Book 4
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He died, according to Hermippus, through drinking too freely of unmixed wine which affected his reason; he was already seventy-five and regarded by the Athenians with unparalleled good-will.
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I have written upon him as followsAnth. Pal. vii. 104.: Why, pray, Arcesilaus, didst thou quaff so unsparingly unmixed wine as to go out of thy mind? I pity thee not so much for thy death as because thou didst insult the Muses by immoderate potations.
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Three other men have borne the name of Arcesilaus: a poet of the Old Comedy, another poet who wrote elegies, and a sculptor besides, on whom Simonides composed this epigramAnth. Plan. iii. 9.: This is a statue of Artemis and its cost two hundred Parian drachmas, which bear a goat for their device. It was made by Arcesilaus, the worthy son of Aristodicus, well practised in the arts of Athena.
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According to Apollodorus in his Chronology, the philosopher described in the foregoing flourished about the 120th Olympiad.300-296 b.c.
Chapter 7. BION (third century B.C.)
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Bion was by birth a citizen of Borysthenes [Olbia]; who his parents were, and what his circumstances before he took to philosophy, he himself told Antigonus in plain terms. For, when Antigonus inquired: Who among men, and whence, are you? What is your city and your parents?Hom. Od. x. 325. he, knowing that he had already been maligned to the king, replied, My father was a freedman, who wiped his nose on his sleeve—meaning that he was a dealer in salt fish—a native of Borysthenes, with no face to show, but only the writing on his face, a token of his master’s severity. My mother was such as a man like my father would marry, from a brothel. Afterwards my father, who had cheated the revenue in some way, was sold with all his family. And I, then a not ungraceful youngster, was bought by a certain rhetorician, who on his death left me all he had.
