Vitae philosophorum

further, that Epicurus’s acquaintance with philosophy was small and his acquaintance with life even smaller; that his bodily health was pitiful,[*](Cf. Aelian, Fr. 39 (De Epicuro eiusque discipulis). According to him the three brothers of Epicurus were all victims of disease. Plutarch (Non posse suaviter, etc., 1097 e) mentions the dropsy. However much his ailments were exaggerated by his enemies, they do not seem to have hindered him from literary work.) so much so that for many years he was unable to rise from his chair; and that he spent a whole mina daily on his table, as he himself says in his letter to Leontion and in that to the philosophers at Mitylene. Also that among other courtesans who consorted with him and Metrodorus were Mammarion and Hedia and Erotion and Nikidion. He alleges too that in his thirtyseven books On Nature Epicurus uses much repetition and writes largely in sheer opposition to others,

Epicurus used to call this Nausiphanes jelly-fish,[*](Cf. Sext. Emp. Adv. math. i. 3 νῦν πλεύμονα καλῶν τὸν Ναυσιφάνην ὡς ἀναίσθητον; Plato, Phil. 21 c ζῆν δὲ οὐκ ἀνθρώπου βίον ἀλλά τινος πλεύμονος; Hesychius, s.v.; whence it appears that obtuseness and insensibility, not weakness or pliability, were the qualities imputed by this term.) an illiterate, a fraud, and a trollop; Plato’s school he called the toadies of Dionysius, their master himself the golden Plato,[*](An ironical compliment, probably on Plato’s style: cf. χρυσός τομος. It is not likely that Plato was ever regarded as a Midas or a golden simpleton, for which latter meaning Lucian, Pro lapsu in sal. i. ἐγὼ ὁ χρυσοῦς, is cited by Bignone.) and Aristotle a profligate, who after devouring his patrimony took to soldiering and selling drugs; Protagoras a pack-carrier and the scribe of Democritus and village schoolmaster; Heraclitus a muddler[*](In the same ironical sense in which Plato speaks of the Heracliteans who preached flux as τοὺς ῥέοντας (Theaet. 181 a), themselves in flux.); Democritus Lerocritus (the nonsense-monger); and Antidorus Sannidorus (fawning gift-bearer); the Cynics foes of Greece; the Dialecticians despoilers; and Pyrrho an ignorant boor.