Vitarum auctio

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.

Indeed, I swear it to you by the dog and the plane-tree.

Buyer Heavens, what strange gods!

Sokrates What's that you say? Don't you think the dog is a god? Perhaps you have not noticed how great Anoubis is in Egypt, and Seirios in the heavens, and Kerberos among the dead.

BuyerYou are right, it was my mistake. But what is your manner of life?

Sokrates I live by myself in a sort of state that I fashioned with a foreign form of government, and I enact my own laws.

Buyer I should like to hear one of your principles.

Sokrates Well, this is the most important: my decision about women. No woman is assigned to one man alone, but to every one who wishes her in marriage. Have you, then, abrogated the laws about marriage?

Buyer What!

Sokrates Dear me, yes, and all such petty formalities. Beauty shall be the reward of the bravest-those who have accomplished some brilliant feat of daring.

Buyer A fine reward! And what is the substance of your philosophy?

Sokrates The ideas and the types of existing things; for, indeed, everything that you see-the earth and all upon it, the sky, the sea-all these things have invisible images outside the universe.

Buyer Where are they?

Sokrates Nowhere; for if they were anywhere they could not be.

Buyer I don't see these types you speak of.

Sokrates Naturally; for your soul's eye is blind.

Buyer Then you will do to buy, for you are wise and have good eyes. Come, Hermes, how much will you charge me for him?

Hermes Two thousand dollars.

Buyer I take him at the price. However, I will pay you later.

Hermes What is your name?

Buyer Dion of Syracuse.

Hermes Take him, with my best wishes. Next I call you, the Epicurean. Who will buy this one? He is the pupil of that laugher and of the drunkard whom I offered a little while ago. But he has made one step in advance of them, inasmuch as he has less regard for holy things. For the rest, he is pleasant and the friend of good living.

Buyer What's the price?

Hermes Forty dollars.

Buyer Here you are. But tell me what sort of food he likes.

Hermes He lives on sweet things like honey, and particularly figs.

Buyer That is easy enough. I will buy him penny-loaves of fig-cake.

Zeus Call up another-that scowling fellow with the shaved head from the Porch.

Hermes Very well. At all events, a great crowd of those who have come to the sale seem to be waiting for him. I offer for sale virtue herself, the most perfect of lives. Who wishes to know everything, alone of all men?

Buyer What do you mean?

Hermes This man alone is wise, he alone is beautiful, he alone is just, manly, a king, an orator, a millionaire, a legislator, and everything else.

Buyer Then, friend, is he alone a cook, and a tanner, by Jove! and a carpenter, and everything of that sort?

Hermes Apparently.