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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, thus to brazen it out in the face of Truth would deserve to have a golden sandal applied to him after the nursery fashion.’
29
Arignotus the Pythagorean now came in—the ‘divine’
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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.’
