The Sale of Lives (12-13)

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?