?'--'We know not
Hermotimus, nor he us,' they would tell me; adding, with a smile, 'your
friend thinks he may believe all our adversaries say of us whether in
ignorance or in malice. Yet if he were umpire in the games, and if he
happened to see one of our wrestlers, by way of a preliminary exercise,
knock to pieces an antagonist of mere empty air, he would not thereupon
pronounce him a victor. Well! don't let your friend Hermotimus
suppose, in like manner, that his teachers have really prevailed over
us in those battles of theirs, fought with our mere shadows. That,
again, were to be like children, lightly overthrowing their own
card-castles; or like boy-archers, who cry out when they hit the target
of straw. The Persian and Scythian bowmen, as they speed along, can
pierce a bird on the wing.'

--Let us leave Plato and the others at rest. It is not for me to
contend against them. Let us rather search out together if the truth
of Philosophy be as I say. Why summon the athletes, and archers from
Persia?

--Yes! let them go, if you think them in the way. And now do you
speak! You really look as if you had something wonderful to deliver.

--Well then, Lucian! to me it seems quite possible for one who has
learned the doctrines of the Stoics only, to attain from those a
knowledge [157] of the truth, without proceeding to inquire into all
the various tenets of the others. Look at the question in this way. If
one told you that twice two make four, would it be necessary for you to
go the whole round of the arithmeticians, to see whether any one of
them will say that twice two make five, or seven? Would you not see at
once that the man tells the truth?

--At once.

--Why then do you find it impossible that one who has fallen in with
the Stoics only, in their enunciation of what is true, should adhere to
them, and seek after no others; assured that four could never be five,
even if fifty Platos, fifty Aristotles said so?

--You are beside the point, Hermotimus! You are likening open
questions to principles universally received. Have you ever met any
one who said that twice two make five, or seven?

--No! only a madman would say that.

--And have you ever met, on the other hand, a Stoic and an Epicurean
who were agreed upon the beginning and the end, the principle and the
final cause, of things? Never! Then your parallel is false. We are
inquiring to which of the sects philosophic truth belongs, and you
s