The moon, in the ancient imagination, was home to many things: the Nemean Lion, giant egg-laying humans, airy daimones flitting between Earth and the gods, and a bizarre race of hermaphroditic aliens who sweat milk, keep their young in marsupial pouches, and “feed” by inhaling the scent of roasted frogs. Tantalizingly near, yet forever beyond reach, the moon served as “a fantasy archival space … symbolic both of the limits of human knowledge and imperializing control of the world of knowledge”, according to Karen ní Mheallaigh, author of this intriguing and wide-ranging study of Greco-Roman (but primarily Greek) ideas about that bright island in the ocean of upper air.

Ní Mheallaigh has published extensively on Lucian, the author responsible for those frog-sniffing Moonmen. Her focus in this book is Lucian’s era, the so-called Second Sophistic of the late first and second centuries AD. The dialogue “On the Face of the Moon” by Lucian’s near-contemporary, Plutarch, is the object of her most fully developed inquiry. But she leads up to the Greek “selenography” of the Roman Empire with a capable account of earlier lunar thinking, ranging from Homer and the fragments of Sappho to the quasi-scientific theories of the Pythagoreans and pre-Socratic philosophers. The moon’s place in magic and ritual, including the “Thessalian trick”, used by witches, of drawing down the moon from the sky, find their place here as well (ní Mheallaigh includes a fascinating list of methods, recorded by the bishop Hippolytus in the third century AD, for creating the illusion that this trick had been accomplished).

A study that encompasses so much disparate material is bound to feel a bit sprawling, but ní Mheallaigh succeeds in emphasizing “patterns of cross-fertilization” between myth, science, and literary fiction. Since the moon itself is, in her view, “a distinctive conceptual space, characterized above all by liminality or in-betweenness”, it makes an ideal vehicle for crossing boundaries between genres and eras. Among ní Mheallaigh’s most daring such moves comes in a final chapter, where she links Lucian’s telescopic fantasies in Icaromenippus and True Stories – both tales in which the Earth is gazed at from the moon – with the experience of modern-day lunar explorers. This far-ranging discussion supports ní Mheallaigh’s assertion that the moon is an “extraordinary imaginary space”, in which we find uniquely close connections between antiquity and the modern world.

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