Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/252

238 of the fiery diurnal hemisphere, while night is the shadow thrown by the earth when the fiery hemisphere is on the other side of it (fr. 48). What, then, is the sun? The Plutarchean Stromateis again give us the answer: "The sun is not fire in substance, but a reflexion of fire like that which comes from water." Plutarch himself makes one of his personages say: "You laugh at Empedokles for saying that the sun is a product of the earth, arising from the reflexion of the light of heaven, and once more 'flashes back to Olympos with untroubled countenance.'" Aetios says: "Empedokles held that there were two suns: one, the archetype, the fire in one hemisphere of the world, filling the whole hemisphere always stationed opposite its own reflexion; the other, the visible sun, its reflexion in the other hemisphere, that which is filled with air mingled with fire, produced by the reflexion of the earth, which is round, on the crystalline sun, and carried round by the motion of the fiery hemisphere. Or, to sum it up shortly, the sun is a reflexion of the terrestrial fire."

These passages, and especially the last, are by no means clear. The reflexion we call the sun cannot be in the hemisphere opposite the fiery one; for that is the nocturnal hemisphere. We must say rather that the light of the fiery hemisphere is reflected by the earth on to the fiery hemisphere itself in one concentrated flash. It follows that the appearance which we call the sun is the same size as the earth. We may perhaps explain the origin of this view as follows.