Plutarch, De facie quae in orbe lunae apparet
Harold Cherniss and William C. Helmbold, Ed.

If not a single one of the parts of the cosmos ever got into an unnatural condition but each one is naturally situated, requiring no transposition or rearrangement and having required none in the beginning either, I cannot make out what use there is of providence¹ or of what Zeus, the master-craftsman² is maker and father-creator.³ In an army, certainly, tacticians are useless if each one of the soldiers should know of himself his post and position and the moment when he must take and keep them. Gardeners and builders are useless too if here water all of itself ‘naturally’ moves to the things that require it and irrigates them with its stream, and there bricks and timbers and stones by following their ‘natural’ inclinations and tendencies assume of themselves their appropriate position and arrangement. If, however, this notion eliminates providence forthwith and if the arrangement of existing things pertains to God and <the> distributing of them too,⁴ what wonder is there that nature has been so marshalled and disposed that here in our region there is fire but the stars are yonder and again that earth is here but the moon is established on high, held fast by the bonds of reason which are firmer than the bonds of nature?⁵ For, if all things really must follow their ‘natural’ inclinations and move with their ‘natural’ motions, you must order the sun not to revolve and Venus too and every other star as well, for light and fiery bodies move ‘naturally’ upwards and not in a circle.⁶ If, however, nature includes such variation in accordance with location that fire, though it is seen to move upwards here, as soon as it has reached the heavens revolves along with their rotation, what wonder is there that the same thing has happened to heavy and earthy bodies that have got there and that they too have been reduced by the environment to a different kind of motion? For it certainly cannot be that heaven ‘naturally’ deprives light objects of their upward motion but is unable to master objects that are heavy and have a downward inclination; on the contrary, by <whatever> influence it rearranged the former it rearranged the latter too and employed the nature of both of them for the better.