Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 2.13 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 2.13 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

WHAT IS THE ESSENCE OF THE STARS, AND HOW THEY ARE COMPOSED. Thales believes that they are globes of earth set on fire. Empedocles, that they are fiery bodies arising from that fire which the ether embraced within itself, and did shatter in pieces when the elements were first separated 'one from another. Anaxagoras, that the circumambient ether is of a fiery substance, which, by a vehement force in its whirling about, did tear stones from the earth, and by its own power set them on fire, and establish them as stars in the heavens. Diogenes thinks they resemble pumice stones, and that they are the breathings of the w^orld ; again he supposeth that there are some invisible stones, which sometimes fall from heaven upon the earth, and are there quenched ; as it happened at Aegos-potami, where a stony star resembling fire did fall. Empedocles, that the fixed stars are fastened to the crystal, but the planets are loosened. Plato, that the stars for the most part are of a fiery nature, but they are made partakers of another element, with which they are mixed after the resemblance of glue. Xenophanes, that they are composed of inflamed clouds, which in the daytime are quenched, and in the night are kindled again. The like we see in coals ; for the rising and setting of the stars is nothing else but the quenching and khidling of them. Heraclides and the Pythagoreans, that every star is a world in an infinite ether, and itself encompasseth air, earth, and ether ; this opinion is current among the followers of Orpheus, for they suppose that each of the stars does make a world. Epicurus condemns none of these opinions, for he embraces any thing that is possible.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch — translated by John Dowel (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)