|925| IX. ‘But you and your friends, dear Apollonides, say that the sun is countless millions of stades distant from the highest circle, and that Phosphor next to him, and Stilbon, and the other planets, move in a region below the fixed stars and at great intervals from one another; and yet you think that the universe provides within itself no interval in space for heavy and earth-like bodies. You see that it is ridiculous to call the moon no earth because she stands apart from the region below, and then to call her a star while we see her thrust so many |B| myriads of stades away from the upper circle as though sunk into an abyss. She is lower than the stars by a distance which we cannot state in words, since numbers fail you mathematicians when you try to reckon it, but she touches the earth in a sense and revolves close to it,
Like to the nave of a wagon, she glances,
says Empedocles,[[318]]
which near the mid axle....
For she often fails to clear even the shadow of earth, rising but little,[[319]] because the illuminating body is so vast. But so nearly does she seem to graze the earth and to be almost in its embrace as she circles round, that she is shut off from the sun by it unless |C| she rises enough to clear that shaded, terrestrial region, dark as night, which is the appanage of earth. Therefore I think we may say with confidence that the moon is within the precincts of earth when we see her blocked by earth’s extremities.
X. ‘Now leave the other fixed stars and planets, and consider the conclusion proved by Aristarchus in his Magnitudes and Distances;[[320]] that the distance of the sun is to the distance of the moon from us in a ratio greater than eighteen to one, |D| less than twenty to one. Yet the highest estimate of the distance of the moon from us makes it fifty-six times the earth’s radius, and that is, even on a moderate measurement, forty thousand stades. Upon this basis, the distance of the sun from the moon works out to more than forty million three hundred thousand stades. So far has she been settled from the sun because of her weight, and so nearly has she approached the earth, that, if we are to distribute estates according to localities, the “portion and inheritance of the earth” invites the moon to join her, and the moon has a next claim to chattels and persons |E| on earth, in right of kinship and vicinity. And I think that we are not doing wrong in this, that while we assign so great and profound an interval to what we call the upper bodies, we also leave to bodies below as much room for circulation as the breadth from earth to moon. For he who confines the word “upper” to the extreme circumference of heaven, and calls all the rest “lower”, goes too far, and on the other hand he who circumscribes “below” to earth, or rather to her centre, is preposterous. On this side and on that the necessary interval must be granted,[[321]] since the vastness of the universe permits. Against the claim that everything after we leave the earth is “up” and poised on high, sounds the counterclaim that everything |F| after we leave the circle of the fixed stars is “down”!
XI. ‘Look at the question broadly. In what sense is the earth “middle”, and middle of what? For the Whole is infinite; now the Infinite has neither beginning nor limit, so it ought not to have a middle; for a middle is in a sense itself a limit, but infinity is a negation of limits. It is amusing to hear a man labour to prove that the earth is the middle of the universe, not of the Whole, forgetting that the universe itself lies under the same difficulties; for the Whole, in its |926| turn, left no middle for the universe. “Hearthless and homeless”[[322]] it is borne over an infinite void towards nothing which it can call its own; or, if it find some other cause for remaining, it stands still, not because of the nature of the place. Much the same can be conjectured about the earth and the moon; if one stands here unshaken while the other moves, it is in virtue of a difference of soul rather than of place and of nature. Apart from all this, has not one important point escaped them? If anything, however great, which is outside the centre of the earth is “up”, then no part of the universe is “down”. Earth is “up”, and so are the things on the earth, absolutely |B| every body lying or standing about the earth becomes “up”; one thing alone is “down”, that incorporeal point which has of necessity to resist the pressure of the whole universe, if “down” is naturally opposed to “up”. Nor is this absurdity the only one. Weights lose the cause of their downward tendency and motion here, since there is no body below towards which they move. That the incorporeal should have so great a force as to direct all things towards itself, or hold them together about itself, is not probable, nor do they mean this. No! it is found on all grounds[[323]] to be irrational, and against the facts, that “up” should be the whole universe, and “down” nothing but an incorporeal and indivisible limit. The other view is reasonable, which we state thus, that a large space, possessing breadth, is apportioned both to “the above” and to “the below”.
XII. ‘However, let us assume, if you choose, that it is |C| contrary to nature that earth-like bodies should have their motions in heaven; and now let us look quietly, with no heroics, at the inference, which is this, not that the moon is not an earth, but that she is an earth not in its natural place. So the fire of Aetna is fire underground, which is contrary to nature, yet is fire; and air enclosed in bladders is light and volatile by nature, but has come perforce into a place unnatural to it. And the soul, the soul itself,’ I went on, ‘has it not been imprisoned in the body contrary to nature, a swift, and, as you hold, a fiery soul in a slow, cold body, the invisible within the sensible? Are we therefore to say that soul in body is nothing, and not rather that Reason, that divine thing, has been made subject to weight and density, that one which ranges all heaven |D| and earth and sea in a moment’s flight has passed into flesh and sinews, marrow and humours, wherein is the origin of countless passions?[[324]] Your Lord Zeus, is he not, so long as he preserves his own nature, one great continuous fire? Yet we see him brought down, and bent, and fashioned, assuming, and ready to assume, any and every complexion of change. Look well to it, my friend, whether when you shift all things |E| about, and remove each to its “natural” place, you are not devising a system to dissolve the universe and introducing Empedoclean strife, or rather stirring up the old Titans against Nature, in your eagerness to see once more the dreadful disorder and dissonance of the myth? All that is heavy in a place by itself, and all that is light in another,
Where neither sun’s bright face is separate seen,
Nor earth’s rough brood, nor ocean any more,