Demonax

He remarked à propos of Herodes that Plato was quite right about our having more than one soul; the same soul could not possibly compose those splendid declamations, and have places laid for Regilla and Pollux after their death.

He was once bold enough to ask the assembled people, when he heard the sacred proclamation, why they excluded barbarians from the Mysteries, seeing that Eumolpus, the founder of them, was a barbarian from Thrace.

When he once had a winter voyage to make, a friend asked how he liked the thought of being capsized and becoming food for fishes. ‘I should be very unreasonable to mind giving them a meal, considering how many they have given me.’

To a rhetorician who had given a very poor declamation he recommended constant practice. ‘Why, I am always practising to myself,’ says the man. ‘Ah, that accounts for it; you are accustomed to such a foolish audience.’

Observing a soothsayer one day officiating for pay, he said ‘I cannot see how you can ask pay. If it is because you can change the course of Fate, you cannot possibly put the figure high enough: if everything is settled by Heaven, and not by you, what is the good of your soothsaying?”

A hale old Roman once gave him a little exhibition of his skill in fence, taking a clothes-peg for his mark. ‘What do

Even for questions meant to be insoluble he generally had a shrewd answer at command, Some one tried to make a fool of him by asking, If I burn a hundred pounds of wood, how many pounds of smoke shall I get? ‘Weigh the ashes; the difference is all smoke.’