Vitarum auctio

Zeus Set him aside and put up another. These two, for choice, the laugher from Abdera and the weeper from Ephesus, for I should like to sell the two together.

Hermes Let them come down into full view. I offer the noblest lives; we announce the sagest of all!

Buyer Heavens, what a contrast! The one never stops laughing, and the other seems to be in grief for somebody. He is consumed with weeping. What is the matter, fellow? Why are you laughing?

Demokritos What a question! Because all your doings and you yourselves strike me as so funny!

Buyer What? You are laughing at us all, and don't take our doings seriously?

Demokritos Even so, for there is nothing serious in them. They are all empty, a whirl of atoms, the infinite.

Buyer By no means; it is you that are really empty and infinitesimal. What impudence! Will you not stop laughing?

But what are you weeping for, my good fellow?

Herakleitos Because, friend, I deem human life a lamentable thing, worthy of tears, so soon passeth it all away. Therefore, I pity you and bewail your lot. The present does not strike me as important, and what is to come hereafter is unmixed woe-I mean the final conflagration and the catastrophe of the universe. These are the things I lament. Nothing is steadfast, but all things are somehow pressed together into an olla-podrïda and the same thing is a joyless joy, a knowing without knowledge, a great littleness, drifting up and down and changing at the caprice of the playful Aeon.

Buyer What may the Aeon be?

Herakleitos A child at play, moving the chessmen, changing them by hazard.

Buyer What, then, are men?

Herakleitos Mortal gods.

Buyer And what are the gods?

Herakleitos Immortal men.

Buyer Are you talking in riddles, fellow, or setting me conundrums? You make your meaning as dim, actually, as Apollo does.

Herakleitos Because I am at no pains about you.

Buyer Very well; neither will any but a lunatic buy you.

Herakleitos I bid each of you go to the devil from his youth up, whether he purchase or purchase not.

Buyer His affliction is not much removed from melancholia. For my part, I am not going to buy either of them.

Hermes These two are left on our hands.

Zeus Put up another!

Hermes That Athenian there, the chatterbox?

Zeus By all means.

Hermes Come here, you! We offer a good, sensible life. Who buys the most holy?

Buyer Tell me, just what do you happen to know?

Sokrates I am a lover and wise in the science of love.

Buyer Then how in the world could I buy you? For what I want is a tutor for my pretty boy.

Sokrates Well, who could be a better man than I to associate with the fair? It is beautiful souls that I love, not bodies.