Book 6
2.47
Rhetoricians and all who talked for reputation he used to call thrice human, meaning thereby thrice wretched. An ignorant rich man he used to call the sheep with the golden fleece. Seeing a notice on the house of a profligate, To be sold, he said, I knew well that after such surfeiting you would throw up the owner. To a young man who complained of the number of people who annoyed him by their attentions he said, Cease to hang out a sign of invitation. Of a public bath which was dirty he said, When people have bathed here, where are they to go to get clean? There was a stout musician whom everybody depreciated and Diogenes alone praised. When asked why, he said, Because being so big, he yet sings to his lute and does not turn brigand.
2.48
The musician who was always deserted by his audience he greeted with a Hail chanticleer, and when asked why he so addressed him, replied, Because your song makes every one get up. A young man was delivering a set speech, when Diogenes, having filled the front fold of his dress with lupins, began to eat them, standing right opposite to him. Having thus drawn off the attention of the assemblage, he said he was greatly surprised that they should desert the orator to look at himself. A very superstitious person addressed him thus, With one blow I will break your head. And I, said Diogenes, by a sneeze from the left will make you tremble. Hegesias having asked him to lend him one of his writings, he said, You are a simpleton, Hegesias; you do not choose painted figs, but real ones; and yet you pass over the true training and would apply yourself to written rules.
