Of the orators, Gorgias, whom some call a sophist, lived to be one hundred and eight, and starved himself to death. They say that when he was asked the reason for his great age, sound in all his faculties, he replied that he had never accepted other people’s invitations to dinner! Isocrates wrote his Panegyric at ninety-six ; and at the age of ninety-nine, when he learned that the Athenians had been beaten by Philip in the battle of Chaeronea, he groaned and uttered the Euripidean line When Cadmus, long agone, quit Sidon town,From the prologue of the lost play dvhrene (frg. 816 Nauck). alluding to himself; then, adding, “Greece will lose her liberty,” he quitted life. Apollodorus, the Pergamene rhetorician who was tutor to Caesar Augustus the divine and helped Athenodorus, the philosopher of Tarsus, to educate him, lived eighty-two years, like Athenodorus. Potamo, a rhetorician of considerable repute, lived ninety years.

Sophocles the tragedian swallowed a grape and choked to death at ninety-five. Brought to trial by his son Iophon toward the close of his life on a charge of feeble-mindedness, he read the jurors his Oedipus at Colonus, proving by the play that he was sound of mind, so that the jury applauded him to the echo and convicted the son himself of insanity.