No one in Carthage was so learned as he. In his youth he had studied at
the College of the Mogbeds, at Borsippa, near Babylon; had then visited
Samothrace, Pessinus, Ephesus, Thessaly, Judaea, and the temples of the
Nabathae, which are lost in the sands; and had travelled on foot along
the banks of the Nile from the cataracts to the sea. Shaking torches
with veil-covered face, he had cast a black cock upon a fire of
sandarach before the breast of the Sphinx, the Father of Terror. He had
descended into the caverns of Proserpine; he had seen the five hundred
pillars of the labyrinth of Lemnos revolve, and the candelabrum of
Tarentum, which bore as many sconces on its shaft as there are days in
the year, shine in its splendour; at times he received Greeks by night
in order to question them. The constitution of the world disquieted him
no less than the nature of the gods; he had observed the equinoxes with
the armils placed in the portico of Alexandria, and accompanied the
bematists of Evergetes, who measure the sky by calculating the number
of their steps, as far as Cyrene; so that there was now growing in his
thoughts a religion of his own, with no distinct formula, and on that
very account full of infatuation and fervour. He no longer believed that
the earth was formed like a fir-cone; he believed it to be round, and
eternally falling through immensity with such prodigious speed that its
fall was not perceived.
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