Works, vol 3 | Page 5

his tomb of a monostich, which I will give:
Admetus' husk earth holds, and Heaven himself.
'What a beautiful epitaph, Admetus!' said Demonax, 'and what a pity it
is not up yet!'
The shrunk shanks of old age are a commonplace; but when his reached
this state, some one asked him what was the matter with them. 'Ah,' he
said with a smile, 'Charon has been having a bite at them.'
He interrupted a Spartan who was scourging his servant with, 'Why
confer on your slave the privilege of Spartans [Footnote: See Spartans
in Notes.] like yourself?' He observed to one Danae, who was bringing
a suit against her brother, 'Have the law of him by all means; it was
another Danae whose father was called the Lawless. [Footnote: See
Danae in Notes.]
He waged constant warfare against all whose philosophy was not
practical, but for show. So when he saw a cynic, with threadbare cloak
and wallet, but a braying-pestle instead of a staff, proclaiming himself
loudly as a follower of Antisthenes, Crates, and Diogenes, he said: 'Tell
us no lies; your master is the professor of braying.'
Noticing how foul play was growing among the athletes, who often
supplemented the resources of boxing and wrestling with their teeth, he
said it was no wonder that the champions' partisans had taken to
describing them as lions.
There was both wit and sting in what he said to the proconsul. The
latter was one of the people who take all the hair off their bodies with
pitch-plaster. A cynic mounted a block of stone and cast this practice in
his teeth, suggesting that it was for immoral purposes. The proconsul in
a rage had the man pulled down, and was on the point of condemning
him to be beaten or banished, when Demonax, who was present,
pleaded for him on the ground that he was only exercising the
traditional cynic licence. 'Well,' said the proconsul, 'I pardon him this
time at your request; but if he offends again, what shall I do to him?'
'Have him depilated,' said Demonax.
Another person, entrusted by the Emperor with the command of legions
and the charge of a great province, asked him what was the way to
govern well. 'Keep your temper, say little, and hear much.'

Asked whether he ate honey-cakes, 'Do you suppose,' he said, 'that bees
only make honey for fools?'
Noticing near the Poecile a statue minus a hand, he said it had taken
Athens a long time to get up a bronze to Cynaegirus.
Alluding to the lame Cyprian Rufinus, who was a Peripatetic and spent
much time in the Lyceum walks, 'What presumption,' he exclaimed, 'for
a cripple to call himself a Walking Philosopher!'
Epictetus once urged him, with a touch of reproof, to take a wife and
raise a family--for it beseemed a philosopher to leave some one to
represent him after the flesh. But he received the home thrust: 'Very
well, Epictetus; give me one of your daughters.'
His remark to Herminus the Aristotelian is equally worth recording. He
was aware that this man's character was vile and his misdeeds
innumerable, and yet his mouth was always full of Aristotle and his ten
predicaments. 'Certainly, Herminus,' he said, 'no predicament is too bad
for you.'
When the Athenians were thinking, in their rivalry with Corinth, of
starting gladiatorial shows, he came forward and said: 'Men of Athens,
before you pass this motion, do not forget to destroy the altar of Pity.'
On the occasion of his visiting Olympia, the Eleans voted a bronze
statue to him. But he remonstrated: 'It will imply a reproach to your
ancestors, men of Elis, who set up no statue to Socrates or Diogenes.'
I once heard him observe to a learned lawyer that laws were not of
much use, whether meant for the good or for the bad; the first do not
need them, and upon the second they have no effect.
There was one line of Homer always on his tongue:
Idle or busy, death takes all alike.
He had a good word for Thersites, as a cynic and a leveller.
Asked which of the philosophers was most to his taste, he said: 'I
admire them all; Socrates I revere, Diogenes I admire, Aristippus I
love.'
He lived to nearly a hundred, free from disease and pain, burdening no
man, asking no man's favour, serving his friends, and having no
enemies. Not Athens only, but all Greece was so in love with him that
as he passed the great would give him place and there would be a
general hush. Towards the end of his long life he would go uninvited
into the first house that offered, and there get his dinner and his bed, the

household regarding it as