Menippus

“ Menippus raised his head, looked at him as one bewildered.
“You spoke?” he asked.
“I said I would remain,” returned Peregrine a trifle testily. When one has stated a difficult and reluctant decision, it is none too pleasant to be obliged to repeat the statement. It is in a manner lowering to one’s dignity.
“You do well,” returned Menippus calmly. “Yet I would have you bear in mind it is by your own free will that you remain.”
“I am wholly aware of it,” retorted Peregrine. This insistence on the matter displeased him.
“I will now,” continued Menippus still calmly, “send for food. You must eat.” ”

“ It set the hearts of curious women—those who sought his wisdom—a-beating; more than once sent them scuttling like frightened hens to the door, and adown the stairs, while Menippus sat chuckling cynically. Weak enough to desire his power to be sought and acknowledged by all men, mere curiosity bored him vastly. You may judge that he was more often bored by his visitors than not. Vanity alone made boredom worth the enduring. ”

“ Now, in speaking of her again, I am very sure she lives. There is the matter in a nutshell. ’Tis a tantalizing enough quest for a man, and maybe I am a fool to pursue it. At times I see the folly very plainly, at times I see in it naught but the clearest sanity.”
Menippus drew down his eyelids. His finger-tips together he spoke smoothly.
“Presuming the quest sane, presuming it fulfilled, what think you to gain when you have found her?”
“That,” said Peregrine quietly, “will lie between her and me.” The Sage’s tone had struck strangely on his heart. It brought with it at once hope and danger. ”

“ Are they not greater than the men and women they sing of? ‘Hector that sweet knight is dead,’ and Lucian tells us how in the dim under-world Menippus saw the bleaching skull of Helen, and marvelled that it was for so grim a favour that all those horned ships were launched, those beautiful mailed men laid low, those towered cities brought to dust. Yet, every day the swanlike daughter of Leda comes out on the battlements, and looks down at the tide of war. The greybeards wonder at her loveliness, and she stands by the side of the king. In his chamber of stained ivory lies her leman. ”

“ Mercury, in Lucian’s dialogue, shows Menippus the skulls of several world-famous beauties; and the philosopher falls to moralizing upon that of Helen. “Was it for this,” [11] he exclaims, “that a thousand ships sailed from Greece, so many brave men died, and so many cities were destroyed?” Menippus was so far of the Ralph Nickleby type, “not a man to be moved by a pretty face,” with a grinning skull beneath it: men like him profess to look and work below the surface, and so to see the skull, and not its delicate covering. ”

“ One is all for innovations and another for some great he-knows-not-what. Another leaves his wife and children at home and goes to Jerusalem, Rome, or in pilgrimage to St. James's where he has no business. In short, if a man like Menippus of old could look down from the moon and behold those innumerable rufflings of mankind, he would think he saw a swarm of flies and gnats quarreling among themselves, fighting, laying traps for one another, snatching, playing, wantoning, growing up, falling, and dying. ”

“ The full articulation of the thought came not entirely home to Peregrine; he but scented the matter as it were from afar. The Sage’s next words brought amazement to him.
“I know the woman you seek,” he said briefly. There was no mistaking the assurance of the tone.
“You have seen her?” he cried, even as he had cried to Simon.
“Verily I have,” returned Menippus. “Now listen. Pursuit of her is of little avail; that you have fully proved. I know her dwelling. She welcomes not all men to her presence. That you have had vision of her shows me that she desires yours. ”

“ Next, the cry dying away, they bowed themselves in silence to the earth, touching the black marble floor with their fillet-bound foreheads. Then, standing again upright, the figure nearest him went up to the pillar, took from it with a pair of golden tongs, what appeared to be glowing charcoal. This he placed in a gold censer. Standing, then, beside the pillar, Menippus, who faced him, came towards him, blew upon the charcoal till it glowed to deeper crimson. Half unconsciously, through the ritual, Peregrine found his brain recording sentences. ”

“ Menippus was quite as little a philosopher, but the most genuine literary representative of that philosophy whose wisdom consisted in denying philosophy and ridiculing philosophers the cynical wisdom of Diogenes; a comic teacher of serious wisdom, he proved by examples and merry sayings that except an upright life everything is vain in earth and heaven, and nothing more vain than the disputes of so-called sages. ”

“ I have added the Icaro-Menippus, because that Dialogue describes another trip to the moon, though its satire is more especially directed against the philosophers.
Menippus was born at Gadara in Coele-Syria, and from a slave he grew to be a Cynic philosopher, chiefly occupied with scornful jests on his neighbours, and a money-lender, who made large gains and killed himself when he was cheated of them all. He is said to have written thirteen pieces which are lost, but he has left his name in literature, preserved by important pieces that have taken the name of “Menippean Satire.” ”

“ Returning to concrete surroundings, he saw the crystal lying on the black velvet, catching the glow from the hanging lamp, naught else pictured within it.
Menippus got quickly to his feet, made his way to the door.
“Castrano,” he called.
A huge negro came silently from behind a curtain.
“Come on the instant,” said Menippus. “I need your aid. A man lies in a snow-drift without.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE CHOICE PEREGRINE, returning to consciousness, and unaware at the first of his surroundings, believed the snow to be an exceeding warm bed. ”

“ Again, a deaf man can receive the vibrations of sound from that same world, where one in possession of his hearing is dulled to them by reason of the presence of the coarser vibrations. This, no doubt, is strange to you, nevertheless it is a fact.” He leaned back in his chair with a sigh, as of one who should say all this is mere child’s play, yet it were well to give it to you.
“Candidly, I find it exceeding bewildering,” said Peregrine.
“Under my tuition the bewilderment will pass,” said Menippus indulgently. “I see you rarely endowed. You need but guidance and teaching in the matter. ”

“ The slight fragments preserved of Menippus are not enough to enable us to judge of his style; but from sundry notices of him in Lucian we may gather that his Satires were written in prose, [3] that they frequently introduced dialogue, and that they embraced a large variety of topics, including especially the ridicule of false philosophers. Varro's Satires gained the name of Menippea, as Cicero informs us, from their general likeness to those of Menippus in style and subject. Both emploved dialogue, both discoursed on many subjects, and both conveyed instruction in a humorous and playful form. ”

“ Whatever the “treasure-chamber” brought in, Callippides had not succeeded in making a new fortune. Men like him, with a restless mind and tireless body,76 only give up one passion to devote themselves to another. He who, when a youth, had cared for nothing except horses and chariots, now, in his fortieth year, could not see a pretty hetaera fasten up her dress to dance without having his heart kindle with the most ardent love. It was no longer Menippus, the horse-dealer, but Philostratus, the go-between, with whom he had business. ”

“ Those who attune themselves rightly can receive the whole stored up thought and knowledge of the centuries. This is wisdom, and wisdom is power.”
Here was the mere jargon of his trade. It is true there were some who believed this doctrine they preached. Excellent sounding, and none too easily refuted, it had deceived more questioners than Peregrine. Yet it is very certain that Menippus, though he had it ready enough on his tongue, held it not in his mind. ”

“ Lucian, who was emulous of this Menippus, seems to have imitated both his manners and his style in many of his dialogues; where Menippus himself is often introduced as a speaker in them, and as a perpetual buffoon; particularly his character is expressed in the beginning of that dialogue, which is called Νεκυομαντια. But Varro, in imitating him, avoids his impudence and filthiness, and only expresses his witty pleasantry. ”

“ He saw clearly the risk of Menippus glancing towards it, perceiving his crouching figure. This risk he was ready to take. There is naught to be gained without some venture. Getting his seat secure, and holding to the bars, he looked within. The place was as he had seen it on the night of his entry there, save that, instead of the stone pillar in the middle of the floor, there was now an altar against the wall to his right. Peregrine guessed some new ritual about to be performed. ”

“ He sent Menippus with about 3000 men and Polyxenidas with the whole of the fleet, and a few days later marched thither in person with 6000 of his own men and a smaller body of Aetolians, taken from such force as could be hastily concentrated at Lamia. The 500 Achaeans and the small contingent supplied by Eumenes under Xenoclides of Chalcis crossed the Euripus, as the route was still open, and reached Chalcis. The Roman troops, who were about 500 strong, came after Menippus had encamped before Sanganeus at the Hermaeum, the point of departure from Boeotia to the island of Euboea. ”

“ Menippus availed himself partly of the old criticism of mythology and partly of the philosophical attacks on the popular conception of the gods. The only novelty was the facetious form in which he concealed the sting of serious criticism. It is impossible to decide whether he positively denied the existence of the gods, but his satire on the popular notions and its success among his contemporaries at least testifies to the weakening of the popular faith among the educated classes. In Hellas itself he seems to have gone out of fashion very early ”

“ He was followed by Menippus, who asserted that the best thing for all the peoples of Greece and Asia would have been for Antiochus to have intervened whilst Philip's power was still unimpaired, everyone would then have kept what belonged to him, and everything would not have been completely at the mercy of Rome. "Even now," he continued, "if only you resolutely carry out the designs you have formed, he will be able with the help of the gods and the assistance of the Aetolians to restore the fortunes of Greece, drooping though they are, to their old place in the world. ”

“ Since you are a man it is safe to make this request. An’ you were a woman it would send you up them in haste at the first opportune moment.”
“Humph!” said Peregrine, leaving the cynicism unanswered.
“And now I bid you good-night,” said Menippus.
The Sage departed Peregrine sat down on his bed. By the light of a candle he surveyed the place. The walls were ochre-washed; the floor bare board, none too clean. Cobwebs hung about the ceiling; a waiting spider or two made dark blots on the soft grey nets. The bed was a straw mattress on wooden trestles, and covered by a somewhat mangey bearskin. ”

“ He is amazed at the absurdity of their burial rites, and he astonishes Hermes by quoting Homer on the subject. Last of all he witnesses a battle and cries out at the folly of it. "Such," he concludes, "is the life of miserable men—and not a word about Charon." [45]
In the same way and in the same spirit Menippus visits the Lower World, where he sees Minos judging the dead. Minos too seems to have been interested in literature, for he reduced the sentence upon Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, on the very proper ground of his generosity to authors. But the general picture has less humour. ”

“ Menippus was a Cynic philosopher, originally a slave, born in Syria. He lived about 60 b.c., and wrote much, but all his works have been lost.
[116] Ixion, of whom the familiar legend is that he was punished in the lower world by being chained to an ever-revolving wheel, was King of the Lapithæ. Sisyphus, whose punishment was to roll a stone up a hill and then see it roll back again, being condemned perpetually to attempt rolling it completely to the top, belonged to a period anterior to Homer, and was the founder of Corinth. Homer describes him as the craftiest of men. ”

“ Again, he was smitten seven times on the privy parts with squills and branches of wild fig and other wild plants. Why with squill and wild fig? Because plants of this kind were purgative, as Miss Harrison [952] very clearly points out. Among other evidences of the existence of this idea, Lucian [953] makes Menippus relate how before he was allowed to consult the oracle of the dead he was “purged and wiped clean and consecrated with squill and torches.” ”

“ The adherents of Rome left the city just before the king's entry. The Achaean troops and those of Eumenes were holding Salganeus, and a small body of Romans were fortifying a post on the Euripus to defend the position. Menippus commenced the attack on Salganeus and Antiochus prepared to capture the fortified post. The Achaeans and the soldiers of Eumenes were the first to abandon the defence on condition of being allowed to depart in safety. ”