The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius (best free ebook reader txt) 📕

expressions of a discourse, but to fix all one’s attention on the arrangement of the arguments, instead of treating it as if it were a piece of boiled meat, or some delicate eatable. He used also to say that young men ought to maintain the most scrupulous reserve in their walking, their gait, and their dress; and he was constantly quoting the lines of Euripides on Capaneus, that⁠—

His wealth was ample.
But yet no pride did mingle with his state,
Nor had he haughty thought, or arrogance
More than the poorest man.

And one of his sayings used to be that nothing was more unfriendly to the comprehension of the accurate sciences than poetry; and that there was nothing that we stood in so much need of as time. When he was asked what a friend was, he replied: “Another I.” They say that he was once scourging a slave whom he had detected in theft; and when he said to him: “It was fated that I should steal;” he rejoined: “Yes, and that you should be beaten.” He used to call beauty the flower of the voice; but some report this as if he had said that the voice is the flower of beauty. On one occasion, when he saw a slave belonging to one of his friends severely bruised, he said to his friend: “I see the footsteps of your anger.” He once accosted a man who was all over unguents and perfumes: “Who is this who smells like a woman?” When Dionysius Metathemenus asked him why he was the only person whom he did not correct, he replied: “Because I have no confidence in you.” A young man was talking a great deal of nonsense, and he said to him: “This is the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth, that we may hear more and speak less.”

Once, when he was at an entertainment and remained wholly silent, he was asked what the reason was; and so he bade the person who found fault with him tell the king that there was a man in the room who knew how to hold his tongue; now the people who asked him this were ambassadors who had come from Ptolemy, and who wished to know what report they were to make of him to the king. He was once asked how he felt when people abused him, and he said: “As an ambassador feels when he is sent away without an answer.” Apollonius of Tyre tells us that when Crates dragged him by the cloak away from Stilpo, he said: “O Crates, the proper way to take hold of philosophers is by the ears; so now do you convince me and drag me by them; but if you use force towards me, my body may be with you, but my mind with Stilpo.”

He used to devote a good deal of time to Diodorus, as we learn from Hippobotus; and he studied dialectics under him. And when he had made a good deal of progress he attached himself to Polemo because of his freedom from arrogance, so that it is reported that he said to him: “I am not ignorant, O Zeno, that you slip into the garden-door and steal my doctrines, and then clothe them in a Phoenician dress.” When a dialectician once showed him seven species of dialectic argument in the mowing argument,82 he asked him how much he charged for them, and when he said “a hundred drachmas,” he gave him two hundred, so exceedingly devoted was he to learning.

They say too, that he was the first who ever employed the word duty (καθῆκον), and who wrote a treatise on the subject. And that he altered the lines of Hesiod thus:

He is the best of all men who submits
To follow good advice; he too is good,
Who of himself perceives whate’er is fit.83

For he said that that man who had the capacity to give a proper hearing to what was said, and to avail himself of it, was superior to him who comprehended everything by his own intellect; for that the one had only comprehension, but the one who took good advice had action also.

When he was asked why he, who was generally austere, relaxed at a dinner party, he said: “Lupins too are bitter, but when they are soaked they become sweet.” And Hecaton, in the second book of his Apothegms, says that in entertainments of that kind, he used to indulge himself freely. And he used to say that it was better to trip with the feet than with the tongue. And that goodness was attained by little and little, but was not itself a small thing. Some authors, however, attribute this saying to Socrates.

He was a person of great powers of abstinence and endurance, and of very simple habits, living on food which required no fire to dress it, and wearing a thin cloak, so that it was said of him:

The cold of winter, and the ceaseless rain,
Come powerless against him; weak is the dart
Of the fierce summer sun, or fell disease,
To bend that iron frame. He stands apart,
In nought resembling the vast common crowd;
But, patient and unwearied, night and day,
Clings to his studies and philosophy.

And the comic poets, without intending it, praise him in their very attempts to turn him into ridicule. Philemon speaks thus of him in his play entitled the Philosophers:

This man adopts a new philosophy,
He teaches to be hungry; nevertheless,
He gets disciples. Bread his only food,
His best desert dried figs; water his drink.

But some attribute these lines to Posidippus. And they have become almost a proverb. Accordingly it used to be said of him: “More temperate than Zeno the philosopher.” Posidippus also writes thus in his Men Transported:

So that for ten whole days he did appear
More temperate than Zeno’s self.

For in reality he did surpass all men in this description of virtue, and in