Set him aside and put up another. These two, for choice, the laugher from Abdera and the weeper from Ephesus, for I should like to sell the two together.
Let them come down into full view. I offer the noblest lives; we announce the sagest of all!
Heavens, what a contrast! The one never stops laughing, and the other seems to be in grief for somebody. He is consumed with weeping. What is the matter, fellow? Why are you laughing?
What a question! Because all your doings and you yourselves strike me as so funny!
What? You are laughing at us all, and don't take our doings seriously?
Even so, for there is nothing serious in them. They are all empty, a whirl of atoms, the infinite.
By no means; it is you that are really empty and infinitesimal. What impudence! Will you not stop laughing?
But what are you weeping for, my good fellow?
Because, friend, I deem human life a lamentable thing, worthy of tears, so soon passeth it all away. Therefore, I pity you and bewail your lot. The present does not strike me as important, and what is to come hereafter is unmixed woe-I mean the final conflagration and the catastrophe of the universe. These are the things I lament. Nothing is steadfast, but all things are somehow pressed together into an olla-podrïda and the same thing is a joyless joy, a knowing without knowledge, a great littleness, drifting up and down and changing at the caprice of the playful Aeon.
What may the Aeon be?
A child at play, moving the chessmen, changing them by hazard.
What, then, are men?
Mortal gods.
And what are the gods?
Immortal men.
Are you talking in riddles, fellow, or setting me conundrums? You make your meaning as dim, actually, as Apollo does.
Because I am at no pains about you.
Very well; neither will any but a lunatic
buy you.
I bid each of you go to the devil from his youth up, whether he purchase or purchase not.
His affliction is not much removed from melancholia. For my part, I am not going to buy either of them.
These two are left on our hands.
Put up another!
That Athenian there, the chatterbox?
By all means.
Come here, you! We offer a good, sensible life. Who buys the most holy?
Tell me, just what do you happen to know?
I am a lover and wise in the science of love.
Then how in the world could I buy you? For what I want is a tutor for my pretty boy.
Well, who could be a better man than I to associate with the fair? It is beautiful souls that I love, not bodies.
Indeed, I swear it to you by the dog and the plane-tree.
Heavens, what strange gods!
What's that you say? Don't you
think the dog is a god? Perhaps you have not
noticed how great Anoubis is in Egypt, and
Seirios in the heavens, and Kerberos among the
dead.
You are right, it was my mistake. But what is your manner of life?
I live by myself in a sort of state that I fashioned with a foreign form of government, and I enact my own laws.
I should like to hear one of your principles.
Well, this is the most important: my decision about women. No woman is assigned to one man alone, but to every one who wishes her in marriage. Have you, then, abrogated the laws about marriage?
What!
Dear me, yes, and all such petty formalities. Beauty shall be the reward of the bravest-those who have accomplished some brilliant feat of daring.
A fine reward! And what is the substance of your philosophy?
The ideas and the types of existing things; for, indeed, everything that you see-the earth and all upon it, the sky, the sea-all these things have invisible images outside the universe.
Where are they?
Nowhere; for if they were anywhere they could not be.
I don't see these types you speak of.
Naturally; for your soul's eye is blind.
Then you will do to buy, for you are wise and have good eyes. Come, Hermes, how much will you charge me for him?
Two thousand dollars.
I take him at the price. However, I will pay you later.