BOOK I CH. XxxI § 88. 193

rubro mari Indiave: a sort of hendiadys for the epvpa Oadacaa of the Greeks, which comprehended the Indian Ocean together with the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. The allusion is probably to the whales, of which Pliny says (NV. H. 1x 2) plurima et maxima in Indico mari animalia, e quibus balaenae quaternum jugerum, pristes ducenum eubitorum ; and further on, speaking of Cadara, rubri maris paeninsula ingens, he says that hujus loci quiete ad immobilem magnitudinem beluae adolescant ; so Strabo xv 212 mentions among the difficulties experienced by Nearchus, in his voyage from the mouth of the Indus to the Euphrates, the shoals of enormous whales (fvonrnpwv); he continues A€éyovar pév ody Kal of viv mdéovres eis “Ivdous peyébn Onpiwy, ‘which are however frightened by shouting and the sound of the trumpet’.
curiosissimi: used in a good sense as of Chrysippus, Zusc. I 108, in omni historia curiosus.
tam multa—quam sunt multa quae exsistunt: this somewhat verbose expression is intended, I suppose, to give greater prominence to the idea of multitude, cf. Orat. 108 nemo orator tam multa scripsit, quam multa sunt nostra. For the substantival use tam multa is more common than fot, which is so used however in Cael. 66 tot unum superare possent.
negemus esse, quia numquam vidimus: cf. Locke’s story of the King of Siam, who refused to believe the Dutch Ambassador’s description of the ice in Holland; and the controversy on the value of experience, as opposed to testimony, between Hume, Campbell and others. In Ep.’s argument against the Stoics, who are here speaking through the mouth of Cotta (see /ntroduction), the point debated is the value of particular ex- perience as opposed to general reasoning. ‘The universe’, said the Stoics, ‘exhibits the working of what we call reason (this is shown at length in Bk. 11), therefore it must be animated by a rational soul’ : ‘no’, replies the Epicurean, ‘ experience shows that a rational soul can only exist in human form’; which the Stoic meets by a reference to the limited nature of our experience, and the vastness of the universe, pointing out the erroneous conclusions which would necessarily flow from the assumption that there can be nothing in the infinite unknown but what is a repetition of the infinitesimal known. In point of fact the Epicureans did not themselves adhere to this principle : their doctrines of atoms, of images, of the gods, of the origin and growth of the world, were anything but matters of ordinary experience (as Lactantius points out De Ira 10 quis ila vidit wumquam ? foll.) ; nor did they care about their scientific truth, except in so far as it offered an escape from the acknowledgment of a divine government of the universe.
§ 89. et tu quidem: ‘yes, and you Vell. have gone further and given us a syllogistic proof of anthropomorphism’ ; see this in § 48.
non vestro more, sed dialecticorum. Cf.§ 70 n. Hirzel p. 177 foll. argues that Zeno is here alluded to, and that there was an important section of the Epicurean school, commencing with Apollodorus 6 knmorvpavvos, who set a