From Homer the one line he most frequently
quoted was :
He had a good word even for Thersites, calling him a mob-orator of the Cynic type.
When he was once asked which of the philosophers he liked, he said: “They are all admirable, but for my part I revere Socrates, I wonder at Diogenes, and I love Aristippus.”
He lived almost a hundred years, without illness
or pain, bothering nobody and asking nothing of
anyone, helping his friends and never making an
enemy. Not only the Athenians but all Greece
conceived such affection for him that when he passed
by the magistrates rose up in his honour and there
was silence everywhere. Toward the end, when ‘he
was very old, he used to eat and sleep uninvited in
any house which he chanced to be passing, and
the inmates thought that it was almost a divine visitation, and that good fortune had entered their
doors. As he went by, the bread-women would pull
him toward them, each wanting him to take some
bread from her, and she who succeeded in giving it
thought that she was in luck. The children, too,
brought him fruit and called him father. Once when
When he realised that he was no longer able
to wait upon himself, he quoted to those who
were with him the verses of the heralds at the
games :
Then, refraining from all food, he took leave of life
in the same cheerful humour that people he met
always saw him in.
A short time before the end he was asked: “What orders have you to give about your burial?” and replied: “Don’t borrow trouble! The stench will get me buried!” The man said: “Why, isn’t it disgraceful that the body of such a man should be exposed for birds and dogs to devour?” “I see nothing out of the way in it,” said he, “if even in death I am going to be of service to living things.”
But the Athenians gave him a magnificent public funeral and mourned him Jong. To honour him, they did obeisance to the stone bench on which he used to rest when he was tired, and they put garlands on it; for they felt that even the stone on which he had been wont to sit was sacred. Everybody attended his burial, especially the philosophers ; indeed, it was they who took him on their shoulders and carried him to the tomb.
These are a very few things out of many which I
might have mentioned, but they will suffice to give
my readers a notion of the sort of man he was.