Book 2
8.74
To one who accused him of living with a courtesan, he put the question, Why, is there any difference between taking a house in which many people have lived before and taking one in which nobody has ever lived? The answer being No, he continued, Or again, between sailing in a ship in which ten thousand persons have sailed before and in one in which nobody has ever sailed? There is no difference. Then it makes no difference, said he, whether the woman you live with has lived with many or with nobody. To the accusation that, although he was a pupil of Socrates, he took fees, his rejoinder was, Most certainly I do, for Socrates, too, when certain people sent him corn and wine, used to take a little and return all the rest; and he had the foremost men in Athens for his stewards, whereas mine is my slave Eutychides. He enjoyed the favours of Laïs, as Sotion states in the second book of his Successions of Philosophers.
8.75
To those who censured him his defence was, I have Lais, not she me; and it is not abstinence from pleasures that is best, but mastery over them without ever being worsted. to one who reproached him with extravagance in catering, he replied, Wouldn’t you have bought this if you could have got it for three obols? The answer being in the affirmative, Very well, then, said Aristippus, I am no longer a lover of pleasure, it is you who are a lover of money. One day Simus, the steward of Dionysius, a Phrygian by birth and a rascally fellow, was showing him costly houses with tesselated pavements, when Aristippus coughed up phlegm and spat in his face. And on his resenting this he replied, I could not find any place more suitable.
