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

be immortal ought to live piously and justly.” He used to say too: “That cities were ruined when they were unable to distinguish worthless citizens from virtuous ones.”

On one occasion he was being praised by some wicked men, and said: “I am sadly afraid that I must have done some wicked thing.” One of his favorite sayings was: “That the fellowship of brothers of one mind was stronger than any fortified city.” He used to say: “That those things were the best for a man to take on a journey, which would float with him if he were shipwrecked.” He was once reproached for being intimate with wicked men, and said: “Physicians also live with those who are sick, and yet they do not catch fevers.” He used to say “that it was an absurd thing to clean a cornfield of tares, and in war to get rid of bad soldiers, and yet not to rid oneself in a city of the wicked citizens.” When he was asked what advantage he had ever derived from philosophy, he replied: “The advantage of being able to converse with myself.” At a drinking party, a man once said to him: “Give us a song,” and he replied: “Do you play us a tune on the flute.” When Diogenes asked him for a tunic, he bade him fold his cloak. He was asked on one occasion what learning was the most necessary, and he replied: “To unlearn one’s bad habits.” And he used to exhort those who found themselves ill spoken of, to endure it more than they would anyone’s throwing stones at them. He used to laugh at Plato as conceited; accordingly, once when there was a fine procession, seeing a horse neighing, he said to Plato: “I think you too would be a very frisky horse;” and he said this all the more, because Plato kept continually praising the horse. At another time, he had gone to see him when he was ill, and when he saw there a dish in which Plato had been sick, he said: “I see your bile there, but I do not see your conceit.” He used to advise the Athenians to pass a vote that asses were horses; and, as they thought that irrational, he said: “Why, those whom you make generals have never learnt to be really generals, they have only been voted such.”

A man said to him one day: “Many people praise you.”⁠—“Why, what evil,” said he, “have I done?” When he turned the rent in his cloak outside, Socrates seeing it said to him, “I see your vanity through the hole in your cloak.” On another occasion, the question was put to him by someone, as Phanias relates in his treatise on the Philosophers of the Socratic school, what a man could do to show himself an honorable and a virtuous man; and he replied: “If you attend to those who understand the subject, and learn from them that you ought to shun the bad habits which you have.” Someone was praising luxury in his hearing, and he said: “May the children of my enemies be luxurious.” Seeing a young man place himself in a carefully studied attitude before a modeller, he said: “Tell me, if the brass could speak, on what would it pride itself?” And when the young man replied: “On its beauty.”⁠—“Are you not then,” said he, “ashamed to rejoice in the same thing as an inanimate piece of brass?” A young man from Pontus once promised to recollect him if a vessel of salt fish arrived; and so he took him with him, and also an empty bag, and went to a woman who sold meal, and filled his sack and went away; and when the woman asked him to pay for it, he said: “The young man will pay you, when the vessel of salt fish comes home.”

He it was who appears to have been the cause of Anytus’s banishment, and of Meletus’s death. For having met with some young men of Pontus, who had come to Athens on account of the reputation of Socrates, he took them to Anytus, telling them that in moral philosophy he was wiser than Socrates; and they who stood by were indignant at this and drove him away. And whenever he saw a woman beautifully adorned, he would go off to her house, and desire her husband to bring forth his horse and his arms; and then if he had such things, he would give him leave to indulge in luxury, for that he had the means of defending himself; but if he had them not, then he would bid him strip his wife of her ornaments.

And the doctrines he adopted were these: He used to insist that virtue was a thing which might be taught; also, that the nobly born and virtuously disposed were the same people; for that virtue was of itself sufficient for happiness, and was in need of nothing, except the strength of Socrates. He also looked upon virtue as a species of work, not wanting many arguments or much instruction; and he taught that the wise man was sufficient for himself, for that everything that belonged to anyone else belonged to him. He considered obscurity of fame a good thing, and equally good with labor. And he used to say that the wise man would regulate his conduct as a citizen, not according to the established laws of the state but according to the law of virtue. And that he would marry for the sake of having children, selecting the most beautiful woman for his wife. And that he would love her; for that the wise man alone knew what objects deserved love.

Diocles also attributes the following apothegms to him: To the wise man, nothing is strange and nothing remote. The virtuous man is worthy to be loved. Good men are friends. It is right to make the brave and just one’s allies. Virtue is a weapon