receive and
reflect the rays of the meridian sun; and a consuming flame was darted,
to the distance, perhaps of two hundred feet. [97] The truth of these
two extraordinary facts is invalidated by the silence of the most
authentic historians; and the use of burning-glasses was never adopted
in the attack or defence of places. [98] Yet the admirable experiments
of a French philosopher [99] have demonstrated the possibility of such
a mirror; and, since it is possible, I am more disposed to attribute the
art to the greatest mathematicians of antiquity, than to give the merit
of the fiction to the idle fancy of a monk or a sophist. According to
another story, Proclus applied sulphur to the destruction of the Gothic
fleet; [100] in a modern imagination, the name of sulphur is instantly
connected with the suspicion of gunpowder, and that suspicion is
propagated by the secret arts of his disciple Anthemius. [101] A citizen
of Tralles in Asia had five sons, who were all distinguished in their
respective professions by merit and success. Olympius excelled in
the knowledge and practice of the Roman jurisprudence. Dioscorus and
Alexander became learned physicians; but the skill of the former
was exercised for the benefit of his fellow-citizens, while his more
ambitious brother acquired wealth and reputation at Rome. The fame
of Metrodorus the grammarian, and of Anthemius the mathematician and
architect, reached the ears of the emperor Justinian, who invited them
to Constantinople; and while the one instructed the rising generation
in the schools of eloquence, the other filled the capital and provinces
with more lasting monuments of his art. In a trifling dispute relative
to the walls or windows of their contiguous houses, he had been
vanquished by the eloquence of his neighbor Zeno; but the orator was
defeated in his turn by the master of mechanics, whose malicious,
though harmless, stratagems are darkly represented by the ignorance
of Agathias. In a lower room, Anthemius arranged several vessels or
caldrons of water, each of them covered by the wide bottom of a leathern
tube, which rose to a narrow top, and was artificially conveyed among
the joists and rafters of the adjacent building. A fire was kindled
beneath the caldron; the steam of the boiling water ascended through the
tubes; the house was shaken by the efforts of imprisoned air, and its
trembling inhabitants might wonder that the city was unconscious of the
earthquake whi