Icaromenippus, or the Sky-man (19-20)

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.