Demonax
Lucian of Samosata
Lucian, Vol. 1. Harmon, A. M., editor. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913.
From Homer the one line he most frequently quoted was :
Iliad 9, 320.
- Idler or toiler,’ tis all one to Death.’
He had a good word even for Thersites, calling him a mob-orator of the Cynic type.
When he was once asked which of the philosophers he liked, he said: “They are all admirable, but for my part I revere Socrates, I wonder at Diogenes, and I love Aristippus.”
He lived almost a hundred years, without illness or pain, bothering nobody and asking nothing of anyone, helping his friends and never making an enemy. Not only the Athenians but all Greece conceived such affection for him that when he passed by the magistrates rose up in his honour and there was silence everywhere. Toward the end, when ‘he was very old, he used to eat and sleep uninvited in any house which he chanced to be passing, and the inmates thought that it was almost a divine visitation, and that good fortune had entered their doors. As he went by, the bread-women would pull him toward them, each wanting him to take some bread from her, and she who succeeded in giving it thought that she was in luck. The children, too, brought him fruit and called him father. Once when
When he realised that he was no longer able to wait upon himself, he quoted to those who were with him the verses of the heralds at the games :
Then, refraining from all food, he took leave of life in the same cheerful humour that people he met always saw him in.
- Here endeth a contest awarding the fairest
- Of prizes: time calls, and forbids us delay.
A short time before the end he was asked: “What orders have you to give about your burial?” and replied: “Don’t borrow trouble! The stench will get me buried!” The man said: “Why, isn’t it disgraceful that the body of such a man should be exposed for birds and dogs to devour?” “I see nothing out of the way in it,” said he, “if even in death I am going to be of service to living things.”
But the Athenians gave him a magnificent public funeral and mourned him Jong. To honour him, they did obeisance to the stone bench on which he used to rest when he was tired, and they put garlands on it; for they felt that even the stone on which he had been wont to sit was sacred. Everybody attended his burial, especially the philosophers ; indeed, it was they who took him on their shoulders and carried him to the tomb.
These are a very few things out of many which I might have mentioned, but they will suffice to give my readers a notion of the sort of man he was.