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 fairestOf 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.