Page:Lucian (IA lucianlucas00collrich).pdf/117

ment. His great accomplishment lies, as he himself professes, in the skilful handling of sophisms—"word-nets," as he calls them—in which he entangles his opponents, stops their mouths, and reduces them to silence. He gives an example of his art, which is a curious specimen of the kind of folly to which the wisdom of the ancients occasionally condescended. A crocodile is supposed to have seized a boy in crossing a river, and promises to restore him to his father if this latter can guess correctly what he intends to do with him. If he guesses that the crocodile means to give him back, he has guessed wrong, because the crocodile's real intention is to eat him. If he guesses that the crocodile means to eat him, why then, if the crocodile gives him back after all, the guess would plainly be proved wrong by the result; so that there seems no chance for the father, guess which he will. The philosopher assures his listener that this is but one out of many choice examples of the sophistical art with which he is prepared to furnish him; and when the other retorts upon him somewhat in his own style, the Stoic threatens to knock him down with an "indemonstrable syllogism," the effect of which, he warns him, will be to plunge him into "eternal doubt, everlasting silence, and distraction of mind." In the end, however, he is purchased by his interrogator for "self and company." The next who is put up for sale is "the Peripatetic," by wham Aristotle is clearly intended. With him the satirist deals briefly and lightly, as though he had some tenderness for that particular school. "You will