II. However, shortly before the Pythian games of Callistratus’ year, it happened that two holy men, travelling from opposite ends of the inhabited globe, met at Delphi; Demetrius the grammarian, on his homeward voyage from Britain to Tarsus, and Cleombrotus the Lacedaemonian, who had wandered much in Egypt and about the land of the Troglodytes, and had sailed far up the Red Sea, not for commerce, but because he loved sights and information. Possessing a competence, and being indifferent to having more, he would use his leisure [Sidenote: B] in such ways, putting together facts as material for a Philosophy which was to end in what he himself called Theology. Having lately been at the temple of Ammon, he made it clear that he was far from admiring its general arrangements, but he told us a story worthy of serious interest as related by the priests, about the lamp which is never extinguished. They say that it consumes less oil each successive year, and claim this as a proof of an inequality in the years which makes each less in duration [Sidenote: C] than its predecessor. Of course, the shorter the period the less the consumption. III. All present found this wonderful, and Demetrius observed that it was quite absurd to hunt out such great results from trifles; not, as Alcaeus puts it, to take the claw and paint the lion from it, but with a wick and a lamp to shift the whole order of the heavens, and make a clean sweep of Mathematics. ‘Nothing of that sort will disturb those gentlemen;’ said Cleombrotus, ‘they will never give in to the mathematicians on the point of accuracy; they would think it easier for them to be wrong in their time about movements and periods so [Sidenote: D] very remote, than for themselves to be wrong in measuring the oil, when they had their attention jealously fixed all the time on so strange a phenomenon. Besides, Demetrius, not to allow small things as indications of great ones would be to stop the way against many arts; many proofs will be put out of account, and many predictions. Yet you grammarians prove a fact of no less importance than that the heroes of old shaved with the razor, because you meet with the word “razor” in Homer,[129] and again, that they lent money at interest, because he has _Since of a debt there owing I have need, Long-standing and not small_,[130]