De Defectu Oraculorum

The company was surprised at this, and Demetrius went so far as to say that it was ridiculous to try in this way to draw great conclusions from small data, not, as Alcaeus[*](Bergk, Poet. Lyr. Graec. iii. p. 184, Alcaeus, no. 113.) puts it, painting the lion from a single claw, but with a wick and lamp postulating a mutation in the heavens and the universe, and doing away completely with mathematical science.

Neither of these things, said Cleombrotus, will disturb these men; certainly they will not concede any superior accuracy to the mathematicians, since it is more likely that a set period of time, in movements and cycles so far away, should elude mathematical calculation than that the measurement of the oil should elude the very men who were always giving careful attention to the anomaly and watching it closely because of its strangeness. Besides, Demetrius, not to allow that small things are indication of great stands directly in the way of many arts; for it will result in taking away from us the demonstration of many facts and the prognostication of many others. Yet you people try to demonstrate to us also a matter of no small importance: that the heroes of old shaved their bodies with a razor, because you meet with the word razor in Homer[*](Il. x. 173.); also that they lent money on interest because Homer[*](Od. iii. 367-368.) somewhere says that a debt is owing, not recent nor small, the assumption being that owing signifies accumulating. And again when Homer[*](Il. x. 394, for example; cf. also Moralia, 923 b. Further explanation of the idea that Θοός may mean conical may be found in the Life and Poetry of Homer, 21 (Bernardakis’s edition, vol. vii. p. 347).) speaks of the night as swift, you cling to the expression with great satisfaction and say that it means this: that the Earth’s shadow is by him called conical, being caused by a spherical body; and as for the idea that medical science can predict a pestilential summer by a multitude of spiders’ webs or by the fig-leaves in the spring when they are like crows’ feet, who of those that insist that small things are not indications of great will allow this to go unchallenged? Who will endure

that the magnitude of the sun be measured by reference to a quart or a gill, or that, in the sun-diai here, the inclination of the acute angle which its shadow makes with the level plane be called the measurement of the elevation of the ever-visible pole above the horizon? This was what one might hear from the priests of the prophetic shrine there; so some other rejoinder must be offered to them, if we would make for the sun the wonted order of its course immutable, in accord with the tradition of the ages.