intro
The recapitulation of this fictitious discussion along with the incidental arguments provoked by it contains all that Plutarch would consider to be scientific in the dialogue. At its conclusion Lamprias is ready for Sulla’s myth (chap. 24 init. [937 C - D]); but before Sulla can begin to speak Theon raises the question of the habitability of the moon, contending that, if it is not habitable, there can be no reason for it to exist with the nature or composition that according to Lamprias and Lucius it does have. cf. 937 D: εἰ δυνατὸν ἐκεῖ κατοικεῖν. εἰ γὰρ δυνατόν, ἄλογον καὶ τὸ γῆν εἰναι τὴν σελήνην: δόκει γάρ πρὸς οὐδὲν ἀλλὰ μάτην γεγονέναι κτλ. Lamprias calls Theon’s speech a kind of relaxation after the seriousness of the preceding discussion. In fact, however, Theon has raised the metaphysical problem of the final cause; and to this Lamprias replies at length (chap. 25). He argues first that the moon, constituted as he contends it is, need not, even if uninhabitable, be without a purpose in the universe (938 C - F), and secondly that, even if uninhabitable by corporeal human beings, it may still be inhabited by living beings of an entirely different kind to whom the moon may justly appear to be the only real earth and our earth the slime and dregs of the universe, uninhabitable by creatures that have warmth and breath and motion. Here Sulla checks Lamprias (chap. 26 init. [940 F]) lest the latter encroach upon his myth; and Lamprias was upon the very threshold of it, for the myth, as it turns out, teaches that the moon is inhabited by souls that have left their bodies after death on earth or have not yet been incorporated by birth into terrestrial bodies. So the episode consisting of Theon’s speech and Lamprias’s reply (chaps. 24-25) is not merely a formal literary device. It is, to be sure, a transition from the scientific part of the dialogue, in which it is argued that the lunar phenomena imply the earth-like constitution of the moon, to the concluding myth in which the purpose of such a moon in the universe is imaginatively portrayed; but this transitional episode raises the philosophical question, without the answer to which the strictly astronomical conclusion could to a Platonist or Aristotelian be no complete or satisfactory explanation, and itself contains the metaphysical answer, of which the myth is, despite all its intrinsic interest, essentially a poetical embellishment. When this transition is properly attended to, there can be no question about the integral unity of the whole dialogue or any doubt that the purpose of the whole is to establish and defend the position that the moon is entirely earthy in its constitution and that on this hypothesis alone can the astronomical phenomena and the existence of the moon itself be accounted for. cf. M. Pohlenz, Gött. Gel. Anz. clxxx [1918], p. 323.
