Works, vol 3 | Page 4

Pollux. Herodes, delighted with
the idea that Demonax was humouring his whim like other people,
asked what it was that Pollux required of him. 'He cannot think why
you are so long coming to him.'
When another person kept himself shut up in the dark, mourning his
son, Demonax represented himself to him as a magician: he would call
up the son's ghost, the only condition being that he should be given the
names of three people who had never had to mourn. The father hum'd
and ha'd, unable, doubtless, to produce any such person, till Demonax
broke in: 'And have you, then, a monopoly of the unendurable, when
you cannot name a man who has not some grief to endure?'
He often ridiculed the people who use obsolete and uncommon words
in their lectures. One of these produced a bit of Attic purism in answer
to some question he had put. 'My dear sir,' he said, 'the date of my
question is to-day; that of your answer is temp. Bell. Troj.'
A friend asking him to come to the temple of Asclepius, there to make
prayer for his son, 'Poor deaf Asclepius!' he exclaimed; 'can he not hear
at this distance?'
He once saw two philosophers engaged in a very unedifying game of
cross questions and crooked answers. 'Gentlemen,' said he, 'here is one
man milking a billy-goat, and another catching the proceeds in a sieve.'
When Agathocles the Peripatetic vaunted himself as the first and only
dialectician, he asked him how he could be the first, if he was the only,
or the only, if he was the first.
The consular Cethegus, on his way to serve under his father in Asia,
said and did many foolish things. A friend describing him as a great ass,
'Not even a great ass,' said Demonax.
When Apollonius was appointed professor of philosophy in the
Imperial household, Demonax witnessed his departure, attended by a
great number of his pupils. 'Why, here is Apollonius with all his
Argonauts,' he cried.
Asked whether he held the soul to be immortal, 'Dear me, yes,' he said;
'everything is.'
He remarked a propos of Herodes that Plato was quite right about our
having more than one soul; the same soul could not possibly compose

those splendid declamations, and have places laid for Regilla and
Pollux after their death.
He was once bold enough to ask the assembled people, when he heard
the sacred proclamation, why they excluded barbarians from the
Mysteries, seeing that Eumolpus, the founder of them, was a barbarian
from Thrace.
When he once had a winter voyage to make, a friend asked how he
liked the thought of being capsized and becoming food for fishes. 'I
should be very unreasonable to mind giving them a meal, considering
how many they have given me.'
To a rhetorician who had given a very poor declamation he
recommended constant practice. 'Why, I am always practising to
myself,' says the man. 'Ah, that accounts for it; you are accustomed to
such a foolish audience.'
Observing a soothsayer one day officiating for pay, he said: 'I cannot
see how you can ask pay. If it is because you can change the course of
Fate, you cannot possibly put the figure high enough: if everything is
settled by Heaven, and not by you, what is the good of your
soothsaying?'
A hale old Roman once gave him a little exhibition of his skill in fence,
taking a clothes-peg for his mark. 'What do you think of my play,
Demonax?' he said. 'Excellent, so long as you have a wooden man to
play with.'
Even for questions meant to be insoluble he generally had a shrewd
answer at command. Some one tried to make a fool of him by asking, If
I burn a hundred pounds of wood, how many pounds of smoke shall I
get? 'Weigh the ashes; the difference is all smoke.'
One Polybius, an uneducated man whose grammar was very defective,
once informed him that he had received Roman citizenship from the
Emperor. 'Why did he not make you a Greek instead?' asked Demonax.
Seeing a decorated person very proud of his broad stripe, he whispered
in his ear, while he took hold of and drew attention to the cloth, 'This
attire did not make its original wearer anything but a sheep.'
Once at the bath the water was at boiling point, and some one called
him a coward for hesitating to get in. 'What,' said he, 'is my country
expecting me to do my duty?'
Some one asked him what he took the next world to be like. 'Wait a bit,

and I will send you the information.'
A minor poet called Admetus told him he had inserted a clause in his
will for the inscribing on