by Athenian law in the time of Demetrius Phalereus, who protected him; and there is even a story that he was condemned to drink hemlock; [705] but he was not of the type that meets martyrdom, though he might go far to provoke it. [706] Roaming from court to court, he seems never to have stooped to flatter any of his entertainers. "You seem to me," said the steward of Lysimachos of Thrace to him on one occasion, "to be the only man who ignores both Gods and kings." [707] In the same age the same freethinking temper is seen in Stilpo of Megara (fl. 307), of the school of Euclides, who is said to have been brought before the Areopagus for the offence of saying that the Pheidian statue of Athênê was "not a God," and to have met the charge with the jest that she was in reality not a God but a Goddess; whereupon he was exiled. [708] The stories told of him make it clear that he was an unbeliever, usually careful not to betray himself. Euclides, too, with his optimistic pantheism, was clearly a heretic; though his doctrine that evil is non-ens [709] later became the creed of some Christians. Yet another professed atheist was the witty Bion of Borysthenes, pupil of Theodoros, of whom it is told, in a fashion familiar to our own time, that in sickness he grew pious through fear. [710] Among his positions was a protest or rather satire against the doctrine that the Gods punished children for the crimes of their fathers. [711] In the other schools, Speusippos (fl. 343), the nephew of Plato, leant to monotheism; [712] Strato of Lampsakos, the Peripatetic (fl. 290), called "the Naturalist," taught sheer pantheism, anticipating Laplace in declaring that he had no need of the action of the Gods to account for the making of the world; [713] Dikaiarchos (fl. 326-287), another disciple of Aristotle, denied the existence of separate souls, and the possibility of foretelling the future; [714] and Aristo and Cleanthes, disciples of Zeno, varied likewise in the direction of pantheism; the latter's monotheism, as expressed in his famous hymn, being one of several doctrines ascribed to him. [715]