vultures and using the birds for horses. The vultures are large and for the most part have three heads: you can judge of their size from the fact that the mast of a large merchantman is not so long or so thick as the smallest of the quills they have.[1] The Vulture Dragoons are commissioned to fly about the country and bring before the king any stranger they may find, so of course they arrested us and brought us before him. When he had looked us over and drawn his conclusions from our clothes, he said: “Then you are Greeks, are you, strangers?” and when we assented, “Well, how did you get here, with so much air to cross?” We told him all, and he began and told us about himself: that he too was a human being, Endymion by name, who had once been ravished from our country in his sleep, and on coming there had been made king of the land. He said that his country was the moon that shines down on us.[2] He urged us to take heart, however, and suspect no danger, for we should have everything that we required. “And if I succeed,” said he, “in the war which I am now making on the people of the sun, you shall lead the happiest of lives with me.” We asked who the enemy were, and what the quarrel was about. “Phaethon,” said he, “the king of the inhabitants of the sun—for it is inhabited,[3]
- ↑ Cf. Odyss. 9, 322 f.
- ↑ The story of Antonius Diogenes included a description of a trip to the moon (Phot. 111 a). Compare also Lucian’s own Icaromenippus.
- ↑ Cf. Lactantius 3, 23, 41: ‘‘Seneca says that there have been Stoics who raised the question of ascribing to the sun a population of its own.”
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