Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 2.29 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 2.29 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

OP THE ECLIPSE OF THE MOON. Anaximenes believes that the mouth of the hollow wheel, about which the moon is turned, being stopped is the cause of an eclipse. Berosus, that it proceeds from the turning of the dark side of the lunar orb towards us. Heraclitus, that it is performed just after the manner of a boat turned upside downwards. Some of the Pythagoreans say, that the splendor arises from the earth, its obstruction from the Antichthon (or counter-earth). Some of the later philosophers, that there is such a distribution of the lunar flame, that it gradually and in a just order burns until it be full moon ; in like manner, that this fire decays by ^degrees, until its conjunction with the sun totally extinguisheth it. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and all the mathematicians agree in this, that the obscurity with which the moon is every month affected ariseth from a conjunction with the sun, by whose more resplendent beams she is darkened ; and the moon is then eclipsed when she falls upon the shadow of the earth, the earth interposing between the sun and moon, or (to speak more properly) the earth intercepting the light of the moon.

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

← Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 2.28 contents Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 2.30 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Aristotle — a life

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)