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

tragedians, and had exile and bloodshed for their prizes; and the marriages of those who lived with courtesans were subjects for the comic poets, and often produced madness as the result of debauchery and drunkenness.

He had also a brother named Pasicles, a pupil of Euclides.

Phavorinus, in the second book of his Commentaries, relates a witty saying of his; for he says that once, when he was begging a favor of the master of a gymnasium on the behalf of some acquaintance, he touched his thighs; and as he expressed his indignation at this, he said: “Why, do they not belong to you as well as your knees?” He used to say that it was impossible to find a man who had never done wrong, in the same way as there was always some worthless seed in a pomegranate. On one occasion he provoked Nicodromus, the harp-player, and received a black eye from him; so he put a plaster on his forehead and wrote upon it, “Nicodromus did this.” He used to abuse prostitutes designedly, for the purpose of practising himself in enduring reproaches. When Demetrius Phalereus sent him some loaves and wine, he attacked him for his present, saying: “I wish that the fountains bore loaves;” and it is notorious that he was a water drinker.

He was once reproved by the aediles of the Athenians for wearing fine linen, and so he replied: “I will show you Theophrastus also clad in fine linen.” And as they did not believe him, he took them to a barber’s shop, and showed him to them as he was being shaved. At Thebes he was once scourged by the master of the Gymnasium (though some say it was by Euthycrates, at Corinth), and dragged out by the feet; but he did not care, and quoted the line:

I feel, O mighty chief, your matchless might,
Dragged, foot first, downward from th’ ethereal height.76

But Diocles says that it was by Menedemus of Eretria that he was dragged in this manner, for that as he was a handsome man, and supposed to be very obsequious to Asclepiades the Phliasian, Crates touched his thighs and said: “Is Asclepiades within?” And Menedemus was very much offended, and dragged him out, as has been already said; and then Crates quoted the above-cited line.

Zeno of Citium, in his Apothegms, says that he once sewed up a sheep’s fleece in his cloak, without thinking of it; and he was a very ugly man, and one who excited laughter when he was taking exercise. And he used to say, when he put up his hands: “Courage, Crates, as far as your eyes and the rest of your body is concerned: For you shall see those who now ridicule you, convulsed with disease, and envying your happiness, and accusing themselves of slothfulness.”

One of his sayings was: “That a man ought to study philosophy, up to the point of looking on generals and donkey-drivers in the same light.” Another was that those who live with flatterers are as desolate as calves when in the company of wolves; for that neither the one nor the other are with those whom they ought to be, or their own kindred, but only with those who are plotting against them.

When he felt that he was dying, he made verses on himself, saying:

You’re going, noble hunchback, you are going
To Pluto’s realms, bent double by old age.

For he was humpbacked from age.

When Alexander asked him whether he wished to see the restoration of his country, he said: “What would be the use of it? for perhaps some other Alexander would come at some future time and destroy it again.

“But poverty and dear obscurity,
Are what a prudent man should think his country
For these e’en fortune can’t deprive him of.”

He also said that he was:

A fellow countryman of wise Diogenes,
Whom even envy never had attacked.

Menander, in his Twin-Sister, mentions him thus:

For you will walk with me wrapped in your cloak,
As his wife used to with the Cynic Crates.

He gave his daughter to his pupils, as he himself used to say:

To have and keep on trial for a month.

Metrocles

Metrocles was the brother of Hipparchia; and though he had formerly been a pupil of Theophrastus, he had profited so little by his instructions that once, thinking that while listening to a lecture on philosophy he had disgraced himself by his inattention, he fell into despondency and shut himself up in his house, intending to starve himself to death. Accordingly, when Crates heard of it, he came to him, having been sent for; and eating a number of lupins, on purpose, he persuaded him by numbers of arguments, that he had done no harm; for that it was not to be expected that a man should not indulge his natural inclinations and habits; and he comforted him by showing him that he, in a similar case, would certainly have behaved in a similar manner. And after that, he became a pupil of Crates, and a man of great eminence as a philosopher.

He burnt all his writings, as Hecaton tells us in the first book of his Apothegms, and said:

These are the phantoms of infernal dreams;

As if he meant that they were all nonsense. But some say that it was the notes which he had taken of the lectures of Theophrastus which he burnt, quoting the following verse:

Vulcan, draw near, ’tis Thetis asks your aid.77

He used to say that some things could be bought with money, as for instance a house; and some with time and industry, as education; that wealth was mischievous, if a man did not use it properly.

He died at a great age, having suffocated himself.

His pupils were Theombrotus and Cleomenes, Demetrius of Alexandria, the son of Theombrotus, Timarchus of Alexandria, the son of Cleomenes, and Echecles, of Ephesus. Not but what Echecles was also a pupil of Theombrotus; and Menedemus, of whom