6
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.
7
Moreover, was it not silly and completely absurd that when they were talking about things so uncertain they did not make a single assertion hypothetically but were vehement in their insistence and gave the rest no chance to outdo them in exaggeration; all but swearing that the sun is a mass of molten metal, that the moon is inhabited, and that the stars drink water, the sun drawing up the moisture from the sea with a rope and bucket, as it were, and distributing the beverage to all of them in order?
