Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​He also composed six hundred elegiac verses, and a prose work on laws for the citizens. He flourished, then, around the forty-second Olympiad; and he died in the archonship of Aristomenes, in the third year of the fifty-second Olympiad, having lived over seventy years [being already an old man]. And upon his tomb the following epitaph is inscribed: “With filial tears does sacred Lesbos here, having given him birth, mourn Pittacus who is departed.” His apothegm was: “Know the opportune moment.” There was also another Pittacus, a lawgiver, as Favorinus says in the first book of his Memorabilia and Demetrius in his Men of the Same Name, who was also called “the Little.” The sage, at any rate, is said once to have spoken the following lines to a young man who was consulting him about marriage, as Callimachus recounts in his Epigrams:

“A stranger from Atarneus once questioned Pittacus of Mytilene, the son of Hyrradius, in this way: ‘Venerable elder, a twofold marriage invites me: the one maiden indeed is suited to me both in wealth and in birth; but the other is of higher rank. Which is better? Come, advise me, which of the two I should lead to the bridal chamber.’ He spoke; and Pittacus, raising his staff, an old man’s weapon, said: ‘Behold, those ones over there will tell you the whole story.’ Now boys in a broad crossroads, keeping swift tops under their lashes, were spinning them. ‘Follow in their footsteps,’ he said. And the man stood near them; and they were saying: ‘Drive the one that suits yourself!’ Hearing this, the stranger refrained from grasping at a greater house, having accepted the omen of the children; and he led home that modest bride. In the same way do you also, Dion, drive the one that suits yourself.”

​He seems to have said these things from his own personal experience. For his wife, being of nobler birth than he—inasmuch as she was the sister of Dracon, son of Penthilus—used to treat him with extreme arrogance. Alcaeus calls him ‘splay-foot’ and ‘drag-foot’ because he was flat-footed and dragged his feet; and ‘chap-foot’ because of the fissures on his feet, which they called ‘hand-cracks’; and ‘swaggerer’ because he strutted about heedlessly; and ‘pot-belly’ and ‘paunch’ because he was fat; and moreover ‘dark-diner’ because he used no lamp; and ‘sloven’ because he was careless in dress and filthy. His exercise was to grind grain, as Clearchus the philosopher states. And there is a short letter of his of this kind: Pittacus to Croesus “You bid me to come to Lydia so that I may behold your wealth; but even without seeing it, I am persuaded that the son of Alyattes is the most opulent in gold among kings. And there is nothing more for us in going to Sardis; for we are not in need of gold, but I possess sufficient means both for myself and for my companions. Nevertheless I shall come, so that I may become a guest-companion to you.”