28
He once saw two philosophers engaged in a very unedifying game of cross questions and crooked answers. ‘Gentlemen,’ said he, ‘here is one man milking a billy-goat, and another catching the proceeds in a sieve.’
29
When Agathocles the Peripatetic vaunted himself as the first and only dialectician, he asked him how he could be the first, if he was the only, or the only, if he was the first.
30
The consular Cethegus, on his way to serve under his father in Asia, said and did many foolish things. A friend describing him as a great ass, ‘Not even a great ass,’ said Demonax.
31
When Apollonius was appointed professor of philosophy in the Imperial household, Demonax witnessed his departure, attended by a great number of his pupils. ‘Why, here is Apollonius with all his Argonauts,’ he cried.
32
Asked whether he held the soul to be immortal, ‘Dear me, yes,’ he said; ‘everything is.’
33
He remarked à propos of Herodes that Plato was quite right about our having more than one soul; the same soul could not possibly compose those splendid declamations, and have places laid for Regilla and Pollux after their death.
34
He was once bold enough to ask the assembled people, when he heard the sacred proclamation, why they excluded barbarians from the Mysteries, seeing that Eumolpus, the founder of them, was a barbarian from Thrace.
35
When he once had a winter voyage to make, a friend asked how he liked the thought of being capsized and becoming food for fishes. ‘I should be very unreasonable to mind giving them a meal, considering how many they have given me.’
36
To a rhetorician who had given a very poor declamation he recommended constant practice. ‘Why, I am always practising to myself,’ says the man. ‘Ah, that accounts for it; you are accustomed to such a foolish audience.’
