Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
Is there, then, some primary power and substance of cold, Favorinus, just as fire is of heat, by presence and participation in which each of the other things becomes cold? Or rather, is coldness a privation of heat, just as they say darkness is of light and rest of motion? For indeed the cold seems to be a thing at rest, while the hot is a thing that moves.
The coolings of hot things, moreover, do not come about through the presence of any power, but through the departure of heat; for at the very moment when a large amount of it is seen going off, what remains behind grows cold. The vapor that boiling water gives off escapes along with the heat as it departs; and this is why the surrounding cooling, by drawing off the heat, reduces the bulk of the water, with nothing else coming in to replace it. But, in the first place, one might suspect of this argument
that it does away with many manifest powers, treating them not as qualities or states but as privations of states and qualities—heaviness as a privation of lightness, hardness as a privation of softness, black as a privation of white, and bitter as a privation of sweet, and so with each pair whose members are by nature opposed to one another in power, not related as a state to its privation. And then, too, every privation is inactive
and inoperative, like blindness, deafness, silence, and death; for these are the departures of forms and the destructions of substances, not distinct natures or substances in their own right. But coldness, arising in bodies, produces effects and changes no less than heat does; for many things are frozen by cold, and drawn together, and made dense; and its being at rest and hard to move
is not a mark of inactivity, but of firmness and stability, possessing from its strength a power that compacts and holds things together. Hence privation is a mere failing and withdrawal of the opposing power, whereas many things are cooled while still retaining much of the heat that was in them; and in some cases the coldness, when it takes hold of things that are hotter, actually freezes and contracts them, just as iron is hardened when it is quenched. The Stoics, moreover, say that even the breath
in the bodies of infants is tempered by the surrounding cold and, changing from its original nature, becomes soul. But this point is disputable; still, it is not right to regard the coldness that is plainly the maker of many other things as a mere privation. Further, no privation admits of degree, of more and less; nor would anyone say that one blind person is more blind than another among those who cannot see, or that one silent person is more silent than another among those not speaking,
or that one dead person is more dead than another among those not living. But among cold things there is a great deal of more and less, of too much and not too much, and in general intensifications and relaxations, just as among hot things, because matter, being affected now strongly and now gently by the opposing powers, produces some things hotter and others colder than others
of its own accord. For indeed there is no mixture of a state with its privation, nor does any power admit into itself the privation opposed to it when it approaches, nor make it a partner, but rises up against it instead; whereas hot things, up to a point, tolerate being blended with cold ones, just as black tolerates white, and sharp tastes tolerate sweet, and astringent tolerates mild, and by this partnership and blending they produce many pleasing and agreeable combinations of colors, sounds, medicines, and
dishes, and give rise to many kindly generations. For the opposition according to privation and state is warlike and irreconcilable, since the existence of the one consists in the destruction of the other; but the opposition according to contrary powers, when it meets its proper occasion, is much used by the arts, and most of all by nature, both in her other processes of generation and in the changes she works in the air, and in all the things which the god, as he orders and directs the world,
is called harmonious and musical for doing—not by fitting together low and high pitches, nor by making black and white consort harmoniously with one another, but by bringing about the partnership and the difference of heat and cold within the order of the world, so that they may combine in due measure and again separate, governing them and removing the excess of each, and settling both within due bounds. And indeed there is
a perception of cold, just as there is of hot; but a privation is neither visible nor audible nor tangible nor knowable by any of the other senses. For perception was of some substance; and where no substance appears, a privation is conceived, being a denial of substance, just as blindness is of sight, silence of voice, and emptiness and void of body. For there is no perception of the void by touch, but rather where
no contact with a body occurs, there arises a conception of void; nor do we hear silence, but rather, even when we hear nothing, we conceive of silence; and likewise there is no perception of blind, naked, and unarmed people as such, but rather a conception by denial of perception. It would follow, then, that there should be no perception of cold things, but rather that wherever heat is lacking, cold should merely be conceived, if indeed it were a privation of heat. But if, just as heat
is perceptible through warming and the loosening of the flesh, so cold is perceptible through compressing and condensing it, then it is clear that coldness too has its own proper origin and source, just as heat does. Further, the privation belonging to any given form is one thing and simple, whereas substances have many differences and powers; for silence is uniform, but voice is varied, now
troubling and now delighting the sense. Colors and shapes likewise have such differences, by which they affect whoever encounters them in one way at one time and another way at another; but what is untouchable and colorless and altogether without quality has no such difference, but is uniform. Does cold, then, resemble these privative things, so as to produce no difference in the affections it causes—or is the contrary true, that there are
great and beneficial pleasures for the body arising from cold things, and again vigorous harms and pains and heavinesses, under which the heat does not always flee and withdraw, but often, being overtaken, resists and fights; and the name for their fight is shivering and trembling; and when the heat is defeated, freezing and numbness follow, but when it prevails over the cold, it produces a diffusion
and a warmth in the body accompanied by pleasure, which Homer has called being "warmed." But these things, at any rate, are plain to everyone; and it is not least by these very affections that cold shows that it stands opposed to heat as substance to substance, or affection to affection, not as a denial and privation, nor is it some destruction and removal of heat, but a destructive nature and power in its own right.
Or else let us also strike winter from the seasons, and the north winds from among the winds, on the ground that they are privations of hot and southerly ones and have no principle of their own. And indeed, since there are four primary bodies in the universe, which most people, because of their abundance, simplicity, and power, set down as the elements and first principles of everything else—fire, water, air,
and earth—it is necessary that there be just as many primary and simple qualities. What, then, are these, apart from heat and cold and dryness and wetness, by which the elements are naturally suited both to be acted upon and to act? And just as among the elements of grammar there are short and long sounds, and among those of music low and high pitches, with neither being a privation of the other, so too
in physical bodies we must suppose a correspondence of wet things to dry and cold things to hot, preserving both what is rational and what appears to the senses—or else, as the ancient Anaximenes supposed, we should leave neither cold nor hot as a substance, but treat them as common affections of matter that arise upon its changes; for he says that what is contracted and condensed in matter is cold, while
what is rarefied and loosened—naming it in this way with this very word—is hot. Hence it is said, not unreasonably, that a person breathes out both hot and cold from the mouth; for the breath is cooled when it is compressed and made dense by the lips, but when the mouth is relaxed, it escapes and becomes hot through being rarefied. This, however, Aristotle treats as a mistake on the man's part; for when the mouth is relaxed,
the heat is breathed out of us ourselves, but when we purse our lips together and blow, it is not the air from within us but the air in front of the mouth, being cold, that is pushed along and driven against us. But if we must allow that cold and hot are substances, let us carry the argument further and inquire what is the substance and origin and nature of coldness. Some,
then, holding that jagged and triangular shapes are present in bodies, say that shivering and trembling and shuddering, and whatever is akin to these affections, arise from roughness; and even if they go wrong in particular details, they at least take hold of the principle from which the inquiry ought to begin, for the search must begin, as it were, from the hearth of the substance of the whole. And it is by this above all
that the philosopher would seem to differ from the physician, the farmer, and the flute-player. For it is enough for them to consider the ultimate causes—for if the cause nearest to the affection is grasped, the intensification of a fever or an intervening chill, sun-scorched days followed by rain in the case of blight, or the slanting and coming-together of the pipes in the case of low pitch, this is sufficient for the craftsman for his own particular work. But for the
natural philosopher who pursues the truth for the sake of understanding, the knowledge of the ultimate causes is not an end but a beginning of the journey toward the first and highest principles. This is why Plato rightly, and Democritus too, in seeking the cause of heat and heaviness, did not stop their reasoning at earth and fire, but, carrying sensible things back to intelligible principles, advanced all the way to the smallest things, as it were to seeds. Nevertheless,
it is better to stir up first these very perceptible things, in which Empedocles and Strato and the Stoics locate the substances of the powers—the Stoics assigning primary coldness to air, Empedocles and Strato to water; though someone else might perhaps show earth to be the cause of coldness. Let us first examine their views. Since
fire is at once hot and bright, the nature opposed to fire must be both cold and dark; for as the murky is opposed to the bright, so cold is opposed to hot: for as darkness confounds sight, so cold confounds touch, while heat diffuses the sensation of the one who touches it, just as brightness diffuses that of the one who sees. Therefore,
what is primarily dark in nature is also primarily cold. And that air is what is primarily dark has not escaped even the poets; for they call darkness "air": "air lay thick beside the ships, nor did the moon shine forth from heaven"; and again, "clothing themselves all in air, they roam over every land"; and again, "at once the sun scattered the air and drove away the mist,
and shone forth"; "and the whole battle grew visible." And indeed they call the unlit air "gloom," it being, it seems, empty of light; and "cloud" is what they call air that has come together and grown dense, named by the denial of light; it is also called mist and fog; and whatever does not offer the sense of sight a passage for light are differences of air; and its formlessness and colorlessness have earned it the names Hades and
Acheron. So then, just as air is dark when light is lacking, so, when heat has departed, what remains is cold air, and nothing else; and this is why Tartarus too has been named from its coldness—Hesiod makes this clear when he speaks of "misty Tartarus"—and shivering and trembling with cold is called "tartarizing." This, then, is the reasoning on these points. And since destruction is a certain change
of things destroyed into their opposite, let us consider whether it has been well said that "the death of fire is the birth of air"; for fire too dies, like a living creature, either extinguished by force or wasting away of itself. Now its extinguishing makes the change of fire into air more evident; for smoke too is a form of air, as is, in Pindar's words, "the soot that kicks up with reeking smoke,"
and the fumes and exhalation. And indeed one may also see, in a flame dying from want of fuel, as with lamps, its tip pouring away into air, dark and gloomy. And sufficiently, too, the cold vapor that rises from those who have poured water over themselves after a bath or a steam-bath shows the change of heat, as it perishes, into air, as if by nature opposed to fire;
and from this it followed that air is primarily dark and cold. And indeed, of all the things that come about through coldness in bodies, the most violent and forceful is freezing, which is an affection of water but a work of air; for water by itself is easily poured, formless, and lacks cohesion, but it is stretched taut and drawn together when it is gripped by air
under the influence of coldness. Hence it has been said, "but if the south wind should summon the north wind, it will at once produce rain" — for while the south wind prepares the moisture as it were for matter, the north air takes hold of it and freezes it. And this is especially clear in the case of snow; for the flakes, releasing air and breathing it out beforehand, thin and cold, thus flow down. Aristotle also says that whetstones of lead melt and flow under frost
and winter, when only water comes near them; and the air, it seems, by compressing the particles with its coldness, shatters and breaks them apart. Furthermore, water drawn off from its spring freezes more readily; for the air more easily overpowers the smaller quantity. And if someone takes cold water from a well in a vessel and lowers it again into the well so that the vessel does not touch
the water but hangs in the air, and waits not very long, the water will become colder; and this shows most clearly that the primary cause of coldness belongs not to water but to air. Yet none of the great rivers freezes to its depth; for the air does not penetrate the whole of it, but only
whatever it grips and comes near with its coldness, that it brings to a stop; hence barbarians cross on foot, sending foxes ahead of them; for if the ice is not thick but only superficial, the foxes, sensing by the sound of the water flowing beneath, turn back; and some also hunt fish, loosening and relaxing the ice with hot water, at least enough to receive the fishing line. Thus nothing at depth is affected by the cold. And yet, of the things above,
Such a great change occurs through freezing that the water, forcing itself inward and compacting, shatters ships — as those who wintered with Caesar on the Ister report. And indeed what happens in our own case gives sufficient testimony: after baths and heavy sweating we feel colder, since our bodies, relaxed and loosened, take in a great deal of cold along with the air. Water undergoes this very same thing: it grows colder if it has first been heated, becoming more receptive to the air — which is just what people are doing, no doubt, when they ladle up boiling water and toss it into the air: nothing else than mixing it thoroughly with a great deal of air. This, then, Favorinus, is the sort of plausible ground on which the argument assigning to air the primary power of coldness rests.
The one who assigns that power to water likewise takes his starting points in a similar way — more or less as Empedocles says: 'Behold the sun, bright and hot everywhere, but rain in all things dark and chill.' By setting the cold over against the hot, as the dark against the bright, he has given us grounds to infer that darkness and cold belong to the same substance, just as brightness and heat belong to the same substance. And that darkness belongs not to air but to water, sense-perception itself bears witness: by air, one might simply say, nothing is blackened, but by water everything is. If you dip the whitest wool or cloak into water, it turns black and remains so until the moisture is dried out of it by heat, or squeezed out by some wringing or weighting. And when the ground is sprinkled with water, the spots caught by the drops turn black while the rest, being otherwise the same, remain as they were. Of water itself, the deepest part appears darkest because of its sheer volume, while the parts that air comes close to are lit up all around and sparkle. Of the other liquids, oil is the most transparent, since it contains the most air — the evidence for this being its lightness, on account of which it floats on the surface of everything, being carried upward by the air within it. Oil also produces calm on the sea when sprinkled on the waves, not because of the smoothness that makes the winds slip off, as Aristotle held, but because, though every liquid, when struck, has its wave dispersed, oil peculiarly furnishes brightness and visibility into the depths, since the liquid is parted apart by the air within it. For it is not only on the surface that it gives light to those who spend the night at sea, but also below, to sponge-divers, when blown out from the mouth it gives off a glow in the sea.
Air, then, has no greater share of darkness than water does, and a lesser share of cold. At any rate, oil, which of all liquids contains the most air, is the least cold and freezes only feebly, since the air mixed into it does not allow the freezing to become hard. Needles, iron clasps, and fine work are dipped not in water but in oil, out of fear that the excessive cold of water would warp them. It is fairer to examine the argument from evidence of this kind than from colors, since snow, hail, and ice are at once the brightest and the coldest of things, while, conversely, pitch is warmer than honey and darker as well.
Still, I am amazed at those who claim air is cold because it is also dark, if they fail to notice that others claim it is hot because it is also light. Darkness is not so proper and akin to cold as heaviness and stillness are: many things that have no share in heat nonetheless partake of brightness, whereas nothing light and buoyant and upward-tending belongs to the cold things. Even the clouds, as long as they belong more to the nature of air, rise aloft; but once they change into liquid, they immediately slip down, casting off lightness no less than heat as coldness sets in; and conversely, when heat comes upon them again, their motion reverses, their substance being carried upward at the same moment it changes back into air.
And indeed the claim about destruction is not true either: for each perishing thing is destroyed not into its opposite but by its opposite, as fire perishes by water into air. Water — as Aeschylus said, tragically perhaps, but truly — 'checks the outrage' that is fire's due; and Homer set Hephaestus against the river, and Apollo against Poseidon, in accordance with this battle, more in a natural than in a mythical sense. And Archilochus, speaking of a woman of contrary purpose, put it well: 'in one hand, with treacherous mind, she carried water, in the other, fire.' Among the Persians, the greatest and most irresistible form of supplication was when a suppliant, taking fire in hand and standing in a river, would threaten, if he did not obtain his request, to throw the fire into the water; for he would indeed get what he asked — but having obtained it, he was punished for the threat, as having acted against law and against nature. And this saying, ready on everyone's lips, 'to mix fire with water' — proverbial for things impossible — seems to bear witness that water is hostile to fire, and that fire is destroyed and chastised by it, being quenched, not by air, as the other view supposes, in taking on air's substance and receiving it as it changes.
For if the cause is that whatever the perishing thing changes into is its opposite, why should fire appear more opposite to air than to water? Air, when condensed, changes into water, and when separated out, into fire; just as, again, water is destroyed by separation into air and by combination into earth — on account, as I think, of the kinship it has toward both, not as being opposite and hostile to each. But those others, however they put it, ruin their own argument. To say that water freezes because of air is quite unreasonable, when one sees that air itself never freezes anywhere. Clouds, mists, and haze are not freezings but condensations and thickenings of moist, vaporous air, whereas air that is dry and free of moisture does not even admit chilling to the point of that change. Indeed there are mountain peaks that receive no cloud, no dew, no mist at all, reaching up into pure air that has no share of moisture — which makes it especially clear that the condensations and gatherings lower down are produced by moisture mixed in with the air, which imparts coldness.
The lower reaches of great rivers, by contrast, do not freeze — reasonably so. For once the upper part has frozen, it does not let the vapor escape; instead the vapor, shut in and turned back, provides warmth to the waters in the depths. The proof of this is that, when the ice breaks up, a great deal of vapor rises again from the water. This is also why the bodies of animals are warmer in winter, since they hold the heat within themselves, driven inward by the cold from outside. Ladling and lifting water up likewise removes not only its heat but also its coldness; hence those who need water that is intensely cold disturb the snow and the liquid pressed out from it as little as possible, since motion drives both out of their proper state. That this power belongs not to air but to water, one might establish afresh as follows.
In the first place, it is not plausible that air — bordering on the aether, touching its revolving motion, and being touched by a fiery substance — should possess the opposite power to it; for it is not possible for two bodies that are in contact and continuous at their boundaries not to be affected by one another, and if affected, for the weaker not to be filled with something of the stronger's power. Nor does it accord with nature that air, next in order to the destroying element, should be ranked as the thing destroyed — as though nature were not a maker of fellowship and harmony but of war and battle. Nature does employ opposites for the sake of the whole, but not unmixed and unmediated ones; rather, they occupy, in alternation, a position and arrangement that is not destructive but cooperative, woven together through intermediaries that share and work together in between — and this is the place air has taken, poured out beneath the fire and before the water, transmitting to both and bringing them together, being itself neither hot nor cold but a blending and a sharing of cold and hot, in which the two extremes are mixed in a mixture that does no harm, relaxes gently, and admits the opposite extremities.
Moreover, air is everywhere the same, but winter and cold are not everywhere alike. Rather, some regions of the inhabited world are cold and waterlogged, and others dry and hot, not by chance, but because coldness and moisture are one and the same substance. Much of Libya, for instance, is hot and waterless, while those who have traveled through Scythia, Thrace, and Pontus report that these lands have great lakes and are crossed by many deep rivers, and that, among the regions between them, the marshy and lake-bordering places have the most cold, on account of the vapors rising from the waters. Posidonius, in saying that the cause of the cold is that marsh air is 'fresh' and moist, did not dissolve the plausibility of our view but made it more plausible still; for freshly-risen air would not always appear colder unless coldness had its origin in moisture. Better, then, is Homer, when he says: 'a breeze blows cold from the river before dawn' — thereby pointing to the source of coldness.
Furthermore, our sense-perception often deceives us: when we touch cold garments or wool, we think we are touching something moist, because the two share a common substance and their natures are close and akin to one another. In regions with harsh winters, the cold shatters many vessels, both bronze and earthenware ones — none of them empty, but all of them full, as the water forces its way outward with its coldness. Theophrastus, indeed, says that air shatters the vessels, using the moisture as if it were a nail; but consider whether this is said more cleverly than truly. For then vessels full of pitch, or of milk, ought to shatter even more readily from the air within them. It seems, rather, that water is cold in and of itself, and primarily so: for it stands opposed in coldness to the heat of fire, just as it stands opposed in moistness to dryness and in heaviness to lightness. In general, fire is a thing that separates and divides, while water is a thing that binds and holds together, uniting and consolidating by its moistness — which is also why Empedocles gave grounds for the notion that fire is 'baneful Strife,' while he calls the moist, in each case, 'binding Love.'
For the food of fire is that which changes into fire, and it is the kindred and proper substance that changes, while the opposite is hard to change; so water is itself, one might almost say, unburnable, and it renders timber, moist grass, and soaked wood hard to burn, producing a flame that is dim and blunted through its greenness, the cold in it fighting against the heat as its natural enemy.
Consider these points too, weighing them against the others. Now, since Chrysippus, believing that air is primarily cold because it is also dark, mentioned only those who say that water is farther removed from the aether than air is, and, wishing to say something against them, said: 'in that case one might as well say that earth too is primarily cold, because it is the farthest removed of all from the aether' — dismissing this as an argument altogether disreputable and absurd — I myself think that earth is not without a share of reasonable and plausible grounds either, taking as my starting point the very thing Chrysippus most relied on concerning air. And what is that? That being primarily dark, it is thereby primarily cold as well.
For if he, taking oppositions of powers, supposes that the one necessarily follows the other, then earth surely has countless oppositions and antipathies toward the aether, which one might just as well claim that coldness follows. For earth is not opposed to aether merely as heavy to light and downward-tending to upward-tending, nor merely as dense to rarefied, nor as slow and stationary to swift and mobile, but rather as the heaviest to the lightest, the densest to the rarest, and finally as that which is of itself motionless to that which moves itself, and as that which occupies the central position to that which is forever revolving in a circle. It is not absurd, then, that the opposition of coldness and heat should follow upon oppositions so many and so great. 'Yes,' one might say, 'but fire is also bright.' And is earth not dark? It is the darkest and least luminous of all things.
Air, at any rate, has a share in light from the first, and it turns to light most quickly, and once filled with it distributes brightness everywhere, offering itself as the body for the sunbeam; for the sun, as it rises — as one of the dithyrambic poets put it — 'straightway filled the great air-walked house of the winds' with light. And from this, descending, it sends a portion of its beam into both lake and sea, and even the depths of rivers sparkle, to the extent that air reaches down into them. Earth alone, of all bodies, is forever unlit and untouched by the illuminating power of sun and moon; it is warmed by them and allows the heat, entering it, to make it tepid to a small depth, but on account of its solidity it does not let brightness pass through — it is only lit up on its surface, while within lie darkness and chaos and what is called Hades; and Erebus, it turns out, was this: the earthy, subterranean darkness.
As for night, the poets tell the myth that it was born from earth, while the mathematicians demonstrate that it is the shadow of earth, blocking off the sun's light; for the air is filled with darkness by earth just as it is filled with light by the sun, and its unlit extent is the length of the night, exactly as far as the earth's shadow spreads.
For this reason, humans make use of the outer air even when it is night, as do the many animals that pasture through the dark, since it somehow still has traces of light and scattered effluences of radiance in it; whereas the air that dwells indoors, housed beneath a roof, since the earth surrounds it on every side, is utterly blind and unlit. Indeed, the skins and horns of animals, taken whole, let no light pass through, because of their solidity; but when they are sawn and scraped thin, they become transparent, once air has been mixed in among them. I think, too, that earth is regularly called 'black' by the poets on account of its darkness and unlit condition, so that the much-prized opposition between dark and bright belongs to earth rather than to air. But this point has strayed from what we are investigating — for many...
...has been shown to be cold, while the dim and dark ones are hot. Those other powers, however, are more akin to coldness — heaviness, density, permanence, unchangeability — of which air has none at all, while earth partakes of them more than water does, indeed more than all of them. And moreover, in the plainest instances the cold is perceptibly hard and hardening, and offers resistance. For Theophrastus records that fish
stiffened by frost, if released onto land, break and shatter like glass or earthenware. And at Delphi you yourself heard how, of those who went up onto Parnassus to help the Thyiads, who were trapped by a fierce storm-wind and snow, their cloaks became so hard and wooden with the frost that they cracked and tore when stretched taut. Extreme cold also makes
the sinews hard to bend and the tongue speechless, through the stiffness and hardness it produces even in the soft parts of the body. Given these facts, consider how the process works. Surely every power, when it prevails, naturally changes and converts into itself whatever it overcomes: what is mastered by heat is turned to fire, what is mastered by wind is turned to air, and what falls into water, unless it escapes,
becomes soaked through, dissolving along with it. So too whatever is thoroughly cooled must necessarily change into that which is primarily cold. Now the extreme of cooling is solidification, and solidification ends in insensibility and petrification, when the cold, having completely mastered its object, freezes the moisture solid and squeezes out the heat. Hence the earth at depth is, so to speak, wholly frost and ice; for the cold there
dwells unmixed and unsoftened, thrust away as far as possible from the aether. And these visible things — cliffs, crags, and rocks — Empedocles supposes stand and are held up by the fire deep within the earth, which is in a blazing state; but it appears more likely that all these things, in those places from which the heat has been squeezed out and has flown away, have been completely solidified by coldness. That is why they are even called "frosts." And
when the extremities of many such things have blackened and the heat has departed, they look just like things burnt by fire — for cold solidifies some things more, some less, and especially those things in which it is naturally present from the start. For just as, if lightness belongs to heat, the lightest thing is the hottest, and if softening belongs to moisture, the softest thing is the moistest, so too, if solidifying belongs to cold, the most
solidified thing — such as earth — must necessarily be the coldest. And what is coldest is surely cold by nature and primarily; therefore earth is cold by nature and primarily. This is indeed also plain to the senses: for mud is colder than water, and men who wish to make fire disappear pile earth upon it; and smiths, when iron is being fired and melted, sprinkle marble dust and stone chippings on it, to check the great flow of heat
and to cool it down. Dust also cools the bodies of athletes and quenches their sweat. And what is the purpose of that need which each year moves and relocates us — fleeing, in winter, as far as possible from the earth to the heights and to places away from the ground, and in summer again clinging to what lies below, burrowing in and pursuing suitable refuges, making our dwelling in the lap of the earth
with gratitude? Are we not doing this because we are guided by our perception of coldness and our recognition of what is primarily cold by nature? At any rate, our winter retreats by the sea are, in a way, flights from the earth, as men leave it as much as they can on account of the cold, wrapping themselves instead in the sea air, which is warm. Then again in summer we long for the earth-born, land-dwelling air on account of the heat,
not because that air is itself cold, but because it springs from what is cold by nature and primarily, and is dyed by the power in the earth as iron is dyed by tempering. And indeed, of running waters those from rocks and mountains are coldest, and of well waters the deepest are coldest; for into these no outside air any longer mingles through their depth, while the others escape through earth that is unmixed and
pure — as with the water near Taenarum, which they call the water of Styx: trickling sparingly out of the rock, it is so cold that no vessel can hold it except only the hoof of an ass, while it cracks and shatters all others. Moreover we hear from physicians that all earth is by its nature astringent and cooling, and they list many minerals as providing an astringent
and constricting power for use in medicines: for indeed its element is neither cutting nor mobile, neither loose nor possessed of sharpness, neither soft nor easily poured, but firmly fixed like a cube and compacting — whence it has both its own weight, and its coldness, which was its distinctive power, by condensing and compressing and squeezing out moisture, produces shivering and trembling
in bodies through this unevenness; and if it prevails completely, once the heat has fled or been quenched, it fixes the condition in a frozen and deadened state. That is why earth does not burn at all, or burns only reluctantly and with difficulty. Air, for its part, often of itself sends up flames, flows, and flashes as it catches fire; but heat needs moisture as its fuel — for it is not the
solid part but the moist part of wood that is combustible; once this has been dried out, what is left is the solid and dry part, become ash. And those who are eager to prove that even this changes and is consumed, by repeatedly soaking it and smearing it with oil and fat, accomplish nothing: for when the oily part has burned away, the earthy part survives entirely and remains — and this is why it stays in place, not only
immovable from its seat, but unchangeable also in its substance. The ancients called it Hestia, "who abides in the house of the gods," and named it also klita, because of its fixity and solidification — the bond of which is its coldness, as Archelaus the natural philosopher said, since nothing loosens or softens it, seeing that it is neither warmed nor heated. But those who suppose that they perceive cold wind and cold water, but earth less so,
are looking only at the nearest layer of earth, which has become a mixture and composite full of air and water and sun and heat; and they are no different from those who declare that the aether is not by nature and primarily hot, but rather boiling water or red-hot iron, on the ground that they touch and make contact with these, while they receive no sensation by touch of the first, pure, heavenly fire — just as
these men, too, receive none of the earth at depth, which one might most properly regard as earth in itself, separated from the rest. A sign of this is found even here, in the case of rocks: for a great cold rises up from the depths, one not easy to bear when it strikes. And those who want colder drink throw pebbles into the water, for it becomes more compact and set firm by the
coldness coming from the stones, fresh and undiluted. We must therefore suppose that the wise and learned men of old held earthly things and heavenly things to be unmixed with one another — not looking at their positions as on a scale, toward what is below and what is above, but rather by the difference of their powers, assigning what is hot, bright, swift, and light to the divine and eternal nature, and
what is dark, cold, and slow to the lot of the dead and those below, judging it not a happy portion. For indeed the body of a living creature, as long as it is breathing and vigorous, as the poets say, makes use of heat and life; but once it is bereft of these and left with the earthy portion alone, coldness and frost take hold of it at once, as though heat by nature belongs to anything
rather than to the earthy. Compare these arguments, Favorinus, with what has been said by others; and whether they fall short in plausibility or do not much surpass it, let the opinions be — considering it more philosophical to withhold assent in matters that are unclear.