Icaromenippus

FRIEND Of all the foolhardy men in the world! Then you weren’t afraid you would fall into the water somewhere and give us a Menippean Sea named after yourself, to match the Icarian ?

MENIPPUS Not at all; Icarus had his feathers fitted on with wax, and so just as soon as that melted in the sun he shed his plumage, of course, and fell down ; but my wings were innocent of wax.

FRIEND What do you mean? For by now, sofhehow or other, you are gradually inclining me to believe in the truth of your story.

MENIPPUS This is what I mean; taking a good large eagle and also a strong vulture and cutting off their wings, joints and all—but I'll tell you the whole scheme from first to last, if you have time.

FRIEND By all means; here I am in suspense, thanks to what you have said, and already waiting with open mouth for the end of your tale. In the name of Friendship, don’t leave me hanging by the ears somewhere in the midst of the story.

MENIPPUS Listen then, for a friend left in the lurch with his mouth open would be anything but a pretty spectacle, especially if he were hanging by the ears, as you say you are. As soon as I began to find, in the course of my investigation of life, that all objects of human endeavour are ridiculous and trivial and insecure (wealth, I mean, and office and sovereign power), contemning those things and assuming that the effort to get them was an obstacle to getting things truly worth effort, I undertook to lift my eyes and contemplate the universe. In so doing I was caused great perplexity, first of all by what the philosophers call the Cosmos, for I could not discover how it came into being or who made it, or its source or purpose. Then in examining it part by part I was compelled to rack my brains still more, for I saw the stars scattered hap-hazard about the sky, and I wanted to know what the sun itself could be. Above all, the peculiarities of the moon seemed to me extraordinary and completely paradoxical, and I conjectured that her multiplicity of shapes had some hidden reason. More than that, lightning flashing and thunder crashing and rain or snow or hail driving down were all hard to interpret and impossible to reason out.