The Moon goddesses showed the usual carelessness of all variable people

The Moon goddesses showed the usual carelessness of all variable people, and seemed quite unable to keep together their own property. The great temple of Artemis at Ephesus had to be built and rebuilt. She deserted the classical temple one October night in 356 B. C. Presumably she had crossed to Macedonia, where she presided at the birth of Alexander the Great. That same night during her absence a villain, desirous of making his name immortal if only by one dastardly crime, set fire to the temple. He was caught, and his name was ordered stricken from every record so that immortality could not touch him. But notoriety is a curious thing. The name of the criminal has survived even to today. We know it, but out of deference to law and order we shall omit it here.

Quite properly under the circumstances, Alexander the Great gave his money and assigned his architect toward a new building. The final temple was over four hundred feet in length, boasted one hundred and twenty-seven columns, with great gates of prized cyprus wood, and treasures given by the richest men of the times. The priests of the Moon were fortunate in having patient friends. They must have needed a constant subscription list of those to whom they could apply each time their goddess was negligent. Yet the temple was extremely sacred. It inspired a universal awe and reverence, and was catalogued by the tourist-guidebook minds of the Alexandrian period as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

In later times Saint Paul came to preach the Gospel to the citizens of Ephesus. "But when they knew that he was a Jew, all with one voice about the space of two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians." The temple was destroyed at last after the triumph of Christianity, when the goddess was off on a longer jaunt, and the columns now adorn a church in Pisa and support the immense dome of Saint Sophia in Constantinople.

Not even the most devoted worshipers of the lunar goddess could doubt her irregularities, but the suggestion that she shone by reflected light was considered grave heresy, punishable by death. About 470 B. C., philosophy moved from Ionia to Athens in the person of Anaxagoras, the friend of Pericles and Aspasia. Anaxagoras, like the elephant's child in Kipling's tale, was full of "'satiable curiosity" and like the elephant's child, it led him into trouble. The account of his investigations which has come down to us through the writings of Hippolytos is worth quoting at some length, although the lunar theory was his real contribution.

"The Sun and the Moon and all the stars are fiery stones carried round by the rotation of the ether. Under the stars are the Sun and Moon, and also certain bodies which revolve with them, but are invisible to us.

"We do not feel the heat of the stars because of the greatness of their distance from the Earth; and further they are not so warm as the Sun, because they occupy a colder region. The Moon is below the Sun and nearer to us.

"The Sun surpasses the Peloponnesos in size. The Moon has not a light of her own, but gets it from the Sun. The course of the stars goes under the Earth.

"The Moon is eclipsed by the Earth's screening the Sun's light from it, and sometimes too by the bodies below the Moon coming before it. The Sun is eclipsed at the new Moon, when the Moon screens it from us. Both the Sun and the Moon turn in their courses owing to the repulsion of the air. The Moon turns frequently, because it can not prevail over the cold.

" Anaxagoras was the first to determine what concerns the eclipses and the illumination of the Sun and the Moon. And he said the Moon was of earth, and had plains and ravines in it."

Those few short paragraphs give testimony that Anaxagoras was as far advanced in knowledge of the Moon as any man before the invention of the telescope. He realized what caused eclipses, and did not confuse them with phases; he understood the relative position of the heavenly bodies, the substance of the Moon and the source of its light. True, he made a few mistakes; he thought the Earth was flat, and he would have done better if he had stuck to his original reason for the coldness of starlight, rather than add supplementary arguments. His description of the Moon's revolution sounds surprisingly human; and no one could accuse him of exaggerating the size of the Sun. Still, all things considered, he had learned a great deal, and his discoveries deserved a better reception than they received.

For a long time, the advanced Greeks had not believed fully in the divinity of the Sun and Moon. The announcements of Anaxagoras were taken as contributions to science. The educated men of the day, Empedocles, Parmenides and Aristophanes, made jokes about "shining by reflected light," much as W. S. Gilbert made jokes in Pinafore about the newly invented telephone. But Anaxagoras had bad luck. A religious revival had sprung up after the Persian wars, and revivalists are not apt to accept heresies with good humor. Pericles interceded for his friend, and Anaxagoras escaped with his life. He was forced to live in exile, and all the accumulated hatred against him was pent up for thirty years until it fell with full force on a greater man than Anaxagoras--the aged, kindly philosopher Socrates. "Do you think you are accusing Anaxagoras?" asked Socrates in his last defense. "The youth can buy his books for a drachma if the price is high, and laugh at Socrates if he pretends that the theories are his own, especially when they are so absurd. But for heaven's sake do you think this of me, that I do not believe there is a God?" That was exactly what his accuser did think. Anaxagoras had set the pace for men of science and Socrates was sentenced to death, one of the highest and most irrational payments that science has ever demanded.

Anaxagoras was perfectly correct when he said that the Moon had a rapid motion for it goes around the Earth in just a month; but it has also a slow rotation on its own axis, a surprisingly steady movement for the Moon. In the same time that it takes to go around the Earth, it also turns itself around, just once. It behaves as if it were a courtier who decided to walk in circles around his queen without so insulting etiquette as to turn his back on her. In order to keep his face to the queen he would have to turn slightly as he walked, and every other person in the room would see first his back and then his side, then his face; but to the queen his face alone would be visible. So the other planets and the stars and the Sun may see all sides of our respectful little satellite, and the sunlight progresses from one side of it to the other, but no number of months or years or centuries seems to change the uninterrupted view of the Earth that our side of the Moon enjoys. Probably it was not always respectful. This peculiar staticness is known in a number of heavenly bodies and is considered a sign of old age, the last phase. No man on Earth has ever known what the other side of the Moon looks like, and the mystery has given logicians a wonderful opportunity to speculate. Of course it may resemble a jabberwock, a unicorn or even the square root of minus one, but the chances against that are enormous. Taking all possibilities into account, we may assume that the other side of the Moon bears a close similarity to the side we see.