'Thou art joking, said Kleodemos, but I was once more incredulous than thou about such things, for I thought nothing could have persuaded me to believe them; but when I first saw that foreign barbarian flying — he was of the Hyperboreans, he said — I believed, and was overcome in spite of my resistance. For what was I to do, when I saw him carried through the air in daylight, and walking on the water, and passing leisurely and slowly through the fire? What? (said his interlocutor), you saw the Hyperborean man flying, and walking on the water? To be sure, said he, and he had on undressed leather brogues as they generally wear them; but what's the use of talking of such trifles, considering what other manifestations he showed us, — sending loves, calling up demons, raising the dead, and bringing in Hekate herself visibly, and drawing down the moon?' Kleodemos then goes on to relate how the conjurer first had his four minæ down for sacrificial expenses, and then made a clay Cupid, and sent it flying through the air to fetch the girl whom Glaukias had fallen in love with, and presently, lo and behold, there she was knocking at the door! The interlocutor, however, comments in a sceptical vein on the narrative. It was scarce needful, he says, to have taken the trouble to send for the girl with clay, and a magician from the Hyperboreans, and even the moon, considering that for twenty drachmas she would have let herself be taken to the Hyperboreans themselves; and she seems, moreover, to have been affected in quite an opposite way to spirits, for whereas these beings take flight if they hear the noise of brass or iron, Chrysis no sooner hears the chink of silver anywhere, but she comes toward the sound.[1] Another early instance of the belief in miraculous suspension is in the life of Iamblichus, the great Neo-Platonist mystic. His disciples, says Eunapius, told him they had heard a report from his servants, that while in prayer to the gods he had been lifted more than ten cubits from the ground, his body and clothes changing to a beautiful golden colour, but after he ceased
- ↑ Lucian. Philopseudes, 13.
