Philosophy as a way of life

resolved to fly up heaven to see for himself how things were.38 He fitted himself out with a pair of wings - on the left side a vulture's wing and on the right side that of an eagle - and soared upwards towards the moon. Once there, he reported, "I rested myself, looking down on the earth from on high and like Homer's Zeus, now observing the land of the horse-loving Thracians, now the land of the Mysians, and presently, if I liked, Greece, Persia and India; and from all this I got my fill of kaleidoscopic pleasure." 39 Once his eyes had become accustomed to the tiny dimensions of human beings, however, Menippus began to observe mankind. He could see "not only the nations and cities but the people themselves as clear as could be, the traders, the soldiers, the farmers, the litigants, the women, the animals, and, in a word, all the life that the good green earth supports." "° Not only could Menippus see what people were doing in the open air, but also what they were about inside their own homes, when they thought no one was observing them. 41

After Menippus has recited a long list of the crimes and adulteries he had seen committed inside people's homes, he sums up his overall impression: what he saw was a cacophonous, ridiculous hodge-podge of a play. What he found most ridiculous of all were those people who fought over the borders of their cities and private land-holdings, since the earth itself appeared to him so absurdly tiny and insignificant. Rich people, says Menippus, are proud of completely unimportant things. Their domains arc no bigger than one of Epicurus' atoms, and the sight of man's cities reminded him of an anthill, with all its inhabitants scurrying about aimlessly.

Once he leaves the moon, Menippus travels among the stars until he arrives at the dwelling-place of Zeus. There, he has a good laugh over the ridiculously contradictory nature of the prayers mankind address to Zeus.

In another of Lucian's dialogues, entitled Charo11, or the lnspeclors,42

Charon, ferryman of the dead, asks for a day off, so that he can go up to the surface of the earth and sec just what this earthly existence is which people miss so much once they arrive in the underworld. With the help of Hermes, he piles up several mountains on top of one another, so as to be able to observe mankind better from on high. There follows the same kind of description we have already seen in Marcus Aurelius and in the lcaromenippus: Charon sees sea-travellers, trials, farmers - in a word, every kind of human activity, but all with one thing in common: an existence full of pain. Charon remarks: "If only humans could get it straight from the beginning: that they're going to die; that, after a brief stay in life, they have to depart from this life like a dream and leave everything on earth behind, then they'd live more wisely and die with fewer regrets." But man is thoughtless; he resembles the bubbles thrown up by a waterfall, which burst as soon as they come into existence.

As we have said, this kind of view from above, directed tow11rd mankind'!!

earthly existence, is a typical manifCi1t111 ion 111' Cynicism. We can Nee thi11 by

The View from Above

247

the fact that the dialogue Charon bears the Greek subtitle Episleopountes, "The Observers," or rather "The Overseers." The Cynic philosopher saw it as his duty to supervise the actions of his fellow men, like a kind of spy, lying in wait for their mistakes, so as to denounce them.43 The Cynic had the task of watching over his fellow men like their censor, surveying their behavior from the heights of a watchtower. The words episleopos or leatasleopos "overseer"

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or "spy" - were used in antiquity as nicknames for the Cynics."" For them, the view from above was intended to denounce the absurdity of human life.

It is no accident if, in one of Lucian's dialogues, it is precisely Charon, ferryman of the dead, who plays the role of observing human affairs from above; he is, after all, peculiarly well placed to observe them from the perspective of death.