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.
What is your name?
Dion of Syracuse.
Take him, with my best wishes. Next I call you, the Epicurean. Who will buy this one? He is the pupil of that laugher and of the drunkard whom I offered a little while ago. But he has made one step in advance of them, inasmuch as he has less regard for holy things. For the rest, he is pleasant and the friend of good living.
What's the price?
Forty dollars.
Here you are. But tell me what sort of food he likes.
He lives on sweet things like honey, and particularly figs.
That is easy enough. I will buy him penny-loaves of fig-cake.
Call up another-that scowling fellow
with the shaved head from the Porch.
Very well. At all events, a great crowd of those who have come to the sale seem to be waiting for him. I offer for sale virtue herself, the most perfect of lives. Who wishes to know everything, alone of all men?
What do you mean?
This man alone is wise, he alone is beautiful, he alone is just, manly, a king, an orator, a millionaire, a legislator, and everything else.
Then, friend, is he alone a cook, and a tanner, by Jove! and a carpenter, and everything of that sort?
Apparently.