12
You had better cast your eye on some one of these rich men with full purses. Certainly for buying a gay life I am not your man.
12
It looks, Zeus, as though this one would be left on your hands.
13
Set him aside and put up another. These two, for choice, the laugher from Abdera and the weeper from Ephesus, for I should like to sell the two together.
13
Let them come down into full view. I offer the noblest lives; we announce the sagest of all!
13
Heavens, what a contrast! The one never stops laughing, and the other seems to be in grief for somebody. He is consumed with weeping. What is the matter, fellow? Why are you laughing?
13
What a question! Because all your doings and you yourselves strike me as so funny!
13
What? You are laughing at us all, and don't take our doings seriously?
13
Even so, for there is nothing serious in them. They are all empty, a whirl of atoms, the infinite.
13
By no means; it is you that are really empty and infinitesimal. What impudence! Will you not stop laughing?
14
But what are you weeping for, my good fellow? I imagine it will be much pleasanter to talk with you.
14
Because, friend, I deem human life a lamentable thing, worthy of tears, so soon passeth it all away. Therefore, I pity you and bewail your lot. The present does not strike me as important, and what is to come hereafter is unmixed woe-I mean the final conflagration and the catastrophe of the universe. These are the things I lament. Nothing is steadfast, but all things are somehow pressed together into an olla-podrïda and the same thing is a joyless joy, a knowing without knowledge, a great littleness, drifting up and down and changing at the caprice of the playful Aeon.
14
What may the Aeon be?
14
A child at play, moving the chessmen, changing them by hazard.
14
What, then, are men?
14
Mortal gods.
14
And what are the gods?
14
Immortal men.
14
Are you talking in riddles, fellow, or setting me conundrums? You make your meaning as dim, actually, as Apollo does.
14
Because I am at no pains about you.
