Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​Apollonides of Nicaea, our fellow-citizen, in the first book of his *Commentary on the Silli*, which he addresses to Tiberius Caesar, says that Timon's father was Timarchus, and that he was a Phliasian by birth; that, being left an orphan while young, he was a dancer, but later, having condemned this profession, he went abroad to Megara to Stilpo; and that having studied with him, he returned home again and married. Then he went abroad with his wife to Pyrrho in Elis, and stayed there until children were born to him, of whom the elder he named Xanthus, taught him the medical art, and left behind as the successor to his profession.

​And he was a man of distinction, as Sotion also says in his eleventh book. Timon, however, lacking means of livelihood, sailed away to the Hellespont and the Propontis; and teaching as a sophist in Chalcedon, he was deemed worthy of still greater esteem; and having gained resources from there, he sailed away to Athens, and spent his time there until his death, having made a short excursion to Thebes. He also became known to King Antigonus and to Ptolemy Philadelphus, as he himself bears witness in his iambics. He was, Antigonus says, also fond of drinking, and if he had leisure from the philosophers, he would compose poems: epics, tragedies, satyr plays, thirty comic dramas and sixty tragic ones, as well as silli and kinaidic verses.

​There are also in circulation prose books of his extending to twenty thousand lines, which Antigonus of Carystus also mentions, having himself written Timon's life. The *Silli* are three in number, in which, as befits a Skeptic, he reviles and mocks all the Dogmatists in the form of parody. Of these the first has a narrative form of expression, while the second and third are in the shape of a dialogue. At any rate, he is seen questioning Xenophanes of Colophon about each matter, and the latter recounts them to him; and in the second book he speaks about the earlier thinkers, and in the third about the later ones; wherefore some people have actually entitled it *Epilogue*.

​The first book contains the same subject-matter, except that the composition has a single speaker; its beginning is as follows: "Tell me now, all you busybody sophists." He died at nearly ninety years of age, as Antigonus says, and Sotion in his eleventh book. I have also heard that he was one-eyed, since he himself used to call himself a Cyclops. There was also another Timon, the misanthrope. At all events, the philosopher was extremely fond of gardens and kept to his own business, as Antigonus also says. The story goes that Hieronymus the Peripatetic said of him: "Just as among the Scythians both those who flee and those who pursue shoot with bows, so among the philosophers some hunt disciples by pursuing them, while others do so by fleeing, just like Timon."