These discrepancies are very thickly sown throughout the _Lives_, and throughout those of whom it might be conceived that, in the time at least of Diogenes, something like authentic and consistent information would have been preserved in Greece, at all events regarding salient facts. Yet between the era of the biographer and that of many, if not most, of his subjects, the lapse of years was more than sufficient, in the absence of systematic records, to accumulate a vast amount of error and entanglement, especially when so many individuals of the same name flourished about the same date. We perceive that even as to the number of the Wise Men, and who they were, there is a conflict of opinion. But, on the other hand, in his memoir of Solon, Diogenes is remarkably minute, and supplies us with the very words which he employed in addressing the Athenian Assembly and the texts of several letters written to contemporaries, which, to be just, he does also in the case of Thales. His tone, however, in the life of Solon is more confident; and he does not trouble himself or us with parallel traditions and various readings. We may discern equally strong ground for scepticism here and there; but he felt his footing surer, as Homer, in some parts of the Odyssey, evidently writes from report, and in others from personal information. Where, as he does so freely in the case of Thales and others, he lays before us all the theories about an event or a fact, Diogenes reminds us of Herodotus, who so often absolves himself from responsibility by setting down all the accounts which had reached him, and leaving us to pick out the truth among them. A considerable proportion of the aphorisms ascribed to the Wise Men strike us as rather commonplace; but that may be the result of familiarity. James I. observed that he was a bold man who first ate an oyster; but the attributes of strangeness and courage have alike ceased to exist. Perhaps one of the maxims which still most preserves its verdure is that of Pittacus of Mitylene: _To observe the season_, which is just our Selden’s _Distingue tempora_. The anecdotes with which the pages of Diogenes are plentifully illustrated are, as I have hinted, familiar to the point of indifference; and I believe that they almost invariably suffer from translation into a foreign idiom and epoch. If we are scarcely able to relish the good things which passed current in our own country in the days of the Tudors and the Stuarts, what likelihood is there of a cordial sympathy with such fragments of the wit and wisdom as have survived of men who lived at such an immeasurably greater distance of time under wholly different conditions and influences? From an historical and philosophical point of view we try to make the best of them; but jocularly they amount to very little indeed. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER VI. THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY--GREEK EPIGRAMS--HERODOTUS--ARISTOPHANES--PLATO.