They say that when Zeno stumbled in entering the assembly, he cried out: “Why do you call me?” Addressed to Pluto. According to Diogenes Laertius 7, 28 he said ἔρχομι· τί μ' αὔεις (“I come: why din it in my ears?”), a quotation from a play called Niobe (Nauck, Trag. Gr. Fragm. p. 51). and then, returning home, starved himself to death. Cleanthes, the pupil and successor of Zeno, was ninety-nine’ when he got a tumour on his lip. He was fasting when letters from certain of his friends arrived, but he had food brought him, did what his friends had requested, and then fasted anew until he passed away.

Xenophanes, son of Dexinus and disciple of Archelaus the physicist, lived ninety-one years; Xenocrates, the disciple of Plato, eighty-four ; Carneades, the head of the New Academy, eightyfive ; Chrysippus, eighty-one; Diogenes of Seleucia on the Tigris, a Stoic philosopher, eighty-eight ; Posidonius of Apameia in Syria, naturalised in Rhodes, who was at once a philosopher and a historian, eighty-four; Critolaus, the Peripatetic, more than eighty-two: Plato the divine, eighty-one.