Being in that state of mind, I thought it best to
learn about all these points from the philosophers,
for I supposed that they surely would be able to tell
the whole truth.” So I picked out the best of them,
as far as I could judge from their dourness of visage,
paleness of complexion and length of beard; and as
the gentlemen at once struck me as being extremely
tall talkers and high thinkers, I put myself i in their
hands, paying down part of a good round sum on
the spot and contracting to pay the balance later,
on completion of my course in philosophy; and
then I expected to be taught how to hold forth
on the Heavens and to learn the system of the
universe. But they were so far from ridding me of
my old-time ignorance that they plunged me forthwith into even greater perplexities by flooding me
every day with first causes, final causes, atoms, voids,
elements, concepts, and all that sort of thing. But
the hardest part of it all, in my opinion at least, was
that although no one of them agreed with anyone
else in anything he said, but all their statements
were contradictory and inconsistent, they nevertheless expected to persuade me and each tried to win
me over to his own doctrine.
Extraordinary that learned men quarrelled with
each other about their doctrines and did not hold
the same views about the same things !
Indeed, my friend, it will make you laugh to hear
about the way they bragged and worked wonders
in their talk! Why, in the first place, they-stood
on the ground and were not a bit better than the
rest of us who walk the earth; in fact, they were
not even sharper sighted than their neighbours, but
some of them were actually purblind through age or
idleness. In spite of that, however, they claimed to
discern the boundaries of Heaven, they measured
the sun, they visited the spheres beyond the moon,
and you would have thought they had fallen from
the stars from the way they told about their
magnitudes and presumed to say just how many
cubits it is in distance from the sun to the moon,
often, perhaps, without even knowing how many
furlongs it is from Megara to Athens. And not only
did they measure the height of the air and the depth
of the sea and the circumference of the earth, but by
the description of circles and the construction of
triangles on squares and of imultiple spheres they
actually measured out the cubic content of the
Heavens.I know of nothing that illustrates Lucian’s meaning better than the Psemmites, a treatise by Archimedes, which, however, is not exactly an attempt to measure the cubic capacity of the universe, but a demonstration that it is possible to express arithmetically a sum greater than the number of grains of sand in a sphere as large as the universe.