18
These are the kings who have been recorded as long-lived by our predecessors. Since philosophers and literary men in general, doubtless because they too take good care of themselves, have attained old age, I shall put down those whom there is record of, beginning with the philosophers. Democritus ot Abdera starved himself to death at the age of one hundred and four. ' -Xenophilus the musician, we are told by Aristoxenus, adopted the philosophical system of Pythagoras, and lived in Athens. more than one hundred and five years. Solon, Thales, and Pittacus, who were of the so-called seven wise men, each lived a hundred years, and Zeno, the head of the Stoic school, ninety-eight.
19
They say that when Zeno stumbled in entering the assembly, he cried out: “Why do you call me?” Addressed to Pluto. According to Diogenes Laertius 7, 28 he said ἔρχομι· τί μ' αὔεις (“I come: why din it in my ears?”), a quotation from a play called Niobe (Nauck, Trag. Gr. Fragm. p. 51). and then, returning home, starved himself to death. Cleanthes, the pupil and successor of Zeno, was ninety-nine’ when he got a tumour on his lip. He was fasting when letters from certain of his friends arrived, but he had food brought him, did what his friends had requested, and then fasted anew until he passed away.
20
Xenophanes, son of Dexinus and disciple of Archelaus the physicist, lived ninety-one years; Xenocrates, the disciple of Plato, eighty-four; Carneades, the head of the New Academy, eightyfive; Chrysippus, eighty-one; Diogenes of Seleucia on the Tigris, a Stoic philosopher, eighty-eight; Posidonius of Apameia in Syria, naturalised in Rhodes, who was at once a philosopher and a historian, eighty-four; Critolaus, the Peripatetic, more than eighty-two: Plato the divine, eighty-one.
