grain of wheat, and running away with it. Probably among them too, conformably to the requirements of ant-life, they have their architects, and their popular leaders, and public officers, and musicians, and philosophers." [If his friend disapproves of the comparison, he bids him remember the old Thessalian fable of the Myrmidons.]
He was just taking flight again, he says, when the Moon—in a soft and pleasant female voice—begged him to carry something for her up to Jupiter. "'By all means,' said I, 'if it's not very heavy.' 'Only a message,' said she—'just a small petition to him. I'm quite out of patience, Menippus, at being talked about in such a shameful way by those philosophers, who seem to have nothing else to do but speculate about me—what I am, and how big I am, and why I am sometimes halved and sometimes round. Some of them say I'm inhabited, and others, that I hang over the sea like a looking-glass; in short, any fancy that comes into their heads, they apply to me. And, as if that were not enough, they say my very light is not my own, but as it were of a bastard sort, borrowed from the sun; trying to make mischief between me and him—my own brother—on purpose to set us at variance; as if it was not enough for them to say what they have about him,—that he is a stone, and nothing but a mass of fire. How many stories I could tell of them, and their goings-on o' nights, for all the grave faces and severe looks they wear by day! I see it all, though I hold my tongue—it seems to me scarcely decent to bring all their proceedings to light. So, when I see any of
