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OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
243
of polished brass, with many smaller and moveable polygons to receive and reflect the rays of the meridian sun; and a consuming flame was darted to the distance, perhaps, of two hundred feet.[1] The truth of these two extraordinary facts is invalidated by the silence of the most authentic historians; and the use of burning-glasses was never adopted in the attack or defence of places.[2] Yet the admirable experiments of a French philosopher[3] have demonstrated the possibility of such a mirror; and, since it is possible, I am more disposed to attribute the art to the greatest mathematicians of antiquity than to give the merit of the fiction to the idle fancy of a monk or a sophist. According to another story, Proclus applied sulphur to the destruction of the Gothic fleet;[4] in a modern imagination, the name of sulphur is instantly connected with the suspicion of gunpowder, and that suspicion is propagated by the secret arts of his disciple Anthemius.[5] A citizen of Tralles in Asia had five sons, who were all distinguished in their respective professions by merit and success. Olympius excelled in the knowledge and practice of the Roman jurisprudence. Dioscorus and Alexander became learned physicians; but the skill of the former was exercised for the benefit of his fellow-citizens, while his more ambitious brother acquired wealth and reputation at Rome. The fame of Metrodorus the grammarian, and of Anthemius the mathematician and architect, reached the ears of the emperor Justinian, who invited them to Constantinople; and, while the one instructed the rising generation in the schools of eloquence, the other filled the capital and provinces with more lasting
- ↑ Tzetzes describes the artifice of these burning-glasses, which he had read, perhaps with no learned eyes, in a mathematical treatise of Anthemius. That treatise, περὶ παραδόξων μηχανημάτων, has been lately published, translated, and illustrated, by M. Dupuys, a scholar and a mathematician (Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions, tom. xlii. p. 392-451). [See A. Westermann's Paradoxographi, p. 149 sqq.; and, for a new fragment of Anthemius, C. Belger in Hermes, xvi. p. 261 sqq. (1881), and C. Wachsmuth, ib. p. 637 sqq.]
- ↑ In the siege of Syracuse, by the silence of Polybius, Plutarch, Livy; in the siege of Constantinople, by that of Marcellinus and all the contemporaries of the vith century.
- ↑ Without any previous knowledge of Tzetzes or Anthemius, the immortal Buffon imagined and executed a set of burning-glasses, with which he could inflame planks at the distance of 200 feet (Supplément à l'Hist. Naturelle, tom. i. p. 399-483, quarto edition). What miracles would not his genius have performed for the public service, with royal expense, and in the strong sun of Constantinople or Syracuse?
- ↑ John Malala (tom. ii. p. 120-124 [403-5]) relates the fact; but he seems to confound the names or persons of Proclus and Marinus. [Marinus was the prætorian præfect to whom Proclus gave his mixture.]
- ↑ Agathias, l. v. p. 149-152. The merit of Anthemius as an architect is loudly praised by Procopius (de Ædif. l. i. c. 1), and Paulus Silentiarius (part i. 134, &c.).
