Much of the matter of III reappears, with little variety of substance, in the _Face in the Moon_, the attack on Aristotle’s theory of the distribution of matter in the one corresponding to that upon the Stoics in the other, and the accounts of the imprisonment of Cronus by his son (or Briareus) being almost identical. It is probable that in both Plutarch has drawn immediately upon Posidonius, and through him from Xenocrates and others. The question is discussed with great thoroughness by Dr. Max Adler (_Dissertationes Vindobonenses_, 1910). The situation of Delphi is one of extraordinary beauty, as well as interest: Some few miles north-east of the ancient site of Cirrha the mountainous range of Parnassus shoots out two little spurs towards the sea, thus locking on three sides an inclined valley, as the tiers of an ancient circus embrace the arena below. Upon the fourth side a small river runs, by name the Pleistus, which has forced its way between the eastern spur and Mount Cirphius, directly south and opposite; crosses laterally at the foot of the glen; then, sweeping round in a shining curve, before many leagues unites its waters to the bay. The descending slope that forms the amphitheatre is broken by ridges into three terraces, such as the traveller is wont to see in hilly countries. On the highest rose the sanctuary; below was the town and the cultivated hollow which poets called the Vale of Delphi; above all towered the ridges of Parnassus itself,[50] sheer walls of rock, rising inland towards the summit of the chain, desolate, grand, and picturesque. Those who stood above the level of the temple, and turned their gaze toward the south-west, might perhaps have looked far over to the smiling gulf of Corinth, an unbroken prospect of well-watered fields. Upon their left was the famous plane-tree, and the spring of Castalia, whose stream, leaping down between two rocks, out of a huge cleft that divided them, lost itself in a dell below, till it fell finally into the Pleistus; and mounting the rough ascent, just beyond the little torrent, might be seen the sacred way, which, issuing from the same gorge as the Pleistus, rounded the flank of the promontory of rock and climbed up its warm side. Few are the shadows that pass over the valley; through the long day the southern sun beats down on it, and the brilliancy of the sky is immortalized in the name which the inhabitants conferred upon the hills about, of Phaedriades, or shining cliffs. But the property of the temple was not bounded by the extent of the _view_. Above, on the heights, as far as Ligorea and Tithorea, both Doric villages—towards the west, beyond the Stadium, and the hill on which it nestled, to Amphissa and the pasturages along its stream—all was part of the Ager Apollinis, sacred to the god and to his priests for ever.