3/22/26
reading
my mixtum dogma book club has been reading through the fragments of Empedocles, in the context in which they are preserved. there are two that really stuck out to me today.
from a scholiast on Plato's Gorgias, 498e:
'Twice and thrice the fair' is a proverb, that one must speak of fair things many times. The line is Empedocles'; hence the proverb. For he says: "For it is noble to say what one must even twice"
i don't know precisely when or where this scholiast was writing, and i certainly don't know what the information environment of that time and place was, but it seems to me that good information was probably just as hard to find back then as it is today. i'm reminded of the more modern proverb, which has been floating around in some form or another since 1710, that
"a lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on."
(this wording can be definitively sourced to Terry Pratchett's 2000 novel The Truth, appropriately enough.)
from Plutarch's The Face on the Moon, 925-b-c:
[The moon] practically touches the earth and revolving nearby, Empedocles says, "like the path of a chariot it whirls, and around the furthest point...". And often [the moon] does not get beyond the shadow of the earth, which extends only a short way, because the source of light is very large. But [the moon] seems to revolve so close to it, and practically in the arms of earth, that it is screened from the sun by it, unless it rises above this shadowy and earthen and nocturnal place which is allotted to earth. So, I think, we must take courage and say that the moon is within the earth's bounds, being occulted by its extremities.
i'm always struck by the different ways "the Earth" is conceived of in antiquity. most strikingly i'm reminded of the psychedelic myth that ends Plato's Phaedo, 109a-114d, where we
...do not perceive that we live in the hollows, but think we live on the upper surface of the earth, just as if someone who lives in the depth of the ocean should think he lived on the surface of the sea, and, seeing the sun and the stars through the water, should think the sea was the sky...
against the idea that our entire perception of the Earth is simply a hollow in the dodecahedral patchwork of the true earth, including the sphere of the Moon in the bounds of what we consider to be "Earth" seems downright simple by comparison. after all, the two bodies are tidally locked, and the Moon orbits the Earth, so why not consider them as the same system? even if, when we zoom out to a further frame of reference, that's not really true either.