Icaromenippus, or the Sky-man (3-6)

FRIEND

Of all the foolhardy men in the world! Then you weren’t afraid you would fall into the water somewhere and give us a Menippean Sea named after yourself, to match the Icarian?

MENIPPUS

Not at all; Icarus had his feathers fitted on with wax, and so just as soon as that melted in the sun he shed his plumage, of course, and fell down; but my wings were innocent of wax.

FRIEND

What do you mean? For by now, sofhehow or other, you are gradually inclining me to believe in the truth of your story.

MENIPPUS

This is what I mean; taking a good large eagle and also a strong vulture and cutting off their wings, joints and all—but I'll tell you the whole scheme from first to last, if you have time.

FRIEND

By all means; here I am in suspense, thanks to what you have said, and already waiting with open mouth for the end of your tale. In the name of Friendship, don’t leave me hanging by the ears somewhere in the midst of the story.

MENIPPUS

Listen then, for a friend left in the lurch with his mouth open would be anything but a pretty spectacle, especially if he were hanging by the ears, as you say you are. As soon as I began to find, in the course of my investigation of life, that all objects of human endeavour are ridiculous and trivial and insecure (wealth, I mean, and office and sovereign power), contemning those things and assuming that the effort to get them was an obstacle to getting things truly worth effort, I undertook to lift my eyes and contemplate the universe. In so doing I was caused great perplexity, first of all by what the philosophers call the Cosmos, for I could not discover how it came into being or who made it, or its source or purpose. Then in examining it part by part I was compelled to rack my brains still more, for I saw the stars scattered hap-hazard about the sky, and I wanted to know what the sun itself could be. Above all, the peculiarities of the moon seemed to me extraordinary and completely paradoxical, and I conjectured that her multiplicity of shapes had some hidden reason. More than that, lightning flashing and thunder crashing and rain or snow or hail driving down were all hard to interpret and impossible to reason out.

MENIPPUS

Being in that state of mind, I thought it best to learn about all these points from the philosophers, for I supposed that they surely would be able to tell the whole truth.” So I picked out the best of them, as far as I could judge from their dourness of visage,

paleness of complexion and length of beard; and as the gentlemen at once struck me as being extremely tall talkers and high thinkers, I put myself i in their hands, paying down part of a good round sum on the spot and contracting to pay the balance later, on completion of my course in philosophy; and then I expected to be taught how to hold forth on the Heavens and to learn the system of the universe. But they were so far from ridding me of my old-time ignorance that they plunged me forthwith into even greater perplexities by flooding me every day with first causes, final causes, atoms, voids, elements, concepts, and all that sort of thing. But the hardest part of it all, in my opinion at least, was that although no one of them agreed with anyone else in anything he said, but all their statements were contradictory and inconsistent, they nevertheless expected to persuade me and each tried to win me over to his own doctrine.

FRIEND

Extraordinary that learned men quarrelled with each other about their doctrines and did not hold the same views about the same things!

MENIPPUS

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.[*]