From Homer the one line he most frequently
quoted was:

 Idler or toiler,’ tis all one to Death.’ Iliad 9, 320. 
 
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



 

there was a party quarrel in Athens, he went intod
the assembly and just by showing himself reduced
them to silence: then, seeing that they had already
repented, he went away without a word.

 
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:
 Here endeth a contest awarding the fairest Of prizes: time calls, and forbids us delay. 
Then, refraining from all food, he took leave of life
in the same cheerful humour that people he met
always saw him in.