N.M.'s book is the first published monograph to explore the Moon in Graeco-Roman antiquity from an epistemological perspective, as a topic of inquiry, knowledge and fantasy. Drawing from a widely varied Greek and Latin corpus, N.M. elucidates the relevance of the Moon in ancient intellectual history through several key notions such as the Moon's essential hybridity, liminal aspect, ambiguous truth-status or its function as a remote world and viewpoint. The book is divided into three parts, investigating respectively the Moon in the ‘mythic’, ‘scientific’ and ‘fantastic’ imagination; those categories’ unfortunately loose definition is somewhat compensated by an awareness of their extreme fluidity. The six chapters follow a roughly chronological order, from the Archaic period to Lucian and eventually modern times.

Part 1 consists of a single chapter, ‘The Moon in Ritual, Myth and Magic’. Under this rather vague title lies an interesting review of representations of the Moon and the Moon-goddess in archaic literature. In epic poetry (Homer, Hesiod) Selene's chariot, along with Helios’, embodies cyclical time; in lyric poetry (Alcman, Sappho, Corinna) she plays a part in nocturnal religious rituals within a choral tradition of partheneia or maiden-songs. In many contexts she is thus associated with fertility and the feminine gender; more specifically, Selene, whose lover is the eternal sleeper Endymion, is symbolic of the female desirous gaze, which partly accounts for the frequently encountered Moon-mirror analogy. Desire and sight are also two crucial aspects of the Moon's involvement in erotic spells, magic tricks (such as ‘drawing down’ the Moon) and ultimately in a dialectic between beliefs and scepticism.

Part 2 is the longest section, consisting of three chapters. Chapter 2, ‘Making Sense of the Moon’, deals with the Presocratics’ hypotheses concerning the shape and nature of the Moon as well as the origin of its light, phases and eclipses. As early as the sixth century bce the Moon is no longer exclusively a goddess, but also a celestial body that corresponds to various artefact metaphors (ring, chariot wheel, felt cap, vessel, mirror); in contrast to its unchanging reality, the variations in its appearance cast doubt on the reliability of sensory perception. One of the main focuses of this chapter is the emergence of heliophotism: by describing the Moon as an eye that reflects the Sun's light, this groundbreaking theory is closely connected with both catoptrics and optics (particularly intromissionist and reflective theories). N.M. shows how this cosmological revolution ends up shaping the Moon as a world and giving birth to lunar metaphysics, according to which this essentially liminal space is inhabited by daimones or by the souls of the dead.

Chapter 3, ‘Life on the Moon’, is therefore concerned with lunar creatures in ancient literature, from the Pythagoreans to Aristotle, Callimachus and even the pseudo-Plutarchan On rivers. Ancient astrobiology pictured extra-terrestrial beings as superior, incorporeal and extremophile, with extraordinary or even inexistent food and excretions. N.M. argues that such theories were rooted in observation and rational theories, even in the case of specific creatures that were reputed to have fallen from the Moon, such as Helen of Troy or the Nemean lion. From revisionist accounts of Helen's elopement to aetiologies of the Nemean games and etymological wordplays, these tales ranged from the serious to the deliberately grotesque or absurd, revealing the equivocal truth-status of the Moon and everything that derives from it.

Chapter 4, ‘The Moon of Many Faces’, is devoted to a commentary on Plutarch's De facie (‘On the face of the Moon’), rightly described as a pioneering work in the history of lunar studies. It gives legitimacy to the ‘Earthy-Moon’ theory and thereby constitutes one of the earliest attempts at selenography or the mapping of the Moon. More interestingly, the form of this treatise – a dialogue, with several discourses embedded within one another – reflects the complexity and ambiguity inherent to the Moon. The first part is shaped like an astronomy lecture and features elements of doxography, in particular the debate between Stoics and Platonists on the nature of the Moon; after a transition that addresses the issue of lunar life, the second part deals with metaphysics and eschatology in the form of a tale in which the Moon is at the centre of the cycle of death and rebirth of souls. As the myth partly contradicts and undermines the previous scientific discourse, it conveys a sense of the fallibility of those speculations. Plutarch's dialogue thus takes us through the different aspects of the lunar world – Earth-like landscape, afterworld, doctrinal and disciplinary battleground.

Part 3 is divided into two chapters. Chapter 5, ‘The Imaginary Moon’, examines lunar journeys in ancient Greek and Latin literature, starting with two mostly lost texts: Endymiones, one of Varro's Menippean Satires, which may have parodied Platonic and Stoic eschatology through the topic of dreams; and Antonius Diogenes’ The incredible things beyond Thule, a Greek novel that probably contained the first realistic account of a lunar expedition, just beyond the frontiers of our world. The core of this chapter is constituted by a discussion of the two travels to the Moon found in Lucian's Icaromenippus and True Stories. N.M. convincingly comments on the metafictional value of the main character's flight in Icaromenippus, which finds inspiration in Old Comedy and in Plato as well as in the Cynics’ kataskopia (‘view from above’), thus illustrating Lucian's taste for mixis or the hybridisation of genres. By departing from Earth only to look back at it, Menippus-Icarus embodies Lucian's complex dialogue with the Classics as he tries to take leave from tradition while also playing with intertextual references. In both of Lucian's lunar journeys the Moon is defined as a ‘third space’ between truth and lies, from which critical views and heterodoxies emerge. N.M. goes on to show how the depiction of the Moon and its inhabitants in True Stories, for all its deliberate nonsensicality, is based on precise astronomical theories taken at face value for the purpose of satire. Lucian's telescopic and telephonic device of a lunar mirror and well is described by N.M. as ‘scientific fiction’ (thus avoiding the potential anachronism of science fiction).

The last chapter, ‘Selēnoskopia’, establishes interesting parallels between Moon-views in ancient imagination and modern reality. In the second half of the twentieth century the first pictures of the Earth from the Moon (most famously Earthrise and The blue marble) were taken. N.M. explores both the astronauts’ direct experience and the public's reactions to those images: the impossibility to put words on such a sight, the paradigm-shift in the outlook on the cosmos, the realisation of the tiny scale of our planet in the universe and of the pettiness of human conflicts. These impressions find striking echoes in the ancient literary tradition of Earth-views, from the Homeric ekphrasis of Achilles’ shield to Socrates’ vision of the upper world in Plato's Phaedo, the dream of Scipio in Cicero's Republic and eventually Menippus’ flight in Lucian. However, N.M. also justifiably points to the contrast between ancient viewpoints that tend towards a certain detachment for philosophical or satirical purposes and the modern awareness of Earth's fragility and the need to save it.

This work is an important contribution, not only to the study of the Moon in Graeco-Roman culture, but generally to the history of knowledge and ideas. It describes how the Moon came to be conceived as a world, both parallel to and radically different from our own, that could sustain life and be visited. This lunar space, characterised by its ‘in-betweenness’, blurs the boundaries between physics and metaphysics, philosophy and satire, truth and appearance, reality and dream. Ultimately, one of the major interests of this book lies in explaining how the Moon, as an object of scientific and philosophical theories, acts back on ancient thought, shaping it into a reflection on the forms and limits of knowledge.