The Sale of Lives (11-15)

Be off with you! Your ways are foul and unnatural.

But the easiest, at least, sirrah, and handy for every one to pursue; for they will not ask education of you, or oratory, or nonsense. No; this road is a short cut to fame; for even if you are a private citizen, a tanner, or a fishmonger, or a carpenter, or a cabinet-maker, nothing prevents your being a wonder if only you are shameless and bold, and have acquired the art of skilful abuse.

I do not want your services in that line, but you might perhaps be convenient as a sailor or a gardener-particularly if the vendor is willing to sell you for not more than five cents.

Take him; we shall be glad to get rid of him. He is a nuisance, yelling and abusing everybody generally with his foul tongue.

Call another, the Cyrenaic, the one in the purple robe with the garland on his head.

Come now, attention, all! This article is expensive, and only for the rich. This is a life of sweetness, a thrice-blessed life! Who wants luxury? Who will buy the daintiest thing going?

Step forward, you, and tell me what you happen to know. I will buy you if you are useful.

Do not annoy him, my good fellow, or ask him questions. He is drunk and cannot answer you, for his tongue is thick, as you perceive.

And who in his senses would buy such an abandoned, dissipated slave? How he reeks of perfumes, and how reeling and uncertain his gait is! But tell me yourself, Hermes, if need be, what his points are, and what his pursuits.

Primarily he is a clever man to live with you, able to drink with you, and just the man to go with a flute-girl on the revels of an amorous and spendthrift master. Moreover, he is a connoisseur of made dishes, a most experienced cook, and a complete professor of the art of pleasant living. In fact, he was educated at Athens, and also served various despots in Sicily, and is highly esteemed by them. This is the substance of his principles: to despise everything, make use of everything, and gather pleasure from every source.

You had better cast your eye on some

It looks, Zeus, as though this one would be left on your hands.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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?

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.

What may the Aeon be?

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

What, then, are men?

Mortal gods.

And what are the gods?

Immortal men.

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

Because I am at no pains about you.

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

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

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

These two are left on our hands.

Put up another!

That Athenian there, the chatterbox?

By all means.

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

Tell me, just what do you happen to know?

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

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

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