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

said: “To avoid excess in everything.” And he used to say that it was necessary to learn geometry only so far as might enable a man to measure land for the purposes of buying and selling. And when Euripides, in his Auge, had spoken thus of virtue:

’Tis best to leave these subjects undisturbed;

he rose up and left the theatre, saying that it was an absurdity to think it right to seek for a slave if one could not find him, but to let virtue be altogether disregarded. The question was once put to him by a man whether he would advise him to marry or not? And he replied: “Whichever you do, you will repent it.” He often said that he wondered at those who made stone statues, when he saw how careful they were that the stone should be like the man it was intended to represent, but how careless they were of themselves as to guarding against being like the stone. He used also to recommend young men to be constantly looking in the glass, in order that, if they were handsome they might be worthy of their beauty, and if they were ugly they might conceal their unsightly appearance by their accomplishments. He once invited some rich men to dinner, and when Xanthippe was ashamed of their insufficient appointments, he said: “Be of good cheer; for if our guests are sensible men, they will bear with us; and if they are not, we need not care about them.” He used to say: “That other men lived to eat, but that he ate to live.” Another saying of his was: “That to have a regard for the worthless multitude, was like the case of a man who refused to take one piece of money of four drachmas as if it were bad, and then took a heap of such coins and admitted them to be good.” When Aeschines said: “I am a poor man, and have nothing else, but I give you myself;”⁠—“Do you not,” he replied, “perceive that you are giving me what is of the greatest value?” He said to someone, who was expressing indignation at being overlooked when the thirty had seized on the supreme power: “Do you, then, repent of not being a tyrant too?” A man said to him: “The Athenians have condemned you to death.”⁠—“And nature,” he replied, “has condemned them.” But some attribute this answer to Anaxagoras. When his wife said to him: “You die undeservedly.”⁠—“Would you, then,” he rejoined, “have had me deserve death?” He thought once that someone appeared to him in a dream, and said:

On the third day you’ll come to lovely Phthia.

And so he said to Aeschines, “In three days I shall die.” And when he was about to drink the hemlock, Apollodorus presented him with a handsome robe, that he might expire in it; and he said: “Why was my own dress good enough to live in, and not good enough to die in?” When a person said to him: “Such an one speaks ill of you;”⁠—“To be sure,” said he, “for he has never learnt to speak well.” When Antisthenes turned the ragged side of his cloak to the light, he said: “I see your silly vanity through the holes in your cloak.” When someone said to him: “Does not that man abuse you?”⁠—“No,” said he, “for that does not apply to me.” It was a saying of his, too: “That it is a good thing for a man to offer himself cheerfully to the attacks of the comic writers; for then, if they say anything worth hearing, one will be able to mend; and if they do not, then all they say is unimportant.”

He said once to Xanthippe, who first abused him and then threw water at him: “Did I not say that Xanthippe was thundering now, and would soon rain?” When Alcibiades said to him: “The abusive temper of Xanthippe is intolerable;”⁠—“But I,” he rejoined, “am used to it, just as I should be if I were always hearing the noise of a pulley; and you yourself endure to hear geese cackling.” To which Alcibiades answered: “Yes, but they bring me eggs and goslings.”⁠—“Well,” rejoined Socrates, “and Xanthippe brings me children.” Once, she attacked him in the marketplace and tore his cloak off; his friends advised him to keep her off with his hands; “Yes, by Jove,” said he, “that while we are boxing you may all cry out, ‘Well done, Socrates, well done, Xanthippe.’ ” And he used to say that one ought to live with a restive woman, just as horsemen manage violent-tempered horses; “and as they,” said he, “when they have once mastered them, are easily able to manage all others; so I, after managing Xanthippe, can easily live with anyone else whatever.”

And it was in consequence of such sayings and actions as these that the priestess at Delphi was witness in his favor, when she gave Chaerephon this answer, which is so universally known:

Socrates of all mortals is the wisest.

In consequence of which answer he incurred great envy; and he brought envy also on himself, by convicting men who gave themselves airs of folly and ignorance, as undoubtedly he did to Anytus; and as is shown in Plato’s Meno. For he, not being able to bear Socrates’s jesting, first of all set Aristophanes to attack him, and then persuaded Meletus to institute a prosecution against him, on the ground of impiety and of corrupting the youth of the city. Accordingly Meletus did institute the prosecution; and Polyeuctus pronounced the sentence, as Phavorinus records in his Universal History. And Polycrates, the sophist, wrote the speech which was delivered, as Hermippus says, not Anytus, as others say. And Lycon, the demagogue, prepared everything necessary to support the impeachment; but Antisthenes in his Successions of the Philosophers, and Plato in his Apology, say that these men brought the accusation: Anytus, and Lycon,