(3) Sylla’s tale in the _Face in the Moon_ (pp. 299-308), a traveller’s story picked up in Carthage from one of those curious characters found on the outer margin of the Greek world in whom Plutarch delighted, is brought in with admirable dramatic fitness, shown in Sylla’s eagerness to produce it at the very outset, in the preparation for it by the skirmish between Theon and Lamprias, and in the vivacity of the narrative. It is dismissed with a Platonic formula: ‘Such is the story which I heard the stranger relate.... But you and your friends, Lamprias, may take the story in what way you will.’ Compare: ‘I am persuaded, O Callicles, that these things that are told are true.... Perchance this shall seem to you an old wife’s fable, and thou wilt despise it: well mightest thou despise it, if by searching we could find out aught better and truer’ (_Gorgias_, 526 D, 527 A). The astronomy of the myth is in the main that of the preceding Dialogue, and Sylla shows considerable familiarity with Plato and also with Xenocrates. It is perhaps noticeable how little interest Plutarch shows in geographical detail, contenting himself with such vague and antiquated views as sufficed for a setting to the story. He appears not to name Pytheas at all in the _Lives_, and only once (on a question of the tides) in the _Moralia_. The whole Dialogue has been the subject of a careful study by Dr. Max Adler of Vienna (_Dissertationes Vindobonenses_, 1910). Without entering into his general view of the structure, we may observe that Dr. Adler seems to be very successful in establishing the close connexion between it and the Dialogue _On the Cessation of the Oracles_, which he is probably right—though he reserves the proofs—in regarding as based upon it, and later in date. This comes out especially in the passages about the captivity of Cronus (cp. p. 301 with pp. 135-6), and the argument about ‘the Middle’ (cp. p. 270 with p. 144). He produces a happy quotation from Maximus Tyrius to establish beyond doubt that the source of an important passage about mind (pp. 271-2) was in Posidonius. His general conclusion as to the myth, is that it too is in the main from Posidonius, and that when Plutarch draws upon Xenocrates, it is through Posidonius. The latter appears to have been a writer of great industry and encyclopaedic learning, quoted as an authority on matters of history, physical geography, and what we should now call anthropology; not an original force in Philosophy, but successful in reconciling systems and making them available for human needs; one the aim of whose life-work was, in the words of one of his most recent exponents, _to make men at home in the universe_ (_Stoics and Sceptics_, by Edwyn Bevan, p. 98).