Pupils gathered round him and he became famous, as we can see in the reminiscences of Aulus Gellius.[67] Sixty or seventy years after his death a man bought his old earthenware lamp for three thousand drachmas.[68] Even in his lifetime men began to come about "the wonderful old man" who were hardly serious students. They wished, he says, to occupy the time while waiting to engage a passage on a ship--they happened to be passing (_parodos estin_) and looked in to see him as if he were a statue. "We can go and see Epictetus too.--Then you go away and say; Oh! Epictetus was nothing! he talked bad Greek--oh! barbarous Greek!"[69] Others came to pick up a little philosophic language for use in public. Why could they not philosophize and say nothing? he asked. "Sheep do not vomit up their grass to show the shepherd how much they have eaten--no! they digest it inside, and then produce wool and milk outside."[70] He took his teaching seriously as a matter of life, and he looked upon it as a service done to mankind--quite equivalent to the production of "two or three ugly-nosed children."[71] He has a warm admiration for the Cynic philosopher's independence of encumberments--how can he who has to teach mankind go looking after a wife's confinement--or "something to heat the water in to give the baby a bath?"[72] These then are the two great teachers of Stoicism, the outstanding figures, whose words and tones survive, whose characters are familiar to us. They are clearly preachers, both of them, intent on the practical reformation of their listeners or correspondents. For them conduct is nine-tenths of life. Much of their teaching is of course the common property of all moral teachers--the deprecation of anger, of quarrelsomeness, of self-indulgence, of grumbling, of impurity, is peculiar to no school. Others have emphasized that life is a campaign with a general to be obeyed, if you can by some instinct divine what he is signalling.[73] But {54} perhaps it was a new thing in the Western World, when so much accent was laid on conduct. The terror of contemporary life, with its repulsiveness, its brutality and its fascination, drove men in search of the moral guide. The philosopher's school was an infirmary, not for the glad but for the sorry.[74] "That man," says Seneca, "is looking for salvation--_ad salutem spectat_." [Sidenote: Self-examination]