Nor doth Thamyras break out into poetic raptures upon any other score;
nor, by Jove, Euxodus, Aristarchus, or Archimedes. And when the lovers
of the art of painting are so enamoured with the charmingness of their
own performances, that Nicias, as he was drawing the Evocation of Ghosts
in Homer, often asked his servants whether he had dined or no, and when
King Ptolemy had sent him threescore talents for his piece, after it was
finished, he neither would accept the money nor part with his work; what
and how great satisfactions may we then suppose to have been reaped
from geometry and astronomy by Euclid when he wrote his Dioptrics, by
Philippus when he had perfected his demonstration of the figure of the
moon, by Archimedes when with the help of a certain angle he had found
the sun's diameter to make the same part of the largest circle that that
angle made of four right angles, and by Apollonius and Aristarchus who
were the inventors of some other things of the like nature? The bare
contemplating and comprehending of all these now engender in the
learners both unspeakable delights and a marvellous height of spirit.
And it doth in no wise beseem me, by comparing with these the fulsome
debauchees of victualling-houses and stews, to contaminate Helicon and
the Muses,--
Where swain his flock ne'er fed,
Nor tree by hatchet bled.
(Euripides, "Hippolytus," 75.)
But these are the verdant and untrampled pastures of ingenious bees;
but those are more like the mange of lecherous boars and he-goats. And
though a voluptuous temper of mind be naturally erratic and precipitate,
yet never any yet sacrificed an ox for joy that he had gained his will
of his mistress; nor did any ever wish to die immediately, might he but
once satiate himself with the costly dishes and comfits at the table of
his prince. But now Eudoxus wished he might stand by the sun, and inform
himself of the figure, magnitude, and beauty of that luminary, though
he were, like Phaethon, consumed by it. And Pythagoras offered an ox in
sacrifice for having completed the lines of a certain geometric diagram;
as Apollodotus tells us,
When the famed lines Pythagoras devised,
For which a splendid ox he sacrificed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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