The Lives and Opinions of Eminent PhilosophersDiogenes Laertius
Philosophy
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
Diogenes Laertius
Philosophers, Ancient -- Biography; Philosophy, Ancient
And one of his sayings used to be, that nothing was more unfriendly to
the comprehension of the accurate sciences than poetry; and that there
was nothing that we stood in so much need of as time. When he was asked
what a friend was, he replied, “Another I.” They say that he was once
scourging a slave whom he had detected in theft; and when he said to
him, “It was fated that I should steal;” he rejoined, “Yes, and that
you should be beaten.” He used to call beauty the flower of the voice;
but some report this as if he had said that the voice is the flower of
beauty. On one occasion, when he saw a slave belonging to one of his
friends severely bruised, he said to his friend, “I see the footsteps
of your anger.” He once accosted a man who was all over unguents
and perfumes, “Who is this who smells like a woman?” When Dionysius
Metathemenus asked him why he was the only person whom he did not
correct, he replied, “Because I have no confidence in you.” A young man
was talking a great deal of nonsense, and he said to him, “This is the
reason why we have two ears and only one mouth, that we may hear more and
speak less.”
Once, when he was at an entertainment and remained wholly silent, he was
asked what the reason was; and so he bade the person who found fault with
him tell the king that there was a man in the room who knew how to hold
his tongue; now the people who asked him this were ambassadors who had
come from Ptolemy, and who wished to know what report they were to make
of him to the king. He was once asked how he felt when people abused him,
and he said, “As an ambassador feels when he is sent away without an
answer.” Apollonius of Tyre tells us, that when Crates dragged him by the
cloak away from Stilpo, he said, “O Crates, the proper way to take hold
of philosophers is by the ears; so now do you convince me and drag me by
them; but if you use force towards me, my body may be with you, but my
mind with Stilpo.”
XX. He used to devote a good deal of time to Diodorus, as we learn from
Hippobotus; and he studied dialectics under him. And when he had made
a good deal of progress he attached himself to Polemo because of his
freedom from arrogance, so that it is reported that he said to him,
“I am not ignorant, O Zeno, that you slip into the garden-door and
steal my doctrines, and then clothe them in a Phœnician dress.” When a
dialectician once showed him seven species of dialectic argument in the
mowing argument,[82] he asked him how much he charged for them, and when
he said “A hundred drachmas,” he gave him two hundred, so exceedingly
devoted was he to learning.
XXI. They say too, that he was the first who ever employed the word duty
(καθῆκον), and who wrote a treatise on the subject. And that he altered
the lines of Hesiod thus:—
He is the best of all men who submits
To follow good advice; he too is good,
Who of himself perceives whate’er is fit.[83]
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