some change and shifting of the surrounding air, surely the moon does not lose her honour or her fame, nor yet her Divinity, when she is held by men to be holy earth of a sort and not, as the Stoics say, fire which is turbid, mere dregs of fire. Fire is honoured in barbarous fashions by the Medes and Assyrians, who fear what injures them, and pay observance or rites of propitiation to that, rather than to what they revere. But the name of earth, we know, is dear and honourable to every Greek, we reverence her as our fathers did, like any other God. But, being men, we are very far from thinking of the moon, that [Sidenote: C] Olympian earth, as a body without soul or mind, having no share in things which we duly offer as first-fruits to the Gods, taught by usage to pay them a return for the goods they give us, and by Nature to reverence that which is above ourselves in virtue and power and honour. Let us not then think that we offend in holding that she is an earth, and that this her visible face, just like our earth with its great gulfs, is folded back into great depths and clefts containing water or murky air, which the light of the sun fails to penetrate or touch, but is obscured, and sends back its reflexion here in shattered fragments.’ XXII. Here Apollonides broke in: ‘Then in the name of [Sidenote: D] the moon herself,’ he said, ‘do you think it possible that shadows are thrown there by any clefts or gullies, and from thence reach our sight, or do you not calculate what follows, and am I to tell you? Pray hear me out, though you know it all. The diameter of the moon shows an apparent breadth of twelve fingers at her mean distance from us. Now, each of those black shadowy objects appears larger than half a finger, and is therefore more than a twenty-fourth part of the diameter. [Sidenote: E] Very well; if we were to assume the circumference of the moon to be only thirty thousand stades, and the diameter ten thousand, on that assumption each of these shadowy objects on her would be not less than five hundred stades. Now, consider first whether it be possible for the moon to have depths and eminences sufficient to cause a shadow of that size. Next, if they are so large, how is it that we do not see them?’ At this, I smiled on him and said, ‘Well done, Apollonides, to have found out such a demonstration! By it you will prove that you and I too are greater than the Aloades[349] of old, not [Sidenote: F] at any time of day, however, but in early morning for choice, and late afternoon; when the sun makes our shadows prodigious, and thereby presents to our sense the splendid inference, that if the shadow thrown be great, the object which throws it is enormous. Neither of us, I am sure, has ever been in Lemnos, but we have both heard the familiar line,[350] _Athos the Lemnian heifer’s flank shall shade._