Philopsuedes sive incredulus

Here Antigonus, the doctor, put in a word. ‘I myself,’ he informed his host, ‘have a Hippocrates in bronze, some eighteen inches high. Now the moment my candle is out, he goes clattering about all over the house, slamming the door, turning all my boxes upside down, and mixing up all my drugs; especially when his annual sacrifice is overdue.’ ‘What are we coming to?’ I cried; ‘Hippocrates must have sacrifices, must he? he must be feasted with all pomp and circumstance, and punctually to the day, or his leechship is angry?. Why, he ought to be only too pleased to be complimented! with a UR of mead or a garland, like other dead men.’

‘Now here,’ Eucrates went on, ‘is a thing that I saw happen five years ago, in the presence of witnesses. It was during the vintage. I had left the labourers busy in the vineyard at midday, and was walking off into the wood, occupied with my own thoughts. I had already got under the shade of the trees, when I heard dogs barking, and supposed that my boy Mnason was amusing himself in the chase as usual, and had penetrated into the copse with his friends. However, that was not it: presently there was an earthquake; I heard a voice like a thunder-: clap, and saw a terrible woman approaching, not much less. than three hundred feet high. She carried a torch in her left hand, and a sword in her right; the sword might be thirty: feet long. Her lower extremities were those of a dragon; but the upper half was like Medusa—as to the eyes, ] mean; they were quite awful in their expression. Instead of hair, she had clusters of snakes writhing about her neck, and curling over her shoulders. See here: it makes my flesh creep, only to speak of it!’ And he showed us all his arm, with the hair standing on end.

Ion and Dinomachus and Cleodemus and the rest of them drank down every word. The narrator led them by their. venerable noses, and this least convincing of colossal bogies,.

Dinomachus, for instance, wanted to know ‘how big were the Goddess’s dogs?’ ‘They were taller than Indian elephants,’ he was assured, ‘and as black, with coarse, matted coats. At the sight of her, I stood stock still, and turned the seal of my Arab’s ring inwards; whereupon Hecate smote upon the ground with her dragon’s foot, and caused a vast chasm to open, wide as the mouth of Hell. Into this she presently leaped, and was lost to sight. I began to pluck up courage, and looked over the edge; but first I took hold of a tree that grew near, for fear I should be giddy, and fall in. And then-I saw the whole of Hades: there was Pyriphlegethon, the Lake of Acheron, Cerberus, the Shades. I even recognized some of them: I made out my father quite distinctly; he was still wearing the same clothes in which we buried him.’ ‘And what were the spirits doing?’ asked Ion. ‘Doing? Oh, they were just lying about on the asphodel, among their friends and kinsmen, all arranged according to their clans and tribes.’ ‘There now!’ exclaimed Ion; ‘after that I should Itke to hear the Epicureans say another word against the divine Plato and his account of the spiritual world. I suppose you did not happen to see Socrates or Plato among the Shades?’ -‘ Yes, I did; I saw Socrates; not very plainly, though; I only went by the bald head and corpulent figure. Plato I did not make out; I will speak the plain truth; we are all friends here. I had just had a good look at everything, when the chasm began to close up; some of the servants who came to look for me (Pyrrhias here was among them) arrived while the gap was still visible-—Pyrrhias, is that the fact?’

RZ

'Your experience,’ observed Cleodemus, ‘is by no means without precedent. In fact I saw something of the same kind myself, not long ago. I had been ill, and Antigonus here was attending me. The fever had been on me for seven days, and was now aggravated by the excessive heat. All my attendants were outside, having closed the door and left me to myself; those were your orders, you know, Antigonus; I was to get some sleep if I could. Well, I woke up to find a handsome young man standing at my side, in a white cloak. He raised me up from the bed, and conducted me through a sort of chasm into Hades; I knew where I was at once, because I saw Tantalus and Tityus and Sisyphus. Not to .o into details, I came to the Judgement-hall, and there were Aeacus and Charon and the Fates and the Furies, One person of a majestic appearance— Pluto, I suppose it was—sat reading out the names of those who were due to die, their term of life having lapsed. The young man took me and set me before him, but Pluto flew into a rage: "Away with him,” he said to my conductor; “his thread is not yet out; go and fetch Demylus the smith; be has had his spindleful and more.” I ran off home, nothing loath. My fever had’ now disappeared, and I told everybody that Demylus was as good as dead. He lived close by, and was said to have some illness, and it was not long before we heard the voices of mourners in his house.’

‘This need not surprise us,’ remarked Antigonus; ‘I know of a man who rose from the dead twenty days after he had been buried; I attended him both before his death and after his resurrection.’ ‘I should have thought,’ said I, ‘that the body must have putrefied in all that time, or if not that, that he must

At this point in the conversation, Eucrates’s sons came in from the gymnasium, one of them quite a young man, the other a boy of fifteen or so. After saluting the company, they took their seats on the couch at their father’s side, and a chair was brought for me. The appearance of the boys seemed to remind Eucrates of something: laying a hand upon each of them, he addressed me as follows. ‘Tychiades, if what I am now about to tell you is anything but the truth, then may I never have joy of these lads. It is well known to every one how fond I was of my sainted wife, their mother; and I showed it in my treatment of her, not only in her lifetime, but even after her death; for I ordered all the jewels and clothes that she had valued to be burnt upon her pyre. Now on the seventh day after her death, I was sitting here on this very couch, as it might be now, trying to find comfort for my affliction in Plato’s book about the soul. I was quietly reading this, when Demaenete herself appeared, and sat down at my side exactly as Eucratides is doing now.’ Here he pointed to the younger boy, who had turned quite pale during this narrative, and now shuddered in childish terror. ‘The moment I saw her,’ he continued, ‘I threw my arms about her neck and wept aloud. She bade me cease; and complained that though I had consulted her wishes in everything else, I had neglected to burn one of her golden sandals, which she said had fallen under a chest. We had been unable to find this sandal, and had only burnt the fellow to it. While we were still conversing, a hateful little Maltese terrier that lay under the couch started barking, and my wife immediately vanished. The sandal, however, was found beneath the chest, and was eventually burnt.—

Do you still doubt, Tychiades, in the face of one convincing piece of evidence after another?’ 'God forbid!’ I cried; ‘the doubter who should presume,

Arignotus the Pythagorean now came in—the ‘divine’

Arignotus, as he is called; the philosopher of the long hair and the solemn countenance, you know, of whose wisdom we hear so much. I breathed again when I saw him. ‘Ah!’ thought I, ‘the very man we want! here is the axe to hew their lies asunder. The sage will soon pull them up when he hears their cock-and-bull stories. Fortune has brought a deus ex machina upon the scene.’ He sat down (Cleodemus rising to make room for him) and inquired after Eucrates’s health. Eucrates replied that he was better. ‘And what,’ Arignotus next asked, ‘is the subject of your learned conversation? I overheard your voices as I came in, and doubt not that your time will prove to have been profitably employed.’ Eucrates pointed to me. ‘We were only trying,’ he said, ‘to convince this man of adamant that there are such things as supernatural beings and ghosts, and that the spirits of the dead walk the earth and manifest themselves to whomsoever they will.’ Moved by the august presence of Arignotus, I blushed, and hung my head. 'Ah, but, Eucrates,’ said he, ‘perhaps all that Tychiades means is, that a spirit only walks if its owner met with a violent end, if he was strangled, for instance, or beheaded or crucified, and not if he died a natural death. If that is what he means, there is great justice in his contention.’ ‘No, no,’ says Dinomachus, ‘he maintains that there is absolutely no such thing as an apparition.’

‘What is this I hear?’ asked Arignotus, scowling upon me; ‘you deny the existence of the supernatural, when there is scarcely a man who has not seen some evidence of it?’ ‘Therein lies my exculpation,’ I replied: ‘I do not believe in the supernatural, because, unlike the rest of mankind, I do not see it: if I saw, I should doubtless believe, just as you all do.’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘next time you are in Corinth, ask for

‘What was that about, Arignotus?’ asked Eucrates. ‘The house,’ replied the other, ‘was haunted, and had been uninhabited for years: each intending occupant had been at once driven out of it in abject terror by a most grim and formidable apparition. Finally it had fallen into a ruinous state, the roof was giving way, and in short no one would have thought of entering it. Well, when I heard about this, I got my books together (I have a considerable number of Egyptian works on these subjects) and went off to the house about bed-time, undeterred by the remonstrances of my host, who considered that I was walking into the jaws of Death, and would almost have detained me by force when he learnt my destination. I took a lamp and entered alone, and putting down my light in the principal room, I sat on the floor quietly reading. The spirit now made his appearance, thinking that he had to do with an ordinary person, and that he would frighten me as he had frightened so many others. He was pitch-black, with a tangled mass of hair. He drew near, and assailed me from all quarters, trying every means to get the better of me, and changing in a moment from dog to bull, from bull to lion. Armed with my most appalling adjuration, uttered in the Egyptian tongue, I drove him spell-bound into the corner of a dark room, marked the spot at which he disappeared, and passed the rest of the night in peace. In the morning, to the amazement of all beholders (for every one had given me up for lost, and expected to find me lying dead like former occupants), I issued from the house, and carried to Eubatides the welcome news that it was now cleared of its grim visitant, and fit to serve as a human

After such a story as this—coming as it did from Arignotus, who was generally looked up to as a man of inspired wisdom— my incredulous attitude towards the supernatural was loudly condemned on all hands. However, I was not frightened by his long hair, nor by his reputation. ‘Dear, dear!’ I exclaimed, ‘so Arignotus, the sole mainstay of Truth, is as bad as the rest of them, as full of windy imaginings! Our treasure proves to be but ashes.’ ‘Now look here, Tychiades,’ said Arignotus, ‘you will not believe me, nor Dinomachus, nor Cleodemus here, nor yet Eucrates: we shall be glad to know who is your great authority on the other side, who is to outweigh us all?? ‘No less a person,’ I replied, ‘than the sage of Abdera, the wondrous Democritus himself. His disbelief in apparitions is sufficiently clear. When he had shut himself up in that tomb outside the city gates, there to spend his days and nights in literary labours, certain young fellows, who had a mind to play their pranks on the philosopher and give him a fright, got themselves up in black palls and skull-masks, formed a ring round him, and treated him to a brisk dance. Was Democritus alarmed at the ghosts? Not he: “ Come, enough of that nonsense,” was all he had to say to them; and that without so much as looking up, or taking pen from paper. Evidently he had quite made up his mind about disembodied spirits.’ ‘Which simply proves,’ retorted Eucrates, ‘that Democritus was no wiser than yourself.

Now I am going to tell you of another

Well now, one of my fellow passengers on the way up was a scribe of Memphis, an extraordinarily able man, versed in all the lore of the Egyptians. He was said to have passed twenty-three years of his life underground in the tombs, studying occult sciences under the instruction of Isis herself.’ ‘You must mean the divine Pancrates, my teacher,’ exclaimed Arignotus; ‘tall, clean-shaven, snub-nosed, protruding lips, rather thin in the legs; dresses entirely in linen, has a thoughtful expression, and speaks Greek with a slight accent?’ ‘Yes, it was Pancrates himself. I knew nothing about him at first, but whenever we anchored I used to see him doing the most marvellous things,—for instance, he would actually ride on the crocodiles’ backs, and swim about among the brutes, and they would fawn upon him and wag their tails; and then I realized that he was no common man. I made some advances, and by imperceptible degrees came to be on quite a friendly footing with him, and was admitted to a share in his mysterious arts. The end of it was, that he prevailed on me to leave all my servants behind at Memphis, and accompany him alone; assuring me that we should not want for attendance. This plan we accordingly followed from that time onwards.

Whenever we came to an

Well, next day he was again busy in the market: so I took the pestle, dressed it, pronounced the three syllables exactly as he had done, and ordered it to become a water-carrier. It brought me the pitcher full; and then I said: Stop: be water-carrier no longer, but pestle as heretofore. But the thing would take no notice of me: it went on drawing water the whole time, until at last the house was full of it. This was awkward: if Pancrates came back, he would be angry, I thought (and so indeed it turned out). I took an axe, and cut the pestle in two. The result was that both halves took pitchers and fetched water; I had two water-carriers instead of one. This was still going on, when Pancrates appeared. He saw how things stood, and turned the water-carriers back into wood; and then he withdrew himself from me, and went away, whither I knew not.’

'And you can actually make a man out of a pestle to this day?’ asked Dinomachus. ‘Yes, I can do that, but that is only half the process: I cannot turn it back again into its original form; if once it became a water-carrier, its activity would swamp the house.’

'Oh, stop!’ I cried: ‘if the thought that you are old men

‘Ah, talking of superstition, now,’ says Eucrates, ‘that reminds me: what do you make of oracles, for instance, and omens? of inspired utterances, of voices from the shrine, of the priestess’s prophetic lines?_ You will deny all that too, of course? If I were to tell you of a certain magic ring in my possession, the seal of which is a portrait of the Pythian Apollo, and actually speaks to me, I suppose you would decline to believe it, you would think I was bragging? But I must tell you all of what I heard in the temple of Amphilochus at Mallus, when that hero appeared to me in person and gave me counsel, and of what I saw with my own eyes on that occasion; and again of all I saw at Pergamum and heard at Patara. It was on my way home from Egypt that the oracle of Mallus was mentioned to me as a particularly intelligible and veracious one: I was told that any question, duly written down on a tablet and handed to the priest, would receive a plain, definite answer. I thought it would be a good thing to take the oracle on my way home, and consult the God as to my future.’

I saw what was coming: this was but the prologue to a whole tragedy of the oracular. It was clear enough that I was not wanted, and as I did not feel called upon to pose as the sole champion of the cause of Truth among so many, I took my leave there and then, while Eucrates was still upon the high seas between Egypt and Mallus. ‘I must go and find Leontichus,’ I explained; ‘I have to see him about something. Meanwhile, you gentlemen, to whom human affairs are not

That is what I got by going to Eucrates’s; and, upon my word, Philocles, my overloaded stomach needs an emetic as much as if I had been drinking new wine. I would pay something for the drug that should work oblivion in me: I fear the effects of haunting reminiscence; monsters, demons, Hecates, seem to pass before my eyes.

Philocles I am not much better off. They tell us it is not only the mad dog that inflicts hydrophobia: his human victim’s bite is as deadly as his own, and communicates the evil as surely. You, it seems, have been bitten with many bites by the liar Eucrates, and have passed it on to me; no otherwise can I explain the demoniacal poison that runs in my veins.

Tychiades What matter, friend? Truth and good sense: these are the drugs for our ailment; let us employ them, and that empty thing, a lie, need have no terrors for us.