Are There or are There Not Animals on the Moon?

Abstract

According to Book IV of Cicero’s Quaestiones Academicae, Xenophanes was of the opinion that “there are inhabitants on the moon and that it is a land of many cities and mountains etc.” The Pythagoreans also believed this for they stated that “the moon appears to be an earthlike body, and because it is like our earth, it is inhabited by very large and fine animal specimens.” Plutarch, furthermore, in his treatise dealing with the appearance of the moon’s sphere, says, “I think that those who inhabit the moon must find it remarkable that the earth can produce and feed animals, when they see our earth as the lowest dregs of the world, appearing through so much moisture, clouds, and vapors, a place dark and low and without motion, etc.”. Macrobius, moreover, in Book I, Chapter 13 of In Somnium Scipionis places people and the purgatory of souls on the moon. Achilles Tatius in his Isagoge de Quibusdam Existimatibus declares, moreover, “that there is a certain region on the moon which is habitable and is endowed with rivers and other natural phenomena which we see here on earth.”