He was once bold enough to ask the assembled people, when he heard the sacred proclamation, why they excluded barbarians from the Mysteries, seeing that Eumolpus, the founder of them, was a barbarian from Thrace. When he once had a winter voyage to make, a friend asked how he liked the thought of being capsized and becoming food for fishes. ‘I should be very unreasonable to mind giving them a meal, considering how many they have given me.’