the impression of flatly insulting Pharnaces by thus passing over the Stoic opinion unnoticed, do now by all means address some remark to the gentleman who, supposing the moon to be a mixture of air and gentle fire, then says that what appears to be a figure is the result of the blackening of the air as when in a calm water there runs a ripple under the surface. [*] You are [very] nice, Lucius, I said, to dress up the absurdity in respectable language. Not so our

comrade[*]; but he said what is true, that they blacken the Moon’s eye defiling her with blemishes and bruises, at one and the same time addressing her as Artemis[*] and Athena[*] and making her a mass compounded of murky air and smouldering fire neither kindling nor shining of herself, an indiscriminate kind of body, forever charred and smoking like the thunderbolts that are darkling and by the poets called lurid.[*] Yet a smouldering fire, such as they suppose that of the moon to be, cannot persist or subsist at all unless it get solid fuel that shelters and at the same time nourishes it[*]; this some philosophers, I believe, see less clearly than do those who say in jest that Hephaestus is said to be lame because fire without wood, like the lame without a stick, makes no progress.[*] If the moon really is fire, whence came so much air in it? For the region that we see revolving above us is the place not of air but of a superior substance, the nature of which is to rarefy all things and set them afire; and, if air did come to be there, why has it not been etherealized by the fire[*] and in this transformation disappeared but instead has been preserved as a housemate of fire this long time, as if nails had fixed it forever to the same spots and riveted it together? Air is tenuous and without configuration, and so it naturally slips and does not stay in place; and it cannot have become solidified if it is commingled with fire and partakes neither of moisture nor of earth by which alone air can be solidified.[*] Moreover, velocity ignites the air in stones and in cold lead, not to speak of the air enclosed in fire that is whirling about with such great speed.[*] Why, they are vexed by Empedocles because he represents the moon to be a hail-like congelation of air encompassed by the sphere of fire[*]; but they themselves say that the moon is a sphere of fire containing air dispersed about it here and there, and a sphere moreover that has neither clefts nor depths and hollows, such as are allowed by those who make it an earthy body, but has the air evidently resting upon its convex surface. That it should so remain is both contrary to reason and impossible to square with what is observed when the moon is full. On that assumption there should have been no distinction of dark and shadowy air; but all the air should become dark when occulted, or when the moon is caught by the sun it should all shine out with an even light. For with us too, while the air in the depths and hollows of the earth, wherever the suns rays do not penetrate, remains shadowy and unlit, that which suffuses the earth outside takes on brilliance and a luminous colour. The reason is that air, because of its subtility, is delicately attuned to every quality and influence; and, especially if it touches light or, to use your phrase, merely is tangent to it, it is altered through and through and entirely illuminated.[*] So this same point seems right handsomely to re-enforce those who pack the air on the moon into depths of some kind and chasms, even as it utterly refutes you who make her globe an unintelligible mixture or compound of air and fire for it is not possible[*] that a shadow remain upon the surface when the sun casts his light upon all of the moon that is within the compass of our vision.

Even while I was still speaking Pharnaces spoke: Here we are faced again with that stock manoeuvre of the Academy[*]: on each occasion that they engage in discourse with others they will not offer any accounting of their own assertions but must keep

their interlocutors on the defensive lest they become the prosecutors. Well, me you will not to-day entice into defending the Stoics against your charges until I have called you people to account for turning the universe upside down. Thereupon Lucius laughed and said: Oh, sir, just don’t bring suit against us for impiety as Cleanthes thought that the Greeks ought to lay an action for impiety against Aristarchus the Samian on the ground that he was disturbing the hearth of the universe because he sought to save (the) phenomena by assuming that the heaven is at rest while the earth is revolving along the ecliptic and at the same time is rotating about its own axis.[*] We[*] express no opinion of our own now; but those who suppose that the moon is earth, why do they, my dear sir, turn things upside down any more than you[*] do who station the earth here suspended in the air? Yet the earth is a great deal larger than the moon[*] according to the mathematicians who during the occurrences of eclipses and the transits of the moon through the shadow calculate her magnitude by the length of time that she is obscured.[*] For the shadow of the earth grows smaller the further it extends, because the body that casts the light is larger than the earth[*]; and that the upper part of the shadow itself is taper and narrow was recognized, as they say, even by Homer, who called night nimble because of the sharpness of the shadow.[*] Yet captured by this part in eclipses[*] the moon barely escapes from it in a space thrice her own magnitude. Consider then how many times as large as the moon the earth is, if the earth casts a shadow which at its narrowest is thrice as broad as the moon.[*] All the same, you fear for the moon lest it fall; whereas concerning the earth perhaps Aeschylus has persuaded you that Atlas

Stands, staying on his back the prop of earth And sky no tender burden to embrace.[*]

Or, while under the moon there stretches air unsubstantial and incapable of supporting a solid mass, the earth, as Pindar says, is encompassed by steel-shod pillars[*]; and therefore Pharnaces is himself without any fear that the earth may fall but is sorry for the Ethiopians or Taprobanians,[*] who are situated under the circuit of the moon, lest such a great weight fall upon them. Yet the moon is saved from falling by its very motion and the rapidity of its revolution, just as missiles placed in slings are kept from falling by being whirled around in a circle.[*] For each thing is governed by its natural motion unless it be diverted by something else. That is why the moon is not governed by its weight: the weight has its influence frustrated by the rotatory motion. Nay, there would be more reason perhaps to wonder if she were absolutely unmoved and stationary like the earth. As it is, while [the] moon has good cause for not moving in this direction, the influence of weight alone might reasonably move the earth, since it has no part in any other motion; and the earth is heavier than the moon not merely in proportion to its greater size but still more, inasmuch as the moon has, of course, become light through the action of heat and fire.[*] In short, your own statements seem to make the moon, if it is fire, stand in greater need of earth, that is of matter to serve it as a foundation, as something to which to adhere, as something to lend it coherence, and as something that can be ignited by it, for it is impossible to imagine fire being maintained without fuel,[*] but you people say that earth does abide without root or foundation. [*] Certainly it does, said Pharnaces, in occupying the proper and natural place that belongs to it, the middle, for this is the place about which all weights in their natural inclination press against one another and towards which they move and converge from every direction, whereas all the upper space, even if it receive something earthy which has been forcibly hurled up into it, straightway extrudes it into our region or rather lets it go where its proper inclination causes it naturally to descend. [*]

At this — for I wished Lucius to have time to collect his thoughts — I called to Theon. Which of

the tragic poets was it, Theon, I asked, who said that physicians

With bitter drugs the bitter bile purge?

Theon replied that it was Sophocles.[*] Yes, I said, and we have of necessity to allow them this procedure; but to philosophers one should not listen if they desire to repulse paradoxes with paradoxes and in struggling against opinions that are amazing fabricate others that are more amazing and outlandish,[*] as these people do in introducing their motion to the centre. What paradox is not involved in this doctrine? Not the one that the earth is a sphere although it contains such great depths and heights and irregularities?[*] Not that people live on the opposite hemisphere clinging to the earth like wood-worms or geckos turned bottomside up?[*] — and that we ourselves in standing remain not at right angles to the earth but at an oblique angle, leaning from the perpendicular like drunken men?[*] Not that incandescent masses of forty tons[*] falling through the depth of the earth stop when they arrive at the centre, though nothing encounter or support them; and, if in their downward motion the impetus should carry them past the centre, they swing back again and return of themselves? Not that pieces of meteors burnt out on either side of the earth do not move downwards continually but falling upon the surface of the earth force their way into it from the outside and conceal themselves about the centre?[*] Not that a turbulent stream of water, if in flowing downwards it should reach the middle point, which they themselves call incorporeal,[*] stops suspended [or] moves round about it, oscillating in an incessant and perpetual see-saw?[*] Some of these a man could not even mistakenly force himself to conceive as possible. For this amounts to upside down and all things topsy-turvy, everything as far as the centre being down and everything under the centre in turn being up.[*] The result is that, if a man should so coalesce with the earth[*] that its centre is at his navel, the same person at the same time has his head up and his feet up too. Moreover, if he dig through the further side, his [bottom] in emerging is [up], and the man digging himself up is pulling himself down from above [*]; and, if someone should then be imagined to have gone in the opposite direction to this man, the feet of both of them at the same time turn out to be up and are so called.

Nevertheless, though of tall tales of such a kind and number they have shouldered and lugged in not a wallet-full, by heaven, but some juggler’s pack and hotchpotch, still they say[*] that others are playing the buffoon by placing the moon, though it is earth, on high and not where the centre is. Yet if all heavy body converges to the same point and is

compressed in all its parts upon its own centre,[*] it is no more as centre of the sum of things than as a whole that the earth would appropriate to herself the heavy bodies that are parts of herself; and [the downward tendency] of falling bodies[*] proves not that the [earth] is in the centre of the cosmos but that those bodies which when thrust away from the earth fall back to her again have some affinity and cohesion with her.[*] For as the sun attracts to itself the parts of which it consists[*] so the earth too accepts as [her] own the stone[*] that has properly a downward tendency, and consequently every such thing ultimately unites and coheres with her. If there is a body, however, that was not originally allotted to the earth or detached from it but has somewhere independently a constitution and nature of its own, as those men[*] would say of the moon, what is to hinder it from being permanently separate in its own place, compressed and bound together by its own parts? For it has not been proved that the earth is the centre of the sum of things,[*] and the way in which things in our region press together and concentrate upon the earth suggests how in all probability things in that region converge upon the moon and remain there. The man who drives together into a single region all earthy and heavy things and makes them part of a single body — I do not see for what reason he does not apply the same compulsion to light objects in their turn but allows so many separate concentrations of fire and, since he does not collect all the stars together, clearly does not think that there must also be a body common to all things that are fiery and have an upward tendency.

Now, said I, my dear Apollonides, you mathematicians[*] say that the sun is an immense distance from the upper circumference and that above

the sun Venus and Mercury and the other planets[*] revolve lower than the fixed stars and at great intervals from one another; but you think that in the cosmos there is provided no scope and extension for heavy and earthy objects. You see that it is ridiculous for us to deny that the moon is earth because she stands apart from the nether region and yet to call her a star although we see her removed so many thousands of miles from the upper circumference as if plunged [into] a pit. So far beneath the stars is she that the distance cannot be expressed, but you mathematicians in trying to calculate it run short of numbers; she practically grazes the earth and revolving close to it

Whirls like a chariot’s axle-box about,

Empedocles says,[*]

That skims [the post in passing].

Frequently she does not even surmount the earth’s shadow, though it extends but a little way because the illuminating body is very large; but she seems to revolve so close, almost within arm’s reach of the earth, as to be screened by it from the sun unless she rises above this shadowy, terrestrial, and nocturnal place which is earth’s estate. Therefore we must

boldly declare, I think, that the moon is within the confines of [the] earth inasmuch as she is occulted by its extremities.