Envoi

Summary

In the Introduction to the book, I promised a symphonic story of lunar thought. I hope, by now, that the reader has come to hear the interconnected harmonies of ancient selenography: how ideas about the Moon as a goddess resurface in the fantastical, querulous Moon of Lucian’s Icaromenippus; how beliefs about the Moon’s moisture and liquescence swell, in Lucian’s hands, into a world of corporeal and political viscosity; how the Moon’s ancient anthropomorphization as a goddess becomes rationalized, in Plutarch’s work, into connections with birth and death; and how the ancient ocular intensity of the Moon makes it into a site for visual science and fantasy.