By Hercules, little do you realize that, thanks to crooked prejudices, things are counted as lies when they are new to the ear, or strange to the eye, or at least too steep for the mind to grasp. Look into them a little more carefully and you will find them not only plain to discover but easy to do.

This is the novel’s argument with its reader, put in Lucius’s mouth. Things get called lies because they are new to the ear or strange to the eye. The skeptic in 1.2 called the first man’s story absurd; Lucius answers that marvels, looked at closely, turn out to be “easy to do.” The book is about to test that claim on him. Compertu and factu are supines, an old verb form in -u that Latin uses after adjectives: facilis factu, “easy to do,” is the classic case. Exploraris is shortened from exploraveris. Minus calles, “you hardly know,” uses calleo, which Lewis & Short defines first as “to be callous, to be thickskinned,” as skin hardens with work, and then as “to know by experience or practice.” The man with thick ears is short of that kind of knowing.