CLASSICAL CORNER
274: MOONSTRUCK
“I don’t know if there are men on the Moon, but if there are, they must be using the Earth as a lunatic asylum” – Bernard Shaw
I was drawn to this subject by recent newspaper reports that NASA is contemplating a return lunar trip in this decade, describing this as stage one in a flight to Mars, something I regretfully see as a delusion. One valid reason would be further exploration of the far side of the Moon, invisible from Earth. In this, they were intellectually anticipated by Plutarch in one of the best of his many miscellaneous essays – more on this below.
As with many other peoples, the early Greeks and Romans worshipped the Moon, respectively Selene in Greek, Luna in Latin. Selene had a very jolly life, driving across the heavens in her chariot, when not shagging various fellow deities. Hecate, goddess of magic and witchcraft, also had strong lunar associations, as well as being the patron and protector of the much-feared witches of Thessaly. She was worshipped by the Romans as goddess of the crossroads, a job I’d not envy in modern traffic.
Then, a sensational new theory degoddified the Moon, coincident with Babylonian astronomers recording the cycles of lunar eclipses. This was the notion of Anaxagoras, an associate of Pericles, who proposed that the Sun was merely a red-hot stone whose luminescence largely obscured that of the Moon. This got him into trouble, bringing him to trial for impiety, followed by exile. Later on, he improved his image in modern astronomical eyes by correctly explaining lunar and solar eclipses. His modern reward is to have a lunar crater named for him, more attractive than being consigned to Dante’s first circle of Hell (Canto 4, 137). In Plato’s Apology, Socrates mentioned you could buy a copy of Anaxagoras’s only published book for one drachma, the basic daily wage for a skilled worker and a soldier – perhaps suggesting it was a bestseller.
His ‘impiety’ would later get myself into trouble in a school Physics class when asked to define the Moon. Having paid my usual lack of attention to the master, I panicked and replied that the Moon was merely a reflection of the Sun, which earned me a good clout on the ear, and a sharply worded denunciation of my idiocy, one reason I promptly switched from the sciences to the classics.
Anaxagoras’s revolutionary theory inspired Aristotle, Seleucus, Archimedes and Ptolemy to their own scientific studies of the Moon, confirming in the process a good deal of ‘modern’ knowledge. Best example is his theory that the Moon was something earlier split off from the Earth, a notion much later revived by George Darwin, son of Charles.
Top ancient honours go to Plutarch for his aforementioned essay on the far side of the Moon, in the form of a Platonic dialogue – there’s an online translation. In it, Plutarch makes a valiant and fairminded attempt to segregate probable scientific facts from palpable fictions, notably (ch24) a lion falling off it – this yarn was later ‘improved’ by substituting a man.
Plutarch denies there were any Moon men, wondering why they stopped at home, since no one had ever seen or met one.
Nevertheless, the battle of science versus superstition continued. In Virgil’s eighth Eclogue, one of his singing shepherds claims (v.64), “Songs can the very Moon draw down from heaven.”
Later in the same poem (vvv. 86-9), a local wizard, Moeris, is said to be a werewolf, also capable of drawing down the Moon, raising the dead (shades of the film unanimously voted the worst of all time, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space), and moving crops from a neighbour’s field.
How many Greeks and Romans really believed these nonsenses? For full treatment of this question, see Paul Veyne’s Did the Greeks believe in their own myths?
Leaving the Moon for a bit, the crop transference merits some discussion. In the early (c. 450 BC) Roman Laws of the Twelve Tables (inspired in part by sending a team of lawyers to Periclean Athens), this crop trick was actually legislated against (8.9). As late as 157 BC, a man suspected of multiple wizardries was accused of this crime and brought to trial, where common sense prevailed and he was acquitted.
Pliny ( Natural History bk 8 ch34 paras 80-3) dismisses werewolves as a typical example of Greek credulity. On the other hand, Petronius ( Satyricon 62) has a tale in which a man meets (suitably) in a graveyard under a bright full Moon another who disrobes, urinates around the pile of his clothes and metamorphoses into a werewolf. No one in his audience expresses the slightest disbelief in this story.
One wonders how modern astronauts would have coped, had the Moon been as portrayed in Lucian’s True Story, often hailed as the first piece of science fiction, a claim challenged by Kingsley Amis, who disqualifies it because it contains no science; let us simply classify it as fantasy fiction and move on, though not before reading John Hilton’s “Lucian and the Great Moon Hoax of 1835” in Akroterion 50, 2005, 1-20 available online.
No telescopes in Lucian’s day (2nd century AD), but he was capable of visualising a device which would allow him to see the Earth from the Moon, an imagination which has never been given the credit it deserves. Some of Lucian’s Moon law rather resembles Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter stories set on Mars, or Barsoom as it is there called. The Moon men (called Selenites, for obvious reasons) are fully described in book one, chapters 22-35) Lack of space constrains me to sundry extracts, in which I reproduce Lucian’s own words.
“They are not born of women but of men. They marry men and do not know the word ‘woman’ at all. Up to age 25, each is a wife and then a husband. They carry their children in the calf of their leg, not the belly. At conception the calf swells, they cut it open, the baby is born dead but brought to life by putting it in the wind with its mouth open. A particular kind of man is born by planting a right testicle in the ground, whence a giant tree grows, from which the men are shelled out. The Moon men have artificial parts, some ivory, others wood. They eat exclusively from the smoke of cooking frogs. They are exempt from the calls of nature, and have intercourse via the hollow of the knee. Their noses run with honey and they sweat cheese…” Fly me to the Moon? Perhaps not.
“I can find nothing that has been calculated, or said, that is sounder than Mr. Shaw’s determination that the moon is 37 miles away” – Fort, Books, p.450.
Lucian might well have been tickled by O’Brien’s lecture to Winston Smith in 1984, in which he first claims the stars are mere twinkles of light reachable only a few miles away, then reverts to the truth, ending “Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy?”