Download PDF | (Greek Culture in the Roman World) Karen ní Mheallaigh - The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination_ Myth, Literature, Science and Philosophy-Cambridge University Press (2020).
338 Pages
THE MOON IN THE GREEK AND ROMAN IMAGINATION
The Moon exerted a powerful influence on ancient intellectual history, as a playground for the scientific imagination. This book explores the history of the Moon in the Graeco-Roman imaginary from Homer to Lucian, with special focus on those accounts of the Moon, its attributes and its ‘inhabitants’ given by ancient philosophers, natural scientists and imaginative writers including Pythagoreans, Plato and the Old Academy, Varro, Plutarch and Lucian. Ní Mheallaigh shows how the Moon’s enigmatic presence made it a key site for thinking about the gaze (erotic, philosophical and scientific) and the relation between appearance and reality. It was also a site for hoax in antiquity as well as today. Central issues explored include the view from elsewhere (selēnoskopia), the relation of science and fiction, the interaction between the beginnings of science in the classical polis and the imperial period, and the limits of knowledge itself.
Karen ní Mheallaigh is Professor of Greek in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Reading Fiction with Lucian: Fakes, Freaks and Hyperreality (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Introduction
To the Moon! Journey into the Ancient Scientific Imagination In the Apollo era, photographic images revealed the lunar landscape to us for the first time. Overnight, our mysterious opaline luminary – the fanciful home of insectoid Selenites, bat-men or benevolent lunar spirits – became a rock in space, a forlorn and uninhabited outpost of our world. But the ancient Greeks and Roman did not know this yet: they did not know what the Moon was made of (fire? ice? cloud?), or what caused it to change its shape each month, and they were fascinated by it – ‘haunted by its thereness’, to paraphrase John Updike, in a poem about the mysterious lunar presence. This book explores particularly the ancient Greeks’ probing and imaginative exploitation of the Moon’s ‘thereness’ in their literature, as well as the ideas about the Moon on which that literature was predicated. It is not a history of the Moon as such, for excellent studies of that nature already exist, which recount precisely what beliefs the ancient Greeks and Romans held about the Moon. Instead, I explore the Moon’s interactions with Greek literary and intellectual culture.
The Moon that emerges from these pages is a distinctive conceptual space, characterized above all by liminality or in-betweenness. Ultimately, it connects the modern world with antiquity. From very ancient times, the Moon was understood to be enmeshed with natural and cultural phenomena of our world (e.g. dew, birth, menstruation, tides, the calendar), but over time it developed ontological, epistemological and topographical qualities all of its own. The first three chapters of the book trace the Moon’s early associations and its gradual fleshing out into a parallel world, fully realized and populated in the ancient imagination. Eventually – as we shall see in Chapter – it would become a platform from which to contemplate the Earth and, at that point, a sensory impression of our world was constructed from the Moon. One way or another, the Moon is always entangled with the Earth: a separate, but related world distinct and yet recognizable, proximate yet detached. In the era before the telescope the Moon was, by necessity, constructed entirely out of the ancient mythical, philosophical, scientific and literary imagination. As these shifted, so too did ideas about the Moon. But more uncannily, as ancient Greek thinkers built and rebuilt the Moon, it exerted its influence back on them and began to shape their thought-world in turn.
It is this dialogic relationship – a noetic version of the ubiquitous Earth– Moon entanglement – that I find fascinating. I will begin in Chapter where Greek literature begins – with the poetry of Homer and Hesiod and with the choral poetry of the Archaic Sparta – traditions which mark the Moon’s chronometric presence very early in the Greek imagination, and which draw it into the world of ritual, song and dance, where new associations can crystallize around it. As a result, a rich tradition of ritual, folk-wisdom, song and dance was already woven around the Moon when the poet Sappho emerged in the seventh century BCE. The hinterland of choral and agricultural traditions represented by Homer, Hesiod and Alcman was undoubtedly a formative influence on Sappho, but this female poet from the island of Lesbos may, with some justification, be hailed as the first poet of the Moon, for it is clear – even through the fragmentary remains of her songs – that the Moon was a distinctive symbol in her work, and that she evolved lunar mythology (especially the myth of Selene and Endymion) in influential new directions.
Now the semiotics of the Moon quickened and took on a new complexity, linked with themes of female desire, the reciprocities of the gaze, and to proto-philosophical ideas that associated the Moon with moisture, liquidity and the feminine. Chapter explores how the Moon became the object of the earliest scientific query in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Thinkers in the Ionian world were puzzled by the strange mutations that made it unique among the celestial bodies – ‘no star but in the zodiac of stars’ (to quote John Updike’s poem). These early theorists drew on their technological and artefactual imaginary to conceptualize the Moon as a fiery ring or a great celestial bowl or a glowing cloud, but in the fifth century they hit on the idea that it is in fact an Earth-like, rocky world rather like our own. The story of how the Moon first became a world is germane to (all) later imaginative traditions about lunar journeys, lunar inhabitants and lunar visitors to our world.
At the same time, questions about the Moon’s nature were entangled with deeper, broader questions about the nature of change and sense-perception. The Moon also became entwined with more metaphysical thrusts of thought, in which it served as the realm of incorporeal entities such as the soul and semi-divine beings called daemones. Chapter traces the Moon’s shift from being the object of purely physical scrutiny to becoming involved with newly emerging doubts about the nature of reality and knowledge itself. In Chapters and , the focus turns towards the implications of the theory that the Moon was an Earth-like space, and a parallel world in the sky. Although the Moon’s nature was never unequivocally fixed in antiquity, the Earthy Moon Theory (EMT) of the fifth century BCE kickstarted speculation on the possibility of lunar life, and thinkers in Plutarch’s great lunar dialogue, On the face of the Moon, pressed complex questions about the Moon’s purpose in the cosmos in both physical and metaphysical terms. Before the encroachments of telescopic lenses, the Moon was a place of both unverifiable reality and unfalsifiable possibility. When eventually writers took their readers on imaginative journeys there, as we will see in Chapters and , it became an alternative world, an eternal other place suspended between truth and lies. From the lunar platform, the imaginary eye could survey with supreme detachment our world and humankind in its entirety, compressed into one convenient eyeshot. On the other hand, when viewed from Earth below, the Moon appeared to reflect the whole world back to us in a mirrory map.
The Moon became, therefore, the ultimate mise en abyme: a fantasy archival space, which offered sensory command of the whole world and a catoptric précis of all our knowledge and existence. It became symbolic both of the limits of human knowledge and of the imperializing control of the world of knowledge. It became, too, a test-site for the philosophical eye, trained to zoom in and out in fantasies of telescopy and microscopy. And all the while, the old traditions of the Moon-goddess, ritual and time that were associated with the Moon continued to flourish. It was never the case that one way of imagining the Moon replaced another; instead, as traditions grew and became entangled with one another, the Moon became an ever more richly complex presence in the ancient imagination. Some candour about the scope of the project is in order at this point. I have focussed mainly on what the Greeks and Romans wrote about the Moon in the literary record. To this heterogeneous body of poetry, philosophical literature, satire, science and fiction I attach the label ‘selenography’ (‘writing about the Moon’), which I have adapted from Johannes Hevelius’ landmark work of .
The analysis in the book sweeps from the Archaic to the Imperial periods, with occasional forays into the lunar imaginary of the Byzantine Greeks (Demetrius Triclinius) and early modern writers (e.g. Cyrano de Bergerac, Kepler). Without doubt, however, the floruit of ancient selenography coincides with the Roman Empire, in the works of Plutarch and Lucian in the first and second centuries CE. These are the most substantial and richly detailed selenographical works from antiquity and, in Chapter , I shall argue that their precise congruence with the height of Roman expansionism is pointedly meaningful. Despite the book’s broad chronological sweep, however, its focus is still, inevitably, selective: I do not, for example, explore visual representations of the Moon-goddess, except sporadically and in passing, and the focus on Graeco-Roman material excludes other important cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, such as the Etruscans (with Tivr and Catha as potential candidates for lunar deities) and Phoenicians (Astarte).
The reader will, however, be compensated somewhat, I hope, by the fact that this is the first study to bring together and analyse this diverse set of texts about the Moon from the Graeco-Roman world itself, and that this is the first sustained exploration of the Moon’s influence on the Graeco-Roman literary and scientific imagination. Moreover, some of the material examined here (e.g. Plutarch’s De facie, Varro’s Endymiones, the recondite lunar mythography of Hellenistic poets) may be unfamiliar even to the seasoned Classicist. Although the book has been written primarily with the Classical scholar in mind, I hope that the scholar of early modern thought will find material of interest here too, as well as the reader who is more generally intrigued by ideas about the Moon, crossovers between scientific and literary thought, or the pre-history of science fiction.
The design is such that each chapter will contribute, gradually, its own motif so that, by the end, the reader will find him/herself immersed in the symphony of ancient lunar ideas. For organization purposes, I employ rather artificial distinctions between different ways of conceptualizing the Moon (‘mythic’, ‘scientific’ and so on), but I will constantly emphasize patterns of cross-fertilization among these categories, for one of my central arguments is that it is in the nature of the Moon to collapse boundaries. That, combined with its strange remoteness (so near, yet so far), made it a unique laboratory, out of which emerged thought-experiments that would powerfully shape the history of literature and ideas. Ultimately, the Moon that emerges from this book is an extraordinary imaginary space: the product and emblem of the ancient scientific imagination itself.
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