Men falling headlong and lives spurned away,9tumbling 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,10 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 storms11 but the air, <being tenuous> already and having a rolling swell12 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,13 so the moon, which is Athena in name and fact,14 nourishes her men by sending up ambrosia for them day by day, the food of <the> gods themselves as the ancient Pherecydes believes.15 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,16 how could it be supposed to grow there if the moon is not moistened by rain ?’
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So we for our part,” said I, ‘have now reported as much of that conversation1 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 moon2 — 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.’
3 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 Tantalus4 and on the other hand that those who dwell upon her, fast bound like so many Ixions5 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,6 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,7 There is reason to wonder then not that the velocity caused a lion to fall on the Peloponnesus8
but how it is that we are not forever seeing countless
1 See 921 f, 929 B, 929 F supra.
2 In De Placitis, 892 A = Aëtius, ii. 30. 1 this notion is ascribed to the Pythagoreans (and in the version of Stobaeus specifically to Philolaüs). Diogenes Laertius, ii. 8 ascribes it to Anaxagoras — if on the basis of frag. B 4 (ii, p. 34. 5 ff. [Diels-Kranz]), wrongly; and Cicero's ascription of it to Xenophanes (Acad. Prior. II, xxxix. 123) is certainly an error (despite Lactantius, Div. Inst. iii. 23. 12) but more probably due to confusion with Xenocrates than, as is usually said, a mistake for Anaxagoras (cf. J. S. Reid ad loc.; Diels-Kranz, Frag. der Vorsok.5 , i, p. 125. 40; Diels, Dox. Graeci, p. 121, n. 1). The ‘moon-dwellers’ became characters of ‘scientific fiction’ at least as early as Herodorus of Heraclea (cf. Athenaeus, ii. 57 f).
3 Timaeus, 40 B-C. Though ἀτρεκῆ does not appear there, it is introduced into the passage by Plutarch at 938 E infra and at Plat. Quaest. 1006 E, which indicates that he meant it as part of the quotation. Since there appears to be no other reference to the words τροφὸν ἡμετέραν in Plutarch's extant works, one cannot be sure that τροφήν here is not his own misquotation rather than a scribal error. (The phrase, τροφαῖς ζῴων, in De Superstitione, 171 A is probably not part of the adaptation of the Timaeus-passage there.)
4 Cf. the sarcastic remarks of Lucius in 923 C supra. For the ‘stone of Tantalus’ cf. Nostoi, frag. x ( = Athenaeus, 281 B - C); Pindar, Olympian, i. 57-58 and Isthmian, viii. 10-11: and Scholia in Olymp. i. 91 a, where reference is made to the ‘interpretation’ that the stone which threatens Tantalus is the sun, this being his punishment for having declared that the sun is an incandescent mass (cf. also scholiast on Euripides, Orestes, 982-986).
5 For the myth of Ixion on his wheel cf. Pindar, Pythian, ii. 21-48 and for Ixion used in a cosmological argument cf. Aristotle, De Caelo, 284 A 34-35.
6 An epithet of Hecate (cf. Athenaeus, vii. 325 A) applied to the moon only after she had been identified with the moongoddess, after which her epithets had to be explained by reference to lunar phenomena. Cf. e.g. Cleomedes, ii. 5. 111 (p. 202. 5-10 [Ziegler]) on τριπρόσωπος, and Cornutus, Theologiae Graecae Compend. 34 (p. 72. 7-15 [Lang]) on τρίμορφος and τριοδῖτις. The etymology here put into Theons mouth had already been given by Varro in his De Lingua Latina, vii. 16. For the moon as Hecate cf. notes b on 942 D and g on 944 C infra.
7 For the text, terminology, and intention of these two sentences cf. Class. Phil. xlvi (1951), pp. 146-147.
8 Cf. Epimenides, frag. B 2 (i, p. 32. 22 ff. [Diels-Kranz]); Anaxagoras, frag. A 77 (ii, p. 24. 25-26 and 28-30 [DielsKranz]). It may be that Anaxagoras referred to this legend in connection with his theory concerning the meteoric stone of Aegospotami, the fall of which he is said to have ‘predicted’ (Lysander, 12 [439 D-F]; Diogenes Laertius, ii. 10; Pliny, Nat. Hist. ii. 58 [59], 149-150). Kepler (note 77) suggests that the story of the lion falling from the sky may have arisen from a confusion of λάων (gen. pl. of λᾶας) and λέων or, as Prickard puts it, between λᾶς and λίς. Diogenes Laertius (viii. 72) quotes Timaeus to the effect that Heraclides Ponticus spoke of the fall of a man from the moon, an incident which Voss after Hirzel refers to a dialogue of his that may have influenced Plutarch (Voss, De Heraclidis Pontici Vita et Scriptis, p. 61).
9 Aeschylus, Supplices, 937; cf De Curiositate, 517 f, where also Plutarch gives βίων instead of Aeschylus's βίου.
10 i.e. Ethiopians: cf. Herodotus, iv. 183. 4; Strabo, ii. 5. 36 (c. 133).
11 Cf. Aristotle, Meteorology, 340 B 36 341 A 4, 347 A 2935, and Alexander, Meteor. p. 16. 6-15, where lines 10-11 guarantee and explain the ἐναντίους in Plutarch's text.
12 Cf 939 E infra and Plat. Quaest. 1005 E.
14 See 922 A supra and note C there.
15 = Pherecydes, frag. B 13 a (i, p. 51. 5-9 [Diels-Kranz]).
16 Megasthenes, frag. 34 (Frag. Hist. Graec. ii, pp. 425-427 [Müller]); cf. Strabo, ii. 1. 9 (c. 70) and xv. 1. 57 (c. 711); Pliny, Nat. Hist. vii. 2. 25. Aristotle (Parva Nat. 445 A 16-17) mentions the belief of certain Pythagoreans that some animals are nourished by odours; cf. the story told of Democritus, frags. A 28 and 29 (ii, p. 89. 23 ff. [Diels-Kranz]), and Lucian on the Selenites (Vera Hist. i. 23), a passage which, however, looks like a parody of Herodotus, i. 202. 2.
Plutarch. Moralia. with an English Translation by. Harold Cherniss and William C. Helmbold. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1957. 12.
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