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Book I Chapter 38

Chapter 38: Ebb and flood tides

How ebb and flood tides arise.

⟨Aëtius.⟩⁹⁶³

1 · Aristotle and Heraclides

Aristotle and Heraclides attribute them to the sun, which sets most of the winds in motion and carries them around. When these winds strike it, the Atlantic sea is pushed forward and swells, producing the flood tide; when they subside, it is drawn back and sinks, which is the ebb tide.⁹⁶⁴

2 · The sun’s presence and withdrawal

⟨Eu⟩enios [Messenian]⁹⁶⁵ likewise assigns the cause to the sun: it makes the seas rise in flood in those regions of the earth where it comes to be, and draws them back from those from which it happens to move away. These effects occur around the morning and midday turnings.⁹⁶⁶

3 · Pytheas

Pytheas of Massalia assigns the causes of these two effects to the moon’s becoming full and to its waning.⁹⁶⁷

4 · Posidonius

Posidonius says that the winds are moved by the moon, and the seas by the winds; in the seas the effects already mentioned then occur.⁹⁶⁸

5 · Plato

Plato favors the oscillation of the waters as the explanation. For there is a natural oscillation that carries the returning flow through an opening in the earth, causing the seas to surge in opposite directions.⁹⁶⁹

6 · Timaeus

Timaeus of Tauromenium assigns the cause to the rivers that flow through the mountainous Celtic country into the Atlantic: they push the sea forward with their onrushes and draw it back during their pauses.⁹⁷⁰

7 · Crates

Crates the grammarian assigns the cause to the sea’s counter-pull.⁹⁷¹

8 · Apollodorus

Apollodorus of Corcyra assigns the cause to returning currents from the Ocean.⁹⁷²

9 · Seleucus

Seleucus the mathematician, who wrote against Crates and himself also sets the earth in motion, says that the moon’s revolution works against the earth’s rotation.⁹⁷³ The air between the two bodies is drawn in the opposite direction and falls upon the Atlantic sea; in this way the sea is made to surge in correspondence with it.⁹⁷⁴

963.The bracketed Latin source-heading, translated here, identifies Aëtius III.17.1-9. The Laurentian florilegium, A.38, preserves a fuller chapter than manuscripts F and P: excerpts 2-4 and 6-9 are absent from those two witnesses. All nine reports printed by Wachsmuth are translated below.

964.The opening Greek leaves “attribute them” understood from the chapter’s subject. The immediate force acting on the sea is wind; the sun initiates its movement. These are reported opinions under the two philosophers’ names, not direct quotations from identified works.

965.The name is textually uncertain. Wachsmuth prints Elter’s restoration Euēnios, based on Photius’s list of authors, and rejects “Messenian” as a divergent written form of the damaged name. The brackets preserve those decisions. Meineke had instead proposed identifying the author as Dicaearchus of Messene; that is not the text printed here.

966.Ekkliseis means turnings or deviations. “Morning” and “midday” take the adjectives temporally in this solar context; they can also mean “eastern” and “southern.” The compressed wording does not establish precisely what these turnings are. The English leaves that uncertainty open.

967.The two effects are flood and ebb. Plērōsis denotes filling or becoming full, and meiōsis diminution. This brief report links the opposite tidal movements to the lunar cycle without specifying the mechanism or a detailed timetable.

968.This report gives a chain of causes: moon, winds, sea, tides. The winds mediate the moon’s influence, whereas the preceding notice of Pytheas does not state an intervening cause.

969.Aiōra is a swinging or oscillating motion. Compare Phaedo 111d-112d, where waters move through connected underground passages and rise and fall through the great chasm called Tartarus. This is a compressed report, not the dialogue’s wording. “Plato” is a marginal attribution in manuscript P according to Wachsmuth’s apparatus.

970.The rivers are the grammatical subjects of both “push forward” and “draw back”; the sea is the understood object. The account attributes the alternating movement to variations in river inflow.

971.Antispasmos means a pull in the opposite direction or a drawing back. This single sentence gives no further mechanism. The final report below says that Seleucus wrote against Crates.

972.The verb is left unstated in Greek and is carried over from the preceding entry. Palirroiai are flows that turn back or return; the report locates their source in the Ocean.

973.The Greek makes “the moon’s revolution” the subject of “works against,” with the earth’s whirling motion as what it opposes. The notice explicitly gives motion to the earth, but does not here describe an orbit around the sun.

974.The intermediary is pneuma, moving air or wind between earth and moon. “In correspondence” renders kata logon in the account’s description of the sea’s response. The related report in the Placita III.17 likewise retains this role for moving air.