Icaromenippus, or the Sky-man (16-20)

MENIPPUS

Although the doings of the kings afforded me such rare amusement, those of the common people were far more ridiculous, for I could see them too— Hermodorus the Epicurean perjuring himself for a thousand drachmas, the Stoie Agathocles going to law with his disciple about a fee, the orator Clinias stealing a cup out of the Temple of Asclepius and the Cynic Herophilus asleep in the brothel. Why mention the rest of them—the burglars, the bribe-takers, the money-lenders, the beggars? In brief, it was a motley and manifold spectacle.

FRIEND

Really, you might as well tell about that too, Menippus, for it scems to have given you unusual pleasure.

MENIPPUS

To tell it all from first to last, my friend, would be

impossible in such a case, where even to see it all was hard work. However, the principal features were like what Homer says was on the shield.[*] In one place there were banquets and weddings, elsewhere there were sessions of court and assemblics; in a different direction a man was offering sacrifice, and close at hand another was mourning a death. Whenever I looked at the country of the Getae I saw them fighting; whenever I transferred my gaze to the Seythians, they could be seen roving about on their wagons: and when I turned my eyes aside slightly, I beheld the Egyptians working the land. The Phoenicians were on trading-ventures, the Cilicians were engaged in piracy, the Spartans were whipping themselves and the Athenians were attending court.

MENIPPUS

As all these things were going on at the same time, you can imagine what a hodge-podge it looked. It is as if one should put on the stage a company of singers, or I should say a number of companies, and then should order each singer to abandon harmony and sing a tune of his own; with cach one full of emulation and carrying his own tune and striving to outdo his neighbour in loudness of voice, what, in the name of Heaven, do you suppose the song would be like?

FRIEND

Utterly ridiculous, Menippus, and all confused.

MENIPPUS

Well, my friend, such is the part that all carth’s singers play, and such is the discord that makes

up the life of men. Not only do they sing different tunes, but they are unlike in costume and move at cross-purposes in the dance and agree in nothing until the manager drives each of them off the stage, saying that he has no further use for him. After that, “however, they are all quiet alike, no longer singing that unrhythmical medley of theirs. But there in the play-house itself, full of variety and shifting spectacles, everything that took place was truly laughable.

MENIPPUS

I was especially inclined to laugh at the people who quarrelled about boundary-lines, and at those who plumed themselves on working the plain of Sicyon or possessing the district of Oenoe in Marathon or owning a thousand acres in Acharnae. As a matter of fact, since the whole of Greece as it looked to me then from on high was no bigger than four fingers, on that scale surely Attica was infinitesimal. I thought, therefore, how little there was for our friends the rich to be proud of; for it seemed to me that the widest-acred of them all had but a single Epicurean atom under cultivation. And when I looked toward the Peloponnese and caught sight of Cynuria, I noted what a tiny region, no bigger in any way than an Egyptian bean, had caused so many Argives and Spartans to fall in a single day.[*] Again, if T saw any man pluming himself on gold because he had eight rings and four cups, I laughed heartily at him too, for the whole of Pangacum, mines and all, was the size of a grain of millet.

FRIEND

You lucky Menippus, what a surprising spectacle!

But the cities and the men—for Heaven’s sake, how did they look from on high?

MENIPPUS

I suppose you have often seen a swarm of ants, in which some are huddling together about the mouth of the hole and transacting affairs of state in public, some are going out and others are coming back again to the city; one is carrying out the dung, and another has caught up the skin of a bean or half a grain of wheat somewhere and is running off with it; and no doubt there are among them, in due proportion to the habits of ants, builders, politicians, aldermen, musicians, and philosophers. But however that may be, the cities with their population resembled nothing so much as ant-hills. If you think it is belittling to compare men with the institutions of ants, look up the ancient fables of the Thessalians and you will find that the Myrmidons, the most warlike of races, turned from ants into men. Well, when I had looked and laughed at everything to my heart’s content, I shook myself and flew upward,

Unto the palace of Zeus, to the home of the other immortals.

Iliad1, 222.

MENIPPUS

Before I had gone a furlong upward, the moon spoke with a voice like a woman’s and said: “Menippus, Pll thank you kindly to do me a service with Zeus.” "Tell me what it is,’ said I, “it will be no trouble at all, unless you want me to carry something.” "Take a simple message and a request from me to

Zeus. I am tired at last, Menippus, of hearing quantities of dreadful abuse from the philosophers, who have nothing else to do but to bother about me, what I am, how big I am, and why I become semicircular, or crescent-shaped. Some of them say I am inhabited, others that I hang over the sea like a mirror, and others ascribe to me—oh, anything that each man’s fancy prompts. Lately they even say that my very light is stolen and illegitimate, coming from the sun up above, and they never weary of wanting to entangle and embroil me with him, although he is my brother; for they were not satisfied with saying that Helius himself was a stone, and a glowing mass of molten metal.