Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​When reproached for drinking in a tavern, he said, "For I also get my hair cut in a barber's shop." When reproached for accepting a cloak from Antipater, he said: "By no means are the glorious gifts of the gods to be cast away." To a man who struck him with a beam and then said, "Look out!" he struck him with his staff and said, "Look out!" To a man who was importuning a courtesan, he said, "Why, wretched man, do you desire to obtain that which it is better to miss?" To a man who scented himself with perfume, he said, "Watch out lest the fragrance of your head bring a foul odor upon your life." He used to say that household slaves serve their masters, but base men serve their desires.

​Being asked why slaves were called 'man-footed' (andrapoda), he said, "Because they have the feet of men, but a soul such as you have who are questioning me right now." He asked a spendthrift for a mina; and when the man inquired why he asked others for an obol but him for a mina, he said, "Because from the others I expect to receive again, but from you it lies upon the knees of the gods whether I shall ever receive again." When reproached for begging himself while Plato did not beg, he said, "He too begs, but holding his head close, so that the others might not hear." Seeing an unskilful archer, he sat down beside the target, saying, "So that I may not be hit." He used to say that lovers are unfortunate in the matter of pleasure.

​Being asked whether death was an evil, he said, "How is it an evil, when, as long as it is present, we do not feel it?" To Alexander, who stood over him and said, "Are you not afraid of me?" he said, "Why, what are you? A good thing or an evil thing?" And when Alexander replied, "A good thing," he said, "Who then fears what is good?" He said that education is temperance to the young, consolation to the old, wealth to the poor, and an ornament to the rich. Once, to Didymon the adulterer who was treating a girl's (kore's) eye, he said, "See to it that while treating the maiden's eye you do not ruin her pupil (kore)." When someone said that he was being plotted against by his friends, he said, "And what ought one to do, if it will be necessary to treat friends and enemies alike?"

​Being asked what is the most beautiful thing among human beings, he said, "Freedom of speech." Having entered a schoolmaster's house and seeing many statues of the Muses but few pupils, he said, "With the gods' help, master, you have many pupils." He was accustomed to do everything in public, both the deeds of Demeter and those of Aphrodite. And he used to put forward arguments of this sort: "If eating lunch is nothing out of the way, neither is it out of the way in the market-place; but eating lunch is not out of the way; therefore it is not out of the way in the market-place either." And as he continuously masturbated in public, he used to say, "Would that it were possible to relieve hunger too by rubbing one's stomach!" Other anecdotes are also attributed to him, which, being numerous, it would take long to enumerate.

​He used to say that training is twofold, one part mental, the other bodily; the latter being that in which the impressions that arise during continuous exercise provide agility for the deeds of virtue. And he said that the one is incomplete without the other, since good condition and strength in appropriate matters arise no less concerning the soul than concerning the body. And he would produce proofs of how easily one arrives at virtue from physical exercise: for one can see, both in the mechanical crafts and in the others, that craftsmen have acquired no ordinary manual dexterity from practice, and that flute-players and athletes surpass all others by their continuous individual exertion; and that if these men had transferred their training to the soul as well, they would not have labored uselessly and incompletely.