Little Green Men From Greece?

A search for space aliens and antiquity will take you into some of the stranger parts of the Internet, but is the idea of intelligent life on another planet merely a staple of modern science fiction?  As it turns out, humans have been giving this some thought for more than 2,500 years.

Philosophy and Science (Fiction)

Lactantius, c250-c325

While preparing for one of the most exciting units of study I will have ever entered into with a high school class (MUCH more on this here), I ran across a quotation from Lactantius, the early Christian author who was an advisor to the Roman emperor Constantine at the time of his conversion to Christianity.  A quick search for the Latin text at Documenta Catholica Omnia, one of the greatest text repositories on the Internet, turned up the quotation and a bit more.

Xenophanes...dixit, intra concavum lunae sinum esse aliam terram et ibi aliud genus hominum simili modo vivere quo nos in hac terra vivimus.  Fuisse Seneca inter Stoicos ait, qui deliberaret utrumne Soli quoque suos populos daret.  Sed, credo, calor deterrebat ne tantam multitudinem periculo committeret.  (Institutiones Divinae III.23)

Xenophanes said that there was another earth inside the hollow bosom of the moon and that there another race of humans lived in a similar manner as we we live on this earth.  Seneca said that among the Stoics was one who deliberated whether he should also attribute to the Sun its own peoples.  But, I believe, the heat deterred him lest he commit such a great number of people to danger.  (Divine Institutes, III.23, translation mine)

It is amusing how Lactantius dismisses the unnamed Stoic's idea of a population on the Sun by suggesting he didn't want even in theory to condemn a race of people to such burning heat, but pause to consider that someone was even thinking about this in the time of Seneca, which was the first century A.D.  Even more striking is that Xenophanes, a Greek philosopher who lived from about 570 to about 478 B.C. kicked around a notion of another planet full of human beings existing inside the moon more than two thousand, five hundred years ago.  Lactantius scornfully disregarded that idea as well, but what is striking to me is how imaginative these ancient thinkers were.

Research Rabbit Trails

One of the things I love about academic life, whether lived out principally in elementary and secondary schools or at the undergraduate and graduate levels, is the discovery that comes from research rabbit trails.  While preparing for a new unit in a second-year Latin, high school Latin class, I chanced upon a quotation in a footnote that caught my attention.  That quotation led me to the original text of a Latin author from the third-to-fourth centuries, which in turn revealed the amazing imagination of a man named Xenophanes, who lived two and a half millennia and half a world from my own time and place.  As I have said countless times in talks and in writing and as has formed my Twitter background for many years, education is a shared journey of discovery.