Demonax

Lucian of Samosata

Lucian, Vol. 1. Harmon, A. M., editor. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913.

When one of his friends said: “Demonax, let’s go to the Aesculapium and pray for my son,” he replied: “You must think Aesculapius very deaf, that he can’t hear our prayers from where we are!”

On seeing two philosophers very ignorantly debating a given subject, one asking silly questions and the other giving answers that were not at all to the point, he said: ‘“Doesn’t it seem to you, friends, that one of these fellows is milking a he-goat and the other is holding a sieve for him!”

When Agathocles the Peripatetic was boasting

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that he was first among the logicians—that there was no other, he said: “Come now, Agathocles; if there is no other, you are not first: if you are first, then there are others.”

Cethegus the ex-consul, going by way of Greece to Asia to be his father’s lieutenant, did and said many ridiculous things. One of the friends of Demonax, looking on, said that he was a great goodfor-nothing. ‘No, he isn’t, either,” said he—“nota great one!”

When he saw Apollonius the philosopher leaving the city with a multitude of disciples (he was called away to be tutor to the emperor), Demonax remarked: “There goes Apollonius and his Argonauts !”[*](Alluding to Apollonius of Rhodes and his poem on the Argonauts, and implying that this was another quest of the Golden Fleece.)

When a man asked him if lie thought that the soul was immortal, he said: “Yes, but no more so than everything else.”

Touching Herodes he remarked that Plato was right in saying that we have more than one soul, for a man with only one could not feast Regilla [*](Wife of Herodes.) and Polydeuces as if they were still alive and say what he did in his lectures.