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 model 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originally made by Thales of Miletus.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.

But do you mean, said Tubero, that he dared to speak thus to men almost