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First they behold the moon as she is in herself1: her magnitude and beauty and nature, which is not simple and unmixed but a blend as it were of star and earth. Just as the earth has become soft by having been mixed with breath and moist<ure> and as blood gives rise to sense-perception in the flesh with which it is commingled,2 so the moon, they say,3 because it has been permeated through and through by ether is at once animated and fertile and at the same time has the proportion of lightness to heaviness in equipoise. In fact it is in this way too, they say, that the universe itself has entirely escaped local motion, because it has been constructed out of the things that naturally move upwards and those that naturally move downwards.4 This was also the conception of Xenocrates who, taking his start from Plato, seems5 to have reached it by a kind of superhuman reasoning. Plato is the one who declared that each of the stars as well was constructed of earth and fire bound together in a proportion by means of the <two> intermediate natures, for nothing, as he said, attains perceptibility that does not contain an admixture of earth and light6; but Xenocrates says that the stars and the sun are composed of fire and the first density, the moon of the second density and air that is proper to her, and the earth of water [and air] and the third kind of density and that in general neither density all by itself nor subtility is receptive of soul.7 So much for the moon's substance. As to her breadth or magnitude, it is not what the geometers say but many times greater. She measures off the earth's shadow with few of her own magnitudes not because it is small but she more ardently hastens her motion in order that she may quickly pass through the gloomy place bearing away <the souls> of the good which cry out and urge her on because when they are in the shadow they no longer catch the sound of the harmony of heaven.8 At the same time too with wails <and> cries the souls of the chastised then approach through the shadow from below. That is why most people have the custom of beating brasses during eclipses and of raising a din and clatter against the souls,9 which are frightened off also by the socalled face when they get near it, for it has a grim and horrible aspect.10 It is no such thing, however; but just as our earth contains gulfs that are deep and extensive,11 one here pouring in towards us through the Pillars of Heracles and outside the Caspian and the Red Sea with its gulfs,12 so those features are depths and hollows of the moon. The largest of them is called13
‘Hecate's Recess,’
14 where the souls suffer and exact penalties for whatever they have endured or committed after having already become Spirits15; and the two long ones are called <‘the Gates’>,16 for through them pass the souls now to the side of the moon that faces heaven and now back to the side that faces earth.17 The side of the moon towards heaven is named ‘Elysian plain,’
18 the hither side ‘House of counter-terrestrial Phersephone.’
19
1 Plutarch certainly wrote αὐτῆς σελήνης (or perhaps αὐτῆς τῆς σελήνης) under the influence of Plato's ‘true earth,’ αὐτὴ ἡ γῆ, in Phaedo, 109 B 7, 110 B 6 (cf. 935 A supra and 944 B infra).
2 Cf. Aristotle, De Part. Animal. 656 B 19-21 and 25-26, 666 A 16-17; and Plato, Timaeus, 77 E on the connection of the blood-vessels with τὸ τῶν αἰσθήσεων πάθος.
3 Not ‘the demons’ who told the stranger the story, as Raingeard says, but the human authors of the theory mentioned in the next sentence; cf. Class. Phil. xlvi (1951), pp. 151-152.
4 Cf. S. V. F. ii, frag. 555 and Class. Phil. xlvi (1951), p. 157, n. 105.
5 The Greek does not imply, as Adler supposes, that Plutarch had any doubt about what Xenocrates had said (cf. E. M. Jones, The Platonism of Plutarch, p. 55).
6 Timaeus, 40 A and 31 B 32 C; cf. [Plato], Epinomis, 981 d-e; Plutarch, De Fortuna Romanorum, 316 E-F. Timaeus, 31 B strictly requires γῆς . . . καὶ πυρός here; but according to Timaeus, 45 B and 58 C φῶς is the species of fire that produces visibility.
7 Xenocrates, frag. 56 (Heinze); for text and implications cf. Class. Phil. xlvi (1951), p. 152.
8 Plutarch here gives a ‘mythical correction’ of the astronomical calculations in 923 A-B and 932 B supra (on the text and the paralogism of this ‘correction’ cf. Class. Phil. xlvi [1951], pp. 152-153) and also a mythical explanation of the acceleration of which he had spoken in 933 B supra. With this account of the effect of the lunar eclipse upon the disembodied souls cf. De Genio Socratis, 591 C and for the harmony in the heavens cf. 590 C-D there, De Musica, 1147, Plato's Republic, 617 B, Aristotle's De Caelo, 290 B 12 291 A 28.
9 Cf. Aemilius Paulus, 17 (264 B); Pliny, Nat. Hist. ii. 12. 9 (54); Tacitus, Annals, i. 28; Juvenal, vi. 442-443. The purpose of the custom is here made to fit the myth; in De Genio Socratis, 591 C the moon herself flashes and bellows to frighten away the impure souls.
10 Cf. Epigenes in Clement, Stromat. v. 49 (= Kern, Orphicorum Fragmenta, frag. 33): Γοργόνιον τὴν σελήνην διὰ τὸ ἐν αὐτῇ πρόσωπον. Cf. the notion that the face in the moon is that of the Sibyl (De Pythiae Oraculis, 398 C-D; De Sera Numinis Vindicta, 566 D).
11 Cf. Plato, Phaedo, 109 B.
12 For the Caspian see note f on 941 C supra. By ‘Red Sea’ Plutarch means what we call the Indian Ocean plus the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea; in Quaest. Conviv. 733 B he cites Agatharchidas who wrote an extensive work on the ‘Red Sea’ (cf. Photius, Bibliotheca, cod. 250 [pp. 441 ff., Bekker]).
13 Cf. Class. Phil. xlvi (1951), p. 151 on 943 E.
14 For Hecate and the moon see notes c on 937 F and b on 942 D supra; cf. Sophocles, frag. 492 (Nauck2) and Kern, Orphicorum Fragmenta, frag. 204. For Hecate's association with a cave cf. Homeric Hymn II, 24-25, and Roscher, Über Selene und Verwandtes, pp. 46-48. Plutarch himself associates μυχός with the ‘punishments in Hades’ (De Superstitione, 167 A).
15 a This has been called inconsistent with the preceding statement in chapter 28 that only pure or purified souls attain the moon. Even the pure souls that reach the moon, however, still have the affective soul as well as mind; and Plutarch has already said in chapter 28 (942 F) that the life which they lead on the moon is οὐ μακάριον οὐδὲ θεῖον.
16 Cf. Class. Phil. xlvi (1951), p. 153.
17 They pass to the outer side on their say to the ‘second death’ (944 E ff. infra) and to the hither side on their way to rebirth in bodies (945 C infra). In Amatorius, 766 B the place to which souls come to be reborn in the body is called οἱ Σελήνης καὶ Ἀφροδίτης λειμῶνες.
18 See 942 F supra and note d there.
19 Plutarch uses ἀντίχθων in the usual Pythagorean sense in De An. Proc. in Timaeo, 1028 B (cf. De Placitis, 891 f, 895 C, 895 E = Aëtius, ii. 29. 4; iii. 9. 2; iii. 11. 3). Identification of the moon with the counter-earth is ascribed to certain ‘Pythagoreans’ (but cf. Cherniss, Aristotle's Criticism of Plato and the Academy, i, p. 562) by Simplicius, De Caelo, p. 512. 17-20 (cf. Asclepius, Metaph. p. 35. 24-27; Scholia in Aristotelem, 505 A 1 [Brandis]).
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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