s of a French philosopher have
demonstrated the possibility of such a mirror; and, since it is
possible, I am more disposed to attribute the art to the greatest
mathematicians of antiquity, than to give the merit of the fiction
to the idle fancy of a monk or a sophist. According to another story,
Proclus applied sulphur to the destruction of the Gothic fleet; in a
modern imagination, the name of sulphur is instantly connected with the
suspicion of gunpowder, and that suspicion is propagated by the secret
arts of his disciple Anthemius. A citizen of Tralles in Asia had five
sons, who were all distinguished in their respective professions by
merit and success. Olympius excelled in the knowledge and practice
of the Roman jurisprudence. Dioscorus and Alexander became learned
physicians; but the skill of the former was exercised for the benefit
of his fellow-citizens, while his more ambitious brother acquired wealth
and reputation at Rome. The fame of Metrodorus the grammarian, and
of Anthemius the mathematician and architect, reached the ears of the
emperor Justinian, who invited them to Constantinople; and while the one
instructed the rising generation in the schools of eloquence, the other
filled the capital and provinces with more lasting monuments of his
art. In a trifling dispute relative to the walls or windows of their
contiguous houses, he had been vanquished by the eloquence of his
neighbor Zeno; but the orator was defeated in his turn by the master
of mechanics, whose malicious, though harmless, stratagems are darkly
represented by the ignorance of Agathias. In a lower room, Anthemius
arranged several vessels or caldrons of water, each of them covered by
the wide bottom of a leathern tube, which rose to a narrow top, and
was artificially conveyed among the joists and rafters of the adjacent
building. A fire was kindled beneath the caldron; the steam of the
boiling water ascended through the tubes; the house was shaken by the
efforts of imprisoned air, and its trembling inhabitants might wonder
that the city was unconscious of the earthquake which they had felt. At
another time, the friends of Zeno, as they sat at table, were dazzled
by the intolerable light which flashed in their eyes from the reflecting
mirrors of Anthemius; they were astonished by the noise which he
produced from the collision of certain minute and sonorous particles;
and the orator declared in tragic style to the senate, that a mere
mortal must