Book 5
2.39
And Aristippus, in his fourth book On the Luxury of the Ancients, asserts that he was enamoured of Aristotle’s son Nicomachus, although he was his teacher. It is said that Aristotle applied to him and Callisthenes what Plato had said of Xenocrates and himself (as already related), namely, that the one needed a bridle and the other a goad; for Theophrastus interpreted all his meaning with an excess of cleverness, whereas the other was naturally backward. He is said to have become the owner of a garden of his own after Aristotle’s death, through the intervention of his friend Demetrius of Phalerum. There are pithy sayings of his in circulation as follows: An unbridled horse, he said, ought to be trusted sooner than a badly-arranged discourse.
2.40
To some one who never opened his lips at a banquet he remarked: Yours is a wise course for an ignoramus, but in an educated man it is sheer folly. He used constantly to say that in our expenditure the item that costs most is time.
2.40
He died at the age of eighty-five, not long after he had relinquished his labours. My verses upon him are theseAnth. Pal vii. 110.: Not in vain was the word spoken to one of human kind, Slacken the bow of wisdom and it breaks. Of a truth, so long as Theophrastus laboured he was sound of limb, but when released from toil his limbs failed him and he died.
2.40
It is said that his disciples asked him if he had any last message for them, to which he replied: Nothing else but this, that many of the pleasures which life boasts are but in the seeming.
