Apophthegmata Laconica

When he was afflicted with a lingering illness, and began to give attention to mind-healers and seers, to whom formerly he had given no attention, someone expressed surprise. Why are you surprised? said he; for I am not now the same man that I was, and, not being the same man, I do not approve the same things. [*](For a similar change in the attitude of Pericles and of Bion Cf. Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, chap. xxxviii. (173 A) and Diogenes Laertius, iv. 54.)

When a public lecturer spoke at considerable length about bravery, he burst out laughing; and when the man said, Why do you laugh, Cleomenes, at hearing a man speak about bravery, and that, too, when you are a king? Because, my friend, he said, if it had been a swallow speaking about it, T should have done the same thing, but if it had been an eagle, I should have kept very quiet.

When the people of Argos asserted that they would wipe out their former defeat [*](Presumably in the battle over Thyrea in 546 B.C. Cf. Herodotus, i. 82, and the reference in Plato, Phaedo, 89 C.) by fighting again, he said, I wonder if by the addition of a word of two syllables [*](The word again. They had lost in the previous fighting.) you have now become more powerful than you were before!