Then Manilius said: Are you going, Lælius, to ridicule a science in which, in the first place, I myself excel; and, secondly, without which no one can distinguish what is his own, and what is another’s? But to return to the point. Let us now at present listen to Philus, who seems to me to have started a greater question than any of those that have engaged the attention of either Publius Mucius or myself.
XIV. Then Philus said: I am not about to bring you anything new, or anything which has been thought over or discovered by me myself. But I recollect that Caius Sulpicius Gallus, who was a man of profound learning, as you are aware, when this same thing was reported to have taken place in his time, while he was staying in the house of Marcus Marcellus, who had been his colleague in the consulship, asked to see a celestial globe which Marcellus’s grandfather had saved after the capture of Syracuse from that magnificent and opulent city, without bringing to his own home any other memorial out of so great a booty; which I had often heard mentioned on account of the great fame of Archimedes; but its appearance, however, did not seem to me particularly striking. For that other is more elegant in form, and more generally known, which was made by the same Archimedes, and deposited by the same Marcellus in the Temple of Virtue at Rome. But as soon as Gallus had begun to explain, in a most scientific manner, the principle of this machine, I felt that the Sicilian geometrician must have possessed a genius superior to anything we usually conceive to belong to our nature. For Gallus assured us that that other solid and compact globe was a very ancient invention, and that the first 371model had been originally made by Thales of Miletus. That afterward Eudoxus of Cnidus, a disciple of Plato, had traced on its surface the stars that appear in the sky, and that many years subsequently, borrowing from Eudoxus this beautiful design and representation, Aratus had illustrated it in his verses, not by any science of astronomy, but by the ornament of poetic description. He added that the figure of the globe, which displayed the motions of the sun and moon, and the five planets, or wandering stars, could not be represented by the primitive solid globe; and that in this the invention of Archimedes was admirable, because he had calculated how a single revolution should maintain unequal and diversified progressions in dissimilar motions. In fact, when Gallus moved this globe, we observed that the moon succeeded the sun by as many turns of the wheel in the machine as days in the heavens. From whence it resulted that the progress of the sun was marked as in the heavens, and that the moon touched the point where she is obscured by the earth’s shadow at the instant the sun appears opposite.[298] * * *
XV. * * *[299] I had myself a great affection for this Gallus, and I know that he was very much beloved and esteemed by my father Paulus. I recollect that when I was very young, when my father, as consul, commanded in Macedonia, and we were in the camp, our army was seized with a pious terror, because suddenly, in a clear night, the bright and full moon became eclipsed. And Gallus, who was then our lieutenant, the year before that in which he was elected consul, hesitated not, next morning, to state in the camp that it was no prodigy, and that the phenomenon which had then appeared would always appear at certain periods, when the sun was so placed that he could not affect the moon with his light.
372But do you mean, said Tubero, that he dared to speak thus to men almost entirely uneducated and ignorant?
Scipio. He did, and with great * * * for his opinion was no result of insolent ostentation, nor was his language unbecoming the dignity of so wise a man: indeed, he performed a very noble action in thus freeing his countrymen from the terrors of an idle superstition.
XVI. And they relate that in a similar way, in the great war in which the Athenians and Lacedæmonians contended with such violent resentment, the famous Pericles, the first man of his country in credit, eloquence, and political genius, observing the Athenians overwhelmed with an excessive alarm during an eclipse of the sun which caused a sudden darkness, told them, what he had learned in the school of Anaxagoras, that these phenomena necessarily happened at precise and regular periods when the body of the moon was interposed between the sun and the earth, and that if they happened not before every new moon, still they could not possibly happen except at the exact time of the new moon. And when he had proved this truth by his reasonings, he freed the people from their alarms; for at that period the doctrine was new and unfamiliar that the sun was accustomed to be eclipsed by the interposition of the moon, which fact they say that Thales of Miletus was the first to discover. Afterward my friend Ennius appears to have been acquainted with the same theory, who, writing about 350[300] years after the foundation of Rome, says, “In the nones of June the sun was covered by the moon and night.” The calculations in the astronomical art have attained such perfection that from that day, thus described to us by Ennius and recorded in the pontifical registers, the anterior eclipses of the sun have been computed as far back as the nones of July in the reign of Romulus, when that eclipse took place, in the obscurity of which it was affirmed that Virtue bore Romulus to heaven, in spite of the perishable nature which carried him off by the common fate of humanity.
373XVII. Then said Tubero: Do not you think, Scipio, that this astronomical science, which every day proves so useful, just now appeared in a different light to you,[301] * * * which the rest may see. Moreover, who can think anything in human affairs of brilliant importance who has penetrated this starry empire of the gods? Or who can think anything connected with mankind long who has learned to estimate the nature of eternity? or glorious who is aware of the insignificance of the size of the earth, even in its whole extent, and especially in the portion which men inhabit? And when we consider that almost imperceptible point which we ourselves occupy unknown to the majority of nations, can we still hope that our name and reputation can be widely circulated? And then our estates and edifices, our cattle, and the enormous treasures of our gold and silver, can they be esteemed or denominated as desirable goods by him who observes their perishable profit, and their contemptible use, and their uncertain domination, often falling into the possession of the very worst men? How happy, then, ought we to esteem that man who alone has it in his power, not by the law of the Romans, but by the privilege of philosophers, to enjoy all things as his own; not by any civil bond, but by the common right of nature, which denies that anything can really be possessed by any one but him who understands its true nature and use; who reckons our dictatorships and consulships rather in the rank of necessary offices than desirable employments, and thinks they must be endured rather as acquittances of our debt to our country than sought for the sake of emolument or glory—the man, in short, who can apply to himself the sentence which Cato tells us my ancestor Africanus loved to repeat, “that he was never so busy as when he did nothing, and never less solitary than when alone.”
For who can believe that Dionysius, when after every possible effort he ravished from his fellow-citizens their liberty, had performed a nobler work than Archimedes, when, without appearing to be doing anything, he manufactured the globe which we have just been describing? 374Who does not see that those men are in reality more solitary who, in the midst of a crowd, find no one with whom they can converse congenially than those who, without witnesses, hold communion with themselves, and enter into the secret counsels of the sagest philosophers, while they delight themselves in their writings and discoveries? And who would think any one richer than the man who is in want of nothing which nature requires; or more powerful than he who has attained all that she has need of; or happier than he who is free from all mental perturbation; or more secure in future than he who carries all his property in himself, which is thus secured from shipwreck? And what power, what magistracy, what royalty, can be preferred to a wisdom which, looking down on all terrestrial objects as low and transitory things, incessantly directs its attention to eternal and immutable verities, and which is persuaded that though others are called men, none are really so but those who are refined by the appropriate acts of humanity?
In this sense an expression of Plato or some other philosopher appears to me exceedingly elegant, who, when a tempest had driven his ship on an unknown country and a desolate shore, during the alarms with which their ignorance of the region inspired his companions, observed, they say, geometrical figures traced in the sand, on which he immediately told them to be of good cheer, for he had observed the indications of Man. A conjecture he deduced, not from the cultivation of the soil which he beheld, but from the symbols of science. For this reason, Tubero, learning and learned men, and these your favorite studies, have always particularly pleased me.
XVIII. Then Lælius replied: I cannot venture, Scipio, to answer your arguments, or to [maintain the discussion either against] you, Philus, or Manilius.[302] * * *