These are the words of Apollodorus; but the old woman who lived with him, as Diocles reports, used to say that he wrote five hundred lines every day. And Hecaton says, that he first applied himself to philosophy, when his patrimony had been confiscated, and seized for the royal treasury. IV. He was slight in person, as is plain from his statue which is in the Ceramicus, which is nearly hidden by the equestrian statue near it; in reference to which circumstance, Carneades called him Crypsippus.[102] He was once reproached by some one for not attending the lectures of Ariston, who was drawing a great crowd after him at the time; and he replied, “If I had attended to the multitude I should not have been a philosopher.” And once, when he saw a dialectician pressing hard on Cleanthes, and proposing sophistical fallacies to him, he said, “Cease to drag that old man from more important business, and propose these questions to us who are young.” At another time, when some one wishing to ask him something privately, was addressing him quietly, but when he saw a multitude approaching began to speak more energetically he said to him:— Alas, my brother! now your eye is troubled; You were quite sane just now; and yet how quickly Have you succumbed to frenzy.[103] And at drinking parties he used to behave quietly, moving his legs about however, so that a female slave once said, “It is only the legs of Chrysippus that are drunk.” And he had so high an opinion of himself, that once, when a man asked him, “To whom shall I entrust my son?” he said, “To me, for if I thought that there was any one better than myself, I would have gone to him to teach me philosophy.” In reference to which anecdote they report that people used to say of him:— He has indeed a clear and subtle head, The rest are forms of empty æther made.[104] And also:— For if Chrysippus had not lived and taught, The Stoic school would surely have been nought. VI. But at last, when Arcesilaus and Lacydes, as Sotion records in his eighth book, came to the Academy, he joined them in the study of philosophy; from which circumstance he got the habit of arguing for and against a custom, and discussed magnitudes and quantities, following the system of the Academics. VII. Hermippus relates, that one day, when he was teaching in the Odeum, he was invited to a sacrifice by his pupils; and, that drinking some sweet unmixed wine, he was seized with giddiness, and departed this life five days afterwards, when he had lived seventy-three years; dying in the hundred and forty-third olympiad, as Apollodorus says in his Chronicles. And we have written an epigram on him:— Chrysippus drank with open mouth some wine Then became giddy, and so quickly died. Too little reck’d he of the Porch’s weal, Or of his country’s, or of his own dear life; And so descended to the realms of Hell.