pleasure of heaving you resume it, or are we come too late?
Philus. We have not yet commenced the discussion, and since the question remains entire and unbroken, I shall have the greatest pleasure, my Lælius, in handing over the argument to you.
Lælius. No, I had much rather hear you, unless, indeed, Manilius thinks himself able to compromise the suit between the two suns, that they may possess heaven as joint sovereigns without intruding on each other's empire.
Then Manilius said: Are you going, Lælius, to ridicule a science in which, in the first place, I myself excel; and, secondly, without which no one can distinguish what is his own, and what is another's? But to return to the point. Let us now at present listen to Philus, who seems to me to have started a greater question than any of those that have engaged the attention of either Publius Mucius or myself.
XIV. Then Philus said: I am not about to bring you anything new, or anything which has been thought over or discovered by me myself. But I recollect that Caius Sulpicius Gallus, who was a man of profound learning, as you are aware, when this same thing was reported to have taken place in his time, while he was staying in the house of Marcus Marcellus, who had been his colleague in the consulship, asked to see a celestial globe which Marcellus's grandfather had saved after the capture of Syracuse from that magnificent and opulent city, without bringing to his own home any other memorial out of so great a booty; which I had often heard mentioned on account of the great fame of Archimedes; but its appearance, however, did not seem to me particularly striking. For that other is more elegant in form, and more generally known, which was made by the same Archimedes, and deposited by the same Marcellus in the Temple of Virtue at Rome. But as soon as Gallus had begun to explain, in a most scientific manner, the principle of this machine, I felt that the Sicilian geometrician must have possessed a genius superior to anything we usually conceive to belong to our nature. For Gallus assured us that that other solid and compact globe was a very ancient invention, and that the first
