From whence it resulted that the progress of the sun was marked as in the heavens, and that the moon touched the point where she is obscured by the earth's shadow at the instant the sun appears opposite.[298] * * * XV.

* * *[299] I had myself a great affection for this Gallus, and I know that he was very much beloved and esteemed by my father Paulus.

I recollect that when I was very young, when my father, as consul, commanded in Macedonia, and we were in the camp, our army was seized with a pious terror, because suddenly, in a clear night, the bright and full moon became eclipsed.

And Gallus, who was then our lieutenant, the year before that in which he was elected consul, hesitated not, next morning, to state in the camp that it was no prodigy, and that the phenomenon which had then appeared would always appear at certain periods, when the sun was so placed that he could not affect the moon with his light.
But do you mean, said Tubero, that he dared to speak thus to men almost entirely uneducated and ignorant?
_Scipio._ He did, and with great * * * for his opinion was no result of insolent ostentation, nor was his language unbecoming the dignity of so wise a man: indeed, he performed a very noble action in thus freeing his countrymen from the terrors of an idle superstition.
XVI.

And they relate that in a similar way, in the great war in which the Athenians and Lacedaemonians contended with such violent resentment, the famous Pericles, the first man of his country in credit, eloquence, and political genius, observing the Athenians overwhelmed with an excessive alarm during an eclipse of the sun which caused a sudden darkness, told them, what he had learned in the school of Anaxagoras, that these phenomena necessarily happened at precise and regular periods when the body of the moon was interposed between the sun and the earth, and that if they happened not before every new moon, still they could not possibly happen except at the exact time of the new moon.