26–27
BUYER
Heracles, what insight!
HERMES
What if I should tell you of other information demanding far keener vision, about sperm and conception and the shaping of the embryo in the womb, and how man is a creature that laughs, while asses do not laugh, and neither do they build houses nor sail boats.
BUYER
This is high and helpful information that you tell of, so I shall buy him for the twenty minas.
15
HERMES
This Sceptic is still on our hands. Reddy,Pyrrhias (Reddy) is a slave name, brought in for the sake of the pun on the name of the founder of the Sceptic school, Pyrrho. come here and be put up without delay. The crowd is already drifting away, and there will be but few at his sale. However,—who'll buy this one?
BUYER
I will. But first tell me, what do you know?
BUYER
What do you mean by that?
SCEPTIC
That in my opinion nothing at all exists.
BUYER
Then do not we exist?
SCEPTIC
I don’t even know that.
BUYER
Not even that you yourself exist?
10
SCEPTIC
I am far more uncertain about that.
BUYER
Oh, what a state of doubt? But what are these scales of yours for?
SCEPTIC
I weigh arguments in them and make them balance one another, and when I see they are precisely alike and equal in weight, then, ah! then I do not know which is the truer.
BUYER
What else can you do fairly well?
SCEPTIC
Everything except catch a runaway slave.
15
BUYER
Why can’t you do that?
SCEPTIC
Because, my dear sir, I am unable to apprehend anything.The same joke is cracked by Lucian in the True Story, 2, 18, at the expense of the New Academy.
