ON SUPERSTITION

INTRODUCTION

The drift of Plutarch’s remarkable Treatise on Superstition is well given in the opening words of Bacon’s famous Essay: ‘It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such an opinion as is unworthy of him. For the one is unbelief, the other is contumely, and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity.’ The word—the same which, in its adjective, St. Paul applies, almost in a good sense, to the Athenians of his day^[262]—is correctly defined by Theophrastus, in his ‘character’ of the superstitious man, as timidity with regard to the supernatural, and this timidity at once passes into cowardice. There is in this treatise a fighting spirit and a directness of attack unusual in Plutarch, who mostly speaks with academic balance about conflicting schools of thought. Thus it has been suggested that one or other of his writings against the Epicureans may be intended to supply the required study ‘On Atheism’. There are many passages in the Lives and also in the Moralia where the author is seen to mediate between credulity and scepticism, superstition and atheism; usually showing a tendency to ‘the more benign extreme’; there is more to be lost by an undue hardening of the intellect than by a wise hospitality to beliefs and ideas which lie beyond strict proof. Here the attack is one-sided and uncompromising. At the end of the treatise true piety is exhibited as a middle path between superstition and atheism. This is not to be understood of a quantitative excess or defect. Piety in excess may induce a habit which deserves the name of superstition, 220such as has been the fair butt of satirists in all ages, and of humorists like Theophrastus. But Plutarch is thinking not of excess, but of perversion, a piety directed to wrong powers, or to powers conceived of in the wrong way. There is a striking instance in the Life of Pelopidas (c. 21), when some of the prophets invited that great soldier to obey the warning of a dream by slaying his daughter, for which there were ancient precedents. ‘But some on the other side urged, that such a barbarous and impious oblation could not be pleasing to any superior beings; that Typhons and Giants did not preside over the world, but the general father of Gods and men; that it was absurd to imagine any Divinities or powers delighted in slaughter or sacrifices of men; or, if there were any such, they were to be neglected, as weak and unable to assist; such unreasonable and cruel desires could only proceed from, and live in, weak and depraved minds.’

The situation is saved by the good sense of the augur Theocritus, the same who plays a quaint and gallant part in the enterprise described in The Genius of Socrates; and a chestnut colt takes the place of the daughter. And there is no doubt on which side of the argument Plutarch’s sympathies lie.

An admirable running commentary on Plutarch’s treatise is supplied by the Discourse on Superstition of John Smith, the Cambridge Platonist (1618-52), here printed as an Appendix to it. Like Bacon, John Smith has written also a Discourse on Atheism, from which it may be sufficient for the present purpose to quote the words of the Son of Sirach appended as his conclusion:

‘O Lord, Father and God of my life, give me not a proud look, but turn away from thy servants a Giant-like minde’ (Ecclus. 23, 4).

See, for this whole treatise, Dr. Oakesmith’s Chapter IX, pp. 179 foll.

221

ON SUPERSTITION

|164 E| The stream of ignorance and of misconception about the Gods passed, from the very first, into two channels; one branch flowed, as it were, over stony places, and has produced atheism in hard characters, the other over moist ground, and this has produced superstition in the tender ones. Now any error of judgement, especially on such matters, is a vicious thing, but if passion be added it is more vicious. For all passion is ‘deceit accompanied by inflammation’; and as dislocations are more |F| serious when there is also a wound, so are distortions of the soul when there is passion. A man thinks that atoms and a void are the first principles of the universe; the conception is a false one, but does not produce ulceration or spasm, or tormenting pain. Another conceives of wealth as the greatest |165| good; this falsity has poison in it, preys on his soul, deranges it, allows him no sleep, fills him with stinging torments, thrusts him down steep places, strangles him, takes away all confidence of speech. Again, some think that virtue is a corporeal thing, and vice also; this is a gross piece of ignorance perhaps, but not worthy of lament or groans. But where there are such judgements and conceptions as these:

Alas, poor Virtue! so thou art but words,

And as a thing I was pursuing thee^[263]—

dropping, he means, the injustice which makes money, and the intemperance which is parent of all pleasure—, these it is worth our while to pity and to resent also, because their presence |B| in the soul breeds diseases and passions in numbers, very worms and vermin.

222II. And so it is with the subjects of our present discourse. Atheism, which is a faulty judgement that there is nothing blessed or imperishable, seems to work round through disbelief in the Divine to actual apathy; its object in not acknowledging Gods is that it may not fear them. Superstition is shown by its very name to be a state of opinion charged with emotion and productive of such fear as debases and crushes the man; he thinks that there are Gods, but that they are |C| grievous and hurtful. The atheist appears to be unmoved at the mention of the Divine; the superstitious is moved, but in a wrong and perverted sense. Ignorance has produced in the one disbelief of the power which is helping him, in the other a superadded idea that it is hurting. Hence atheism is theory gone wrong, superstition is ingrained feeling, the outcome of false theory.

III. Now all diseases and affections of the soul are discreditable, but there is in some of them a gaiety, a loftiness, a distinction, which come of a light heart; we may say that none of these is wanting in a strong active impulse. Only there is this common charge to be laid against every such affection, that by stress of the active impulse it forces and |D| constrains the reason. Fear alone, as deficient in daring as it is in reason, keeps the irrational part inoperative, without resource or shift. Hence it has been called by two names, ‘Deima’ and ‘Tarbos’,^[264] because it at once constricts and vexes the soul. But of all fears that which comes of superstition is most inoperative, and most resourceless. The man who never sails fears not the sea, nor the non-combatant, war; the home-keeping man fears no robbers, the poor no informers, the plain citizen no envy, the dweller among the Gauls^[265] no earthquake, among the Ethiopians no thunder. The man who fears the Gods fears everything, land, sea; air, sky; darkness, 223light; sound, silence; to dream, to wake. Slaves forget |E| their masters while they sleep, sleep eases the prisoner’s chain; angry wounds, ulcers that raven and prey upon the flesh, and agonizing pains, all stand aloof from men that sleep:

Dear soothing sleep, that com’st to succour pains,

How sweet is thy approach in this my need.^[266]

Superstition does not allow a man to say this; she alone has no truce with sleep, and suffers not the soul to breathe awhile, and |F| take courage, and thrust away its bitter heavy thoughts about the God. The sleep of the superstitious is a land of the ungodly, where blood-curdling visions, and monstrous whirling phantoms, and sure penalties are awake; the unhappy soul is hunted by dreams out of every spell of sleep it has, lashed and punished by itself, as though by some other, and receives injunctions horrible and revolting. Then when they have risen out of sleep, they do not scorn it all, or laugh it down, or perceive that none of the things which vexed them was real, but, escaped from the shadow of an illusion with no harm in it, they fall upon a vision of the day and deceive themselves outright, and spend |166| money to vex their souls, meeting with quacks and charlatans who tell them:

If nightly vision fright thy sleep,

Or hags their hellish revel keep,^[267]

call in the wise woman, and take a dip into the sea, then sit on the ground, and remain so a whole day.

Ah! Greeks, what ills outlandish have ye found,^[268]

namely, by superstition—dabbling in mud, plunges into filth, keepings of Sabbaths, falling on the face, foul attitudes, weird prostrations. Those who were concerned to keep music 224regular used to enjoin on singers to the harp to sing ‘with |B| mouth aright’. But we require that men should pray to the gods with mouth aright and just; not to consider whether the tongue of the victim be clean and correct, while they distort their own and foul it with absurd outlandish words and phrases, and transgress against the divine rule of piety as our fathers knew it. The man in the comedy has a passage which puts it happily to those who plate their bedsteads with gold and silver:

The one free gift of gods to mortals, sleep,

Why make it for thyself a costly boon?^[269]

|C| So we may say to the superstitious man, that the Gods gave sleep for oblivion of troubles and a respite from them; why make it for thyself a cell of punishment, a chamber of abiding torment, whence the miserable soul cannot run away unto any other sleep? Heraclitus^[270] says that ‘waking men have one world common to all, but in sleep each betakes him to a world of his own.’ The superstitious has no world, no, not a common world, since neither while he is awake does he enjoy his reason, nor when he sleeps is he set free from his tormentor; reason ever drowses, and fear is ever awake; there is no escape, nor change of place.

IV. Polycrates was a terrible tyrant in Samos, Periander |D| at Corinth, yet no one continued to fear them when he had removed to a free and democratic state. But when a man fears the sovereignty of the Gods as a grim inexorable tyranny, whither shall he migrate, where find exile, what sort of land can he find where no Gods are, or of sea? Into what portion of the world wilt thou creep and hide thyself, and believe, thou miserable creature, that thou hast escaped from God? There is a law which allows even slaves, if they have despaired 225of liberty, to petition to be sold, and so change to a milder master. Superstition allows no exchange of Gods, nor is it possible to find a God who shall not be terrible to him who fears those of his country and his clan, who shivers at the ‘Preservers’ and trembles in alarm before the beneficent beings from whom we ask wealth, plenty, peace, concord, a successful |E| issue for our best of words and works. And then these men reckon slavery a misfortune, and say:

A dire mishap it is, for man or maid,

To pass to service of some ill-starred lord.^[271]

Yet how much more dire is it, think you, for them to pass to lords from whom is no flight, or running away, no shifting. The slave has an altar to flee unto, even for robbers many temples are inviolable, and fugitives in war, if they lay hold of shrine or temple, take courage. The superstitious shudders in alarm at those very things beyond all others, wherein those who fear the worst find hope. Never drag the superstitious man from temples; within them is punishment and retribution |F| for him. Why more words? ‘Death is the limit of life to all mankind.’^[272] Yes, but even death is no limit to superstition; superstition crosses the boundaries to the other side, and makes fear endure longer than life. It attaches to death the apprehension of undying ills, and when it ceases from troubles, it |167| thinks to enter upon troubles which never cease. Gates are opened for it into a very depth of Hades, rivers of fire and streams which flow out of Styx mingle their floods; darkness itself is spread with phantoms manifold, obtruding cruel visions and pitiful voices; there are judges and tormentors, and chasms and abysses which teem with myriad evil things. Thus has superstition, that God-banned fear of Gods, made that inevitable to 226itself by anticipation, of which it had escaped the suffering in act.^[273]

V. None of these horrors attaches to atheism. Yet its ignorance is distressing; it is a great misfortune to a soul |B| to see so wrong and grope so blindly about such great matters, because the light is extinguished of the brightest and most availing out of many eyes when the perception of God is lost. But to the opinion now before us there does attach from the very first, as we have already said, an emotional element, cankering, perturbing, and slavish. Plato^[274] says that music, whose work it is to make men’s lives harmonious and rhythmical, was given to them by Gods, not for wanton tickling of the ears, but to clear the revolutions and harmonies of the soul from the disturbing impulses which rove within the body, such as most often run riot, where the Muse is not or the Grace, |C| and do violence and mar the tune; to bring them to order, to roll them smooth, to lead them aright, and settle them.

But they whom Zeus not loves (says Pindar)^[275]

Turn to the sound a dim disdainful ear

What time the Muses’ voice they hear.

Yes, they grow savage and rebellious, as the tigers, they say, are maddened and troubled at the sound of the drum, and at last tear themselves to pieces. A lesser evil then it is for those who, through deafness and a dulled ear, are apathetic and insensible to music. Tiresias was unfortunate that he could not see his children and familiar friends, but far worse was the |D| case of Athamas and of Agave, who saw them as lions and stags. Better, I think, it was for Hercules in his madness not to see his sons, or feel their presence, than to treat his dearest ones as enemies.

VI. What then? Comparing the feeling of the atheists with 227that of the superstitious, do we not find a similar difference? The former see no Gods at all, the latter think that they exist as evil beings. The former neglect them, the latter imagine that to be terrible which is kind, that tyrannical which is fatherly, loving care to be injury, the ‘unapproachable’^[276] to be savage and brutal. Then, trusting to coppersmiths, or marble workers, or modellers in wax, they fashion the forms of the Gods in human shape, and these they mould and frame and worship; while |E| they despise philosophers and men who know life, if they point them to the majesty of God consisting with goodness, and magnanimity, and patience, and solicitude. Thus in the former the result is insensibility and want of belief in all that is fair and helpful, in the latter confusion and fear in the presence of help. In a word, atheism is an apathy for the Divine which fails to perceive the good, superstition is an excess of feeling which suspects that the good is evil. They fear the Gods, and they flee to the Gods for refuge; they flatter and they revile them; they invoke and they censure them. It is man’s common lot not to succeed always or in all. |F|

They, from sickness free and age,

Quit of toils, the deep-voiced rage

Of Acheron for ay have left behind,

as Pindar^[277] says; but human sufferings and doings flow in a mingled stream of vicissitude, now this way, now that.

VII. Now look with me at the atheist, first when things cross his wishes, and consider his attitude. If he is a decent, quiet person, he takes what comes in silence, and provides his own means of succour and consolation. If he be impatient and querulous, he directs all his complainings against Fortune, and |168| the way things happen; he cries out that nothing goes by justice or as Providence ordains, all is confused and jumbled up; 228the tangled web of human life is unpicked. Not so the superstitious: if the ill which has befallen him be the veriest trifle, still he sits down and builds on to his annoyance a pile of troubles, grievous and great and inextricable, heaping up for himself fears, dreads, suspicions, worries, a victim to every sort of groaning and lamentation; for he blames not man, nor fortune, nor |B| occasion, nor himself, but for all the God. From that quarter comes pouring upon him, he says, a Heaven-sent stream of woe; he is punished thus by the Gods not because he is unfortunate, but because he is specially hated by them, all that he suffers is his own proper deserts. Then the atheist, when he is sick, reckons up his own surfeitings, carouses, irregularities in diet, or over-fatigues, or unaccustomed changes of climate or place. Or, again, if he have met with political reverses, become unpopular or discredited in high quarters, he seeks for the cause in himself or his party.

Where my transgression? or what have I done? what duty omitted?^[278]

But to the superstitious every infirmity of his body, every |C| loss of money, any death of a child, foul weather and failures in politics, are reckoned for blows from the God and assaults of the fiend. Hence he does not even take courage to help himself, to get rid of the trouble, or to remedy it, or make resistance, lest he should seem to be fighting the Gods, and resisting when punished. So the doctor is thrust out of the sick man’s chamber, and the mourner’s door is closed against the sage who comes to comfort and advise. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘let me take my punishment, as the miscreant that I am, an accursed |D| object of hate to Gods and daemons.’ It is open to a man who has no conviction that there are Gods, when suffering from some great grief and trouble, to wipe away a tear, to cut his hair, to put off his mourning. How are you going to address the superstitious 229in like case, wherein to bring him help? He sits outside, clothed in sackcloth, or with filthy rags hanging about him, as often as not rolling naked in the mud, while he recites errors and misdoings of his own, how he ate this, or drank that, or walked on a road which the spirit did not allow. At the very best, if he have taken superstition in a mild form, he sits in the house fumigating and purifying himself. The old women ‘make a peg of him’, as Bion says, and on it they hang—whatever |E| they choose to bring!

VIII. They say that Tiribazus, when arrested by the Persians, drew his scimitar, being a powerful man, and fought for his life; then, when they loudly protested that the arrest was by the king’s orders, at once dropped his point, and held out his hands to be tied. Is not this just what happens in the case before us? Other men make a fight against mischances and thrust all aside, that they may devise ways of escape and evade what is unwelcome to themselves. But the superstitious man listens to nobody, and addresses himself thus: ‘Poor wretch, |F| thy sufferings come from Providence, and by the order of the God.’ So he flings away all hope, gives himself up, flies, obstructs those who try to help him. Many tolerable troubles are made deadly by various superstitions. Midas^[279] of old, as we are to believe, dispirited and distressed by certain dreams, was so miserable that he sought a voluntary death by drinking bulls’ blood. Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, during the war with the Lacedaemonians, when dogs were howling like wolves, and rye grass sprouting around his ancestral hearth, in utter despair at the extinction of all his hopes, cut his own throat. Perhaps it would have been better for Nicias^[280], the Athenian |169| general, to find the same release from superstition as Midas or 230Aristodemus, and not, in his terror of the shadow when the moon was eclipsed, to sit still under blockade, and afterwards, when forty thousand had been slaughtered or taken alive, to be taken prisoner and die ingloriously. For there is nothing so terrible when the earth blocks the way, or when its shadow meets the moon in due cycle of revolutions; what is terrible is that a man should plunge^[281] into the darkness of superstition, |B| and that its dark shadow should confound a man’s reason and make it blind in matters where reason is most needed.

Glaucus, see! the waves already from the depth of ocean stirred,

And a cloud is piling upwards, right above the Gyrean point,

Certain presage of foul weather.^[282]

When the helmsman sees this, he prays that he may escape out of the peril, and calls on the Gods that save; but, while he prays, his hand is on the tiller, and he lowers the yard-arm,

Furls his mainsail, and from billows black as Erebus he flees.^[283]

Hesiod^[284] tells the farmer to pray to Zeus below the earth and holy Artemis before he ploughs or sows, but to hold on to |C| the plough-handle as he prays. Homer^[285] tells us that Ajax, before meeting Hector in single combat, commanded the Greeks to pray for him to the Gods; then, while they were praying, he was arming. Agamemnon, when he had given orders to the fighters:

Let each his spear set, and prepare his shield,

then begs of Zeus:

Grant that this hand make Priam’s halls a heap.^[286]

For God is the hope of valour, not the subterfuge of cowardice. 231The Jews, on the other hand, because it was a sabbath, sat on in uncleansed clothes, while their enemies planted their ladders and took the walls, never rising to their feet, as though entangled in the one vast draw-net of their superstition.^[287]

IX. Such then is superstition in disagreeable matters and on |D| what we call critical occasions, but it has no advantage, even in what is more pleasant, over atheism. Nothing is more pleasant to men than feasts, temple banquets, initiations, orgies, prayers to the Gods, and solemn supplications. See the atheist there, laughing in a wild sardonic peal at the proceedings, probably with a quiet aside to his intimates, that those who think this all done for the Gods are crazed and possessed; but that is the worst that can be said of him. The superstitious man wants to be cheerful and enjoy himself, but he cannot.

Rife too the city is with heavy reek

Of victims slain, and rife with divers cries,

The wail for healing and the moan for death.^[288]

|E| So is the soul of the superstitious. With the crown on his head he grows pale; while he sacrifices he shudders; he prays with a quivering voice and offers incense with hands that shake; he shows all through that Pythagoras^[289] talks nonsense when he says: ‘We reach our best when we draw near to the Gods.’ For it is then that the superstitious are at their miserable worst; the halls and temples of the Gods which they approach are for them dens of bears, lairs of serpents, caverns of monsters of the sea!

X. Hence it comes upon me as a surprise when men say that |F| atheism is impiety, but that superstition is not. Yet Anaxagoras had to answer a charge of impiety for saying that the sun is a stone, whereas no one has called the Cimmerians impious for thinking that there is no sun at all. What do you say? Is the man who recognizes no Gods a profane person, and does 232not he, who takes them for such beings as the superstitious think, hold a far more profane creed? I know that I would rather men said about me that there is not, and never has come |170| into existence, a Plutarch, than that there is a man Plutarch unstable, shifty, readily provoked, revengeful over accidents, aggrieved at trifles; who, if you leave him out of your supper party, if you are busy and do not come to the door, if you pass him without a greeting, will cling to your flesh like a leech and gnaw it, or will catch your child, and thrash him to pieces, or will turn some beast, if he keep one, into your crops, and ruin the harvest. When Timotheus was singing of Artemis at Athens in the words:

Wanderer, frenzied one, wild and inebriate!

|B| Cinesias the composer rose from his place with ‘Such a daughter be thine!’ Yet the like of this, and worse things too, do the superstitious hold about Artemis:

She would burn a hanging woman,

She a mother in her pangs;

She would bring pollution to you

From the chamber of a corpse.

In the crossways swoop upon you,

Fix on you a murderer’s shame.^[290]

Nor will their views about Apollo, or Hera, or Aphrodite be a whit more decent, they fear and tremble at them all. Yet what was there in Niobe’s blasphemy about Latona, compared to what |C| superstition has persuaded fools to believe about that goddess, how she felt herself insulted and actually shot down the poor woman’s

Six daughters, beauteous all, six blooming sons,^[291]

so greedy of calamities for another woman, so implacable! For if the Goddess had really been full of wrath and resentment of 233wickedness, and felt aggrieved at insults to herself, disposed to resent, rather than to smile at human folly and ignorance, why then she ought to have shot down those who lyingly imputed to her such savage bitterness, in speech or books. Certainly we denounce the bitterness of Hecuba as savage and beastly: |D|

In whose mid-liver I my teeth would set,

And cling and gnaw.^[292]

But of the Syrian Goddess superstitious men believe that if one eats sprats or anchovies, she munches his shins, fills his body with sores, and rots his liver.^[293]

XI. How then? Is it impious to say bad things about the Gods, but not impious to think them? Or is it the thought of the blasphemer which makes his voice amiss? We men scout abusive language as the outward sign of ill-feeling. We reckon for enemies those who speak ill of us because we think that they also think ill. Now you see the sort of things which the superstitious think about the Gods; they take them to be capricious, |E| faithless, shifty, revengeful, cruel, vexed about trifles, all reasons why the superstitious must perforce hate and fear the Gods. Of course he does, when he thinks that they have been, and will be again, authors of his greatest ills. But if he hates and fears the Gods, he is their enemy. Yet he worships, and sacrifices, and sits before their shrines. And no wonder; men salute tyrants also, and court them, and set up their figures in gold. But ‘in silence’ they hate them, ‘wagging the head’.^[294] Hermolaus remained Alexander’s courtier, Pausanias served on Philip’s |F| bodyguard, Chaereas on that of Caligula; but each of them would say while he attended on his master

Sure thou shouldst rue it if my arm were strong.^[295]

234The atheist thinks there are no Gods, the superstitious wishes that there were none; he believes against his will, for he fears to disbelieve. And yet, as Tantalus would gladly slip from beneath the stone swinging over his head, so is it with the superstitious and his fear, a pressure no less sore. He would reckon the atheist’s mood a blessed one, for there is freedom in it. As things are, the atheist is quite clear of superstition; the superstitious is at heart an atheist, only too weak to believe what he wishes to believe about the Gods.

|171| XII. Again, the atheist is in no sense responsible for superstition, whereas superstition provides atheism with a principle which brings it into being, and then an apology for its existence which is neither true nor honest, but is in a sense colourable. For it is not because they find anything to blame in sky, or stars, or seasons, or cycles of the moon, or movements of the sun around the earth, ‘those artificers of day and night’,^[296] or espy confusion and disorder in the breeding of animals or the increase of fruits, that they condemn the universe to godlessness. No! Superstition and its ridiculous doings and emotions, words, |B| gestures, juggleries, sorceries, coursings around and beatings of cymbals, purifications which are impure, and cleansings which are filthy, weird illegal punishments and degradations at temples—these give certain persons a pretext for saying that better no Gods than Gods, if Gods accept such things and take pleasure in them, Gods so violent, so petty, so sore about trifles.

XIII. Were it not better then for those Gauls^[297] and Scythians to have had no notion at all about Gods, neither imagination nor record of them, than to think that there are Gods who take |C| pleasure in the blood of slaughtered men and who accept that as the supreme form of solemn sacrifice? What? Were it not an advantage to the Carthaginians to have had a Critias or a Diagoras for their first lawgiver and to recognize neither God 235nor daemon, than to offer such sacrifices as they did offer to Cronus?^[298] It was not the case which Empedocles puts against those who sacrifice animals:

Father, uplifting his son, not marking the change of the body,

Prays as he takes the dear life, poor fool.

Knowing and recognizing their own children, they used to sacrifice them—nay, the childless would buy children from poor parents and cut their throats as though they were lambs or chickens—, and the mother would stand by dry-eyed and with |D| never a groan. If she should groan or weep, she would have to lose the merit, and the child was sacrificed all the same, while the whole space in front of the shrine was filled with the rattle of drums and the din of fifes, in order that the sound of the wailing might be drowned. Suppose that Typhons, say, or Giants, had turned out the Gods and were our rulers, in what sacrifices but these would they delight, or what other solemnities would they require? Amestris,^[299] wife of Xerxes, buried twelve men alive, as her own offering to Hades, who, as Plato^[300] tells us, is |E| kind and wise and detains souls by persuasion and reason, and so has been named ‘Hades’. Xenophanes,^[301] the natural philosopher, when he saw the Egyptians beating their breasts and wailing at their feasts, gave them a home lesson: ‘If these are Gods, do not mourn them; if men, why sacrifice to them?

XIV. There is no sort of disease so capricious and so varied in emotions, such a medley of opposite, or rather conflicting, opinions, as is that of superstition. We must flee from it then, but as safety and advantage point, not like men who run for their lives from robbers or beasts or fire, never looking round or using their heads, and plunge into pathless wastes with pits and |F| precipices. For that is how some flee from superstition and plunge into a rough and flinty atheism, overleaping Piety seated in the middle space.

236

APPENDIX A SHORT DISCOURSE OF SUPERSTITION

By JOHN SMITH

THE CONTENTS OF THE ENSUING DISCOURSE

The true Notion of Superstition well express’d by Δεισιδαιμονία, i.e. an over-timorous and dreadful apprehension of the Deity.

A false opinion of the Deity the true cause and rise of Superstition.

Superstition is most incident to such as Converse not with the Goodness of God, or are conscious to themselves of their own unlikeness to him.

Right apprehensions of God beget in man a Nobleness and Freedome of Soul.

Superstition, though it looks upon God as an angry Deity, yet it counts him easily pleas’d with flattering Worship.

Apprehensions of a Deity and Guilt meeting together are apt to excite Fear.

Hypocrites to spare their Sins seek out waies to compound with God.

Servile and Superstitious Fear is encreased by Ignorance of the certain Causes of Terrible Effects in Nature, &c., as also by frightful Apparitions of Ghosts and Spectres.

A further Consideration of Superstition as a Composition of Fear and Flattery.

A fuller Definition of Superstition, according to the Sense of the Ancients.

Superstition doth not alwaies appear in the same Form, but passes from one Form to another, and sometimes shrouds it self under Forms seemingly Spiritual and more refined.

237

Of Superstition

Having now done with what we propounded as a Preface to our following Discourses, we should now come to treat of the main Heads and Principles of Religion. But before we doe that, perhaps it may not be amiss to enquire into some of those Anti-Deities that are set up against it, the chief whereof are Atheism and Superstition; which indeed may seeme to comprehend in them all kind of Apostasy and Praevarication from Religion. We shall not be over-curious to pry into such foule and rotten carkasses as these are too narrowly, or to make any subtile anatomy of them; but rather enquire a litle into the Original and Immediate Causes of them; because it may be they may be nearer of kin then we ordinarily are aware of, while we see their Complexions to be so vastly different the one from the other.

And first of all for Superstition (to lay aside our Vulgar notion of it which much mistakes it) it is the same with that Temper of Mind which the Greeks call Δεισιδαιμονία, (for so Tully frequently translates that word, though not so fitly and emphatically as he hath done some others:) It imports an overtimorous and dreadfull apprehension of the Deity; and therefore with Hesychius Δεισιδαιμονία and Φοβοθεΐα are all one, and Δεισιδαίμων is by him expounded ὁ εἰδωλολάτρης, ὁ εὐσεβής, καὶ δειλὸς παρὰ θεοῖς, an Idolater, and also one that is very prompt to worship the Gods, but withall fearfull of them. And therefore the true Cause and Rise of Superstition is indeed nothing else but a false opinion of the Deity, that renders him dreadfull and terrible, as being rigorous and imperious; that which represents him as austere and apt to be angry, but yet impotent, and easy to be appeased again by some flattering devotions, especially if performed with sanctimonious shewes and a solemn sadness of Mind. And I wish that that Picture of God which some Christians have drawn of him, wherein Sowreness and Arbitrariness appear so much, doth not too much resemble it. According to this sense, Plutarch hath well defined it in his book περὶ δεισιδαιμονίας 238in this manner, δόξαν ἐμπαθῆ καὶ δέους ποιητικὴν ὑπόληψιν οὖσαν ἐκταπεινοῦντος καὶ συντρίβοντος τὸν ἄνθρωπον, οἰόμενον τε εἶναι θεοὺς εἶναι δὲ λυπηροὺς καὶ βλαβερούς, a strong passionate Opinion, and such a Supposition as is productive of a fear debasing and terrifying a man with the representation of the Gods as grievous and hurtfull to Mankind.

Such men as these converse not with the Goodness of God, and therefore they are apt to attribute their impotent passions and peevishness of Spirit to him. Or it may be because some secret advertisements of their Consciences tell them how unlike they themselves are to God, and how they have provoked him; they are apt to be as much displeased with him as too troublesome to them, as they think he is displeased with them. They are apt to count this Divine Supremacy as but a piece of tyranny that by its Soveraign Will makes too great encroachments upon their Liberties, and that which will eat up all their Right and Property; and therefore are lavishly afraid of him, τὴν τῶν θεῶν ἀρχὴν ὡς τυραννίδα φοβούμενοι σκυθρωπὴν καὶ ἀπαραίτητον, fearing Heaven’s Monarchy as a severe and churlish Tyranny from which they cannot absolve themselves, as the same Author speaks: and therefore he thus discloseth the private whisperings of their minds, ᾅδου τινες ἀνοίγονται πύλαι βαθείαι, καὶ ποταμοῖ πυρὸς ὁμοῦ καὶ στυγὸς ἀπορρῶγες ἀναπετάννυνται, &c., the broad gates of hell are opened, the rivers of fire and Stygian inundations run down as a swelling flood, there is thick darkness crowded together, dreadfull and gastly Sights of Ghosts screeching and howling, Judges and tormentors, deep gulfes and Abysses full of infinite miseries. Thus he. The Prophet Esay gives us this Epitome of their thoughts, chap. 33: The Sinners in Zion are afraid, fearfulness hath surprized the hypocrites: who shall dwell with the devouring fire? who shall dwell with everlasting burnings? Though I should not dislike these dreadful and astonishing thoughts of future torment, which I doubt even good men may have cause to press home upon their own spirits, while they find Ingenuity less active, the more to restrain sinne; yet I think it little commends God, and as little benefits us, to fetch all this horror and astonishment from the Contemplations of a Deity, which should alwayes be the most serene and lovely: our apprehensions of the Deity should be such as might ennoble our Spirits, and not debase them. A right knowledge of God 239would beget a freedome and Liberty of Soul within us, and not servility; ἀρετῆς γὰρ ἐλπὶς ὁ Θεός εστιν οὐ δουλείας πρόφασις, as Plutarch hath well observ’d; our thoughts of a Deity should breed in us hopes of Vertue, and not gender to a spirit of bondage.

But that we may pass on. Because this unnaturall resemblance of God as an angry Deity in impure minds, should it blaze too furiously, like the Basilisk would kill with its looks; therefore these Painters use their best arts a little to sweeten it, and render it less unpleasing. And those that fancy God to be most hasty and apt to be displeased, yet are ready also to imagine him so impotently mutable, that his favour may be won again with their uncouth devotions, that he will be taken with their formall praises, and being thirsty after glory and praise and solemn addresses, may, by their pompous furnishing out all these for him, be won to a good liking of them: and thus they represent him to themselves as Lucian, in his De Sacrificiis [c. I] speaks too truly, though it may be too profanely, ὡς κολακευόμενον ἥδεσθαι, καὶ ἀγανακτεῖν ἀμελούμενον. And therefore Superstition will alwaies abound in these things whereby this Deity of their own, made after the similitude of men, may be most gratified, slavishly crouching to it. We will take a view of it in the words of Plutarch, though what refers to the Jews, if it respects more their rites than their Manners, may seem to contain too hasty a censure of them. Superstition brings in πηλώσεις, καταβορβορώσεις, σαββατισμούς, ῥίψεις ἐπὶ πρόσωπον, αἰσχρὰς προκαθίσεις, ἀλλοκότους προσκυνήσεις, wallowings in the dust, tumblings in the mire, observations of Sabbaths, prosternations, uncouth gestures, and strange rites of worship. Superstition is very apt to think that Heaven may be bribed with such false-hearted devotions; as Porphyrie, Lib. 2, περὶ ἀποχῆς, hath well explained it by this, that it is ὑπόληψις τοῦ δεκάζειν δύνασθαι τὸ θεῖον, an apprehension that a man may corrupt and bribe the Deity; which (as he there observes) was the Cause of all those bloudy sacrifices and of some inhumane ones among the Heathen men, imagining διὰ τῶν θυσιῶν ἐξωνεῖσθαι τὴν ἁμαρτίαν like him in the Prophet that thought by the fruit of his body and the firstlings of his flock to expiate the sinne of his Soul. Micah 6.

But it may be we may seeme all this while to have made too 240Tragicall a Description of Superstition; and indeed one Author whom we have all this while had recourse to, seemes to have set it forth, as anciently Painters were wont to doe those pieces in which they would demonstrate most their own skill; they would not content themselves with the shape of one Body onely, but borrowed severall parts from severall Bodies as might most fit their design and fill up the picture of that they desired chiefly to represent. Superstition it may be looks not so foul and deformed in every Soul that is dyed with it, as he hath there set it forth, nor doth it every where spread it self alike: this πάθος that shrowds it self under the name of Religion, wil variously discover it self as it is seated in Minds of a various temper, and meets with variety of matter to exercise it self about.

We shall therefore a little further inquire into it, and what the Judgments of the soberest men anciently were of it; the rather that a learned Author of our own seems unwilling to own that Notion of it which we have hitherto out of Plutarch and others contended for; who though he have freed it from that gloss which the late Ages have put upon it, yet he may seem to have too strictly confined it to a Cowardly Worship of the ancient Gentile Daemons, as if Superstition and Polytheism were indeed the same thing, whereas Polytheism or Daemon-worship is but one branch of it, which was partly observed by the learned Casaubon in his Notes upon that Chapter of Theophrastus περὶ δεισιδαιμονίας, when it is described to be δειλία πρὸς τὸ δαιμόνιον, which he thus interprets, Theophrastus voce δαιμόνιον et Deos et Daemones complexus est, et quicquid divinitatis esse particeps malesana putavit antiquitas. And in this sense it was truly observed by Petronius Arbiter,

Primus in orbe Deos fecit Timor—

The whole progeny of the ancient Daemons, at least in the Minds of the Vulgar, sprung out of Fear, and were supported by it: though notwithstanding, this Fear, when in a Being void of all true sense of Divine goodness, hath not escaped the censure of Superstition in Varro’s judgment, whose Maxim it was, as S. Austin tells us, Deum a religioso vereri, a superstitioso timeri: which distinction Servius seems to have made use of in his Comment upon Virgil, Aeneid 6, where the Poet describing the torments of the wicked in hell, he runs out into an Allegoricall 241exposition of all, it may be too much in favour of Lucretius, whom he there magnifies. His words are these, Ipse etiam Lucretius dicit per eos super quos jamjam casurus imminet lapis, Superstitiosos significare, qui inaniter semper verentur, et de Diis et Cœlo et locis superioribus male opinantur; nam Religiosi sunt qui per reverentiam timent.

But that we may the more fully unfold the Nature of this πάθος, and the effects of it, which are not alwaies of one sort, we shall first premise something concerning the Rise of it.

The Common Notions of a Deity, strongly rooted in Mens Souls, and meeting with the Apprehensions of Guiltiness, are very apt to excite the Servile fear: and when men love their own filthy lusts, that they may spare them, they are presently apt to contrive some other waies of appeasing the Deity and compounding with it. Unhallowed minds, that have no inward foundation of true Holiness to fix themselves upon, are easily shaken and tossed from all inward peace and tranquillity; and as the thoughts of some Supreme power above them seize upon them, so they are struck with the lightning thereof into inward affrightments, which are further encreas’d by a vulgar observation of those strange, stupendious, and terrifying Effects in Nature, whereof they can give no certain reason, as Earthquakes, Thundrings, and Lightnings, blazing Comets and other Meteors of a like Nature, which are apt to terrifie those especially who are already unsetled and Chased with an inward sense of guilt, and, as Seneca speaks, inevitabilem metum ut supra nos aliquid timeremus incutiunt. Petronius Arbiter hath well described this business for us,

Primus in orbe Deos fecit Timor, ardua cœlo

Fulmina cum caderent, discussaque moenia flammis,

Atque ictus flagraret Athos—

From hence it was that the Libri fulgurales of the Romanes, and other such volumes of Superstition, swelled so much, and that the pulvinaria Deorum were so often frequented, as will easily appear to any one a little conversant in Livy, who everywhere sets forth this Devotion so largely, as if he himself had been too passionately in love with it.

And though as the Events in Nature began sometimes to be found out better by a discovery of their immediate Natural 242Causes, so some particular pieces of Superstitious Customs were antiquated and grown out of date (as is well observ’d concerning those Charms and Februations anciently in use upon the appearing of an Eclipse, and some others) yet often affrights and horrours were not so easily abated, while they were unacquainted with the Deity, and with the other mysterious events in Nature, which begot those Furies and unlucky Empusas ἀλάστορας καὶ παλαμναίους δαίμονας, in the weak minds of men. To all which we may adde the frequent Spectres and frightfull Apparitions of Ghosts and Mormos: all which extorted such a kind of Worship from them as was most correspondent to such Causes of it. And those Rites and Ceremonies which were begotten by Superstition, were again the unhappy Nurses of it, such as are well described by Plutarch in his De defect. Oracul., Ἑορταὶ καὶ θυσίαι, ὥσπερ ἡμέραι ἀποφράδες, καὶ σκυθρωπαί, ἐν αἷς ὠμοφαγίας, &c. Feasts and Sacrifices, as likewise observations of unlucky and fatall dayes, celebrated with eating of raw things, lacerations, fastings, and howlings, and many times filthy Speeches in their sacred rites, and frantick behaviour.

But as we insinuated before, This Root of Superstition diversely branched forth it self, sometimes into Magick and Exorcismes, other times into Pædanticall Rites and idle observations of Things and Times, as Theophrastus hath largely set them forth in his Tract περὶ δεισιδαιμονίας: in others it displayed itself in inventing as many new Deities as there were severall Causes from whence their affrights proceeded, and finding out many φρικτὰ μυστήρια appropriate to them, as supposing they ought to be worshipt cum sacro horrore. And hence it is that we hear of those inhumane and Diabolicall sacrifices called ἀνθρωποθυσίαι, frequent among the old Heathens (as among many others Porphyry in his De abstinentia hath abundantly related) and of those dead mens bones which our Ecclesiastick writers tell us were found in their Temples at the demolishing of them. Sometimes it would express itself in a prodigall way of sacrificing, for which Ammianus Marcellinus (an heathen Writer, but yet one who seems to have been well pleased with the simplicity and integrity of Christian Religion) taxeth Julian the Emperor for Superstition. Iulianus, Superstitiosus magis quam legitimus sacrorum observator, innumeras sine parsimonia pecudes mactans, ut æstimaretur, si revertisset de Parthis, boves iam defuturos: 243like that Marcus Caesar, of whom he relates this common proverb, οἱ λευκοὶ βέες Μάρκῳω τῷ Καίσαρι, ἄν συ νικήσῃς, ἡμεῖς ἀπωλόμεθα. Besides many other ways might be named wherein Superstition might occasionally shew it self.

All which may best be understood, if we consider it a little in that Composition of Fear and Flattery which before we intimated: and indeed Flattery is most incident to base and slavish minds; and when the fear and jealousy of a Deity disquiet a wanton dalliance with sin, and disturb the filthy pleasure of Vice, then this fawning and crouching disposition will find out devices to quiet an angry conscience within, and an offended God without, (though as men grow more expert in this cunning, these fears may in some degree abate). This the ancient Philosophy hath well taken notice of, and therefore well defin’d δεισιδαιμονία by κολακεία, and useth these terms promiscuously. Thus we find Max. Tyrius in his Dissert. 4 concerning the difference between a Friend and a Flatterer. ὁ μὲν εὐσεβής, φίλος θεῷ, ὁ δὲ δεισιδαίμων, κόλαξ θεοῦ· καὶ μακάριος ὁ εὐσεβής, ὁ φίλος θεοῦ, δυστυχὴς δὲ ὁ δεισιδαίμων. ὁ μὲν θαρσῶν τῇ ἀρετῇ, πρόσεισι τοῖς θεοῖς ἄνευ δέους· ὁ δὲ ταπεινὸς διὰ μοχθηρίαν, μετὰ πολλοῦ δέους, δύσελπις, καὶ δεδιὼς τοὺς θεοὺς ὥσπερ τοὺς τυράννους. The sense whereof is this, The Pious man is God’s friend, the Superstitious is a flatterer of God: and indeed most happy and blest is the condition of the Pious man, God’s friend, but right miserable and sad is the state of the Superstitious. The Pious man, emboldened by a good Conscience and encouraged by the sense of his integrity, comes to God without fear and dread: but the Superstitious being sunk and deprest through the sense of his own wickedness, comes not without much fear, being void of all hope and confidence, and dreading the Gods as so many Tyrants. Thus Plato also sets forth this Superstitious temper, though he mentions it not under that name, but we may know it by a property he gives of it, viz.: to colloque with Heaven, Lib. 10, de Legibus, where he distinguisheth of Three kinds of Tempers in reference to the Deity, which he then calls πάθη, which are, Totall Atheism, which he saies never abides with any man till his Old age; and Partial Atheism, which is a Negation of Providence; and a Third, which is a perswasion concerning the Gods ὅτι εὐπαράμυθοί εἰσι θύμασι καὶ εὐχαῖς, that they are easily won 244by sacrifices and prayers, which he after explaines thus, ὅτι παραιτητοί εἰσι τοῖσιν ἀδικοῦσιν, δεχόμενοι δῶρα, &c., that with gifts unjust men may find acceptance with them. And this Discourse of Plato’s upon these three kinds of Irreligious πάθη Simplicius seems to have respect to in his comment upon Epictetus, cap. 38, which treats about Right Opinions in Religion; and there having pursued the two former of them, he thus states the latter, which he calls ἀθεΐας λόγον as well as the other two, as a conceit θεοὺς παρατρέπεσθαι δώροις, καὶ ἀναθήμασι, καὶ κερματίου διαδόσεσιν, quod muneribus et donariis et stirpis distributione a sententia deducuntur, such men making account by their devotions to draw the Deity to themselves, and winning the favour of Heaven, to procure such an indulgence to their lusts as no sober man on earth would give them; they in the meanwhile not considering ὡς μεταμέλειαι, καὶ ἱκετεῖαι, καὶ εὐχαί, καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα, ἀναλογοῦσι τῷ κάλῳ, that Repentance, Supplications, and Prayers, &c., ought to draw us nearer to God, not God nearer to us; as in a ship, by fastning a Cable to a firm Rock, we intend not to draw the Rock to the Ship, but the Ship to the Rock. Which last passage of his is therefore the more worthy to be taken notice of, as holding out so large an Extent that this Irreligious temper is of, and of how subtil a Nature. This fond and gross dealing with the Deity was that which made the scoffing Lucian so much sport, who in his Treatise De Sacrificiis tells a number of stories how the Daemons loved to be feasted, and when and how they were entertained, with such devotions which are rather used Magically as Charms and Spells for such as use them, to defend themselves against those Evils which their own Fears are apt perpetually to muster up, and to endeavour by bribery to purchase Heaven’s favour and indulgence, as Juvenal speaks of the Superstitious Aegyptian,

Illius lacrimae mentitaque munera præstant

Ut veniam culpae non abnuat, ansere magno

Scilicet et tenui popano corruptus Osiris.

Though all this while I would not be understood to condemn too severely all servile fear of God, if it tend to make men avoid true wickedness, but that which settles upon these lees of Formality.

To conclude, Were I to define Superstition more generally 245according to the ancient sense of it, I would call it Such an apprehension of God in the thoughts of men, as renders him grievous and burdensome to them, and so destroys all free and cheerfull converse with him; begetting in the stead thereof a forc’d and jejune devotion, void of inward Life and Love. It is that which discovers itself Pædantically in the worship of the Deity, in anything that makes up but onely the Body or outward Vesture of Religion; though then it may make a mighty bluster; and because it comprehends not the true Divine good that ariseth to the Souls of men from an internall frame of Religion, it is therefore apt to think that all its insipid devotions are as so many Presents offered to the Deity and gratifications of him. How variously Superstition can discover and manifest itself, we have intimated before: To which I shall only adde this, That we are not so well rid of Superstition, as some imagine when they have expell’d it out of their Churches, expunged it out of their Books and Writings, or cast it out of their Tongues, by making Innovations in names (wherein they sometimes imitate those old Caunii that Herodotus speaks of, who that they might banish all the forrein Gods that had stollen in among them, took their procession through all their Country, beating and scourging the Aire along as they went;) No, for all this, Superstition may enter into our chambers, and creep into our closets, it may twine about our secret Devotions, and actuate our Formes of belief and Orthodox opinions, when it hath no place else to shroud itself or hide its head in; we may think to flatter the Deity by these, and to bribe it with them, when we are grown weary of more pompous solemnities: nay it may mix it self with a seeming Faith in Christ; as I doubt it doth now in too many, who laying aside all sober and serious care of true Piety, think it sufficient to offer up their Saviour, his Active and Passive Righteousness, to a severe and rigid Justice, to make expiation for those sins they can be willing to allow themselves in.

246

ON THE FACE WHICH APPEARS ON THE ORB OF THE MOON A DIALOGUE

INTRODUCTION

Plutarch’s Dialogue on The Face in the Moon is not a scientific treatise, and its author would have disclaimed any intention of writing to advance science. It is discussion for the sake of discussion, the ‘good talk’ of which Plutarch wished that Athens should have no monopoly, any more than she had when the Boeotian Simmias and Cebes were among the trusted friends of Socrates, or, later, when ‘plain living and high thinking’ could be exhibited in lofty perfection in the Theban home of Epaminondas. A mixed company, which includes an astronomer, another mathematician, a literary man, and professed philosophers (there is no Epicurean here), with Lamprias, Plutarch’s brother, for president, discusses the movements and physical nature of the moon, from many points of view. Reference is made throughout to a previous discussion at which Lamprias, and Lucius, another of the speakers, had been present, when a person called ‘Our Comrade’ had dealt faithfully with the Peripatetic view, endorsed by the Stoics, that the moon is not of substance like our earth, but is a fiery or starlike body. This discussion had wandered into mystical theories as to the moon’s office in the birth and death of human souls, and her connexion with ‘daemons’. Sylla has joined the present company with a myth to relate bearing on these deep subjects, which had come to him at Carthage as a traveller’s tale. Its production is delayed until the end of the Dialogue, which it 247closes after the manner of a Platonic myth; the phrases with which it is opened and dismissed may be compared with those of the Gorgias. This double device, of referring part of the matter to a former conversation (as the E at Delphi is a recollection of an old discourse by Ammonius), and part to a new and strange tale, skilfully relieves this elaborate Dialogue. Some difficulty is caused by the imperfect, or doubtful, condition of the text of the opening chapter, as no complete explanation seems to be given as to the place or time of the former discussion. Probably this abruptness is intentional, but the text requires careful attention.

Perhaps this Dialogue throws more light on the views about the solar system accepted or under discussion in the first century of our era than a scientific treatise could have done. No reference is made to the great astronomical work of Ptolemy, which belongs to the second century, and closed most questions until the sixteenth. The estimate, e.g. of the moon’s distance (56 earth’s radii) is not Ptolemy’s (59). Some of the geographical details, as that of the Caspian Sea, seem to show that Ptolemy’s geographical work was not known to the Author.

It may be useful to enumerate some of the simpler of the accepted views about the heavens :

(1) That the earth is a Sphere was known to Pythagoras and allowed by Plato (Phaedo 110 B), and affirmed by Aristotle, De Caelo, 2, 14, 297 b 18. The moon, and, according to Aristotle, the stars, are also spherical.

(2) That the moon derived her light from the sun was a discovery due to Anaxagoras (fifth century B.C.).

(3) The true cause of eclipses was known to the Pythagoreans, and is stated by Aristotle, and, with more precision, by Posidonius.

(4) The inclination of the equator to the sun’s path is stated by Oenopides of Chios (a little after Anaxagoras).

248(5) That the moon revolves round the earth at a moderate distance is stated by Empedocles.

(6) The other planets (including the sun) revolve round the earth at a distance vastly less than that of the fixed stars. (No actual estimate of the distances or sizes is given even by Ptolemy, who is not able to state a parallax for any, or an angular diameter.)

(7) That the planets share in the (apparent) daily motion of the stars, and also have an (apparent) motion of their own in the reverse direction was held by Pythagoras.

All these refer to physical facts and can be stated without the use of mathematical language, though many of the discoverers were expert mathematicians. Gradually, and certainly from the time of the great astronomer Hipparchus (about 130 B.C.), attention came to be fixed upon the accurate mathematical interpretation of observed apparent facts; in a favourite phrase, the object was ‘to save the phenomena’, irrespective of physical and actual fact.

In the case of the moon, the two lines of inquiry are less sharply divided than in that of other bodies. Very correct statements as to her size and distance from the earth may be gathered from Plutarch’s Dialogue. A guess is even hazarded that she is lighter than the earth, bulk for bulk, because of the action of fire in the past.

The mathematical account of the movements of the moon has its history. As we have seen, it was early realized that she revolved round and near the earth in a circular orbit. Soon it appeared that there were irregularities in this movement. The ‘First Anomaly’, a difference of speed observed at different parts of the orbit, was well understood by Hipparchus. It could be expressed, so as to ‘save the phenomena’, by either of two methods, both resting on the assumption that no curve except a circle was admissible, and both superseding the ingenious but cumbrous arrangement of ‘concentric Spheres’ known to 249Aristotle. One was that of ‘movable eccentrics’, where the orbit of the planet was round a point outside the earth, itself shifting. The other, which prevailed, and was finally adopted by Ptolemy, was that of epicycles, circles described round points in the primary orbit, by means of which the planet’s motion could be retarded or quickened at will, and its position modified. By this device, the visible movement could be, and was, recorded with great accuracy, but sometimes at the expense of physical truth. Thus the epicyclic arrangement for the moon’s orbit involved, if closely looked into, the consequence that her distance from us at nearest must be half that at the farthest, and her angular diameter double! Kepler, after the work of a lifetime (1571-1630), discovered the cause of this ‘anomaly’ in the shape of the orbit, which is elliptical, not circular, and substituted ‘eccentricity’ for ‘anomaly’ as the key-word. Newton (1642-1727) proved that a body revolving round another must move in an ellipse, with the larger body at one focus. Thus the wheel had come full circle, and physical and mathematical inquiry met after two thousand years of separation. The ‘Second Anomaly’ due to the action of the sun (the ‘Evection’) was indicated by Hipparchus, worked out as a phenomenon by Ptolemy, and its physical cause explained by Newton. The inclination of the moon’s path to the sun’s was known to Hipparchus as 5°, and the recession of her nodes was familiar to him. A third anomaly now known as ‘Variation’ is instructive because its discovery has been claimed for an Arabian astronomer of about A.D. 1000. After an exhaustive discussion during the last century (1836-71), it seems to be proved that the claim rested upon a mistake, and that the sole credit is due to Tycho Brahe (see Dreyer, p. 252). In fact, whatever in astronomy does not belong to modern science is Greek, after allowing for what the Greeks may have learnt in early ages from Chaldaeans or Egyptians. The Romans contributed nothing, 250the Indians learnt much from scientific men who accompanied Alexander, and used it skilfully, but did not advance it. And the modern makes a really continuous whole with the ancient Greeks, for it is not only astronomy which should be considered, but the essential preliminaries, such as the study of the Conic Sections, which, in its geometrical form, is purely Greek.

One authority to whom Plutarch twice refers by name requires special mention. This was Aristarchus of Samos, who belongs to the middle or later part of the third century B.C. He is the author of a work on ‘The Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon’ which is extant. It was well edited by Wallis for the Oxford Press in 1688, and more recently (1913) and in a modern form, by Sir Thomas Heath, F.R.S., who has prefixed an invaluable history of astronomy prior to Aristarchus. The book is rigorously mathematical, and contains six ‘hypotheses’, and eighteen propositions deduced from them. The second of the hypotheses, ‘That the earth is in the relation of a point and centre to the sphere in which the moon moves’, is quoted by Plutarch, apparently as being accepted by Hipparchus. The sixth, ‘That the moon subtends one-fifteenth part of a sign of the Zodiac (i. e. 2°)‘, raises a curious point which is fully considered by Sir T. Heath. That Aristarchus should at any time have thus exaggerated (multiplied by four) a measurement which seems open to some sort of simple observation, and have based good work upon it, seems very strange, firstly, because he must have considered the matter, (since he is aware that the same figure may stand for sun and moon); and, secondly, because Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), whose knowledge and good faith are beyond question, says that ‘Aristarchus discovered that the sun appeared to be about one seven hundred and twentieth part of the circle of the Zodiac (30´)‘, which is roughly correct.^[302]

The fourth hypothesis runs: ‘That when the moon appears 251to us halved, its distance from the sun is then less than a quadrant by one-thirtieth of a quadrant (i.e. is 87°).’ From this is directly deduced (Hypothesis 6 is not here used) Prop. 7, an elaborate proof that ‘the distance of the sun from the earth is greater than eighteen times, but less than twenty times, the distance of the moon from the earth’, quoted by Plutarch in c. 10. The fact assumed does not appear to be open to observation; perhaps Aristarchus, or a predecessor, arrived at it by comparing the average times taken by the moon over the first and second quarters of her orbit. The true (theoretical) figure is 89° 50´. The sequel is very interesting. Hipparchus, a century later, adopted the result in calculating the parallax of the sun, which he found to be 3´ of arc (more than twenty times too much). This was adopted by Ptolemy in the second century A.D., and remained the official estimate until nearly A.D. 1700, though both Hipparchus and Kepler had protested, the latter stating as his opinion that the parallax could not be greater than one minute of arc, or the distance less than twelve millions of miles. Shortly before A.D. 1700 improved knowledge of the orbit and distances of Mars enabled the sun’s parallax to be reduced to 9-1/2 seconds of arc, and his distance stated at eighty-seven millions of miles, which is not very inadequate. It was a great achievement of Aristarchus, though he led the world into error, to state a reasoned figure at all, and to think in such mighty units.

His cosmical speculation is even more daring. It is known to us from this Dialogue (c. 6) and also from Archimedes, who records it in his (extant) Arenarius without comment. Aristarchus proposed to ‘disturb the hearth of the universe’ by his hypothesis that the heaven of the stars is fixed, while the earth has a daily motion on her axis and an annual motion round the sun. It was a brilliant intuition, possible in an age of comparatively simple knowledge, which could not easily have been advanced 252when the complexity of the several orbits was increasingly realized (see Dreyer, pp. 147-8). Dr. Dreyer (p. 145) makes the interesting suggestion that Aristarchus took the idea from some early form of the system of ‘movable eccentrics’, and, further (p. 157), that if that system had prevailed against that of epicycles, it must have flashed, sooner or later, upon some bright mind, that there was one eccentric point, namely, one in the sun, central to the orbits of all the planets.

It is to be observed that ‘Heraclides of Pontus’ (at one time a pupil of Plato’s) discovered the movement of the two inner planets round the sun. It is possible (as contended by Sciaparelli) that he believed all the planets to move round the sun, and the sun round the earth, in fact anticipated Tycho Brahe. Further, there is a statement that he anticipated Aristarchus as to the movement of the earth; but Sir T. Heath, who examines the evidence very fully, concludes that the evidence has been misread. Aristarchus certainly contended for the diurnal rotation of the earth, but this was rejected by Hipparchus and passed out of account for many centuries.

The history of the emergence of the heliocentric theory has a curiously close counterpart in that of the circulation of the blood. Harvey communicated his discovery to the College of Physicians on April 17, 1616, but he had kept it back for twelve years out of deference to the great and deserved authority of Galen, which it was dangerous to dispute, as Copernicus held back his ‘Treatise of Revolutions’ for thirty years, because it was very dangerous, even for the nephew of a Bishop, himself the Canon of a cathedral far north of the Alps, to question the findings of Ptolemy. ‘Yet for years the profession had been in latent possession of a knowledge of the circulation. Indeed a good case has been made out for Hippocrates, in whose works occur some remarkably suggestive sentences’ (see The Growth of Truth, the Harveian Oration of 1906, by Sir William Osler, 253M.D., F.R.S.). Bacon, who ‘writes philosophy like a Lord Chancellor’—i.e. seeks to eliminate error from facts stated, and then to apply the law (see De Morgan, Bundle of Paradoxes, p. 50)—, would have none of the Copernican hypothesis. Nor would Sir Thomas Browne, though he preferred Dr. Harvey’s discovery ‘to that of America’. But truth will out, at her own time and through the ministers of her choice.

Behind the horseplay of the Stoics and Academics, on the subject of the centre of the universe and the laws which light and heavy bodies obey, there seems to lie some real groping after a general cosmic law, such as gravitation. Thus the earth and the moon draw bodies, each from its own surface to its own centre, and if the earth draws the moon, it is as a part of herself, once ejected and now reclaimed.

There is no direct evidence of the time or place when this Dialogue is supposed to take place, nor of the date of its composition. Much of the matter is common to it with the Dialogue On the cessation of the Oracles, one passage of which has been thought (by Adler) to be an extract from it. Lamprias takes the principal place in both, and Plutarch is not present, at least under his own name. The solar eclipse mentioned in c. 19 as recent would give a clue if it could be identified. Ginzel (Spezieller Kanon) has selected three for special consideration, viz., those of April 30, A.D. 59, March 20, A.D. 71, and January 5, A.D. 75. By the kindness of J. K. Fotheringham, Esq., D.Litt., Fellow of Magdalen College, who has made the laborious computation, I am able to state the respective magnitude of these eclipses at Chaeroneia as 11·08, 11·82, 10·38 (totality = 12). Thus Ginzel’s preference for No. 2 is confirmed; it was there a large partial eclipse, and the time of greatest phase was 11 hours 4·1 minutes local solar time. Several stars would become visible, 66/67 of the sun’s diameter being obscured; a few might be visible during No. 1, none during No. 3.

254

PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE

1. Sextius Sylla, the Carthaginian, mentioned in the Life of Romulus (c. 15) as ‘a man wanting neither learning nor ingenuity’, who had supplied Plutarch with a piece of archaeological information. Elsewhere (De cohib. ira, c. 1) he is addressed as ‘O most eager Sylla!’ In another Dialogue he declines to be led into a discussion on all cosmology by answering the question ‘whether the egg or the bird comes first?’ (Sympos. 2, 3).

He has a story, or myth, to tell about the moon, which he is impatient to begin. This story, which he had heard from a friend in Carthage, is mainly geographical in interest. The details remind us of those quoted from Pytheas about his journeys to Britain and the Northern Seas. The whole conception of the globe is clearly earlier than that of Ptolemy (see especially as to the Caspian Sea, c. 26). The myth also introduces us to the worship of Cronus as practised at Carthage, and connects it with the wonders of the moon, and her place in the heavenly system.

In c. 17 Sylla raises a good point, about the half-moon, which was being passed over.

2. Lamprias, a brother, probably an elder brother, of Plutarch directs the course of the conversation, and himself expounds the Academic view, referring to Lucius for his recollections of a recent discussion at which both had been present, when the Stoic doctrines on physics had been criticized.

In some of the Symposiacs and other dialogues Lamprias takes a similar place; in others both brothers take part. Lamprias probably died early.

‘Evidently a character, a good trencherman, as became a Boeotian, one who on occasion could dance the Pyrrhic war dance, who loved well a scoff and a jest ... and who, if he thrust himself somewhat brusquely into discussions which are going forward, was quite able to justify the intrusion.’—Archbishop Trench.

3. Apollonides, astronomer and geometrician; perhaps the latter would be the more correct designation. In another Dialogue (Sympos. 3, 4) a ‘tactician’ of the name appears.

255As Apollonius, the great mathematician (living about 200 B.C.) was also a geometrician who contributed to astronomical theory, not himself an astronomer, it seems likely that the name Apollonides has been coined by Plutarch for ‘one of the clan of Apollonius’, i. e. a young professor of geometry. Apollondes is treated rather brusquely by Lamprias, certainly with less respect than Menelaus. He seems to have cast in his lot with the Stoics in their physical opinions.

4. Aristotle, a Peripatetic. Perhaps the name was given to him to mark the School to which he belonged. In the Dialogue On the Delays in Divine Punishment an ‘Epicurus’ is a representative Epicurean.

5. Pharnaces, a Stoic, who sturdily supports his physical creed against all comers.

6. Lucius, an Etruscan pupil of Moderatus the Pythagorean, spoken of in one place (Sympos. 8, 7 and 8) as ‘Lucius our comrade’. He is elsewhere reticent as to the inner Pythagorean teaching, but is courteous and ready to discuss ‘what is probable and reasonable’.

Kepler is inclined to complain of his professorial tone and longwindedness in the present Dialogue. This is hardly fair, as he is for the most part reporting a set discourse heard elsewhere, and that by request. Lamprias has to give him time to remember the points (c. 7). In c. 5 he asks that justice may be done to the Stoics. He associates himself with the Academics on physical matters.

7. Theon (see Preface, p. xii), represents literature (as he does in other Dialogues, notably in that on the E at Delphi). He is a welcome foil to the more severe disputants. In c. 24 he interrupts by moving the previous question—‘Why a moon at all?’ and is congratulated on the cheerful turn which he has given to the discussion. Theon may sometimes recall to readers of Jules Verne’s pleasant Voyage autour de la lune the sallies of Michel Ardan the poet.

8. Menelaus, a distinguished astronomer who lived and observed at Alexandria. Observations of his, which include some taken in the first year of Trajan, A.D. 98, are recorded by Ptolemy (Magna Syntaxis, 7, 3, p. 170) and other writers.

256

ANALYSIS

[The opening chapters are lost. There must have been an introduction of the speakers, with some explanation as to time and place, a reference to a set discussion at which some of the speakers had been present, and a promise of Sylla to narrate a myth, bearing upon the moon and her markings, which he had heard in Carthage. This conversation had taken a turn, prematurely as Sylla thinks, towards the mythical or supernatural aspects of the moon.] But see note (1) on p. 309.

c. 1. It is agreed that the current scientific or quasi-scientific views on the markings of the moon’s face shall be first considered, then the supernatural.

cc. 2-4. Lamprias mentions

(i) The view that the markings are due to weakness of human eyesight. This is easily refuted.

(ii) The view of Clearchus, the Peripatetic, that they are caused by reflexion of the ocean on the moon’s face. But ocean is continuous, the markings are broken; they are seen from all parts of the earth, including ocean itself (and the earth is not a mere point in space, but has dimensions of its own); and, thirdly, they are not seen on any other heavenly body.

c. 3. The mention of Clearchus brings up the view, adopted from him by the Stoics, that the moon is not a solid or earth-like body, but is fire or air, like the stars. This view had been severely handled in the former conference.

c. 6. Pharnaces complains that the Academics always criticize, never submit to be criticized. Let them first answer for their own paradox in confusing ‘up’ and ‘down’, if they place a heavy body, such as the moon is now said to be, above. Lucius retorts: ‘Why not the moon as well as the earth, a larger body, yet poised in space?’ Pharnaces is unconvinced.

cc. 7-15. To give Lucius time to remember his points, Lamprias reviews the absurd consequences from the Stoic tenet that all weights converge towards the centre of our earth. Why should not every heavy body, not earth only, attract its parts towards its own centre? Again, if the moon is a light fiery body, how do we find her placed near the earth and immeasurably far from the sun, planets, and stars? How can we assume that earth 257is the middle point of the Whole, that is, of Infinity? Lastly, allow that the Moon, if a heavy body, is out of her natural place. Yet why not? She may have been removed by force from the place naturally assigned to her to one which was better. Here the tone of the speaker rises as he lays down, often following the thought and the words of Plato’s Timaeus, the theory of creative ‘Necessity’ and ‘The Better’.

c. 16. Lucius is now ready to speak, but Aristotle intervenes with a reference to the view, held by his namesake, that the stars are composed of something essentially different from the four elements, and that their motion is naturally circular, not up or down. Lucius points out that it is degrading to the moon to call her a star, being inferior to the stars in lustre and speed, and deriving her light from the sun. For this, the view of Anaxagoras and of Empedocles, is the only one consistent with her phases as we see them (not that quoted from Posidonius the Stoic).

cc. 17, 18. To an inquiry from Sylla whether the difficulty of the half-moon (i. e. how does reflexion, being at equal angles, then carry sunlight to the earth, and not off into space beyond us?) had been met, Lucius answers that it had. The answer given was: (i) Reflexion at equal angles is not a law universally admitted or true; (ii) there may be cross lights and a complex illumination; (iii) it may be shown by a diagram, though this could not be done at the time (such a diagram is supplied by Kepler), that some rays would reach the earth; (iv) the difficulty arises at other phases also. He repeats the argument drawn from the phases as we see them; and ends with an analogy: Sunlight acts on the moon as it does on the earth, not as on the air; therefore the moon resembles earth rather than air.

c. 19. This is well received, and Lucius refers (a second analogy) to solar eclipses, and in particular to a recent one, to show that the moon, like the earth, can intercept the sun’s light, and is therefore, like it, a solid body. The fact that the track of the shadow is narrow in a solar eclipse is explained.

c. 20. Lucius continues his report, and describes in detail what happens in a lunar eclipse. If the moon, he concludes, were fiery and luminous, we should only see her at eclipse times, i. e. at intervals, normally of six months, occasionally of five.

c. 21. Pharnaces and Apollonides both rise to speak. Apollonides 258raises a verbal point about the word ‘shadow’; Pharnaces observes that the moon does show a blurred and fiery appearance during an eclipse, to which Lamprias replies by enumerating the successive colours of the moon’s face during eclipse, that proper to herself being dark and earth-like, not fiery. He concludes that the moon is like our earth, with a surface broken into heights and gullies, which are the cause of the markings.

c. 22. Apollonides objects that there can be no clefts on the moon with sides high enough to cast such shadows. Lamprias replies that it is the distance and position of the light which matter, not the size of objects which break it;

c. 23. And goes on himself to supply a stronger objection—that we do not see the sun’s image in the moon—and the answer. This is twofold: (a) general, the two cases differ in all details; (b) personal to those who, like himself, believe the moon to be an earth, and to have a rough surface. Why should we see the sun mirrored in the moon, and not terrestrial objects or stars?

c. 24. Sylla’s myth is now called for, and the company sits down to hear it. But Theon interposes: Can the moon have inhabitants or support any life, animal or vegetable? If not, how is she ‘an earth’, and what is her use?

c. 25. Theon’s sally is taken in good part, and gravely answered at some length by Lamprias.

c. 26. The mention of life on the moon calls up Sylla, who again feels that he has been anticipated. He begins his myth, heard from a stranger met in Carthage, who had himself made the northward voyage and returned. Once in every thirty years (or year of the planet Saturn) an expedition is sent out from Carthage to certain islands in the Northern Atlantic where Cronus (Saturn) reigns in banishment. The stranger had charged Sylla to pay special honour to the moon,

cc. 27-29. instructing him as to the functions of Persephone in bringing about the second death—the separation of mind from soul—which takes place on the moon, and the genesis of ‘daemons’,

c. 30. to whom are assigned certain functions on earth. Sylla commends the myth to his hearers.

259

OF THE FACE WHICH APPEARS ON THE ORB OF THE MOON

I. Here Sylla said:^[303] ‘All this belongs to my story, and comes |920 B| out of it. But I should like to ask in the first place whether you really backed on to those views about the moon’s face which are in every one’s hand and on every one’s lips.’ ‘Of course we did,’ I answered, ‘it was just the difficulty which we found in these which thrust us off upon the others. In chronic diseases, patients grow weary of the common remedies and plans of treatment, and turn to rites and charms and dreams. Just so in obscure and perplexing enquiries, when the common, received, familiar accounts are not convincing, |C| we cannot but try those which lie further afield; we must not despise them, but simply repeat to ourselves the spells which the old people used, and use all means to elicit the truth.

II. ‘To begin, you see the absurdity of calling the figure which appears in the moon an affection of our eyesight, too weak to resist the brightness, or, as we say, dazzled; and of not observing that this ought rather to happen when we look at the sun, who meets us with his fierce strong strokes. Empedocles has a pretty line giving the difference between the two:

The sun’s keen shafts, and moon with kindly beams.

Thus he describes the attractive, cheerful, painless quality of her light. Further, the reason is given why men of dim and weak eyesight do not see any distinct figure in the moon; |D| her orb shines full and smooth to them, whereas strong-sighted 260persons get more details, and distinguish the features impressed there with clearer sense of contrast. Surely the reverse should happen if it were a weakness and affection of the eye which produced the image; the weaker the organ the clearer should be the appearance. The very irregularity of the surface is sufficient to refute this theory; this image is not one of continuous and confluent shadow, but is well sketched in the words of Agesianax: |E|

All round as fire she shines, but in her midst,

Bluer than cyanus, lo, a maiden’s eye,

Her tender brow, her face in counterpart.

For the shadowy parts really pass beneath the bright ones which they encircle, and in turn press and are cut off by them; thus light and shade are interwoven throughout, and the face-form |F| is delineated to the life. The argument was thought to meet your Clearchus also, Aristotle, no less unanswerably; for yours he is, and an intimate of your namesake of old, although he perverted many doctrines of the Path.’

III. Here Apollonides interposed to ask what the view of Clearchus was. ‘No man’, I said, ‘has less good right than you to ignorance of a doctrine which starts from geometry, |921| as from its native hearth. Clearchus says that the face, as we call it, is made up of images of the great ocean mirrored in the moon. For our sight^[304] being reflected back from many points, is able to touch objects which are not in its direct line; and the full moon is of all mirrors the most beautiful and the purest in uniformity and lustre. As then you geometers think that the rainbow is seen in the cloud when it has acquired a moist and smooth consistence, because our vision is reflected on to the sun,^[305] so Clearchus held that the outer ocean is seen |B| in the moon, not where it really is, but in the place from which 261reflexion carried our sight into contact with it and its dazzle. Agesianax has another passage:

Or ocean’s wave that foams right opposite,

Be mirrored like a sheet of fire and flame.’

IV. This pleased Apollonides. ‘What a fresh way of putting a view; that was a bold man, and there was poetry in him. But how did the refutation proceed on your side?’ ‘In this way’, I answered. ‘First, the outer ocean is uniform, a sea with one continuous stream, whereas the appearance of the dark places in the moon is not uniform; there are isthmuses, so to call them, where the brightness parts and |C| defines the shadow; each region is marked off and has its proper boundary, and so the places where light and shade meet assume the appearance of height and depth, and represent very naturally human eyes and lips. Either, therefore, we must assume that there are more oceans than one, parted by real isthmuses and mainlands, which is absurd and untrue; or, if there is only one, it is impossible to believe that its image could appear thus broken up. Now comes a question which it is safer to ask in your presence than it is to state an answer. Given that the habitable world is “equal in breadth and length”,^[306] is it possible that the view of the sea as a whole, thus reflected from the moon, |D| should reach those sailing upon the great sea itself, yes, or living on it as the Britons do, and this even if the earth does, as you said that it does, occupy a point central to the sphere in which the moon moves?^[307] This’, I continued, ‘is a matter for you to consider, but the reflexion of vision from the moon is a further question which it is not for you to decide, nor yet for Hipparchus. I know, my dear friend [that Hipparchus is a very great astronomer], but many people do not accept his view 262on the physical nature of vision, since it is probably a sympathetic |E| blending and commixture, rather than a succession of strokes and recoils such as Epicurus devised for his atoms. Nor will you find Clearchus ready to assume with you that the moon is a weighty and solid body. Yet “an ethereal and luminous star”, to use your words, ought to break and divert the vision, so there is no question of reflexion. Lastly, if any one requires us to do so, we will put the question, how is it that only one face is seen, the sea mirrored on the moon, and none in any of all |F| the other stars? Yet reason demands that our vision should be thus affected in the case of all or of none. But now,’ I said, turning to Lucius, ‘remind us which of our points was mentioned first.’

V. ‘No;’ said Lucius, ‘to avoid the appearance of merely insulting Pharnaces, if we pass over the Stoic view without a word of greeting, do give some answer to Clearchus, and his assumption that the moon is a mere mixture of air and mild fire, that the air grows dark on its surface, as a ripple courses over a calm sea, and so the appearance of a face is produced.’

‘It is kind of you, Lucius,’ I said, ‘to clothe this absurdity in sounding terms. That is not how our comrade dealt with it. He said the truth, that it is a slap in the face to the moon when they fill her with smuts and blacks, addressing her in one breath |922| as Artemis and Athena,^[308] and in the very same describing a caked compound of murky air and charcoal fire, with no kindling or light of its own, a nondescript body smoking and charred like those thunderbolts which poets^[309] address as “lightless” and “sooty”. That a charcoal fire, such as this school makes out the moon to be, has no stability or consistence at all, unless |B| it find solid fuel at once to support and to feed it, is a point 263not so clearly seen by some philosophers as it is by those who tell us in jest that Hephaestus has been called lame because fire progresses no better without wood than lame people without a stick! If then the moon is fire, whence has it all this air inside it? For this upper region, always in circular motion, belongs not to air but to some nobler substance, which has the property of refining and kindling all things. If air has been generated, how is it that it has not been vaporized by the fire and passed away into some other form, but is preserved near fire all this time, like a nail fitted into the same place and wedged there for ever? If it is rare and diffused, |C| it should not remain stable, but be displaced. On the other hand, it cannot subsist in a solidified form, because it is mingled with fire, and has neither moisture with it nor earth, the only agents by which air can be compacted. Again, rapid motion fires the air which is contained in stones, and even in cold lead, much more then that which is in fire, when whirled round with such velocity. For they are displeased with Empedocles, when he describes the moon as a mass of air frozen like hail and enclosed within her globe of fire. Yet they themselves hold that the moon is a globe of fire which encloses air variously distributed, and this though they do not allow that she has |D| clefts in herself, or depths and hollows (for which those who make her an earth-like body find room), but clearly suppose that the air lies upon her convex surface. That it should do so is absurd in point of stability, and impossible in view of what we see at full moon; for we ought not to be able to distinguish black parts and shadow then; either all should be dull and shrouded, or all should shine out together when the moon is caught by the sun. For look at our earth; the air which lies in her depths and hollows, where no ray penetrates, remains in shadow unilluminated; that which is outside, diffused over the earth, has light and brilliant colouring, because from its 264rarity it easily mingles, and takes up any quality or influence. |E| By light, in particular, if merely touched, or, in your words, grazed, it is changed all through and illumined. This is at once an excellent ally to those who thrust the air into depths and gullies on the moon, and also quite disposes of you, who strangely compound her globe of air and fire. For it is impossible |F| that shadow should be left on her surface when the sun touches with his light all that part of the moon which is framed within our own field of vision.’

VI. Here Pharnaces, while I was still speaking, broke in: ‘Round it goes again, the old scene-shifter of the Academy brought out against us; they amuse themselves with arguing against other people, but in no case submit to be examined on their own views, they treat their opponents as apologists, not accusers. I can speak for myself at any rate; you are not going to draw me on to-day to answer your charges against the Stoics, unless we first get an account of your conduct in turning the universe upside down.’ Lucius smiled: ‘Yes, my friend,’ he said, ‘only do not threaten us with the writ of heresy, such as Cleanthes used to think that the Greeks should have |923| had served upon Aristarchus of Samos, for shifting the hearth of the universe, because that great man attempted “to save phenomena” with his hypothesis that the heavens are stationary, while our earth moves round in an oblique orbit, at the same time whirling about her own axis. We Academics have no view of our own finding, but do tell me this—why are those, who assume that the moon is an earth, turning things upside down, any more than you, who fix the earth where she is, suspended in mid air, a body considerably larger than the moon? |B| At least mathematicians tell us so, calculating the magnitude of the obscuring body from what takes place in eclipses, and from the passages of the moon through the shadow. For the shadow of the earth is less as it extends, because the illuminating 265body is greater, and its upper extremity is fine and narrow, as even Homer,^[310] they say, did not fail to notice. He called night “pointed” because of the sharpness of the shadow. Such, at any rate, is the body by which the moon is caught in her eclipses, and yet she barely gets clear by a passage equal to three of her own diameters. Just consider how many moons go to make an earth, if the earth cast a shadow as broad, at its shortest, as three moons. Yet you have fears for the moon lest she should tumble, while as for our earth, Aeschylus^[311] has perhaps satisfied you that Atlas |C|

Stands, and the pillar which parts Heaven and Earth

His shoulders prop, no load for arms t’ embrace.

Then, you think that under the moon there runs light air, quite inadequate to support a solid mass, while the earth, in Pindar’s^[312] words, is compassed “by pillars set on adamant”. And this is why Pharnaces has no fear on his own account of the earth’s falling, but pities those who lie under the orbit of the moon, Ethiopians, say, or Taprobanes, on whom so great a weight might fall! Yet the moon has that which helps her against falling, in her very speed and the swing of her passage round, as objects placed in slings are hindered from falling by the |D| whirl of the rotation. For everything is borne on in its own natural direction unless this is changed by some other force. Therefore the moon is not drawn down by her weight, since that tendency is counteracted by her circular movement. Perhaps it would be more reasonable to wonder if she were entirely at rest as the earth is, and unmoved. As things are, the moon has a powerful cause to prevent her from being borne down upon us; but the earth, being destitute of any other movement, might naturally be moved^[313] by its own weight; being heavier 266than the moon not merely in proportion to its greater bulk, |E| but because the moon has been rendered lighter by heat and conflagration. It would actually seem that the moon, if she is a fire, is in need of earth, a solid substance whereon she moves and to which she clings, so feeding and keeping up the force of her flame. For it is impossible to conceive fire as maintained without fuel. But you Stoics say that our earth stands firm without foundation or root.’ ‘Of course,’ said Pharnaces, ‘it keeps its proper and natural place, namely the essential middle point, that place around which all weights press and |F| bear, converging towards it from all sides. But all the upper region, even if it receive any earth-like body thrown up with force, immediately thrusts it out hitherward, or rather lets it go, to be borne down by its own momentum.’