Well, revolving this in my mind, I turned up
near the Painted Porch, and there I saw a great
crowd of men gathered, some inside the porch
itself, but most of them in the open air, and some
were shouting, stretched out on the benches. I
guessed what was the case: that they were philosophers of the eristic order, and I determined
to stand by and listen to what they might say. I
happened to have a cloud wrapped round me—a
thick one-so I took on an exterior of their sort,
drew forth my beard, and presented no bad imitation of a philosopher. And so I elbowed my
way through the crowd and got inside without
being recognized, and I found a violent controversy going on between that fox Damis the Epicurean and Timokles the Stoic, the best of men.
Timokles was in a perspiration, and had lost his
voice already with screaming, and Damis was exasperating him still further by sardonic mockery.
Now, if you will believe it, their whole discussion was about us. Damis (confound him) declared that we have no forethought for men or
guardianship of their affairs, asserting that we do
not exist at all, for this was plainly the purport