Vitarum auctio

HERMES What is your name?

BUYER Dion of Syracuse.[*](Chosen for mention, because he was Plato’s pupil.) HERMES He is yours; take him, with good luck to you. Epicurean, I want you now. Who will buy him? He is a pupil of the laugher yonder and of the drunkard, both of whom we put up a short time ago.[*](The Epicureans took over the atomic theory from Democritus and the idea that pleasure is the highest good from the Cyrenaics.) In one way, however, he knows more than they, because he is more impious. Besides, he is agreeable and fond of good eating.

BUYER What is his price?

HERMES Two minas.

BUYER Here you are. But, say! I want to know what food he likes.

HERMES He eats sweets and honey-cakes, and, above all, figs.

BUYER No trouble about that; we shall buy him cakes of pressed figs from Caria.

ZEUS Call another, the one over there with the cropped head, the dismal fellow from the Porch.

HERMES Quite right; at all events it looks as if the men who frequent the public square were waiting for him in great numbers.[*](Lucian means that the Stoic philosophy was in high favour with statesmen, lawyers, and men of affairs generally.) I sell virtue itself, the most perfect of philosophies. Who wants to be the only one to know everything ?

BUYER What do you mean by that?

HERMES That he is the only wise man, the only handsome man, the only just man, brave man, king, orator, rich man, lawgiver, and everything else that there is.[*](Compare Ad summam: sapiens uno minor est Jove, dives,Liber, honoratus, pulcher, rex denique regum,Praecipue sanus,— nisi cum pituita molestast !Horace, Epp. 1, I 106 ff) BUYER Then he is the only cook,—yes and the only tanner or carpenter, and so forth ?

HERMES So it appears.

BUYER Come here, my good fellow, and tell your buyer what you are like, and first of all whether you are not displeased with being sold and living in slavery?

STOIC Not at all, for these things are not in our control, and all that is not in our control is immaterial.

BUYER I don’t understand what you mean by this.

STOIC What, you do not understand that of such things some are “approved,” and some, to the contrary, “disapproved”’ ?[*]( Just as things "in our control” were divided into the good and the bad, so those "not in our control” were divided into the “approved” and the "disapproved,” according as they helped or hindered in the acquirement of virtue.) BUYER Even now I do not understand.

STOIC Of course not, for you are not familiar with our vocabulary and have not the faculty of forming concepts; but a scholar who has mastered the science of logic knows not only this, but what predicaments and bye-predicaments are, and how they differ from each other.[*](The hair-splitting Stoics distinguished four forms of predication according to the case of the (logical) subject and the logical completeness of the predicate : the direct, complete predicate, or σύμβαμα (predicament), i.e. Σωκράτης βαδίζει; the indirect, complete predicate, or παρασύμβαμα (bye-predicament), i.e. Σωκράτει μεταμέλει ; the direct, incomplete predicate, e.g. Σωκράτης φιλεῖ, and the indirect, incomplete predicate, i.e. Σωκράτει μέλει.) BUYER In the name of wisdom, don’t begrudge telling me

at least what predicaments and bye-predicaments are ; for I am somehow impressed by the rhythm of the terms.

STOIC Indeed, I do not begrudge it at all. If a man who is lame dashes his lame foot against a stone and receives an unlooked-for injury, he was already in a predicament, of course, with his lameness, and with his injury he gets into a bye-predicament too.