The Works of Philo Judaeus, Vol. 2

PHILO JUDÆUS.

now speaking boastfully concerning your precepts, as if they contained the rules of truth itself? For, behold, the books that you call the sacred scriptures also contain fables, at which you are accustomed to laugh when you hear others relating them." And what is the use of devoting our leisure to collecting the fables interspersed in so many places throughout the history of the giving of the law, as if we had special leisure for the consideration of slander, and as if it were not better to attend merely to what is at hand and before us? Certainly, this one fable resembles that which is composed about the Aloadæ In Greek mythology, the Aloadae were giant brothers who attempted to scale heaven by piling mountains on top of one another., whom Homer, the greatest and most glorious of all poets, says had in contemplation to heap the three loftiest mountains on one another, and to build them into one mass, hoping that by this means there would be a road for them, as they were desirous to mount up to heaven. And the verses of Homer on this subject are these:—

High on Olympus' top they strove to raise

Gigantic Ossa; and on Ossa's heights

To place the leafy Pelion, that heaven

Might thus become accessible.

But Olympus, Ossa, and Pelion are the names of mountains. Instead of these mountains, the lawgiver Referring to Moses. represents a tower as having been built by these men, who, out of ignorance and wicked ambition, were desirous to reach heaven. Every alienation of mind, then, is grievous; for even if every portion of the whole earth could be built over, with a slight foundation laid and a superstructure raised in the fashion of a single pillar, it would still be an enormous distance removed from the heavenly sphere—especially according to the tenets of those philosophers who affirm that the earth is the center of the universe The geocentric model of the cosmos..

III. There is also another story akin to this, related by the devisers of fables, concerning the sameness of language among animals: for they say that formerly, all the animals in the world—whether land animals, aquatic ones, or winged ones—had but one language.