A Roman senator at Athens once presented his son, who had great beauty of a soft womanish type. ‘My son salutes you, sir,’ he said. To which Demonax answered, ‘A pretty lad, worthy of his father, and extremely like his mother.’ A cynic who emphasized his principles by wearing a bear’s skin he insisted on addressing not by his name of Honoratus, but as Bruin. Asked for a definition of Happiness, he said that only the free was happy. ‘Well,’ said the questioner, ‘there is no lack of free men.’—‘I count no man free who is subject to hopes and fears.’— ‘You ask impossibilities; of these two we are all very much the slaves.’ ‘Once grasp the nature of human affairs,’ said Demonax, ‘and you will find that they justify neither hope nor fear, since both pain and pleasure are to have an end.’ Peregrine Proteus was shocked at his taking things so lightly, and treating mankind as a subject for humour: ‘You have no teeth, Demonax.’ ‘And you, Peregrine, have no bowels.’ A physical philosopher was discoursing about the antipodes; Demonax took his hand, and led him to a well, in which he showed him his own reflection: ‘Do you want us to believe that the antipodes are like _that_?’ A man once boasted that he was a wizard, and possessed of mighty charms whereby he could get what he chose out of anybody. ‘Will it surprise you to learn that I am a fellow-craftsman?’ asked Demonax; ‘pray come with me to the baker’s, and you shall see a single charm, just one wave of my magic wand, induce him to bestow several loaves upon me.’ Current coin, he meant, is as good a magician as most. The great Herodes, mourning the untimely death of Pollux, used to have the carriage and horses got ready, and the place laid at table, as though the dead were going to drive and eat. To him came Demonax, saying that he brought a message from Pollux. Herodes, delighted with the idea that Demonax was humouring his whim like other people, asked what it was that Pollux required of him. ‘He cannot think why you are so long coming to him.’ When another person kept himself shut up in the dark, mourning his son, Demonax represented himself to him as a magician: he would call up the son’s ghost, the only condition being that he should be given the names of three people who had never had to mourn. The father hum’d and ha’d, unable, doubtless, to produce any such person, till Demonax broke in: ‘And have you, then, a monopoly of the unendurable, when you cannot name a man who has not some grief to endure?’ He often ridiculed the people who use obsolete and uncommon words in their lectures. One of these produced a bit of Attic purism in answer to some question he had put. ‘My dear sir,’ he said, ‘the date of my question is to-day; that of your answer is _temp_. _Bell_. _Troj_.’ A friend asking him to come to the temple of Asclepius, there to make prayer for his son, ‘Poor deaf Asclepius!’ he exclaimed; ‘can he not hear at this distance?’