Works, vol 3 | Page 4

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 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