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,
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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.
FRIEND Extraordinary that learned men quarrelled with each other about their doctrines and did not hold the same views about the same things !
MENIPPUS 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
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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.)