A certain person was admiring the offerings in the temple at Samothrace,[70] and he said to him, “They would have been much more numerous, if those who were lost had offered them instead of those who were saved;” but some attribute this speech to Diagoras the Melian. Once he saw a handsome youth going to a banquet, and said to him, “You will come back worse (χείρων);” and when he the next day after the banquet said to him, “I have left the banquet, and was no worse for it;” he replied, “You were not Chiron, but Eurytion.”[71] He was begging once of a very ill-tempered man, and as he said to him, “If you can persuade me, I will give you something;” he replied, “If I could persuade you, I would beg you to hang yourself.” He was on one occasion returning from Lacedæmon to Athens; and when some one asked him, “Whither are you going, and whence do you come?” he said, “I am going from the men’s apartments to the women’s.” Another time he was returning from the Olympic games, and when some one asked him whether there had been a great multitude there, he said, “A great multitude, but very few men.” He used to say that debauched men resembled figs growing on a precipice; the fruit of which is not tasted by men, but devoured by crows and vultures. When Phryne had dedicated a golden statue of Venus at Delphi, he wrote upon it, “From the profligacy of the Greeks.” Once Alexander the Great came and stood by him, and said, “I am Alexander, the great king.” “And I,” said he, “am Diogenes the dog.” And when he was asked to what actions of his it was owing that he was called a dog, he said, “Because I fawn upon those who give me anything, and bark at those who give me nothing, and bite the rogues.” On one occasion he was gathering some of the fruit of a fig-tree, and when the man who was guarding it told him a man hung himself on this tree the other day. “I, then,” said he, “will now purify it.” Once he saw a man who had been a conqueror at the Olympic games looking very often at a courtesan; “Look,” said he, “at that warlike ram, who is taken prisoner by the first girl he meets.” One of his sayings was, that good-looking courtesans were like poisoned mead.