Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 5 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"Plutarch
Philosophy
Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 5 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"
Plutarch
Classical literature; Essays; Ethics; Philosophy
Now as to her breadth and magnitude, it is not such as the
geometricians deliver, but manifoldly greater. And she seldom measures
the shadow of the earth by her greatness, not because she is small, but
because she adds to her motion by heat, that she may quickly pass the
shady place, carrying with her the souls of the blessed, which make
haste and cry. For when they are in the shadow, they can no longer hear
the harmony of the heavenly bodies. And withal, the souls of the damned
are from below presented to them, lamenting and wailing through this
shadow. Wherefore also in eclipses, many are wont to ring vessels of
brass, and to make a noise and clattering to be heard by these souls.
Moreover, that which is called the face of the moon affrights them
when they draw near it, seeming to them a dreadful and terrible sight;
whereas indeed it is not so. But as our earth has deep and great bays,
one here running between Hercules’s pillars into the land to us, and
others without, as the Caspian, and those about the Red Sea; so in
the moon also there are hollows and great depths. Now of these, the
greatest they call the gulf of Hecate, where the souls punish or are
punished according to the evils they suffered or did whilst they were
Daemons. The two others are long passages, through which the soul must
go sometimes to that part of the moon which is towards heaven, and
sometimes to that which is towards earth. Now that part of the moon
which is towards heaven is called the Elysian fields; and that which
is towards the earth, the fields of Proserpine that is opposite to the
earth.
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