Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Polemo was the son of Philostratus, an Athenian from the deme of Oe. In his youth he was so licentious and dissipated that he even carried money about him for the ready satisfaction of his lusts, and would hide it away in the alleys. In the Academy too, a three-obol piece of his was found plastered against a column for a similar purpose to that already mentioned. And once, by agreement with his companions, he burst into the school of Xenocrates drunk and garlanded; but Xenocrates, not at all disturbed, continued his discourse just the same, which was on temperance. Hearing this, the youth was gradually captivated, and became so industrious that he surpassed the others and himself succeeded to the school, beginning from the one hundred and sixteenth Olympiad.

​Antigonus of Carystus says in his Lives that Polemo's father was foremost among the citizens and maintained horses for chariot-racing; and that Polemo was also sued for maltreatment by his wife on the ground of having relations with young men. But having begun to study philosophy, he made his character so tense that he always remained in the very same posture of countenance. Moreover, his voice was unalterable; which is why Crantor was captivated by him. When a mad dog tore open his calf, he was all but devoid of paleness; and when an uproar arose in the city and people learned what had happened, he remained unperturbed. In the theatres too he was utterly devoid of emotion.

​At any rate, when Nicostratus, nicknamed Clytaemnestra, was once reading something of the poet to him and to Crates, while the latter showed deep emotion, Polemo acted just as if he had not heard. And in general he was such as Melanthius the painter describes in his work On Painting; for he says that a certain stubbornness and hardness ought to run through works of art, and likewise in character. Polemo used to say that one ought to exercise oneself in real actions and not in dialectical speculations, like someone who has swallowed some petty treatise on harmony but has not practiced it, so as to be admired for his questioning, but to be at variance with himself in his disposition. He was therefore refined and noble, rejecting what Aristophanes says of Euripides: "pickled and dressed with silphium,"

​which, as the same poet says: "is effeminacy compared to a solid piece of meat." Furthermore, he did not even speak on the theses while seated, they say, but engaged with them while walking about. It was on account of this noble-mindedness that he was honored in the city. Moreover, he spent his life withdrawn in the garden, beside which his disciples built small huts and lived near the sanctuary of the Muses and the exedra. Polemo seemed indeed to have emulated Xenocrates in everything; and Aristippus in the fourth book of On the Luxury of the Ancients says that he was his lover. At any rate, he constantly remembered him, adopting the man's guilelessness and austere manner, as well as the solemnity, so to speak, of the Dorian mode.

​He was also a lover of Sophocles, and especially in those passages where, according to the comic poet, his verses seemed to be such that "a Molossian dog seemed to be his collaborator," and where it was, according to Phrynichus: "not sweet wine nor diluted, but Pramnian." He used to say, then, that Homer was an epic Sophocles, and Sophocles a tragic Homer. He died already advanced in years of consumption, leaving behind a considerable number of writings. And our epigram on him is as follows: "Do you not hear? We have hidden Polemo, whom illness, that terrible affliction for mortals, laid here. Not rather Polemo, but his body; for he himself, ascending to the stars, cast down to the earth this consumed frame."