Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​He was also sharp in understanding and quick to jeer; he was a lover of letters and capable of writing plots for the poets and collaborating in the composition of dramas. He shared his tragedies with Alexander and Homerus. When disturbed by the maidservants and dogs, he would do nothing, being eager to keep quiet. They say that Aratus also inquired of him how he might procure a sound text of Homer's poetry, and that he replied: "If you consult the ancient manuscripts, and not those that have already been emended." His poems lay about at random for him, sometimes half-eaten;

​so that when reading something to Zopyrus the rhetorician, he rolled up the scroll and went through whatever came into his head; and when he had gone halfway, only then did he find the passage, having been unaware of it till then. So indifferent was he. Yet he was also fluent in speech, so as not even to allow time for breakfast. They say that when he saw Arcesilaus passing through the Cercopes, he said: "Why are you coming here, where we freemen are?" And he was accustomed constantly to quote against those who approve sensory impressions when verified by the intellect: "Attagas and Noumenios have met together." He was also in the habit of making jokes like this. To someone who marveled at everything, he said: "Why don't you marvel that though we are three, we have four eyes?" For both he himself and his pupil Dioscurides were one-eyed, while the man to whom he spoke had his sight sound.

​When asked once by Arcesilaus why he was present from Thebes, he said: "So that I may laugh at seeing you all stretched out at ease." Yet, although he attacked Arcesilaus in his *Silli*, he praised him in the work entitled *Arcesilaus' Funeral Banquet*. No successor to him arose, as Menodotus says; rather, the school lapsed until Ptolemy of Cyrene revived it. But as Hippobotus and Sotion say, Dioscurides of Cyprus, Nicolochus of Rhodes, Euphranor of Seleucia, and Praÿlus from the Troad were his pupils; and Praÿlus became so steadfast, as Phylarchus records in his history, that he unjustly endured being punished on a charge of treason, not having deemed the citizens worthy of even a word of defense.

​Euphranor's pupil was Eubulus of Alexandria; his was Ptolemy; his were Sarpedon and Heraclides; and Heraclides' was Aenesidemus of Cnossus, who also wrote eight books of *Pyrrhonean Discourses*; his pupil was his fellow-citizen Zeuxippus; his was Zeuxis Goniopus; his was Antiochus of Laodicea on the Lycus; and his were Menodotus of Nicomedia, an empirical physician, and Theiodas of Laodicea; Menodotus' pupil was Herodotus of Tarsus, son of Arieus; Herodotus' was Sextus the Empiric, whose works include the ten books of the *Skeptica* and other very fine treatises; and Sextus' pupil was Saturninus of Cythenas, who was also himself an empiric.